The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (28 page)

She was alone. Her mother and father had done their drinking before dinner, as was their habit, and had gone to bed by nine-thirty, also their habit. Janet had almost forgotten their routines, and a flood of sour memories swept over her, depressing her, separating her from her own life sufficiently to make her feel self-righteous sitting there on the porch with the bottle of Teacher’s, a pitcher of water, a tub of ice cubes, and a small transistor radio on the floor beside her. She poured and drank one glassful of Scotch and water after another, letting the sweetly sad songs from that summer’s crop swarm over her past and present lives. At one point she told herself that she was very interested in the differences between the way her parents drank and the way she drank—meaning that she was interested in making sure that there were differences.

As the land behind her cooled, the wind blew steadily and strongly, and the sound of the waves crashing in darkness on the packed, wet sand filled all the space that lay behind the sound of the radio. Janet thought in clumsy spirals backwards in time, of her husband, Roger, his years in graduate school, and their town house in Cambridge, where the children were born, and the years before that, when she and Roger were in college, the years she’d endured while in high school in Connecticut, living at home with her parents, and then she was a very young girl visiting her grandparents, here, at Kitty Hawk, where the family had been coming for summers for as long as she could remember and before she was born. And now here she was again, back where she had started, where they had started, too, her parents, and she was placing her own daughters where she had been placed, even to the point of sleeping them in the same room she had used at their age. Her chest and throat filled with a hard knot of longing. And as soon as she was aware of its presence, the knot loosened and unraveled and regathered as anger—anger at her life, as if it were an entity distinct from her, for all the cunning ways it had trapped her and her children.

Momentarily satisfied with this object for her emotion, she flicked off the radio, stood slightly off-balance, rocked on the balls of her feet like a losing prizefighter, and wound her way back into the living room, bumping curtly against the maple arm of the couch, grabbing at the light switches, dumping the house finally into darkness, and made her way down the hall to the stairs and up the stairs to her bedroom, the “guest room” at the end, moving in spite of the darkness with pugnacious confidence, but off-balance, inept.

*  *  *

Over on the western side of the Outer Banks, the sound side, the water was shallow and most of the time calm. The fourth morning at Kitty Hawk, Janet decided to take the girls to one of the small inlets where they could wade and even swim safely. They were excited by the prospect, though they didn’t quite understand how it could be so different only a few miles away. If here by the cottage there was an ocean with huge, dangerous waves and undertows and tides, how could they get into the car and go to the same salty water a few miles away and have it be like a shallow lake?

Driving fast along the narrow road north of Kitty Hawk—deep sand on both sides, witchgrass, sea oats, and short brush, with high dunes blocking any possible views of the ocean—Janet slowed suddenly and carefully pulled her father’s green Chrysler station wagon over and picked up a hitchhiker. He was slight and not very tall, an inch or two taller than Janet. About twenty-two or -three, with long blond hair, almost white, that hung straight down his back, he moved with an odd, precise care that was slightly effeminate and, to Janet, attractive. As he came up beside the car, he smiled. He had even white teeth, good-humored blue eyes, a narrow nose. He pitched his backpack into the rear of the car, where the girls sat, nodded hello to them, and climbed into the front seat next to Janet.

“How far you goin’?” he asked.

“Out beyond Duck, to the Sound. Four or five miles, I guess. Will that get you where you want?”

“Yeah,” he answered. He slid down in the seat, folded his hands across his flat belly, and closed his eyes, obviously enjoying the smooth luxury of the car, the insulating comfort of the air conditioner, as Janet drove the huge vehicle swiftly along the road, floating over bumps, gliding flatly around curves and bends in the road.

“Connecticut plates,” the young man said suddenly, as if remembering a name he’d forgotten. “Are you from Connecticut?” He was unshaven, but his cheeks weren’t so much bearded as covered with a soft, blond down. He was tanned, wearing jeans, patched and torn, faded and as soft-looking as chamois, and a dark green T-shirt. He was barefoot. Slipping a bit further down in the seat, his weight resting on the middle of his back, he placed his feet onto the dashboard in front of him gingerly, with a grace and care that made it seem natural to Janet.

