“Nice picture,” Cary said, watching the woman’s features blur in his shaking hands.
“I’m not going to involve the police in this, Cary. Laskin wanted to press charges, but I said I wanted to talk to you. Cary?”
“Has the rabbit died yet? Because the rabbit my dad got me for Easter one year died. A neighborhood dog got it. Mom said it was a lousy gift—the rabbit. I guess she was right,” he said, letting out a short laugh.
Mr. Haynes cleared his throat, an unpleasant noise. “Cary, I think you should leave now.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. Cary stood and held out his hand to shake. But Mr. Haynes just sat there and looked down at his desk, at some bills or invoices or whatever happened to be there. He didn’t look at Cary. Cary set the frame upright on his desk and left.
On his way out of the store he nearly bumped into Dale, whose eyes were wide in concern. Cary tried to brush past him, but Dale pulled him aside, behind a toilet paper pyramid. “Here,” he said, pulling at Cary’s hand, placing in it a Valium. “One for the road.”
Cary didn’t even look at Dale, but he closed his fingers over the pill, moved away, and walked out the door into the parking lot. For an hour he sat there listening to the radio, hoping it would calm him. His hand remained closed, and when he finally opened it the pill had left tiny, white, sweaty streaks on his palm. He swallowed it dry. He felt it slide down his throat, heavy, like a lump, dissolving.
• • •
For the rest of the day, Cary drove around town, and for a few hours he sat in Monnish Park, which bordered his old high school. His classmates had always crossed the football fields to smoke here, but Cary never had. Today the park’s benches and picnic pavilions were mostly empty; he figured the high schoolers had found other smoking spots, and this made him sad. When it got close to the time when schools let out, he drove to the Academy, Louise’s school.
He arrived twenty minutes before the bell was supposed to ring, before Louise would walk out to her car, ready to raid Harco once again. He parked in a space that gave him a view of both the entrance to the school and her gaudy red Honda. He sat in his car, sweating, waiting for all of those carefree kids to get in their own cars and head home. He saw himself back then, all of those days when he rushed home as if that were the only place in the world he needed to be. Not worrying about the future, just knowing that things would somehow work out okay because they had to. Now he felt he had been cheated out of happiness. Things had not amounted to what they should have, people had not turned out the way he wanted them to. He didn’t blame his father or his mother or anyone else for this—he figured that this disappointment was something that couldn’t be altered one way or the other, that this was just the way things had to be. He tried not to think about what would happen next, but thoughts kept creeping in like cold drafts through cracks in a wall. He supposed he would go back to the university and finish, maybe even move back into his own apartment. Maybe call some of his friends. Study. Read books and learn. Go about the days with a purpose. Then find a job—no, a career. The bare outline of it seemed simple, but thinking about the actuality of it exhausted him. It all seemed like one big chore, as pointless as dusting.
But for now, at least, he had the Valium. It had started to make him feel good, light-headed and exuberant and bold. He heard the school bell ring, and there was a pause before the onslaught of high schoolers poured out the doors. He got out of his car and stood by the door, watching.
After the crowd of students had thinned, Cary saw Louise sauntering toward her car. She was wearing a black miniskirt and a loose, sleeveless white top, and her eyes were coated in bruiselike brown eye makeup. She carried no books, no purse, just her keys. He walked to her Honda and sat on its hood before she got there. She stopped when she saw him. She was only about ten feet away, looking at him with no expression.
“Hey, Louise.”
She said nothing, just rattled her keys. There were others still around, but no one was paying them any attention.
“I was fired,” he said. “But it’s not your fault. I just wanted you to know that.”
She crossed her arms over her chest but remained where she was.
“So you won’t be seeing me anymore, at Harco, I mean.” Cary smiled. He knew she wouldn’t say anything, but he waited anyway, just to make her stand there, unable to get to her car.
When he returned to his car, Louise was sitting on her hood watching him. He drove past her slowly and honked the horn, and when he looked back in the rearview mirror, he was surprised to see her hold up her hand and offer a tiny, hesitant, but unmistakable wave.
