Labor Day

by Joyce Maynard

  One recurrent dream featured me, running around a pole in a field somewhere, or maybe it was a tree. I was chasing Rachel McCann, and she was naked. As fast as I ran, I could never catch up with her, and we kept running in circles. I could see her bottom, and the backs of her legs, but never the front of her, never her breasts (small, but interesting to me now) or what lay below, in the nameless place I thought about all the time.

  In this dream, an idea came to me, or you might say it came to the character that was me in my dream. I stopped running suddenly and turned around to face the opposite direction. This way, Rachel McCann would be coming straight toward me. Finally, I’d get to see the front of her. Even dreaming, I registered how smart I was to think of this. What a good idea it had been.

  Only I never got to see her. Every time I got to this part in the dream, I woke up, usually in a bed wet with my own embarrassing secretions, that I concealed from my mother by turning the sheets over, or stuffing them in the bottom of the laundry, or dabbing them with water and laying a towel on the spot until it dried.

  I figured out, finally, why it was Rachel never came around the other side to face me in her nakedness. My brain could not have supplied the necessary images. Breasts I knew, though only (except for that one time, with Marjorie) from pictures. But the other—a blank.

  As much time as I now spent thinking about girls, I had never spoken to a single girl at my school, except to say, Could you pass the paper back? I had no sister, no cousins. I liked the girl on Happy Days, and one of the Charlie’s Angels—not the two most people considered the most beautiful, but the one with the brown hair, who went by the name of Jill on the show. I also liked Olivia Newton-John, and one particular Playmate of the Month named Kerri from an old issue of Playboy I found at my father’s house one time and sneaked home in my backpack, though—maddeningly—the actual centerfold had been ripped out. But the only female person in my life I actually knew was my mother. In the end, whatever ideas I might have about how women were came back to her.

  I knew people considered my mother pretty, even beautiful. The time she’d come to my school to see me in the play, a boy I didn’t even know—an eighth grader—had stopped me on the playground and said, Your mom’s hot. I was just feeling proud when he said the next part.

  I bet when you grow up all your friends will want to ball her.

  The fact that she was good-looking, with her dancer’s shape, was only part of the story. I think my mother also gave off a kind of feeling, as strong as if she had a smell, or a sign on the front of her shirt, that told people there was no man around for her. There were other kids with divorced parents at my school, but nobody else like my mother, a person who seemed to have taken herself out of the game, like a woman from some foreign culture or a tribe in Africa I probably heard about one time, or maybe India, where once your original husband dies, or leaves, your own life is over.

  In all the years since my father left, she only went on a date one time that I knew of. This was with a man who fixed our oil burner. He had been over all morning, down in our basement, cleaning the heating ducts. After, when he came up to give my mother the bill, he apologized for all the dust his work must have spread around our house.

  I guess you’re single, he said. No ring.

  I was in the kitchen doing my homework when he said this, but he didn’t seem to mind that I was there.

  It can get pretty lonesome, he said. Winter especially.

  I have my son, she said. She asked if he had children.

  I always wanted to, he said. Then my wife left me. Now she’s having someone else’s kid.

  I remember thinking, when he said this, how odd that sounded. It seemed like who a person had would be their own child, not anybody else’s. I was my mother’s, but now I was wondering: Did the baby Marjorie had belong to my father?

  You like dancing? he asked her. Because there’s a function coming up at the Moose Lodge this Saturday. If you aren’t busy.

  Did she like dancing? There was the question. My mother couldn’t lie.

  He brought flowers when he came to pick her up. She wore one of her dancing skirts that swirled out when she turned, not like how she had dressed that time long ago, when she met my father, and her underwear showed, but this time just enough to accentuate the moves and show off her legs.

  Her date had also dressed up. When we’d met him, he’d been wearing his heating company uniform, with his name—Keith—over the left side of his chest, but tonight he was wearing a shirt made out of some kind of synthetic fabric that stuck to his body, which was very thin, and this shirt had been unbuttoned enough that you could see a little chest hair, which gave the impression that he’d thought about how this would look and possibly even arranged the hair to stick out at the top. Because I had seen my mother getting ready, and how she’d changed her outfit three times before deciding on this one, and standing in front of the mirror arranging her hair, now I pictured him, fluffing that chest hair so it stuck out the top of the shirt.

  I had no chest hair. My father had a lot of it, but nothing about me resembled him. Sometimes I wondered if maybe I wasn’t even his real son, and if maybe his real kid had always been Richard. That I was just some kind of mistake.

  She did not hire babysitters, my mother. She didn’t know any, considering the fact that she’d almost never gone anyplace I didn’t accompany her. And anyway, she said, leaving me alone with a sitter was more dangerous than just leaving me alone. There were all kinds of people around who might seem like nice people but how could you be sure?

