Andre Dubus: Selected Stories

by Andre Dubus

  When she got home he had just finished showering and shaving, and she took him to bed with lust that was as much part of her hangover as hunger and the need to smoke were; silent and hasty, she moved toward that orgasm that would bring her back to some calm mooring in the long day. Crying out, she burst into languor; slept breathing the scent of his washed flesh. But she woke alone in the twilit room and rose quickly from the bed, calling him. He came smiling from the living room, and asked if she were ready to go to the mall.

  The indoor walk of the mall was bright and warm; coats unbuttoned, his arm over her shoulder, hers around his waist, they moved slowly among people and smells of frying meat, stopping at windows to look at shirts and coats and boots; they took egg rolls to a small pool with a fountain in its middle and sat on its low brick wall; they ate pizza alone on a bench that faced a displayed car; they had their photographs taken behind a curtain in a shop and paid the girl and left their address.

  ‘You think she’ll mail them to us?’ Anna said.

  ‘Sure.’

  They ate hamburgers standing at the counter, watching the old man work at the grill, then sat on a bench among potted plants to smoke. On the way to the department store they bought fudge, and the taste of it lingered, sweet and rich in her mouth, and she wanted to go back for another piece, but they were in the store: large, with glaring white light, and as the young clerk wearing glasses and a thin moustache came to them, moving past television sets and record players, she held Wayne’s arm. While the clerk and Wayne talked, she was aware of her gapped and jutting teeth, her pea jacket, and old boots and jeans. She followed Wayne following the clerk; they stopped at a shelf of record players. She shifted her eyes from one to the other as they spoke; they often looked at her, and she said: Yes. Sure. The soles of her feet ached and her calves were tired. She wanted to smoke but was afraid the clerk would forbid her. She swallowed the taste of fudge. Then she was sad. She watched Wayne and remembered him running out of the drugstore and, in the car, saying Jesus Christ, and she was ashamed that she was sad, and felt sorry for him because he was not.

  Now they were moving. He was hugging her and grinning and his thigh swaggered against her hip, and they were among shelved television sets. Some of them were turned on, but to different channels, and surrounded by those faces and bodies and colliding words, she descended again into her hangover. She needed a drink, a cigarette, a small place, not all this low-ceilinged breadth and depth, where shoppers in the awful light jumped in and out of her vision. Timmy’s: the corner of the bar near the door, and a slow-sipped tequila salty dog and then one more to close the spaces in her brain and the corners of her vision, stop the tingling of her gums, and the crawling tingle inside her body as though ants climbed on her veins. In her coat pocket, her hand massaged the box of cigarettes; she opened it with a thumb, stroked filters with a finger.

  ‘That’s a good advertisement for the Sony,’ Wayne said. ‘Turning on the RCA next to it.’

  She wanted to cry. She watched the pictures on the Sony: a man and a woman in a car, talking; she knew California from television and movies, and they were driving in California: the winding road, the low brown hills, the sea. The man was talking about dope and people’s names. The clerk was talking about a guarantee. Wayne told him what he liked to watch, and as she heard hockey and baseball and football and movies she focused so hard on imagining this set in their apartment and them watching it from the couch that she felt like she had closed her eyes, though she had not. She followed them to the cash register and looked around the room for the cap and shoulders of a policeman to appear in the light that paled skin and cast no shadow. She watched Wayne counting the money; she listened to the clerk’s pleased voice. Then Wayne had her arm, was leading her away.

  ‘Aren’t we taking them?’

  He stopped, looked down at her, puzzled; then he laughed and kissed the top of her head.

  ‘We pick them up out back.’

  He was leading her again.

  ‘Where are we going now?’

  ‘Records. Remember? Unless you want to spend a fucking fortune on a stereo and just look at it.’

  Standing beside him, she gazed and blinked at album covers as he flipped them forward, pulled out some, talked about them. She tried to despise his transistor radio at home, tried to feel her old longing for a stereo and records, but as she looked at each album he held in front of her, she was glutted with spending, and felt more like a thief than she had last night waiting outside the drugstore, and driving home from it. Again she imagined the apartment, saw where she would put the television, the record player; she would move the chest of drawers to the living room and put them on its top, facing the couch where—She saw herself cooking. She was cooking macaroni and cheese for them to eat while they watched a movie; but she saw only the apartment now, then herself sweeping it. Wayne swept it too, but often he either forgot or didn’t see what she saw or didn’t care about it. Sweeping was not hard but it was still something to do, and sometimes for days it seemed too much to do, and fluffs of dust gathered in corners and under furniture. So now she asked Wayne and he looked surprised and she was afraid he would be angry, but then he smiled and said Okay. He brought the records to the clerk and she watched the numbers come up on the register and the money going into the clerk’s hand. Then Wayne led her past the corners and curves of washers and dryers, deeper into the light of the store, where she chose a round blue Hoover vacuum cleaner.

