Girls (8 page)

Lumber with a red flag stapled to the end of a stud protruded through the open back window. Freezing air and carbon monoxide were sucked in, mixing with what was coming through the floor. I kept the full blast of warm air blowing onto the windshield, I kept the wipers clacking, and I drove slowly, hoping for the best. I got home. Every mile closer to it, I thought I ought to go back for Fanny. She didn’t want me to. I knew that. I thought I should. She knew
that.

How good that we knew what we knew.

Our road was getting axle-high in snow, and I thought the town crews would decide to stay in until the snow stopped. Why plow twice?

I answered: Because of Fanny coming home.

I let the dog out, and we stayed outside awhile, tossing snowballs and talking about the day. He butted me in the thigh a few times and dashed around the yard in the snow, then went up on the side porch because it was time to get fed. I poured out his kibble, and after he inhaled it, I let him out again to roam. Then I propped the door open and unloaded the wagon, carrying the materials directly upstairs so I wouldn’t change my mind. It took me quite a few trips. Then I closed the car up, got the mail from the roadside box, brought the dog in, and turned on the porch lights in case Fanny came home early. I turned up the heat so she would be warm.

The studs and firring strips for cleats and pine one-by-tens for shelves were on the hallway floor outside the room, and the plasterboard and compound and drywall tape and sacks of nails and screws were leaning against the hallway door. Inside, there was the closet, the little writing table, the small bed, the shelf unit. We had given the toys and books away. The plan had evolved to this: We would build bookshelves along the long outer wall, we would build a unit of storage shelves along the opposite wall next to the closet, and the room would become a kind of office. Fanny could keep professional records here, and we would do the bills together, she sitting at a desk and I in a rocker. The idea was to make us stop feeling what wasn’t in the room. In our bedroom, or carrying woolens in plastic bags filled with mothballs to store in the big closet at the end of the hall, we felt it. It was like a bruise. If you hurt your arm, you could run your hand along it and then you’d suddenly wince. It was a part of our house that made us wince.

I put down some blue plastic tarpaulins to protect the floor. I brought in extension cords and my circular saw. I made sure the battery in the drill was charged. I looked at the wallpaper that Fanny had put up. She was good with wallpaper. I had forgotten paint. I would have to use the heat gun and a putty knife and take the wallpaper down, because you can’t pay bills and balance your checkbook in any hardheaded way with Bambi smiling at you from the wall.

So I sat on a ladder and, with the heat gun roaring, taking care
not to cook the walls or the studs behind them, I took Bambi down, a square at a time. When I let the heat gun focus too long and the wallpaper began to smoke, the smell made me hungry and I remembered I hadn’t eaten dinner or lunch. I thought about Archie Halpern at the Blue Bird and remembered I hadn’t had breakfast, either. I thought I’d start to drool and drip on the heat gun and electrocute myself. The dog waited in the hall, and he escorted me to the refrigerator. There was a plastic-wrapped bowl of noodles with some kind of green peas and cheese and bacon in them. There was another bowl, this one filled with Fanny’s winter vegetable soup. I looked at the cheese in its wrap. I looked at eggs and at pickles in a jar. I took a glass of orange juice and went back upstairs to eliminate Bambi.

I woke up when the heat gun fell out of my hand.

“Okay,” I said. Outside, in the hallway, the dog thumped his tail. I said, “You’re right. It’s a sign. You fall asleep, you know it’s a signal to get a little sleep.” The dog banged back. I unplugged the heat gun, ran my hand along the wall to make sure it was cool. I had taken most of the long wall down; it was a good night’s work. I went down-stairs and sat in the back room with the lights off. I heard the snow hitting the windows, the wind gusting, the tikkety-tak of a dog’s nails on the wooden floor.

I told him, “Come lie down.” He hit the floor beside the sofa. I lay down on it and said, “I’ll get you out to pee later on. You let me know if I forget.” His tail thumped twice. I closed my eyes and felt the day.

