by Ann Hood
Gary and Troy started laughing. They couldn’t stop. “She wants a hard one,” Gary said.
But Rena was shouting words. “Occupation. Veterinarian. Hypodermic.”
And Marie was spelling them.
All the way to the quarry. Once they were there, and Troy led her through the woods, she kept spelling everything they passed. “B-I-R-C-H,” she said. “M-O-O-N.” She didn’t stop even when he tore the zipper on her jeans pulling them down, even when he entered her and pushed hard into her. “S-K-Y, and, and, S-H-A-D-O-W-S.” He left her there, spelling, her jeans ripped, her shirt bunched up, and walked back through the trees, past the stolen car, down the dirt road, all the way home.
Sometimes in the morning Tom could pretend nothing had changed. Libby had always been a late sleeper, so even if she hadn’t locked herself in her room she wouldn’t be downstairs in the morning. Tom could drink his coffee and read his newspaper while Dana sulked around him, and Troy—if he appeared at all—held his head in his hands and gazed all bleary-eyed at the table. In the morning Tom could glance up and pretend that Libby was upstairs, dressed in one of her long white nightgowns, all lacy and ruffled, asleep.
When Troy stumbled to the table this morning, Tom could still smell old liquor coming from him. Old liquor and smoke. He had tried to talk to Libby about their son but she had only wrinkled her forehead and narrowed her eyes as if she was trying to remember who exactly Troy was. Remembering that, Tom wondered again how he could have missed so many signs. Of course she was getting ready to leave. Her eyes were already searching elsewhere. Of course.
Tom tried to concentrate on the newspaper. When he glanced up again, Troy was resting his head flat on the table.
“Hey,” Tom said. “Pick it up.”
Troy opened his eyes and looked up at his father.
“Hey,” Tom said again. “What are you doing? Huh? You’ve got to get ahold of yourself, Troy. Come on.”
He touched the boy’s head lightly but Troy just closed his eyes again.
Tom knew it wasn’t fair to compare your children to yourself. But sometimes, especially with Troy, he couldn’t help himself. When he was in school, he’d played sports. The feel of a bat in his hand, or the way a football fit into the crook of his arm, those things meant something. Sure he drank some, smoked a little pot, and there were some mornings after victory parties when he felt the way Troy did right now. But this was something different. Something much worse than just a hangover. The boy had nothing, except maybe that worn-out girl from the Dixie Cup plant.
He thought again of Libby. Young this time, and sitting beside him in his car on a summer night. With a mother like her, how could Troy even look at someone like Nadine?
“I heard,” Dana was saying, “that some girl had to get her stomach pumped from mixing pills with liquor and they think she even stole some senator’s kid’s car up at Williams.”
Suddenly Troy sat up. “She didn’t die or anything,” he said. “Did she?”
“Do you know what they do when they pump your stomach?” Dana said. “They stick like a vacuum cleaner hose down your throat and suck everything out.”
“I don’t think so,” Tom told her. He had just been reading about that stolen car, a new BMW 320i convertible. He looked back at the paper and found the article.
“But the girl’s all right?” Troy was asking.
“I heard her hands were all cut up and somebody found her wandering down Route 23 bleeding all over the place and acting weird,” Dana said. “Of course, this is according to Mike so take it for what it’s worth.”
“What’s wrong with Mike?” Tom said. He liked that kid, even if he was a Yankees fan. At least Mike could talk baseball.
“Oh, please,” Dana said, groaning. “He’s a philistine.”
“Some kids just took that car for a joyride,” Tom said. He sighed. A philistine. Where did she come up with this stuff?
“I’m sure that girl is fine,” Troy said.
Tom looked at him sharply. Pills and liquor and stolen cars, he thought. Troy was gnawing at a callus on his thumb. Tom took a breath. Even if Libby really were upstairs, she would just sigh and wrinkle her forehead. She would shrug and sigh some more. She would not look at him. “I don’t know,” she’d say. “I really don’t know.”
Tom stood and tugged on Troy’s arm. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going for a ride.”
