“So what do you think of this whole hunting thing?” the friend asks Kate.
“Should be interesting.”
“You don’t mind killing Bambi?”
She pours more syrup on her pancake. “Someone has to do it.”
“You ever handled a gun before?”
“We do target shooting at my uncle’s.”
“She’s an excellent shot,” her father says.
“You have such nice posture,” the wife—Mary—tells Kate. “So many girls your age slouch.”
Everyone is focused on her, the way a gathering of adults will focus on a child. Kate enjoys the attention. She chews her bacon daintily. She is used to her father showing her off. For her mother, she is all need and worry, expanding like Alice in Wonderland, taking up space her mother (now home playing cards with boring Miles) once occupied. But for her father she is a luxury, a bonus.
They put their overnight bags in their respective rooms. Mary hands Kate and her father chocolate-chip cookies and a water bottle as they leave through the kitchen door. They get into an old Jeep missing a roof and doors and a backseat. The place where the backseat used to be is covered by a stained tarp. A hole gapes in the floor of the passenger side. Kate watches the matted grass rush below as they jolt through a field and then another downward-sloping field, the two divided by a low stone wall. Woods surround the second field, where Dennis brakes and kills the engine. They walk, Dennis carrying the gun, pointed down, and a bag that contains ammunition, binoculars, ear protectors. Kate carries the water and the cookies. Her father has changed from his tweedy academic clothes into mountain-man garb: green army pants, lace-up rubber-soled boots, a plaid flannel shirt. Twigs snap under his feet and wind tousles the grass. A breeze pushes around the wet bright leaves, and the life inside the forest quivers. Kate envisions sensitive English-speaking animals, as in a Disney movie or a children’s book, crowded up to the very last front of trees, watching the girl and the man.
They arrive at a tree with twelve-inch lengths of wood nailed in increments to the trunk to create a makeshift ladder. Dennis ascends, rifle and bag slung over his shoulder. Kate follows and pulls herself through a wooden platform into a tree house, the kind she might, in other circumstances, decorate with curtains and a tea set.
They don the ear protectors. He has her practice holding and aiming the rifle. She kneels on one knee, the opposite foot on the platform.
“Hold the butt tight against your shoulder and look down the barrel. You see that little horseshoe. There. You want the tip of the barrel inside of it, between the two points. You want all that lined up. You want to know your surroundings. How deep the wood goes, what’s beyond it, who lives next door. Last year maybe, up in Maine, this family had built a lean-to in somebody’s woods and were living there. A bullet went right through the side of the house and into a crib.”
She aims the gun at a tree. She lines the tip of the barrel up between the two ends of the horseshoe. “Seems too high,” she says.
“They lined up?”
“Yup. But …”
“You can lie down if that’s more comfortable.”
She lies on her stomach. “That’s better.”
He lowers his voice. “Hey. There,” he says. “See that?”
Something moves amid the trees. Leaves make a whispering sound. Branches crackle.
“Your shot,” he says.
“I’m going to miss.”
“You might. Not the end of the world.”
He checks her hold on the gun. He clicks off the safety. “Line ’em up. Shoot. Now.”
She snaps the trigger, a little thing that produces a gigantic noise. The bullet flies invisibly through the atmosphere, leaving no residue, very separate from its surroundings. Then the sound expands, softens, and loses focus. The sections of brown hide bound away.
“Did I hurt it?”
“No. You can hear if it hit.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“What happens if we get one?”
“Then we go back. You’ve got to clean the deer right away. Take out the organs. The sooner you do that the better the meat will taste.”
“Gross.”
“Well, it ain’t for sissies.”
They wait and wait and wait. They drink the water and eat the cookies.
“Let’s try another spot,” he says, finally.
She unwinds her tingling legs and goes first down the ladder and waits for Dennis at the bottom. Then as she follows him farther down the field she feels blood between her legs, warm and sudden. She keeps walking, squeezing her thighs together. This slows her down. Dennis glances back, frowning. “Everything okay?”
