Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories

by Tobias Wolff

  “You are trying to be arrested,” he said.

  “No.”

  He made a mirthless laughing sound. “Do I look like a fool?”

  “No…I don’t know. I haven’t seen you.”

  “I am not a fool. Turn right.”

  They were on Frontage Road now, heading upriver. The night was clear, and the almost full moon hung just above the old tanneries on the far bank. The moon made a broad silver path on the smooth water in the middle of the river, glimmering dully on the slabs of ice jammed up along the sides and turning Maureen’s bare hands ghostly white on the steering wheel. They looked cold; they were cold. She felt chilled all through. She turned up the heater, and within moments the car was filled with the man’s smell—ripe, musky, not unpleasant.

  “You were using alcohol,” he said.

  She waited for him to say more. His knees were angled toward her, pressed together against the console. “A little,” she said.

  He was silent. His breathing slowed, deepened, and Maureen felt obscurely grateful for this. She could feel him watching her.

  “There’s over seventy dollars in my purse,” she said. “Please just take it.”

  “Seventy dollars? That is your offer?” He laughed his unreal laugh.

  “I can get more,” she said. Her voice was small and flat—not her voice at all. She hesitated, then said, “We’ll have to go to an ATM.”

  “This is not about money. Drive. Please.”

  And so she did. This was something she could do, drive a car on Frontage Road, as she’d done for almost thirty years now. She drove past the Toll House Inn, past the bankrupt development with its unfinished, skeletal houses open to the weather, past the road to the bridge that would take her home, past the burned-out house with the trailer beside it, on past the brickworks and the quarry and the farm her tannery-fleeing grandparents had worked as tenants, where, after several years of learning the hard way, the owner sold out and the new owner found more experienced hands and sent them packing, back across the river. When she was young Maureen and her sisters had picked strawberries with their mother on different farms, and she had marveled at how her mother could chat with a woman in the next row or just look dully into the distance while her fingers briskly ransacked the plants for ripe berries as if possessed of their own eyes and purpose. At the end of a day she’d look over Maureen’s card—punched for a fraction of the flats she herself had picked—then hand it back and say, “At least that mouth of yours works.”

  Maureen drove on by the harshly lit 7-Eleven and the Christmas-tree farm and the old ferry pier where she and Francis, her ex-husband, then a sweet, shy boy, had parked after high-school dances to drink and make out; on through pale fields and brief stands of bare black trees that in summer made a green roof overhead. She knew every rise and turn, and the car took them easily, and she surrendered to the comfort of her own mastery of the road. The silent man beside her seemed to feel it too; it seemed to be holding him in a trance.

  Then he shifted, leaned forward. “Turn right up there,” he said in a low voice. “On that road, you see—that one up there, after the sign.”

  Maureen made the turn almost languidly. The side road was unplowed, covered with crusty snow that scraped against the undercarriage of the car. She hit a deep dip; the front end clanged, the wheels spun for a moment, then they caught and shot the car forward again, headlights jumping giddily. The road bent once and ended in a clearing surrounded by tall pines.

  “You drive too fast,” the man said.

  She waited, engine running, hands still on the wheel, headlights ablaze on a Park Service sign picturing the local animals and plants. The peaked roof over the sign wore a hat of snow. Then it came to Maureen that she’d been here before—a trailhead, unfamiliar at first in its winter bleakness. She had come with Katie’s scout troop to hike up to the palisades overlooking the river. The trail was historic, a route of attack for some battle in the Revolutionary War.

  The man sniffed, sniffed again. “Beer,” he said.

  “I was having a drink with friends.”

  “A drink? You stink of it. The great lady teacher!”

  That he knew she was a teacher, that he knew anything about her, snapped the almost serene numbness that had overtaken Maureen. She remembered his seeing the exam booklets. That could explain his knowledge of her work, but not his tone—the personal scorn and triumph in his discovery of her weakness, as he clearly saw it.

