20 (36 page)

They take the dark blue Crown Victoria, purchased with money from Marilyn's father's estate. It's four years old, but looks brand new, and Chapin delights in the feel of the wheel in his hand, the way the engine responds to the slightest pressure on the gas. They take the narrow two-lane road to the restaurant, the one that winds southwest through the forest preserve. The night is damp, the road like satin; the smell of the pine trees hits them like a jolt of pure oxygen.

“I'm glad to see you doing this,” she says.

Chapin doesn't take his eyes from the road. “Like riding a bicycle,” he says. “I thought I'd forgotten.”

“Feels all right?”

Chapin nods.

Marilyn settles back and closes her eyes. “Things are getting better,” she says. “I know it.”

Chapin's eyes are riveted on the road. He senses the depth of darkness to his left but dares not look into it.

“Were you working this morning?” Marilyn says.

“Sort of. Looking over some old starts.”

“That's great.”

“What's so great about it?”

She smiles. It's an indulgent smile. Chapin hates the triumph he sees in her face. Doesn't she know that the question is still open? The ancient, cosmic question of chicken and egg. Was Chapin's character the causal egg, the “accident” a revelation of sorts? In that case, the sour downward spiral that brought him here was, in classical terms, inevitable.

“What about the novel?”

“I've got pieces,” Chapin says. “Some of them pretty good, but…”

On the other hand: wasn't he just like everyone else until then? Promising, compromised, flawed. In that case, killing an old woman, lugging pudding boxes back to her flat, was impersonal, circumstantial, truly an accident, and in that case,…

“So?”

“I can't sort it out, I guess.”

Unjust.

“Not true,” Marilyn says. “You ‘sorted out' that magazine piece in—what was it?—three days?”

“How I spent my summer vacation.”

“You made some very clever observations.”

“Dreck,” he says.

“Why do you insist…”

“What?”

Marilyn says nothing.

“You think everything can be fixed,” he says.

“If you want it fixed, yes, I do.”

The road has modulated into a series of tricky curves, poorly banked so that Chapin has to fight the wheel for control. They seem to come up faster than he expects.

“Slow down,” she says.

The woods close in. Only six o'clock, and yet a smoky blue-green darkness hovers around them.

“I'm thinking omelet,” Chapin says.

The curves get tighter. They're like a puzzle with no clues. You have to guess the way the road wants to go.

Marilyn shifts in her seat. “Want me to drive?”

Chapin feels he is getting the hang of it. The trick is to accelerate through the curves.

“There's a great one-liner,” Chapin says. “Groucho Marx, I think.”

“Watch the road.”

“‘She criticized my apartment, so I knocked her flat.'”

“Let me drive.” Marilyn says. “Really.”

“Get it? ‘Knocked her flat.'”

“Oh, for God's sake, David, let it go.”

Chapin rounds a corner, and the landscape opens out. The pine trees fall away on either side, and the road runs straight, perhaps forever, toward the sun. Chapin is lost in the brilliance. It is finally too much. Chapin throws his hands up, lets go of the wheel.

Suddenly the windshield is spattered with shadows. Someone screams as the car jolts down an embankment, through a tangle of weeds. The engine quits. The wheels sink in mud, and the car stops.

Chapin is out and, oddly gleeful, circles the car, dancing. The crash has started a scatter of birds that whispers up from the grass. They lift and fan out across the sky, released.

Marilyn is still facing forward, but when Chapin arrives at the passenger window, she turns. And, finally, the look on her face is one he has never seen before.

“Are you all right?” she says.

Chapin leans in close and whispers: “You said, ‘Let go.'”

————

Marilyn's car is a practical white Ford Escort. It stands at the gate with the doors open. A small blue train case and a matching Pullman lay on the back seat.

“Well, that's everything,” she says.

He says nothing.

“Unless…”

Chapin can't meet her eyes, won't meet her eyes. He has to hold out just a little bit longer.

“I hadn't realized,” she says. “I'm sorry.”

Seconds pass. Chapin, half-turned away from her, his hands in his pockets, feels her holding her breath. There is a perfectly round bruise over her right eyebrow, like a shadow, oddly beautiful. Chapin feels her shift her weight and pretends to notice something on the horizon. Of course, there is nothing there, but it kills any impulse she might have had to make some sort of gesture, to reach out and touch him.

“We don't have to do this,” she says.

He turns. He faces her. He looks her in the eye and says, as though in casual conversation, “Do what?”

————

“So. Things are improving.”

The therapist has cut her hair. She looks younger, happier somehow. Chapin wants to support her in the illusion that he has been “helped.”

