The New Yorker Stories (16 page)

“Race you back,” Ray says now, lowering May. But she is too tired to race. She and Sugar just keep walking when he runs off. They walk in silence most of the way back.

“Sugar,” May says, “do you know how long we’re going to be here?”

Sugar slows down. “I really don’t know. No. Are you worried that your mother might be back?”

“She ought to be back by now.”

Sugar’s hair looks like snow in the moonlight. “Go to bed when we get back and I’ll talk to him,” Sugar says.

When they get to the house, the light is on, so it’s easier to see where they’re walking. As Sugar pushes open the sliding door, May sees her father standing in front of Gus in the living room. Gus does not turn around when Sugar says, “Gus. Hello.”

Everyone looks at him. “I’m tired as hell,” Gus says. “Is there any beer?”

“I’ll get you some,” Sugar says. Almost in slow motion, she goes to the refrigerator.

Gus has been looking at Ray’s pictures of Sugar, and suddenly he snatches one off the wall. “On
my
wall?” Gus says. “Who did that? Who hung them up?”

“Ray,” Sugar says. She hands him the can of beer.

“Ray,” Gus repeats. He shakes his head. He shakes the beer in the can lightly but doesn’t drink it.

“May,” Sugar says, “why don’t you go upstairs and get ready for bed?”

“Go upstairs,” Gus says. Gus’s face is red, and he looks tired and wild.

May runs up the stairs and then sits down there and listens. No one is talking. Then she hears Gus say, “Do you intend to spend the night, Ray? Turn this into a little social occasion?”

“I would like to stay for a while to—” Ray begins.

Gus says something, but his voice is so low and angry that May can’t make out the words.

Silence again.

“Gus—” Ray begins again.

“
What?
” Gus shouts. “What have you got to say to me, Ray? You don’t have a damned thing to say to me. Will you get out of here now?”

Footsteps. May looks down and sees her father walk past the stairs. He does not look up. He did not see her. He has gone out the door, leaving her. In a minute she hears his motorcycle start and the noise the tires make riding through gravel. May runs downstairs to Sugar, who is picking up the pictures Gus has ripped off the walls.

“I’m going to take you home, May,” Sugar says.

“I’m coming with you,” Gus says. “If I let you go, you’ll go after Ray.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Sugar says.

“I’m going with you,” Gus says.

“Let’s go, then,” Sugar says. May is the first one to the door.

Gus is barefoot. He stares at Sugar and walks as if he is drunk. He is still holding the can of beer.

Sugar gets into the driver’s seat of the Cadillac. The key is in the ignition. She starts the car and then puts her head against the wheel and begins to cry.

“Get moving, will you?” Gus says. “Or move over.” Gus gets out and walks around the car. “I knew you were going crazy when you dyed your hair,” Gus says. “Shove over, will you?”

Sugar moves over. May is in the back seat, in one corner.

“For God’s sake, stop crying,” Gus says. “What am I doing to you?”

Gus drives slowly, then very fast. The radio is on, in a faint mumble. For half an hour they ride in silence, except for the sounds of the radio and Sugar blowing her nose.

“Your father’s O.K.,” Sugar says at last. “He was just upset, you know.”

In the back seat, May nods, but Sugar does not see it.

At last the car slows, and May sits up and sees they are in the block where she lives. Ray’s motorcycle is not in the driveway. All the lights are out in the house.

“It’s empty,” Sugar says. “Or else she’s asleep in there. Do you want to knock on the door, May?”

“What do you mean, it’s empty?” Gus says.

“She’s in Colorado,” Sugar says. “I thought she might be back.”

May begins to cry. She tries to get out of the car, but she can’t work the door handle.

“Come on,” Gus says to her. “Come on, now. We can go back. I don’t believe this.”

May’s legs are still sandy, and they itch. She rubs them, crying.

“You can take her back to Wanda’s,” Sugar says. “Is that O.K., May?”

“Wanda? Who’s that?”

“Her mother’s friend. It’s not far from here. I’ll show you.”

“What am I even doing talking to you?” Gus says.

The radio drones. In another ten minutes they are at Wanda’s.

“I suppose nobody’s here, either,” Gus says, looking at the dark house. He leans back and opens the door for May, who runs up the walk. “Please be here, Wanda,” she whispers. She runs up to the door and knocks. No one answers. She knocks harder, and a light goes on in the hall. “Who is it?” Wanda calls.

“May,” May says.

“May!” Wanda hollers. She fumbles with the door. The door opens. May hears the tires as Gus pulls the car away. She stands there in Sugar’s raincoat, with the red belt hanging down the front.

“What did they do to you? What did they do?” Wanda says. Her eyes are swollen from sleep. Her hair has been clipped into rows of neat pin curls.

“You didn’t even try to find me,” May says.

“I called the house every hour!” Wanda says. “I called the police, and they wouldn’t do anything—he was your father. I did too try to find you. Look, there’s a letter from your mother. Tell me if you’re all right. Your father is crazy. He’ll never get you again after this, I know that. Are you all right, May? Talk to me.” Wanda turns on the hall lamp. “Are you all right? You saw how he got you in the car. What could I do? The police told me there was nothing else I could do. Do you want your mother’s letter? What have you got on?”

