The Times Are Never So Bad

by Andre Dubus

  ‘It’s like waiting in ambush,’ Walter said.

  ‘It’s better at night. It looks like a ghost at night.’

  ‘It looks like one now.’

  The first car that came around the curve down the road to their left was green and foreign; Walter pressed his palms and bare toes against the earth and saw a second shape behind the windshield, a woman, and then two more figures in the back, and now the driver’s face: a man beyond the hood, wearing sunglasses, right hand at the top of the wheel, peering now, shifting down, flowing and slowing, the woman’s hands in front of her, pushing toward the windshield, then her head out of the window saying ‘What is it?’ and the children leaning forward, arms and hands out of the windows, and the man stopped and got out, he was tall and wore a suit, and Walter pressed against the leaves and watched him holding the line and looking down both of its ends; then breaking it, and watching the handkerchief fall, and standing with fists on his hips, turning his head from one side of the road to the other as he spoke: ‘I want you boys to think about something while you’re in there laughing and having your fun. You could kill somebody. You could make somebody swerve into another car. I’ve got two kids in mine. You could have caused something you’d regret for the rest of your lives.’ Then he went back to his car. Before he got in, his wife said: ‘Don’t just leave it in the road.’

  ‘I don’t want to touch it.’

  She opened the door but he said ‘Let’s go’ and got in and shifted and drove slowly by, his wife hunting the woods, her eyes sweeping the fallen pine branch. Then the car was hidden by trees, and he listened to it going faster up the road, and laughing, he stood and squeezed Mark’s shoulders and hopped and skipped in a circle, pulling Mark with him, forcing the sound of his laughter faster when it slowed and louder when it lulled; he stopped dancing and laughing, but still quivering with jubilance, he squeezed Mark’s shoulder and shouted: ‘I don’t want to touch it.’

  When he rode his bicycle up the driveway, the sun was low above the trees across the lake, and his mother and sisters were still at the glass table; then, coming out of the garage, he saw that it was not still but again: his mother and Julie wore dresses and Stephanie wore shorts; beyond them, downwind, smoke rose from charcoal in the wheeled grill.

  ‘I’ll be right down,’ he said.

  ‘I’m coming up,’ his mother said.

  He went into the pale light of the house, up the stairs, hearing the screen door open and shut, and the clack of her steps on the kitchen floor then muted by carpets as she followed him up. His room was sunlit. He looked down at Julie and Stephanie, then turned to face the door a moment before she entered it. Her dress was white and, between its straps, a pearl necklace lay on her tan skin. She had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other: a tall, clear one with a piece of lime among the bubbles and ice.

  ‘Did you have a good day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Bike riding.’

  She put her drink on the chest of drawers and flicked ashes into her hand.

  ‘That’s quite a workout.’

  ‘We went to the woods too.’

  ‘You were right across the lake?’

  ‘The big woods. By the highway.’

  ‘Oh. You said—Mark?—moved here yesterday? When did you meet him?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here. He was looking around. ’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to’—she glanced at her drink, drew on her cigarette, flicked ashes in her hand—‘I don’t want to make a big thing out of it, but why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You really don’t? That’s so—I don’t know, it’s so—strange? ’With forefinger and thumb of her ash-hand she picked up her drink. ‘Well. Will you do something for me? Ask him to come over sometime when I’m home. We’ll have dinner. Will you do that?’

  ‘I’ll ask him.’

  He looked at the cigarette burning close to her fingers.

  ‘Good. I like meeting your friends. You have time to shower before dinner, pal.’

  ‘I was about to.’

  She smiled and left, and he followed her to the door and said to her back as she moved down the hall, gingerly holding the drink and cigarette: ‘Will I have time to swim? After my shower?’

  ‘Plenty of time,’she called over her shoulder. ‘It’s pork.’

