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they keep to themselves), and she still likes being carried and held. She almost never says anything, and when you try to get her to, she becomes moody and even more introverted. Alison bounces her slightly and reaches with her other hand to hug Marge one last time. Both women are fighting back tears. “I’ll keep in touch,” says Marge. “It’ll go fast, and I’ll be back here with this kid.”
It’s hard to imagine. They exchange a look that expresses this. Marge touches Kalie’s cheek.
“Bye,” Kalie says, and puts her face in the little hollow of Alison’s neck. Marge kisses the little curls, hugs Jonathan, and gets into the jeep.
“Bye,” Kalie says again, not quite looking up from her hiding place. It occurs to Alison that this is another leave-taking in the child’s life. She’s clinging tight.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Alison tells her. “Ever.”
Marge starts the engine, and Kalie squeezes even tighter. Marge’s big St. Bernard begins to bark, sticking his large, floppy head out the passenger window. As Marge shifts the gears, grinding them slightly, Oliver pulls up behind her in the truck, honking his horn. He gets out and hurries to the driver’s side door of the jeep and leans in to hug her. His dusty black shirt rides up, and his lower back is visible—the wiry black hair there. It makes him look so vulnerable, and he has put on a lot of weight in the last two years. He steps back and seems faintly out of balance, but then rights himself. “I’m gonna miss you, kid,” he says. His hypothalamic tic is more pronounced than normal, and his eyes are glazed. The tic is always worse when he’s tired or stressed, the head shaking back and forth, back and forth. He looks terrible.
Marge is crying. “I’ll be back. Do me a favor and kill Gregory for me.”
“I told you I’d take the rap for you. But you have to do it, honey.”
Marge blows him a kiss, waves the small handkerchief in her hand, and drives off, honking the horn. The dog stares dumbly back, wind displacing his large, soft ears.
Alison’s father is still in the street, wiping his eyes and sniffling a little.
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lets her down and turns to Jonathan. “Honey, watch her for a little while, do you mind?”
“I requested that, not two minutes ago.”
“Will you please take her out back and let her swing?”
He takes his sister’s hand with a motion expressing faintly parental exasperation and walks her around the side of the house. Kalie’s quiet again, her face down-turning, and there’s an aspect of patience about her, as if she understands her brother’s mood. They go out back, where he’ll watch her swing.
Alison turns from this vision of her children to find that her father has come to the curb and is observing her.
“I tell you I’m proud of you today?” he says. There’s something hangdog about his expression. She notices that he’s wearing the same clothes he had on yesterday, which is unlike him.
“What’d you do this morning, Dad? Where’d you go so early?”
He steps up into the lawn and puts his arm across the top of her shoulders. “Honey, I’ve misbehaved. I spent the night over at Justice Hall.” He shakes his head.
“Oh, no, Oliver.”
“Stupid, I know,” he says. “I had a couple margaritas.”
The phone rings inside. For a moment, they hesitate, and then he steps away from her and starts toward the house. “I’ll get that.”
She watches him hurry on in, and then walks back through the complicated shade to the front of the house, with its single step leading onto the porch—the best feature of the place. Here are boxes of the baby’s toys, and Jonathan’s old ones, too, because the boy is sentimental and can’t part with anything. Plastic trucks, model planes (one with a broken wing), dolls, rubber food, action figures, paint sets. Along with the boxes, there are five lawn chairs and a small tea table with toy tea-things that Kalie got from her father last Christmas. Clutter. She wonders what someone might think coming upon these things a thousand years from now; this doll with its asinine grin and its eyes that roll open on a weighted metal rod in the head. Her father’s talking on the phone, and she doesn’t want to hear it—it’s either someone he drinks with or someone about a job for him. His arrangements trouble her, precisely because she’s afraid it’s someone he drinks with.
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“Morbid,” she says to herself, going in. The light in the house is gray; the white walls look gray. The pictures she has hung on them, her own bright paintings and some of Jonathan’s drawings—he makes blueprint-like sketches of buildings, cathedral shapes, or modernistic, sleek complexes of angle and wall and roof. She can hear the little protest of the chains on the swing outside.
Oliver’s just put the receiver back in its cradle. “Did you say morbid ?”
“My thoughts. Me.” She picks up the newspaper that’s strewn across the couch, stacks the sections, and drops it in the magazine rack.
He sits down in his chair with a sigh, reaches for his guitar, and, leaning back with it, plays a couple of soft chords. He’s really quite comfortable with the instrument, and good enough so that people notice. “Anything go wrong last night?” This is his usual question about her work hours.
She tells him about Holly and Fiona, and the episode of the roof.
“I’ll be goddamned,” he says.
“What?”
“Temporary Road?” he says.
“Yes.”
“Got to be them.” And he tells her about his visit to the Crazies. He uses the word, because Will Butterfield and his wife used it. “That was one of them—Holly—just now on the phone.”
“I got a kick out of her. She was the one on the roof.”
“I think I might’ve guessed the other one.”
