by David Gates
Holly watches from the living room window as he backs out of the driveway, then goes into the laundry room to put the clothes in the dryer. She takes out the lamb chops. In The Way to Cook she finds a marinade with olive oil, dijon mustard, garlic and rosemary; she puts the chops in to soak. She straightens up the kitchen, sponges off the countertops, gets down dinner plates, salad plates and wineglasses—which is a little crazed with so many hours to go, but anything to put off Madame Bovary. She turns the radio on, listens for a few seconds, then realizes it’s “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks,” which they seem to play about forty times a week. She turns it off and goes back to the sofa. Charles’s first wife spits blood and dies as the buzzer goes off on the dryer.
When Van’s not back at four-thirty, she calls Seth at work. “What am I supposed to do?” he says. “Maybe he took a sentimental journey up to New Haven. The old goat’s probably lurking around Machine City trying to pick up coeds.”
“Coeds?”
“You’ve heard the expression? Look, if I’m going to get home by—”
“Okay, fine, thanks.”
“Did you need the car?”
“I wanted to run up to Hay Day to get bread and salad stuff.”
“So tell me what you need and I’ll stop by.”
“That’s so out of your way. I’m sure he’ll be back any minute. I probably worry too much.”
“Speaking of worrying too much,” he says, “how’s your finances? I paid the mortgage today, so I was hoping you could take care of the bills. I’ve been putting them in my top drawer.”
“Sure. No problem.” She’s got about six hundred left in her checking. After the bills, she’ll have walking-around money for another couple of weeks. The bad heat bills won’t start until next month. By which time she’d better think of something.
“I’m glad I married money,” he says.
Her line here is Me too. “Okay, I’ll see you soon,” she says.
At quarter after five the Saturn pulls into the driveway. Van comes into the kitchen, gives her a courtly bow and sets a Barnes & Noble bag on the counter: Sue Grafton and her cute overbite. “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho,” he says.
“So how was the mall?” This is to put him on notice that she’s not without her own Sue Grafton detective skills.
“The mall,” he says. “Yes. Very civilized. If you’re expecting a philippic against malls, I’m going to have to disappoint you.” She smells liquor breath.
“Where else did you go?”
“Oh?” he says. “Might I ask in what spirit you’re asking?”
“Just a spirit of curiosity.”
“Good. Good answer,” he says. “Because not all sixty-seven-year-olds have Alzheimer’s disease.”
“What is this with you and Alzheimer’s? Aren’t people more likely to die in a car crash?”
“This is—this may be true. But you can have Alzheimer’s and still die in a car crash. Or prostate cancer and die in a car crash. Or Alzheimer’s and die of prostate cancer. How in God’s name did we get onto this?”
“Can I see what you bought?” Holly nods at the Barnes & Noble bag.
“Very deft. Thank you. Yes, let’s talk books. Books. All right: baroque as it may seem, I got a sudden hankering to reread Hazlitt. I found your Portable Coleridge upstairs and that made—”
“Not mine.”
“Yours now, n’est-ce pas? At any rate, the reason I say civilized, I’m sitting up in your lovely guest room reading Coleridge on Shakespeare. This naturally makes me want to read Hazlitt instead, so I hop in your car, over to the mall, find the Barnes & Noble and voilà,” He reaches in the bag and produces Hazlitt: Selected Writings. “Ten minutes from an idle wish to its fulfillment. Fifteen, tops. You can’t tell me that’s not a modern miracle.”
“Can I see?” He hands her the book. William Hazlitt (1778–1830) seems to have been a great social and literary critic who said, “No one has come between me and my freewill.” Like whoosie and her Calvins. It’s not the world’s zingiest quote.
