by Andre Dubus
‘Jeesum Crow,’ one says. ‘What do you figure that was about?’
‘Tooth fairy,’ Steve says, and offers them a beer. They accept, their voices mischievous as they excuse themselves for drinking at this hour after being wakened. They blame the fire. Polly has come to understand this about men: they need mischief and will even pretend a twelve-ounce can of beer is wicked if that will make them feel collusive while drinking it. Steve brings out four bottles, surprises her by handing her one he had not offered; she is pleased and touches his hand and thanks him as she takes it. She sits on the back stoop and watches the men standing, listens to their strange talk: about who would want to do such a thing, and what did a guy want to get out of doing it, and if they could figure out what he was trying to get done, then maybe they could get an idea of who it might be. But their tone will not stay serious, moves from inquisitive to jestful, without pattern or even harmony: while one supposes aloud that teenaged vandals chose the house at random and another agrees and says it’s time for the selectmen to talk strict curfew and for the Goddamn cops to do some enforcing, the first one cackles and wheezes about a teenaged girl he watched water skiing this afternoon, how she could come to his house any night and light some fire. They clap hands on shoulders, grab an arm and pull and push. Steve takes in the empties and brings out four more.
Polly goes upstairs for cigarettes and stands at the back window, looking down at them. Steve has slept in here since she moved in; some nights, some days, one of them has stood in the short hall between their rooms and tapped on the door, with a frequency and need like that of a couple who have lived long together: not often, and not from passion, but often enough for release from carnal solitude. She does not want to join the men in the yard and does not want to be alone in the house; she goes downstairs and sits on the stoop, smoking, and staring at the woods beyond them. She imagines Ray lying under the trees, watching, his knife in his hand. One of the men stoops and rises with something he shows the others. A cap from a gasoline can, they say. Sitting between the house and the men, she still feels exposed, has the urge to look behind her, and she smokes deeply and presses her fingers against her temples, rubs her eyes to push away her images of him softly paddling a canoe on the lake, standing on the front lawn, creeping into hiding in the living room, up the stairs to her bedroom; in the closet there. The men are leaving. They tell her good night, and she stands and thanks them. Steve comes to her, three bottles in his large hand. He places the other on her shoulder.
‘Looks like your ex is back,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘Dumb asshole.’
‘Yes.’
Vinnie is a bruise on the pillow, and from a suspended bottle of something clear, a tube goes to his left arm and ends under tape. He is asleep. She stands in the doorway, wanting to leave; then quietly she goes in, to the right side of the bed. His flesh is black and purple under both eyes, on the bridge of his nose, and his right jaw; cotton is stuffed in his nostrils; his breath hisses between swollen lips, the upper one stitched. Polly has not written a card for the zinnias she cut from her mother’s garden but, even so, she can let him wake to them and phone later, come back later, do whatever later. When she puts them on the bedside table, his eyes open.
‘I brought you some flowers,’ she says. She looks over her shoulder at the door, then takes from her purse a brown-bagged pint of vodka. Smiling, she pulls out the bottle so he can see the label, then drops it into the bag. He only watches her. She cannot tell whether his eyes show more than pain. She pushes the vodka under his pillows.
‘Do you hurt?’
‘Drugs,’ he says, through his teeth, only his lips moving, spreading in a grimace.
‘Oh Jesus. Your jaw’s broken?’
He nods.
‘Will you hurt if I sit here?’
‘No.’
She sits on the side of the bed and takes his right hand lying on the sheet, softly rubs his bare forearm, watching the rise and fall of his dark hair, its ends sun-bleached gold. His arm is wide and hard with muscle, her own looks delicate, and as she imagines Ray’s chest and neck swelling with rage, a cool shiver rises from her legs to her chest. She reaches for her purse on the bedside table.
‘Can I smoke in here?’
‘I guess.’
He sounds angry; she knows it is because his jaw is wired, but still she feels he is angry at her and ought to be. She finds an ashtray in the drawer of the bedside table, cocks her head at the hanging bottle of fluid, and says: ‘Is that your food?’
‘Saline. Eat with a straw.’
‘Can you smoke?’
‘Don’t know.’
She holds her cigarette between his lips, on the right side, away from the stitches. She cannot feel him drawing on it; he nods, she removes it, and he exhales a thin stream.
‘Are you hurt anywhere else? Your body?’
‘No. How did you know?’
‘My father called me.’ She offers the cigarette, he nods, and as he draws on it, she says: ‘He said you’re not pressing charges.’
His face rolls away from the cigarette, he blows smoke toward the tube rising from his arm, then looks at her, and she knows what she first saw in his eyes and mistook for pain.
‘I don’t blame you,’ she says, ‘I wouldn’t either. In June he came into my apartment with a fucking knife and raped me. I was afraid to do anything, and I kept thinking he was gone. Really gone, like California or someplace. Because Dad checked at where he worked and his apartment, and he never went back after that night. Even if I knew he hadn’t gone, I wouldn’t have. Because he’s fucking crazy.’
She stands and takes her cigarettes and disposable lighter from her purse and puts them on the table.