  I set out a snack, she said. She had also left me an issue of National Geographic about life in ancient Greece, and a book on tape she’d sent away for about a boy who’d been shipwrecked on an island in the South Pacific where he lived on his own for three years until someone on a passing freighter had rescued him, and a project she thought I might enjoy, which was putting her penny collection into wrappers, with the promise that when we turned them in at the bank (we meaning me; she’d be out in the car) I’d get 10 percent, meaning maybe thirty-five cents if I was lucky.

  You look like a princess, Keith told her. I know this will sound stupid, he said, but I don’t actually know your first name. On your records down at the office we just have your last name and your account number.

  He looked young, Keith. I was too young myself for the difference to seem that dramatic, between twenty-five and thirty-five, but he might not even have been twenty-five. Seeing my binder that I had out on the table again, he said, Oh, you go to Pheasant Ridge. That’s where I graduated. He named a teacher he had, like I might know her.

  Less than an hour after the two of them took off for the dance, my mother was home. If Keith walked her to the door, I didn’t see. He didn’t come in.

  You can tell a lot about someone from how they dance, she said. This was a person with no sense of rhythm.

  His idea of a slow dance, she said, was rocking back and forth in one spot on the floor, rubbing his hand up and down her back. Also, he smelled like furnaces. And in spite of how clear she made it, that she wasn’t interested, he had still tried to kiss her before she got out of the car.

  I didn’t think this was my type of thing, but I thought it was only fair to give it a try, she said. Now I know, I have no interest in dating.

  What interested my mother was romance. The kind of person for my mother—if such a person existed—would be unlikely to show up at the Loyal Order of the Moose.

  THIS BEING LABOR DAY WEEKEND, Frank said he thought we should barbecue. The problem was, we had no meat in the freezer besides Meal in Minutes dinners and Cap’n Andy fish.

  I want to buy you dinner, he said. Only I’ve got this cash flow problem.

  We had a lot of ten-dollar bills in the Ritz crackers box my mother kept on top of the refrigerator, from my last run to the bank. She took down three of them. It was unusual for my mother to take the car out more than once every few weeks, but now she said we could drive to the st
ore.

  I guess you would want to come along, she told Frank. To make sure we don’t try a getaway.

  Nobody laughed when she said this. Part of the odd, slightly uncomfortable feeling I had with the situation here was the way I could never be 100 percent sure who Frank was to us. He seemed like a guest we had invited over, like company that comes from out of town, but there was this other part, too, that all three of us knew, which was how he came to be with us in the first place.

  That morning, when she’d come down in her flowered blouse, with her hair all fluffy, he had told her—after setting the coffee at her place, and the biscuits—not to try anything funny here.

  I don’t want to have to do anything we’d both regret, he said. You know what I’m talking about, Adele.

  His words sounded almost like something from an old movie, a western, like what you’d see on TV on a Sunday afternoon. Still, my mother had nodded then, lowered her eyes to the table, like a kid at my school when the teacher tells them to get rid of their gum.

  After he’d made the pie, he had slipped the paring knife in his pocket. Our sharpest one. The silk scarves were still out, draped over a dishtowel next to the sink. He hadn’t tied her up again since that first time, but now he gestured with his head in their direction, as if no further explanation was necessary, which it wasn’t, evidently, for the two of them. Only for me.

  I lived here. She was my mother. Still I felt like an interloper. Something was happening here that I wasn’t sure I should be seeing.

  He drove. She sat next to him. I sat in the backseat, that we’d never used as long as I could remember. This is how it is in a regular family, I thought. The mom, the dad, the kid. This was how my father liked to think we were, when he and Marjorie and his new kids came to pick me up, except on those nights all I wanted was to have it be over, where now having it be over was what I dreaded. I could only see the back of her head, but I knew if I could see my mother’s face, she’d have that expression I was so unfamiliar with. Like she was happy.

  As we headed into town, nobody referred to the fact that the police were looking for Frank, but I was nervous. He was wearing his baseball cap, and it seemed to me he’d taken the extra precaution of pushing the brim lower than normal over his forehead. But I also knew that his main disguise was just having us with him. Nobody on the lookout for Frank was expecting a woman and a kid to be with him. And anyway, he would stay in the car. His limp was still pretty noticeable.

  When we got to the supermarket parking lot, my mother handed me the bills. Frank ran over the list of things he needed: ground beef, chips, ice cream for the pie. An onion and some potatoes, for soup, Frank said.

  I need a razor, he said. He preferred a straight razor, but no way were they going to carry those at Safeway.

  The picture came to me again: Frank with his arm around my mother’s neck, pressing a blade against her cheek. A razor now. A single bright red drop of blood dripping down her face. Her voice saying, Do what he tells you, Henry.

  And shaving cream, he said. I want to clean myself up for you two. I don’t want to look like a bum.

  Or an escaped convict. Only nobody said that.

  In the store, everyone was stocking up for the holiday weekend. For once, I was the person with only a few items, instead of how it usually went when I came here—my cart piled high with frozen dinners and soup cans, the checkout girl’s comment: You expecting a hurricane or a nuclear attack?

  In the line, the woman ahead of me was talking with her friend about the heat wave. Now they were saying it was going to reach a hundred on Sunday. Good time to hit the beach, but the traffic would be hell.

