One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Ruth Doan MacDougall

  “Thank heavens,” I said. I buckled my seat belt.

  We joined the stream, and I followed the bus past the beach. It was a state beach now, and a wealth of cars was parked in the parking area, and you had to pay. I’d paid, and on the sand littered with the empty Fresca cans and potato chip bags people had left, the Wonder Bread bags once packed with sandwiches, the beer cans and greasy french fry containers and crumpled cigarette packs spilling out of trash cans overturned by seagulls, I had found space for my beach towel between a family of parents, grandparents, children, picnic hampers and coolers, all under a beach umbrella, and a boy and girl who slept holding hands. I was always very serious about my tan, but this summer, what with the job hunting and the apartment hunting, I’d had only a few chances to lie in the sun in my mother’s backyard. The beach was terribly crowded. A radio was playing, and voices around me seemed even closer than they were. “Billy, don’t throw sand.” “Have you seen Joyce? She looks like a hippopotamus on vacation, and I told her so.” “Billy, you want to go home?” “Somebody bring the camera.” “You get wet and I’ll kill you.” “See my seaweed!” “Billy, do it again and we’ll go home.” I had dozed, alone at a beach for the first time in my life.

  We drove past the cabin colony where David and I had stayed during our honeymoon. I’d been able to avoid seeing my grandparents’ camp farther down the coast, but I hadn’t been able to avoid this. There were more cabins now, so I couldn’t tell which one was ours, and a pond had been built since, on which sailed ducks and seagulls and swans. Cars were pulling off the road to watch them. I followed the bus past pleasantly awful big old camps, past the picture windows of horrid little new ones. There was the smell of the salt marsh, and then the ocean could no longer be seen.

  The emptiness came back as I drove. Or, rather, it had been there all along, but now I was aware of it again. A great hollowness inside me.

  I drove across a short suspension bridge, the grid jarring me in just the same way the grid of the bridge entering Concord had when I was a kid; the bridge, the special whine of the tires, the constant tug underneath, a scary massage, had been something to look forward to on trips. That bridge was replaced by a modern one now.

  Then there were houses, and a cemetery whose many graves had a fine view of the harbor, and through the crowded streets of the old seacoast town I followed the be-blossomed bus, past glimpses of narrower streets and proud old houses.

  Then we jounced along the detour around the overpass construction, drove past houses and gas stations out to the turnpike, and still the bus was always ahead of me, leading me over the new bridge beside the old bridge, each one-way now, across the bay to the Hull exit. Our directional lights flicked on.

  At the stoplight on Main Street I flicked my directionals again but Warren didn’t, and when the light changed to green he went on ahead while I turned; the bus gave a Volkswagen beep, and I honked my horn. So that was that.

  The house was tall and white, deep in the old residential part of town, and its street had more trees left than any other street. Green leafy quietness.

  I parked in front of the house, because there was no parking space allotted in the garage for the attic apartment, and collected my pocketbook, towel, and beach bag from the passenger seat and got out. I looked up and down the green street at the big comfortable houses. Then I looked way up at the window in the eaves, my living room window.

  It was a long climb. Already I thought twice before I took down the garbage. On the first floor lived an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Crabtree; when I came in yesterday from buying milk she had opened her hallway door and invited me in. Mr. Crabtree was nearly blind, and so was their fat wheezing beagle. Their house, Mrs. Crabtree told me, had got too much for them a few years ago, and they had moved to this nice apartment. With, evidently, every stick of their furniture. She showed me pictures of children and grandchildren and of the house, a white farmhouse.

  My landlady, Mrs. Dupuis, lived on the second floor. So did Mr. Dupuis, I supposed, although I hadn’t seen him there yet, just in his car as he drove off to work. It seemed an odd apartment to have chosen to live in, sandwiched between the two other apartments, but perhaps they preferred to put up with it and make the extra money the first-floor apartment must bring. Mrs. Dupuis herself went off to work at some office every morning in a rattletrap Chevrolet.