“Um, I kind of want to go back.”
“To the house?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
He points to a tree. She shuffles toward it and leans against the trunk, out of his sight. She undoes her jeans and investigates.
She hasn’t yet learned to keep track. And some months she doesn’t get it at all. Other months, only for a day or two and lightly. Now, though, the blood, or whatever it is, has soaked through her underpants to the denim and smeared her inner thighs.
She considers the fallen leaves an inch thick around her, the moss growing against the trunk. Then she considers poison ivy and bugs. She wedges her underpants into her crotch and ties her sweatshirt around her waist. She rubs her finger on the outside of her jeans. It comes back red and smelling of metal. She hobbles up the incline to her father.
“I want to go back to the house,” she tells him.
“What’s the matter? You sick?”
“No. I just …” Too late, she realizes she should have said yes.
“We’re just getting going here.”
“I think maybe I am sick, actually.”
“Now you’re sick? What’s going on?”
“I need something.”
“What, you need what?”
“I need to lie down.”
Mary is younger than her mother. She must still get it. If no, or if she’s gone out, there’s toilet paper, tissue paper, a washcloth. Enough to get her through the rest of the day if she remains sedentary.
She crosses her legs. “I don’t want to shoot Bambi after all.”
“Well, you don’t have to then. I will. You can keep me company.”
“I really need you to drive me back right now.” Her thighs are soaked. Blood creeps into the cleft of her behind. “Please!”
“You upset about missing the shot? Don’t feel bad. Takes a while. You’ll get the hang of it. But in the meantime, pull yourself together. Be a sport about it. Move on.”
“I have my period. I’m bleeding, I have to go, I need stuff.”
Oh, shame! But. Never before has she managed to startle him. The rifle jerks at his side. His face twitches.
“Oh.” He ducks his head in acknowledgment. “Of course.”
They return to the truncated Jeep. He steers past the stone wall to the house and brakes in front of the garage.
“I have to go to the store.”
“Think you could talk to Mary?”
Her original plan, but—
“She might already have what you need.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
She maneuvers out of her seat and swipes at the leather with her sweatshirt.
She finds Mary, who does in fact have what Kate needs. Dennis goes back out alone and bags a doe. They eat it that night, the four of them, with a side of mashed turnips. Kate and Dennis drive home in the morning with a cooler full of meat.
NOW HE SPENDS EVENINGS in his study instead of the living room. He asks Kate only occasionally about her day. He no longer insists on her beauty—it feels like he won’t look at her directly. Maybe she isn’t beautiful anymore; anyway, maybe she never was. She doesn’t know. But the fault, the source of their estrangement, is hers; the problem rises directly from her flighty, supplicating body. Her father grows more i
nterested in Miles, who, at age seven, comes up to Kate’s shoulder and outweighs her by twenty pounds. Kate’s family visits Galveston and the men and boys hunt and shoot at targets. Miles and Kate’s father and uncle and cousins hunker down by the lake, her father in the army pants, her brother’s plump backside squeezed into jeans and a KISS T-shirt. Kate lies on her side on the deck, doing homework. Over and over she answers the same question, losing her place every time a shot sounds, exploding down her ear canal like a handful of rocks.
6
ATE GOT A JOB in Yale’s development office and now Colin and she commuted in opposite directions: she north on the train, he south in the Jeep. They earned money and saved it and spent it. They rearranged their bedroom and living room. They built additional bookshelves. They went on vacation. They attended weddings, wedding after wedding until everyone but Darcy was married. They celebrated their fourth anniversary. Then, over the subsequent year, something shifted between them. Some mechanism essential to their rapport began to shut down like a defective valve. Maybe it had been shutting down right from the beginning—maybe it had never been viable at all. To Kate, this development felt impersonal, unfortunate but arbitrary—hopelessly so, like a fatal car accident or illness. Still, she racked her brain for what she’d done wrong. Without contemplation or discussion, they rigged alternative structures, emergency conduits, makeshift constructions in the form of tense conversations that collapsed regularly under the stubborn accumulated weight of confined feeling.
