Finding a Girl in America

by Andre Dubus

  Then he was outside, arm-in-arm with Jack, and he was laughing.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  He could feel Jack trembling; he was trembling too.

  ‘I feel great,’ he said.

  ‘You tore his ass. You crazy bastard, I didn’t know you could fight.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Hank said, sagging from Jack’s arm as he laughed. ‘I just did, that’s all.’

  He is awake a long time but it is excitement and when finally he sleeps he is still happy. The dream is familiar now: it comes earlier than usual, or Hank feels that it does, and next morning at ten he wakes to that and much more. He is grateful the sun is coming in; it doesn’t help, but a grey sky would be worse: he lies thinking of Johnny’s anger last night, and he wonders who the man is, and hopes that somewhere he is lying with a gentle woman who last night washed his cuts. Then he is sad. It has been this way all his life, as long as he can remember, even with bullies in grade school, and he has never understood it: he can hate a man, want to hurt him or see him hurt; but if he imagines the man going home to a woman (as the bullies went to their mothers) he is sad. He imagines the man last night entering his apartment, the woman hurrying to his face, the man vulnerable with her as he is with no one else, as he can be with no one else, loving her as she washes eachcut—Does that hurt? Yes—the man becoming a boy again as she gently cleans him, knowing this is the deepest part of himself beneath all the layers of growing up and being a man among men and soldiering: this—and he can show it only to her, and she is the only one in his life who can love it.

  ‘I hope he finds me and beats shit out of me,’ Hank says aloud. Then he can smile: he does not want the shit beat out of him. He drives to Jack’s house. In the car, when Hank tells him how he feels now, Jack says: ‘Fuck that guy; he wanted a fight all night. And after school we’ll go see Johnny. He’ll start laughing as soon as he sees you.’ Immediately Hank knows this is true. He wonders what men without friends do on the day after they’ve been drunken assholes.

  At Lake Kenoza he parks at the city tennis courts and locks his wallet and their windbreakers in the car. They start slowly, running on a dirt road, in the open still, the sun warm on Hank’s face: he looks at the large pond to his left. The purple loose-strife is gone now; in summer it grows bright purple among the reeds near the pond. The road curves around the pond, which is separated from the lake by a finger of tree-grown earth. As they leave the pond they enter the woods, the road sun-dappled now, deeply rutted, so he has to keep glancing down at it as he also watches the lake to his left; the road is close to it, just up the slope from its bank lapped by waves in the breeze; to his right the earth rises, thick with trees. He and Jack talk while they run.

  He wishes Lori ran. He has never had a woman who did. Edith started after their marriage ended. Running is the most intimate part of his friendship with Jack. Hank does not understand precisely why this is true. Perhaps it has something to do with the rhythm of their feet and breath. But there is more: it is, Hank thinks, setting free the flesh: as they approach the bend marking the second mile, the road staying by the lake and moving deeper into the woods which rise farther and farther to their right, he is no longer distracted by anything: he sees the lake and road and woods and Jack’s swinging arms and reaching legs as he could never see them if he were simply walking, or standing still. It is this: even in lovemaking the body can become a voyeur of its own pleasure. But in the willful exertion of running, nothing can distract the flesh from itself.

  Which is why he waits for the long hill that comes at the middle of their nearly six-mile run. They are close to it now, and are both afraid of it, and know this about each other. The road climbs away from the lake and they go up it, then leave it, onto a dirt trail dropping to the lake again. Here the lake’s bank is sheer, there are rocks at its base, pebbles on the sand; to the right is the slope of the hill, steep, covered brown with pine needles, nearly all its trees are pines, and looking up there Hank cannot see the top of the hill or even the sky; always here he thinks of For Whom the Bell Tolls, sees Robert Jordan and Anselmo in the opening pages, lying up there among the pines. The trail often rises and falls, and then it goes down and to the right and up and they are on it: the long curving deceptive hill. It took Hank nearly a year to stop believing the next crest was the last one: short of breath, legs hurting, he looks up the road which is so steep and long that he cannot see beyond the next crest; he has never counted them, or the curves between them; he does not want to know. He prefers to run knowing only that it will get worse; and by doing this he always has that weary beat of joy when he sees that finally, a quarter of a mile or so ahead, is the top.

