It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  His roommate says, “It stopped raining or snowing or whatever it was doing,” tugs a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and offers it around. Both girls shake their heads no but Artie takes one, lights up and inhales, looks back at the car, Barry sitting rigid behind the wheel. Hope is surprised but thankful Artie’s brother-in-law has not joined the group, telling jokes in his frat-boy way.

  Hope can’t focus on anything, not Artie, his roommate or his roommate’s girlfriend, her brain like a loaded shotgun ready to go off. Artie pulls her close.

  They hear the car before they see it round the corner, their heads cocked at the sound; Hope stiffens against Artie’s side.

  “It will be okay,” he says again.

  A black car, in need of a wash, angles alongside theirs and stops. A woman gets out, scarf over her hair, cat’s-eye sunglasses, a bulky blue parka.

  Hope watches as Artie hands the woman the envelope, red fingernail slashing it open, fingering the bills, lips moving as she counts before she stuffs it into her pocket.

  His roommate hands over a second envelope. The woman counts again.

  Hope studies the woman’s face, the lines around her mouth, guesses she is somewhere in her late thirties, possibly forty. The woman looks up, arcs her chin toward the car idling behind her, a man at the wheel, fedora low on his forehead, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth like a gangster.

  Hope thinks, No way, but then the roommate’s girlfriend nods at her and they head toward the car holding hands like little girls.

  The woman in scarf and sunglasses flicks a smile at them, then says to Artie, “Be back here at eleven,” opens the car’s back door for the young women, who climb in.

  Artie wants to say something, to call out, but can’t think of what before the door slams shut and the car takes off. He watches it disappear from the lot.

  “Well,” his roommate says, a cloud of smoke surrounding the word.

  Barry calls from the car. “You guys want to get something to eat? There’s a diner across from the mall.”

  The roommate shakes his head, “I’m going to stay here,” tugs a copy of their college newspaper, of which he is editor, from his back pocket. The headline reads: IMPEACH JOHNSON.

  “I’ll stay with you,” Artie says.

  “No, go with your brother.”

  “In-law,” Artie says. “You sure?”

  His roommate nods, adjusting his wire-framed glasses.

  Barry says, “C’mon, Artie, I’m starving.”

  • • •

  The diner is all hard surfaces, tiled floor, tin ceiling, metal cases filled with cakes and pies that look as if they are made of Styrofoam, cold fluorescent lighting, disinfectant thickening the air.

  Artie slides into a booth, drums his nails on the scratched Formica tabletop.

  “Coffee?” the waitress asks, thirtyish, eyes smudged as if she is exhausted or wearing last night’s mascara.

  Barry nods and she fills his cup. Artie says, “Tea,” the idea of coffee nauseating. Barry orders two eggs over easy with bacon and hash browns, rye toast.

  “How about you, Artie?” he asks.

  “Can’t eat.”

  “C’mon. Eat something.”

  Artie sighs, says, “One egg, scrambled. Toast, whole wheat.”

  When the waitress leaves, Barry says, “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine, it’s not a big deal.”

  Artie is about to say Are you kidding? but the waitress is already back with his hot water and tea bag. A few minutes later she delivers their food. He eyes the eggs, clots of yellow and white, pushes the plate aside, pries a small butter container open and scrapes it onto a piece of toast while Barry shakes ketchup onto his eggs and potatoes, tears open three packets of saccharine for his coffee.

  Artie watches Barry eat, ketchup on the edges of his brother-in-law’s mouth while he talks, thinking how his businessman father had given him the $500 needed for today without hesitation, without the usual criticism or the ongoing question: “What are you going to do with a degree in art?”

  “Be an artist,” Artie always says, though he has no idea what being an artist means or requires.

  He wonders if his father has told his mother about the money. He figures he has; his parents are close.

  “Does my sister know?” Artie asks.

  “I had to tell her something,” Barry says, staring into his coffee.

  Artie finishes his tea. “We should get going.”

  “It’s only ten.”

