Refund

by Karen E. Bender

  “And what’s your name?”

  “Diane,” said the boy.

  “Man,” the girl said, looking up at Woody Wilson.

  It was late afternoon. The house smelled like a rotten melon. The afternoon was weighted toward night. The golden light already held an undertone of darkness. Diane had read what he stood for, and she hated all of it. It would be so simple, so luxurious, to slam the door on him! But she did not. His eyes were clear and blue as a baby’s.

  “Diane, can I have just a moment of your time?” he asked. He kept smiling, but his face was red from the heat. “I can see that you’re a family person.” He stepped back and began to arrange the plastic vehicles scattered across her front porch. He put Big Wheels behind sedans. “I have a family, too. How old are your kids? I have two, eight years old and five.” He laughed, brokenly; it almost sounded like weeping. “I’ve come to ask for your vote, Diane,” he said. “And—” he lifted a manila envelope marked CONTRIBUTIONS— “perhaps a donation to my cause. I am for family. We are what make America great.” He swept his arm toward her in a grand, appropriating gesture; she stepped back from him. “What does your family need? If you want more money in your wallet, I have the answers. If you want better schools, I can answer that, too.”

  She tightened her arm around Liza’s waist. She knew that her political beliefs were opposite to his. “And how are you going to make the schools better?” she asked.

  He heard the blade in her voice; his smile brightened. The pale, clapboard houses behind him seemed to be melting in the heat. “Good question, Diane,” he said, speaking quickly. “We want to bring faith back to our schools. Every child should be allowed to pray. No cost to the taxpayer.” His words sounded a little breathless.

  “Pray to what?” she asked.

  He blinked. “I’d say Jesus,” he said. She was silent. “But it’s a free country,” he said. He sounded hesitant on that one, she thought. He tapped a rolled-up leaflet against his hand.

  “I believe in the separation of church and state,” she said, crisply.

  He nodded vigorously, as though by making this movement they would be in agreement. The optimism in the gesture was ridiculous, almost moving. But then he handed her a leaflet. “Some folks may say it’s hard to know whether to choose me or my opponent, Judy Hollis. So I wanted you to know this.”

  Did you know that JUDY HOLLIS is a lesbian?

  That she is bringing her gay agenda to Raleigh?

  Vote for WOODY. FAMILY VALUES.

  Diane set Liza down on the floor and slowly stood to face him.

  “Diane, our campaign is getting the word out,” he said. “Judy is bad news for our state.”

  “Because she’s gay?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “We don’t want them coming here. I stand for values, Diane, family values. You know what I mean—”

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to hear this bullshit. Stop.”

  Woody blinked but did not move. The boy glared at Woody Wilson as though he were an animal the boy wanted to eat. He regarded most men who were tall with brown hair this way—it was the simplest way they could describe their father. The boy lay on the floor and rolled from side to side. Why did they work, the ways he tried to comfort himself? He rolled and screeched and turned; they were strategies that adults found amusing at two but now made them look away. The girl gazed at him. The girl’s love for the boy poured out of her; she could not help herself. She stretched herself on top of him. She screeched and tried to lick his lips. “Stop!” the boy roared, trying to push her off. She clutched his foot as he tried to crawl away from her. Diane plucked the girl off the boy and set her on the couch, where the girl began to scream.

  “Please,” Woody Wilson said. “Let me say—” His face went white. Then he toppled forward onto her living room floor.

  THE GIRL LET OUT A PIERCING SHRIEK OF DELIGHT, AS THOUGH THE man was entertaining them. The boy jumped back, his hands pressing his ears. “Stop!” he bellowed. He rolled into a ball on the floor.

  Woody was lying facedown across Diane’s hardwood floor. His envelope marked CONTRIBUTIONS fell open, and a couple dollars emptied out. He seemed as incongruous as a whale washed up on a beach; she looked down at him, afraid. Diane lightly tapped his shoulder, and then rolled him over. His shoulder was soft as an avocado. He had recently eaten a mint, and his breath was medicinal; she was embarrassed to know this about him.