She explained that she was from Cambridge, that the car was her father’s, her parents were the ones who lived in Connecticut. Manchester, outside Hartford. And she was just down here for a while, she and her daughters, visiting them at their cottage. Though she herself hadn’t been down here in years, not since her childhood. Because of summer camps and school and all…

“Yeah, right,” he said, peering casually around, taking in the girls in the back, who grinned soundlessly at him, and the Styrofoam floats in the far back of the car, beach towels, a change of clothes for each of them, a bag with sandwiches and cookies in it, a small cooler with ice and a six-pack of Coke inside. “You going swimming in the Sound?” he asked.

“Yes, for the kids, y’know?” She started to explain, about the waves, the undertow, the tides, how these presented no problem over on the Sound and children their ages could actually swim and enjoy themselves, not just sit there digging in the sand, which was about all they could do over on the sea side—when she realized that she was talking too much, too rapidly, about things that didn’t matter. She asked him, “What about you? Are you staying down here for the summer? Or what?”

“I’m just kind of passing through. I may stay on for the summer, though,” he added softly. His accent identified him as a Northerner, but that was about all.

“Are you living here? In Kitty Hawk, I mean?”

“I made like this camp out on the dunes a ways, beyond where the road ends. It’s a fine place, so long as they don’t come along and move me out. Nobody’s supposed to be camping out there.”

“Do you have a tent?” she asked, curious.

“They’d spot that as soon as I pitched it. I just sort of leaned some old boards and stuff together, pieces of wood I found along the beach and in the dunes. Last night, when it rained, I bet I stayed as dry as you did. It’s the best place I’ve had all year. Up north, even in summer, there’s no way you can be comfortable drifting around like this. But down here, it’s easy, at least till winter comes. I work a couple of days every couple of weeks pumping gas at the Gulf station in Manteo, for groceries and stuff. That’s where I’m comin’ from now. I got my two weeks’ groceries an’ stuff in my pack. I just spend the rest of my time, you know, out on the dunes, sitting around in my shack, playing a little music, smoking some good dope, fishing on the beach. Stuff like that.”

“Oh,” she said.

The road ahead was narrower and, on both sides, dunes, and beach beyond dunes, and no vegetation except for brown grasses scattered sparsely across the sands, and as they rounded a curve, the road ended altogether. There was a paved cul-de-sac at the end where, without much trouble, one could turn a car around, and Janet steered the big Chrysler into this area and parked it. She shut off the motor, opened the door, and stepped out quickly.

The young man got out and walked around to the back, where he flopped the tailgate down, pulling his pack out first, then the kids’ floats, the lunch bag and cooler, and the towels and clothes. The girls scrambled past him, leaped down from the tailgate, and ran for the water. They were already in their bathing suits and didn’t break stride as they hit the quietly lapping water and raced in, quickly finding themselves twenty or thirty feet from shore and the water not yet up to their knees. Janet had come around to the back of the car, but by the time she got there the man was already closing the tailgate, lifting it slowly. Smiling, she came and stood beside him, to help lift the heavy tailgate, brushing his bare arm with her hand, then moving tightly toward him, touching his thigh with the front of hers. They lifted the slab of metal together, slamming it shut, and moved at once away from the car and from each other. She peered easily into his face, and he answered with a slight smile.

“Want to come up and see my shack?” He stood about eight feet away from her, one hand resting on his pack.

“Where is it?” She tossed her head and slung a wisp of hair away from her eyes. She leaned over and picked up the two coffin-shaped floats, hating the touch of the things against her hands, their odd weightlessness.

He waved a hand toward the seaside. “A couple hundred yards over that way. Just walk over those dunes there, and when you get to the beach, go along for maybe a hundred yards and cut in toward the dunes again, and then you’ll see my shack. It’ll look like a pile of driftwood or something to you at first, but when you get closer, you’ll see it’s a pretty cool place to live,” he said, showing his excellent teeth again. “I got some good smoke, too, if you care for that.”

She looked down at the clothes lying in the sand, the paper bag and ice chest, the beach towels, then back at the bony youth in front of her.