“I haven’t told your husband this,” Van says, “but I’ve been thinking about maybe going back to teaching. Little adjunct position someplace. Help ’em screw some young guy out of a full-time job. Oh, brother. I better sit down.” He pulls out a chair and sits, his palms flat on the table. “Better.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’ll put a narrow construction on that,” he says. “Yes, I’m fine. You want to know what I’ve been thinking about all day? Of course you do. This is something that happened back when I was probably thirty-five, thirty-six—Jesus, think of it. It was the time when the students were discovering pot and all that. I’d contend with them all day long and then drive back home to Woodbridge. Spray the shrubs, whatever I did—well, you know.” He waves an arm around, presumably to indicate the house and grounds. “Okay, okay, get to the point, Van. So this particular day, I’d suspended a student, to what purpose God only knows, and he came into my office—big, husky, blond boy, with one of those beards where it won’t grow in on the sides? Just a little on the chin.” Van rubs his jaw. “He was already on probation, and this was the next step. So I told him, ‘You’ve got to start making better choices.’ And he looks at me—surly little bastard—and he says, ‘Like what?’ And I said, ‘Fucking?’ Well. He goes bright red, the way blonds do? Because the whole time I’m thinking, Seth’s Little League team’s playing out of town this afternoon, so when I go home I’ll get to be all alone with my wife. Boy, he was out of there like a shot. He either thought I was a pervert or just completely out of my mind. Isn’t that a strange story?”
“Van, I have to tell you, it sort of bothers me that you drove my car after you’d been drinking.”
He waves this away. “Oh, pooh. And pooh again. As in: Pooh pooh. A couple of vodka tonics in the afternoon does not a drinking make. Nor iron bars a cage.” He stands up and walks to the refrigerator. “I guess you’d’ve had to see Lily to appreciate that story. But hell, you did see Lily. Once in the wheelchair, once in the box. And now you have the pictures.” He shakes his head. “You know, the one thing that got to me. The day I took the handicap plates off the car. Not a day I’d care to live over. May I offer you one of your own beers?”
“No, thanks. May I have the keys, by the way?”
“Hmm. Then may I invite you back to T.G.I. Friday’s? Which is the answer to your question. Where I was? I went in there thinking I’d just sit and have a drink and read Hazlitt. But, as it turns out, they have a big, you know, overhead TV, and they were showing a hockey game, and it was so—what’s the word? Restful. They just skate around and around and around. It was like a fish tank. Am I painting an attractive enough picture? They also have a real fish tank, by the way.”
“Keys?” Holly says.
“Of course.” He digs in his pocket.
“I think it might be a better idea to go upstairs and lie down for a while.”
“Now, there’s an offer.” He shakes his head. “Jesus, I am drunk.” He dangles the keys, drops them in her palm. “Oh, yes. The old boy’s definitely overdue for a nap.”
Holly turns on the radio and opens the refrigerator, maybe there’s enough stuff for salad in the vegetable drawer. “I’m Daniel Zwerdling,” she says, right along with Daniel Zwerdling after his “Hello.” She knows all their voices. Was she to blame for that going-upstairs remark? She’d meant it to be free of any little edge of anything. And we all know what that’s worth. On “All Things Considered” they’re talking about Cuba’s currently lively arts scene; she catches the phrase this island nation. She’s got salad stuff galore, and they can do without fancy-schmancy bread. God knows if Seth’s father will even be able to eat.
So. The lamb chops are marinating. Seth won’t be home for at least an hour. And she’s got no work to do—hasn’t even turned her computer on for a week. Well, she could pay those bills. She goes up to their bedroom, quietly, so Van won’t hear, and closes the door behind her. In Se
th’s top drawer she finds half a dozen envelopes with a rubber band around them, next to his stubby brass pipe and his old Edgeworth tobacco box. She opens the lid: it’s full of sticky, piney-skunky-smelling buds, like tiny green shrimps, and she plucks out one and hides it in her kangaroo pocket. Thievery pure and simple. Then she closes the drawer, leaving the bills, having decided that—no, having understood that she’s going to call Mitchell. She walks to the bed as if somebody were inside her body, controlling it the way a little man up in his little booth runs a giant construction crane.
“Well,” Mitchell says. “What do you know. I was just thinking about you.”
“Me, too,” she says. “Then again, I’m always thinking about myself.”
“You’re a card,” he says. “But.”
She begins wrapping coils of phone cord around her index finger, whose nail she keeps short for her husband. “I’m not sure I can be dealt with,” she says.
“Yeah, I always liked that about you. Though you don’t sound too happy about it.”
“I don’t know, I didn’t call to complain.”
He clears his throat. “Which raises the question.”
“I guess I wanted to hear a friendly voice.”
“Oh? I was under the impression that you had all the friends you could use.”
