Finding a Girl in America

by Andre Dubus

  Then she walked. To her left the sea was loud and dark, and she thought of Vicente Torrez with the pistol in his lap: a slender Mexican boy who in high school had teased her about being named Juanita, when she had no Mexican blood. Blonde gringita, he called her, and his eyes looked curiously at her, as if her name were an invitation to him, but he didn’t know how to answer it. Five years after high school, while she was married to Patrick, she read in the paper that he had shot himself. There was no photograph, so she read the story to know if this were the same Vicente, and she wanted it to be him. He had been a cab driver in San Diego, and had lived alone. The second and final paragraph told of the year he was graduated from the high school in San Diego, and listed his survivors: his parents, brothers, sisters. So it was Vicente, with the tight pants and teasing face and that question in his eyes: Could you be my girl? Love me? Someone she once knew had sat alone in his apartment and shot himself; yet her feeling was so close to erotic that she was frightened. Patrick came home in late afternoon and she watched through the window as he walked uniformed across the lawn (it was winter: he was wearing green) and when he came inside she held him and told him and then she was crying, seeing Vicente sitting in a dirty and disorderly room, sitting on the edge of his bed and reaching that moment when he wanted more than anything else not to be Vicente, and crying into Patrick’s chest she said: ‘I wonder if he knew somebody would cry; I wonder if he wouldn’t have done it; if that would have seen him through till tomorrow—’ The word tomorrow stayed in her heart. She saw it in her mind, its letters printed across the black and white image of Vicente sitting on the bed with the pistol, and she loosened Patrick’s tie and began to unbutton his green blouse.

  She was looking out at the sea as she walked, and she stepped into a shallow pool left by the tide; the water covered her sandalled feet and was cool and she stood in it. Then she stepped out and walked on. For a year after Patrick was killed she took sleeping pills. She remembered lying in bed and waiting for the pill to work, and the first signals in her fingers, her hands: the slow-coming dullness, and she would touch her face, its skin faintly tingling, going numb, then she was aware only of the shallow sound and peaceful act of her slow breathing.

  Juanita Jody Noury Creehan. Her mother had named her, given her a choice that would not change her initials if later she called herself Jody. Her mother’s maiden name had been Miller. She looked up at the sky: it was clear, stars and a quarter-moon. Noury Creehan: both names from men. She stepped out of her sandals, toe against heel, toe against heel, heart beating as though unclothing for yet another man, remembering the confessions when she was in high school, remembering tenderly as if she were mother to herself as a young girl. Petting: always she called it that, whispering through lattice and veil, because that was the word the priests used in the confessional and when they came to the Saturday morning catechism classes for talks with the junior and senior girls; and the word the nuns used too on Saturday mornings, black-robed and looking never-petted themselves, so the word seemed strange on their tongues. The priests looked as if they had petted, or some of them did, probably only because they were men, they had hands and faces she liked to watch, voices she liked to hear.

  Petting, for the bared and handled and suckled breasts, her blouse unbuttoned, and her pants off and skirt pulled up for the finger; the boys’ pants on and unzipped as they gasped, thick warmth on her hand, white faint thumping on the dashboard. She confessed her own finger too, and while petting was a vague word and kept her secrets, masturbation was stark and hid nothing, exposed her in the confessional like the woman in the photograph that Ruth had shown her: a Mexican woman of about thirty, sitting naked in an armchair, legs spread, hand on her mound, and her face caught forever in passion real or posed.