She became finicky about sex, wanting it only occasionally. Her body began to feel like a recently tidied room she didn’t want Colin to mess up. She flinched when he put his fingers in her vagina, then her hair. She found the tastes and the drips and the leaks newly objectionable and afterward she gargled twice or washed herself off.
Their sixth November as husband and wife, Kate’s father fell on the street. He hit his nose, which bled so lividly that he drove himself to the Yale–New Haven emergency room. The staff conducted certain tests and directed him to an oncologist, who detected a glioblastoma tumor in the right temporal lobe of his brain. Kate’s mother and father had split up when Kate was in college, after Dennis had carried on with one of his female graduate students. But even in divorce Edie remained his loyal concubine. Dennis informed her of his prognosis, and she notified Miles and Kate. Treatments were considered. But the cancer worsened immediately upon recognition, as if taking the diagnosis as a sort of prompt.
In December, Dennis Allison entered hospice. He called for his journals. Kate’s mother transported them from his rented apartment. Soon, in spite of the journals, he would die. But he lay stubbornly reading them anyway.
Kate stayed with her mother for two weeks. Colin drove back and forth, visiting. “I could stay here with you,” he said. “I could take time off.”
“Don’t do that. It’s … I’m fine. It doesn’t matter.”
The temperature dropped and the days passed. Kate spent them at the hospice center, driving her father’s car to and from Livingston Street. She sat in the visitor’s chair in the antiseptic room, looking through magazines. He fidgeted in the mechanical bed, paging through his journals. She ate sandwiches from the cafeteria. She bought a pack of cigarettes, though she hadn’t smoked since college, and stood outside the drab building on a drably developed street, smoking them. Miles came up from New York, where he now worked as a speechwriter for the mayor. He offered himself to their father upon his arrival, but Dennis pulled the covers over his head and grumbled, so Miles retreated to the waiting room, where he proceeded to sit for days, scanning the New York Times and talking on his cell phone. He’d dropped his baby fat after college finally, and now he appeared, if not ruggedly masculine, at least mature. Kate sat down next to him and offered him half a ham sandwich from the cafeteria. He took it and finished it in three bites. His glasses shone under the fluorescent lighting.
“I feel terrible that I’m not much help here,” he said. “That you’re dealing with everything.”
“Don’t worry. I can handle it.” She patted his shoulder.
“Is he behaving himself?” Miles removed his glasses and cleaned them on his flannel shirt.
“He loves you. He wants you here. He’s embarrassed for you to see him like this because you’re the boy.”
“You’re too easy on him. After all that insanity.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I probably needed the discipline.”
“You were just a kid.”
“Whatever.” Rolling the remains of her sandwich half into the paper bag, she wondered if Miles had a girlfriend, what music he listened to, if he still liked to brush his teeth in the shower.
That night Kate fell asleep in the visitor’s chair over the December issue of Martha Stewart Living. She woke at three to beeping from the monitoring device. Her father sat up, beating his hands on the sheet, underneath which he appeared to have an erection. The Valeries snickered. The girls from the D’Aulaires: The Valerie Valkyries. Still Kate’s attendant, incendiary spirits after all this time. Vanishing for years, emerging at critical junctures.
Dennis’s mouth hung open. His tongue flailed. Clenched sounds came from his throat. Kate ran into the hall. She grabbed a passing nurse’s arm and shook it inanely. The nurse hurried after her to the room but he’d checked out already, the sheet kicked off and the erection deflating.
The following morning Kate got a coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts and caught an early train home to Bridgeport. A storm had threatened for days and finally snow was falling. She took a seat near the window. The car filled as they stopped in Milford and Stratford. Commuters read the paper or worked on their laptops, many leaving their big puffy coats on, some removing them and throwing them up onto the luggage rack. A graduate student scribbled something in a scientific journal. Kate looked out the window. The snow rushed toward the grimy glass. Bare trees reached, various nondescript specimens. She should know what they were called but she didn’t. They spread their limbs longingly, bombarded by snow.
