But another part of her was curious in spite of or because of everything: who was he and what made him crazy and dangerous and had he always been that way. She said, “I guess she made you real mad. Hey, what’s your name? I’m Bonnie. Are you hungry? How about I fix you a sandwich? Turkey and Swiss OK?”
Rattling on. He didn’t answer, just opened the new beer and drank from it. He watched as Bonnie moved around the kitchen, yanking bread, plates, the rest that she needed. She made up the sandwich with plenty of everything, mayo, lunchmeat, cheese. Cut it nicely on the diagonal and emptied a bag of potato chips into a bowl. “Here you go,” she said, setting it all down on the table and moving out of the way, just a bit closer to the door. “Oh, wait. Napkin.”
Now he was looking at her, which might or might not turn out to be a good thing. He picked up the knife and the beer and sat down in front of the sandwich, stared at it. “Whadja put on this?”
“Just mayonnaise.”
“Mayonnaise’s all right I guess,” he said, and bent over the plate, using both hands to get as much food as he could into his mouth.
Bonnie said, “Do I know you from someplace? You go to the bars or anything?”
He didn’t answer, still working on the sandwich. You saw guys like him on campus often enough, panhandlers or criminals or both, homeless or close to it, hanging around because students were stupid and careless and easy pickings, well she sure was, why hadn’t she locked the damned door behind her and taken her keys? She tried again. “You from around here?”
He was eating the chips now, crunching them by the handful. She was running out of things to feed him, inane questions to ask him. She ducked around the table, keeping it between them, and ran water in the sink. “Mind if I clean up some?”
He didn’t answer. He was sucking bits of food from the inside of his mouth. Bonnie opened the cupboard under the sink and put on Jane’s big green rubber gloves. It was comforting, putting this extra, protective layer over her skin. “Yeah, it’s my turn to, you know, shovel the place out.” He wasn’t paying her any particular attention; why should he? She was just some random body, currently making noise. Beneath the sink were the usual scrubbers and sponges and soaps, when what she really needed was a baseball bat, or the sort of things they made weapons out of on television, batteries and matchsticks and chewing gum. All she could find was a spray bottle of some vile mildew remover Jane had bought for the bathroom. It had a reassuring trigger grip and she set it out on the counter with one green-gloved hand. “Not that most of the mess isn’t mine. Not all of it. Most.”
The man shifted around in his chair and the plates on the table jumped. “You sure run your mouth a lot.”
“I do. Nervous habit.” Was he angry? She guessed she should shut up now but she couldn’t stop, because they might be the last words she ever said, aside from those things he might soon make her say. “I really think men and women speak different languages. I bet if you did a scientific study you could prove it. Because men aren’t socialized to talk about emotions, relationships, I get that, but see, women can’t leave that stuff alone, we want men to pay attention to us. The right kind of attention.” Not the breaking and entering and assault kind. “I mean”—Bonnie’s breath ran out; she stopped her babbling to pry her lungs open—“did you and her have some kind of fight? What happened?”
“Her and her big deal friends.”
“Ah,” Bonnie said, nodding.
“They was always against me.”
Right, because what could any fair-minded person object to? “They ganged up on you,” Bonnie suggested.
“The law took her side too. Like a man doesn’t have a right to live under his own roof.”
His hand on the table was a fist now. Behind her back, Bonnie made a green rubber fist with one hand. She said, “But there must have been things you liked about her; it wasn’t all bad, was it?”
He didn’t answer right away, but gave her another glance that had some seeing in it. Like, what was Bonnie doing here in the middle of his righteous grievances? Bonnie said, “I mean, maybe the two of you could make up.” Unless he had already murdered her. “A fresh start. Sort of like cleaning house.” She picked up the bottle of cleanser and waved it around. “Everybody cops to their share of the dirt, you know?”
He said, “How is it a woman always thinks she can talk her way out of anything.”
