The Outer Cape

by Patrick Dacey

  The movie has already started and the theater packed with big, long bodies. The three of them have to hunker down in the very last seats in the front row, directly opposite the giant screen.

  “It’s like having the theater all to ourselves,” Robert says, ushering the boys into their seats.

  He takes the aisle seat and hunches down. This close, it’s like the soldiers are firing their rifles right at them. The noise is so loud that at one point Robert turns and sees Andrew with his fingers in his ears.

  “Put your hands in your lap,” Robert whispers harshly.

  “What?” Andrew says loudly.

  Robert grabs his hands and presses them down onto Andrew’s thighs.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Andrew says.

  “It can wait.”

  “But I really have to go, Dad. I won’t get lost. There’s no missing where we are.”

  “Fine. But make sure you use a stall.”

  Nathan, transfixed, doesn’t register his brother’s exit. The drill sergeant is yelling at the soldiers, saying bad words Nathan knows but putting them together in ways he’d never heard before. Then a group of soldiers beat Private Pile with soap because they had to do extra push-ups. Robert shares some of his Junior Mints with Nathan and whispers that he had a drill sergeant just like this one, a real prick.

  Is it over his son’s head? Robert thinks. Some of it, sure. “This is my rifle, this is my gun. This is for fighting, this is for fun!” But when the audience laughs, Nathan laughs, and at least he’s having a good time and will probably remember that line so he can use it in school to make friends. Robert knows it’s cool when kids say they’re allowed to see R-rated movies, and part of him would still rather be cool than loved.

  Robert is so lost in thought that he doesn’t catch on to what’s happening in the latrines toward the end of the first half of the movie: Private Pile on the toilet, shouting at no one, those dead eyes and the rifle at his side. But he sees it now, as though the images of the film from beginning to now have caught up to him in one whole burst of light, and when Private Pile presents the gun barrel to his mouth and pulls down on the trigger, it’s too late for Robert to cover Nathan’s eyes before the blood and brains hit the wall. Nathan screams and bats his ears. The sound is worse than the gunshot. Both theaters can hear it. Robert tries to hold him still, but Nathan won’t stop batting his head and even strikes Robert in the nose. Robert picks him up as he used to when Nathan was an infant. He holds the back of Nathan’s head against his shoulder and looks toward the fuzzy theater wall half-jogging up the aisle and outside under the metal awning.

  For a while, Nathan cries and snorts and rubs his chubby face on Robert’s shoulder. Then Robert stands him up and swipes his thumb under Nathan’s eyes. He’s been crying so hard his face is red and puffy. Robert tries to apologize. He tells him what he saw isn’t real, it’s just a movie.

  “But,” Nathan says, “someone must’ve done that for it to be in a movie, or else someone thought it up in their head and isn’t that real, too?”

  Robert doesn’t have an answer. Perhaps because the answer is too simple. A grown man can go to camp again just as a private in the army can blow his own brains out.

  On the ride home, Nathan sits in the backseat staring out the window. Even when Andrew has topped his own high score on the Game Boy and tries to show his brother, Nathan doesn’t react.

  “You didn’t come back to our seats,” Robert says to Andrew.

  Robert looks in Andrew’s eyes in the rearview mirror sternly, and his son’s face twitches. Well, shit, he thinks, not you, too.

  “Go ahead,” Robert says, “tell us what Ernest did when he went to camp. We need to get our stories straight.”

  * * *

  Later that night, Nathan eats his food in silence, while Andrew architects brilliant, absurdist buildings out of the starches on his plate, then uses his spoon to knock them down.

  After an episode of Cheers, Robert and Irene move about the house as though preparing it for another family who will be arriving in the morning. Irene tidies up the newspapers and magazines, and stuffs the Nintendo set and controllers behind the television. She is back to being a homemaker, which makes Robert feel even more guilt than the day before. He doesn’t know what he wants her to be anymore.

  After she empties the half-full glasses and puts them in the dishwasher, they smoke a last cigarette on the front step under starlight.

  “This has felt like the longest day,” Irene says, taking a drag.

  “The rain finally stopped,” Robert says.

  “That’s true.”

  In bed, Robert feels Irene’s leg rub against him. Already her legs are prickly again. She says something. Then she says, “Kiss me, Robert.”