  The apartment in Philadelphia smelled of the city, not only exhaust but something else that came through the open windows: a stale-ness, as though Philadelphia itself were enclosed by ceiling and walls, and today’s breeze carried to his lungs yesterday’s cement and stirred dust; when the windows were closed, the apartment’s motionless air had no smell, and that too, for Walter, was Philadelphia. With his father in the apartment she had filled with plants was blond Jenny, who, that first morning when he visited them for a weekend, knocked on his door, and he woke remembering where he was and said Yes, and she came in with a tray holding hot chocolate and bread she had baked last night, wrapped in hot foil—that child, his mother had said, that child. With those clothes from Nashville by way of Hollywood. What is she? There aren’t any more hippies. I ’m sorry, children, he’s your father but I cannot can not live quietly through this mad time. She was born the year we were married and I’ve spent twenty-two years giving my life to my husband and my home and now it feels like I was just taking care of him while she did nothing but get taller and busty so he could leave with her—Jenny sat on the bed and talked to him while he drank the chocolate and ate the bread and liked her, and understood his father loving her, and so shared his father’s guilt. He was the first to visit; in two weeks Stephanie would come, and then Julie, because there was only the one guest room, his father said, and his mother said: He’s protecting that girl from handling all of you at once. Jenny said: You probably don’t like breakfast in bed, and he said: No, not even when I’m sick, and she blushed, smiling at herself, and said: I don’t either. I’ll stop trying so hard. Are you all right? At first he thought she meant the bed, the room, his hunger, then looking at her he knew she didn’t, and he said: Yes. And Stephanie and Julie? They’ll be all right. They’re not now? They’l get better. Is your Mom? No. That’s why they’re not. It’s awful. I wish— He wanted to hear the wish: perhaps behind her worried blue eyes she wished his father had no wife, no children, that he and his mother and Julie and Stephanie were dead or had never lived; now sadly he saw them, the woman and girls he had left at home: they were in the living room, talking, then they vanished; for moments their voices lingered in the room and then faded with them into space. There’s too much to wish, she said; there’s nothing to wish. I just have to hope. For what? That nobody’s hurt too badly for too long. Sunday night he boarded an airplane for the second time in three days and in his life; he had spent most of the flight Friday afternoon imagining the weekend, making himself shy and awkwardly intrusive in his father’s new home and life before he saw either. He had met Jenny, had eaten dinner in restaurants with her and his father and sisters; but that was all. Sunday in the plane he liked being alone with the small light over his head and the black sky at his cool window; a man sat beside him, but he was alone: no one knew him, and when the stewardess spoke to him as though he were either boy or man, he felt that his age as well as his name had remained on the earth. Philadelphia was done; Philadelphia was good; he could go back, and now he was going home.

  His mother and sisters ate dinner in Boston, then met him at the airport, and he sat in the back seat with Stephanie; the night was cool, and in the closed car he remembered what he had forgotten to remember until now: Jenny and his father smelled of soap and cloth and flesh, and no smoke drifted toward his face through the still air of their rooms. He started to say this, nearly said: At least she doesn’t smoke; then he knew he must not.

  ‘So how was it,’ Stephanie said, and watching his mother in part-profile, hair and upper cheek,
her hand on the wheel, smoke pluming from her mouth he could not see, he told of the weekend without once saying Jenny. For the next few nights, when at dinner they questioned him or he remembered something about the weekend that he wanted to make alive again with words so it would be more than just a memory, he glanced from his sisters to his mother’s face, her eyes quick and lips severely set, and said Dad and we and all but twice was able to avoid saying even they, until finally he could no longer bear the shame of loving two women and betraying them both, and he kept his memories in silence. Then Stephanie went to Philadelphia and came back, and he watched his mother’s face at the dinners and said nothing or little and began to rid himself of shame, and in the week after Julie’s visit he knew he had never had reason for shame, that he had not been afraid to tell his mother he loved Jenny too, that it was not him but she who needed the lie; and, loving her, he felt detached and older, and at times he was lonely.