“Well, no. I don’t think so. I have my daughters here. They haven’t had a chance to swim, really, not since we got here, and I promised them this would be it. A whole day of it. But thanks,” she said.

He answered, “Sure,” lifted his pack onto his back and jabbed his arms through the straps and started across the pale sand, through slowly waving lines of sea oats, leaving deep, drooping tracks behind him.

She stood at the back of the car for a few moments, watching him depart, then turned and dragged the Styrofoam floats down to the edge of the water.

“You coming in, too, Mamma?” Eva asked her.

“Yeah, Pickle. I’m coming in, too.”

“What were you talking about, you and that man?” Laura wondered, looking anxious. She stood knee-deep in the tepid water, about twenty feet from shore.

“Nothing much, really. He wanted me to come and see the way he lives. I guess he’s proud of the way he lives. Some people are proud of the way they live. I guess he’s one.”

“Are you?” Laura asked.

“No,” Janet said. Then she went back to the car for the rest of their gear.

When she woke the next morning, the first thing she knew was that it was raining—a soft, windless, warm rain, falling in a golden half-light—and she couldn’t decide if it had just begun or was about to end.

Dressing quickly, she shoved a brush through her hair and walked out to the hall, heard her daughters talking behind the door of their bedroom, saw that the door to her parents’ room was still closed, and, judging it to be early, probably not seven yet, walked downstairs to the living room. Immediately, upon entering the room, she felt the dampness of it. In the mornings here, the living room and kitchen seemed strangely inappropriate to her—wet, chilled, smelling of last night’s supper—which made her eager to get a pot of coffee made, bacon frying, the new day begun.

As she moved about the small kitchen, from the Formica-topped counter to the stove to the refrigerator, she gradually realized that the rain had stopped, and the golden haze had been replaced by a low, overcast sky that cast a field of gloomy, pearl-colored light. She stopped work and looked out the window toward the ocean. A gull, as it swept up from the beach, ascending at the ridge between the cottage and the water, seemed to burst from the ground. Its belly was stained with yellow streaks the color of egg yolk, and she realized that the seagulls—scavengers, carrion eaters, filthy, foul-smelling creatures—were beautiful only when seen from a distance. Suddenly, the force of the day, the utter redundancy of it, the closure it represented and sustained, hit her. She was unwilling to believe that her life was going to be this way every day, unwilling to believe it and yet also unable to deny it any longer: a lifetime of waking to damp, smelly couches and chairs, to rooms filled with cold furniture, to preparing food again, for herself, for her children, of waking to sudden gray skies and stinking birds searching for garbage, and on through the day more meals, more messes to make and clean up afterwards, until nightfall, when, with pills or alcohol, she would put her body to sleep for eight or ten hours, to begin it all over again the next morning. It wasn’t that she believed there was nothing more than this. Rather, she understood that—no matter what else there was—she would never get away from this. Anything she might successfully add to her life could only enter it as background to this repeated series of acts, tasks, perceptions, services. She was thirty years old, not old, and it was too late to begin anything truly fresh and new. A new man, a new place to live, a new way of life, a profession, even—the newness would be a mockery, a sad, lame reaction to the failure of the old. There had been the promise, when she left Roger, of sloughing off her old life the way a snake sloughs off an old skin, revealing a new, lucid, sharply defined skin beneath it. But the analogy hadn’t held.

And she was trapping her own children. The terms of her life had become the terms of theirs, and thus they, too, would spend the rest of their lives in relentless, unchanging reaction to patterns she could not stop establishing for them. None of them, not she, not her daughters, was going to get free. Once again, she’d been fooled, but this time, she knew, it was for the last time. She felt a dry bitterness working down her throat. Walking to the bottom of the stairs, she quietly called her daughters down for breakfast.

*  *  *

“Look, it’s going to be a lousy day all day, so instead of waiting around here hoping the sun will come out, is it okay if I take your car and spend the day with the kids, just driving around and taking in the sights?” She lit a cigarette, flicked the match onto the floor, saw it lying there, a thin tail of smoke ascending from one end, and quickly plucked it back. And wondered what the hell made her do that. She held the burnt match carefully between her thumb and forefinger, while her father tried to answer her first question.