by Andre Dubus
She looks at the walls, the chest with her purse and cassette player on its top, the closed door of the closet; she will keep this room so she’ll have the lake (and it occurs to her that this must have been Steve’s, and he gave it up), and she’ll hang curtains. She will leave his room, or the back room, alone; will store in it whatever she doesn’t want downstairs, that chair with the flowered cover he always sat in, and its hassock, the coffee table with cigarette burns like Timmy’s bar; she will paint the peeling cream walls in the kitchen. For the first time since moving in, she begins to feel that more than this one room is hers; not only hers but her: her sense of this seems to spread downward, like sentient love leaving her body to move about the three rooms downstairs, touching, looking, making plans. Her body is of no use to her but to move weakly to the bathroom, to sleep and drink and, when it will, to eat. Lying here, though, is good; it is like the beach or sleeping late, better than those because she will not do anything else, cannot do anything else, and so is free. Even at the beach you have to—what? Go into the water. Collect your things and drive home. Wash salt from suit, shower, wash hair, dry hair. Cook. Eat. But this, with no chills now, no pain unless she moves, which she won’t, this doesn’t have to end until it ends on its own, and she can lie here and decorate the house, move furniture from one room to another, one floor to another, bring all her clothes from her parents’ house, her dresser and mirror, while outside voices lower as the smell of meat fades until all she smells is smoke. Tomorrow she will smell trees and the lake.
She hears a car going away, and would like to stand at the window and look at the darkened houses, but imagines them instead, one by one the lights going out behind windows until the house becomes the shape of one, locked for the winter. She is standing at the chest, getting her cigarettes, when she hears the people next door leaving. Do it, she tells herself. She turns out the bedside lamp, crouches at a front window, her arms crossed on its sill, and looks past trees in the front lawn at the dark lake. She looks up at stars. To her right, trees enclose the lake; she cannot see the houses among them. Water laps at the beach and wharf pilings. She can see most of the wharf before it is shielded by the oak; below her, Steve’s boat, covered with tarpaulin, rests on sawhorses. Her legs tire, and she weakens and gets into bed, covers with the sheet and spread, and lights a cigarette, the flame bright and large in the dark. She reaches for the lamp switch, touches it, but withdraws her hand. She smokes and sees the bathroom painted mauve.
For a long while she lies awake, filling the ashtray, living the lovely fall and winter: in a sweater she will walk in the woods on brown leaves, under yellow and red, and pines and the blue sky of Indian summer. She will find her ice skates in her parents’ basement; she remembers the ponds when she was a child, and wonders how or why she outgrew skating, and blames her fever for making her think this way, but is uncertain whether the fever has made her lucid or foolish. She is considering a snow blower for the driveway, has decided to buy one and learn to use it, when he comes in the crash of breaking glass and a loud voice: he has said something to the door, and now he calls her name. She moves the ashtray from her stomach to the floor, turns on her side to get the gun from under the pillow, then lies on her back.
‘Polly?’ He is at the foot of the stairs. ‘It’s me. I’m coming up.’
He has the voice of a returning drunk, boldly apologetic, and she cocks the hammer and points the gun at the door as he climbs, his boots loud, without rhythm, pausing for balance, then quick steps, a pause, a slow step, evenly down the few strides of hall, and his width above his hips fills the door; he is dark against the grey light above him.
‘You in here?’
‘I’ve got a gun.’
‘No shit? Let me see it.’
She moves her finger from the trigger, and pushes the safety down with her thumb.
‘It’s pointed at you.’
‘Yeah? Where’s the light in here?’
‘You liked the dark before.’
‘I did? That’s true. That little apartment we had?’
‘I mean June, with that fucking knife.’
‘Oh. No knife tonight. I went to the Harbor Schooner—’
‘Shit: what for.’
‘—So I goes Hey: where’s Polly? Don’t she work here? Sick, they said. To see you, that’s all. So I did some shots of tequila and I’m driving up to New Hampshire, and I say what the fuck? So here I am. You going to tell me where the light is?’