  Then finally in high school it was Billy Campbell in the spring of her junior year, quick-coming Billy dropping the Trojan out of the car window, the last of her guilt dropping with it, so that after one more confession she knew she had kneeled and whispered to a priest for the last time. Young and hot and pretty, she could not imagine committing any sin that was not sexual. When she was thirty there was no one to tell that sometimes she could not bear knowing what she knew: that no one would help her, not ever again. That was the year she gained weight and changed sizes and did not replace her black dress, though she liked herself in black, liked her blonde hair touching it. She began selecting colors which in the store were merely colors; but when she thought of them on her body and bed, they seemed to hold possibilities: sheets and pillowcases of yellow and pink and pale blue, and all her underwear was pastel, so she could start each day by stepping into color. Many of those days she spent at the beach, body-surfing and swimming beyond the breakers and sleeping in the sun, or walking there in cool months. Once a bartender told her that waitresses and bartenders should have a month off every year and go to a cabin in the mountains and not smile once. Just to relax the facial muscles, he said; maybe they go, like pitchers’ arms. Her days were short, for she slept late, and her evenings long; and most days she was relieved when it was time to go to work, to the costume-smile and chatter that some nights she brought home with a gentle man, and next day she had that warmth to remember as she lay on the beach.

  She unbuttoned and unzipped her skirt, let it fall to the sand; pulled down her pants and stepped out of them. She took off the sweater and blouse and shivering dropped them, then reached around for the clasp of her brassiere. She walked across wet sand, into the rushing touch of sea. She walked through a breaking wave, sand moving under her feet, current pulling and pushing her farther out, and she walked with it and stood breast-deep, watching the surface coming from the lighter dome of the sky. A black swell rose toward her and curled, foam skimming its crest like quick smoke; she turned to the beach, watched the wave over her shoulder: breaking it took her with head down and outstretched arms pointing, eyes open to dark and fast white foam, then she scraped sand with breasts and feet, belly and thighs, and lay breathing salt-taste as water hissed away from her legs. She stood and crossed the beach, toward her clothes.

  He was sleeping. In the dark she undressed and left her clothes on the floor and took a nightgown to the bathroom. She showered and washed her hair and when she went to the bedroom he said: ‘Do you always get up when it’s still night?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  She got into bed; he placed a hand on her leg and she shifted away and he did not touch her again.

  ‘In three months I’ll be thirty-nine.’

  ‘Thirty-nine’s not bad.’

  ‘I was born in the afternoon. They didn’t have any others.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Almost five.’

  ‘It’s going to be a long day.’

  ‘Not for me. I’ll sleep.’

  ‘Night worker.’

  ‘They were Catholics, but they probably used something anyway. Maybe I was a diaphragm baby. I feel like one a lot of the time.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Like I sneaked into the movie and I’m waiting for the usher to come get me.’

  ‘Tell him to shove off.’

  ‘Not this usher.’

  ‘You talking about dying?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he’s one shit of an usher.’

  She believed she could not sleep until he left. But when she closed her eyes she felt it coming in her legs and arms and breath, and gratefully she yielded to it: near-dreaming, she saw herself standing naked in the dark waves. One struck her breast and she wheeled slow and graceful, salt water black in her eyes and lovely in her mouth, hair touching sand as she turned then rose and floated in swift tenderness out to sea.

  PART THREE

  Delivering

  JIMMY WOKE BEFORE the alarm, his parents’ sounds coming back to him as he had known they would when finally three hours ago he knew he was about to sleep: their last fight in the
kitchen, and Chris sleeping through it on the top bunk, grinding his teeth. It was nearly five now, the room sunlit; in the dark while they fought Jimmy had waited for the sound of his father’s slap, and when it came he felt like he was slapping her and he waited for it again, wished for it again, but there was only the one clap of hand on face. Soon after that, she drove away.

  Now he was ashamed of the slap. He reached down to his morning hardness which always he had brought to the bathroom so she wouldn’t see the stain; he stopped once to turn off the alarm when he remembered it was about to ring into his quick breath. Then he stood and gently shook Chris’s shoulder. He could smell the ocean. He shook Chris harder: twelve years old and chubby and still clumsy about some things. Maybe somebody else was Chris’s father. No. He would stay with what he heard last night; he would not start making up more. Somewhere his mother was naked with that son of a bitch, and he squeezed Chris’s shoulder and said: ‘Wake up.’ Besides, their faces looked alike: his and Chris’s and his father’s. Everybody said that. Chris stared at him.

