Suncatchers (38 page)

When he looked across the street, back toward his own house, he was surprised to see, through a clearing in the treetops, the moon, suspended like an enormous misshapen pumpkin.

The Jelliffs lived in the house next to Jewel. It was their driveway where Joe Leonard shot baskets. The Jelliffs were a retired couple, Roman Catholics and avid golfers. Their front door was open now, and Perry saw their large white poodle, Mozelle—short for Mademoiselle, Eldeen had told him—lying beside the couch inside. Kirk Jelliff sat in a recliner beside the couch, aiming the remote control toward the television, and his wife sat on the couch writing something.

Perry saw a shadow pass in front of a window back at the Whittingtons'. Mrs. DePalma came to her front door and hollered to her daughter, “Telephone, Andrea!” Tim St. John pulled down the shade in the bedroom, and as the wind gusted, Perry heard the faint clinking of the pipe chimes on the corner of the Musselmans' house. He stopped in the middle of the street and turned in a slow circle.

At the Bushongs' house next to the Jelliffs', Perry heard a sudden wail, like that of a frightened child, and saw a light go on in a corner room. And, ironically, as he turned to the last remaining house on the circle—the Fullers'—he saw a light go off.

Slowly the thought impressed itself on Perry's mind that tonight was unique. Never again would things be repeated just this way. Whatever went on inside these little brick boxes tonight would never happen exactly that way again. Some small act performed tonight could cause a response, which in turn could lead to another act, which could in some subtle way alter the course of someone's whole life. The ordinary details of life suddenly seemed to be laden with importance. That telephone call, for example, at the DePalmas' house could change their lives somehow. The child's cry at the Bushongs' could signal the genesis of some lifelong fear. Whatever it was Emily Jelliff was writing could end up terminating the way things
used
to be.

It had always intrigued Perry to think of dividing lines and starting points. As a child during a thunderstorm he had always wondered where the exact point was that the rain stopped falling. There had to be a place, a geometric plane, where on one side it was raining and the other side it wasn't. He used to wonder what it would be like to stand in that spot, arms stretched out on either side, one hand wet and the other dry. Other dividing lines weren't so distinct. He still thought of his music appreciation professor in college saying, “Don't think that on the day Bach died, people ran through the streets yelling, ‘Finally! We can get out of the Baroque Era and start writing classical music now!'”

He also used to wonder when certain ideas had first begun. When he was nine, he remembered asking his mother where bread had started. She had been kneading dough at the time, scowling into it as she stretched and pounded, when it suddenly occurred to Perry that someone must have
invented
the whole process of making bread. But how would anyone ever come up with something like that? When he had asked his mother, she evidently hadn't understood his question, for she had merely replied distantly, “Oh, my grandmother taught me how to do this.”

In high school biology he had pondered over the inception of life—not just the point at which something was born, but the moment at which matter became, say, a potential
being
. He had heard a radio talk-show host argue the issue of abortion once, asserting that a baby was not an entity, thus not a
person
, until the moment it emerged from the mother's womb. Therefore, the host had concluded, abortion was not the same as killing a living person. A fetus, he had told the caller, had no identity, therefore no rights. “Not until the moment I was
born
,” he had said, “did I become Dale Halston.”

“Then when your mother was carrying you,” the caller had responded, “who
was
that inside her—Peter Pan?” Dale Halston had immediately cut the caller off and said wearily, “Let's screen these callers a little more carefully. We should at least make
marginal intelligence
a criterion for getting on the air.” Perry had been disappointed. He had wanted to hear Dale's answer to the caller's question.

The Bushongs' front door opened suddenly and someone stepped outside. “
What the
—you mean you never even checked the mail today?” a man's voice from inside asked. “What did you do all day anyway?” As Perry started walking again, he heard part of the reply, a woman's shrill voice saying, “Well, for starters, I cleaned up two bucketfuls of puke after breakfast, then—” The voices were cut off by the slamming of the door.

