Girls (12 page)

“Sleeping at school.”

“You found her?”

“Yeah. She didn’t think I was doing her a service.”

“How’d you know about her?”

“I saw her on one of those supermarket milk cartons.”

“We don’t drink milk,” Fanny said. She went to the refrigerator and she opened the door. “See?” she said. “No milk. You never go into the supermarket. So why would you notice a milk container in the market, Jack?”

“I went in there one time, I guess. I guess I noticed them. How can I go in there and
not
notice them?”

“This does not help, Jack.”

“It helped her parents. But listen—there was something she said I wanted to ask you about.”

“They did a physical on her. Whatever he did had healed. She’d been gone awhile.”

“You think he did it? Her
father?
”

“You are not a guard at a nursery school, Jack. You
know
about these things.”

“But I had to send her back, right?”

Fanny sat at the kitchen table. Her chin was in her palm, her
elbow was on the table, and she looked more tired than anyone I’d seen since the war.

I said, “Right?”

She might have moved her head. I couldn’t tell.

“Am I nuts, Fanny?”

“Sometimes—I don’t know. Maybe
I’m
crazy. Maybe we’re both crazy and our marriage went crazy and the only sane thing in our lives is a dog. That’s what I sometimes think.”

I remembered, once, telling her how fortunate we were not to keep a gun in the house, because one of us would use it for sure on the other someday. She’d reminded me we
did
have a gun in the house and I had to admit I thought I’d kept it hidden from her.

I wondered why I was thinking of the gun. I moved myself back to her and drew her by the waist. She lifted her arms to my shoulders, and I thought of how old couples, when the right music comes on the kitchen radio, can fit together so easily and start to dance. I kept my eyes closed and I matched us, chest and belly and groin and thigh. I pulled her to me the strongest I could.

“Fanny,” I said “Tell me what to do. Tell me what to know.”

We rocked at one another, and it was like getting a memory back, except in the flesh.

She pulled me. I thought we were going to fall onto the floor. I felt the heat of her mouth when she whispered, “Tell me why our baby died.”

I tried to answer. I don’t remember the words I wanted. The dog began to bang his tail along the floor because I was doing Fanny’s trick. I couldn’t hear if she had also begun to cry, because I made so much noise against her shoulder and her neck.

F
RIDAY NIGHT
, after I fed the dog and walked along our road with him for a half an hour or so, I made myself a burger out of turkey meat. It was a new ingredient for me. Fanny thought we ought to eat healthier foods, so I was trying to get used to patties of ground bird and to yogurt that, even with fruit, tasted to me like something gone rotten. The dog and I shared three-quarters of a pound of partially fried meat. He showed more enthusiasm than I did. Then I washed the dishes and went upstairs to make a decision about the room.

Fanny had done the rest of the wallpaper. She hadn’t cleaned up, so charred strips and chunks, some still attached to the old gypsum board, lay in a track about ten inches from the two walls that she’d worked on with the putty knife and heat gun. The gun, which looked like a bulky, more dangerous hair dryer, lay on the floor, still plugged in. The putty knife was a foot away from it. She had worked steadily, I would have bet, probably crying through part if not all of the job. Then she’d have tossed her tools down and thrown a curse at me or something larger and walked out of the room to shower.

She could have told me, I thought, remembering the eyes that had lived on the wall. It occurred to me that this had been no kind of
wallpaper for a child to grow up staring at. I tried to imagine how it would feel, in the weak glow of a night-light, to lie in a crib with the eyes on you over and over along the wall, ceiling to floor, looking at you through the slats and over the headboard again and again. I’d been required to qualify for a license to drive and I’d had to apply for a permit to keep my handgun, but no one had asked me a question about my abilities to be a father to a small girl. On the floor, in ragged, worried strips, was more evidence that I oughtn’t ever to have started.

She should have been sleeping, of course. She should have come home from work and walked through the house, maybe puttered awhile, and then she should have showered and slept, waking up in time to leave while I was sleeping. Instead, she had come into this room and finished what I’d begun. It was a kind of talk, I thought. It was the way we’d been talking for some years now. When she took down the paper, she was giving something to me, I knew. I wasn’t sure what it was. I thought it must have cost her a lot.

While she slept in our bedroom at the end of the hall, I sawed by hand instead of using the power saw, and instead of driving eight-penny nails by hand, I used inch-and-a-half Sheetrock screws that I sank with my battery-driven drill. She was in her deepest sleep now, and if her brain was going to let her sleep, my noise wouldn’t waken her. I framed up an alcove that came at right angles out of the wall between the closet door and the window corner. I eyeballed the studs but used a right-angle measure to be sure I had the footers level. Then I measured gypsum board, cutting it with a razor knife, and I screwed it, using the drill, into the studs that I had fastened at ceiling and floor as well as to headers and footers.

I had five gallons of joint compound there, and I taped so the seams were tight. I went on the toes of my stocking feet to the bathroom and made a thick soup of the compound by adding more water than you would for taping joins. I stirred the soup with my hand and the sponge, then did a heavy wash of the wallboard. Once I got the mixture and the pressure right, the stuff worked and the new right angle of wall looked like an old-fashioned plasterer had done it.

I would install a heavy-duty outlet with a built-in reset, and we’d go to barn sales and antique dealers and find a perfect writing table for her. This would be her office. She’d have privacy here. I thought maybe we could find one of those old brass lamps with a green glass shade and I could rewire it for her. I thought of buying her a cracked felt eyeshade as a joke.

The rest of the room would be for guests. Maybe someone would stay with us sometime. We’d have a convertible sofa bed and a chair and a reading lamp and pictures on the painted walls. Maybe I would sit and read while Fanny sat at her desk on a weekend morning when we both worked the same shift. It would be an ordinary room. Maybe we could put in a television set and I’d watch the football games. She might watch one with me. We’d just be a married couple who sat in a room.