  Artie sags back against the booth’s plastic, stares at the large wall clock above the chrome counter, ticking off seconds. He tries not to think about what’s going on, what she is going through, if she will be okay; he’s heard many bad stories.

  Barry starts to say something but Artie cuts him off. “Let’s go,” he says.

  “We’re only five minutes away,” says Barry, but Artie is already edging out of the booth.

  • • •

  The windows of the roommate’s rental car are fogged.

  Artie raps on the glass, simultaneously wiping away the icy mist, the frost starting up again. His roommate flinches, cracks the door, says, “Guess I dozed off,” the newspaper with IMPEACH JOHNSON crumpled in his lap. “What time is it?” He takes off his glasses, rubs at his eyes.

  Artie can’t believe the guy fell asleep. He feels as if his nerve endings are electrified, his mind sparking. He walks to one end of the parking lot and back, replaying everything—Hope crying as she told him she was two months late—“and I’m never late”—asking around until he got a name—everyone seemed to have one—making the call and the way he felt in the phone booth on Commonwealth Avenue, small and scared as the unidentified man on the other end of the line told him the cost, where and when to meet.

  He is sweating inside his coat though it’s frigid, his face pricked by icy needles. He thinks: What if something goes wrong?

  Barry ambles over, tells him to relax, pats his shoulder.

  The three of them huddle together, a helpless trio of boys with no idea of what to do, what to think, how to imagine what is going on. Artie grubs another cigarette from his roommate, blows smoke rings into the bitter winter air.

  Barry says, “It’s freezing,” heads back to his car, but Artie and his roommate do not, pacing and smoking until the black car rounds the corner and comes to a stop. The back doors open and the girls get out.

  Artie thinks, She’s alive!

  He runs toward her, notes how pale she looks, gets an arm around her and asks, “Are you okay?”

  “I feel—empty,” she says, and sags against his chest.

  His roommate’s girlfriend, Rochelle, is crying as they get into their rental.

  No one says goodbye.

  • • •

  In the back seat of the car Artie and Hope hold hands but look in opposite directions as Barry drives them to Newark Airport for a flight back to Boston where they are both in school.

  Hope thinks about the appointment she has tomorrow with a gynecologist, who will check her out, someone she’s never met, a recommendation from a girlfriend who has assured her that the doctor will be “cool.” How many stories has she heard about botched abortions, about women who could never bear children again though she is not sure she wants to have children, not after this.

  “Everyone okay back there?” Barry calls over his shoulder.

  Hope doesn’t answer. She curls up, arms across her belly, crying softly now, like a mewing kitten, Artie’s hand resting lightly on her back.

  • • •

  On the flight Hope falls into a deep sleep and Artie watches her, still the observer, looking for signs of what she has gone through.

  Back in Boston things are strained and he just wants everything to be the way it was, carefree, easy, two young people in love, but it isn’t; Hope is moody, wounded, seemingly mad at him and she doesn’t want to do anything, no movies, no parties and he is beginning to resent it. He keeps asking her if she is okay;
she is always crying.

  It is several weeks before she tells him the details.

  • • •

  It was a house, a small private home with a room decked out like a doctor’s office but there was no sheet on the metal table which was stained and rusty and the doctor—if that’s what he was—was smoking!—his cigarette ash falling onto the table, onto the floor, and the place looked so dirty—and the woman, the one who took the money, was his assistant, maybe his wife or girlfriend—I can’t remember if either of them wore gloves but I don’t think so. The woman kept telling me it would be okay and held my hand—Oh, I remember now, I can feel her hand in mine—she wasn’t wearing gloves, both of them smoking as they attached my legs to stirrups, and all I kept thinking was . . . I am going to die.

  Artie listens, afraid to say anything wrong because once when he said, “But you wanted to do this,” she snapped: “No one wants to have an abortion!”

  • • •

  The roommate and his girlfriend break up soon after. “She was always mad at me,” he says to Artie, “and what did I do?”

