Middle Age (39 page)

In Wal-Mart, a shock to see Beatrice Avery—but of course it couldn’t have been Beatrice, the woman would never have set foot into a Wal-Mart anywhere. Yet Marina saw men who resembled Salthill acquaintances, she saw women who resembled glamorous Augusta Cutler, always at a distance. Crowds of shoppers blocked her view, loose-running children collided rudely with her, the piped-in Christmas music made her head ache.

Yes, she saw Adam Berendt, sometimes. She stared, and her vision wavered. Adam Berendt, heavier, shopping in Sears with his stout middle-aged wife, pausing to consider linoleum tile “drastically reduced” . . .

Marina turned blindly away. “Am I lonely?
I am not lonely
.” In the parking lot between Sears and the garishly lighted Mexican Villa, Marina saw a couple seriously quarreling, the angry youngish man was Rick Pryde, with long straggly dark hair, drooping moustache and beard, in a crimson satin jacket with a black logo (wolf, wolverine) on the back; but this Rick Pryde didn’t limp, and his voice was higher-pitched. The girl was young, no more than nineteen, with a full petulant-pretty face, very like the girl-cashier at the -Eleven in Damascus Crossing with whom Marina had brief, friendly exchanges. The quarrel appeared to be escalating by quick degrees. Marina, who never quarreled, Marina Troy, who was of a class, and in Salthill-on-Hudson an entire society, in which voices were never raised in public, listened in fascinated alarm. No man had ever, no man would ever, speak to her, Marina Troy, in such a way. “You bitch—” “God damn you, you can’t—” “Listen, you—” “
You
listen—” “Fuck you,
you listen
—” Marina was standing beside the Jeep and unlocking the driver’s
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door slowly, distractedly. She seemed to have misplaced her gloves, her fingers were bare, chilled. It was very cold, gritty soiled snow underfoot, above the garish Christmas lights of the mall was an achingly clear night sky. Marina had driven to the Delaware River in daytime and had lingered, taking photographs in a trance, and on the way home she’d stopped impulsively at the East Stroudsburg mall, in no hurry to return to the drafty deserted house on Mink Pond Road. Now, so unexpectedly, she stood listening to strangers quarreling. The sexual fury of young people unknown to her.
Don’t get involved,
Marina warned herself even as she positioned herself where the young man could see her, staring in his direction, for now he’d backed the girl against a car, and appeared to be twisting her arm; the girl was sobbing and slapping at him in a way that looked, to Marina, dangerously provoking. It was a movie or TV scene of a kind Marina Troy rarely saw and yet she spoke boldly—“Excuse me? Is something wrong?” Her voice sounded stronger than she felt. “What’s happening there?” The face turned toward her was a variant of Rick Pryde’s raw, male, aggrieved face, furious at being challenged. “This ain’t none of your business, ma’am. Best mind your own fucking business, ma’am.” His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

Marina’s heart was beating violently. Never had she behaved in such a way. Yet she couldn’t turn away as if nothing were happening. She asked the girl, “Is he hurting you? Do you need help?” The girl burst into louder sobs, broke suddenly away from the man in the crimson jacket, and ran clumsily to Marina. The young man cursed them both, but advanced only a few feet before he halted, for there were security guards at the mall, he wouldn’t have wanted to draw their attention.

The girl begged, “Could you give me a ride, ma’am? I just want to get the hell out of here.” Her young face was damp, swollen, flushed, with small close-set eyes luridly smudged with mascara. She was panting, hair in her face. It occurred to Marina to wonder if she and the angry young man were married.

What am I doing, this is a mistake!

But Adam too behaved recklessly
.
He, too, was brave
.

Marina unlocked the Jeep, the girl clambered inside. There was Marina, hand trembling so badly she could barely insert the key into the ignition, starting the engine, and driving out of the lot as the young man shouted after them.
Bitches! Cunts!
It was a TV-movie scene. And how would it end, Marina had no idea. She would recall afterward that she’d

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been both excited and calm. Inappropriately calm perhaps. But how does one know how to act, how to behave, in such circumstances, what is appropriate behavior! She saw the crimson jacket, the furiously gesticulating man with the full moustache and beard, following briefly after the Jeep, his face contorted with rage, and his fists clenching and unclenching.