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘I need you to.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything last night.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘You buying the doughnuts?’

  ‘After we swim.’

  In the cool room they dressed for the warm sun, in cut-off jeans and T-shirts and sneakers, and went quietly down the hall, past the closed door where Jimmy stopped and waited until he could hear his father’s breath. Last night after she left, his father cried in the kitchen. Chris stood in the doorway, looking into the kitchen; Jimmy looked over his head at the table, the beer cans, his father’s bent and hers straight, the ashtray filled, ashes on the table and, on the counter near the sink, bent cans and a Seagram’s Seven bottle.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Chris said.

  ‘You’d sleep through World War III.’

  He got two glasses from the cupboard, reaching over the cans and bottle, holding his breath against their smell; he looked at the two glasses in the sink, her lipstick on the rim of one, and Chris said: ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Makes me sick to smell booze in the morning.’

  Chris poured the orange juice and they drank with their backs to the table. Jimmy picked up her Winston pack. Empty. Shit. He took a Pall Mall. He had learned to smoke by watching her, had started three years ago by stealing hers. He was twelve then. Would he and Chris see her alone now, or would they have to go visit her at that son of a bitch’s house, wherever it was? They went out the back door and around to the front porch where the stacked papers waited, folded and tied, sixty-two of them, and a note on top saying Mr. Thompson didn’t get his paper yesterday. ‘It’s his Goddamn dog,’ he said, and cut the string and gave Chris a handful of rubber bands. Chris rolled and banded the papers while Jimmy stood on the lawn, smoking; he looked up the road at the small houses, yellow and brown and grey, all of them quiet with sleeping families, and the tall woods beyond them and, across the road, houses whose back lawns ended at the salt marsh that spread out to the northeast where the breeze came from. When he heard the rolling papers stop, he turned to Chris sitting on the porch and looking at him.

  ‘Where’s the car?’

  ‘Mom took it.’

  ‘This early?’

  He flicked the cigarette toward the road and kneeled on the porch and started rolling.

  ‘Where’d she go so early?’

  ‘Late. Let’s go.’

  He trotted around the lawn and pushed up the garage door and went around the pickup; he did not look at Chris until he had unlocked the chain and pulled it from around the post, coiled it under his bicycle seat, and locked it there. His hands were ink-stained.

  ‘You can leave your chain. We’ll use mine at the beach.’

  He took the canvas sack from its nail on the post and hung it from his right side, its strap over his left shoulder, and walked his bicycle past the truck and out into the sun. At the front porch he stuffed the papers into the sack. Then he looked at Chris.

  ‘We’re not late,’ Chris said.

  ‘She left late. Late last night.’ He pushed down his kickstand. ‘Hold on. Let’s get these papers out.’

  ‘She left?’

  ‘Don’t you start crying on me. Goddamnit, don’t.’

  Chris looked down at his handlebar.

  ‘They had a fight,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Then she’ll be back.’

  ‘Not this time. She’s fucking somebody.’

  Chris looked up, shaking his head. Shaking it, he said: ‘No.’

  ‘You want to hear about it or you just going to stand there and tell me I didn’t hear what I heard.’

  ‘Okay, tell me.’

  ‘Shit. I was going to tell you at the beach. Wait, okay?’

  ‘Sixty-two papers?’

  ‘You know she’s gone. Isn’t that enough for a while?’ He kicked up his stand. ‘Look. We’ve hardly ever lived with both of them. It’ll be like Pop’s aboard ship. Only it’ll be her.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘What’s not.’

  ‘About hardly ever living with both of them.’

  ‘It almost is. Let’s go.’