  “Well,” Artie says, his tone slightly mocking: “You did get her pregnant,” and they almost smile the way young men do because there is something powerful in the idea that a man can get a woman pregnant—a way to prove you are a man.

  • • •

  Five years later Artie and Hope marry and she supports him through graduate school by teaching and they have one child and lose another to a miscarriage, but they never talk about the abortion.

  Artie loses touch with his roommate, but one day, thirty years later, he is reading his monthly college newspaper, an article titled “Where Are They Now: The Student Radicals,” an interview with his roommate who refers to “my husband” and how he has always been gay but how “back in the day, you could call for the impeachment of the president of the United States—and I did—but admit I was gay? Not a chance.”

  Artie lays the paper aside, processes this new information—that his roommate, who got a girl pregnant, a girl who had an abortion along with Hope—was gay. He feels sad that his roommate could not tell him and sad that he didn’t understand what Hope was going through and sadder still that everything his generation fought for feels as if it could be lost.

  JONATHAN SANTLOFER is a writer and artist. He has published five novels, including the The Death Artist, the Nero Award–winning Anatomy of Fear, and many short stories. He has been editor/contributor of several anthologies as well as the New York Times bestselling serial novel Inherit the Dead. His artwork has been exhibited widely in the US, Europe, and Asia, and is in such public and private collections as the Art Institute of Chicago, Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Newark Museum, among many others. Santlofer is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants and serves on the board of Yaddo. His memoir, The Widower’s Notebook, will be published by Penguin Books in July 2018. Visit Jonathan at www.jonathansantlofer.com.

  ELIZABETH STROUT

  * * *

  The Walk

  About his children, something was wrong.

  This came to Denny Pelletier as he walked alone on the road one night in late December. It was a chilly night, and he was not dressed for it, having only a coat over his T-shirt, with his pair of old jeans. He had not intended to walk, but after dinner he felt the need in him arise, and then later, as his wife readied herself for bed, he said to her, “I have to walk.” He was sixty-nine years old and in good shape, though there were mornings when he felt very stiff.

  As he walked, he thought again: something was wrong. And he meant about his children. He had three children; they were all married. They had all married young, by the age of twenty, just as he and his wife had married young; his wife had been eighteen. At the time of his children’s weddings—the last, his daughter’s seventeen years ago—Denny did not think about how young they were, even though now, walking, he realized that it had been unusual during that time for kids to marry so young. Now his mind went over the classmates of his children, and he realized many had waited until they were twenty-five, or twenty-eight, or even—like the really handsome Woodcock boy—thirty-two years old when he married his pretty yellow-haired bride.

  The cold was distracting and Denny walked faster in order to warm up. Christmas was two weeks away, and yet no snow had fallen. This struck Denny as strange—as it did many people—because he could remember his childhood in this very town in Maine, and by Christmastime there would be snow so high he and his friends would build forts inside the snowbanks. But tonight as he walked, the only sound was the quiet crunching of leaves beneath his sneakers.

  The moon was full. It shone down on the river as he walked past the mills, their windows lined up and dark. One of the mills, the Washburn mill, Denny had worked in starting when he was eighteen; it closed thirty years ago, and then he had worked in a clothing store that sold among other things rain slickers and rubber boots to the fishermen and to the tourists as well. The mill seemed more vivid to him than the store, the memories of it, though he had worked there not nearly as long as he had at the store. But he could remember with surprising clarity the machines that went on all night, the loom room he worked in; his father had worked as a loom mender there at the time, and when Denny began he had been lucky enough to go from sweeping the floors for three months to becoming a weaver and then, not long after, a loom mender as his father had been. The earsplitting noise of the place, the frightening scoot a shuttle could take if it got out of place, whipping across the cloth and chipping pieces of metal—what a thing it had been! And yet it was no more. He thought of Snuffy, who had never learned to read or write, and who had taken his teeth out and washed them in the water trough, and then a sign had been put up: NO WASHING TEETH HERE! And the jokes about Snuffy not being able to read the sign. Snuffy had died a few years ago. Many—most—of the men he had worked with at the mill were now dead. Somehow, tonight, Denny felt a quiet astonishment at that fact.