Marriages had their dividing points, too, Perry thought as he turned onto Lily Lane and took to the sidewalk. Over the past months he had tried to analyze his life with Dinah—put it on some kind of graph with the fifteen years laid out across the bottom and a scale from one to ten along the side, with corresponding descriptors ranging from “ecstatically happy” to “tormentingly miserable.” When had the first hairline crack occurred? How long had it gone on before that dark, wide fault of Dinah's afternoon pronouncement of “I want out”? What had he done—or failed to do, as Brother Hawthorne would have him believe?

As he looked back over it, he was ready to admit he hadn't been a good listener. In recent years, that is. During the early years he remembered soaking up Dinah's words thirstily, astounded at her openness. He had grown up thinking all women were closed up as tightly as his mother or were as tiresomely unimaginative as Beth.

Listening—this was a subject Brother Hawthorne had drummed on repeatedly in his Wednesday evening talks. But how was a man ever supposed to know how much that meant to a woman? Or to kids either. Brother Hawthorne frequently took a break from harping on the subject of listening to your wife and said things like “It's imperative, parents, for us to
attend
to our children when they talk to us. We must lay aside our work and look at them while they speak. Otherwise, the day will come when we long for the closeness of their talk but hear only silence, for we figuratively closed the door on them years ago.” Perry remembered all the times he had nodded absentmindedly when Troy had run into his office to show him a picture or a rock or—what
were
all those other things?

But how did Brother Hawthorne know? Maybe he was just guessing. Maybe listening had nothing to do with it. Perry had to admit, however, that it
had
been included in Dinah's complaints of recent years.

Dinah had always been a talker. In the good years of their marriage, she would burst through the front door talking, and at night when Perry fell asleep she would still be talking. Details, always details—what color a friend's new sofa was, how many ounces of formula Troy drank, how much down to the penny a new pair of shoes cost, what so-and-so
said
, which wasn't at all what she
meant
. On and on. It was only natural that he had become selective in his listening. “You didn't hear a word I was saying, did you?” she began to ask him. Sometimes he could fake it, retrieving a few key phrases from his short-term memory bank, but more and more in the last few years she wouldn't even bother to ask the question. She would merely stop talking, fix him with a withering glare, and leave the room.

Did the husbands in these Montroyal houses listen to their wives? In how many houses right now, Perry wondered, were husbands actually doing that? The notion of conducting an informal survey came to Perry's mind. Maybe he would just see how much listening was going on. And, of course, talking. In how many houses were a man and woman actually engaged in a conversation in which the man was actually listening attentively part of the time?

It was surprising how many people in Montroyal left windows and doors wide open at this hour of night. All up and down Lily Lane light spilled out into the tiny front yards. October had been mild so far. Although the nighttime temperatures dropped, the daytime ones still climbed into the low eighties. By nightfall everyone seemed to remember it was autumn again and opened up their houses to the cool breezes.

Once again Perry slowed his steps and turned his attention to the houses. He wasn't sure why the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah came to mind, but he found himself thinking, “Peradventure ten shall be found there.” The piquant, archaic phrasing had appealed to him immediately the first time he had read the passage in Genesis about Abraham's bargaining with God to spare the city of Sodom. Then sometime later Brother Hawthorne had preached a very dramatic sermon titled “The Sin and Sorrow of Sodom.” Of course, Sodom had nothing to do with Montroyal. God didn't consume cities with fire just because men didn't listen to their wives. Still, Perry couldn't shake the analogy from his mind, and he felt certain that, like the wicked cities of old, Montroyal wouldn't produce its quota.

It was eight blocks to Hardee's, but Perry stretched it to eleven by taking a few detours. From Lily Lane, he turned onto Rose Street for three blocks, then took a side trip down Tulip Court, then Violet Street and from there to Fredericks Road, one of Derby's main thoroughfares. When he arrived at Hardee's, the teenager who was mopping the entryway looked at him unenthusiastically and sullenly motioned him to come on in. Perry tiptoed through, then quickly placed his order inside and sat down in a booth by the window.

Two houses—that was the result of his survey. Through an open window on Tulip Court, he had seen a middle-aged couple sitting together at the dining room table. The man was the only one eating, but as he lifted each forkful to his mouth, he kept his eyes on the woman, who sat in a chair to his left but facing him. She had one arm propped on the table, but the other was moving freely, almost wildly as she talked. Perry had stopped and watched them only long enough to verify that they really qualified, then had continued on his way.