Her father would never see this—never see any of it again.
Factories and fences glided past—embankments, a car driving under a bridge, bulrushes, electrical wires and cables overreaching the tracks in complicated grids. Junkyards, machinery. Birches, pines, inlets. The smaller, less affluent houses clustered in the shadow of the train, colorful Christmas lights strung up around doors and porches. She held her coffee, light and sweet and very hot, in both hands and sipped at it. The highway erupted alongside the tracks at intervals. Nothing sounded in the car but the wheels, subdued, and coughs, and rustling coats. Heat came up from metal grids below the windows, against Kate’s left leg and arm. There went a stadium, mysterious industrial structures, billboards and wrecked cars, graffiti messages on a concrete wall, brick buildings with boarded-up windows, ads for health clubs and Broadway shows, motorboats docked for winter, a maintenance crew in orange jackets, a discount car wash, housing projects, the signs for ferry parking and P. J. Murphy Moving & Storage. Across from her, the graduate student spread his long legs and shifted in his seat. His hair, cropped short, set off a handsome face. Snow piled up all around the tracks and on the wires and cables.
The Valeries spread their legs too. They slouched in their seats and got comfortable. They bumped their knees against those of the graduate student. They made lewd remarks about the size of his hands. Kate leaned her head against the grimy glass and watched him frown over the book.
She loved men—resented and abhorred them but adored them!—their big shoes, their loaded pockets, their consumption of space, their confounding sense of entitlement.
She could have called Colin to pick her up in the Jeep, but she didn’t. She took a taxi from the train station to the apartment. Snow continued to fall and the taxi skidded on the road.
“On the left here,” she said. She took out her wallet.
“You need your walk shoveled?”
“My husband will do it.”
“You got
a husband?”
“Yep.”
“You don’t look more than eighteen or nineteen.”
The Valeries sneered. She tipped him an extra two bucks.
She stood in the entryway with her bag. The cold inside the apartment dug at her through her coat. Colin had prudently turned down the heat before work. It was she who left lights on, windows unlocked, cabinet doors open. She turned the thermostat up high, angered—but of course, he hadn’t known she was coming home; he hadn’t known to keep the apartment warm for her, didn’t know she was here, didn’t know anything.
Signs of his two weeks alone abounded. Cushions tossed off the couch. The television remote askew amid these cushions. The Xbox hooked up, wires sprawling. Her irrational irritation increased—playing his games when! But he didn’t know, she hadn’t told him, he would have stayed with her but she’d sent him away, why shouldn’t he divert himself with Xbox?
In the kitchen, a cereal bowl and coffee mug sat beside the sink. She went into the bedroom and lay down on the unmade bed. This was the warmest room in the apartment. Years ago a fire had destroyed the back half of the house, which had then been rebuilt and properly insulated.
She made herself more coffee, added cream and sugar. White take-out cartons filled the fridge. Outside, the snow came down and down. She turned on the radio. A storm was mentioned. Yes, it did seem to be a storm. She saw a note in Colin’s handwriting: Humidifier, salt. Weekend?
She stuck the note to the fridge with a magnet. What was she doing here? Who was he, this man she lived with, preoccupied with humidifiers?
She poured coffee into the sink and scrubbed out the pot with salt. She had no idea what to do with herself.
She kept the glass bowls and the barware and the wedding china in the latticework china closet, which occupied a corner of the dining room. She kept the beautiful but essentially useless bowls lined up in the back—things given by people who believed in her and Colin and their young marriage, were counting on them, had invested with these objects in their happy future. She reached into the back compartment and took out a Steuben bowl given to them by friends of Colin’s parents. It was small and thick and heavy. On the rare occasions they entertained Kate filled it with salted almonds, which Colin and she and their guests would snack on over drinks.
Games to Play After Dark Page 7