NEXT TIME
Michelle Rick
I’m crying, I’m crying, I’m crying in my peas and carrots because the TV is broken again and I didn’t lose weight on my Hollywood juice diet and Martin’s sperm didn’t take and I drank by myself this afternoon. Kahlúa and whole milk. I swore I wouldn’t do that anymore.
“Next time,” he says, swallowing his indifference as easily as his next forkful of food.
He is referring to the baby, of course, the one that won’t come. I’m crying in my peas and carrots and getting fat on Kahlúa and he’s telling me about next time. He pats my hand, which lies flat and cold on the formica tabletop. I know he means well, him with his gentle words. But it’s hard to find solace in a man with white cream sauce in the corner of his mouth.
“You have white cream sauce in the corner of your mouth.”
He wipes the wrong corner.
“Gone?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, and he turns his attention back to his food.
I watch him, this man I married after all those years of indecision. When he first asked me, straight out of high school, I’d said, not now. I expect to head out to Nevada to be a torch singer, I said, or to get commissioned by rich people to paint their portraits or see what it would feel like to be Mary Tyler Moore, working in a newsroom; to be the kind of girl who’s going to make it after all. Marty waited for me; he bided his time, understanding that none of these things would come to pass, and also that I would always wonder whether they would have if he didn’t let me find out for myself. While I was getting nowhere, he worked his way up management at the Mazola plant, where he still works, coming home every day smelling like french fries.
When we dated he took me to places like the zoo and the cloisters, quiet places where, among other things, we talked about whether you can divide the world up into two kinds of people or not, and what those kinds might be and which we are.
On this late afternoon, this afternoon of Kahlúa and peas and carrots, I cry as if I might never stop because now I know that there are two kinds of people but I still don’t know which kind I am. My husband sits with his back to the door leading to our yard, which opens up into a wild field thick with burnt-out waist-high grass. He eats so intently I wonder if he’ll ever realize he’s still got cream sauce on the corner of his mouth. I am wondering about the cream sauce on the corner of his mouth, and what kind of a boss Lou Grant would really make and just how many calories were in that Kahlúa, when the door slams open. My insides drop to the floor. I jump up and push my plate away. Martin swings around.
“What the hell?”
A slight man, dressed head to toe in black—from his Converse high-tops all the way up to his ski mask—stands before us. It is hard to tell what he is thinking because of the ski mask, but since he hesitates, I imagine he is confused, that he did not expect to find a husband with cream sauce on the corner of his mouth sitting across from a fat housewife crying into her peas and carrots.
“Your phone!” he shouts.
“Over there,” I point at the phone.
“Damn it,” he says. “It’s attached to the wall.”
“Yes,” I say.
“It’s a rotary,” he says.
“I know.”
“Everyone’s gone cordless, cordless and touch-tone,” he says.
“Not us.”
�
�Nobody even makes these rotary wall phones anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Bitsy! What are you . . . what are you doing apologizing to this . . . this hoodlum?” Martin asks.
The hoodlum reaches into his jacket, pulls out a pistol, and waves it at Martin.
“Watch how you talk to the lady,” the man in black says.
I fall back into my chair, in front of the peas and carrots. That chair feels like the only steady thing in this room, maybe even in the world.
“Hey, hey. Watch it now,” Martin says, rising halfway from his seat. To himself, I’ll bet he even sounds forceful and tough; he, my salvation, me, his damsel under duress.
“I don’t think you are in a position to be making demands.”
The man approaches Martin and holds the gun to his temple. Martin blanches. I imagine how cold that barrel must feel, how like a cannon instead of the small weapon it is.
“It’s just that . . . just that . . . your weapon could discharge.” Martin’s face muscles twitch, and the twitching escalates into spasms, small ones at first, then bigger through his neck and his shoulders, until his whole body is racked with them. Finally, his legs collapse from under him, and Martin drops to the floor and crawls underneath the kitchen sink. I think this is my cue to go to him. Christ, I’ll bet he’s shit his pants even, but he should have known better and kept his mouth shut in the first place.