“Definitely.”

“I'm so glad.”

They stare at one another. Does she like daiquiris?

“I know you haven't been taking your medication.” There is no accusation in her voice. “Any particular reason?” she says.

Chapin shrugs. There are a thousand reasons. And, there is, finally, no reason at all.

“I killed someone.”

He thinks she may want to argue about the verb. Usually she corrects him: “I was responsible for someone's death.” But this time she merely nods her head. “An old woman, you told me.”

“Her, too.”

————

The beach house is empty, filled with Marilyn's things. Chapin can barely endure it. Daiquiri is still available. She telephones now, now that Chapin's alone, and one day he invites her over, a first. She arrives with all the eagerness of a college girl out on a blind date and carries a grocery bag with a loaf of French bread and a stalk of celery sticking out of the top.

“I thought we'd cook.”

“Fine.”

She stands there. “So? Where's the kitchen?”

Chapin shakes his head like a man awaking from a long, convoluted dream. “Sorry. It's this way.”

He leads her back through the narrow hallway, takes the bag from her hands, and puts it on the countertop.

“Drink?” he says.

“Sure.”

He opens the freezer for ice, fills two glasses.

“Scotch?” she says, already resisting.

“Just try it.”

“I don't know.”

She takes a sip and wrinkles her nose. “Ugh,” she says. “It's bitter.”

“Yes, a little. You get used to it.”

Lucy Honig

She had been out of class for three or four days and he had missed her: the dry wisecracks, those bright green eyes letting him know with the slightest narrowing or shift if he had stopped making sense. When he saw her in the hallway, finally, before first-period bell, he folded his big arms across his chest. All the ninth graders called him Mr. Clean behind his back, and he knew he looked like the character who advertised the cleanser, with his massive shoulders, the exaggerated athletic build, even the smooth-topped head. He was not altogether bald yet, but getting there, too soon. He folded his arms across his chest and made his voice even gruffer than usual. “Hey, you, kid! Where've you been? You owe me a book report!”

Her eyes flashed in panic and her face began to crumble, tears brimming.

“Hey,” he said softly, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“Didn't they tell you?” she asked.

“
What?
”

She sighed, then whispered: “My father died. Last Wednesday.”

“Oh, Jesus.” He hugged her, but she accepted the hug as if she were standing there alone. Nobody had told him. He became furious.
His
star, and no one told him. Goddamn principal, goddamn jerks.

“El, I am so so sorry.”

“Not
here
,” she groaned, reacting not to his words but to the feeling in them, an intensity that she more than matched with the sudden, deep adult intimacy of her voice. “I feel like I've been gone a hundred years,” she said. She swung her head back so that her dark, stringy hair swept over her shoulders. “Here, I have it here, the book report.”

“Oh, Ellen, no! I didn't mean—”

She fumbled in her bookbag and retrieved the papers, folded and slightly soiled. “Here.” She handed them to him.

He touched her shoulder again. “You idiot,” he said. He opened up the folded pages. “Oh, no.” She had picked Faulkner, read As
I Lay Dying
. The irony had already registered fully in her eyes when he glanced back at her: a momentary flicker of her humor.

“I'd read it just before. I didn't want to fall behind. Yesterday I wrote it up. It's not very good.”

“Who cares,” he said. “How's your mother?”

She shook her head no. “It was rough.” The irony was gone now, leaving just the tiredness and distress in that thin little fifteen-year-old, smarter-than-anybody face. It was creased and lined, as if she had been sleeping on a damp, wrinkled pillow. She looked down at her feet.

“Come talk,” he said.

————

When she ran it was like flying, and the driveway was not long enough, she ran along the highway to the dirt road that went up toward the Kozaks and the Sayer farm. Fields of young alfalfa spread out on either side. When she came to the steep hill downward, she took it with arms stretched out, banking like wings, and hurtled down faster and faster, her feet barely touching the ground. She created a whoosh! of a breeze around her, and she became the breeze around her: she and the air merged in the sheer speed of flight. And if there was a wind, a strong wind just before an evening rain—oh,
how she could fly through it, running with all her might, and then she
was
the wind, she dissolved into millions of molecules of motion, pure motion. How wonderful she felt when she flew!

But when she stopped, the things around her collected, drew together into a wall: the trees and the house, the grass and the sky arranged themselves into an impenetrable layer at one grasp beyond her. Everything was flat, as if the world hung before her on one straight, solid curtain. And weaving in and out of it as they went through the motions of a day, were her sister, the sleepwalker, and her mother in a new, awful silence, flat as glass.