  ‘Monet again,’ Jack says.

  Hank looks past him, down the hill; between the pines he can see sweat-blurred flashes of the lake; but it is the sun on the trees he’s looking at. Jack is right; the sun touches the trees like Monet. Now they run harder, to reach the top, end the pain, and slowly the road levels and they shorten their strides: fast dry breaths, and Jack shakes his hand; they are at the center of the top of the hill, and suddenly, shaking Jack’s hand and running beside him, Hank sees the dream again; the hill has not worked, he has run out of cures, and he releases Jack’s hand and shouts through his own gasping: ‘I can’t get cafuckingtharsis—’

  Going downhill now, watching the road so he won’t turn an ankle in a rut, he tells Jack about Monica; and the dream, which is with him now as he talks past trees and lake, talks all the way out of the woods into the sunlight where finally he stops talking for their last sprint to the tennis courts, the car, the water fountain.

  ‘Marry Lori,’ Jack says, as he bends toward the fountain; he walks away gargling, then spits out the water and returns. ‘The fucking country’s gone crazy,’ he says. ‘Marry her.’

  Lori worries too much. Sometimes she thinks if she could stop worrying about so many parts of her life, and focus on her few real problems, there would be an end to those times, which are coming at least weekly now so she is afraid of an ulcer, when she is eating and it seems her food drops onto tense muscles and lies there undigested and after the meal it is still there and she is nauseated; and she could stop smoking so much; and she could stop staring at her school work at night instead of doing it; and she could ask questions in class, and could say what she was thinking when the teacher tried to start a discussion, instead of sitting there with her stomach tightening and feeling sorry for him because no one else is talking either. She could talk to her friends at school, girls and boys; she talks to them now, but usually only about what they are saying; she doesn’t think they even realize this, but she knows it is why they like her and think of her as sweet and kind, their faces warm when she joins them at a table in the dining room or snack bar; but they don’t know any of her secrets, and they are good friends who would listen, so it is her fault. She has been able to talk to Hank, so he knows more about her than anyone, but still she has not talked to him enough. She suspects though—and this makes her feel safely loved—that he understands more about her than she has told him.

  Yet on the one night, two weeks ago, when she tried to separate her smaller problems from her essential ones, made parallel lists on a legal pad, she found that they were all connected, so the vertical lists, beginning with my stomach in the left column and career in the right column, became a letter to herself.

  As she wrote it she was both excited and frightened: excited because she was beginning to see herself, and lovingly, on the paper on her desk; and frightened because she did not know where the writing was taking her; and because it might take her no place at all, might end on the very next page, in mid-sentence—Her first line was: My name is Lori Meadows. She wrote that she was nineteen years old, would be twenty in January, was a sophomore in college and was screwed up. But as soon as those two words appeared on the yellow page, she did not believe them. She was a C student. That was in her file in the registrar’s office: 2.4 next to her name. Her mother said she wou
ld never get to graduate school like that. Lori always nodded, always said I know I know I’ll bring it up. She never asked her mother what she was supposed to study in graduate school. She was all right, she wrote, except when she thought about the future. She liked going to her classes and sometimes she even came out excited; but then at night she could not study. Hank told her it was easy: she only had to spend two or three hours on school nights going over the notes from that day’s classes and reading the assignments, she would be free by nine every night, and when exams came there would be no cramming, no all-nighters, all she would have to do was go over the notes again and the passages she had marked in the books. She loved the books. She loved owning them, and the way they looked on the shelves in her small room. But at night she didn’t want to open them. Hank said he studied that way all through college and was on the dean’s list every semester. But he was smarter than she was, and she worried about that too. But maybe that wasn’t it. He was writing then; before he got out of college he wrote a novel and burned it. She would have to ask him if he studied like that so he’d have time to write, or if that was just the way he did things.