  The extended family, she calls its. I hope we can be like sisters someday; she actually said that. What did you say? I wanted to say Right, airhead: incest. She gives him three eggs a week. She doesn’t know what to call him. When she talks about him to us. She said that. She feels funny when she says Walter and funny when she says Your father. So what does she do? She takes turns. And if she’s talking to him she says Hon. Or Darling. No: nobody says darling except in books. She watches his salt too. And every day before dinner they go to this health club and swim. How cute. She’s the one who needs it, old thunder thighs. She had a pimple. She looks out of those big blue eyes and talks about how much he cares about us, and I wanted to tell her if he cares so much why is he here with you, and she’s got a pimple on her chin—

  He watched them: their faces over plates of food glowed with malice, the timbre of their voices was sensually wicked, their throaty laughter mischievous. They were eerie and fascinating; he had never seen them like this. He knew his silence was not disloyal to his father and Jenny; sometimes he gave his mother’s eyes what they had to see: he smiled, even laughed.

  At night the handkerchief was a pale shape in the air, then lit by headlights, and he knew that to the driver it had suddenly appeared without locomotion or support, and the cars stopped faster, and the voices from them were more frightened and then more angry. One night they rode past the woods to the bridge over the highway and leaned on the steel fence and watched the four lanes of cars coming to them and passing below. They pressed against the vertical railings and pissed arcs dropping into headlights.

  ‘I’ve got to shit,’ he said, and started for the woods.

  ‘Wait. We can use that.’

  He stopped and looked at Mark, then down at the cars.

  ‘You think I’m going to squat on that little fence and shit over the highway?’

  Near the bridge the woods ended at a small clearing before the slope going steeply down to the highway. Among beer bottles and cans Mark found a paper bag.

  ‘It won’t do anything,’ Walter said. ‘When it hits the car. If it hits it.’

  ‘You have any matches?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll get some. Go on.’

  He started to go into the woods, but Mark turned and walked back to the bridge, so he squatted in the clearing and looked at bottles and tire tracks in the grass that was high enough to tickle his shins, and wondered when the teenagers parked here; he had seen them: once there were three or four cars and boys and girls sitting on fenders or standing, but the other times it was only one car nestled in the shadows of the woods, dully and for an instant reflecting his mother’s headlights as she drove off the bridge. Always he had seen them from his mother’s car, when they had been to a movie or dinner and were coming home late. Carrying the bag away from his body, he went onto the bridge, his face turned to the breeze.

  ‘If we wait, we can get some parkers,’ he said.

  ‘Get our asses whipped too.’

  ‘We could sneak through the woods. Let the air out of the back tires, then throw this in the front window.’

  ’What do you think he’ll be doing while all that hissing is going on?’

  ‘Getting out and beating our asses. We could get close enough to listen, though. Maybe even look in.’

  ‘Now you’re talking. Maybe we can think up a trap. Something he’d drive into and couldn’t get out of. Let’s go find a front porch to burn your dinner on.

  With headlights on, they rode fast over the winding road past the woods and then open country where the lighted houses were separated by low ridges and shallow draws and trees planted in lines and orchards, and up Walter’s driveway, onto the terrace, where he placed the bag beside his kickstand. In the kitchen they looked on counters and in drawers and behind the bar.

  ‘They use lighters.’

  He went upstairs with Mark following, into his mother’s room, and switched on the ceiling light, standing a moment looking at her wide bed covered with light blue, and felt behind him Mark breathing the air of the room while his eyes probed it. He moved to the dresser, and when Mark pulled open a drawer of the chest at another wall, he raised his face and looked at himself in the mirror. Then he looked down, and between a hairbrush and an ashtray saw a glossy black matchbook bearing a name in gold script.

  Let’s go,’ he said, and crossed the room and closed the drawer as Mark’s hand, dropping a stack of silk pants, withdrew.