  And then his mind returned to his children. They were quiet, he thought. Too quiet. Were they angry with him? All three had gone to college, and his sons had moved to Massachusetts, his daughter to New Hampshire; there seemed to be no jobs for them here. His grandchildren were okay; they all did well in school. It was his children he wondered about as he walked.

  Last year at Denny’s fiftieth high school reunion, he had shown his eldest boy his yearbook, and his son had said, “Dad! They called you Frenchie?” Oh sure, Denny said, with a chuckle. “It’s not funny,” his son had said, and he had gotten up and walked away, leaving Denny with his yearbook open on the kitchen table.

  Times changed.

  But Denny, who had turned to walk along the river, now saw his son’s point: to be called “Frenchie” was no longer acceptable. What Denny’s son had not understood was that Denny had never had his feelings hurt by being called Frenchie. As Denny kept walking, digging his hands deeper into his pockets, he began to wonder if this was true. He realized: what was true was that he, Denny, had accepted it.

  To accept it meant to accept much: that Denny would go to work in the mills as soon as he could, it meant that he did not expect himself to go on to school, to pay attention to his studies. Did it mean these things? As Denny approached the river, and could see in the moonlight how the river was moving quickly, he felt as though his life had been a piece of bark on that river, just going along, not thinking at all. Headed toward the waterfall.

  • • •

  The moon was slightly to the right of him, and it seemed to become brighter as he stopped to look at it. Is this why he suddenly thought of Dorothy Prescott?

  Dorie Prescott had been a beautiful girl—oh, she was a beauty! She had walked the halls of the high school with her long blond hair over her shoulders; she was tall and wore her height well. Her eyes were large, and she had a tentative smile always on her face. She had shown up at the end of their sophomore year, and she was the reason Denny had stayed in school. He just wante
d to see her, just wanted to look at her. Otherwise he had been planning on quitting school and going to work in the mill. His locker was not far from Dorie’s, but they shared no classes, because Dorie, along with her astonishing looks, had brains as well. She was, according to teachers and even students said this, the smartest student to have come through in a long time. Her father was a doctor. One day she said, “Hi,” as they were at their lockers, and Denny felt dizzy. “Hi there,” he said. And after that, they were sort of friends. Dorie hung around with a few other kids who were smart, and those were her real friends, but she and Denny had become friends too. “Tell me about yourself,” she said one day, after school. They were alone in the hallway. “Tell me everything.” And she laughed.

  “Nothing to tell,” Denny said, and he meant it.

  “That’s not true, it can’t be true. Do you have brothers and sisters?” She was almost as tall as he was, and she waited there for him while he fumbled with his books.

  “Yeah. I’m the oldest. I have three sisters and two brothers.” Denny finally had his books and he stood and looked at her. It was like looking at the sun.

  “Oh wow,” Dorie said, “is that wonderful? It sounds wonderful. I only have one brother and so the house is quiet. I bet your house isn’t quiet.”

  “No,” said Denny. “It’s not too quiet.” He was already going out with Marie Levesque, and he worried that she would show up. He walked down the hall away from the gym where Marie was practicing—she was a cheerleader—and Dorie followed him. So at the other end of the school, near the band room, they talked. He could not now remember all they said that day, or the other days, when she would suddenly appear and they headed toward the band room and stood outside it and talked. He did remember she never said he should go to college, she must have known—of course, “Frenchie”—he did not have the grades, or the money, to go; she would have known because of the classes they were not in together, just as he knew she would go to college.

  For two and a half years they did this, talked maybe once a week. Mostly they talked during the basketball season when Marie was practicing in the gym. Dorie never asked him about Marie, though she’d have seen him in the halls with her. He saw Dorie with different guys, always a different fellow seemed to be following Dorie, and she’d laugh with whoever it was, and call out, “Hi, Denny!” He had really loved her. The girl was so beautiful. She was just a thing of beauty.