  After the second-floor landing, the stairway narrowed and grew steeper and darker. My door was a makeshift accordion one which pleated back as I opened it. I was in the kitchen. I put the towel and bag and pocketbook down on the gleaming pink Formica tabletop and wandered through the low-ceilinged rooms. Everything had been spotlessly cleaned by Mrs. Dupuis before I moved in last week, the linoleum shining, crisp doilies on the backs of the old overstuffed chairs, a new lampshade in its cellophane wrapper that I dared not remove, the starched and ironed bureau scarf, and the satiny turquoise bedspread. The smell of wax and detergents was still fresh. Nothing belonged to me here, except my clothes, the sheets and blankets and the china and silverware and TV set, my typewriter and my five-string banjo.

  The apartment had been made out of only half the attic. The other half had been left as it was, for storage, and although I had forced myself to explore it and discovered nothing more sinister than old chairs, a foot-treadle sewing machine, some trunks, and a great deal of dust, I still didn’t like the idea of its being there behind that door in my kitchen.

  The rooms were stifling. I turned on the air conditioner in the kitchen window; it made a horrible racket. In the refrigerator freezer was the pound of ground round I had divided into quarter-pound foil-wrapped pillows, and I took one out to defrost for supper. It looked ridiculously small.

  After I had stripped off my skirt and blouse and faded bikini, and rinsed out the bikini in the washbasin, I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I could take a bath, but sweating I would go into it and sweating I would emerge, nothing accomplished except washing off the dried salt which I rather liked on my skin. I put on my bathrobe and examined the clothes in the hot closet under the slanting roof. Staying home writing all those years, I had accumulated mostly slacks and sweaters for autumn and winter, so I’d had to buy some new things to go to work in, a little skirt and jacket, a frilly blouse, a turtleneck jersey, a brief dress, a pair of square-toed shoes, and two pairs of panty hose—my version of a basic wardrobe I’d no doubt recalled from some fashion magazine or even, oh, God, my home economics course back in junior high. Soon I’d buy more, when I started getting my pay. Here the new clothes hung, and the old skirts and dresses from school days at Brompton State College were all shortened and mended, everything very clean and ready for tomorrow. The terror of the first day at school. I felt as if I ought to have bought a pencil box.

  I went back to the living room. I would read, and then I’d have a drink and watch the news on TV, and then there’d be supper, and then there was the evening to get through. I sat down in the chair near the window and picked up my murder mystery. The doily on the little table beside me was plastic. Evenings, the evenings. I’d read of people doing this, but I never thought I would: in the evenings, alone, I was afraid to look in the mirror because I’d find I had no face.

  The telephone on the plastic doily rang. It’d be my mother, in Saundersborough.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello.”

  I’m no good at identifying voices on the phone, not even David’s, and for one wild searing moment I thought it was David. Sweat drenched my hands. “Hello?”

  “Hello.”

  It wasn’t, because David knew my difficulty and by now would’ve said who he was. So this must be either Warren Goodwin or an obscene phone call (another first!) or maybe both. In my anguish I myself was rude. “I hate people who don’t immediately give their names,” I said fiercely. Then I thought, oh, good Christ, what if it’s the principal or somebody?

  “Hey, I’m sorry, this is Warren Goodwin.”

  “My number isn’t
in the phone book yet.”

  “I called information, simple as that. Would you like to go out and have some dinner tonight?”

  “Thank you, but I’ve got to start work tomorrow, there’s a teachers’ meeting.”

  “What time?”

  “Nine o’clock,” I said.

  He said, “That’s the middle of the afternoon for me, I have to be at work by six.”

  “Six in the morning? My God.”

  “I’m the Morning Man,” he said, and he seemed to say it with pride.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “So we wouldn’t stay out too late. What do you think?”

  I was thinking of the little pillow of hamburg. “Well,” I said.

  “Would you like to go back down to the Seaside or somewhere else on the ocean?”

  “Oh, no, that drive’s too nerve-racking to do twice in one day.”

  He said, “Is there any place in particular you like around here?”

  “I don’t know any place, I’ve just been here a week.”