Days.

Longer than that.

I let my breath go out and out and out. I said, my mouth so tired that I barely moved it, “Thank you, God, for all this shit you’ve given us, you son of a bitch.” I waited. I waited a minute more as my arms and legs got heavy while my brain filled like a sail with what I was thinking. “You son of a bitch,” I said. I got up, went to the side door, and let the dog out. I made myself some toast and, when I couldn’t decide what to spread on it, I ate it dry. When the dog came in, I went back up and worked on stripping the walls.

I
HEARD A ROARING
sound in the road and I woke up on the floor of the room. The dog was beside me, waiting. At the window, I saw the wrecker drive off, yellow lights whirling. He had left Fanny’s car outside our little drive. The road was unplowed and so was the drive. When the town plows did come, they’d have to detour her car, but they would, and there we were, both of us home and nobody killed. I heard her walk slowly through the house. I went into the bathroom, and by the time I came out, the dog had found her and had been released to go outside.

I made coffee while she changed from her uniform. I called in sick.

She came back downstairs while I was doing that, and she said, “What?”

I told the dispatcher, “Tomorrow. Guaranteed.”

Fanny waited. She was wearing jeans and a thick black turtleneck and wool-lined moccasins over woolen socks. She kept rubbing her hands together like she was cold. Her eyebrows were up over her pale face, and her lips looked bitten. Her green eyes were wide. She was waiting to hear bad news.

“I just got too tired,” I said. “It isn’t anything. I got tired.”

“Depression makes you tired,” she said.

“Then everybody I know is tired.”

She smiled a little and nodded.

“Coffee’s up pretty soon,” I said. She sat at the table and folded her hands. “Was it rough?”

“No,” she said. “A lot of car wrecks, nothing too terrible. Did you hear the tow truck?”

“You didn’t get hurt.”

“No,” she said, “no. I’m fine. I came down Potter Road and I wasn’t thinking, I was half back in ER and halfway home, I guess. I did what I always do. I hit the brakes at the last minute, and I sailed through the T junction and into where the plows dropped off these huge loads of snow they were moving. I couldn’t back out.”

“So you went to the farmhouse up there where the vampires live—”

“They were very nice to me.”

“And instead of calling me, you called a stranger from a stranger’s house.”

“The stranger,” she said, “was a tow truck stranger. You do not offer a tow truck, among your attractions.”

“I have towed you out of every other snowbank in the county.”

“I thought you’d be in the shower.”

“Or shaving,” I suggested.

She said, “Balancing the checkbook.”

I said, “We’re joking about this, right? We’re being relaxed and friendly and we’re joking about this?”

“He got me home, Jack. And he was polite and helpful. He kept calling me ma’am.”

“Did you correct him?”

She put her head down on her hands and rolled her head to signify no.

I poured coffee for us, then let the dog in and rewarded him with a biscuit for identifying his own door. He lapped a lot of water from his dish, groaned, and lay down under the table. I knew he was on Fanny’s feet. She lifted her head and looked at her coffee, then leaned back in the chair.

“And you’re only tired?” she said. “Not sick?”

“Not sick. I started in doing the room.”

She put her cup down.

I said, “We’d pretty much decided.”

“Pretty much,” she said. “I thought we might talk about it again.”

“All right,” I said.

“Well, there isn’t much point. Not if you’ve begun. What’d you do?”

“There
is
a point. We can talk. I can stop. It doesn’t have to happen.”

“What made you begin?”

I shook my head. I shrugged.

“And what did you do?”

“I took a lot of wallpaper down.”

“The Bambi?”

“That’s the wallpaper.”

“Why does it have to come
down?
” Her eyes were full.

“So I can build the bookshelves we talked about.” I sounded to myself like a reasonable man, but I’m not sure that’s who she heard.