  A small dull pain pulsed behind her eyes, all that was left of the drink she’d had. The heat blowing into the car was making her contacts dry and scratchy. She reached over to turn it down, but he seized her wrist and pulled it back. His fingers were thin and damp. He turned the heat up again. “Leave it like this—warm,” he said, and dropped her hand.

  She almost looked at him then, but stopped herself. “Please,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “This is not about sex,” he said. “That is what you are thinking, of course. That is the American answer to everything.”

  Maureen looked ahead and said nothing. She could see the lights of cars on Frontage Road flickering between the tree trunks. Though she wasn’t that far from the road, the idea of making a run for it struck her as a demeaning absurdity—herself flailing through the drifts like some weeping, dopey, sacrificial extra in a horror movie.

  “You know nothing about our life,” he said. “Who we are. What we have had to do in this country. I was a doctor! But okay, so they won’t let me be a doctor here. I give that up. I give up the old life so my family will have this new life. My son will be a doctor, not me! Okay, I accept, that’s how it is.”

  “Where are you from?” Maureen asked, and then said, “Never mind,” hoping he wouldn’t answer. It seemed to her that the musky smell was stronger, a little sour. She kept her eyes on the Park Service sign in the headlights but she was aware of the man’s knees knocking rapidly and soundlessly together.

  “‘Never mind,’” he said. “Yes, that is exactly your way of thinking. That is exactly how the great lady teacher destroys a family. Without a thought. Never mind!”

  “But I don’t know your family.” She waited. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No, you don’t know what I’m talking about. You have already forgotten. Never mind!”

  “You have the wrong person,” Maureen said.

  “Have you told a lie, lady teacher?”

  “Please. You must have the wrong person. What you’re saying—none of it makes sense.” And because this was certainly true, because nothing he’d said had anything to do with her, Maureen felt compelled—as prelude to a serious sorting out of this whole mess—to turn and look at him. He was leaning back against the door, hunched into a puffy coat of the vivid orange color worn by highway crews. In the reflected glare of the headlights his dark eyes had a blurred, liquid brightness. Above the straight line of his eyebrows the bald dome of his head gleamed dully. He wore a short beard, a few thin patches of it reaching high on his cheeks.

  “I have the right person,” he said. “Now you will please answer me.”

  She was confused; she shook her head as if to clear it.

  “No?” he said. “The great lady teacher has never told a lie?”

  “What are you talking about? What lie?”

  A sudden glint of teeth behind the beard. “You tell me.”

  “Any lie? Ever?”

  “Ever. Any lie or cheat.”

  “What do you think? Of course I have. Who hasn’t, for God’s sake?”

  He rocked forward and jabbed his head at her. “Don’t curse! No more cursing!”

  Maureen could see his face clearly now, the full, finely molded, almost feminine lips, the long thin nose, the dark unexpected freckles across the bridge of his nose and under his eyes, vanishing into the beard. She turned away and leaned her throbbing head against the steering wheel.

  “You can lie and cheat,” he said. “That’s okay, no problem. Wh
o hasn’t? Never mind! But for others—poof! No faults allowed!”

  “This is crazy,” she murmured.

  “No, Mrs. Casey. What is crazy is to destroy a good boy’s life for nothing.”

  Her breath caught; she raised her head and looked at him.

  “Hassan makes one mistake—one mistake—and you destroy him. Understand this, most esteemed lady teacher: I will not allow it.”

  “Hassan? Hassan is your son?”

  He leaned away again, lips pursed, cheeks working out and back, out and back, like a fish.