  She didn’t have any reason to study like that except to make grades and she didn’t know what to make grades for except so she wouldn’t feel like a dumb shit, and so her mother wouldn’t start in on her. So at night she talked with people or went to Hank’s. At least she didn’t smoke dope. She didn’t smoke it at all, but she was thinking of those who just went to their rooms and turned on the stereo and smoked themselves to sleep. Often in February, or even before Christmas, they packed their things and went home. In the morning she woke in panic because she hadn’t done her work. Last year she got a D in biology because she couldn’t memorize, but she liked the classes. But she could memorize. She just didn’t. She got Bs last year in Hank’s literature courses because she had a crush on him and she liked the stories and novels he assigned and she could write about them on tests. And she’d probably get a B or A in his Chekhov course this fall. Maybe it was love last year, not a crush. They were drinking friends then, in September, and often she went drinking with him and Monica and sometimes just she and Hank walked down to Timmy’s and sat in a booth in the dining room. She could talk to him then too. But she fell in love with him when he started taking her out after Monica, and when he made love with her so gently the first time and she came for the first time with a man, but if she hadn’t had the crush she wouldn’t have fallen in love holding hands on Boylston Street and stopping in the bookstore and making love that night, so maybe it was called a crush when you were in love without touching.

  She didn’t understand about school. She was not lazy. She worked hard learning to ride and won three cups for jumping before she was fifteen and then she stopped riding except for fun. Some girls stayed with horses, at a certain age, and they didn’t change after that; they didn’t go for boys. At least the girls she had known. She worked hard at the restaurant last summer and the summer before. She knew everything about those two summers, the work and what she had read and the beach and her friends, loving her quiet father and loving her mother too, wishing she and her father could talk and touch, watching him, wondering what he thought, what pictures were in his mind when she entered a room and he looked up at her, and his face loved her; and wishing she could talk to her mother instead of just listen to the words that seemed to come as long as her mother was awake, like a radio left on; but this radio was dangerous, sometimes it was witty, sometimes cheerful, sometimes just small talk, but each day there were always other things, nearly always subtle, sometimes even with a smile: warnings, reprimands, disapprovals, threats, most of them general, having to do with things as vague as growth, the future, love, being a woman. None of these was vague but they were when her mother talked about them: cryptic, her voice implying more than the words; her mother never spoke as if, in the world, there was a plan. And when Lori listened closely enough to this she heard or felt she heard the real cause: some brittle disappointment in her mother’s voice, and she wanted to say Are you unhappy Mother? What is it you want? What is it you want for me?

  For they had never had any real trouble. Lori had avoided dope because the first time she smoked it she didn’t like it, she only got very sleepy and very hungry at once and was suddenly asleep at the party; and she was afraid to swallow anything, did not want something down in her stomach where she could not throw it away. She was obedient, and had always been. She was pretty, as her sisters were. She had a notion, which she didn’t want, that if she were not pretty, her mother would not forgive her for that. They had never really quarrelled. She had watched her mother flirt with boys who came for her or her sisters, and with men, in front of her father; had watched her father’s face, not quite grim, mostly calm. She knew her mother needed to flirt, see her effect on the boys who blushed and the men who did not. Her mother flirted with Hank too, but when he wasn’t there she frowned when Lori spoke of him. He’s too old for you, she said. We’re just friends. What kind of friends? I get lonely at school; he’s good to talk to. This is summer. He’s still my friend. Wishing she could say I’m in love and What does too old mean? That he’ll die first? I could drown tomorrow. She had told Hank. He said It’s not age. It’s money. If I were a doctor or a Republican senator she’d bring us coffee in bed.