“Come on, please don’t—you know.” Suddenly feeling cold, she puts her free hand in her kangaroo pocket. She needs to get socks on, too.
“Holly, I’m not understanding this. Look, do you want me to meet you someplace?”
“No.” She fingers the sticky little bud.
“Okay.”
The sound of him waiting for her to go on.
She takes her hand out of her pocket and sniffs her fingers: the resinous smell that she can never decide is pleasant or unpleasant. She must’ve had it in mind to meet him, get him high and seduce him. Re-seduce him. Seduce him doubly: Mitchell doesn’t do drugs. “Oh, God,” she says. “This was really a mistake.”
“Yeah, sounds like.”
“So I guess I should hang up.”
“Whatever you think,” he says. “I’m just taking this all in.”
“I’m going to hang up now.”
“What would you like me to say?”
“Okay, I’m hanging up.” And she does. She hadn’t thought she would.
She’s halfway down the stairs when her pulse starts pounding in her throat. She lies down on the sofa, closes her eyes and instantly gets an image of a hospital corridor: a nurse enters left, looks at a clock on the wall, exits right. Holly’s never been in such a hospital. Her eyes fly open: she’s in the living room in South Norwalk. If she’d been traveling out of body, could she have got back this fast? Then it comes to her: this must be the rehab unit where Seth’s mother died. She didn’t travel there, that’s insane; it was an image beamed to her by Seth’s mother from wherever she is now. As a warning. A warning against getting old and paralyzed and dependent, with all your deeds past remedy.
Holly wakes up hearing Seth’s key in the lock, and tries to sit up, but the tiny will inside her can’t move the big body. Her hands can’t make fists.
“You okay?” he says. He unwinds his scarf, then roughs up his hair and snow flies out.
“Is it snowing?”
“Yeah, it’s beautiful. You should take a little walk. It’s falling through the streetlights.” He flutters his fingers down. She closes her eyes again and hears him open the hall closet. A jingling of coat hangers. “So where’s the Emperor of Ice Cream?”
“Up taking a nap, I think. I’m going to nap a little more, too, okay?”
“Will you be able to sleep tonight?”
She doesn’t answer. What conceivable business is it of his?
She hears him walk into the kitchen. A beer-top pops, the refrigerator door closes with a whump and she opens her eyes, needing to latch onto something real. The antique clock on the mantel says, as always, 8:25—according to Seth, the most esthetically pleasing time. The clock’s one of his family treasures: a tall French-polished box with a glass door whose bottom panel is a painting of a pointy-roofed mill and water water-falling over the mill wheel. Seth’s father used to tell him it was the mill of God, grinding slow but exceeding fine. Seth laughs about it now, but Holly knows that in olden times they made everything mean something; a picture of a mill wheel on a clock could very well have been their code for, like, Get to work because God’s coming to grind you up.
Seth comes out of the kitchen and starts up the stairs when somebody hollers, “Look out below!” He freezes, looks up, drops his beer can (which goes tumbling end over end, beer pulsing out) and jumps aside as the wheelchair, his father in the seat—gripping the armrests, eyes wild—comes bumping and leaping down the stairs, then flies off the last step and rolls to the front door.
Seth says, “Jesus fucking Christ.”
His father gets out of the wheelchair, stately with drink. “Look what I found,” he says. “Chariot of the Gods. I’ll pay for banging up your stairwell, no need to worry about that aspect. You cannot imagine”—he puts his hand on his chest—“what that was like.”
“Are you all right?” Seth says.
Holly sits up and paws around on the floor for her running shoes.
“I shouldn’t think so,” says Van. “Good God, who in their right mind would do such a thing?”
“I’m going out,” Holly says. “To whom it may concern.”
“Say again?” says Seth.
“I’ll call you.”
“Wait, you’re just—I don’t get what’s going on here.”
“You can deal with this. That way you’ll really have something to hold against me. I mean”—and she can’t help laughing—“it’s the least I can do.”
The streets have a dusting of snow, tinted a sick pink by the streetlights, with black stripes from passing car wheels. But the snowfall has stopped: a beautiful sight she’s missed out on. She sees that she’s heading for 95, and understands that at the entrance she’ll choose 95 South, bound for New York.