  Hassan. She liked him, too much. He was tall and graceful and broodingly, soulfully handsome. Not very bright, Hassan, and bone idle, but with a sudden offhand charm that had amused her and distracted her from dealing firmly with him, as he well knew. He’d been getting away with murder all year, fudging on his homework, handing in essays he obviously hadn’t written, and Maureen had done nothing except warn him. She hated calling people on their offenses: her own raised voice and shaking hands, her heart pumping out righteousness, all the rituals of grievance and reproach were distasteful to her, and had always held her back, up to a point. Beyond that point she didn’t spare the lash. But she was slow to get there; her sisters had pushed her around, she’d spoiled her daughter, her husband’s gambling had brought them to the brink of ruin before her own cowardice became too shameful to bear and she began to challenge his excuses and evasions, and finally faced him down—“ran him off,” as Katie liked to say when she wanted to cut deep.

  A similar self-disgust had caught up with Maureen this morning. After months of letting Hassan slide, she’d seen him blatantly cheating during an exam, and she’d blown—really blown, surprising even herself. She’d pulled him out of class and told him in some detail how little she thought of him, then sent him home with a promise—shouted at his back—to report his cheating to Father Crespi, who would certainly expel him. Hassan had turned then and said, evenly, “Stupid cow.” And now, remembering that betrayal, the advantage he’d taken, his insulting confidence that he could cheat in front of her with impunity, she felt her fingers tighten on the steering wheel and she stared fixedly in front of her, seeing nothing.

  “Hassan!” she said.

  “I will not allow it,” he repeated.

  “Hassan has been cheating all year,” she said. “I warned him. This was the last straw.”

  “Warnings. You should give him help, not warnings. It’s hard for Hassan. He wasn’t born here, his English is not good.”

  “Hassan’s English is fine. He’s lazy and dishonest, that’s his problem. He’d rather cheat than do the work.”

  “Hassan is going to be a doctor.”

  “Sure.”

  “He will be a doctor! He will. And you won’t stop him—you, a drunken woman.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Of course. Of course. Women. All our fault, right? Bunch of stupid cows messing things up for the bulls.”

  “No! I bow before woman. Woman is the hand, the heart, the soul of her home, set there by God himself. All comes from her. All is owed to her.”

  “Now you’re quoting,” Maureen said. “Who’s your source?”

  “The home,” he said. “Not the army. Not the surgery. Not the judge’s chair, giving laws. Not the discotheque.”

  “Who’s your source?” Maureen repeated. “God, is it?”

  The man drew back. “Have some care,” he said. “God is not mocked.”

  Maureen rubbed her scratchy eyes and one of her contacts drifted out of focus. She blinked furiously until it slipped back into place. “I’m turning the heat off,” she said.

  “No. Leave it warm.”

  But she turned it off anyway, and he made no move to stop her. He looked wary, watching her from his place against the door; he looked cornered, as if she had seized him and forced him to this lonely place. The car engine was doing something strange, surging, almost dying, then surging again. The noise of the blower had masked it. Piece of shit. Another paycheck down the drain.

  “Okay, doctor,” she said. “You’ve got your parent-teacher conference. What do you want?”

  “You will not report Hassan to Mr. Crespi.”

  “Father Crespi, you mean.”

  “I call no man father but one.”

  “Wonderful. So you choose a school called St. Ignatius.”

  “I understand. This would not happen if Hassan were Catholic.”

  “Oh, please. Hassan can’t speak English, Hassan needs help, Hassan isn’t Catholic. Jesus! I’m not even Catholic.”

  He made his laughing sound. “So you choose a school called St. Ignatius. With your Jesus on the cross behind your desk—I have seen it myself at the open house. I was there! But no, she is not Catholic, not Mrs. Maureen Casey.”

  Even with the heat off, the air in the car was stale and acrid. Maureen opened her window halfway and leaned back, bathing her face in the cold draft. “That’s right,” she said. “I’ve had it with clueless men passing on orders from God.”

  “Without God, there is no foundation,” he said. “Without God, we stand on nothing.”

  “Anyway, you’re too late. I’ve already reported him.”

  “You have not. Mr. Crespi is out of town until Monday.”

  “Father Crespi. Well, I’m impressed. At least you’ve done your homework.”