She was quiet then. He tipped the can up to empty it. A little of the beer dribbled past the loose corner of his mouth. He wiped at it with the back of his hand and pushed his chair away and patted at the pockets of his coat, looking for something. Not the horrible knife, it was right there in front of him on the table. Cigarettes? Her high school boyfriend, the one who’d had the same kind of coat, had smoked, and they used to argue about it because Bonnie said the smell got into her hair and clothes. They’d gone round and round about it. Of course the cigarettes were just an excuse to argue about everything they couldn’t put into words, how their bodies bewildered them, now impossibly close, now separating into two contrary creatures, so that there was always longing and always the confusion of feeling. They had been so young! His name was Eddie. Where was he now, she didn’t know; he’d moved away and she’d lost track. She would have liked to find him again and tell him, what, what, what had she learned in all this time? She burst into sudden, noisy tears.
“Now quit that,” the man said, annoyed. “It’s not needed.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you.” Bonnie reached for a paper towel and blew her nose.
“Oh, hah.”
“I don’t care if you believe me or not. I was thinking about my very first boyfriend, well not very first, but the first important one, and how we really did love each other but we were too young and I guess angry to know it.”
“What a woman means by ‘love’ is ‘give me all your money,’” he pronounced, sneering.
“That is so unfair. And I’m sorry, I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t be so”—so criminally vicious?—“upset if you and whoever she is hadn’t started out with some kind of love.” The crying had clogged up her nose. She reached for another paper towel and honked into it.
“She sure didn’t seem to mind driving my car. Emptying out my wallet.”
At least he was having an actual conversation, not just muttering grievances. Bonnie said, “Well, I never took anybody’s money. I never went out with anybody for their money.”
Sneering again. “Then somebody got himself a good deal.”
“Wait, I get it. You think women trade sex for money! That is totally, totally insulting!”
“Yeah,” he said, but it was as if he was losing patience with talk. Maybe she should not have said “sex.”
“So you’re mad because things didn’t work out, and because it cost you money.”
“None of your business.”
“I’m just trying to figure things out,” Bonnie said, and then there was a silence. She would scream, if she had to. Scream and scream. He rubbed at his eyes, yawned. Maybe he was just sleepy? Or on some kind of crazy-making drugs? She should have thought of drugs right away. She watched his head nod lower, hoping he’d just nod off.
But he jerked himself awake and said, “I allow that a mother loves her child. But that’s the whole of it.”
“You are so, so wrong.”
“It’s all about what a woman wants to get off a man. And what a man wants to get off a woman,” he said, looking Bonnie over in a nasty way, which she pretended not to notice.
“All right, so, there’s no such thing as unselfish love. There’s just greed and lust and narcissism.”
“What the hell’s that mean.”
“Narcissism? That’s basically when you’re in love with yourself.”
“You learn that in college, huh?”
Ignoring him, Bonnie said, “According to you
, everybody who thinks they’re in love is either a liar or a fool. That’s nice. That’s real healthy.”
“You can shut up any time now.”
“No, see, I get it with all you guys, love is unmanly! Because it involves loss of control, sure! Think of all the crazy things you do when you’re in love, you like, humiliate yourself and talk baby talk and, well, I’m not even going to tell you some of the things I’ve done. It’s so much easier to say it’s all about sex, because that involves these fantasies of conquest and domination—”
He actually put his hands over his ears then. Bonnie went on, half inspired, half just making noise. “—and I guess that’s why you go looking for women you can victimize, because there’s not any emotional component, the part that’s so difficult if it’s a true peer relationship. I don’t suppose you have any gay male friends?”
“Who you calling gay?” he said, the blurry look coming into his eyes again, and right then the door to the apartment opened and Jane and Jonah came in.
“Hey,” Jane began, and then the two of them stopped short, taking things in. They had been to the Karmelkorn shop and they were both holding bags of popcorn, as if they had just walked into a movie.
Bonnie grabbed the mildew remover, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The bottle sputtered. A little foam dribbled out and over her rubber glove, and they all stared at that.
The man cleared his throat. “OK if I use your bathroom?”
“Sure,” Bonnie said. “Thataway.”