  “What’d he do?” yelled the boy.

  She jumped up and grabbed the phone off a side table. Woody’s eyes opened, and he was staring at them.

  “I’m calling a doctor,” she said.

  “Don’t call anyone. I don’t want them to know.” His presence on billboards made the mundane facts of humanity strange and troubling. His forehead was pink, with creases in it like clay. There was golden hair on the backs of his hands. He touched his eyebrow; a dark bruise was forming. She was afraid of him, which translated into a great and useless pity. She rarely pitied anyone but herself now, so that superiority was somewhat enjoyable.

  She left the front door open. Moths flew in. Woody Wilson put a hand on his forehead. “Ow,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Exhaustion. That’s what the doctor said. Nothing wrong at all. He said if it happens, sit down for a few minutes, take some breaths, and keep going. I have to keep going.”

  “Okay,” she said, reluctantly. She felt afraid of being blamed.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “But when I feel strongly about something, sometimes I see black. I feel my heart churning. Perhaps the Lord is telling me something. Ow,” he said, softly.

  What did he mean, the Lord told him things? She sat in her cubicle every day, convincing her students: Evidence. A clear and organized argument. Sometimes, she heard herself ranting about evidence, concrete examples, and she felt herself sweating, pathetically, with her own zealotry. He rubbed the bruise on his forehead. She went to the kitchen and brought him an ice pack. He sat up and pressed it to his face.

  “Why are you running for office?” she asked.

  “He told me to do this. It is the grace of God. Woody Wilson. I will stand for values. Speak out. The town needs to know your name.”

  Through the open front door the clouds were knitting together in a searing, bright sky. She could see the houses on their lawns, each life parceled out into its plot of land, the determined, clipped order of flowers and shrubbery. There were two registered Democrats on her street that she knew of and five Republicans. They went in and out of their houses, shaving their lawns, picking up their newspapers, remarking on the weather. They would all walk into their voting booths, educated and uneducated, intelligent and dumb, and their votes would be worth the same. They sat, diligently filling in bubbles on paper, and, she thought, because of the voters’ impulsive, careless yearnings, wars started, debts soared, the land grew barren, and their great-grandchildren would starve.

  The bump on Woody’s head was growing larger and larger. The phone began to ring. Her husband was most lonely around dinner-time. He did not love them but did not know who else to call.

  “I’m sorry,” said Woody Wilson. His right foot tapped on the floor like a rabbit’s. “A minute, and I’ll be on my way.” He paused. “Does it look very bad?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you should keep the ice on it.”

  The phone rang ten times and then stopped.

  “Thank you very much, Diane,” he said. He carefully scooped the dollars on the floor back into his envelope and closed it.

  They sat in silence for a moment. He smiled, so his injuries seemed slight.

  “Okay,” she said. “While you’re here, I have a question.” She folded her arms, then unfolded them, then folded them again. “Why do you hate so many people? I just want to know—”

  “I do not hate them,” he said. “Listen. I am trying to help them from leading lives of so much pain—”

  “Why do you assume t
hat people who are not like you are in pain?” she asked.

  “I know a lot about pain,” he said. “My mama died when I was eight. My father had to work three jobs. He was always tired. He was so tired we had to forage for dinner ourselves. I got a job working a paper route when I was six. I worked hard. I was angry, I did not know what to do with it, but I said, God, take this anger, and He did. I worked my way up, the good days and the bad. Hard work and faith, that’s what got me to college, law school, to where I am today.”

  He recited his litany of pain solemnly, like a prayer. Everyone was competitive in terms of their pain. Did it matter more that Woody’s mother had died when he was young or that Diane’s husband had left the family? Was a troubled, problematic child worse than infertility? What about the fact that Diane’s hours working as a remedial composition instructor had been cut in half, the sudden eczema that spread across her skin, how did that weigh compared to diagnosis with cancer, losing your family in a war, fearing that you might not make love to another person again?

  “You were lucky that you succeeded,” she said. “Some people don’t.”