The intruder turns to me. “Who is this fool?”
“My husband, Martin.”
“Tell Martin I know how to handle my weapon and then tell him he’s got cream sauce on his mouth.”
“All right,” I say.
“You a good wife?” the masked man asks.
“I hope so.”
“Because you should tell your husband about things like that; don’t let him embarrass himself in front of strangers.”
“We weren’t expecting anyone.”
“Didn’t your mother always tell you to be ready to welcome unexpected guests into your home?”
“Not criminals,” Martin whispers.
“You shut up,” the masked man says, swerving the gun in Martin’s direction again.
Martin shuts up.
The masked man picks up the phone and dials just three numbers.
“I’m the man you’re looking for,” he says into the receiver.
He pauses. “What do you mean which one? How many men you looking for who just robbed the only bank in this one-bank town?”
Another pause.
“Yes, I’ll hold,” he says. He turns to me, waves the gun at the fridge. “You got something to drink? A beer?”
“We have beer,” I say.
I jump up too fast and get that dizzy feeling like the floor is rushing at me. The masked man grabs my elbow to steady me. The decency in the gesture, his touch, so unexpected, calms me, warms me.
“I’m all right,” I say.
Hanging on to the table for support, I edge toward the refrigerator.
“Domestic or import?” I ask.
“Why, now we’re talking. I’ll take the import,” he says.
But now I’m hanging on to the refrigerator door, not moving, my face immersed in the fluorescent glow, and I can’t tell the milk from the cola from the devil’s food cake from the ham sandwich from yesterday’s meatloaf, and for the life of me I can’t make out which of these abstract shapes is a beer bottle, import or not, but I won’t cry, I won’t cry.
“Why is she crying?” the masked man asks my husband.
I look at Martin. He seems shrunken; his head is bowed, half-hidden by a drain pipe. He shrugs his shoulders.
“Don’t you care why your own wife’s crying?”
But Martin doesn’t get a chance to answer because someone is on the line now talking to our visitor. I watch his hand grip the receiver tighter, the veins and tendons swelling with his speech, strong, terse.
“Hello, Officer. There is an armed intruder holding two people hostage at 555 Dale Drive. I believe he might be dangerous. . . . Yes, I am that very gentleman.” He smiles mischievously at me, like he and I are in on this together. It’s impossible not to return the smile. I remember Martin and turn to him. He has the look of a man who just caught his wife doing unspeakable things with another man.
As the stranger continues to talk I snap to, find the beer, the bottle opener in the silverware drawer, pop the bottle open, drop the cap in the recycling bin, and hand it to him.
“What a nice lady,” he says, slugging from the bottle. The beer’s half gone by the time he pulls it away from his lips. “Would be a damn shame if something bad happened to her.”
As he continues to talk the sound of sirens approaches. I peek out the front window curtain. Police cars are grinding to a halt on our lawn, willy-nilly across the azalea beds and freshly mown grass, and officers in hard vests are pouring out, their guns trained on us. The police lights cast a swirling, ceaseless glow across the kitchen walls. Static hisses from walkie-talkies, inaudible, jumbled voices crying commands, dispatched from some safe place where they don’t want to mess up from because a thing like this doesn’t happen every day, because a thing like this, if it goes wrong, could cost them their jobs.
Our neighbors pour out of their houses and congregate on the blocked-off street, whispering—Mrs. Annie Ardley, whose divorce papers came through yesterday, whispering to the Gradys, who just had their twins, whispering to little Thomas, fourteen now, who broke his sister’s arm last week when she aggravated him over a misplaced shirt. There are more, many more, crawling out of their homes like aliens from pods, glad they’re not us, but glad to be here to see it. It could get grisly.
