True Enough

by Stephen McCauley

  Maybe her ambition for this project had been too narrow. Pauline Anderton and Great American Nobodies. She should have recognized the difficulty of selling the idea. She should have expanded her ambition. She shouldn’t have let Dale fill her with optimism. The television screen finally sizzled to life. The public TV station was broadcasting one of those chipper children’s shows which everyone raved about and which Gerald, at age four, had declared “moronic.” Watching a pack of blobby creatures roll down a green and purple hill while mumbling nonsense syllables, she had to agree. Yet, at the time, his rejection of the show had felt like one more rejection of her. She hit the channel button a few more times until she landed on a morning news show and killed the sound. The screen was filled with maps with graphics of clouds and weather fronts swirling above them. It used to be that she saw these reports as mere predictions of temperature and precipitation; now she regarded them as diagnostic reports on the health of the planet.

  She dialed her home number. Gerald picked up on the first ring, a cranky “Hello,” as if she’d interrupted him at an important chore.

  “Hi, honey,” she said. “It’s me.”

  “Hi . . . mom.”

  He was getting better at avoiding her first name, but there was still this slight hesitation.

  “You and daddy weren’t home when I called last night. Did you go out to dinner?”

  “We went to the Cambodian place.”

  She could picture the two of them, sitting at one of the small corner tables in the restaurant’s basement, quietly discussing food or computers or some book Thomas had given Gerald to read, as serious and engaged as a couple of grad students.

  “Did you have a good day at school yesterday, sweetie?”

  “Yes, except I wasn’t sure who was going to pick me up, since you weren’t here, and then I got sick and couldn’t go to my piano lesson after all.”

  “Gerald! That’s not like you. What happened?” Gerald had the most amazing constitution his pediatrician had ever seen. So far, he’d avoided all the major childhood illnesses, along with colds, flus, and ear and throat infections.

  “I don’t know. I just felt funny. So I went to the nurse’s office and took a nap and then Thomas told me I didn’t have to go to the lesson.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. Are you all right now?”

  “I woke up a little iffy, but I think I’m starting to feel better.”

  Jane stubbed out the cigarette in the glass ashtray by the bed and sat up against the puffy, vinyl headboard, clutching the blankets against her chest. He missed her. What he was really saying, without saying it, of course, was that he missed her and had been worried that she was out of town. He had been anxious and depressed, had felt cut off from her, and now that she had called, now that they were talking, he was starting to feel better. Tell me more, Gerald, she longed to say. Tell me how you hated to see me leave and you wished I’d been at the restaurant last night, even if my presence would have dumbed down your conversation with Thomas. But no, she’d take what she’d been handed already and quit while she was ahead.

  “Gerald, do me a favor, sweetie, and ask your father to pick up.”

  “I would like to, but he left early to visit Aunt Joyce and the baby. What’s the baby’s name again?”

  “I think they decided on Clara.” The name had been Brian’s choice—God knows why—and wisely, Joyce had accepted it. Not the most attractive name, but unusual and interesting, and surely it was a good sign that Brian cared enough about his child’s future to have an opinion about her name. “Is Sarah there? Is she making you breakfast?”

  “I’m making it for her.”

  “I hope it’s delicious. I’ll talk to you later today.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Nice,” she thought as she got out of bed. He thought it would be nice for her to call. At this moment, coming from Gerald, it sounded like a declaration of love.

  Tricked into believing it was as cold outside as it was in the room, she put on a sweater over her jersey. She opened her door and walked into a wall of wet heat. If she’d known it was going to be this humid, she wouldn’t have bothered to get the disastrous haircut. The climate would have done it all for her and she could have saved the hundred and ten bucks. All this ferocious heat and it wasn’t even eight o’clock. As she walked toward the coffee shop, a door opened in one of the motel rooms ahead—Chloe’s room, if she remembered correctly—and Tim came out, bare-chested, his T-shirt clutched in one hand, his sneakers in the other. She stood beside the ice machine and watched as he made his way along the concrete walkway, fumbled with a key, and entered what had to be his room. If that meant what it appeared to mean, it more than made up for dragging unpaid-intern Tim down here and sticking him in one of these grim rooms. She couldn’t imagine Chloe continuing this after the plane touched down in Boston, but at least for the moment, skinny little Tim had definitely scored. Good for him. Maybe he should head up to Desmond’s room next and try his luck there.

