Fast Lanes

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  I wonder what Nickel Campbell knew of my father. They were acquainted; Nickel was Henry Briarley’s day foreman and manager at Consol Coal, where my father dropped in two or three times a week. Nickel sat in the outer office behind a burled mahogany desk. The desk was bigger and fancier than Henry’s, and I remember my father joking about it with Nickel on our back porch. My mother gave a barbecue for Wes’s birthday; it may be an indication of his lack of interest that Lenny and I were allowed to invite the guests. Predictably, she invited Cap, whose parents declined to attend, and I invited Delia, whose parents did. Mina Campbell sat nursing Johnny, who was just a baby then, a year before Nickel died. It was June and the corn was in the fields, young, pale-green stalks, and the wild fields were not tangled yet with milkweed and pokeberries and their bitter, pronged stems. The sun was setting slowly and an ocher light was on the grass. Must have been Sunday, no sound of cars going by on the road past the house. There were crickets, their melodic, intermittent alarms sounding out like little cries of surprise, and farther off, the panicked warble of a cicada. I was sitting by Delia, my face in her hair, whispering; we spent years in that posture or its reverse, trained on each other like homing devices, deliciously unaware of adults except when we needed their services, or when they interrupted and demanded our attention. I remember the smell of Delia’s hair, like cold vanilla, and the minuscule, starburst scars on the side of her face from chicken pox. I always thought they were pretty. I was seeing them, hearing laughter indistinguishable from my own, when I became aware of my father’s voice, of the two men warily conversing at the other end of the table. It was a picnic table, unpainted and roughhewn, like the ones used in roadside parks in the Fifties. Nickel Campbell sat at the end of the bench, his hands spread on the wood beside his legs as though for balance. He wore a gold signet ring on the smallest finger of his right hand. Girls in a special club might wear such rings, in our small town, to represent a secret. It resembled in design the plastic jewelry we collected from bubble-gum machines.

  “Where did Henry get that damn desk he’s got you set up in? Looks like something his wife’s folks might have pressed on him.”

  “Oh, it’s not Henry’s. My desk, had it at school. My parents sent it, turned up on our porch one day in a big crate. Mina wouldn’t have it in the house, so I moved it to the office. She doesn’t get on with my family.”

  My father laughed. “You mean you had that desk as a kid? Must have been bigger than you were.”

  “It was, nearly,” Nickel Campbell nodded.

  “Schools provide desks around here. Where’d you go to school?”

  “Place up in Connecticut. I lived there, pretty much. Bed, desk, clothes. I told Mina she was lucky they didn’t send the bed.”

  “Or Henry is lucky.”

  “But Henry is always lucky. Luck is Henry’s stock-in-trade.”

  He smiled wryly, felt my scrutiny, and glanced at Delia and me. He touched my hair. “Are you lucky, Alma?”

  “We’re lucky together,” Delia answered, but her voice didn’t reassure me. Her father had never really looked at me before, never seen me. He’d seemed part of the atmosphere of Delia’s house, always gone to work, wedding and graduation photographs staring from the mantel in his absence. On my occasional overnight visits he sat reading by a window that looked out on railroad tracks and the overgrown athletic field of Presbyterian College. The small living room was lined with bookshelves; books were always scattered and stacked by his chair, as though he were studying for a test. He sat reading and Delia and I sat in the dining room where no one dined, where the folded dining-room table supported pots of Mina’s lush, crowded spider plants. A Motorola television glittered The Price Is Right in a corner, pots rattled in the kitchen. The baby, Johnny, not walking yet, visible through the narrow doorframe, sat on the linoleum floor and held to the porcelain leg of an old-fashioned sink. I couldn’t remember that Nickel Campbell had ever spoken directly to me. Now, on my own summer porch, I felt the full force of his recognition, a questioning appraisal not deflected by the fact of my childhood. His eyes, vaguely golden, held me. And I saw that his right pupil was crossed by a dark slash.

  “My dad has a cat’s eye,” Delia said quietly, behind me.

  Then the women returned from the kitchen in a noise of bustle and conversation, a clicking of high-heeled sandals on concrete, their hands full of trays piled with cups, saucers, dessert plates, the cake lone and revered like a crown on a pillow. Lenny was carrying the baby and Cap brought the presents, peering from behind boxes wrapped in modestly celebratory papers. Her quizzical, watchful face was aglow. Nickel Campbell turned from me. The candles were on fire and we all began to sing.

  I still see us, standing around the cake, and there’s a shadow beside Nickel Campbell. Not a shadow of his shape, as in the child’s poem we all memorized in school, but a shade, a subtle darkening, a blur in the summer air, as though he is already moving toward another evening a year later—the evening his car went off Winfield Bridge in a gathering dusk, and the police dragged the river to find him. My mother wasn’t with him; she would never have been in the car with him—they would never have taken that kind of chance. My mother and Nickel Campbell took plenty of chances, ignored all manner of shadows, fell into a darkness from which she emerged alone. Or not quite alone. I was with her.