  Finished your back-to-school shopping yet, Janice? the friend said.

  Don’t remind me, the first woman told her. Three pairs of blue jeans for the boys and a couple of skirts and underwear, and the bill came to ninety-seven dollars.

  The cashier had gone to the city the week before. Her husband took her to see Cats. You know the truth? she said. For the money those tickets cost, we could stay home and watch TV and get ourselves an air conditioner.

  The man behind me had spent the day cooking the tomatoes from his garden. Now he was picking up canning jars. There was a woman with a baby, who said she intended to spend the weekend sitting in her children’s kiddie pool.

  You hear about the guy they’re looking for that jumped out the window at the prison? the back-to-school shopper asked her friend. I can’t get his face out of my head.

  He’s probably halfway to California by now.

  They’ll get him eventually, the first one said. They always do.

  The worst part is knowing a person like that has nothing to lose anymore, the other woman said. They’re going to do anything. Life, to a person like that, is worth about ten cents.

  Her friend had more to offer, but I missed it. I had reached the front of the line now, paid my money, ran out with the groceries. For just a moment, I couldn’t find our car, then I spotted them. Frank had driven around the side of the building, where the Home Depot was. They had one of those swings made of cedar logs set up in the front, an end-of-season sale. The two of them were sitting in it, and he had his arm around her. The car was turned off, but with the key in the accessory position so the radio could still play, and the song was “Lady in Red.”

  They didn’t notice I was back. I pointed out that we should get on home before the ice cream melted.

  IT WASN’T ALL THAT LATE when we finished the pie, but I told them I was tired. I went up to my room and put on the fan. It was nine o’clock, but still hot enough that I took off all my clothes except my boxers, and put a single sheet over myself.

  I had my issue of Mad magazine, but I had a hard time concentrating. I was thinking about the photograph of Frank on the front page of the newspaper that morning, and how the paper had sat there all day without one of us opening it to read the whole story. I knew from the headline there was a search going on, and that he’d killed someone, just not the particulars. In a funny way, it seemed rude to read about it, with him right there.

  Downstairs, I could hear the murmur of their voices, and the sound of running water as they cleaned up, but not the words they were saying, and this would have been true even if the fan was not on high. Later, the voices said less, but there was music—an album my mother loved, Frank Sinatra singing ballads. Good dancing music, if a person knew what they were doing.

  At some point I must have fallen asleep, because I was sleeping when I heard the sound of feet on the stairs. The night before, he had stayed on our couch, but this time, along with the familiar sound of my mother coming up, there was another footstep, heavier, and his low voice, that seemed to come from another whole place, somewhere deep and dark and still, like a cave or a swamp.

  Still no words, just their two voices, and the hum of the fan, and from outside the open window, the sound of crickets, and a car on the road, though never as far as our driveway. Someone—probably Mr. Jervis—had a ball game on, that he must be listening to out in his yard because it was cooler there. Now and then I heard the sound of cheering and knew the Red Sox must have done something good.

  Someone had run the shower, and the water had kept running for a long time, longer than any shower I ever took, so long for a moment I wondered if something had happened and I should get up and check to make sure we didn’t have a broken pipe, but another part of me knew not to. Moonlight was coming in the window now. Her bedroom door creaked open. Organ music from the ball game on the radio. The voices again. Whispering now. The only words I could make out: I shaved for you.

  The place where my head lay, against the thin wall of my tiny room, backed up against the headboard of her bed, on the other side. Over the years, I would sometimes hear her voice as she slept—the kind of murmur a person makes in the middle of a dream. I must have been familiar with the sound her bedsprings made, or the winding of her alarm clock, and afterward, the ticking, but I had never thought about those things a
ny more than I thought about the sound of my own heart beating. My room was close enough to hers that I could hear all these things, hear the sigh she sometimes made drawing back the sheets, the sound of her water glass when she set it on the table, or the creak of the window when she opened it to get a breeze, as she did now. Hot night.

  She must have heard the sounds from my room too, though this had never occurred to me before. Now I thought about the nights, recently, when I’d moved my hand over my unfamiliar new body, my breath becoming rapid, the short, low whoosh of air that escaped from my lips when it was over. Only now did I think about it, because now there was a voice on the other side of the wall, murmuring, and hers murmuring back. No longer even words. Sounds and breath, bodies moving, the slap of the headboard against wallboard, and then a single long cry, like a bird in the night who had spotted its mate, or a nesting loon when an eagle flies overhead. Distress call.

  On the other side of the wall, hearing this, I felt my body stiffen. I lay that way for many minutes—ball game over now, voices in the next room stilled, with no sound but the whirring of the fan—until at last, not soon enough, I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 9

  SATURDAY. WHAT WOKE ME WAS the sound of knocking on our door. I knew, from the smell of the coffee again, that Frank must be downstairs, but he couldn’t answer it, and I figured my mother would still be asleep. I ran downstairs in my pajamas and opened the door. Not all the way, just partly.