‘I’ll leave you these. I have to go. I’ll be back.’
Her eyes are filling. Besides Steve, Vinnie is the only person outside her family she has told about the rape, but his eyes did not change when she said it; could not change, she knows, for the sorrow in them is so deep. She has known him in passion and mirth, and kissing his forehead, his unbruised left cheek, his chin, she feels as dangerous as Ray, more dangerous with her slender body and pretty face.
‘I guess it wasn’t worth it,’ she says.
‘Nothing is. I’m all broken.’
Sometimes, on her days off that summer, she put on a dress and went to Timmy’s in early afternoon to drink. It was never crowded then, and always the table by the window was empty, and she sat there and watched the Main Street traffic and the people walking outside in the heat; or, in the rain, cars with lights and windshield wipers on, the faces of drivers and passengers blurred by rain and dripping windows.
She slept late. She was twenty-six and, for as long as she could remember, she had hated waking early; now that she worked at night, she not only was able to sleep late, but had to; she lived at home and no longer felt, as she had when she was younger and woke to the family voices, that she had wasted daylight sleeping while everyone else had lived half a day. There had been many voices then, but now two brothers and a sister had grown and moved away, and only Margaret was at home. She was seventeen and drank a glass of wine at some family dinners, had never, she said, had a cigarette in her mouth, had not said but was certainly a virgin, and early in the morning jogged for miles on the country roads near their home; during blizzards, hard rain, and days when ice on the roads slowed her pace, she ran around the indoor basketball court at the YMCA. She received Communion every Sunday and, in the Lenten season, every day. She was dark and pretty, but Polly thought all that virtue had left its mark on her face, and it would never be the sort that makes men change their lives.
Polly liked her sister, and was more amused than annoyed by the way she lived. She could not understand what pleasures Margaret drew from running and not drinking or smoking dope or even cigarettes, and from virginity. She did understand Margaret’s religion, and sometimes she wished that being a Catholic were as easy for her as it was for Margaret.
Then she envied Margaret, but when envy became scorn she fought it by imagining Margaret on a date; certainly she felt passion, so maybe her sacramental life was not at all easy. Maybe waking up and jogging weren’t either; and she would remember her own high school years when, if you wanted friends and did not want to do what the friends did, you had to be very strong. So those times when she envied, then scorned Margaret ended with her wondering if perhaps all of Margaret’s life was good because she willed it.
Polly went to Mass every Sunday, but did not receive communion because she had not been in the state of grace for a long time, and she did not confess because she knew that she could not be absolved of fornication and adultery while wearing an intrauterine device whose presence belied her firm intention of not sinning again. She was not certain that her lovemaking since the end of her marriage was a sin, or one serious enough to forbid her receiving, for she did not feel bad about it, except when she wished during and afterward that she had not gone to bed with someone, and that had to do with making a bad choice. She had never confessed her adultery while she was married to Raymond Yarborough, though she knew she had been wrong, had felt wicked as well as frightened; but, remembering now (she had filed for divorce and changed her name back to Comeau), her short affair with Vinnie when the marriage was in its final months was diminished by her sharper memory of Raymond yelling at her that she was a spoiled, fucked-up cunt not worth a shit to anybody, Raymond slapping her, and, on the last night, hitting her with his fist and leaving her unconscious on the bedroom floor, where she woke hearing Jerry Jeff Walker on the record player in the living room and a beer bottle landing on others in the wastebasket. Her car key was in there with him, so she climbed out the window and ran until she was nauseated and her legs were weak and trembling; then she walked, and in two hours she was home. She had to wake them to get in, and her mother put ice on her jaw, Margaret held her hand and stroked her hair, and her father took his gun and nightstick and drove to the apartment, but Raymond was gone in his jeep, taking with him his weights and bench and power stands, fishing rods and tackle box, two shotguns and a .22 rifle, the hunting knife he bought in memory of his brother, his knapsack and toilet articles and some clothes. When she moved from that apartment two weeks later, she filled a garbage bag with his clothes and Vietnam books, most of them hardcover, and left it on the curb; as she drove away, she looked in the rear view mirror at the green bulk and said aloud: ‘Adiós, motherfucker.’
She also did not go to confession because, as well as not feeling bad about her sexual adventures, and knowing that she would not give them up anyway, she did believe that in some way her life was not a good one, but in a way the Church had not defined. Neither could she: even on those rare and mysterious nights when drinking saddened her and she went to bed drunk and disliking herself and woke hung over and regretful, she did not and could not know what about herself she disliked and regretted. So she could not confess, but she went to Mass with her family every Sunday and had gone when she lived alone, because it was one religious act she could perform, and she was afraid that neglecting it would finally lead her to a fearful loneliness she could not bear.