His shoulders lurch as he steps forward; she fires at the ceiling above him, and he ducks, his hands covering his head.
‘Polly.’ He lowers his hands, raises his head. ‘Hey, Polly. Hey: put that away. I just want to talk. That’s all. That was an asshole thing I did, that other time. See—’
‘Go away.’
Her hand trembles, her ears ring, and she sits up in the gunpowder smell, swings her feet to the floor, and places her left hand under her right, holding the gun with both.
‘I just want to ask you what’s the difference, that’s all. I mean, how was it out here with Steve? You happy, and everything?’
‘It was great. And it’s going to be better.’
‘Better. Better without Steve?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why’s that? You got somebody moving in?’
‘No.’
‘But it was good with Steve here. Great with Steve. So what’s the difference, that’s what I think about. Maybe the lake. The house? I mean, what if it was with me? Same thing, right? Sleep up here over the lake. Do some fucking. Wake up. Eat. Swim. Work. How come it was so good with Steve?’
‘We weren’t married.’
‘Oh. Okay. That’s cool. Why couldn’t it be us then, out here? What did I ever do anyways?’
‘Jesus, what is this?’
‘No, come on: what did I do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? I must’ve done something.’
‘You didn’t do anything.’
‘Then why weren’t you happy, like with Steve? I mean, I thought about it a lot. It wasn’t that asshole DeLuca.’
‘You almost killed him.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘You could have.’
‘You see him?’
‘I brought him flowers, is all.’
‘See: it wasn’t him. And I don’t think it was me either. If it was him, you’d be with him, and if it was me, well, you got rid of me, so then you’d be happy.’
‘I am happy.’
‘I don’t know, Polly.’
She can see the shape and muted color of his face, but his eyes are shadows, his beard and hair darker; his shoulders and arms move, his hands are at his chest, going down, then he opens his shirt, twists from one side to the other pulling off the sleeves.
‘Don’t, Ray.’
Flesh glimmers above his dark pants, and she pushes the gun toward it.
‘Let’s just try it, Polly. Turn on the light, you’ll see.’ He unbuckles his belt, then stops, raises a foot, holds it with both hands, hops backward and hits the doorjamb, pulls off the boot, and drops it. Leaning there, he takes off the other one, unzips his pants, and they fall to his ankles. He steps out of them, stoops, pushing his shorts down. ‘See. No knife. No clothes.’ He looks down. ‘No hard-on. If you’d turn on a light and put away that hogleg—’
He moves into the light of the door, into the room, and she shakes her head, says No, but it only shapes her lips, does not leave her throat. She closes her eyes and becomes the shots jolting her hands as she pulls and pulls, hears him fall, and still pulls and explodes until the trigger is quiet and she opens her eyes and moves, leaping over him, to the hall and stairs.
In the middle of the night I sit out here in the skiff and I try to think of something else but I can’t, because over and over I keep hearing him tell me that time: Alex, she’s the best fuck I’ve ever had in my life. I don’t want to think about that. But I look back at the house that was Kingsley’s and I wish
I had put on the lights before I got in the boat, but it wasn’t dark yet and I didn’t think I’d drift around half the night and have to look back at it with no lights on so it looks like a tomb, with his weights and fishing gear in there. I’ll have to get them out. It looks like we’re always taking somebody’s things out of that house, and maybe it’s time to sell it to somebody who’s not so unlucky.
He bled to death, so even then she could have done something. I want to hate her for that. I will, too. After he knew he loved her, he didn’t talk about her like that anymore, but it was still there between us, what he told me, and he knew I remembered, and sometimes when we were out drinking, me and somebody and him and Polly, and then we’d call it a night and go home, he’d grin at me. What I don’t know is how you can be like that with a guy, then shoot him and leave him to bleed to death while you sit outside waiting for your old man and everybody. This morning we put him next to Kingsley and I was hugging Mom from one side and the old man hugging her from the other, and it seemed to me I had two brothers down there for no reason. Kingsley wouldn’t agree, and he wouldn’t like it that I don’t vote anymore, or read the newspapers, or even watch the news. All Ray did was fall in love and not get over it when she got weird the way women do sometimes.