  But it isn’t the same as last week: there’s nothing at stake.

  “Not tonight,” he says.

  “You’re such a bore,” she hisses, then turns over.

  * * *

  Robert spends the following morning in the trailer at the subdivision going over blueprints and piles of documents from council meetings.

  There’s a knock at the flimsy trailer door.

  “It’s open,” Robert says.

  Candice Dunning, the wife of his foreman, Mike, stands on the last wooden step, her head peeking inside. Robert sees the glow of her face in the rectangular light shining through the trailer windows. She’s a pretty thing, but so are certain flowers and pop songs and moonscapes. Otherwise, she’s Mike’s wife, the hot blonde Mike brought to the company’s first Memorial Day cookout. She’s a married woman who up until recently Robert had maybe two or three conversations with in the last eighteen months he’d known the couple. She is soft and sweet, and a mother. She makes decent pasta salad and has an annoying cackle for a laugh. Her daughters look healthy. Robert is proud of that.

  “I went to the model first,” she says.

  “Mike isn’t here,” Robert says.

  “I know. I wasn’t looking for Mike.”

  Robert realizes that now. She is inside the trailer. She has never been to the subdivision before.

  “What can I do?”

  “Be quick,” she says, and he smells her cinnamon-flavored gum and something else, something distinct and overpowering, like boxes of ripe fruits stacked together at a farmer’s market.

  He stays seated, lifts up her dress, and pulls down her panties over her cross-thatched shoes. Then he breathes in as much of her as he can stand. It’s that smell, rare and fleeting, he’s trying to take home with him, because, as before, this, he tells himself, is the last time.

  THREE

  Irene remembers how when they first pulled down the pebbled drive of the house on Main, Minnie Rodgers, the real estate agent with whom she’d been speaking for weeks leading up to their move, met Robert and the kids and her on the wide front porch. Minnie had been holding, by the tip of her fingers, a silver cage with a blue canary inside. Her gray hair was cupped around her narrow head like two elephant ears.

  “Oh, good, you made it!” she said with affected cheer. “Don’t mind Annabelle here, I take her everywhere.”

  Minnie Rodgers guided them through the front door, separating Robert from Irene and the boys.

  “So, this is what we call a classic Greek colonial. The house had been built by a sea captain named Nichols. He and his wife and their ten children lived here through three generations.”

  As they went through each room, Irene managed to ask and have answered every question she had jotted down on her little notepad. She was concerned with the upkeep of such a large home. She didn’t want to waste her days sweeping the floors, vacuuming the bedrooms, and polishing the tables and countertops. In her mind, she was still a working artist. These last twelve years had just been a long interlude, a time to gather perspective. Settling down meant now she could paint again. Motherhood wasn’t her intended life’s work. You didn’t get much credit for raising good kids, and all the blame when they turned ou
t bad.

  “The Nicholses had a housekeeper,” Minnie Rodgers said. “In fact, they had two.”

  “Has no one lived here since?” Robert asked.

  “Of course, of course. There was a pilot and his family here last. He died, sadly, in a car accident. I believe the widow said she was moving back to Ohio, or something. Before that, the house was a museum showcasing the Nichols family’s antiques and artifacts, once the Nicholses had lived out their final days here and none of the three boys had any boys of their own. There was something in the deed, though, that made it so that if the museum did not turn a profit, then it could be put back on the market.”

  Robert had pointed to the chipped paint on the exterior, the large drum in back that meant the house was heated with oil, the split deck boards and rotting wood and single-paned windows.

  But the history, the molding on the stairwell, the large open kitchen, the bay window in the dining room, which let in light from the early evening sun, and the two guest rooms for entertaining friends and family on long weekends—all of it was so overwhelmingly agreeable to Irene’s sense of what a home should be that when they were back in the Wagoneer, on their way to Robert’s father’s house, she already felt like the captain’s house on Main Street had been waiting for them all this time.

  But now, large as their house is, Irene feels, with all the things they’ve collected in the past two years, that she can barely breathe. Panicked by a creeping claustrophobia, she spends most of the day in the carriage house out back, with just her stool and easel and a view of the dripping leaves on the trees outside the windows. She smokes a little grass in a metal pipe she keeps hidden in a broken floorboard, while looking at the sketch of the bowl full of nectarines she had begun weeks ago. She sits on her stool and blows the smoke up the flue, then tears the page from the sketchbook and burns it to mask any lingering odor. Just like the drawing of the woman lying on her side, and the outline of a man with his hand on his hip and his finger pointing down toward a child, and the falcon’s nest she had seen on the pole at the bridge crossing over Oyster Bay, she cannot remember the story behind the beginning, the reason she had picked up her pencil and started in the first place. They are like bones to her now.

