Continental Drift (13 page)

The morning George Dill returns to work, he comes accompanied by his daughter. Bob has already opened the store and is sweeping the floor with a push broom, when he looks up and sees the tomato red Plymouth drive into the lot, Marguerite at the wheel. Her father, wearing his usual blue cap, white short-sleeved shirt and khaki trousers, looks small and fragile next to the woman, as if he were her child and she were driving him to school. Bob quickly puts the broom behind the stockroom door and walks to the cash register, pulls out his pen and order book and bends over the book, dropping deeply into the intricacies of the retail liquor business.

The woman enters first, wearing a nurse’s uniform with a light, pale blue cardigan sweater over it. “Well,” Bob says, “you’re safely back. That’s good.”

“We are.” She smiles lightly. Her dark brown face shows her fatigue. She has ashen circles under her eyes, and when she smiles, the skin over her high cheekbones tightens.

“I’ve missed you, George,” Bob says heartily. “You never realize how much you need someone until they take a vacation. ’Course, I know this wasn’t a vacation.”

“No, Mistah Bob, it weren’t no vacation. Dead and buried and resurrected and up in the Kingdom of Heaven now …” George says, his voice trailing off, his gaze starting to wander across the store.

“Daddy wants to come back to work right off, Mister Dubois. He’s not really … right yet, you know, but I thought, if it was fine with you, that it would be good for him to come back to work, maybe get his mind off his brother that way.” She ends her sentences with a lilt, a slight upturning of tone, so that she seems to be asking a question, a question that Bob feels compelled to hasten to answer.

“Oh, yes, sure, of course. I understand. Beautiful. Let him get right back to work. Be good for him. George,” he says, “the broom’s back by the stockroom door. You might’s well take over where you left off.”

The woman watches her father hurry off, her expression an odd mixture, odd to Bob, of relief and irritation. Bob has never seen an attractive black woman up close before. That is, he’s never really looked into her eyes, never studied the curve of her lips and let his gaze fall along her long, tense throat. He’s never allowed himself the pleasure, never subjected himself to the threat, of her beauty. In the past, whenever he’s happened to find himself standing next to an attractive young black woman in line at the supermarket, for instance, or facing one of the two black women tellers at the bank in town or a customer, a housewife from the project asking for a six-pack of Colt 45, he’s either dimmed his gaze or else has turned away altogether, embarrassed and frightened.

He hasn’t been aware of that, of course, until now, when he unexpectedly finds himself staring at Marguerite, examining her boldly but nonetheless innocently, for at last his curiosity has overcome his fear and at this moment, but only for this moment, he has not yet made himself sufficiently familiar with her darkness to begin to long only for her, to touch and hold her, lick and kiss her, to lie down and fuck her and her alone and not just any tall, slender, attractive black-skinned woman, which is the way it has been until this moment, impersonal, abstract, pornographic and racist. Here I am on a white shag carpet fucking a beautiful black woman, me, Bob Dubois, for God’s sake, pale and hairy, muscles tensed, cock swollen, red, stiff, while the beautiful, smooth-skinned black woman shakes her round buttocks in my face and peers back at me and offers me some more of her marijuana cigarette.

George has started sweeping in the far corner of the store, out of sight beyond the head-high shelves of gallon jugs of cheap wine, and the woman turns back to Bob. “I think I’ll be picking him up and leaving him off for a while,” she says thoughtfully, biting her lower
lip with large, widely spaced upper teeth. “He’s still not … like he was yet. I’m a little worried about his getting the right bus home and all, you know? And getting off at the right stop? You know?”

“Oh, sure, sure, I understand. I mean, it’s a hell of a shock to his whole system, probably.” Bob feels himself stumbling after the words he wants to say. He wants to be both suave and consoling, as reassuring as he is seductive, but he knows he sounds instead like a man who’s busy and hasn’t quite heard what’s been told to him.

“So … you’re a nurse,” he finally says. Her hair, cut in a short, loose Afro, is black and shiny and prematurely flecked with gray.

“Yes, I work for three doctors, out at the Westway Clinic.”

“Ah,” Bob says, as if gaining an insight.

“You know it? You live out there in Auburndale?”

“No, no. It’s just … that’s a nice job, a nurse in a clinic. Better than a hospital, right?”

“Better hours. But that’s about all,” she says. Then, “You got a nice smile, you know that?”