  “It was not luck,” he said, sternly. “It was faith. Let me tell you something. A few months ago, before I decided to run for office, I was waking up one morning, and I swore I saw a pit bull rush toward the bed. It wanted to eat me. It had a huge, pink mouth. It had been waiting for me for years. It was probably a dream, but it looked real. I said, ‘Jesus,’ and it disappeared.”

  The boy noticed Woody’s bag of buttons and stickers. He began, methodically, to take them out and count them. The phone rang again.

  “Don’t you need to answer that?” Woody asked.

  HOW DID ANYONE KNOW THE RIGHT WAY TO LIVE? DIANE’S HUSBAND, at forty-five, had begun to feel pains in his chest. The pains were nothing, the doctor said, but anxiety, but her husband felt, abruptly, the slow, inevitable closing of his own life. He had awakened one night, damp and trembling, after dreaming that his children had him by the throat. In the dream he had peeled their hands off and risen up, free, into the sky. She had these feelings, too, for she had her own disappointments—it had not been her dream to berate undergraduates to turn in gratuitously late papers, for one thing—but she was going along with what was given them, and when she tucked the children in, she had not thought there was anything else to do. But suddenly her husband believed that their family was killing them. He was almost gleeful in this, a solution. He was a large, healthy man, but after this dream, he began visiting doctors, checking not only his heart, but also his lungs, his kidneys, his skin. He said that something was dirty in his blood. No doctors found anything. He searched the Internet for remote adventures; he logged onto sites that described trips into mountains, forests, deserts barely developed by human hands. He said he wanted to go somewhere clean. His home office—he was a freelance reporter for a variety of computer magazines—was papered with posters of Tibet, mountains white, iridescent with snow.

  This business intensified shortly after the doctor had explained to Diane and her husband that testing had placed their son on the autism spectrum. The boy, he said, loved rules so intensely it could be difficult for him to get married or live with someone. He might be tormented in public school, so make sure to explain his issues to his teachers. He could receive therapy to help him understand when another person was happy or sad. On the bright side, the boy would be excellent at math.

  After they had heard this, her husband asked her to drive the car home. She stared at the shiny, broad backs of the cars in front of them. His silence made her aggressively talkative.

  “I don’t know if he was the best guy,” she said. “We could see someone else.”

  He sat, hunched, arms wrapped around himself as though he were freezing.

  “Don’t you have anything to say?” she asked sharply, in the tone she sometimes used, despite herself, with the children.

  He glanced at the dashboard. “We’re low on gas,” he said.

  THE PHONE STOPPED RINGING. SHE COUNTED; THIS TIME IT TOOK twenty rings. Woody lowered the ice pack. “Someone wants to talk to you,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Actually, he doesn’t.”

  The boy looked up. “There are fifty-eight Woody Wilson buttons in your bag,” he said.

  “Really?” said Woody. “There are, I think, 108 signs all over town. Yard signs, billboards. I drove around counting them. My wife, Daisy, helped me put up the signs. She did a good job. It was a good day for her.” He pressed the ice pack to his head and closed his eyes. “I am her rock,” he said. “I am her anchor in troubled water.”

  The hope in his face, his desire to be seen in this role, made her look away.

  “You are your husband’s rock,” he said, eagerly. “I can see it.” He picked up the ice pack again. “My wife used to work in real estate,” he said. “Did I tell you? She sold a house three blocks away.” He paused. “She was very happy,” he said. “We had wine and steaks at the Port House.” He was staring at his shoe with the frozen gaze of someone banishing other thoughts from his head. Then he looked at her. “What kind of work does your husband do?”

  “I don’t really know right now,” she said.

  She did not know yet how to answer this. Should she say he was dead? “He left three months ago,” she said. Telling Woody was practice. She hated other people’s pity; their sympathy, she felt, was a way of flattering themselves. She tried to laugh, a hollow, cheerless sound—why? She did not want him to be afraid of her. She was certainly afraid of herself. “That was him on the phone.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I call His name when I cannot take another step.” He looked at her as though she would understand this. “Do you ever feel that, Diane? Who do you call when you cannot take another step?” Woody Wilson lowered the ice pack from his forehead and touched the dent in the blue pack. He bit his lip, concerned.