  She did not know if her mother did more than flirt. But all through the years there were times when her mother would go away, tell husband and daughters she needed a vacation, and she would go to Mexico, or the Caribbean, and return a week or two later with a tan and presents for everyone; and when Lori was fifteen she realized that for at least two years she had been trying not to wonder what a flirtatious, pretty and slender woman did alone at Puerto Vallarta, Martinique … Now the words on the legal pad told her exactly what her mother did and she understood why her father was even gentler than usual as he cooked for the three daughters while his wife screwed men she had met hours before. Why did her mother need that? It frightened her, as though it were an illness that ran in the women in the family, and she was ashamed that there were men walking the earth who had screwed her mother, who might crazily someday even meet her, realize she was the daughter of that six-day woman winters ago, and how could her mother do that to her—to them?

  She did not know why she made love to Blake summer before last; could remember, as she wrote, moments in the restaurant when they smiled at each other as they hurried with trays, and then drank at the bar when the kitchen closed and they were done for the night. It was simply, she knew now, the camaraderie of people working together, an assurance that they were not really carriers of trays, smiling servants, charming targets of well-mannered abuse. He could have been a woman. Then at the night’s end, after their drinks, Lori and the woman would have separated, as they would at the summer’s end; by the time the leaves fell they would fondly think of each other, in their separate schools, as summer friends, waitress friends. But because he was a man, that affinity of coworkers, especially those with menial jobs, grew to passion and all its tributaries of humor and tenderness and wanting to know and be known; and she was eighteen, the last virgin among her friends and in her home; the last virgin on the block, her sisters teased.

  It was August, she had been working all summer, school was coming. Blake was going back to Illinois, it seemed time: time to complete or begin or both, and there was tequila and cheer, the very sound of her laugh seeming different to her, something of freedom in it; there was the dirt path near the cliffs edge over the sea and rocky beach, and tenderly she walked with him and tenderly she kissed him and went to the earth with him and was not afraid, was ready, here on the cliff she had walked as a child, so much better than in a dormitory, waves slapping rocks as if they knew she was up there between them and the moving clouds and moon and stars. Then she was afraid: the slow tenderness of the walk was gone with her clothes he removed too quickly; she lay waiting, her eyes shut, listening to his clothes sliding from his skin, then too soon
he was in her, big and she was tight, and everything was fast and painful and she cried, not only that night but every night after work, not because it always hurt, but because she couldn’t tell him how to make it better and finally after two weeks when the summer was ending and he came, then rolled away and sat naked looking at the sea while beside him she lay softly crying, he said: You’re screwed up. She said nothing. She got up fast and dressed and was on the path before he called to her to wait. She did not. She walked faster. But she knew he would catch up with her, so she crouched behind a pine tree, heard him coming, watched him trot past. Then she left the tree and sat near the cliff’s edge and watched the ocean, listening. When she was certain she heard only wind and waves, she rose and walked down the path.

  She did not want to walk the four miles home. She went to a bar where she knew her girl friends would be. She found their table; they waved and beckoned as she went to them. Monica was there. They had pitchers of beer and were laughing and on the bandstand a group was singing like Crosby Stills Nash and Young: the same songs, the same style. Her friends were talking to her: she was smiling, talking, accepting a mug. But she was angry. She did not know why and it made her feel unpredictable and moody like her mother, and guilty because her friends had not hurt her, it was Blake, yet he was only a shard of pain inside her anger. Yet writing about it over a year later she understood, and was delighted at the understanding till she paused and put her pen in her mouth and sucked on it and wondered if tonight she could have understood this without Hank. Had he taught her to see? She felt diminished. Her long-time voice with its long-time epithet whispered at her spine: You’re a dumb shit. Then she was angry. At herself. It was Chekhov, that wonderful man dead too young; his story, when the old doctor said: Why do you hate freedom so? Chekhov who wrote about the perils, even the evil, of mediocrity. Hank merely assigned the stories and talked about them. And wasn’t that really why she was in school? She stopped writing. Made a dash, indented. Wrote about the bar again, her friends, her anger, or else she would forget and she must get that down quickly because she had started to discover something else and if she didn’t get back to the bar now she might never.