City of Boys (31 page)

—Who would eat them? she said. —Who would eat boiled peanuts?

—They’re not to
eat
, he said. —That’s not the point. He held up the can. —Look at them. He glanced unhappily at the picture on the label, then gazed around at the rest stop. After a moment he seemed to draw enthusiasm from the familiar glazed faces of children, the grim tight men. —It’s a gag, he said. —It’s like a gag gift.

—Well, she said, turning away, —let’s go.

She still doesn’t know what bothered her about the peanuts; it was just a small joke, but now the can sits on the seat between them, a bright reminder of this most recent failure. There is something pathetic about the jauntiness of the label, and the can rolls with the pitch of the car whenever David takes a sudden swerve to pass another station wagon full of tired parents and unhappy children.

Anne wants to be sure to get her sister alone later and explain that she had nothing to do with the peanuts, that they were David’s idea. You know how men are, she’ll say, waving her hand, and Nancy will nod distractedly, leaving the peanuts on the counter until David and Anne are gone; then she will put them in a cabinet, where, over the years, they will gradually be pushed to the back, making way for cans and boxes of real food, until one day Nancy will come upon them as she cleans her cupboards and wonder what on earth possessed her to buy a can of boiled peanuts. She’ll blame it on her husband or decide one of her children must have begged her for them; by then she will have forgotten all about David, but Anne is determined to remember every detail. She wishes she could keep the peanuts, take them back home with her, carry them around. Cincinnati, she thinks, Cleveland, Columbus.

The car jerks suddenly, and Anne opens her eyes to see David gazing anxiously at an exit ahead, but when he discerns that there is no rest area off the highway, he picks up speed again. Anne leans her head on her elbow and lets the wind whip her hair across her face. It’s been in the nineties all day, and even the wind that passes through the car is breathless and heavy. Her skin feels like a layer of plastic wrapped around her body, but David refuses to run his air conditioner; there’s something wrong with it, he says, and he doesn’t want to take the chance of overheating the car in this weather, but she suspects him of trying to cut costs, since this trip is, after all, for her, with nothing much in it for him other than the ride, something he calls her attention to every now and then.

—You know, he’ll say, —this isn’t exactly how
I
would choose to spend this weekend. But then, after his point has been made, he looks happily back at the road ahead or the greenish fields to either side, pleased with what a good sport he is, how helpful he has been. The purpose of their trip is to pick up several pieces of furniture–a table, some chairs, a secretary–that Nancy has been keeping since their parents moved to a retirement center in Florida. Anne has no real need for the furniture–she already has too many things in her small apartment–but lately Nancy has referred to it more frequently in her letters, finally almost insisting that Anne come and retrieve it. The furniture has become a kind of theme in letters that have grown increasingly bland, empty of all but a kind of brittle newsiness, little facts about the house, her children, her husband Andy. Any break in the clutter of minutiae is bridged with cryptic remarks, oblique suggestions that things are not quite right, grim little homilies apropos of nothing.

—
Well, what goes around comes around
, Nancy will write,
but then it is back to the report cards, the lawn, a store clerk’s rudeness.

Anne hasn’t seen Nancy for almost three years, and what limited sense Anne has of her life comes from her letters and the Christmas photographs of Andy, Nancy, and their three children. Anne can hardly keep the names and ages of the children straight, and they all look alike, with blond hair and serious, composed faces. They look like no one in Anne’s family, but neither do they resemble Andy, who is tall, with a sharp bitter face that grows more closed with each picture. Before she and David left, Anne found the most recent photograph in order to remember the faces and names of the children. In this picture, Nancy’s hair is tied back sloppily and she gives the impression of gazing off into space, though, like the others, she is looking stonily into the camera; her arms are wrapped around her sides, and her children squat in a little line in front of her. Nancy writes about them often, but every sentence seems punctuated by a heavy sigh: this one doesn’t sleep well in the summer, that one needs glasses or has to go to the doctor again, and they all need shoes all the time. Anne memorized the children’s names and ages and put the picture back in a drawer, but now all she can remember is that Jimmy is nine.