“No, thanks.”
“This isn’t optional,” Tom said.
Troy stumbled to his feet, and for an instant Tom saw his son as he used to be when he was a toddler, all thick legs and arms with a shock of black hair that stood straight up like a Halloween cat’s. This kid’s going to be a linebacker, Tom used to say. He’ll be the one to save the Patriots at last.
“Come on,” Tom said again, gentler this time.
Troy hated his father’s obsession with sports. It was plain dumb. All of it—trying to toss a ball through a hoop and trying to hit one over a fence or kick a ball over a post. Dumb. But that’s what he rattled on and on about that morning. The Red Sox. RBIs and ERAs and the stamina of Dwight Evans. While Troy tried to not get carsick. Pick a focal point and don’t shift your gaze from it at all. That’s what his mother had taught him when he was a kid and he used to get carsick. He used to pick a spot on the back of her head as his focal point.
But this morning he stared at the center of the visor he’d put down to block some of the bright summer sun. He wished his father would shut up. He wished the car would stop. He wished that crazy girl Marie was all right. Not dead or in a coma or something. What if, he thought, he turned on the news some night and there were her parents all old and sad, trying to get permission to pull the plug on her? His eyes shifted from his focal point and his stomach lurched.
“Are we almost there?” he said.
His father nodded. “It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “That’s what it is. I should have been a Yankees fan, right?”
“Yeah,” Troy said. “I guess so.”
The car stopped then, in the middle of nowhere.
Troy followed his father out.
“Boy,” Tom said, shaking his head. “I had such big plans.”
The fresh air felt good and Troy gulped it down. Here in the quiet, in the shade, his stomach settled and his head started to slowly clear.
“What plans?” he asked finally.
His father seemed almost embarrassed. “I thought we’d have a bunch of kids. A big house.” He laughed at himself. “There used to be this TV show called Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and that was the kind of family I imagined Libby and I would have. Kids and a big old sheepdog and a house and lots of laughter.”
Tom looked bewildered as he talked, as if the realization that he didn’t get what he’d hoped for surprised him somehow. Until Libby left him, he’d felt he had everything he wanted. He had not even known until this very minute how much his happiness, his sense of who he was, had been tied up with his love for Libby.
“You know,” Tom said, his voice full of surprise, “I never did get that, did I? Not the sheepdog. Not the laughter.”
Troy could remember lots of laughter. But it was always between him and his mom. They used to be able to make each other laugh. He had a way of turning his eyelids practically inside out so he looked like a monster. That used to make her scream and run away from him and when he chased her she would start to laugh. He used to stretch his arms out straight in front of him and act like a zombie. Oh, no, she’d say, it’s the creature from the Black Lagoon. And she’d run and giggle. She could wiggle her ears. It’s not a talent, she’d explained to him. It’s just a muscle that’s going extinct and in another generation no one will have it. I’m a dying breed, she used to say. Then she’d wiggle them like crazy and he would laugh until it hurt.
There were other times when just looking at each other could send them both into hysterical laughter. Not lately. But before she got so sad. Before she’d sit in her room day after day and n
ot talk. Not even to him. Sometime last fall he’d even stood in the doorway and made his zombie eyes at her. But she’d hardly smiled. You nut, she’d said. But she said it like it was the saddest thing in the world.
Now his father was saying how he’d always imagined he’d build that big Please Don’t Eat the Daisies house up here someday.
“But that’s never going to happen,” Tom said. “Not for me at least.”
“Who owns this land?”
“I do. Libby’s parents used to. They thought they’d build up here but they never did. They wanted to be in the thick of things. So they gave it to us when Dana was born.” Tom took a deep breath. “Now I want you to have it.”
Troy laughed. “Me?”
“Sure. What am I going to do with it?”
“What am I going to do with it?” Troy said. He stared out at the foothills of the Berkshires. In the fall, he thought, when the leaves changed, they would look like a crazy quilt.
“I don’t know,” his father said. “Do whatever you want.”
His father walked back to the car, but Troy stayed a few minutes more, breathing the clean pine smell, staring out at a distant point, clearing his head.