————

At five-thirty in the morning the light was fine and gentle and cool, slanting though the pines in pale strands. He took the trail at a medium jog, pacing himself steadily as he went along the ravine, down to the stream, which was swollen brown with springtime torrents, across the bridge, and, after the sixth mile, back up to the main road. Charlie Marshall passed in the pickup at the usual spot, exactly halfway between the Shell station, shut tight, and the Matthews' barking mongrel. He waved at Charlie, then picked up speed and felt the expansion in all the muscles of his thighs. He was in the full power of his youth, not yet thirty, and yet he was—had always been, it seemed—haunted by the specter of decay and immobility. Something he'd picked up in books, his wife insisted: his family all lived robustly until their quick and late and quiet deaths. He ran and lifted weights, built himself stronger, a human fortress, immense and invulnerable.

In the faculty lunchroom, Ginny Firth, the girls' gym teacher, sat beside him, a big, bony, smart lady. His wife said Ginny Firth liked women. He didn't know; he didn't care; he liked Ginny. She leaned over to him and said, “Are you training her?”

“Who? What?”

She laughed, her smile reaching up to immense cheekbones. “Ellen Frisch. She's my best runner. For all these years, completely unexceptional in phys ed. And suddenly she's winning every race, I mean it,
every
race.”

————

“I hear you're running,” he said. She sat on top of a desk in the front row of the empty classroom, swinging her feet, her face still marred by those
strange wrinkles. He wondered if all the thinking was doing it, the intensity of her thoughts somehow engraving her flesh.

“Just in the driveway. Down a back road,” she said.

“How far?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. Not very. But I go fast.”

“Better not take it too—” He stopped, watching her face, and saw that she did not simply run. Her running was something else. Whatever it was, the rules of fitness would not apply.

“I run like the wind,” she said, and then she giggled. “Sometimes…it's like I'm not even there. The
me
part of me, that voice.”

“Is that what you want?”

She blushed. “Yes.” She spent a minute thinking, the colors of her thoughts rising and falling in her cheeks as she swung her feet, her wrinkled face wrinkling more.

“It's a release,” she said finally.

He almost said, “Like sex,” but stopped, remembering she was a child.

“If I could believe in God,” she said, “it would all be easier.”

“Well hell, El, don't expect
me
to tell you to.” He scowled, to match the gruffness of his tone. “You know I'm a son-of-a-bitch atheist.”

“It
would
be easier,” she said again.

“Yeah, and then you'd be like them,” he said.

“Them!” she cried. “
God
forbid!”

————

When she waited for the school bus, standing in the shelter of her father's vegetable stand, Mr. Spinner went by in the little gray Volkswagen and waved. She had learned the sound of his car, the putter of the Bug's engine. Even from inside the house, upstairs, doors closed, she could tell when he was going by and picture his massive frame filling the tiny cab.

Putt-putt-putt. In the afternoon when she had no reason to be there, she hid in the shadow of the stand and watched the small gray car toodle past, a wind-up toy, filled with
him
. She wished he would see her and stop, but she stayed hidden, listening to the sound of him trail off, grow fainter as he rounded the hill, and fade away completely in the wind. Then she turned and ran as fast as she could, back down the driveway to the house.

————

He gave a groan and slowly, very slowly, lowered the last barbell. Sweat oozed down his limbs, glistening on the bulge of muscles. His big arms trembled. “Shit!” he said gruffly to himself. From the doorway of the cellar room, his wife laughed. He spun around and aimed a frown at her. “Watchit!” he said fiercely. She stuck her tongue out, laughed, and disappeared up the stairs.

————

Her father walked down the driveway from the stand. He stopped beside the row of bushel baskets, knelt down, and examined the tomatoes. She walked toward him from the house, calling out. He looked in her direction but did not seem to see. She called out again. He turned and walked away and she followed, breaking into a run. But she never got near him. She awoke.

She sat on top of the desk, dangling her legs. She wore white socks, sneakers, a heavy, rough-textured pleated skirt—not a summer skirt, though it was the first week of June. “And I feel like it's so completely
real
,” she said, looking down into her lap. “Each time I have the dream, I know he's alive. There's no question. And it's so un
fair
!” Her voice rose angrily.

He sat and listened. She turned her face toward him, the anger in it now directed at him. Livid red. “He wasn't even nice to us most of the time, you know.”

“I didn't know, no.”

