Final Vinyl Days (12 page)

The only other thing I know about my daddy was told to me that day my mother came to visit. When he was a boy he had two cats he liked to torture. Their names were Uddnnnn and Errrrrnt, so that when my daddy went outside to call them, it sounded like a car wreck. A car wreck sounds like such a pleasant event compared to spending time with him. And why did somebody named Ashley Amelia choose such a loser? Maybe because her own mother threatened
her
husband that she'd kill him if he didn't take to the road and never return. There are some people who are not entirely convinced that my grandma
didn't
do something to him. Such is my legacy.

Way back, when I was on a scholarship at the junior college nearby and thought I needed to get married to be safe in this world, I often kept a boy in my room. I
liked the way that a boy looked propped up on my bed, like something you might win at the fair. One of them was real cute but not too swift at all. A real limited vocabulary, limited mainly to
well I'll be goddamned
or
Ain't that some shit
. He was real handsome, when he was all cleaned up, but I couldn't stop thinking of his head as a maraca, like the ones I loved to shake in elementary school; he had little tiny specks of information rolling around in his head and making enough sound that he didn't seem like a zombie. Another boy who liked me a lot I let go, due to the fact he smelled like a chicken.

“Don't you know?” Mary Edna asked me while laughing hysterically. “All the unknown things in life taste and smell like chicken.”

I said that I didn't say “chicken” but “
a chicken
,” like that coop we grew up down the road from. The smell of chickens in a coop has nothing in common with the Colonel and his seven secret spices. I told her that she had to change the way that she looked at men, that it was like upgrading your car or anything else in life. At the time she was dating a man whose idea of a good time was renting those red-shoe diary videos and ordering out for pizza. I met him once, and he invaded my space so entirely that I could smell his gingivitas. When I told Mary Edna this, she said I should be ashamed, like I might have
really sniffed this jerk around the butt like a dog. I said, dental hygiene? You know bacteria, decay, death within life? Unflossed gums like an unplowed field. Rotten. She looked at me like I might be insane, and I thought then we had moved so far from each other that there was no hope of us ever conquering the world.

I love to floss my teeth. I like the thought of how you can take pulpy, unhealthy gums and floss them until they are tough and ready, no longer bleeding. There's enough blood in this world without what is unnecessary and completely avoidable. That's how I see the children I work with. Elizabeth has talked me into going back to school, and in a few years I'll have my own classroom. I might have Mary Edna's children with me.

I fall asleep at night while creating my future. I make my grandma color-blind. I tell her to give me a little bit of a smile, work those muscles so she will keep her face in shape, like old Jack Lelane—as ancient as he is, he keeps teaching. I give her a freezer full of frozen Baby Ruths (her very favorite), and I buy her that fancy sewing machine she has wanted forever. And then I start telling lies, as many of us do as a form of survival. I tell her that she ought to forgive herself for the way my mother turned out, that it wasn't her fault at all. I tell my mother that I'm sorry her life took such bad turns, that it wasn't her
fault at all, that she could still climb up and out of that hole and start over. I tell her that just because your back tire gets stuck in a muddy field doesn't mean you ought to drive the whole car in. I give her a case of Ivory soap and thick nubbly washcloths to cleanse herself; I give her a new dress and a new hairdo and a daughter who in my opinion has turned out damn well. I tell her I wish I had the power to send her back to the time of that high school photograph and give her a second chance, but I can't. And that's what is really the sad part. I can't change a single thing in her past, and even if I could, I don't know now that I'd want to. Who knows where I would be if things had not happened as they did?

First, you recognize what was wrong, I tell Mary Edna's girls every chance I get, and then you
accept
it. This does not mean that you
agree
with it, just that you say, yes, that is what happened. And then you walk off and leave it there; it is not your mess to clean up. Right now I use that speech when I'm talking about the neighbor's dog who uses the sidewalk for his toilet, or when some child gets mad and throws toys around the room in a tantrum. But there will come a day when I have to say it in reference to their mother; I like to think they will be relieved.

The temperature plummeted, and by late afternoon what had promised to be the beginning of the spring thaw refroze in slick, sloppy patterns, prompting radio deejays to warn drivers again and again that they should use caution, should prepare for long delays on the turnpike, should stay home if possible. The back roads were dangerous, especially in the suburban towns that refused to use salt. Charlotte lived in such a town. She rented a small, two-bedroom house at a very busy intersection. The house was so small it barely held her half of the marriage.

She played the radio at the end of every day while she cooked dinner—Stouffers for herself, Chef Boyardee for
her six-year-old son. Station 93.7—hits of the seventies. It seemed the music was the background of her whole life. Sometimes it left her feeling hopeful, as if she was back in high school and worried only about a math quiz or a date for the football game. The radio was her spouse now, churning out words and rhythms to prompt her emotions. Meanwhile, Sam stared into the big colored screen, orange and blue with the Nickelodeon logo. The Eagles, America, Seals and Croft—
take it easy
and
summer breeze
. She often thought of clothes and record albums and turns of phrase her husband would not recognize as
her
. He didn't know
that
her; it was odd to think how often people must not
really
know their spouses. They know part of a person—the post–high school, postcollege, postdivorce person. Were the missing parts important?

It was in the afternoon that she most felt the cold; when the tendon in her upper thigh—thanks to an ancient hamstring pull—tightened like a knot. But there was more, an animosity, a fear. The cold set her teeth on edge as she looked out over that dark backyard just big enough for a swingset and sandbox. She was separated from her neighbors by a row of dark shrubs. The neighbors' sensor light switched on and off with the movement of the icy tree branches. The lights should have been a comfort, but
instead they kept her alert, vigilant, waiting for something about to happen. Her paper was delivered and often remained untouched, the headlines too bleak for her to handle. People were snapping, committing the unthinkable. Crimes were described in too much detail. Like the au pair who shook a child to death. The man who was leading a double life—he murdered his girlfriend of five years and their child, then drove to the next town where his wife of three months was waiting for him. The young bride was so shocked by his arrest—
it's a mistake
, she screamed at reporters. Last night the word
murder
, smudged by damp plastic wrap, prompted her to toss the whole paper unopened into the garbage. The sensor lights went on and off and on and off, and she felt a chill as if someone or something out in the darkness of the yard were watching.