  “That’s about what I figured. Okay then, what kind of place do you like in general?”

  “Well,” I said again, and paused. There were only the opinions developed with David. “I don’t like restaurants where you get great huge meals, I mean I like the meals but you eat too much and feel awful and it’s always sort of disappointing, it’s not special, it’s not much different from Sunday dinner when you were a kid. It’s simply got parsley added.”

  “Then what’s special?”

  “Something you can’t make so well at home. Is there a Chinese restaurant?”

  “Nope. There’re some along the coast.”

  “Haven’t I seen some pizza joints around town?”

  “Only two serve beer. Or do you like Coke with pizza?”

  “Egad.”

  “Then let’s go to one that has beer,” he said. “I think the Pizza Hut’s pizza is better than the Den’s, okay?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Unless you’d like one of Hull’s other specialties. The Burger Chef? Stan’s Submarine Sandwiches? Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken? The Dunkin’ Donut? Lum’s steamed hot dogs with sauerkraut? A&W Root Beer? A Dairy Queen?”

  “I’d like a pizza, please,” I said decisively.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Fourteen Brewster Street. My car’s out front. My name’s under the doorbell.”

  “See you at five thirty. We’ll go have a drink first.”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  I hung up and wiped the wet receiver with the sleeve of my bathrobe.

  It all seemed very peculiar, in the bathtub, washing off the salt, shaving my legs; I felt that I was back in high school getting ready for a date with David. When I got out of the tub I rubbed the mirror clear of steam and looked at my face. My hair, light brown, had been cut extremely short ever since I was in the eighth grade. So I could wash it now, and it’d be dry by five thirty.

  Waiting, I had badly wanted a cigarette for the first time in weeks. As Warren helped me up into the bus, I said, “Would you happen to have a cigarette?”

  “I stopped a couple of years ago.”

  “Oh,” I said. Saved. “So did we. I. Then I started again and stopped again. Good Lord, this is just like a real bus, isn’t it? I mean, there’s nothing in front of you.”

  “I think your seat belt’s down here, I’ll get it.”

  We hauled the belt up through the crack in the seat, and he helped shorten it for me. The bus was too old to have come with seat belts installed, so he must have bought them. And he actually used his, as David did.

  He said, “I’m afraid Hull doesn’t have much to offer in the way of drinking places.”

  He had to drive like a real bus driver, too. Sitting very high, we chugged down the street. I glanced behind me into the back and saw a sliding pile of LP records, a towel, some empty beer cans, and a pair of sneakers.

  I said, “Wherever you want to go is fine.”

  “Let’s try the Hampshire.”

  It wasn’t far. The hot summer evening, the quiet old streets. Then some gas stations, and we drove down into the motel parking lot. Beyond was the turnpike, busy with cars.

  “Everybody’s going home,” he said.

  How strange to walk into a motel lobby with somebody else. The cocktail lounge was dark and air-conditioned, icy cold. People were secret at little candlelit tables. We sat down in a booth and were secret ourselves.

  “What would you like?” he asked.

  I wasn’t driving. “A martini, please.”

  “Two martinis,” he said to the waitress. “Very dry.”

  The seats here were red, like at the Seaside, but the decor, I realized as my eyes adjusted, was decidedly different. Yet what on earth was it? Big fake beams, coats of arms on the walls, crossed swords above the bar. Baronial? Through the suave strains of Muzak, the television told us how many people had by now been killed this holiday weekend.

  He said, “Did you have a hard time finding an apartment?”

  “It’s a furnished one, there were only a few decent ones to choose from, and none at all in Millbridge. It’s the best I looked at.”

  “It’s in the good section of town. Mine’s a real dump, I keep meaning to hunt for another one but I never get around to it, so I’ve been there six years.”

  The martinis, as I expected, were not dry.

  He said, “Where did you grow up?”

  “Saundersborough.”

  “I’m from here, Hull.”

  I said, “When we used to play you in football and basketball, we used to call you Hell. Got a night game in Hell, we’d say.”