“Ah,” Bob says again. Suddenly he asks her, “Are you married? I mean, George never mentions a son-in-law. Only you. He talks about you a lot. So I wondered …” Her skin is clear, unblemished and roan-colored, dark brown with a slight reddish tinge brought forward, Bob notices, by lipstick and the makeup on her cheeks. She’s wearing perfume, lilac, and when he sniffs for more of it, he looks at her nose, broad, symmetrical, functional. A true nose, he thinks. Not a large, pointy, phony nose like his, not a dog’s nose. Elaine’s nose he hasn’t looked at for years, although he used to wonder at it, because it was so perfectly shaped, or so it seemed to him then—slightly curved, short and narrow, giving to her small face the look of a fierce bird, like a falcon or hawk—but now he can’t recall it. His memory is only of having paid attention to something that has disappeared, swallowed by her eyes, so that now, when he looks at his wife’s face or remembers it, all he sees is the center of her eyes, as if her face has somehow gradually become invisible without his ever having noticed until after it was gone, lost to him, he is sure, forever.

Marguerite answers his question as directly as he asked it, as if she is used to having white men she barely knows ask her if she is married. She was, she tells him, but not now, not for over five years. Her husband was in the air force and stationed here at Shure. “But,” she says, shrugging, “that didn’t work out so good. But I liked it here, and I had a better job than the one I used to have in Macon, so I stayed. And the next year my mama died and Daddy came down.”

“It doesn’t make sense, your being alone,” Bob says with great seriousness.

She laughs. “Yes, it does, Mister Dubois …”

“Bob.”

“Okay, Bob. Yes, it does make sense! A lot of sense.” Then, turning to leave, she smiles and says, “Besides, I’m not alone, you know.”

“You’re not? I thought …” He doesn’t know what he thought.

“I got my daddy!” she calls from the door. Then, to the old man, “Bye, honey! I’ll pick you up at five, okay? You remember, now, y’ hear?” And then she is gone, leaving Bob Dubois standing at the cash register, his heart thumping, head abuzz, hands, he suddenly notices, wet with sweat.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Bob looks forward to seeing Marguerite twice, in the morning when she brings her father to work and again in the late afternoon when she picks him up. She could more easily drop the old man off in the morning, and later, sitting in her car outside, signal with the horn for him to come out, but she doesn’t. She gets out of the car and comes into the store and talks with Bob. Bob believes she does this because she is falling in love with him. He believes this because he thinks he is falling in love with her, and just as his days have now taken on an unexpected yet longed-for significance, at least his Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays have, so, too, he believes, have her days, once tedious and bland as boiled potatoes, now come to seem intense, shapely, piquant.

At home, Bob merely waits for time to pass. He withdraws from his nightly conversations with Elaine, leaves off, or treats as a chore,
reading stories to the girls before they go to bed, and usually ends up falling asleep on the couch before the eleven o’clock news comes on. Naturally, Elaine resents and then quickly fears the change in him, for she does not attribute it to anything other than to the change in her, that is, to her pregnancy, which, she thinks, has made her more sensitive than usual, more demanding and more easily hurt.

So she tries to avoid criticizing Bob for depriving her and the girls of his attention, and really, that is all he’s guilty of so far, so why should he be criticized? He’s working sixty and seventy hours a week at a demeaning, boring job that he was led to expect would be something quite different from what it’s turned out to be, he’s cut himself off from everything that’s familiar to him—landscape, manners, friends—and except for Eddie, around whom he’s never able to rest, he has no one he can simply enjoy himself with, no one to go out for pizza and beers with, no one to go fishing with, no one to go with him on a Sunday morning to Chain-O’-Lakes Park in Winter Haven, where the Red Sox hold their spring training rites and play their exhibition games, where, if he got out there before they went north in late April, he could get, he told her, Carl Yastrzemski’s, Jim Rice’s and Freddie Lynn’s autographs for their son, because someday, he said to her, those guys will be dead and buried and Bob junior won’t believe that his dad saw them in the flesh and actually had a conversation with them.

Elaine feels sorry for her husband. She suggests hiring a babysitter and going out together to the Okie Doke, a dance club she’s heard about from one of the wives she’s befriended at the park, a woman named Ellen Skeeter, but Bob says, “Naw, that’s just one of those cracker joints where the music’s too loud and everybody gets drunk and ends up stomping on your feet if you try to dance or picking a fight with you on the way to the men’s room.”