Last night had been warm. The sidewalks were slushy. Early crocus bulbs were trying to surface. It was supposed to stay warm, today and tomorrow; it was supposed to rain and wash away the last of the dirty gray ice outlining the yards. Oh, but
April fools
, the deejays began saying, promising snow, lots of snow, a nor'easter with inches and inches predicted for the next day. Phone lines and electricity could be downed. People should stay in, be careful, which translated to
get out to the store while you can
. Get
your candles and sterno and firewood and flashlights. Charlotte had a closetful of supplies, which had prompted her husband to nickname her
the liberal survivalist
. He said that she was a woman prepared for all emergency situations. Bring on your storm, your power failure, your Nightmare on Elm Street. Now she went to the small stuffy basement to make sure her supplies were in place: water, batteries for the transistor, candles, flashlights, thermal blankets, astronaut food (Sam's contribution). She was prepared for everything except her current situation. How do you prepare for rejection?

They had planted crocus bulbs back in the fall, a last attempt at planning a future. He had never planted a bulb in his life and dug every hole meticulously, measuring with a ruler, sprinkling the bonemeal, topping with the mulch. She watched with fascination, hopeful of spring, an end to the bleakness, a welcoming to warmth. Now all over New England crocus tips were reaching up, trying to break out, and where were they? Not divorced and not together. Domestic purgatory.

She should have seen it as an omen that she'd met him at the Spooky Carwash on Route 9. The waiting line of cars wrapped out into the road, screeches and bad organ music mingling with the squeals of children and
the sounds of swishing suds. Both of them were young and single. So why do young and single people go to the Spooky Carwash alone in late October?

“Car freak,” he said. “And I like the entertainment.”

“Feature article,” she said, though at the time she had no idea that the local paper would actually run it. She wrote as a freelance while attending nursing school at night. They talked so long waiting in line that they agreed she would park her car and just ride through with him. It was a decision she was relieved to have made once they were inside the dark, scary tunnel. She grabbed his arm and held on until the idling car was pushed back out into the crowded lot.

Now the memory of the haunted house sounds and goblin faces gave her the creeps, and she went to close the drapes. There was a time when Jeff called to check on them. Are you in for the night? Are you okay? The calls both comforted and angered her. At first his voice pulled her back to the beginning and bathed her in a wash of promise, charming and witty and oh so concerned. She would feel herself near the point of begging; they could start all over. She would pretend that he had never cheated on her, something he still denied, as did all of their friends, who, she is certain, must have known
something
. Things don't just happen without any clues at all, do they?

Too late
, he said, in so many words.
Too late
. And she knew in his dismissal that
his
life had never stopped moving. He got off one train and boarded another. He left his son behind like he might a piece of luggage. He'd come back with a claim slip one of these weekends.

“Can't we try?” she had whispered, Sam asleep in the next room. But his silence, his inability to look her in the eye was the answer. He could cry. He could express a sadness that the marriage had failed. What he couldn't seem to express is
why
it had happened—
how, when, and where
it had happened. How could he see it as a complete failure when she didn't? She felt stupid to be caught in such an ordinary situation.

“How did this happen?” her relatives kept asking, and when she responded “I don't know,” they looked at her in a way that left her feeling guilty and responsible. She could hear the females clucking their tongues, determining that she must have fallen short on her wifely duties. Poor thing, Jeff, after all, worked so hard. Yes, all of those emergency dermatology calls.
If it's wet, dry it up. If it's dry, make it wet
. From the beginning, he went to this convention and that, and no one ever offered to come and help
her
. But just turn it around and look what happened—little helpers flew in like good fairies with casseroles and hours of free babysitting for him. There were no survival
kits for what
that
made her feel like. So why is it that everyone seems to understand
why
he left her? Why don't they wonder why she didn't leave him?

She thought of those people who snap suddenly—or so it seems to the public—like the man who impaled his wife on a post in their well-landscaped backyard, all because his tostado was too hot. Or the one who forced his girlfriend to climb into a trunk in his attic and watch wild-eyed as he tore off lengths of silver electrician's tape to plug the airholes, to bind her wrists and ankles. All the papers. All the news programs. How many domestic cases? How many in the poor neighborhoods? Blue-collar? White-collar, like the hideous impaling, makes it to the front page.

Sometimes, at night, she sought comfort at the foot of Sam's bed; his little-boy breath, sighs in the night. She liked to walk Jingles, their old collie, early and then turn in for the night. But tonight she had promised him a night out, Papa Gino's, or one of those godawful indoor playgrounds. Phony worlds created to look wonderful from a distance. No sooner were they in the car with the heater going full blast, and battling bumper-to-bumper traffic as people made their way home for the blizzard weekend, than Sam began begging for Wonderland. The
latest site of numerous birthday parties, it was a huge tin structure, converted from one of the wholesale clubs that had gone out of business, and there were enough fluorescent tubes inside and out to light an airport.

So much for people staying in for the night. The Wonderland parking lot was filled to capacity, and Charlotte had to drive to satellite parking across the street behind Computer City. She flipped on her car alarm and turned to pull Sam's hat into place and remind him that he was to hold her hand and walk quickly. She explained that it was icy and it was cold and they couldn't stay at Wonderland that long anyway.