  Slowly across the grass, then onto the road, pumping hard, shifting gears, heading into the breeze and sun, listening for cars to their rear, sometimes looking over his shoulder at the road and Chris’s face, the sack bumping his right thigh and sliding forward but he kept shoving it back, keeping the rhythm of his pedalling and his throws: the easy ones to the left, a smooth motion across his chest like second to first, snapping the paper hard and watching it drop on the lawn; except for the people who didn’t always pay on time or who bitched at him, and he hit their porches or front doors, a good hard sound in the morning quiet. He liked throwing to his right better. The first week or so he had cheated, had angled his bicycle toward the houses and thrown overhand; but then he stopped that, and rode straight, leaning back and throwing to his right, sometimes having to stop and leave his bicycle and get a paper from under a bush or a parked car in the driveway, but soon he was hitting the grass just before the porch, unless it was a house that had a door or wall shot coming, and he could do that with velocity too. Second to short. He finished his road by scaring himself, hitting Reilly’s big front window instead of the wall beside it, and it shook but didn’t break and when he turned his bicycle and headed back he grinned at Chris, who still looked like someone had just punched him in the mouth.

  He went left up a climbing road past a pine grove, out of its shade into the warmth on his face: a long road short on customers, twelve of them scattered, and he rode faster, thinking of Chris behind him, pink-cheeked, breathing hard. Ahead on the right he saw Thompson’s collie waiting on the lawn, and he pulled out a paper and pushed the sack behind his leg, then rose from the seat pumping toward the house, sitting as he left the road and bounced on earth and grass: he threw the paper thumping against the open jaws, his front tire grazing the yelping dog as it scrambled away, and he lightly hand-braked for his turn then sped out to the road again. He threw two more to his left and started up a long steep hill for the last of the route: the road cut through woods, in shade now, standing, the bicycle slowing as the hill steepened near the hardest house of all: the Claytons’ at the top of the hill, a pale green house with a deep front lawn: riding on the shoulder, holding a paper against the handlebar, standing, his legs hot and tight, then at the top he sat to throw, the bicycle slowing, leaning, and with his left hand he moved the front wheel from side to side while he twisted to his right and cocked his arm and threw; he stood on the pedals and gained balance and speed before the paper landed sliding on the walk. The road wound past trees and fifteen customers and twice that many houses. He finished quickly. Then he got off his bicycle, sweating, and folded the sack and put it in his orange nylon saddlebag, and they started back, Chris riding beside him.

  From one house near the road he smel
led bacon. At another he saw a woman at the kitchen window, her head down, and he looked away. Some of the papers were inside now. At Clayton’s house he let the hill take him down into the shade to flat land and, Chris behind him now, he rode past the wide green and brown salt marsh, its grass leaning with the breeze that was cool and sea-tanged on his face, moving the hair at his ears. There were no houses. A fruit and vegetable stand, then the bridge over the tidal stream: a quick blue flow, the tide coming in from the channel and cove beyond a bend to the north, so he could not see them, but he knew how the cove looked this early, with green and orange charter boats tied at the wharves. An hour from now, the people would come. He and Chris and his father went a few afternoons each summer, with sandwiches and soft drinks and beer in the ice chest, and his father drank steadily but only a six-pack the whole afternoon, and they stood abreast at the rail, always near the bow, the boat anchored a mile or two out, and on lucky days filled a plastic bag with mackerel slapping tails till they died, and on unlucky ones he still loved the gentle rocking of the boat and the blue sea and the sun warmly and slowly burning him. Twice in late summer they had bottom-fished and pulled up cusks from three hundred feet, tired arm turning the reel, cusk breaking the surface with eyes pushed outward and guts in its mouth. His mother had gone once. She had not complained, had pretended to like it, but next time she told them it was too much sun, too smelly, too long. Had she been with that son of a bitch when they went fishing again? The boats headed in at five and his father inserted a cleaning board into a slot in the gunwale and handed them slick cool mackerel and he and Chris cleaned them and threw their guts and heads to the sea gulls that hovered and cried and dived until the boat reached the wharf. Sometimes they could make a gull come down and take a head from their fingers.