Then Marina left him behind, driving the Jeep bumpily along the shoulder of an access road. Traffic lights swirled and spun toward her. Not knowing what she did she ran a red light. Now she was driving on a county highway, a sobbing girl, a stranger, beside her. The girl was muttering, “I hate him. Hate hate hate him.” Striking her thighs with her fists.

Marina offered to drive the girl home but the girl seemed not to hear. “All he wants, ma’am, the bastard wants to hurt me,
he
don’t show up and
I’m
the one to blame.
I wish we were both dead
.”

Marina drove blindly, not knowing what to do, or to say. In the face of such emotion. She appeared to be headed south toward the city of Stroudsburg, in the opposite direction of Damascus Crossing; it was past seven o’clock. The sobbing girl took up so much space! As if a giant baby had climbed into the Jeep, bursting out of her tight showy-sexy clothes.

Big-hipped, with a large glistening face like a glaring moon, and hair that looked electrified. The girl wore designer jeans with metallic studs, a smart fawn-colored suede jacket opened over a cheap yellow sweater that fitted her young, jutting breasts snugly; there were numerous glittering studs in both her ears, and what looked like a tiny pearl pierced into her left eyebrow. She smelled of cigarette smoke and hair spray, spilled beer and hot female anguish. Quarreling with her lover had aroused her, clearly; her eyes were dilated and her nostrils widened. Marina could hear her harsh breathing.

Another time Marina asked where she should drive the girl, yet still, stubbornly, the girl seemed not to hear. She was incensed, indignant. “He hurt me, the fucker. You saw it, ma’am! I’ve got witnesses! He’s got no right.”

Marina asked, “How did he hurt you?”

“Different ways! All kinds of ways.”

“Should we go to the police, then? Should I stop, and call the police, and report him?”

Now the girl turned to look frankly at Marina. Her expression was one of mild shock. “Jesus God, no! No ma’am, no cops.” With an air of disgust she said, “
He’s
a cop, Christ sake. And so’s his brothers.”

Afterward Marina would think calmly
He could trace my license plate
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number
.
If he’s a police officer
.
He could find me, if he wanted to
. But at the moment, she had no thought for anyone except the sobbing girl beside her.

They stopped finally at a diner. The girl wanted to get cleaned up, and make a telephone call.

It was a large place, noisy with mostly young customers and blaring rock music, brightly lit as a stage set. They were given a rear, corner booth.

Never would Marina learn where the girl lived. Her first name was Lorene, she refused to disclose more. “You’re not, like, a social worker, are you, ma’am?” Biting her thumbnail, crinkling her forehead so that her soft doughy skin puckered alarmingly. “Like—for the county?”

Marina laughed. “No, I am not. I’m a private citizen.”

“Not from around here, though?”

“Yes. I live near Damascus Crossing.”

The girl shook her head doubtfully. As if she’d never heard of Damascus Crossing. “You don’t sound like from around here. Or look like from around here.”

“I’m originally from Maine.”

“Maine! Jesus.” The girl laughed uneasily. Was Maine a foreign country to her? Maybe a province of Canada. She said, “Well, it’s sure nice of you, ma’am, to do this.”

“Please call me Marina.”

Lorene frowned, not wanting to call her benefactress by her first name.

As you wouldn’t want to call a high school teacher by her first name. It wasn’t proper, it was maybe distasteful.

Almost shyly she said, “Marina—that’s a pretty name.”

“Lorene is a pretty name, too.”

Lorene shrugged, grimacing. “Oh, hell.” As if to say
you don’t need to
flatter me, ma’am, you don’t need to be nice to me, come on!

Lorene went to use the rest room and was gone for some time. Marina ordered two cups of coffee. She leaned shakily forward, elbows on the table, pressing her chilled hands against her warm cheeks. From a short distance there was Adam Berendt observing her. If she looked directly at him, she wouldn’t see him; yet in the corner of her eye she almost saw him. Was he surprised, baffled? Wondering why Marina was here? In this noisy place, just outside Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania? Had it to do with
him?
But how had it to do with
him?
Still, Adam was pleased with her.

She knew that. He liked Marina acting impulsively for once.