So I sit out here in the skiff and it’s like they’re both out here with me. I can feel them, and I wish I’d see them come walking across the lake. And I’d say, Why didn’t you guys do something else? Why didn’t you wait to be drafted, or go to Canada? Why didn’t you find another girl? I’d tell them I’m going to sell this— and oh shit it starts now, the crying, the big first one, and I let it come and I shout against it over the water: ‘I’m going to sell this fucking house, you guys. And the one in town, and I’m moving in with Mom and the old man; I’m going to get them to sell theirs too and get the fuck out of here, take them down to Florida and live in a condo. We’ll go fishing. We’ll buy a boat, and fish.’
PART III
GRADUATION
SOMETIMES, OUT IN California, she wanted to tell her husband. That was after they had been married for more than two years (by then she was twenty-one) and she had settled into the familiarity so close to friendship but not exactly that either: she knew his sounds while he slept, brought some recognition to the very weight of his body next to her in bed, knew without looking the expressions on his face when he spoke. As their habits merged into common ritual, she began to feel she had never had another friend. Geography had something to do with this too. Waiting for him at the pier after the destroyer had been to sea for five days, or emerging from a San Diego movie theater, holding his hand, it seemed to her that the first eighteen years of her life in Port Arthur, Texas had no meaning at all. So, at times like that, she wanted to tell him.
She would look at the photograph which she had kept hidden for four years now, and think, as though she were speaking to him: I was seventeen years old, a senior in high school, and I got up that day just like any other day and ate Puffed Wheat or something with my parents and went to school and there it was, on the bulletin board—But she didn’t tell him, for she knew that something was wrong: the photograph and her years in Port Arthur were true, and now her marriage in San Diego was true. But it seemed that for both of them to remain true they had to exist separately, one as history, one as now, and that if she disclosed the history, then those two truths added together would somehow produce a lie which in turn would call for more analysis than she cared to give. Or than she cared for her husband to give. So she would simply look at the picture of herself at sixteen, then put it away, in an old compact at the bottom of her jewelry box.
The picture had been cut out of the high school yearbook. Her blonde hair had been short then, an Italian boy; her face was tilted down to one side, she was smiling at the camera, and beneath her face, across her sweater, was written: Good piece.
It had been thumbtacked to the bulletin board approximately two years after she had lost her virginity, parked someplace with a boy she loved. When they broke up she was still fifteen, a long way from marriage, and she wanted her virginity back. But this was impossible, for he had told all his friends. So she gave herself to the next boy whose pledge was a class ring or football sweater, and the one after that (before graduation night there were three of them, all with loose tongues) and everyone knew about Bobbie Huxford and she knew they did.
She never found out who put the picture on the bulletin board. When she got to school that day, a group of students were standing in the hall; they parted to let her through. Then she met the eyes of a girl, and saw neither mischief nor curiosity but fascination. A boy glanced at the bulletin board and quickly to the floor, and Bobbie saw the picture. She walked through them, pulled out the thumbtacks, forcing herself to go slowly, taking out each one and pressing it back into the board. She dropped the picture into her purse and went down the hall to her locker.