  “Hassan is going to be a doctor,” he said, rubbing his hands together, gazing down at them as if expecting some visible result.

  “Look at me. Look at me. Now listen.” She held the man’s liquid eyes, held the moment, not at all displeased that what she was about to say, though true, would give him pain. “Hassan is not going to be a doctor,” she said. “Wait—just listen. Honestly, now, can you picture Hassan in medical school? Even supposing he could get in? Even supposing he can get through college at all? Think about it—Hassan in medical school. What an idea! You could make a comedy—Hassan Goes to Medical School. No, Hassan will not be a doctor. And you know it. You have always known it.” She gave that thought some room to breathe. Then she said, “So it doesn’t really matter if I report him or not, does it?”

  Still she held his eyes. His lips were working, he seemed about to say something, but no sound emerged.

  She said, “So. Let’s say I don’t play along. Let’s say I’m going to report him, which I am. What are you going to do about it? I mean, what were you thinking tonight?”

  He looked away, back down at his hands.

  “You followed me from school, right? You waited for me. You had this spot picked out. What were you going to do if I didn’t play along?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, what? Kill me?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You were going to kill me? Too much! Have you got a gun?”

  “No! I own no guns.”

  “A knife?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  Head bent, he resumed rubbing his hands together as if over a fire.

  “Stop that. What, then?”

  “Please,” he said.

  “Strangle me? With those? Stop that!” She reached over and seized his wrists. They were thin, bony. “Hey,” she said, then again, “Hey!” When at last he raised his eyes to her, she lifted his hands and pressed the palms to her neck. They were cold, even colder than the air on her face. She dropped her own hands. “Go on,” she said.

  His fingers were icy against her neck. His eyes, dark and sad, searched hers.

  “Go on,” she said softly.

  The engine surged, and he blinked as if startled and pulled his hands away. He rested them in his lap, looked at them unhappily, then put them between his knees.

  “No?” she said.

  “Mrs. Casey…”

  She waited, but that was all he said. “Tell me something,” she said. “What did your wife think of this brainstorm? Did you tell her?”

  “My wife is dead.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

&n
bsp; He shrugged.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Mrs. Casey…”

  Again she waited, then said, “What?”

  “The window? It is very cold.”

  Maureen had a mind to say no, watch him freeze, but she was getting pretty numb herself. She rolled the window up.

  “And please? The heater?”

  Maureen drove back down Frontage Road. He kept his face to the other window, his back to her. Now and then she saw his shoulders moving but he didn’t make a sound. Though she’d planned to put him out by the turnoff for her bridge, let him find his own way home from there, as she approached the intersection she couldn’t help asking where he’d left his car. He said it was in the same lot where she’d parked hers. Ah, yes. That made sense. She drove on.

  They didn’t speak again until she stopped just up from the parking lot, under a streetlight, in plain view of the drunks walking past. Even here, cocooned in the car, engine surging, Maureen could feel the heavy bass thump of the music coming from Harrigan’s.

  “Hassan will be dismissed from school?” he asked.

  “Probably. He’s spoiled, it’ll do him good in the long run. You’re the one I haven’t made up my mind about. You’re the one on the hot seat. Do you understand?”

  He bowed his head.

  “I don’t think you do. Forget the prison time you’re looking at—you haven’t even said you’re sorry. I said it, about your wife, which makes me the only one who’s used that word tonight. Which strikes me as pretty damned ridiculous, given the circumstances.”

  “But I am. I am sorry.”

  “Yeah—we’ll see. One thing, though. Suppose I’d promised not to report Hassan. Whatever made you think I’d keep my word?”

  He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and took out a white book and laid it on the dashboard. Maureen picked it up. It was a Bible, a girl’s Bible bound in imitation leather with gilt lettering on the cover. “You would swear,” he said. “Like in court, to the judge.”

  Maureen opened it, riffled the thin, filmy pages. “Where did you get this?”

  “Goodwill.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “You really thought you could save him.”