She stands at the window looking out on the side yard and the neighboring house. Greg has come out and is sitting in a lawn chair on his back stoop, watering the backyard with a hose. The water arcs in the sun like a bending stream of light. Sometimes, when she can’t sleep at night, she listens to him on the radio. There’s something entertaining about knowing the person behind the voice—and knowing that for all his cool on the air waves, he’s pretty unhappy all the time. He begged Marge not to leave.
“Tell me what happened last night,” she says to her father.
He shrugs. “I had too much to drink. I’ll have to go to traffic school.
There’s a court date.”
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“What would we do if you lost your license?”
“It’s almost ten years since I got a ticket, honey.” He sighs and plays a blues progression, watching his fingers on the fret board. “It’s a miracle, I know, that I’ve made it this far. I saw Stanley there. You remember Stanley?”
She sighs “No,” and, moving from the window, flops down on the sofa. “Should I?” She feels as if she could sleep for months.
“Guess not. Good kid, I remember. Nice guy.”
“Are you thinking of setting me up with somebody you met in the drunk tank?”
He says nothing, playing the guitar, not looking at her.
“Sorry,” she tells him.
“Nothing to be sorry about.”
But she has hurt him, she can tell. And just now she lacks the energy to do anything about it. She closes her eyes and feels the drowsiness that comes from stress, the haziness of an overactive mind. How good it might be to go under and stay there until all the problems melt away, and to wake up fresh, in a new situation.
Oliver puts the guitar down and stretches back, crossing his legs at the ankle. “I’ve got an appointment in a little while. Our nutty ladies. I got them to agree to sixty more dollars. They want to consult me about a job.”
“You should take a nap or something,” she tells him.
“You ought to see if you
can take a nap. I’m okay. I’ll watch Kalie awhile. I don’t have to go over there right away.”
“What about the Gilman house? Don’t you have to do that?”
“I—I stopped and talked to them briefly before I came here. Talked to them about it a little.”
“They’re not doing it and they want their deposit back,” Alison says.
Oliver’s eyes answer.
More strain on her about money, the rent, the bills, which she takes care of. Occasionally, she fields calls from people she has taken to calling kindly collectors—those gentle, affectionate, warm voices promising eviction, talking of affidavits and lawsuits and jail, even jail.
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tries not even to think about it. The mail is depressing, filled with demands and notifications, along with the usual enticements, the usual presorted junk telling her she’s eligible, or in need of something, or in possession of something that can quickly be turned into big savings or earnings.
Now she gives forth a small, involuntary groan, sitting forward. He holds one hand up, palm toward her. “I know, I know. But I think our crazy ladies are going to be good money—with what she talked about.”
She knows that he’ll eventually get around to the Gilman house, too, and when he does, it’ll be good work. Excellent work. It’s his pattern.
Delay, procrastination, and then furious work, continuously, until it is done. He has a perfectionist’s eye for detail, once the work is under way.
She wonders if he doesn’t put these jobs off because of some worry about leaving her alone for the long hours with the children, though, in fact, it has always been the story, as long as she can remember. Her father in his work clothes, coming home in dawn light, after finishing a job on time, no matter how late it was begun.
He puts the guitar down carefully and then crosses his arms over his chest, lying back. They say nothing for a spell. Often they sit quietly like this while the children sleep. She’ll read her books, and he’ll look at the paper or play the guitar softly or work a crossword puzzle. They’ll watch a baseball game together. Sometimes Jonathan stays up to watch.
Jonathan does so with a curious detachment: he doesn’t really care about sports. His gestures are those of vague curiosity, as though the real matter of interest is the passion with which his mother and grandfather watch it. Oliver has tried to teach him how to throw and catch, but the boy seems genuinely appalled at the prospect of trying to manipu-late something as hard as a baseball. It frightens him, and he shies away from the softest lob; he cringes, bat in hand, and swings wildly as if to fend off a hornet or a wasp. His discouragement shows, and Oliver is very patient with him, as he was with Alison when he taught her to play, all those years ago, in what she remembers as a happier time than it must have been—because Oliver, by his own admission, has always had this fault line about the bottle. “Your mother put up with a lot,” he says often enough for her to feel the truth of his words.
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And it is indeed true that Alison, when off-duty, spends too much time alone. She and the children and the bills and waiting for Oliver.
It’s all she knows these days. The shifts of work—two nights on, one night off, three nights on, two nights off, and back again—and now, with Marge having left, this is all going to be that much harder.