  The booths and counter stools in the coffee shop were upholstered in veiny red vinyl, and there was a plastic case on the counter filled with what appeared to be honest-to-God pies. Context was everything. In Boston or New York, this would be the hippest spot in town, all these coffee-shop-chic accoutrements, but here, in this place, it was just a tad too real. The waitress behind the counter motioned with a pot of coffee and said, “Sit wherever, I’ll be right over.”

  Jane slid into a booth. The window offered a spectacular view of the parking lot and the road beyond, clogged with rush-hour traffic. Three men were on stools at the counter, cradling cups of coffee as if they were in no rush to get anywhere, casting disinterested glances at a television suspended from the ceiling. More clouds swirling over weather maps and shots of a rainlashed island somewhere in the Caribbean.

  The waitress came to her booth, adjusted her silverware, flipped her coffee cup and filled it, all with a show of nimble professionalism Jane admired. It isn’t what you do in life that matters, it’s how well you do it. She was a big, square woman with straight, dark hair that hung like a curtain to the middle of her back and was cut in long, rounded bangs in front, as if they’d been rolled in a can. Lucy, according to her name tag. No doubt younger than she looked, as this type of woman always seemed to be.

  “Not too busy here this morning,” Jane said.

  “No. The storm probably scared them off. I just hope we don’t get a rush at the last minute.” Her accent sounded less Southern than country-western: I jest hope.

  “Which storm is that?”

  She shifted her weight onto one foot and nodded toward the television. “Another darned tropical storm. They all come up here from Mexico, blow up along the coast. I wish they’d go somewhere else for a change. My youngest’s got to be at the hospital in Pensacola by two, so I don’t have time for another storm.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “Kidneys. But he’s a tough little bastard. Six years old and he says to the doctor, ‘I’m gonna kick this thing.’ Can you imagine that?”

  “I hope it goes well today.”

  “It will or it won’t. Not up to me to decide. You know what you want?”

  She’d decided on toast and a poached egg, but after listening to this tragic story, those items sounded so self-indulgently calorie-conscious, she couldn’t bring herself to order them. “Buttermilk pancakes,” she said. “With bacon.”

  There was a rack of postcards beside the cash register on the counter, and when the waitress had gone back into the kitchen, she went over to it and picked out three. One for Gerald, one for Thomas. One—why not admit it?—for Dale. Dear Dale, she’d write. Thank you for the loan. Thank you for not calling me.

  She slid back into her booth and took a pen from her purse. “Dear Dr. Berman,” she wrote, in tiny script, surprising herself. “Everything I haven’t told you—about Thomas, about Dale—it isn’t that I don’t trust you, it isn’t that I don’t believe you could h
elp, it’s just that there’s so much I don’t want to know about myself. Can we start from scratch?”

  Lucy delivered her pancakes, each nearly as wide across as the plate itself. If you were going to eat this kind of slop, you damn well better enjoy it. She smeared them with butter and poured a stream of syrup over the top until the whole mess was swimming, bacon included. As she was trying to fit a forkful into her mouth, she realized that she wasn’t alone. Tim was standing next to her booth, looking down at her with his silent, goofy grin. She pointed to the banquette opposite her with her fork.

  He was one of those skinny boys with shoulder-length hippie hair and the soft, scraggly facial hair of an adolescent. He had a long, pale face, and pale arms that stuck out shapelessly from his yellow T-shirt. It was odd how many of the people who worked on the technical side of the crew at the station were some variation on this physical type, proof, perhaps, that genetics had determined his career choice. He picked up a spoon and started to drum at the back of his hand with it.