He hadn't come across the other house until he was almost at the end of Violet Street, near the large brick marker overtaken with vines and bearing the faded old signboard that read
MONTROYAL, TEXTILE MERCHANT OF THE SOUTH
. It was a small house, one of the two-bedroom variety, Perry guessed from the outside, but at some point an occupant had extended the front stoop to a porch, and it was here in the porch swing that Perry saw the second couple. He had slowed his steps. They were sitting close together on the swing, and the man had his arm around the woman, who was talking in that rapid, breathless way that younger women often have. She was holding a book in one hand, gesturing with the other. As he drew nearer, Perry heard her say, “And they actually got
pictures
of it!” The man chuckled as she went on talking. They both looked up at Perry as he walked by, and the woman stopped in midsentence, then continued after he had passed by. Perry heard her say, “But it
could
be true, you see! Really! It's all right here in this book if you'd only read it.”

So a grand total of two husbands were found to be listening—and he wasn't even sure he should count a man listening to a book report. Of course he hadn't been able to see into every house. Maybe in the ones that were dark, the husband and wife were whispering in bed. Maybe in the ones with the blinds closed, the wives were talking intimately while their husbands listened with rapt expressions. On the other hand, maybe the husbands were snoring in front of the television.

Perry was halfway through with his hamburger when two women came in and sat in the booth behind him. They were both heavy women in their forties, he guessed, and they both wore neon-colored warm-up suits that swished loudly as they moved. Perry wondered if they had been out walking for exercise and had decided to reward themselves with fries and large drinks. Perry's booth wobbled violently as they settled in.

“Yep, he's one sorry man,” one of them said.

“Well, if you ever find one that's not, let me know,” replied the other one. As they both laughed, Perry felt the booth shake again and imagined them craning their necks to look at him and point derisively.

“Doctor says Lorena's dilated four centimeters,” he heard the first one say. “If that baby don't come on, she's gonna die, poor thing. She's not as big as a gnat.”

Perry started eating faster.

“Didn't she have a hard time with her first one?” the other one asked. “Oh, honey, she was in labor for
thirty-seven
hours . . . look, isn't that Eddie pulling into the Texaco?” The booth shook again, and Perry found himself looking out the window at the Texaco station next door, where a man was just getting out of a red Honda.

“That's him all right, that low-down . . .” They were both silent a few moments as Eddie yanked the lever on the gas pump, then shoved the nozzle into his tank.

“He sure thinks he's God's gift to the female population, don't he, though? Look at the rooster strut!” the first woman said. Perry agreed that the man did look pretty self-satisfied swaggering toward the station attendant with his money extended, rolled up like a long cigarette between two fingers.

Suddenly the other woman guffawed. “Oh, listen,
listen!
See that car wash there? Charlene told me the funniest thing today! You gotta hear this! You know, she takes her granddaddy to all his doctor's appointments and things—well, yesterday—oh, honey, this is the
best
story—on the way back from their trip to the doctor, Charlene decides to get her car washed, okay, 'cause Joe's been telling her how cruddy it looks. So she pulls into this drive-through place—I think it was that one right there—and anyway she tells her granddaddy what she's doing and all, only he's mad at her for leaving him at the doctor's twenty minutes after his appointment was over, so he doesn't answer her. And Charlene—you know how spacey she can be—she thinks she's pushing the button to roll the back windows
up
when really she was rolling them
down
.” The woman broke off with a loud yap of laughter, and when she finally resumed the story, she kept having to stop after every few words before she could go on. “Her granddaddy never said a
word
the whole time they was going through that car wash! And Charlene said she didn't even catch on to what was happening at first because she was just sitting up front enjoying the view and thinking, ‘My, that water sounds awful loud,' and then she all of a sudden felt some spray on the back of her neck, and she looks around and”—she broke down again in a paroxysm of laughter—“there sets her granddaddy just lookin' like he wanted to
murder
her, and the water just
shootin'
at him from both sides!”