  She carried it, boxed, into the apartment; behind her on the stairs Wayne carried the stereo in two boxes that hid his face. They went quickly downstairs again. Anna was waiting. She did not know what she was waiting for, but standing on the sidewalk as Wayne’s head and shoulders went into the car, she was anxious and mute. She listened to his breathing and the sound of cardboard sliding over the car seat. She wanted to speak into the air between them, the air that had risen from the floorboard coming home from the mall as their talk had slowed, repeated itself, then stopped. Whenever that happened, they were either about to fight or enter a time of shy loneliness. Now grunting, he straightened with the boxed television in his arms; she grasped the free end and walked backward up the icy walk, telling him Not so fast, and he slowed and told her when she reached the steps and, feeling each one with her calves, she backed up them and through the door, and he asked if she wanted him to go up first and she said No, he had most of its weight, she was better off. She was breathing too fast to smell the stairway; sometimes she smelled cardboard and the television inside it, like oiled plastic; she belched and tasted hamburger, and when they reached the third floor she was sweating. In the apartment she took off her coat and went downstairs with him, and they each carried up a boxed speaker. They brought the chest into the living room and set it down against the wall opposite the couch; she dusted its top, and they put the stereo and television on it. For a while she sat on the couch, watching him connect wires. Then she went to the kitchen and took the vacuum cleaner from its box. She put it against the wall and leaned its pipes in the corner next to it and sat down to read the instructions. She looked at the illustrations, and thought she was reading, but she was not. She was listening to Wayne in the living room: not to him, but to speakers sliding on the floor, the tapping touch of a screwdriver, and when she finished the pamphlet she did not know what she had read. She put it in a drawer. Then, so that raising her voice would keep shyness from it, she called from the kitchen: ‘Can we go to Timmy’s?’

  ‘Don’t you want to play with these?’

  ‘No,’ she said. When he did not answer, she wished she had lied, and she felt again as she had in the department store when sorrow had enveloped her like a sudden cool breath from the television screens. She went into the living room and kneeled beside him, sitting on the floor, a speaker and wires between his legs; she nuzzled his cheek and said: ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t want to play with them either. Let’s go.’

  She got their coats and, as they w
ere leaving, she stopped in the doorway and looked back at the stereo and television.

  ‘Should we have bought it all in one place?’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  She hurried ahead of him down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, then her feet slipped forward and up and he caught her against his chest. She hooked her arm in his and they crossed the street and the parking lot; she looked to her left into the Sunnycorner, two men and a woman lined at the counter and Sally punching the register. She looked fondly at the warm light in there, the colors of magazine covers on the rack, the red soft-drink refrigerator, the long shelves of bread.

  ‘What a hangover I had. And I didn’t make any mistakes.’

  She walked fast, each step like flight from the apartment. They went through the lot of Chevrolet pickups, walking single file between the trucks, and now if she looked back she would not be able to see their lawn; then past the broad-windowed showroom of new cars and she thought of their—his—old Comet. Standing on the curb, waiting for a space in traffic, she tightly gripped his arm. They trotted across the street to Timmy’s door and entered the smell of beer and smoke. Faces turned from the bar, some hands lifted in a wave. It was not ten o’clock yet, the dining room was just closing, and the people at the bar stood singly, not two or three deep like last night, and the tables in the rear were empty. McCarthy was working. Anna took her place at the corner, and he said: ‘You make it to work at seven?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to be at work at seven; another tequila, Johnny.’

  She raised a hand to her laughter, and covered it.

  ‘I made it. I made it and tomorrow I don’t work till three, and I’m going to have two tequila salty dogs and that’s all; then I’m going to bed.’

  Wayne ordered a shot of Fleischmann’s and a draft, and when McCarthy went to the middle of the bar for the beer, she asked Wayne how much was left, though she already knew, or nearly did, and when he said About two-twenty she was ahead of his answer, nodding but paying no attention to the words, the numbers, seeing those strange visitors in their home, staring from the top of the chest, sitting on the kitchen floor; then McCarthy brought their drinks and went away, and she found on the bar the heart enclosing their initials that she and Wayne had carved, drinking one crowded night when McCarthy either did not see them or pretended not to.

  ‘I don’t want to feel bad,’ she said.

  ‘Neither me.’

  ‘Let’s don’t. Can we get bicycles?’

  ‘All of one and most of the other.’

  ‘Do you want one?’

  ‘Sure. I need to get back in shape.’

  ‘Where can we go?’

  ‘The Schwinn place.’

  ‘I mean riding.’

  ‘All over. When it thaws. There’s nice roads everywhere. I know some trails in the woods, and one of them goes to a pond. A big pond.’

  ‘We can go swimming.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘We should have bought a canoe.’

  ‘Instead of what?’

