The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  He dresses quickly and heads downstairs. The ritual in the mornings is simplified by the fact that neither of them is eating breakfast. He makes the orange juice, puts vitamins on a saucer for them both. When he glances out the living-room window, he sees that she is now doing somersaults in the dewy grass. She does three of them while he watches, and he isn’t stealthy this time but stands in the window with what he hopes is an approving, unworried look on his face. After each somersault she pulls her sweat shirt down, takes a deep breath, and begins again, the arms coming down slowly, the head ducking slowly under; it’s as if she falls on her back, sits up, and then stands up. Her cheeks are ruddy with effort. The moistness of the grass is on the sweat suit, and in the ends of her hair. It will rain this morning—there’s thunder beyond the trees at the end of the street. He taps on the window, gestures, smiling, for her to come in. She waves at him, indicates that she wants him to watch her, so he watches her. He applauds when she’s finished—three hard, slow tumbles. She claps her hands together as if to remove dust from them and comes trotting to the door. As she moves by him, he tells her she’s asking for a bad cold, letting herself get wet so early in the morning. It’s his place to nag. Her glance at him acknowledges this.

  “I can’t get the rest of me to follow my head,” she says about the somersaults.

  They go into the kitchen, and she sits down, pops a vitamin into her mouth, and takes a swallow of the orange juice. “I guess I’m not going to make it over that vaulting horse after all,” she says suddenly.

  “Sure you will.”

  “I don’t care.” She seems to pout. This is the first sign of true discouragement she’s shown.

  He’s been waiting for it. “Brenda—honey, sometimes people aren’t good at these things. I mean, I was never any good at it.”

  “I bet you were,” she says. “I bet you’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

  “No,” he says, “really.”

  He’s been keeping to the diet with her, though there have been times during the day when he’s cheated. He no longer has a job, and the days are long; he’s hungry all the time. He pretends to her that he’s still going on to work in the mornings after he walks her to school, because he wants to keep her sense of the daily balance of things, of a predictable and orderly routine, intact. He believes this is the best way to deal with grief—simply to go on with things, to keep them as much as possible as they have always been. Being out of work doesn’t worry him, really: he has enough money in savings to last awhile. At sixty-one, he’s almost eligible for Social Security, and he gets monthly checks from the girl’s father, who lives with another woman, and other children, in Oregon. The father has been very good about keeping up the payments, though he never visits or calls. Probably he thinks the money buys him the privilege of remaining aloof, now that Brenda’s mother is gone. Brenda’s mother used to say he was the type of man who learned early that there was nothing of substance anywhere in his soul, and spent the rest of his life trying to hide this fact from himself. No one was more upright, she would say, no one more honorable, and God help you if you ever had to live with him. Brenda’s father was the subject of bitter sarcasm and scorn. And yet, perhaps not so surprisingly, Brenda’s mother would call him in those months just after the divorce, when Brenda was still only a toddler, and she would try to get the baby to say things to him over the phone. And she would sit there with Brenda on her lap and cry after she had hung up.

  “I had a doughnut yesterday at school,” Brenda says now.

  “That’s lunch. You’re supposed to eat lunch.”

  “I had spaghetti, too. And three pieces of garlic bread. And pie. And a big salad.”

  “What’s one doughnut?”

  “Well, and I didn’t eat anything the rest of the day.”

  “I know,” her grandfather says. “See?”

  They sit quiet for a little while. Sometimes they’re shy with each other—more so lately. They’re used to the absence of her mother by now—it’s been almost a year—but they still find themselves missing a beat now and then, like a heart with a valve almost closed. She swallows the last of her juice and then gets up and moves to the living room, to stand gazing out at the yard. Big drops have begun to fall. It’s a storm, with rising wind and, now, very loud thunder. Lightning branches across the sky, and the trees in the yard disappear in sheets of rain. He has come to her side, and he pretends an interest in the details of the weather, remarking on the heaviness of the rain, the strength of the wind. “Some storm,” he says finally. “I’m glad we’re not out in it.” He wishes he could tell what she’s thinking, where the pain is; he wishes he could be certain of the harmlessness of his every word. “Honey,” he ventures, “we could play hooky today. If you want to.”

  “Don’t you think I can do it?” she says.

  “I know you can.”

  She stares at him a moment and then looks away, out at the storm.

  “It’s terrible out there, isn’t it?” he says. “Look at that lightning.”

  “You don’t think I can do it,” she says.

  “No. I know you can. Really.”

  “Well, I probably can’t.”

  “Even if you can’t. Lots of people—lots of people never do anything like that.”

  “I’m the only one who can’t that I know.”

  “Well, there’s lots of people. The whole thing is silly, Brenda. A year from now it won’t mean anything at all—you’ll see.”

  She says nothing.

  “Is there some pressure at school to do it?”

  “No.” Her tone is simple, matter-of-fact, and she looks directly at him.

  “You’re sure.”

  She’s sure. And of course, he realizes, there is pressure; there’s the pressure of being one among other children, and being the only one among them who can’t do a thing.

