After a pause, she said, “Sheri’s talking about getting a divorce.”
He nodded, and drank, and said nothing.
The singers went on, working two separate parts of the same song. Lily drank the beer, and wondered how she had landed in this place. Tyler was watching the singers, tapping his fingers on the table.
Finally he turned to her. “I don’t know a thing about my own mother. But I think she’s got something to do with how I feel about the world.”
“How do you feel about it?”
He smiled. “I wish I knew. From one minute to the next. I have to say there’s a lot of anger sometimes. The kind you can’t do anything with. And then there’s fear, too. That bedrock kind that clutches at you inside, and makes it hard to imagine there won’t be some terrible catastrophe on the other side of the next minute.”
“Believe it or not,” Lily said, “I know exactly what you’re talking about.”
The singing was loud again, a single note with all its attendant related notes on the harmonic scale.
“She left my father,” he said. “But she left me, too, and I don’t know how many levels of my personality that sank into. I think I was like the consolation prize for the old man.” He sighed, and seemed to ponder this, slightly shaking his head. “Anyway, I don’t have any reason to stay in this part of the country—”
Lily had the thought that she would be a reason to stay, and suddenly she felt lost. “I try never to think about my parents these days,” she said, trying to find anything else to talk about. “I’m not going home, I know that.”
“Where are you going?”
She didn’t look at him, aware that he had leaned toward her. “I don’t know.” This struck through her as miserable truth. Her heart raced. Taking a long drink of the beer, she fought to get it to stay down, coughing. The voices rose around her, a lambent, oversweet harmony, and Tyler had come around the table and put his hand on her shoulder.
“Hey,” he said.
She leaned into him, and he held her, and the singing went on. She had been unable to cry for so long, and now, abruptly, she could. It seemed so simple. A part of her attended in wonder. He had put one hand along the side of her face, and he ran it over her hair, rocking her gently. She kept crying. The singing had stopped. The men were standing, talking; one or two of them had looked over at her and then looked away. She took paper napkins from the table and blew her nose and tried to speak.
Tyler said, “Let’s go down there together, Lily.”
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” she told him, sniffling. The words felt obligatory, merely what she should say out of politeness.
He kissed her. She had half-expected it, hoped for it. She relaxed in his arms and let it happen, experiencing an exquisite sense of letting go, an internal avalanche. The men were moving past, several of them humming something again. There was an element of unreality in the moment.
Then they had gone, and Tyler was holding her by her arms. “Let’s get married, Lily. I’ve wanted you since that first minute at the party after the football game.”
“You—but you—” she began.
“I know about all that—but Sheri got in the way and I was seeing someone else. And—and I’ve got a lot of—I’ve got a lot of psychological baggage, you know. But that’s all beside the point. The point is, I love you. Couldn’t you tell how I felt?”
“How was I supposed to know?” she said. “We seemed so perfect, and then I didn’t see you and I didn’t see you.”
He let go of her, and folded his hands on the table. Thornton had brought the food. She picked up her sandwich and bit into it, and all the glands around her jaw seemed to protest. Yet it was luscious, the flavors of grilled chicken and fresh lettuce and tomato reaching up into all her nasal passages. She thought she had never tasted anything quite so delectable.
“You—you feel something for me, don’t you?” Tyler said. “I mean—how do you feel? I know you feel the same.”
She had to wait until she could swallow. “Yes. Yes. But let’s not talk about it here.” She took another bite of the sandwich.
“I’m in love with you,” he told her. “Stop eating for a minute.”
“You don’t understand.” She took still another bite. Her stomach hurt. She could feel every bite entering it, and she washed it down with more of the beer. He kept staring. “I haven’t really eaten anything for days.”
“Days.”
He watched her. Presently, he said, “I’ve been thinking of nothing else but you since I first laid eyes on you, Lily. I—I didn’t come after you because you seemed—because—well, because I was so nervous around you. You were so self-possessed.”
“Me?” she said through the food in her mouth.
“Do you feel the same way about me?” he demanded. “Can’t you stop eating just for this? Jesus, Lily, I’m proposing to you and you’re sitting there stuffing your face.”
Suddenly, in exactly the same instant, they broke out laughing. The sound came from Tyler like a shout, and others in the restaurant looked their way. The laughing went on, and Lily was holding her hands over her mouth, trying to keep what she had bitten off of the sandwich from spraying across the table. At last, when they subsided, she tried to swallow, and then it started again. She grabbed a napkin and put it to her mouth, and held it there, and they went on. It had its own momentum now, and was feeding on itself. Lily thought she might lose consciousness at one point. Finally, they gained control of themselves, and she took a long drink of the beer.
“Let’s get married, then, can we? I’m sorry, I know that sounds like I just asked you if you wanted to go out or something. I mean the whole thing. Will you marry me, Lily.” He spoke this last as if it were a statement.
She laughed again. They were both laughing, looking at each other. She couldn’t make words come, and the waves of it washed over them both. At last, by stages, they grew quiet, and looked around the room where they were sitting. Other people had come in—a man and wife, and three small children. One of the children was a baby, in a stroller.