“He yelled and hollered. No matter what we did, it was wrong. Once a friend of mine came over and I was so embarrassed—he threw a fit at my sister for getting eighties instead of nineties on her report card. It was awful. I didn't know why he was like that. But my friend was there, I had to explain it, so she wouldn't think I had a monster for a father. So I said, ‘He's a sick man. He's had a bad heart ever since he was a kid. He's so angry about always being sick, sometimes he blows up at the rest of us for no reason.'” She paused, biting her lip. “And as soon as I said it, I knew I was right, or near enough. And after that it was different. I could talk to him.”

She stared down at her lap again. He waited.

“The last few months,” she said slowly, “we talked. A lot. I came home from school and told him about my day. He listened.” She stopped
and swung her legs in that ungainly way, her stringy hair hanging about her eyes.

“After the funeral,” she said, “I just wanted to tell him about the funeral.”

————

The uncles decided the girls should run the stand that summer—his stand, his business, an enterprise only
his
heart and soul had ever entered; they had always detested helping there. They fought their uncles, but with such listlessness they had no chance of winning. And Muriel still barely spoke; her fight was gone. She worked all week in town. On the weekends she went to market, bought the produce. Ellen and Jackie dragged themselves out in the mornings, sometimes close to noon, and like zombies they arranged the baskets of tomatoes, beans, and squash, the mounds of sweet corn and heaps of melons, and the boxes of maple-sugar candy left from the previous year, now aged to a granular pallor. The shelves were barely covered: a match to the girls' half-heartedness.

She hated customers. She hated having to be polite or answer questions or make change. Jackie went to summer school each afternoon, and Ellen sat in the little Shaker rocking chair with a book in her lap. The traffic whizzed by, cars and trucks all of one flat piece with the gray asphalt. “Don't stop, don't stop.” She repeated the incantation if cars slowed down. Across the road, at the motel but as near to her as the single dimension of the road, Nelson the hired man whistled as he slowly pushed the laundry cart from one room to the next. Sometimes he waved; she waved back.

And then one day that woman stopped, the silver-haired woman with the jangling bracelets who came every year on her way from New York City to Saratoga. Years ago she had given Ellen a wooden doll that Ellen had cherished. And now, with her make-up heavy, perfume strong and foreign, she grabbed at baskets of cherries and peaches, she made a pile on the counter with zucchini, peppers, onions, and corn. “Every year! What would I do without it! You have no idea what a relief it is…yes, yes, to leave all that behind. And the humidity! You lucky child, here in the fresh air!” She made a big fuss, chattering without stop, until finally she bit her lip so that the dark lipstick cracked suddenly to a pale white patch, and peered sharply at Ellen. “Now. Where's that father of yours?”

Ellen tried to speak, but it was as if a hard plug of metal blocked her throat. To get the words out, the metal plug had to be pushed. The city woman frowned at her, fading into the flat, pale wall of road, motel, sky. Everything dimmed. She tried to remember the wooden doll, tried to unblock her throat. But the metal stayed. Everything dimmed more. Finally she spoke. “He died.” The words crashed into the air, and she felt a rapid spinning. The woman from New York cried out, “Oh, my
dear
!” and caught her.

————

Sometimes when he drove by he saw her at the stand, that tumbledown shack with the peeling gray paint. She waited on a customer, her shoulders drooping, or sat in the back where it was shady. And sometimes he saw the flash of movement in the driveway, the dash of her quick sprints. She seemed utterly alone. But because it was summertime and school was off and nothing seemed amiss, he did not think to stop, but waved and putt-putt-putted his way up the road, around the hill, and home.

————

She dove into the pool and swam underwater in strong, steady frog strokes just inches from the bottom and all the way down the length of the pool. Then she did a quick turn, kicking off from the rough concrete side, and swam back, still deep underwater, still pushing out with strong frog strokes, lost in the water's caress. She forgot air, she forgot the limits of her lungs, she forgot the limits of her skin, which now interjoined with water. And she felt the ecstasy of being nothing but water and motion, the pure push through blue space, the stretch and reach of her arms now an energy that seemed to come as much from outside of herself as within, and the power in her legs, kicking out, the very same as the power of the water's resistance. She reached the other end and turned, propelling herself off the concrete with the strong agreement between her knees and the soles of her feet. But then: she had pushed upward and her head surfaced, and she breathed in the hot air, gasping like a fish that did not want air, and this air in her lungs and on her shoulders and around her face seemed to pull her body and mind into separate parts again. She grabbed onto the side of the pool and looked around. The road shimmered with heat, and across it was the gray stand, dwarfed by ancient pines. And everything composed a
flat canvas, one pale surface, color and depth gone. She put her hand out to touch it, but it was not there to touch. She filled her lungs, plunged under the cool water again, and swam down, down to the safety of her own dispersion.