One evening last month, she and Marge split a bottle of chardonnay and then decided to open a bottle of red. They drank merlot and ate cheese and crackers, sitting on the couch, the children asleep, a movie playing that neither of them much liked. Marge lay over and put her head in Alison’s lap, and let her hand play along the ridge of Alison’s collarbone. Alison closed her eyes, astonished at the excitement this tactile contact caused in her. Abruptly, the other woman sat up and put her mouth on Alison’s, and Alison found herself returning the kiss. It felt simple and rather innocent; it felt, in fact, utterly, miraculously good, too. Calming and deeply restorative and nourishing. They went to Alison’s room and locked the door, and soon they were out of their clothes and engaged in acts neither of them would’ve believed possible, given who they were and how they had always lived their lives. It went on and on, and when it was at last over, they got dressed and had another drink—from another bottle of chardonnay—and agreed, rather shyly, not to refer to it again. Alison went to bed that night and couldn’t sleep, wondering at herself, and wondering, too, what lay ahead. For her, sex had always meant some sort of commitment. She wouldn’t have believed that she could get so starved-feeling for physical contact. Except that it felt more like a discovery involving her deepest nature.
When she saw Marge again, the following afternoon, the other woman’s eyes gave nothing back about what had transpired the night before.
It seemed that, more than wanting to keep to the agreement they had made, Marge had forgotten everything. And, in fact, they had been very drunk. So, Alison was left with the memory adrift inside, faintly tinged with guilt and puzzlement, and more important for its revelation of the depths of her loneliness than for anything else.
Now, Jonathan comes in with Kalie. He walks with her into the kitchen to make a bowl of cereal for her. Alison gets up, moves to the doorway, and looks out at the houses across the street, the man there, going off to work.
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The day’s starting, the first without her friend to talk to and worry with. She makes her way downstairs and busies herself with putting in a load of laundry. Her father catnaps over the newspaper. Standing in the downstairs hall, folding clothes from the dryer, she sobs suddenly and puts her hand to her mouth, listening for movement on the stairs. In a little alcove-like space off the main room of the basement is a table laden with the materials of an old hobby: tools and various dolls in different stages of completion. She goes in there and sits down, sniffling softly, and picks up the nearest doll, an Indian girl with braided hair, carrying a child. The whole condition of the living universe, understood in the viscera and bone, is the feeling of something carved, by courage and necessity, out of fear. Alison thinks of the rabbit foraging in a field, one eye on heaven and what wheels and circles there among the fleecy clouds in the wide, bright blue. She fears loneliness with that same wrench-ing of the nerves and heart. It has made her run to these different crafts and hobbies—photography, knitting, doll-making, watercolors. Holding the doll with its wide-cheeked, clay-colored, Asian face, she decides that this hobby can be rekindled. She recalls losing herself in it. So, she stays here for a while, sanding the edges where the knife has left marks, concentrating only on the motion of her hands.
f o r c e o f g r a v i t y
1.
If, in the beginning, Elizabeth was troubled by Will’s calling the old women the Crazies, recently she has taken to calling them that to their faces. Lately, she doesn’t wish to spend time in their society at all. And if Holly and the roof haven’t sealed it for her, what happens the following Wednesday evening does. She gets trapped into going to Kmart with Fiona, to get some charcoal for the grill. Will says he’ll cook a big fi-let of salmon. Elizabeth volunteers to go get the charcoal, because she wishes to go off by herself for a little respite; but Fiona insists on coming along.
All the way to the store, the old woman talks about the curse of materialism. She sees it everywhere. She’s been thinking about it.
Of course, Elizabeth knows what this means.
By the time they get to the store, Fiona has fairly well worked herself into a state. One can see it in her walk—a certain headlong aspect to her gait. Elizabeth follows her on her march through the aisles of the Kmart, to the lawn-and-garden section. Fiona chooses a big bag of charcoal, muttering about consumerism. Even so, Elizabeth begins to hope that her companion will simply purchase the bag and they’ll get out t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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br /> of the store and the only discomfort she’ll have to endure is Fiona herself, going on, in escalating volume, about the decline of values in her native land. But there’s a line at the checkout: other people patiently waiting with their purchases. The man directly in front of them has a television, a combination VCR and DVD player, and three tall CD racks in his cart, along with a sack of crabgrass-killer. Fiona stands with her charcoal, gazing at him, and then gazing beyond him at another man, this one with a fifty-foot garden hose, a garage-door opener, and a weed-whacker. At the register, a heavy woman in a tank top is getting her order rung up: a tremendous number of lawn ornaments and five electric clocks.
“Would you look at that,” Fiona abruptly says to the man in front of her. “That lady will never be late anywhere ever again.”
The man, who is also quite heavy, and very hirsute, looks at Fiona and then looks down.
“That’s a hell of a lot of clocks,” Fiona says, to no one in particular.
The woman only glances at her.
“What would a person do with all those?”
Elizabeth says, “Fiona, please.”
“This is what I’m talking about, though,” says Fiona. “Look at it.
Look at this. It’s just consumption. Rapaciousness.” She indicates the TV and the player. “I bet this gentleman’s already got a couple each of these at home.” She reaches over and touches the man’s heavy elbow.
“Excuse me, there, sir. Do you have a television set at home?”
He’s startled by her touch—he was obviously daydreaming—and now he seems puzzled and maybe even a little annoyed. But he answers,
“Yeah. So?”
Fiona indicates his purchases. “Are these for somebody else?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Do you really need this, then? Any of this?”
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