—Hey, David says, but she ignores him and tries to recall the other two children’s names.

—Hey, he says again, and she moves her head away from the window. Her skin feels puffy from the heat and wind.

—What? he says. —Were you asleep? He glances at her, then back to the road, and she shakes her head.

—You know, he says, —it’s kind of boring, just driving like this. This trip is a lot longer than I thought it would be.

He looks down at the odometer and she wonders if he is keeping track of the mileage; she knows it would not occur
to him to ask her to pay for the miles traveled, but it bothers her that he might be keeping track–that when he thinks back on this trip, he might remember it as the number of miles he put on his car for her.

—It wouldn’t seem so long if we had air conditioning, she says as a truck pulls up beside them on the left. David steps on the gas, shooting ahead, then slides into the left lane, in front of the truck. He looks in the rearview mirror and smiles; it is a minor victory, but it restores his good mood and he settles back in his seat.

This annoys Anne, this easy equanimity; she likes to think it betrays a lack of depth, and most of the time she feels secure in this perception, but sometimes, late at night when she wakes and he is sleeping, she is struck by the uneasy thought that perhaps it is she who is missing something, that her impatience with David is a failure of imagination on her part. She tries now to watch him surreptitiously, but he glances over and offers an uncomplicated smile, his mild resentment already forgotten. She looks away. His friendly mood won’t stop her, she tells herself; it is over, and she is going to end it. David presses on the gas, and they surge forward into a future apart, a future she saw as far back as Columbus, perhaps even Cincinnati. In the bright light of such a future, she can see that there is something sweet about David, something nearly likeable; even the peanuts provoke a slight fondness in her, and she smiles and leans her head back to plan the end of their affair.

By the time they are approaching Marion, where Nancy lives, Anne has gone over their breakup so many times–what she will say, how she will say it, how David will look, and how she will comfort him–that she feels pleased and settled, as though something has already been agreed upon between them, and their years together, which have been unexciting and untroubled, end in a gloriously friendly burst
of sympathy. Anne pulls the visor down to look in the mirror, but nothing is changed, she is still the same: her hair, which she wore up to keep neat, looks messy and dirty, and the shirt she thought would travel well is wet and rumpled. She wonders how she will look to her sister and to three children who have not seen her since they were toddlers. Oh, she will say to each of them, you’ve gotten so tall. She practices a smile to go along with this, the mild smile of an aunt, with her eyebrows raised, but in the mirror it looks fake and comical, so she lowers her brows, but the effect is slightly demonic.

—What are you doing? David asks. —Did you get something in your eye?

Anne pushes the visor up. —Do you think we could have some air conditioning for the rest of the drive? she says.

David takes a quick look at the dashboard panel. —I don’t think so, he says. —I don’t want to put too much stress on the engine. What if it overheats? We’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere. He glances in the rearview mirror. —After all, he says, and looks at her earnestly, —this isn’t exactly a pleasure trip for me, you know.

She forces a smile; it is moments like these, she tells herself, that are forcing her to leave him, small moments that in themselves are only remotely irritating, but that all together add up to something large and impossible. Soon they won’t be lovers anymore, she reminds herself; in fact, since Cincinnati–and she is nearly certain it was Cincinnati–it is almost as if they are already no longer lovers. She closes her eyes, and until he asks her for directions, she imagines her life without him. In a perfect quiet room, she will sit by the window, and not once will he wander by and ask her what she is doing, or sit down on the couch opposite her and smile, wondering what they will do next. These are small things, she knows that, but even so, when she thinks of a
life without him, the days and weeks seem to stretch out like a big clean icy block of time, undisturbed by any sound or voice or presence other than her own.

When they arrive in Marion, David looks distastefully around at the stretch of strip malls and fast-food places on the edge of town; Anne was born here, and lived here until she left for college. She has always hated it, but it seems worse even than she remembers, a huge complicated garden of shiny glass and metal huts.

—You were born here? David asks. —No wonder you never want to come back.