  They met on a Saturday, the week after my father’s birthday, for lunch in the nearly deserted Winfield bus station. The station was just a block from Souders department store, where Audrey took us to buy school clothes. Later, during numerous fifty-minute car rides along Route 19 to Winfield, she recited details, so many images and sounds, so much story and puzzle. But that first time I didn’t know how or when they’d planned it or why we were going to Souders to buy me a spring coat on sale. People from all the little towns around—Gaither, Weston, Bellington—shopped occasionally in Winfield, a real city of sixty thousand or so, a city with buildings tall enough to house elevators, a city with a real department store. We always dressed in our church clothes and good shoes to go there, and we met after shopping in the lobby of the Stonewall Jackson Hotel. Lenny and I would ride the elevators up and down, stepping out on various floors to look at the different wallpapers, the empty corridors, views of the city from the narrow corner windows of the hotel. The rooftops were black and deserted, each fitted with a windowless shack. With their waist-high walls, the roofs seemed the abandoned, tar-papered fields of another, more secretive city.

  But now my mother bypassed the hotel and wide main boulevard of Winfield and pulled into the bus-station parking lot. Atop the squat brick building there stood a faded representation of a greyhound, a sign nearly as long as the buses parked behind the station. It was meant to be the classic image, sleek and anonymous, but it was hand-painted, transformed, made clumsy and real. The dog had an expression at once cartoonish and melancholy, and its form cast a shadow across our car as my mother drove slowly past, easing into a space not fully visible from the street.

  “We’ll have some lunch here,” Audrey said.

  “Here? Why don’t we go to the hotel?”

  She regarded me, considering. “I might want to check on a ticket.”

  Inside, the station was dusty and neglected, and a man slept on one of the iron benches in the waiting area. I followed my mother as she walked uncertainly toward the lunch counter, an outpost of booths toward the rear of the building. I’m sure she’d never been to the bus station. Not much came or went through Winfield, big city though it seemed to us, and the bus station was known to host rummies and bums, and the poor too poor to afford trains. Years ago, the station was closed and torn down. But I still hear my mother talking, telling a story that’s finished.

  I don’t know how I was brave enough to be so foolish, phoning him at work that Monday. Maybe I was just desperate, not willing to go along nursing some little hope. I told him it was Audrey Swenson, please not to say anything until I was finished, that I knew he went to Winfield
to do banking for Consol every Saturday, I wanted to meet him there, this week, at noon at the bus station, I wanted to talk to him … more than anything in the world, please if he would just not ask questions and agree. He didn’t hesitate, just answered like he’d been waiting for my call. Yes, I’ll see you then. He said nothing for a moment, I said nothing, but maybe I sighed, tense, relieved, some anguished sound I couldn’t stifle, and he said, so calmly, It’s all right. Maybe you don’t know what feeling is, comfort, gratitude, until you’ve reached a certain point, then you’ll tear out your soul for it.

  He was sitting at a table by the wall, a wall maybe the height of a man’s shoulder, and beyond it we could see a cafeteria counter with a steam table. She walked right up to him, holding my hand. To his credit, he feigned no surprise and gestured to indicate we should sit with him. The chairs were metal, the seats covered with the same yellow vinyl as our kitchen chairs at home. For a moment I was deeply embarrassed that we owned and used objects similar to those in a bus station, but I realized he wouldn’t remember, the barbecue had been outside. I felt my mother’s gloved hand at the back of my neck.

  “Alma,” she said to me, “you must be hungry. You go ahead and get a tray, and I’ll pay for your food when I come.”

  I walked away from them, around the partition of the little wall. People seemed to have appeared from nowhere, maybe a bus had pulled in, and there was a line of five or six customers, one dragging a toddler. I moved along the wall behind them, and realized I could hear Nickel Campbell’s voice.

  They were sitting just opposite. The wall was tall enough to obscure the top of my head.

  “What possessed you to bring Alma?” he said.

  “I had to, really. What other excuse do I have to drive to Winfield on a Saturday or any other day?” Her voice faltered. “You mustn’t worry. She’ll keep it all to herself.”

  “What do you mean? She’s like sisters with Delia.”

  “Yes, but—she’s unusual. I can trust her, I know it. And believe me, there’s no other way. I’ll schedule lessons for her here, maybe, dance or something—”

  “Audrey …” he said, in his wise, sad voice, and I moved along the wall, staring at my feet. I moved because the woman behind me was starting to edge past, and my mother was right, I was starved.

  So it began. I don’t know if my mother actually inquired about Saturday lessons in Winfield, but she invented classes in baton. I already knew how to twirl, though I was clumsy, and I had wanted a baton for some time. My mother announced that evening at the supper table that I would be taking baton on Saturday afternoons in Winfield.

  Lenny looked up from her plate with interest. “You mean you want to be a majorette in high school?”

  “Maybe.” I shrugged. Even then, I had a feeling the lessons weren’t real. Touching the lace of the tablecloth, touching the nearly black wood of the walnut table through cutouts in the lace flowers, I remembered Audrey’s voice: I’d be afraid of real lace, this is just synthetic, won’t hold a stain. And she’d shaken out a broad panel of white froth, a froth that settled and was flat and thin.