Some nights, when Nadine was at work, Troy went out to the land alone. He stretched out smack in the center and imagined he was in a house that he’d built, in a bed with crisp sheets and colorful quilts and lots of soft pillows. Or he imagined he was in front of a big fireplace and that it was winter and the hills were covered with snow, like birthday cake frosting. Or he would just lie on his back and stare up at the stars. There seemed to be more up here somehow. He wouldn’t want to lose those stars, so he’d imagine that the house had skylights.
The only thing he couldn’t imagine there was Nadine. Whenever he tried to, his mind grew completely blank. She somehow had the ability to erase everything—his image of the distant hills covered in colored leaves, his fantasy of being in bed looking up at the sky, she could even erase the stars. So he stopped trying to bring Nadine into his fantasies at all.
Instead, when she left him at night in her cramped sour-smelling bed and went off to stuff Dixie Cups into their dispensers, Troy dressed and drove through the black woods to this spot. Once there, he felt suddenly freer. Sometimes he slept the whole night there, waking with the sun coming up in his eyes. The sun had a way of making the hills seem like they were on fire.
Until his father gave him this land, Troy had no real focus. If someone asked him, he supposed he would say that he would work for his father at the garage when—if—he finished school. He felt that his future was more immediate. It was that very moment with Nadine, or planning how to get high that night. But when his mother left and his father gave him the land, Troy started to feel as if he could make things happen. He read woodworking magazines. He had always liked shop in school. He used to make things for Libby, bookends and once a small wooden jewelry box. Now he went into the basement at home and practiced using the tools again. He was sure that on this very spot he could build something real, something long-lasting.
Sometimes he drew plans for a big house as he sat up there in the early morning light. Then he would stretch out his arms and flip his eyelids and walk zombielike through his imaginary rooms. He pretended he could walk through walls and windows. He moaned and made zombie noises and sent them echoing across the hills. And then he would catch himself, a seventeen-year-old guy pretending he was a zombie, and he would start to laugh.
The last day of school, June twenty-fourth, was a half day, as always. Dana and Mike and Caitlin and Kevin all drove to the stone quarry when school was over. The girls had packed a lunch. The guys had brought beer. When they got there, they changed into their bathing suits and stretched out on some rocks. Now Kevin and Mike were diving, showing off.
“They think they’re Tarzan,” Caitlin said.
“They are so boring,” Dana said. She propped herself up on her elbows and watched. The best thing about Mike was his body. He wasn’t very tall but he had a great build. “He spends all his free time working out,” she told Caitlin. “That is the extent of his life.”
“Kevin doesn’t even do that,” Caitlin said.
Dana looked over at her. She counted Caitlin’s ribs, easy as can be.
Caitlin’s eyes were hidden behind bright blue sunglasses. “We should make a plan,” Caitlin said.
“What kind of plan?”
Caitlin raised her sunglasses above her eyes. In the sunlight, Dana could see her freckles more clearly.
“An escape plan,” Caitlin said. “An escape from Holly.” She pointed with her chin toward Mike and Kevin. “From boys like them.”
Dana nodded. “We could take the SATs,” she said. “Go to college.” She thought of her promise to God the day her mother left. Maybe if she kept her part of it, Libby would come back.
Caitlin dropped her sunglasses back over her eyes. “College,” she laughed. “No way.”
“What then?”
“New York,” she said.
And by the way she said it, Dana could tell this wasn’t a new plan.
They had schemed to do a lot of things together. When they were little, they wanted to be professional roller skaters. They would go to the rink in Lee every Saturday and practice. Caitlin even won some state competitions. For a while, they thought they should become airline stewardesses. Caitlin heard about a school in Florida that trained people for jobs in the travel industry. But then she flew to Atlantic City with her mother and was airsick the whole time.
“New York,” Dana said.
“I’ve been thinking, I could become a model. I’m tall enough,” Caitlin said.
Dana stretched out again flat on the rock and closed her eyes. She imagined what it was like in New York. She’d have to go to the library and read up on it. Rent Woody Allen movies. She smiled at the idea of being somewhere so far from Holly.