He got up and squeezed past Jane and Jonah, who shuffled together to give him room. He left the knife on the kitchen table.
The bathroom door shut behind him. “Really?” Jane said. “I mean, he’s kind of on the scabby side. Where did you meet him?”
Bonnie hissed at her to shut up. The toilet flushed. “Open the front door, stay out of his way.”
The man came back into the room, looked around at the three of them as if he’d asked a question and was waiting for the answer. “Bye,” Bonnie said melodiously. “Take it easy.”
He took his time leaving. When he was gone, Bonnie said, “Shut the door, lock it!”
Jane looked out into the hallway, then closed the door and turned the latch. “No offense, but I kind of hope you broke up with him.”
Jonah wandered over to the kitchen table, munching popcorn. His cheeks bulged as he chewed. Bonnie supposed she ought to be grateful to him, since only a male presence had scared her visitor away. But he was so perfectly and willfully dull, such a well-kept animal. Was it wrong to expect so much more from a man? He picked up the knife. “Hey, what’s this?” he said, through crumbs.
Bonnie said, “Would one of you knuckleheads call the police? Never mind. I’ll do it myself.”
This was how she came to work in the field of crisis intervention.
jane gets married
That May, for some number of days, if Jane woke at a certain time and the weather was clear, the bedroom walls were lit with her own private sunrise. The house was a rental, but the landlord allowed them to paint, and Jane had chosen this pretty cream color for the room. Now, on these mornings, the cream took on shades of apricot, rose, and gold, one melting into the other, washes and tints of unnerving beauty, the colors of heaven. Jane watched from bed, as still as if she had sighted a rare bird on a tree branch. Because it was for a few moments only, this gift of light, nothing you could hold in place. Even as she tried to fix it in her mind, make a memory of it, the sun brightened and flared, or went behind a cloud, and then it would be time to get up and go about her day.
Eric would already be up and gone, making his early hospital rounds. He was a first-year resident and he worked punishing hours. Jane had the house to herself a lot, which she understood was necessary, given the high seriousness of medicine. She was bored rather than resentful; they had not had any other kind of married life together so there was nothing else to compare it to. They were trying to put together some time off next month, a break from everything hasty and rushed and undone.
This was now her life, her world, herself. So much had changed. Even the air in her lungs felt different, breathing in so much busy newness.
They had been married in cold December, the week before Christmas. December was the only free time she and Eric had to get married and move seven hundred miles away, given all the complications of Eric’s work schedule. The date was the closest they could come to obliging everyone else’s travel and holiday plans. Still, their families greeted the invitation with an undercurrent of exasperation. No one said it quite this way, but a wedding was one more claim on their time during this busy season.
“Don’t come if you can’t fit it in,” Eric told his relatives, meaning it. One of the things Jane admired about him: he said what he thought, he wasn’t forever worrying about what people thought of him, like she did. Jane assured her family that it was only a little old wedding, nothing grand, and would not seriously inconvenience anyone. They were paying for everything themselves. Jane was twenty-five, Eric twenty-six. It had not seemed right to ask her parents for a wedding at this age, although it was true they did not have much money. Eric’s medical school loans were going to be around for a while. But Jane did not want battles over what things cost, or her many mistaken choices regarding dress, music, food, and so on. It was surely not the last occasion her family would feel entitled to boss her around, but one of the big ones. Eric, like most grooms, just wanted to get things over with.
In the end, everyone came. They found a Methodist chapel that was available to the unchurched, along with a pastor who made the most tactful references to God, along the lines of God equals universe. There were not enough guests to fill the sanctuary, so they were seated in the choir stalls on both sides of the altar, and eyed each other like the fans of two opposing football teams. A guitarist and a fiddler, friends of theirs, served up winsome Appalachian tunes. Eric wore a suit, Jane a lace skirt and a frilled blouse. She carried a bouquet of evergreens and Christmas roses. She had one attendant, a nineteen-year-old cousin.
Bonnie had been emphatic about not standing up at the wedding. “I’ll do whatever else you want. I’ll laugh at your dad’s jokes. I’ll dance the Hokey Pokey—”
“No one will be dancing the Hokey Pokey.”