  “Alma doesn’t have to be a majorette,” Audrey said. “I mean, unless she wants to. Baton is just good exercise, good for coordination and confidence, like dance.”

  “Hmmm,” Lenny responded. “A little coordination wouldn’t hurt.” She smiled a slow, close-mouthed smile, a mannerism I knew she’d learned from Cap Briarley.

  “That’s not your smile,” I said immediately.

  “What do you mean?” She waited, staring, as though trying to make sense of gibberish.

  “You don’t smile that way, Cap does. You’re always trying to look like her, and she’s always trying to look like you. But you don’t look like each other, you just look like nobody real. It’s horrible. I’m so sick of it.”

  “You are nuts,” Lenny replied evenly, but she didn’t look angry, only interested, considering, as though I’d hit on something the two of them might refine.

  My father broke in. “How much are these lessons going to cost? And why can’t she wait until junior high and take lessons for free in the school band?”

  “Well,” Audrey said, hesitating a beat as though she didn’t want to imply I’d be no one’s first choice as a twirler, “the girls have to try out to take baton in band, and most of them would already have had classes. My mother sent me a check for Alma’s birthday—so she could take music lessons of some kind—but baton is cheaper than renting an instrument. I’m not saying she has to become a majorette or make it her life’s work, I just thought it would be nice if she had an interest.”

  “Alma.” Wes gave me a sardonic, amused look, a mark of affection I highly prized, though it was usually offered in collusion against my mother. “Alma, do you need an interest? And it seems to me that if your grandmother wanted to send you money, she might have sent it to you instead of to your mother.”

  Audrey stood up and began clearing plates. “You don’t need to worry. I won’t ask you to drive her. I’ll take her. It’ll be fun, something for the two of us.” This she said for my benefit, to indicate once again that I was her special one, the one who cared for her, the one for whom she cared. She made such statements in a tone that paid homage and registered complaint, but Lenny and Wes didn’t seem to hear. Her feelings were a consistent atmosphere, an expected weather that inspired no comment or reply. I was always afraid she’d leave, though I never acknowledged my fears, even to myself. Sometimes I still have the same scary dream that evolved in my mind during those years—that I’m walking through the house of my childhood, a Fifties-style ranch house with parquet floors and a long hallway, wandering from my parents’ bedroom in the back, past the bathroom and Lenny’s closed door, turning the corner near my own small room, desperately trying to keep my footing because the floor is moving and the walls are not stationary. I move out toward the dining room, which opens into the living room, a large space, it seemed to me then. The blue couch and chair, the white fiberglass drapes, the braided rug on the floor, waver as though seen underwater. I make my way to the narrow kitchen, where I nearly always find my mother, but the room is empty, the counters wiped clean, the doors of the cabinets shut, the dishrag wrung out and dried stiff over the long neck of the spigot. The sink is clean, and the metal stopper is in place, washed and dried, free of the garbage she’s constantly cleaning from our dirty plates. It’s as though she’s been released, she’s gone, I’ve lost her.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “Am I going to get a baton?”

  “Of course you are. We’ll just park at the lot near the hotel and then we’ll go to Craigie’s.”

  “You mean the store that sells instruments?”

  “They sell batons, too, and instruction booklets. I already phoned to be sure.”

  We were driving along the road to Winfield, a gentle two-lane that curved past the little towns of Peeltree and Quiet Dell (“wide spots in the road,” Audrey called them) and a few farms with big, prosperous barns. Many more were scroungy and poor, the houses sagging, a dog or two chained in the yard. Later, when the interstate was built, none of them showed anymore, not the houses or the way people really lived. The new road was only for passing through, so outsiders could cross the state faster and admire the seemingly empty hills, rolling land dotted with stands of maples and oaks. That day, just less than a year before Nickel Campbell died, the trees were heavy-leaved, their foliage motionless in the heat. My mother and I kept the car windows rolled down and were assaulted by hot air redolent with the smells of hay and soil. She wore a scarf to keep her hair from blowing, and a black dress with a wide white organdy collar, the one Lenny said made her look like a Pilgrim.

  That day, she wouldn’t have said some of the words I remember now. She must have said them later, and surely more than once, because I know exact phrases and the inflections of her voice.

  It was such a day, that first day. The air was rushing into the car b
ut beyond that roar everything seemed hushed, hot, and still. It seems terrible that I told you so much, but is it always terrible to tell a child the truth? When I married at twenty, I believed all the fairy tales, and they didn’t get me very far. I knew Lenny would hold herself apart, like Wes always did, they were born that way, like animals with protective coloring. You were so like me and I didn’t ever want you to fade away and then have such trouble coming back from the dead, have to deceive and turn yourself inside out. Being with him was the worst wrong I ever did but it felt the most like belief; I still believe things he said. I don’t have any shame in my mind about that time, just a still white calm like a snowfield over all the pictures and the words.