  “Sleep well?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” he said, unable to meet her eye.

  “The air conditioner in my room was broken, so I spent the night huddled under a stack of blankets. Frankly, I was so exhausted, I probably would have fallen asleep if it had been snowing in there.” He nodded, apparently as confused as she was as to why she was telling him this. She cut off another forkful of pancakes and put them into her mouth. “There’s been too much going on lately—at work, at home.”

  He was beginning to look a little nervous, a sure sign that she was talking too much. “How’s the pancakes?” he asked.

  “Buttery. You should have some. You should have some of mine, in fact. You need them more than I do.”

  He ordered a bowl of corn flakes, a piece of pie, and a large Diet Pepsi. Her immediate impulse was to scold him for his diet, but hers wasn’t much better this morning. “You’re ready for the taping today?”

  “I guess so.” He hooked his stringy hair behind his ears. “I mean everything’s more or less ready.”

  When his food arrived, she sat back and watched him shovel in the cereal and wash it down with soda. This was one way to suppress her own rampaging appetite.

  “Have you enjoyed working on this project?” she asked.

  “I’m getting credit,” he said. “At school.”

  “Credit. Basically, that’s all anyone wants in life, credit; not quite as good as appreciation, but a reasonable alternative.” She reached back among the salt and pepper shakers and the ketchup and mustard bottles and slid the ashtray across the table. She lit a cigarette, blew the smoke above his head, and asked him if he minded her smoking, embarrassed by the realization that she was probably trying to be seductive. “You must be learning a lot from Chloe.”

  “I guess. Yeah, I am. She says she learned a lot from you.”

  Jane was touched by this. Chloe often thanked her for her help, was generous with her appreciation, but compliments always count for more when they come through a third party.

  “She likes you a lot,” he went on. “She felt terrible about that dinner show getting canceled.”

  Jane bristled and ground out her cigarette. It wasn’t that she expected Chloe wouldn’t talk about it, but it was the first time anyone outside the station had mentioned it, and it made the loss of the show more real; the story of the cancellation had a life of its own, and she couldn’t control it. “I appreciate her sympathy, but obviously, it had nothing to do with her.”

  Tim took another big swallow of his Diet Pepsi, bobbed his head, and said, “Yeah, that’s what I told her. I told her they must have had the whole cancellation planned way before they accepted her proposal for a show.”

  Jane felt her face flush. At the counter, one of the men got up and walked toward the door while the remaining two advised him to board up his windows, assuming he’d taken down the boards from the last storm. The butter and syrup and grease from the bacon were starting to congeal on her plate, and the sight of the hardening puddles of slime made her feel queasy. The subject of Chloe’s contrition seemed to have broken through Tim’s wall of silence; he was talking, or his lips were moving anyway, although Jane was having a difficult time hearing the words that were coming out. She was bargaining with herself, trying to talk herself out of this hot, senseless rage she felt toward Chloe, all tangled up with the sick feeling in her stomach. Jane hadn’t had any long-term hopes for Dinner Conversation, and some tiny piece of her—carefully tucked into a far corner of her body—was happy for Chloe. But for Christ’s sake, the least she could have done was tell her she was actually setting up meetings, writing proposals, and pitching some of the ideas she had tossed around with Jane. She could have been adult about the whole thing and come to talk with her after David had broken the bad news about Dinner Conversation. Jane motioned the waitress over to their table. “I’m done with this,” she said, indicating the mess on her plate.

  She watched the waitress gather up the dish and her silverware. For her own sake, someone should sit Chloe down and have a talk with her, tell her how to behave, how to avoid burning bridges, how to take advantage of her advantages without burying a lot of people in the process. Maybe this afternoon when they got back from Anderton’s daughter’s house, Jane would take her out for a drink and a heart-to-heart.

  The door to the coffee shop opened, and Chloe walked in.