So at graduation she was not leaving the camaraderie, the perfunctory education, the ball games and dances and drives on a Sunday afternoon; she was leaving a place where she had always felt watched, except when Sherri King had been seduced by an uncle and somehow that word had got out. But the Kings had moved within a month, and Bobbie’s classmates went back to watching her again. Still there was nostalgia: sitting on the stage, looking at the audience in the dark, she was remembering songs. Each of her loves had had a song, one she had danced to, pressed sweating and tight-gripped and swaying in dance halls where they served beer to anyone and the juke box never stopped: Nat ‘King’ Cole singing ‘Somewhere Along the Way,’ ‘Trying’ by the Hilltoppers, ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ by Joni James, all of them plaintive songs: you drank two or three beers and clenched and dipped and weaved on the dance floor, and you squeezed him, your breasts against his firm narrow chest feeling like your brassiere and wrinkled blouse and his damp shirt weren’t even there; you kept one hand on the back of his neck, sweat dripped between your fused cheeks, and you sang in nearly a whisper with Joni or Nat and you gave him a hard squeeze and said in his ear: I love you, I’ll love you forever.
She had not loved any of them forever. With each one something had gone sour, but she was able to look past that, farther back to the good times. So there was that: sitting on the stage she remembered the songs, the love on waxed dance floors. But nostalgia wasn’t the best part. She was happy, as she had been dancing to those songs that articulated her feelings and sent them flowing back into her blood, her heart. This time she didn’t want to hold anyone, not even love anyone. She wanted to fly: soar away from everything, go higher than rain. She wanted to leave home, where bright and flowered drapes hung and sunlight moved through the day from one end of the maroon sofa to the other and formed motes in the air but found dustless the coffee table and the Bible that sat on it.
She was their last child, an older brother with eight years in the Army and going for twenty, and an older sister married to a pharmacist in Beaumont, never having gone farther than Galveston in her whole life and bearing kids now like that was the only thing to do.
In the quiet summer afternoons when her mother was taking a nap and her father was at work, she felt both them and the immaculate house stifling her. One night returning from a date she had walked quietly into the kitchen. From there she could hear them snoring. Standing in the dark kitchen she smoked a cigarette, flicking the ashes in her hand (there was only one ash tray in the house and it was used by guests). Then looking at their bedroom door she suddenly wanted to holler: I drank too much beer tonight and got sick in the john and Bud gave me 7-Up and creme de menthe to settle my stomach and clean my breath so I could still screw and that’s what we did: WE SCREWED. That’s what we always do.
Now, looking out into the dark, Bobbie wondered if her parents were watching her. Then she knew they were, and they were proud. She was their last child, she was grown now, they had done their duty (college remained but they did not consider it essential) and now in the clean brightly-colored house they could w
ait with calm satisfaction for their souls to be wafted to heaven. Then she was sad. Because from the anxiety and pain of her birth until their own deaths, they had loved her and would love her without ever knowing who she was.
After the ceremony there was an all-night party at Rhonda Miller’s camp. Bobbie’s date was a tall shy boy named Calvin Tatman, who was popular with the boys but rarely dated; three days before graduation he had called Bobbie and asked her to be his date for Rhonda’s party. The Millers’ camp was on a lake front, surrounded by woods; behind the small house there was a large outdoor kitchen, screened on all sides. In the kitchen was a keg of beer, paper cups, and Rhonda’s record player; that was how the party began. Several parents were there, drinking bourbon from the grown-ups’ bar at one side of the kitchen; they got tight, beamed at the young people jitterbugging, and teased them about their sudden liking for cigarettes and beer. After a while Mr. Miller went outside to the barbecue pit and put on some hamburgers.
At first Bobbie felt kindly toward Calvin and thought since it was a big night, she would let him neck with her. But after Calvin had a few tall cups of beer she changed her mind. He stopped jitterbugging with her, dancing only the slow dances, holding her very close; then, a dance ended, he would join the boys at the keg. He didn’t exactly leave her on the dance floor; she could follow him to the keg if she wanted to, and she did that a couple of times, then stopped. Once she watched him talking to the boys and she knew exactly what was going on: he had brought her because he couldn’t get another date (she had already known that, absorbed it, spent a long time preparing her face and hair anyway), but now he was saving face by telling people he had brought her because he wanted to get laid.