  She needed to change the subject. “So your wife sells real estate,” she said lightly.

  “She did until a year ago,” he said.

  He set the ice pack beside him and stared at it. When he looked up, he stared through her, as though another person were simply a clear window to a better view. “She won’t get out of bed. She stays there with the curtains shut. She says the light hurts her hair,” he said.

  She looked at Woody Wilson, the blazing whiteness of his shirt, the way his hair was parted very neatly in the middle. She imagined him standing in front of the mirror that morning while his wife lay silent in the dim bedroom, drawing his comb tenderly through his hair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It sounds hard.”

  “Hard,” he said, and he laughed, a sad laugh. “Life is hard. But you know, marriage is a sacred union.”

  “Fine,” she said, thinking that this was what she resented most of all, the lack of specifics, the cheerful vagueness. “But you know, I think that each person has to give something.”

  “I give her my devotion,” he said, sitting up, excited, ready for a debate. “She does the best she can. I wake up in the morning, and sometimes I look at her face, and I just want to know what she is thinking. I tell her she needs to go to church. God will help her.” His face was naked, a boy’s face, the pale, terrible lids of a child. “I want people to see that I’m trying. I want people to say that Woody Wilson is a good man.”

  A FEW WEEKS BEFORE HER HUSBAND LEFT, DIANE HAD HEARD HIM crying at odd moments: when he was in the bathroom shaving, when he was in the garage bringing in the trash. His crying was soft, private, not meant for her or the children, and each time she came upon it, she felt both wounded and enraged. He only wept away from her, and she knew this meant she was not supposed to comfort him. One night, during this time, she had woken up and made his lunch. In the dark kitchen, she had put a peanut butter sandwich, an apple, a strong cheese, and a cookie in a brown bag and left it on the counter. The next day, he took the bag to work, and when he came home that night, he said, “I took your lunch today. Sorry.”

  S
he was then ashamed of her gesture. “I know you did,” she said, and they were both more familiar in this, the feeling of deprivation, their quiet, growing anger toward something they could not quite describe. The next morning, that same lunch was on the counter; he had made it for her. She had wept and had begun to eat it slowly; after a few bites, she stopped. He would be leaving soon; they both knew this.

  The phone was ringing again. Woody clapped his hands over his ears. The boy suddenly stood up and went into the kitchen. The girl wandered off to join him. There was the scream, “Stop!” by the girl followed by the boy yelling, “Give it!” and then the sound of a body falling in the kitchen. Diane ran into the room. She heard the candidate stepping behind her.

  The boy had the girl pressed to the floor with his body. She was coughing. He was trying to unpeel her tiny closed fist. “Give it!” he growled.

  “I want it!” screamed the girl.

  “Get off her!” Diane ordered the boy. She grabbed his thin shoulders and tried to shake him off, but the boy would not move. “Now!”

  Diane imagined how Woody Wilson saw them, the disheveled middle-aged woman in the putrid kitchen, wrestling with the enraged son who was stronger than she was. Legislate against this, she thought. The girl opened her mouth to bite the boy’s hand.

  Woody grasped the boy’s hands. “Let go of your sister,” said Woody quietly.

  “She stole it!” screamed the boy.

  Woody held a hand out, as though to calm the air. “Now wait, everybody,” he said. “Wait.” He reached into his pocket to pull out a Woody Wilson sticker. “I’ll trade you.” He handed the girl his sticker: Vote for me. The girl grabbed it. She was already possessed of a startling rage, as though she foresaw the difficulties her life would bring her. When the girl stared at someone, as she did at her brother, Diane saw how she would someday regard a lover, the assumption that the other would feed some endless hunger inside of her. She gazed at Diane with the same expression, and Diane whispered to her, ashamed before its vastness.