  An ocean of pink colors the sky outside. “Oh,” she says. Then she remembers she had better start dinner before Robert gets home.

  In the kitchen, she heats up a frying pan of olive oil, pounds the chicken cutlets, rolls them in flour, and covers them in bread crumbs. Then she steams broccoli and carrots over a double boiler. She drinks a beer and listens to Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. While the chicken is cooking, she goes to put back on her wedding ring but notices it is missing. Now she sees Andrew sauntering around the kitchen with one of her long scarves around his neck, showing off to an invisible gallery of jealous women the oversized pear-cut diamond engagement ring Robert had bought her on credit years ago.

  “Oh my,” he cries in their adoring voices. “He didn’t! Oh, yes, he did.”

  Andrew has a hand on his hip and those glasses as big as ski goggles cocked sideways on his face.

  “Sweetie, don’t lose that,” Irene says.

  “This? Oh, this is nothing. You should see ma au-to-mo-bile,” he says, ramping up a Southern accent he could have only picked up from his recent addiction to Huckleberry Hound.

  She smacks him on the butt.

  “Get out of the kitchen,” she says, laughing. “And give me back my ring.”

  She puts on Surrealistic Pillow, and turns up the volume.

  “Feed your head,” Grace Slick sings. What year was that? Irene thinks. ’Sixty-eight, ’Sixty-nine. “Feed your head.” But at the age of thirty-eight, when the good drug years are behind her, when a little pot to relax and a dab of coke when she and Robert are on vacation is about all she can handle. It’s hard to return to that place of openness she once had, when her head could be fed by the euphoria that surrounded her. Whatever was inside most people during those years has now spilled out, replaced with rational logistics, the fastest route from point A to point B, and her greatest fear is her greatest irony, that she is somewhat comforted by the fact that she is no different than most people.

  Irene calls for Nathan and Andrew to set the table. Nathan plods down the stairs reluctantly, while Andrew holds the dishes across his puny forearms.

  While the chicken is cooling, Irene mixes a drink of vodka and ice, wondering if she has forgotten anything. She lets her mind drift. She thinks of the bowl she had sketched and crumpled and burned. It was just a bowl. Who cares? She has meals to prepare, youth sports games to attend, school functions to organize; and the house, always the house needs to be restocked. On the recent pages of the drawing pad in the carriage house, she had taken inventory of the pantry and the refrigerator and the four bathrooms and the laundry room, as though they live in a shop that sells everything from asparagus to cotton swabs. She has not had an intelligent conversation about art, or artists, or anything really, in a long time.

  The next day, Irene drives to an art supply store in town, having decided to try to paint again. The same childish excitement she had when she was young beats through her as she selects different oils, brushes, and colored charcoal and carries them to the register. Back then, she might be able to afford two tubes of paint, and the other colors she stuffed in her pockets and purse. Now she pays for everything in full, and the girl at the counter with her nose pierced through with a bull ring makes a print of her credit card and throws the tubes and brushes in a bag, looking at her briefly with a snarky smile, as if to say, “Expensive hobby.” But just the same, lethargy takes over once she’s in the carriage house and has set her paints on the wooden folding table beside her newly sanded easel. She looks at the canvas, her canvas, for a long while. She smokes three cigarettes in a row. When she hears the phone ring in the main house, she has reason to leave her work, even though she knows she will not get to the phone in time to receive the call. She crosses the wet grass in the backyard, takes off her sneakers midway, rolls her socks off, and feels the soggy earth against the palms of her feet. She checks in on Checkers, the bunny Andrew had begged for as a present for his birthday, and remembers explaining to him that there were bunnies everywhere, especially in the morning, eating up her flowers. But Andrew wanted one in a cage with a little water spout and feeder, and for a few weeks after his party, he fed the bunny diligently and stood by the cage making bunny faces, twisting his mouth and wiggling his nose. Somehow, caged, fat Checkers has acted as a deterrent to the other bunnies who were eating Irene’s flowers earlier that spring.