“You know that play Cats?” Caitlin said. She was almost whispering. “I’d like to see that.”
Dana nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”
Dana did not really have her own idea about what she wanted to do, or where she wanted to go. She worked more from a negative point of view. She had a long list of what she didn’t want: to marry Mike, to marry anybody, to work at the Dixie Cup factory, to act like her mother. She supposed she’d have to leave Holly in order to avoid all of these things. If it took roller-skating or serving cocktails in the sky, she’d do it. She could hear Mike and Kevin climbing the rocks toward them.
From above her, Mike shook his curly hair, splashing cold water all over her. She knew she was supposed to jump up, squealing and giggling. She was supposed to yell, “Stop it!”
Instead she opened her eyes and said, “Grow up.”
Suddenly, Holly seemed to sprout dozens of available women. Everywhere Tom turned there was someone else smiling at him, wiggling past him, flicking their hair or batting their eyes. He felt like an animal, emitting some kind of primal odor. A signal that said Needs a mate.
At first, it was easy to ignore them. All he had to do was think of Libby, of their last time together. He was embarrassed at how little sex he needed, at how a memory could keep him going for a long time. But he was sure that was because of love. When you love someone, that was the feeling that supersedes everything else.
On the night he came home and found Dee-Dee Winthrop sitting on the front steps, he didn’t suspect a thing. He chalked it up to one more case of this sudden overflow of women. It was so hot that night, he had taken off his shirt in the car, and so he stood bare-chested in front of Dee-Dee, his T-shirt rolled into a damp ball in his hands.
“I brought you some sloppy joe filling,” Dee-Dee said. She pointed to a red pot.
“Thanks,” he said.
It was so still that he could hear her breathing, hear her body shift.
“People forget after a while,” she said. “Don’t they?”
He didn’t want to ask her in. He wanted to go up to
bed, keep the lights out, and remember Libby.
“I didn’t forget,” Dee-Dee was saying. “How could she do this to you?”
“You know,” Tom said, “I’m not quite myself yet.”
Dee-Dee was nodding away.
“I really appreciate the chili—”
Still nodding she said, “Sloppy joes. That’s okay.”
“—but I need this time to myself. To my own thoughts.” It sounded so stupid when he said it out loud. He felt like he was making love to a ghost every night, alone in the dark with just memories.
Dee-Dee stood. “You don’t have to explain to me. When you’re ready, I’ll be here. Meanwhile, have a sandwich. Get yourself together.”
“Thanks,” he said.
But he was thinking, Ready? Ready for what?
Dee-Dee was right. After a few weeks, the people stopped coming. They stopped bringing casseroles and calling up to ask if he needed anything. Tom kind of missed all the company. Now, if he stayed home, he was completely alone. And all he did was think about Libby. He kept expecting her to call. Or to just show up back home. But as each day passed, he realized how unlikely either of those things was.
Whenever things got slow at the garage, he found himself going over the last few months in his mind, like a constant replay of the same game, again and again. For about a year now, Libby had been staying in her room by herself for long stretches of time. Sue brought her magazines and face cream, and stayed up there talking with her. He brought her food up on a fancy white tray he’d bought special. He always put a bud vase on the tray, and one flower in the vase.
Then, after weeks like that, she’d suddenly appear back with the family, all dressed up and smelling good. Her hair done, her makeup on. She’d set the table with the good china, the one with the pattern of raised daisies around the border. She’d buy a bottle of wine, and make a special dinner. She always had a theme when she cooked. Once, autumn was one of her themes. She’d sprinkled fall leaves across the table, all red and gold and orange, and made soup that she served in pumpkin shells.
The last time she’d done this was back around March sometime. She hadn’t been doing much since. Sue’s big New Year’s party. Then one rainy day he’d come home from work and found her polishing the furniture with lemon Pledge. She had on a tight gold dress he’d never seen before, and her highest high heels. Her hair was in an upsweep, her earrings long and dangling.