Dressing for Mass was different from dressing for any other place, and she liked having her morning coffee and cigarette while, without anticipating drinks or dinner or a man or work or anything at all, she put on makeup and a dress and heels; and she liked entering the church where the large doors closed behind her and she walked down the aisle under the high, curved white ceiling, and between stained-glass windows in the white walls whose lower halves were dark brown wood, as the altar was and the large cross with a bronze Christ hanging from the wall behind it. When she was with her family, her father chose a pew and stood at it while Margaret went in, then Polly, then her parents; alone, she looked for a pew near the middle with an aisle seat. She kneeled on the padded kneeler, her arms on the smooth old wood of the pew in front of her, and looked at the altar and crucifix and the stained-glass window behind them; then sat and looked at people sitting in front of her on both sides of the aisle. There was a scent of perfume and sometimes leather from purses and coats, tingeing that smell she only breathed here: a blending of cool, dry basement air with sunlight and melting candle wax. As the priest entered wearing green vestments, she rose and sang with the others, listened to her voice among theirs, read the Confiteor aloud with them, felt forgiven as she read in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, those simple and general words as precise as she could be about the life, a week older each Sunday, that followed her like a bridal train into church where, for forty minutes or so, her mind was suspended, much as it was when she lay near sleep at the beach. She did not pray with concentration, but she did not think either, and her mind wandered from the Mass to the faces of people around her. At the offertory she sang with them and, later, stood and read the Lord’s Prayer aloud; then the priest said Let us now offer each other a sign of peace and, smiling, she shook the hands of people in front of her and behind her, saying Peace be with you.
She liked to watch them receive communion: children and teenagers and women and men going slowly in two lines up the center aisle and in single lines up both side aisles, to the four waiting priests. Coming back, they chewed or dissolved the host in their mouths. Sometimes a small boy looked about and smiled. But she only saw children when they crossed her vision; she watched the others: the old, whose faces had lost any sign of beauty or even pleasure, and were gentle now, peacefully dazed, with God on their tongues; the pretty and handsome young, and the young who were plain or homely; and, in their thirties and forties and fifties, women and men who had lost the singularity of youth, their bodies unattractive, most of them too heavy, and no face was pretty or plain, handsome or homely, and all of these returned to their pews with clasped hands and bowed heads, their faces both serious and calm. She tenderly watched them. Now that she was going to Mass with her family, she watched them too, the three dark faces with downcast eyes: slender Margaret with her finely concave cheeks, and no makeup, her lips and brow bearing no trace of the sullen prudery she sometimes turned on Polly, sometimes on everyone; her plump mother, the shortest in the family now, grey lacing her black hair, and her frownlike face one of weariness in repose, looking as it would later in the day when, reading the paper, she would fall asleep on the couch; her father, tall and broad, his shirt and coat tight across his chest, his hair thick and black, and on his face the look of peaceful concentration she saw when he was fishing; and she felt merciful toward them, and toward herself, not only for her guilt or shame because she could not receive (they did not speak to her about it, or about anything else she did, not even—except Margaret—with their eyes), but for her sense and, often at Mass, her conviction that she was a bad woman. She rose and sang as the priest and altar boys walked up the aisle and out the front of the church; then people filled the aisle and she moved with them into the day.
She had always liked boys and was very pretty, so she had never had a close girl friend. In high school she had the friends you need, to keep from being alone, and to go with to places where boys were. Those friendships felt deep because at their heart were shared guilt and the fond trust that comes from it. They existed in, and because of, those years of sexual abeyance when boys shunned their company and went together to playing fields and woods and lakes and the sea. The girls went to houses. Waiting to be old enough to drive, waiting for those two or three years in their lives when a car’s function would not be conveyance but privacy, they gathered at the homes of girls whose mothers had jobs. They sat on the bed and floor and smoked cigarettes.
Sometimes they smoked marijuana too, and at slumber parties, when the parents had gone to bed, they drank beer or wine bought for them by an older friend or brother or sister. But cigarettes were their first and favorite wickedness, and they delightfully entered their addiction, not because they wanted to draw tobacco smoke into their lungs, but because they wanted to be girls who smoked. Within two or thr
ee years, cigarette packs in their purses would be as ordinary as wallets and combs; but at fourteen and fifteen, simply looking at the alluring colored pack among their cosmetics excited them with the knowledge that a time of their lives had ended, and a new and promising time was coming. The smooth cellophane covering the pack, the cigarette between their fingers and lips, the taste and feel of smoke, and blowing it into the air, struck ìn them a sensual chord they had not known they had. They watched one another. They always did that: looked at breasts, knew who had gained or lost weight, had a pimple, had washed her hair or had it done in a beauty parlor, and, if shown the contents of a friend’s closet, would know her name. They watched as a girl nodded toward a colored disposable lighter, smiled if smoke watered her eyes, watched the fingers holding the cigarette, the shape of her lips around the tip, the angle of her wrist.
So they were friends in that secret life they had to have; then they were older and in cars, and what they had been waiting for happened. They shared that too, and knew who was late, who was taking the pill, who was trusting luck. Their language was normally profane, but when talking about what they did with boys, they said had sex, slept with, oral sex, penis. Then they graduated and spread outward from the high school and the houses where they had gathered, to nearby colleges and jobs within the county. Only one, who married a soldier, moved out of the state. The others lived close enough to keep seeing each other, and in the first year out of high school some of them did; but they all had different lives, and loved men who did not know each other, and soon they only met by chance, and talked on sidewalks or at coffee counters.