So she urges him to take a Sunday and pack a lunch and drive with her and the girls to New Smyrna Beach on the coast, but he sighs and says, “Just what I need after a hard week, a day spent in the car fighting the traffic, with the kids fussing in back, a bunch of sandy
sandwiches in the sun, and a sunburn to boot. Besides, this time of year the beaches are jammed with all those noisy Canucks who couldn’t afford to come down in January and February. God save me from the Frenchmen. It’s the same kind as used to drive us nuts in July at Old Orchard Beach in Maine.”

Well, maybe he could go fishing with Eddie one Sunday, take a ride in the boat he’s always bragging about, learn how to water ski, since Eddie’s so eager to teach him.

“Fuck Eddie,” Bob grunts, leaning forward on the couch to switch channels on the Sony.

Naturally, then, though neither of them intends or desires it, Bob and Elaine fall to quarreling. At first it’s a snarl and countersnarl, followed by a sullen silence that fades in an hour or two. But then her insecurity and attempts to please him, colliding almost nightly with his desire to be left alone with his fantasies and depression, make him feel entrapped as well, a feeling that makes him act like a man who thinks his guilt is being exploited, even though he believes that he has done nothing to feel guilty for, which only increases his resentment. Confused and angry, he lashes out at her, until she, too, is confused and angry. Weeks go by marked only by their quarrels and the silent, solitary periods in between, a sad time for them, since neither of them knows what is happening to them or how to stop it.

Until finally, one morning in late May, following a particularly vicious argument the night before, a shouting, name-calling fight that began when Bob arrived home from work without the half gallon of milk she’d called and asked him to bring, and he’d stomped to the refrigerator for a beer and found none there, which meant she’d been drinking his beer in the afternoon with her fat friend from Georgia, the redhead whose name he refused to remember because he hated her voice. They’d gone to sleep shuddering with rage and the knowledge that they both were becoming ugly people.

The next morning, Elaine, as usual, wakes first, showers and dresses quickly and wakes the girls. An hour later, showered, shaved, barefoot and wearing a clean pair of khaki pants and a tee shirt, Bob
enters the kitchen, passes the girls at the table and Elaine at the sink without acknowledging them, as if the three are familiar bits of furniture, two chairs and a pole lamp reliably in their accustomed places. He opens the refrigerator door and studies its foggy interior, settles finally on tomato juice and closes the door. He has to step around his wife to get a glass from the cupboard, and as he passes her, he looks down at her high, rounded belly.

“Morning,” he says in a low voice.

“Good morning,” she answers, and she looks at her children as if for approval. Wasn’t Mommy polite to Daddy?

Squinting, Emma watches her father carefully. Her puffy, round face is covered with purple jelly. White underpants and a tank top cling to her sausage-like body, making her look more like a miniaturized sumo wrestler than a Caucasian female child. Ruthie, opposite her at the table, ignores her father altogether. Dressed for school in clean corduroy jeans and a striped short-sleeved jersey, she pretends to read the advertising on the back of the Count Chocula box.

“Hi, kids,” Bob says, pouring himself a glass of juice.

Emma continues squinting up at him, as if he were the sun, while Ruthie seems to go on reading about adult daily nutrition requirements.

Bob puts his face next to Emma’s and, grinning, bugs his eyes out. “What’re you so serious about, Flowerpot?”

When the child lets a tentative smile creep over her thin lips, Bob stands up, tousles her thin hair with one hand and empties the glass of juice into his mouth. Then, to Ruthie: “Hey, don’t you say good morning to your father?”

Slowly, like peeling back a gummed sticker, Ruthie removes her gaze from the cereal box and looks into her father’s eyes. Then she looks down, almost shyly. “Hi, Daddy.”

“You want breakfast?” Elaine asks him.

“Sure. Whatcha got?” He’s at the stove, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Eggs, if you want. Bacon’s all gone.” She squeezes the words from her mouth like tiny, dry seeds.

“Fine.” Pushing open the screened door, Bob steps outside and, coffee cup in hand, strolls barefoot from the trailer across the driveway and gets the
Ledger
from the box. Opening it to the sports section, he checks out last night’s major league baseball scores.