  She tosses her shoes and socks in the mudroom, then pours a glass of beer and pushes the message button on the answering machine, annoyed to hear the phone on the other end click. She sits in the stiff, floral-printed chair beside the phone and waits. Then she picks up the phone and dials Robert at the office, but his secretary says he’s just gone out to a job site.

  Later, around two in the afternoon, she drives to the supermarket and buys a Bavarian cream pie and a carton of milk. At the kitchen table, she eats the pie and drinks two tall glasses of milk. She smokes a cigarette while looking at the empty container, her disgust assuaged by a mild sense of accomplishment. Once a week, around happy hour, when she was little, Irene’s mother would drop her off at her grandmother’s apartment in the spring-inspired senior living community set off Route 33 and go meet up with friends at a bar called Partners. Irene’s grandmother was a thick, Swedish woman in wool skirts upon wool skirts, even in summer. She never preached or complained. She ordered and criticized. Irene’s shorts were too short, her makeup made her look like a whore, Bs were okay but was that all she wanted to be in life? Okay? She fried steaks on an iron skillet and watched as Irene ate around the fatty gristle, then tapped her fork on the plate and said, “Finish.” There was something to be said about a woman who could eat the gristle off a steak. Irene remembered that the grueling ordeal was worth it when it came time for de
ssert. She made chocolate chip brownies and lemon pound cake and braided bread dusted with cinnamon with an apple pie filling throughout the center. From a woman of God came her love of sweets.

  She picks the crumbs of pie from the waxed paper, goes to the bathroom, and shoves her finger down her throat. The moment she feels the burn drive up her septum and wet the inside of her nose, she experiences a rush of adrenaline so pleasurable it’s as if she’s in full contact with every part of her physical self. She coughs, gags, and lets the sweet chunks of pie slip from her mouth. She feels her abdomen stretch, chest expand, lungs pump, mouth contract, and eyes water. She had started throwing up just after last Christmas, when Robert had said, “Is it me or is your rump getting a little big?” He had apologized, of course, and he wasn’t unkind with his honesty. But she felt a great implication in his remarks, a threat that if she didn’t lose weight, she would have to accept the consequences, the most important being that he would fuck other women. At first, she felt frightened by the act, that she could commit her body to such a violent reaction. But soon she had begun to enjoy the rush of it—the consumption, preparation, and expulsion. It was not unlike the first time she took a shot of tequila in Eddie Prince’s basement when she was a sophomore in high school or that first line of coke when she had visited those friends from school who had all moved to Manhattan after graduating from college. She curls her upper lip and brushes her chocolate-stained teeth, then wipes the tears from under her eyelids and splashes water on her face. Afterward her body tightens, her bones are sore.

  The doorbell rings. Irene doesn’t answer. Then she hears a sharp knock on the door. What’s wrong with you? she thinks. What if it’s about the boys? She pushes up her hair and wipes her forehead with a washcloth. As she reaches for the doorknob, she notices the chocolate on her middle and index fingers and sucks it off before opening the door.

  A large square package has been left on the step. The delivery driver is back in his truck. He’s portly with a creepily thick mustache. He waves to Irene when he sees she has picked up the box. He will not do in tonight’s dream scenario. She takes the package inside, slices the tape with scissors, and opens the cardboard flaps. Inside is a porcelain jug she had ordered from Christie’s two weeks ago. She can’t remember why she ordered it. Painted on the jug is a pattern of blue and white swivels. There’s a tap at the bottom and perhaps she had an idea that this might be a fancy way to serve water or punch to guests during semi-casual dinner parties. She pulls off the bubble wrap and places the jug in the cabinet left of the refrigerator, where other items such as the power juicer and ice cream maker are stored and never used. As she’s removing her hand from the cabinet, a spider crawls down from the inside of the cupboard door onto the back of her palm and up her arm. It moves so quickly that she doesn’t scream as she normally would have, but instead giggles girlishly as its spindly legs move under her shirt and the spider falls between her breasts. She lifts her blouse and the spider drops to the floor and skitters toward the pantry. Suddenly she feels an overwhelming urge to have sex with her husband. She’ll bite his chest when she comes, tear the flesh from his body. The violence of the other night is still with her.