  “Honey,” he says lamely, “it’s not that important.”

  When she looks at him this time, he sees something scarily unchildlike in her expression, some perplexity that she seems to pull down into herself. “It is too important,” she says.

  He drives her to school. The rain is still being blown along the street and above the low roofs of the houses. By the time they arrive, no more than five minutes from the house, it has begun to let up.

  “If it’s completely stopped after school,” she says, “can we walk home?”

  “Of course,” he says. “Why wouldn’t we?”

  She gives him a quick wet kiss on the cheek. “Bye, Pops.”

  He knows she doesn’t like it when he waits for her to get inside, and still he hesitates. There’s always the apprehension that he’ll look away or drive off just as she thinks of something she needs from him, or that she’ll wave to him and he won’t see her. So he sits here with the car engine idling, and she walks quickly up the sidewalk and into the building. In the few seconds before the door swings shut, she turns and gives him a wave, and he waves back. The door is closed now. Slowly he lets the car glide forward, still watching the door. Then he’s down the driveway, and he heads back to the house.

  It’s hard to decide what to do with his time. Mostly he stays in the house, watches television, reads the newspapers. There are household tasks, but he can’t do anything she might notice, since he’s supposed to be at work during these hours. Sometimes, just to please himself, he drives over to the bank and visits with his old co-workers, though there doesn’t seem to be much to talk about anymore and he senses that he makes them all uneasy. Today he lies down on the sofa in the living room and rests awhile. At the windows the sun begins to show, and he thinks of driving into town, perhaps stopping somewhere to eat a light breakfast. He accuses himself with the thought and then gets up and turns on the television. There isn’t anything of interest to watch, but he watches anyway. The sun is bright now out on the lawn, and the wind is the same, gusting and shaking the window frames. On television he sees feasts of incredible sumptuousness, almost naus
eating in the impossible brightness and succulence of the food: advertisements from cheese companies, dairy associations, the makers of cookies and pizza, the sellers of seafood and steaks. He’s angry with himself for wanting to cheat on the diet. He thinks of Brenda at school, thinks of crowds of children, and it comes to him more painfully than ever that he can’t protect her. Not any more than he could ever protect her mother.

  He goes outside and walks up the drying sidewalk to the end of the block. The sun has already dried most of the morning’s rain, and the wind is warm. In the sky are great stormy Matterhorns of cumulus and wide patches of the deepest blue. It’s a beautiful day, and he decides to walk over to the school. Nothing in him voices this decision; he simply begins to walk. He knows without having to think about it that he can‘t allow her to see him, yet he feels compelled to take the risk that she might; he feels a helpless wish to watch over her, and, beyond this, he entertains the vague notion that by seeing her in her world he might be better able to be what she needs in his.

  So he walks the four blocks to the school and stands just beyond the playground, in a group of shading maples that whisper and sigh in the wind. The playground is empty. A bell rings somewhere in the building, but no one comes out. It’s not even eleven o’clock in the morning. He’s too late for morning recess and too early for the afternoon one. He feels as though she watches him make his way back down the street.

  His neighbor, Mrs. Eberhard, comes over for lunch. It’s a thing they planned, and he’s forgotten about it. She knocks on the door, and when he opens it she smiles and says, “I knew you’d forget.” She’s on a diet too, and is carrying what they’ll eat: two apples, some celery and carrots. It’s all in a clear plastic bag, and she holds it toward him in the palms of her hands as though it were piping hot from an oven. Jane Eberhard is relatively new in the neighborhood. When Brenda’s mother died, Jane offered to cook meals and regulate things, and for a while she was like another member of the family. She’s moved into their lives now, and sometimes they all forget the circumstances under which the friendship began. She’s a solid, large-hipped woman of fifty-eight, with clear, young blue eyes and gray hair. The thing she’s good at is sympathy; there’s something oddly unspecific about it, as if it were a beam she simply radiates.

  “You look so worried,” she says now, “I think you should be proud of her.”

  They’re sitting in the living room, with the plastic bag on the coffee table before them. She’s eating a stick of celery.

  “I’ve never seen a child that age put such demands on herself,” she says.

  “I don’t know what it’s going to do to her if she doesn’t make it over the damn thing,” he says.

  “It’ll disappoint her. But she’ll get over it.”

  “I don’t guess you can make it tonight.”

  “Can’t,” she says. “Really. I promised my mother I’d take her to the ocean this weekend. I have to go pick her up tonight.”

  “I walked over to the school a little while ago.”

  “Are you sure you’re not putting more into this than she is?”

  “She was up at dawn this morning, Jane. Didn’t you see her?”

  Mrs. Eberhard nods. “I saw her.”

  “Well?” he says.

  She pats his wrist. “I’m sure it won’t matter a month from now.”

  “No,” he says, “that’s not true. I mean, I wish I could believe you. But I’ve never seen a kid work so hard.”

  “Maybe she’ll make it.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Maybe.”