Lily said, “You don’t really know me, Tyler. We don’t know each other, really. We haven’t spent any time together. I don’t even know what I want out of life. I don’t know if I want to have any children.” She felt herself blurting all this out as if it were something she had been waiting to say, something bottled up inside her that had been seeking release.
“I don’t care about that,” he said. “That’s fine with me.”
“But you can’t know how you’ll feel down the line.”
“I know I love you. That’s all I need to know.”
“You don’t know me, Tyler. Not really.”
“I know how I feel. And I know you feel it, too. Lily, it’s there.”
She wiped her eyes with the paper napkin. The tears felt wonderful, first from crying and then from the laughter. It was like magic. So recently she had told herself she no longer believed in romance, would never allow herself to be fooled by her own adolescent yearnings—the trappings of courtship, falling in love, the swoon of the heroines in the novels, the passions of pursuit and capture, ecstasy and surrender, the glib emotional laxity of all the songs and stories, so many of the plays, growing up, she had watched her father in. And here she was—and here she had been over the past weeks, unhappier than she’d ever imagined she might be. It was all gone.
“Well?” he said. “Do you?”
And they laughed again. “Yes,” she said to him, through the laughter. “Yes, whatever you’re asking me, the answer is yes.”
5
Dear Doris,
I’m not coming home right away, and I have news that may shock you and Daddy. I’ll just come right out and say it: I’m getting married. His name is Tyler Harrison, and we’re wildly in love, and we decided not to have a big ceremony. We’ll be married by a justice of the peace, and Dominic will be the witness for us. We’re not completely sure of our plans—I still w
ant to finish school somewhere—but we’ll live in Mississippi for a while, where Tyler has the offer of some work for his stepfather. There isn’t time to come North now and visit, and I hope you’ll forgive that. I do want you to meet Tyler, and I’ll write and call of course, when things are a little more settled, and I’ve got my feet on the ground. I know I wasn’t very kind over the telephone, and I know I ought to call you with this news, but I just can’t now. I think that the divorce did things to me that I wasn’t aware of and didn’t know how to deal with; it’s not any-one’s fault. I know this letter will seem inconsiderate if not unfeeling and I wish
Dear Doris,
I’m getting married. I wish there was time to bring him north to meet you and Daddy but we’re heading for Mississippi and there just isn’t time
Dear Doris,
I love you, and I hope you’ll understand what I’m doing
Dear Daddy,
I don’t know how to tell you this
She swept everything from the table where she sat—the lamp, the books and papers, the glass of water she had been drinking. It all went flying. Then she overturned the table itself, and stood there alone, with a cut on her little finger. She stared at it, a bead of blood. The glass hadn’t broken. She couldn’t decide how it had happened that she had cut herself. She went out and down the hall to the bathroom, and washed it. Then she regarded herself in the mirror. Her own face looked rather deranged in the light. Back in the room, she worked to clean up the mess, throwing the pages away, wiping up the water. The bulb in the lamp had come loose, and the lamp wouldn’t work now, so she wrapped the cord around it tight, and put it in the closet. She spent most of the night packing books, records, and tapes. Several times, she stopped to dial her mother’s number, but hung up before Doris answered. She did not call her father.
Sheri called, and was cheering in her enthusiasm. Tyler had called down there to say that he and Lily were coming. Her voice squeaked over long distance, sounding as though she were speaking from the other end of a long tunnel. “Just think, we’re gonna be sisters-in-law.”
Later, Tyler brought roses and perfume, and he picked her up in his arms and carried her to the bed, where she had a dark little fright of remembering what had happened with Dominic. Tyler kissed her, and lay close, but went no further. “We’ll do this right,” he said. “We’ll wait.”
She didn’t want to wait. She wished to start, desired to get on with everything, feeling the old sense of flying in the face of what she was afraid of. She kissed him, long and slow, and put her hand on him.
“Honey, please,” he said. “I really want it to be right.”
“It is right,” she murmured, kissing him. “I want to.”
In a little while they were undressed. He rolled onto her, pushed in—it thrilled her, so easy, so right—but then he stopped. He was supporting himself on his hands, looking down at her. “God,” he said. “You’re so beautiful.” He was holding still.
“Come on,” she said, and moved her hips.
“Do you—” he began. “Wait.”
She lay still. His presence inside her was a warm, solid feeling: completeness. She said, “What?”
“Aren’t you even a little worried about what might happen?” There was something guilty in his voice, almost apologetic.
“I don’t care about anything,” she heard herself say. And abruptly it was true. She could forget everything, the whole long, troubled, complicated past, and concentrate on this, just this, because it was natural and right and not a lie.
“Maybe.” His voice shook. Neither of them had moved.
“I’m very regular,” she told him. “So I know when I’m ovulating. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Do you want a baby, eventually?” he said. “Is it important?”
“Tyler, this is nothing to worry about now. I don’t want to think about it now. I told you how I felt.”
“You said you don’t know if you want children.”
“What a time to bring that up. Let’s talk about prenuptial agreements.”
And they were both laughing again. It was such a strange, wonderful sensation, laughing with him inside her.
He let his weight down, and spoke in her ear. “Tell me. Please.”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“No.” He moved. It was a glorious feeling.