When Lorene returned, sliding heavily into the booth, Marina saw

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that she’d washed her face; she’d wiped away the runny mascara, but her small bright eyes were reddened. Her face seemed boneless, her lips were thin, a glossy crimson. She might have been a mature seventeen, she might have been an immature twenty-seven. Strangely attractive she seemed to Marina, with her savagely glittering ear studs, the little pearl in her left eyebrow. Her hair was bleached in uneven streaks and fell past her shoulders, constantly she pushed it back, always she was brushing it out of her face in a luxuriant sweeping gesture. Her eyes were somewhat glassy, the pupils dilated, Marina wondered was she on drugs? or only just excited, anxious? Marina felt a stab of arousal as if she were in the presence of danger, and drawn to it.

A waitress brought their coffee. Lorene emptied two sugar packets into hers. She was sniffing, rummaging through her jacket pockets for a tissue, Marina gave her a small opened packet of Kleenex and she blew her nose, obedient as a little girl, and laughed and said, “Y’know? Ma’am?

This could be, like, a change in my life. This, tonight. It’s what I’m thinking.”

“That’s good, Lorene. Isn’t it?”

“It’s got me thinking! I need to think.”

Lorene spoke in a rushed rambling elated way of making new plans, it was time to make new plans, there were people she’d “kind of let down”

and she was feeling guilty, and “you, tonight, ma’am” had caused her to think in a different way, and she was grateful. Marina had the idea that Lorene had been married, was now divorced or living apart from her husband; possibly, there was a small child, somewhere; this child was living with relatives . . . Marina was about to ask more specifically when Lorene said suddenly, “What I need to do, I need to make a phone call, ma’am.

That’s what I need to do.” She was excited, nervous. “I need to make that call. Somebody could come get me, then.” But she hesitated, as if awaiting Marina’s permission.

Marina said, “Yes, why don’t you, Lorene? That sounds like a good idea.”

Lorene swiped at her nose, embarrassed. “I don’t have any change, I guess.”

Marina gave her several quarters and dimes.

Lorene said, “Thanks, Marina!” with a flashing smile. It took so little to transform her sullen face, Marina could see why men would be drawn to her.

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Lorene went away again, and was gone for perhaps ten minutes, and when she returned, she shook her head, disappointed, evasive; the people she’d tried to call hadn’t answered, she said. “I’d need to take a bus. To get where I’d like to go. Tomorrow, I could go. But I need to call them first.”

“Where would you like to go? Maybe I could drive you.”

Lorene shook her head again, not meeting Marina’s eye.
She doesn’t
trust me
.
But why?
“I’m O.K. I’ll get a bus.”

“Where would you get the bus, Lorene? In Stroudsburg?”

“Oh, anywhere.” Lorene’s voice was vague, annoyed. “I just need to make another phone call, I guess.”

Things were becoming confused. Marina knew she was being rebuffed but she smiled, and gave Lorene several dollar bills since Lorene had run out of change; and Lorene mumbled thanks, and slid out of the booth again, a big-boned, pretty girl with a tiny pearl glinting above her eye and flyaway streaked hair, and she was gone again for perhaps ten minutes while Marina drank her coffee, heedless that the caffeine would thrum along her nerves through the night. She glanced around, and her heart stopped: there was Rick Pryde entering the diner, no, it was the young man who’d cursed her, no, it was a stranger, with a scruffy black beard and straggling black hair but no crimson jacket, a tall narrow-shouldered man Marina had never seen before.

When Lorene returned to the booth she was holding an unlighted cigarette in her shaky fingers. “I just bummed this from a guy up front,” she said, laughing. “Christ! I’m so fucked up. It’s no smoking in here, I guess?”

She slid into the booth heavily. Her young face was flushed as if she’d been running. She laughed again, and wiped at her nose with a crumpled napkin. “I could take a bus from, like, Stroudsburg. Tomorrow morning.”

“A bus to—where?”

Lorene murmured what sounded like “Pittsburgh.” Her lips barely moved.

“Pittsburgh? Do you have a—relative there?”

“I got some family there.” Lorene raised her eyes frankly to Marina.

See? I’m not lying
.

Marina asked if Lorene needed money for the bus and Lorene shrugged, embarrassed, and murmured what sounded like “no”—or possibly “I don’t know”—shifting self-consciously in her seat. She said, “See, if I can get through with this call I’m trying to make? Then maybe not.”