He is from Oregon, and his tone, when he speaks of it to Anne, is both wistful and patronizing, as if anyone from the Midwest could never quite understand the magic of such a place. Although Anne herself feels oppressed by the dozens of unnecessary restaurants, the stacks of light-colored brick apartment buildings with tiny terraces stuck to the sides, the little square gas station/food marts evenly spaced a block apart on each corner, she feels she must defend it from him before he begins to compare it to Portland.

—It’s not so bad. The people are very down-to-earth, she says, although in fact she remembers them as generally not very good-tempered. She moved away as soon as she could, and she has always been surprised at Nancy’s decision to settle here.

David shakes his head. —There are a lot of fast-food places, he says. —In Portland you don’t see that many fast-food places. He glances at her. —Really, he says. —It’s mostly just diners and things. Real food.

A mile or so into town, they pass a small carnival set up in the scrabbly lot next to a discount store. There are only a few people wandering through the carnival, and from the car the rides look rickety and cheap.

—Look, he says. —Even the circus is tacky.

—I don’t see, Anne says, —how someone who’s bringing boiled peanuts as a hostess gift can call anything tacky. Though she meant to say it lightly, she can hear the reproof in her tone, and he looks at her in surprise.

—Hey, he says seriously, —it’s a joke. Don’t you get it?

—Oh sure, she says, and tries out the smile she practiced for the children. —Turn here.

For the rest of the way, she guides him through the flat wide streets, past houses built according to the same blueprint, all sitting nakedly in the bright centers of close-cut lawns that sprout trees still years too young to cast any shade.

When Nancy opens the door, Anne looks at her closely for some sign of the age and unhappiness that have seeped into her letters, but she looks unchanged by the years and her life, and she still possesses the kind of untouched, untroubled beauty that always impressed the men Anne introduced to her. David steps back, glancing at Anne, and looks down at the can of peanuts, then slides it down his thigh, almost out of sight.

His face changes when they step inside the house. There seems not to be a single uncovered surface in the room: piles of folded clothes rise from chairs; records lean against the legs of furniture; books and magazines and boxes are stacked carefully on tables and against walls. David shoots Anne a look as if to ask why she didn’t tell him about this, but she turns her head; she supposes she should have mentioned it, though this is how Nancy has always lived. Even as a child, rather than put her clothes into her drawers, she folded them neatly and left them in piles around her bed, as if she could not bear to lose sight of the things she owned.

The precariousness of the living room makes Anne want to stand in a corner and hold her breath, but Nancy glides
through it easily. When she turns, she seems surprised to see them still standing at the doorway, and she comes back. —So you’re David, she says, as though Anne has told her all about him.

David flushes at the attention, looks at Anne, and finally holds the can of peanuts out to Nancy. —Here, he says, looking down at the can. —We brought you these.

Nancy takes the peanuts, reads the label, and nods.

—Boiled peanuts, she says. —I’ve heard of them.

She turns away. —Kids, she calls, and almost immediately the door to the kitchen is filled by three children, who stare at Anne and David without curiosity. Their faces are familiar to Anne, but oddly so, the way letters jumbled randomly together resemble words. She tries to recall names and ages; the oldest is Jimmy, and the youngest is the girl, Jenny, she thinks. She has forgotten the name of the middle one. When Nancy introduces the children to David, Anne wonders what to do; as an aunt, she supposes, she should bend down and hug them, but as a niece and nephews, it seems that they should have run happily to her in order to be hugged. They all seem like little strangers, so she smiles brightly.

—Well, you’ve all certainly grown, she says. Nancy looks somewhat surprised, and gazes at them as if in fact they have not grown at all, then turns back to Anne.

—Yes, she says, —I suppose they have. Their feet have, that’s for sure.

The children wait patiently at the door until Nancy says, —Okay, and as a unit, they turn and leave.

—Well, Nancy says, —Andy’s not here. He’s going to pick up some steaks on his way home, though. For dinner. She looks down at the can of peanuts in her hand, as if she is surprised to find it still there. —Do you want a Coke? she asks David, but before he answers, she takes Anne’s elbow. —Come on, she says, —we’ll get you one. You sit down,
she tells David, and a kind of dismayed panic comes into his face as he looks around for a seat secure enough not to bring a stack of things down on his head.