  “What class were you, when did you graduate?”

  “Fifty-seven.”

  “I bet you were a cheerleader.”

  “Does it show?”

  “I was class of fifty-nine,” he said, “so I wouldn’t’ve been playing yet when you were cheering, but I’d’ve been watching.”

  And we were together, long ago, in gymnasiums.

  I said, “My sister cheered, too; she was class of fifty-nine.” He was Susan’s age, twenty-eight. My baby sister. I remembered, irrelevantly, that my father had been seven years younger than my mother. I said, “Your colors are red and white.”

  “Yours are—don’t tell me, I’ve got it—they’re purple and gold.”

  I ate my olive. “You can’t imagine how hard it was to buy gold underpants to go with our uniforms,” I said, and stopped. Then I thought, oh, so what. “The stores in Saundersborough had to stock them specially.”

  He said, “The cheerleader I used to go out with wore two pairs of underpants. Red ones.”

  “We wore two pairs, too. It’s a matter of being discreet during cartwheels.”

  We began to laugh, and on the television the news program showed highways of speeding cars just like our turnpike outside.

  “You don’t have any rings on,” he said. “You don’t even have a mark where a ring might have been.”

  “We got married in school and there wasn’t any money for such nonsense. Anyway, my hands are too ugly,” I said, displaying them, the writer’s bump on my right middle finger, the nails of my left hand filed very short, the banjo calluses on my fingertips, and the many little white scars where warts had been removed. “It used to be even worse, when my writer’s bump was yellow with nicotine.”

  “You were married.”

  “Yes. I play the banjo, that’s why these nails are so short, for fretting.”

  He touched the writer’s bump briefly.

  I said, “I learned to type in high school but it never completely went away.”

  The waitress materialized and asked, “Would you like another?”

  He looked at me. I said, “Whatever you think.”

  “Sure,” he said. When she left, he said, “You must’ve written a lot.”

  “I guess I did.”

  “Do you still?”

 
“I’ll have to see if there’s time, now I’m working.” Stupid answer; if I wanted to enough, I would make time.

  “What do you write?”

  “Novels. Stories.”

  “I’ll be damned. Are any published?”

  “No.” I drank some new martini, and, desperate to change the subject, I very nearly asked a direct question. “I don’t have a radio, so I haven’t listened to the Hull station. I remember the morning program my mother always used to listen to, the guy kept calling the listeners ‘gummy eyes,’ which wasn’t particularly pleasant when one was trying to eat one’s Cheerios.”

  “You get a radio, and I’ll play ‘Green Eyes’ for you,” he said, and I was more startled than flattered that he’d noticed, since I wasn’t used to anyone’s noticing, and anyway it was only because my jersey and eye makeup were green that my eyes were green tonight instead of no color. He said, answering what I didn’t quite ask, “That’s about all I do, play records and try to keep things lively enough so I’m waking people up, not putting them back to sleep. And I read the local news.”

  “That itself must be mighty lively.”

  “You bet it is. ‘At five P.M. last night a car driven by Roger St. Jean failed to negotiate a turn on High Street and struck a utility pole; no one was injured. Vandals last night broke into Pete’s Grocery, robbing the till of forty-six dollars and fifty-three cents. Stay tuned for the marine weather forecast after this message from Kimball’s Camera Store.’”

  “Hey, I’ll have to buy a radio so I can get the no-school announcements when it snows. I suppose you do Millbridge.”

  “We do everywhere. ‘There will be no school today at the Winnie-the-Pooh Nursery School.’”

  Even these wet martinis seemed to have begun to numb the hollowness; I could pretend it was simply my hunger for supper. All at once I felt very chatty. “What a crazy place to find myself, Hull and Millbridge, the last place in the world I ever thought I’d end up, I’ve always hated it down here. Except for the ocean. But I had to pick up some credits, you’re supposed to get six credits every five years if you teach and I’d never got any, and I figured I might as well get them at the university so I might as well work near it, I’m absolutely no good at driving anywhere, I expect to be killed every minute.”