A more official-looking man than the other officers (he wears a suit, not a uniform, and no hard vest) emerges from a car with his loudspeaker in hand. It’s clear he’s their leader because he’s got the look of a guy who doesn’t get surprised by anything anymore. I let the curtain drop back into place.
“Mr. Urchin,” he says at the house. “Wick Urchin.”
“Is that your name?” I ask. “Wick Urchin?”
“No,” he says. “But you can call me Urchin. That’s what people sometimes call me.”
“Okay, Urchin.”
“It’s not so bad yet, Mr. Urchin,” the man outside says. “All you did was attempt—I stress, attempt—to rob First Nationwide. It’s a felony. I won’t lie to you, but I can see here on your record, you’re pretty clean. You can walk away from this.”
“Don’t believe him,” Urchin says to me. “I’ve got a rap sheet longer . . . I was gonna say longer than your husband’s spine, but I can see . . .” He doesn’t need to say the rest. He laughs.
I whirl around. Martin’s face is now completely obscured, buried in his arms, which are wrapped around his knees. He rocks back and forth like he just got sprung from Sweet Meadows Asylum a month too soon.
“Is Bitsy really what they call you?”
“Don’t you like it?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says. “But your mother didn’t really name you Bitsy, did she? It’s not your real name, is it?”
“My real name is Elizabeth,” I tell Urchin.
“Elizabeth,” he says, and I can see his eyes crinkling in a smile. “Like the queen.”
And as he says it, I suddenly feel regal, and beautiful, the way I felt when I drank my Kahlúa today and put on the Johnny Mathis record and my black lace bustier, the one with the imitation pearl décolletage, and ran my hands over my breasts as I watched myself, luxurious and spilling over, in the standing mirror. For a moment I’d thought maybe I’d fallen in love with myself. I was beautiful, but there hadn’t been anyone there to see it.
“Like the queen,” I say, falling in love with myself all over again, this time with someone here to see it.
The phone rings. Urchin picks it up.
“It’s for you,” he says, holding it out to Martin. But Martin simply shakes his head, unable to speak. I take the receiver.
> “We’re fine,” I say in response to the policeman on the other end of the line. “But he’s got a gun.”
“I’m not frightened,” I say, and again Urchin smiles. Somehow his approval fills me. I remember a line I read in the Bible, I think, a line so beautiful and poetic and unfathomable until now:
I am replete with the very thee.
I want him to feel as I do. He fills me.
I return the phone to Urchin and wander into the pantry, with its narrow glassed-in shelves. My hand, I notice, is only trembling slightly now as I open the delicately frosted cabinet door, with its wisteria etching framing it. I am going to cook. A huge pot of soup. I’ve got chicken stock, and bouillon cubes for flavor, and cornstarch, and flour and potatoes to thicken the broth, and in the fridge there are nearly fresh vegetables from the green market: celery stalks—I’ll still have to trim the leaves—and carrots, which need peeling, and scallions and sweet Vidalia onions, and clove upon clove of garlic which need mincing. I’ll make us a pot of soup, and fill the house with the smell of it, and watch it simmer with Urchin when he is not taking calls. When it’s finished I’ll pour a big bowl of it for him, and he can have as much as he wants. And I will sit across from him as he eats my soup.
“What did I tell you?” Urchin booms from the kitchen, his voice escalating.
“It’s true. I was born at night. But not last night, you incompetent—”
I hurry back toward the kitchen, my arms full with the bag of flour and bouillon cubes and garlic vines and chicken stock, but before I get there, there is a crack, like the world coming to an end, and the shattering of glass from the back window, and a thud—a thud so heavy and definite even I know what it is. And I see the sniper who’d been lying in wait like a snake in the field out back, maybe waiting for me to get out of his sight line—slithering out of the weeds, as a jumble of blue men flood my kitchen, their guns waving wildly in case they still have a target to shoot at. And then I see him, Urchin, on the floor, bleeding from his neck, his eyes still open, but no longer smiling.
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