“But Bambi doesn’t have to come down for us to make bookshelves. We could’ve seen the paper through the shelves. That wouldn’t have hurt anybody, Jack. She used to look at the wallpaper. She used to make noises at Bambi, Jack. She would have learned to
talk
to him. How can you take it down?”

I did not tell her that I’d done only two walls and that there were plenty of fawns with big eyes. I took a sip of coffee and I sat an instant. Then I said, “I’m sorry. I think I didn’t understand. I have to get a shower and change my clothes.” I went upstairs.

When I came down, the dog was lying behind the living room sofa, slapping his tail against the floor, which meant Fanny was on it and blowing her nose. I put my boots on and I went out to shovel snow. It took me an hour of sweating in the very cold, very still day to clear the area between my car and the road. I dug around the axles to make sure they were clear. Then I started up the old bomber and went in to tell Fanny she was snowbound. The tow truck had left her car in the road, and the plows had gone around it, sealing it behind
a thick wall of snow. She wasn’t in the living room. I heard her upstairs, and I heard the dog’s nails. I tracked the sounds and knew she was in the room, looking at what I’d erased.

I heard something shatter and I figured it might be a coffee cup. I hoped it wasn’t a window. I heard objects against a wall. I heard—I barely could hear it—the sound of Fanny breathing hard while she lifted things. The studs clattered and there was a thick, solid noise that could have been a sheet of plasterboard getting holed. I knew what she looked like. Her eyes would be huge. Her face would be wet with her tears. It would be very pale. She would lift and push like a man. She was trained to be physical. She knew about wreckage. Right now, she wanted some. When she went like this, her lips curled in on each other and she looked through whatever she was moving into the air and onto walls and floors. She was there, but she also wasn’t, and her empty eyes were frightening.

I knew she had waited until she thought I was gone. She was never not fair. She had waited so that I wouldn’t think of what she did as warfare. It wasn’t. I knew that. It was mourning. It was grief. It was some kind of general rage. I thought there had to be a difference between those feelings. I thought I could ask Archie Halpern what the difference might mean. Or Fanny, I thought. Archie would tell me how she’d be someone to ask. I sipped a little hot coffee and I called Strodemaster. He shouted into the phone. I took one of our telephone pads and a pen. It seemed to make sense to take notes. You take notes, I’d learned on my jobs, and you can focus on something besides your feelings. That would be a sound idea today.

The tiny village Janice Tanner’s parents lived in was like a long crossroads separated from an ice-choked river by a cornfield that ran about a third of a mile. Under all that heavy whiteness was corn stubble. In the spring, I thought, deer would wander down from the hills and across the river and into the field. It would be good to see them doing that if spring ever came. I didn’t believe it would.

Most of the population here was in the houses that lay parallel to the river on either side of the road. I’d seen dozens of hamlets like this one. The children, some very young and some almost teenaged, shifted in clusters from lawn to yard to lawn to yard, from game to game. Kids grew up here, before they moved to driving and drinking and sex, by fishing together and torturing frogs and picking the worms from tomatoes in gardens, and when you drove through and saw them in noisy clusters, it occurred to you that human life was possible.

I drove to Strodemaster’s house and went in the back door. He was in a heavy blue woolen bathrobe and unlaced boots. “
Here
he is!” he called. He acted embarrassed. He didn’t want to meet my eyes. I tried to think of a way to get him off the hook, but I couldn’t. I’m not very good at that. He shouted, “Damn it, Jack, I’m glad as hell. Good man!”

He brought me coffee I didn’t want, and breakfast cake in a supermarket wrapper. When I looked at his kitchen and the toothpaste stains down the front of his bathrobe, I remembered that his wife had left him. She had taken their kids, a daughter and a son. I remembered that gossip had him driving her out. He periodically moved in local women, but they left promptly enough, and he was a handsome-looking, lonely-looking, shabby middle-aged man. Let that be a lesson to you, I thought, tracking the green-white drip marks on his bathrobe.