“—but I’m sorry, you know weddings make me itch. People should just go to the courthouse and recite the ordinance. Weddings are all about the commodification of women, with these awful subtexts of submission and subordination. I’m really happy for you, by the way.”
“Thanks,” Jane said. “Just show up, OK?” It was actually something of a relief not to have Bonnie as a member of the wedding party, since now she would not have to worry about Bonnie drinking too much, or wearing something with fringe or feathers, or flirting with a randy old uncle, or rather, she might still worry about such things but they would not have official, ceremonial status.
As it happened, Bonnie was no problem. She wore a printed jersey dress, drank her portion of domestic champagne from a plastic glass, and did indeed laugh at Jane’s father’s jokes. True, she did ask Jane, as she was making herself ready in the church basement, “Want me to talk you out of it?” But that was just another joke, ha ha, meant to steady Jane as she was being fussed over by her female relatives.
“Now Bonnie, don’t even say such a thing,” said Jane’s mother, dabbing at Jane’s face with a Kleenex. “What was that horrible movie? With what’s-her-name?”
“Runaway Bride,” Bonnie said. “Julia Roberts. It’s all right, she really did get married in Steel Magnolias. Of course, later she died.”
“You’re not helping,” Jane’s mother said. “Don’t mind her, Jane dear. She’s only trying to be funny to soothe your nerves.”
Jane lifted her forearm to deflect the Kleenex. “Please don’t do that, unless I have dirt on my face.” In fact Jane was, if not entirely nerveless, distracted. The
day after tomorrow she and Eric were renting a U-Haul truck, loading it with their boxed belongings, and moving themselves from Chicago to Atlanta, where Eric had already begun his residency, and Jane would start the job that had been found for her at Emory. Any honeymoon would have to be deferred. So that instead of approaching her vows in the proper bridal swoon, a part of Jane’s attention was still given over to checklists with subheadings like Bank, Utilities, and Packing Tape.
Jane’s mother and the attendant cousin and the cousin’s mother, Jane’s aunt, did their best to prod at her and perfect her, but there was no veil or train, no borrowed pearls or something blue, just Jane in her pieced-together costume, wishing, mildly, that she was not the center of attention. “Do you want a 7UP to settle your stomach?” Jane’s mother asked, and Jane said no thanks, and her mother took this to mean that Jane needed something else instead, a Diet Coke? Perhaps her mouth was dry? It wouldn’t do to get up there and not be able to recite her vows. “Cough drop? Maybe just an ice cube to suck on?”
“Xanax?” Bonnie offered, wriggling an eyebrow to show that she had some on her. Jane shook her head.
“Go on upstairs and tell them I’m ready.” Bonnie gave her a finger wave and headed out.
“I wish I’d thought of Xanax,” the aunt said. “It really hits the spot. All I have is aspirin. Alex, it’s time to put that thing away,” she said to her daughter, who was still hooked up to her iPod.
“I’m fine,” Jane said stolidly. In her mind the fuss of getting married was just that, because the hard part of things, finding Eric, the two of them finding each other, had already been accomplished. But she did feel a tug of anxiety, wanting to see him, wanting to make sure that in spite of everything, plighting their troth, buying rings, signing leases and all the rest, he had not somehow decided he’d made a mistake and changed his mind. “Let’s move,” she said, getting a good grip on her bouquet.
They passed through a hallway filled with stacks of retired hymnals. Up the stairs. Jane and the cousin hung back while their mothers took their seats. Jane tried to see around her cousin’s now-unencumbered ear, saw nothing but the half-lit sanctuary and its rows of vacant pews. The musicians took up a new tune, not “The Wedding March,” but some Scotch-Irish stand-in. Jane gave the cousin a nudge and they moved forward. And there Eric was, all dressed-up and handsome in his gray suit, outright grinning at her. Jane grinned back. The rest would be easy. A walk in the park. “Dearly beloved . . .”
She Poured Out Her Heart Page 5