  And then maybe, on the way home, she’d drown her. All right, so she was young, smart, beautiful; Jane had no resentment about that, or none that she couldn’t control. But Jane had considered herself Chloe’s mentor, had spent what undoubtedly amounted to hours helping her shape and refine some of her ideas.

  Waitress Lucy leaned over the table to retrieve Tim’s empty cereal bowl. “What gets me,” she said, “is that they come in and ruin Miami so you can’t even live there, and then they start marching up this way, as if we don’t have enough problems with crowding already.”

  Tim was trying to get an ice cube unstuck from the bottom of his glass, pounding the bottom of it with the side of his fist. And which of the generally shallow ideas of Chloe’s had the station grabbed at? “I’m sorry?” Jane asked the waitress. “What did you say?”

  “They don’t want to learn English, so we’ve got to spend millions putting up signs in Spanish.” Lucy had the plates and silverware expertly stacked on her arm. Jane didn’t know what crucial piece of her non sequiturial monologue she’d missed, but it sounded like some narrow-minded rant. The waitress motioned with her shoulder toward the cash register where Chloe was slowly turning the rack of postcards. “And look at her,” she said, “all done up in that costume, like a spic whore.”

  The angry diatribe Jane was composing in her head came to a screeching halt. Had she heard correctly? She couldn’t remember when or where she’d last heard a slur of this kind tossed off in what she’d assumed to be polite conversation, and the naked ugliness of it was like a blow. The last minute fell into place: ruin Miami, learning English, overcrowding. Nausea again gripped her stomach. Tim turned and waved at Chloe.

  “Sorry,” the waitress said. “I didn’t know she was a friend of yours.”

  “That isn’t the point,” Jane said.

  Tim started to jiggle his skinny legs; Jane could feel the floor under her feet shaking. “Yeah, and she’s not Puerto Rican.”

  “And that isn’t the point either!” Jane said. “Assuming it’s all right to say that in front of us, whether we know her or not! As if we were as racist as you are.”

  “Yeah. Whatever.” Lucy picked up Tim’s dirty napkin and walked off.

  Chloe clomped to the booth on her big, thick sandals and shooed Tim over on the banquette. “Have you guys heard about the storm? They might get something like half a foot of rain here.”

  Jane tossed her cigarettes and matches into her purse. She couldn’t even look Chloe directly in the face. She felt such a confusing mix of anger—for obvious reasons—and apology—for not ta
king her claims of discrimination more seriously, for not defending her more loudly, probably for being white—she didn’t dare open her mouth. She pulled a twenty dollar bill out of her purse and slapped it onto the table. Let Lucy keep the change or give it to her sick kid, assuming she really had one. “You’re not eating here,” Jane said, and slid out of the booth.

  “That’s okay. I only want coffee.”

  “You don’t want anything here. Believe me.”

  “I just want—”

  She took hold of Chloe’s upper arm—narrower than her own wrist—and gave it a tug. “I said we’re leaving. All of us. Right now. We’re not giving this coffee shop another penny.”

  She practically dragged Chloe out the door with Tim trailing behind them like a child embarrassed by his parents. “Did someone say something?” Chloe asked.

  “Yes,” Jane said. The heat and humidity slammed into her again as they walked outside. She let go of Chloe’s arm and leaned against the hot glass of the door to stabilize herself. “Someone said something. And I’m sorry, I’m very, very sorry.” Chloe opened her pretty mouth, outlined in subtle pink lipstick, about to speak some brave and wise words. “But how could you do this to me, Chloe? How?”

  “I just came in for coffee, Jane. It isn’t my fault.”

  “No,” Jane said. “It isn’t. It absolutely is not. And I know it, but I’m pissed off anyway.” She walked toward her room, digging in her bag for her keys.

  “You forgot this,” Tim called after her. “On the table.”

  She ignored him and made it to her door just in time. She needed ten minutes of privacy, that was all, ten minutes for a good, humiliating, poor-forty-year-old-me cry. Then she’d be ready to put it behind her and face the rest of the day.