  She was watching McCarthy make a Tom Collins and a gimlet.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘I guess we bought winter sports.’

  ‘Maybe we should have got a freezer and a lot of food. You know what’s in the refrigerator?’

  ‘You said you didn’t want to feel bad.’

  ’I don’t.’

  ‘So don’t.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t want to either. Let’s have another round and hang it up.’

  In the morning she woke at six, not to an alarm but out of habit: her flesh alert, poised to dress and go to work, and she got up and went naked and shivering to the bathroom, then to the kitchen, where, gazing at the vacuum cleaner, she drank one of the glasses of milk. In the living room she stood on the cold floor in front of the television and stereo, hugging herself. She was suddenly tired, her first and false energy of the day gone, and she crept into bed, telling herself she could sleep now, she did not have to work till three, she could sleep: coaxing, as though her flesh were a small child wakened in the night. She stopped shivering, felt sleep coming upward from her legs; she breathed slowly with it, and escaped into it, away from memory of last night’s striving flesh: she and Wayne, winter-pallid yet sweating in their long, quiet, coupled work at coming until they gave up and their fast dry breaths slowed and the Emmylou Harris album ended, the stereo clicked twice into the silence, a record dropped and Willie Nelson sang ‘Stardust.’

  ‘I should have got some ludes and percs too,’ he said.

  Her hand found his on the sheet and covered it.

  ‘I was too scared. It was bad enough waiting for the money. I kept waiting for somebody to come in and blow me away. Even him. If he’d had a gun, he could have. But I should have got some drugs.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered.‘

  ‘We could have sold it.’

  ‘It wouldn’t matter.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s too much to get. There’s no way we could ever get it all.’

  ‘A lot of it, though. Some of it.’

  She rubbed the back of his hand, his knuckles, his nails. She did not know when he fell asleep. She slept two albums later, while Waylon Jennings sang. And slept now, deeply, in the morning, and woke when she heard him turning, rising, walking barefooted and heavily out of the room.

  She got up and made coffee and did not see him until he came into the kitchen wearing his one white shirt and one pair of blue slacks and the black shoes; he had bought them all in one store in twenty minutes of quiet anger, with money she gave him the day Wendy’s hired him; he returned the money on his first payday. The toes of the shoes were scuffed now. She kept the shirt clean, some nights washing it in the sink when he came home and hanging it on a chair back near the radiator so he could wear it next day; he would not buy another one because, he said, he hated spending money on something he didn’t want.

  When he left, carrying the boxes out to the dumpster, she turned last night’s records over. She read the vacuum cleaner pamphlet, joined the dull silver pipes and white hose to the squat and round blue tank, and stepped on its switch. The cord was long and she did not have to change it to an outlet in another room; she wanted to remember to tell Wayne it was funny that the cord was longer than their place. She finished quickly and turned it off and could hear the records again.

  She lay on the couch until the last record ended, then got the laundry bag from the bedroom and soap from the kitchen, and left. On the sidewalk she turned around and looked up at the front of the building, old and green in the snow and against the blue glare of the sky. She scraped the car’s glass and drove to the laundry: two facing rows of machines, moist warm air, gurgling rumble and whining spin of washers, resonant clicks and loud hiss of dryers, and put in clothes and soap and coins. At a long table women smoked and read magazines, and two of them talked as they shook crackling electricity from clothes they folded. Anna took a small wooden chair from the table and sat watching the round window of the machine, watched her clothes and Wayne’s tossing past it, like children waving from a Ferris wheel.

  THEY NOW LIVE IN TEXAS

  for Peggy

  WHEN THEY LEFT the party near midnight she felt sober enough to drive, but in the heated car on the way home she knew she was not. Her husband was driving with both hands, and leaning forward, and she could see space between his shoulders and upper back and the car seat. She looked through the windshield at the moving reach of their headlights; on both sides of the road were snowbanks, then woods. She said: “Stephen told me about his religious experience.”

  “He had one of those?”

  “Before AA.”

  “Whatever it was, it worked.”

  When they approached their house, free of neighbors for three acres, she told her husband she was not drunk but she was not sober, and asked him to drive the sitter
home. He smiled and said he wasn’t sober either but the car didn’t seem to know it, and as he turned he shifted down then accelerated and climbed the long and sanded driveway.

  The girl rose from the couch, turned off the television, and putting on her parka said the children had gone to bed on time, and had given her no trouble. The woman thanked and paid her and walked her to the door, then lay her coat beside her purse on the dining room table and went down the hall, into the room where her four-year-old daughter slept among stuffed bears. For moments she stood looking at her daughter’s face in the light from the hall, then she crept out and went into the next room where the six-year-old girl slept with three animals she had loved since she was two: an elephant, a bear, and a rabbit. The woman pulled the blankets to the girl’s shoulders and left.