Fanny was behind me. I heard her voice, still slow with sleep, say, “What’s this?”

“Where your office goes,” I said, turning around. She’d slept in her uniform. She hadn’t showered. Her hair looked greasy and her skin was dull. There were bits of wallpaper stuck to her uniform pants and shirt. Her white shoes were laced, and I wondered if she’d slept in them.

“Not any office
I’m
working in,” she said. “Thank you, but this is really—well, Jack, how could you even
think
I’d work in here? And what’s that coffin for? That’s my office? So I can be dead in here, too?”

I couldn’t fasten to enough of what she said. I couldn’t answer. There wasn’t any answer. I felt like I had a sore throat, and I couldn’t swallow because it hurt too much. So when I talked, it sounded to me like I had a sandwich in my mouth and the words came around it. “A slight miscalculation,” I said. “I can take it down.”

She said, “Please.”

“I can take it down
now
,” I said.

“Fine.”

It was easy. I stuck the blade of my pry bar into the corner seam near the ceiling and I struck it, hard, with the palm of my left hand. The bar slid in through the thick, even paste of compound. I angled
it toward a screw, and I pulled toward me with both hands. A lot of wallboard and a lot of compound and a snake of wet, heavy tape came away. I inserted the pry in the seam near the floor and pulled out and up. A lot of the board tore. I could have located the Sheetrock screws and put the drill in reverse and taken them out. But I didn’t want to take care. I wanted to break things. I pulled away more of the board, slopping the compound on my hands and onto the floor, spattering it up onto my face. When I had the outside stud at the corner partially exposed, I approached it and raised my leg. I could hear myself breathing hard. I didn’t look at Fanny. I kicked the stud and tore it away from the ceiling. It fell, still fastened to the floor. Some of the ceiling tore away. I kicked the other stud, and it went over, wallboard and all. I knocked each stud down. I laid the pry bar under the footers, two by four by thirty-six inches, and tore them up and out. The screws came up, tearing away subfloor, thin plywood on which I had planned to lay carpet.

I stood in the mess, my knees bent and my back strained, panting. “There,” I said. “A little dramatic. A little messy. A little destructive. But, Fanny, fucking
there:
The alcove is down. You have any further wishes for the room?”

As I looked at her, as she rocked back and forth and looked at me, I thought I should have started by thanking her for stripping the rest of the wallpaper.

What I said was, “You want me to find the same pattern of paper and put it back on the walls?”

I put my head down as soon as I’d said it. I couldn’t any longer find satisfaction in a fight with her. We were both too beat up for this. I started to say it but found when I looked up that she had left the room. I followed her. That was how our fights had always gone, Fanny walking off and me following. We had done it in cities on the West Coast and in the Middle West and even in Manhattan, where I’d finished up my stateside rotation and mustered out. She’d stood at a cement wall in Battery Park, looking down into the dirty water. She’d been wearing an ugly bronze raincoat I’d always hated because it made her skin look gray. She’d move, and I’d move with her. We went that way along the embankment. Finally, at the navy monument,
she said, “If you’d tell me how to get home, I could stalk away and you could follow me there and get this damned thing over with.” I’d shown her the right subway entrance, but by then she wanted me with her, and we went home together. Now we
were
home together, and no one knew where else to go.

I went down the hall to the bathroom and listened at the door. I heard the shower. I banged on the door.

She said, “What?”

“I’m sorry.”

I banged again after I’d waited half a minute.

“What?”

“I said I was sorry.”

“I heard you.”

“Fanny, are
you
sorry?”

She said, “What do you think?”

“Don’t cry,” I said.

“So what should I do?”

“Come out.”

“In a while.”

“Fanny, I’m lonely for you.”

“What?”

“I miss you. It’s like I’m in Tokyo or someplace and talking on the phone. I keep missing you.”

Then she said, “I miss you, too.”

I was sitting on the floor outside the bathroom, my back against the linen closet door, and I’d been sleeping. She had put a blanket over me. The dog was on the floor beside me, with his back wedged hard against my leg. We were littermates. When I moved again, I woke him, and he looked over his shoulder with a kind of stupid glare, and then he thumped his tail.

“We missed again,” I said.

He rolled to his feet and shook himself head to foot as if to throw off water, and he planted himself. He was ready. Good dog.

The college was digging out after days of storm. Pickup trucks with plows in front and salt distributors in the bed worked the narrow lanes and paths while big trucks with highway plows cleared the larger roads. Grounds crew on ladders and a cherry picker crane worked to lever ice off the roofs before it melted enough to come down in avalanches. We’d had students buried under slides like that. The sky was bright and the sun, though it hadn’t any weight on your skin, was good to see, especially if you believed in winter ending, which I did not. From high up on the campus roads, you could look into neighboring counties. I was patrolling near the graveyard where they used to sell lots to the faculty. It was my suggestion, since my English professor’s girlfriend had hiked up here to try killing herself, that we include the cemetery and the quarry in our rounds. I wasn’t really patrolling. I sat in the idling car and looked over the campus, over the bright hills, and I stared without focusing.

I was counting my credit hours. Since I wasn’t taking a course this semester, I was a little behind schedule. According to my calculations, the sun would get very, very old and explode, incinerating all the planets in the solar system, a year and a half before my degree was in hand. This was not a viable self-improvement program, and I was going to have to step up the pace. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine taking another course as long as I lived. I kept seeing myself as I used a yellow crayon to draw a picture of Ralph for Introduction to Art. I heard myself making up songs about Ralph for Music 101. I was too disgusted to think for long about my having written a paper and handing it in and letting myself be graded for what I had to say about a story I had told a baby girl about a duck.