“Do that again.”
“It doesn’t matter to you?”
“Tyler. We’re making love. Or we were.”
“But—you aren’t worried about getting pregnant?”
She lowered her hips, and raised them, and he sighed, softly, supporting himself on his hands again. She ran her own hands up the tight muscles of his arms. “Come on. I’ve planned everything I ever did. I don’t want to plan anymore.”
“Yes,” he said, and began to move with a quickness that surprised her. It was almost rough, but it felt good. She raised her hips each time to meet him, and went soft inside, silk on all the inner surfaces. Rightness. “Oh,” he said, and came in a burst of liquid heat that she felt as a deep melting.
Afterward, they lay there, and the light failed at the window. There was still so much to do.
“I think we ought to go north and meet your parents tomorrow,” he said.
He was far from understanding her. “I don’t want to see them. Not my father, anyway. And if we go see my mother, we’ll have to see my father.”
“I think we ought to.” He got up and put his pants on, and went out to the bathroom across the hall.
When he came back, he said, “You’re tremendously mad at your father.”
“Dr. Freud.” She rose from the bed, with the cover sheet around her, and went out to the bathroom. As she crossed the open hallway, a part of her wanted the other girls on that hall to be home, and to see her.
“Now you’re mad at me,” he called.
“I can’t hear you,” she yelled, though she had heard him. When she came out, he had dressed. It made her feel exposed. She closed the door to the room and sat on the bed, still wrapped in the sheet.
“Let’s drive up there tomorrow,” he said. “It’s only an hour and a half.”
6
WHEN HE HAD GONE, she picked up the phone to dial her mother. There wasn’t any answer, but her mother had recently bought an answering machine. A bodiless electronic voice, a machine voice so devoid of any human feeling that it frightened her, spoke: “Hel-lo,” it said. “Please…leave…a…mes-sage af-ter…the…beep.” The beep came, longer than she expected, so that she began to speak before it quit, then had to stop and wait, then start again in the silence that followed.
She said, “Doris, I’m coming into town tomorrow morning. Driving up to see you with—with a friend. I don’t know when we’ll get in. Probably mid-morning. It’s so strange talking to these things. Do I say sincerely now? ’Bye.”
She hung up. She had, she supposed, sounded all right.
Outside, the sun was shining. There were people enjoying the shade, lying or sitting in the grass. She didn’t see anyone she knew. She had decided that she would go to a shop and use some of her father’s most recent check to buy a new dress. She would wear it to the wedding. The wedding. She walked along the sidewalk, edging past small groups of others, thinking of this thing she was about to do. Get married. It seemed to her now that this was probably how it happened for almost everyone, stumbling into the years, the future. She saw herself being pulled on into time, looking back and pining for her girlhood—that time before the world, and then her family, came apart. But the world was what it was. She wanted to stop brooding, and get on with life. She desired Tyler, of that she was as certain as anyone could be; it was tangible and as aching in her body as hunger.
At the corner of Rugby Avenue and University Drive, she waited for the light, staring at the little window opposite with the words DON’T WALK in it. Another young woman stood at her shoulder and coughed. Lily glanced at her, saw the dark features of the face and
the look of preoccupation. She almost spoke: I’m getting married this week. The light changed, and the other woman stepped off the curb. Lily followed. There was an entire world of associations for this stranger who walked along next to her. Lily received the impression of how odd it was to imagine the other’s personal life. She felt sorry for whatever this stranger’s sorrows might be. Across the street was a dress shop, and leaning against the lamppost opposite the entrance, she saw Dominic. He had his arms folded. When she reached the curb, he straightened and held out his arms, and she walked into them. All the weight seemed to go out of her legs.
“Kid,” he said.
“Where have you been?” She was close to crying. She had so much to tell him.
“I’ve been around.” He stepped back, still holding her hands, appraising her with an expression that was almost proprietary. “You look a little wired.”
“Where did you go, Dominic?” Now she was crying. She wiped the tears away with the back of her hands, and the mascara stung her eyes.
They worked together to get the mascara off her cheeks, standing very close in the sunlight on the sidewalk. Their reflection showed brokenly in the angle of glass from the window of the dress shop. She saw the sun in their hair in the reflection. He thought she was crying from her old despair.
“I go away for a few days, and look what happens—somebody steals my girlfriend away from me.” He dropped her hands, and when she started walking, stepped to her side and kept pace. “My dear Miss Scarlett—this is so sudden.”
“Dominic, I didn’t see you—”
“Are you gonna say you’re sorry you didn’t ask my permission?”
She stopped. They had come to an antique shop. There were dolls and dollhouses in the window. “How did you find out?”
“I know Tyler, a little. He’s very excited. A little too serious for me sometimes, old Tyler. But that’s just when he’s preoccupied with the categorical imperative. I like him. Have you done much talking to him?”
“I’m in love, Dom. Completely totally madly utterly out of my mind in love.”
“You look bright as a new dime, except for the mascara.” He reached to take a little smudge from her cheek. “I’ve been making a few discoveries myself, love, and I feel tremendously relieved and happy, and I’m happy for you, too.”
Hello to the Cannibals Page 12