She stops at the drive-up cash machine and gets a hundred dollars; the receipt says she’s now down to $537.33. Then she drives around behind the bank building, parks under the featureless back wall and feels in her kangaroo pocket. Still there: now how’s she going to do this? She unzips her purse, finds a ballpoint pen and unscrews the two pieces, picks up a Diet Coke can from the floor and pushes in the cigarette lighter. She turns the can upside down (a last trickle wetting her knee) and lays the bud on the concave bottom. If a police cruiser comes back here to check out the suspicious car, she’s fucked. The lighter pops out and she touches the orange end to the bud. When it starts smoldering she picks up the bottom part of the pen, puts the threaded end between her lips, poises the little hole over the bud and sucks, focusing the smoke into a narrow, tornado-like rope, twisting up the barrel and into her lungs. She coughs out a cloud of piney smoke, gets her breath, goes at it again.
On 95 she eases her way into the leftmost lane and makes the needle inch up a hair above 70, then a hair above that. She hits PLAY on the CD changer, a soprano starts up, she peels the Post-It with her list off the glove-compartment door and holds it up in her line of vision. Disc One? Okay, Joan Sutherland. Whom she has yet to figure out a thing for. Holly concentrates as the voice navigates its own upper reaches; essentially, Joan Sutherland sounds shrieky, though you don’t want that to be your formulation. In fact, it’s Holly who’s about to shriek, in the midst of what’s starting to feel like a major mistake: trucks all around, their wheels higher than her roof, their brutal chrome radiators higher still. Their rush and roar drowns the music, and everything feels motionless, as if she could open the door, step out and stroll around. She’d better try to take this seriously. There’s a sign for a service area: two miles. Surely she can make it two more miles.
She parks next to a silver minivan that’s taken a handicap spot, then follows footprints and a pair of bicycle tracks across the
snow-dusted blacktop. What kind of parents would allow their kids to ride bikes in a service area on a snowy night? If she ever—but really, let’s not even get into that. She wishes she could see falling snow.
Inside the doors it’s suddenly so warm that she shivers reflexively. She’s got bare ankles and a cotton sweatshirt. McDonald’s to the right; rest rooms and phones to the left. She punches in Mitchell’s number, then her credit card number. But it’s Seth who says “Yellow?” How could he possibly have got there ahead of her? Wait, how could he even have found out? But of course she’s called home by mistake.
“Holly?”
She cradles the receiver, then feels a rush and her heart thumping, as after a near fender-bender. What this little slip means is that Seth is her true love. Or (b) that she’s even more self-destructive than she realized.
She prefers (b). And if nothing else, she can be stubborn. When her heart stops pounding she’ll call Mitchell. No, first she’ll go in and wash her face, which feels like it’s coated with gray film.
Holly sticks her hands under the automated faucet for her little ration of water. How’s this formulation? That late capitalism tries to make you feel at the same time degraded and magically powerful: water at my mental command! Lately she’s been favoring that expression, “late capitalism,” except how could anybody know it’s late rather than still early? She pumps liquid soap into her palm and again holds her hands under the faucet in supplication, but the machine knows it’s her asking for seconds, so she moves to the next sink, which duly mistakes her for someone else.
Back in the car, she fastens her seat belt and realizes she’s forgotten to call Mitchell. She closes her eyes and she’s in bed with Seth. He reaches over. She opens her eyes and sees snowflakes bouncing off the windshield. So her wish came true. She starts the engine for some heat, and Joan Sutherland gives an ungodly shriek. She punches the STOP button and something like silence is restored. It’s nothing like silence.
Through the falling snow, an old man is pushing an old woman down the walk in a wheelchair, heading this way. He’s wearing a plaid shirt and no hat—what does snow feel like on a bald head?—but she’s bundled up in a puffy coat and an I NY baseball cap. She has a no-pleasure-ever-again stare; the man is smiling. Holly jams the car into reverse, refusing to witness what happens next. A crunching thud as she hits something behind her—the front bumper of a car trying to crawl past—and she stomps on the brakes. The man in the plaid shirt turns to look; the woman continues to stare; somebody’s getting out of the car behind her. Holly decides to haul ass, but she can’t back up, can’t go forward. She puts her head down on the wheel. Couldn’t this just stop right here?