  Mrs. Eberhard sits considering for a moment, tapping the stick of celery against her lower lip. “You think it’s tied to the accident in some way, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, standing, moving across the room. “I can’t get through somehow. It’s been all this time and I still don’t know. She keeps it all to herself—all of it. All I can do is try to be there when she wants me to be there. I don’t know—I don’t even know what to say to her.”

  “You’re doing all you can do, then.”

  “Her mother and I …” he begins. “She—we never got along that well.”

  “You can’t worry about that now.”

  Mrs. Eberhard’s advice is always the kind of practical good advice that’s impossible to follow.

  He comes back to the sofa and tries to eat one of the apples, but his appetite is gone. This seems ironic to him. “I’m not hungry now,” he says.

  “Sometimes worry is the best thing for a diet.”

  “I’ve always worried. It never did me any good, but I worried.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Mrs. Eberhard says. “It’s a terrific misfortune to have to be raised by a human being.”

  He doesn’t feel like listening to this sort of thing, so he asks her about her husband, who is with the government in some capacity that requires him to be both secretive and mobile. He’s always off to one country or another, and this week he’s in India. It’s strange to think of someone traveling as much as he does without getting hurt or killed. Mrs. Eberhard says she’s so used to his being gone all the time that next year, when he retires, it’ll take a while to get used to having him underfoot. In fact, he’s not a very likable man; there’s something murky and unpleasant about him. The one time Mrs. Eberhard brought him to visit, he sat in the living room and seemed to regard everyone with detached curiosity, as if they were all specimens on a dish under a lens. Brenda’s grandfather had invited some old friends over from the bank—everyone was being careful not to let on that he wasn’t still going there every day. It was an awkward two hours, and Mrs. Eberhard’s husband sat with his hands folded over his rounded belly, his eyebrows arched. When he spoke, his voice was cultivated and quiet, full of self-satisfaction and haughtiness. They had been speaking in low tones about how Jane Eberhard had moved in to take over after the accident, and Mrs. Eberhard’s husband cleared his throat, held his fist gingerly to his mouth, pursed his lips, and began a soft-spoken, lecture-like monologue about his belief that there’s no such thing as an accident. His considered opinion was that there are subconscious explanations for everything. Apparently, he thought he was entertaining everyone. He sat with one leg crossed over the other and held forth in his calm, magisterial voice, explaining how everything can be reduced to a matter of conscious or subconscious will. Finally his wife asked him to let it alone, please, drop the subject.

  “For example,” he went on, “there are many collisions on the highway in which no one appears to have applied brakes before impact, as if something in the victims had decided on death. And of course there are the well-known cases of people stopped on railroad tracks, with plenty of time to get off, who simply do not move. Perhaps it isn’t being frozen by the perception of one’s fate but a matter of decision making, of will. The victim decides on his fate.”

  “I think we’ve had enough, now,” Jane Eberhard said.

  The inappropriateness of what he had said seemed to dawn on him then. He shifted in his seat and grew very quiet, and when the evening was over he took Brenda’s grandfather by the elbow and apologized. But even in the apology there seemed to be a species of condescension, as if he were really only sorry for the harsh truth of what he had wrongly deemed it necessary to say. When everyone was gone, Brenda said, “I don’t like that man.”

  “Is it because of what he said about accidents?” her grandfather asked.

  She shook her head. “I just don’t like him.”

  “It’s not true, what he said, honey. An accident is an accident.”

  She said, “I know.” But she would not return his gaze.

  “Your mother wasn’t very happy here, but she didn’t want to leave us. Not even—you know, without … without knowing it or anything.”

  “He wears perfume,” she said, still not looking at him.

  “It’s cologne. Yes, he does—too much of it.”

  “It smells,” she said.

  In the afternoon he w
alks over to the school. The sidewalks are crowded with children, and they all seem to recognize him. They carry their books and papers and their hair is windblown and they run and wrestle with each other in the yards. The sun’s high and very hot, and most of the clouds have broken apart and scattered. There’s still a fairly steady wind, but it’s gender now, and there’s no coolness in it.

  Brenda is standing at the first crossing street down the hill from the school. She’s surrounded by other children yet seems separate from them somehow. She sees him and smiles. He waits on his side of the intersection for her to cross, and when she reaches him he’s careful not to show any obvious affection, knowing it embarrasses her.

  “How was your day?” he begins.

  “Mr. Clayton tried to make me quit today.”

  He waits.

  “I didn’t get over,” she says. “I didn’t even get close.” “What did Mr. Clayton say?”

  “Oh—you know. That it’s not important. That kind of stuff.” “Well,” he says gently, “is it so important?”

  “I don’t know.” She kicks at something in the grass along the edge of the sidewalk—a piece of a pencil someone else had discarded. She bends, picks it up, examines it, and then drops it. This is exactly the kind of slow, daydreaming behavior that used to make him angry and impatient with her mother. They walk on. She’s concentrating on the sidewalk before them, and they walk almost in step.