  He did not know any of the neighbors well enough to choose a target, so with lights off they rode to the last house before the woods and walked their bicycles up the long driveway between tall trees, and lay them on the ground where the pavement curved and rose through open lawn to the garage beside the house. Upstairs one room was lighted, and light came through the two high windows on either side of the small front porch with a low narrow roof and two columns. At the base of a tree they lay on their bellies and watched the windows, and Mark whispered: ‘Don’t ever think your shit doesn’t stink,’ and they pressed hands against their mouths and laughed through their noses. Then, crouching, they ran to the front porch and listened and heard nothing. Walter set the bag near the screen door and unfolded its top and listened again, then struck the match and held the flame to one corner of the opening and then another, and stood, and when fire was moving down the sides, Mark pressed the doorbell and held it chiming inside the house, then they ran to the tree, and Walter dived beside it and rolled behind it next to Mark. The door swung inward, a short, wide man stepped into its frame, then said something fast and low, and pushed open the screen and with one foot stomped the flames smaller and smaller to embers and smoke, then he cursed, and Mark was running and Walter was too, hearing cursing and heavy running steps coming as he ran beside his bicycle down the driveway and jumped onto the seat, passing Mark before the road, where he turned and pumped for the woods.

  Across the glass table Mark’s wet hair was sleek in the sunlight. He sat beside Julie; the sun, nearing the trees across the lake, was behind and just above him, so that Walter squinted at him. Walter’s mother had thawed chicken, then when she came home early from the boutique she had bought after going to court with his father, she said she had decided on hamburgers because some people were clumsy about eating barbecued chicken with a knife and fork and she didn’t want to make it hard on him. Walter had said Mark could eat chicken with his hands, and she said she knew he could and Walter would like to, and that’s what she meant about making it hard on Mark.

  She could clean the bones of a chicken with knife and fork as daintily as if she were eating lima beans, so he liked watching her with a hamburger: it was thick and it dripped catsup and juice from the meat and tomatoes and pickles; she leaned over the plate and opened her mouth wide enough to close on both buns, yet with that width of jaws she took only a small bite from the edge and lowered the hamburger, then sat straight to chew with her lips closed. Julie’s and Stephanie’s bites were larger but still small, and neither had to use a napkin. He and Mark had stayed in the pool until now, so his mother was aski
ng questions between eating: Where he was from and what his father did and did his mother work, how many brothers and sisters and where had he gone to school. Some of this was new to Walter; the rest of it he had learned in the woods, during the heat of afternoons as they lay on cool shadowed grass and spoke to avoid silence. His mother’s questions ended before her hamburger did; she held her wineglass toward Walter and he filled it, then she said: ‘And your sisters,’ and he reached to their places and poured, then held the bottle over Mark’s glass of milk, and Mark said: ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Just two more years,’his mother said, and she leaned toward him and tousled his wet hair.‘This boy of mine,’ she said to Mark, and dried her hand with her napkin.

  ‘He’ll be doing more than wine in two more years,’; Julie said.

  ‘A lot more,’ Stephanie said, and smiled at Mark.

  ‘Like what? ’ Walter said.

  ‘You’ll have a girl,’ Julie said.

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘You will. Some girl will take care of that.’

  ‘Wow,’ he said to Mark. ‘I’ll have a date.’

  ‘In the car ’Mark said.

  ‘With a girl,’

  ‘And you’ll love it,’ his mother said. ‘You two guys will beg for the car and start looking in the mirror. We have blueberry pie and ice cream.’

  ‘Tell me you didn’t,’ Stephanie said. ‘Not blueberry. I’m going to be very fat tonight.’

  ‘You might get an older man,’ his mother said. ’‘Dessert is for these boys who swim and ride bikes all day.’

  ‘I swam this morning,’ Stephanie said, and stood, and then Julie and his mother did, and when he pushed back his chair she said: ‘stay with your guest. We ’ll do it,’ and they were all in motion, clearing and wiping the table and setting it again with ashtrays and cigarette packs and plates and three demitasses and a silver coffeepot, and pie and ice cream for everyone, though he and Mark had the biggest slices and scoops. When his mother reached for her cigarettes, he stood and said: ‘Let’s go down to the lake.’