May takes the letter from Wanda and turns her back. She opens the envelope and reads: “Dear May, A last letter before I drive home. I looked up some friends of your father’s here, and they asked me to stay for a couple of days to unwind, so here I am. At first I thought he might be in the closet—jump out at me for a joke! Tell Wanda that I’ve lost five pounds. Sweated it away, I guess. I’ve been thinking, honey, and when I come home I want us to get a dog. I think you should have a dog. There are some that hardly shed at all, and maybe some that just plain don’t. It would be good to get a medium-size dog—maybe a terrier, or something like that. I meant to get you a dog years ago, but now I’ve been thinking that I should still do it. When I get back, first thing we’ll go and get you a dog. Love, Mama.”

It is the longest letter May has ever gotten from her mother. She stands in Wanda’s hallway, amazed.

Colorado

P
enelope was in Robert’s apartment, sitting on the floor, with the newspaper open between her legs. Her boots were on the floor in front of her. Robert had just fixed the zipper of one of the boots. It was the third time he had repaired the boots, and this time he suggested that she buy a new pair. “Why?” she said. “You fix them fine every time.” In many of their discussions they came close to arguments, but they always stopped short. Penelope simply would not argue. She thought it took too much energy. She had not even argued when Robert’s friend Johnny, whom she had been living with, moved out on her, taking twenty dollars of her money. Still, she hated Johnny for it, and sometimes Robert worried that even though he and Penelope didn’t argue, she might be thinking badly of him, too. So he didn’t press it. Who cared whether she bought new boots or not?

Penelope came over to Robert’s apartment almost every evening. He had met her more than a year before, and they had been nearly inseparable ever since. For a while he and Penelope and Johnny and another friend, Cyril, had shared a house in the country, not far from New Haven. They had all been in graduate school then. Now Johnny had gone, and the others were living in New Haven, in different apartments, and they were no longer going to school. Penelope was living with a man named Dan. Robert could not understand this, because Dan and Penelope did not communicate even well enough for her to ask him to fix her boots. She hobbled over to Robert’s apartment instead. And he couldn’t understand it back when she was living with Johnny, because Johnny had continued to see another girl, and had taken Penelope’s money and tried to provoke arguments, even though Penelope wouldn’t argue. Robert could understand Penelope’s moving in with Dan at first, because she hadn’t had enough money to pay her share of the house rent and Dan had an apartment in New Haven, but why had she just stayed there? Once, when he was drunk, Robert had asked her that, and she had sighed and said she wouldn’t argue with him when he’d been drinking. He had not been trying to argue. He had just wanted to know what she was thinking. But she didn’t like to talk about herself, and saying that he was drunk had been a convenient excuse. The closest he ever got to an explanation was when she told him once that it was important not to waste your energy jumping from one thing to another. She had run away from home when she was younger, and when she returned, things were only worse. She had flunked out of Bard and dropped out of Antioch and the University of Connecticut, and now she knew that all colleges were the same—there was no point in trying one after another. She had traded her Ford for a Toyota, and Toyotas were no better than Fords.

She was flipping through the newspaper, stretched out on her side on the floor, her long brown hair blocking his view of her face. He didn’t need to look at her: he knew she was beautiful. It was nice just to have her there. Although he couldn’t understand what went on in her head, he was full of factual information about her. She had grown up in Iowa. She was almost five feet nine inches tall, and she weighed a hundred and twenty-five pounds, and when she was younger, when she weighed less, she had been a model in Chicago. Now she was working as a clerk in a boutique in New Haven. She didn’t want to model again, because that was no easier than being a salesperson; it was more tiring, even if it did pay better.

“Thanks for fixing my boots again,” she said, rolling up her pants leg to put one on.

“Why are you leaving?” Robert said. “Dan’s student won’t be out of there yet.”

Dan was a painter who had lost his teaching job in the South. He moved to New Haven and was giving private lessons to students three times a week.

“Marielle’s going to pick me up,” Penelope said. “She wants me to help her paint her bathroom.”

“Why can’t she paint her own bathroom? She could do the whole thing in an hour.”

“I don’t want to help her paint,” Penelope said, sighing. “I’m just doing a favor for a friend.”

“Why don’t you do me a favor and stay?”

“Come on,” she said. “Don’t do that. You’re my best friend.”

“Okay,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t fight over it anyway. He went to the kitchen table and got her coat. “Why don’t you wait till she gets here?”

“She’s meeting me at the drugstore.”

“You sure are nice to some of your friends,” he said.

She ignored him. She did not totally ignore him; she kissed him before she left. And although she did not say that she’d see him the next day, he knew she’d be back.

When Penelope left, Robert went into the kitchen and put some water on to boil. It was his habit since moving to this apartment to have a cup of tea before bed and to look out the window into the brightly lit alley. Interesting things appeared there: Christmas trees, large broken pieces of machinery, and, once, a fireman’s uniform, very nicely laid out—a fireman’s hat and suit. He was an artist—or, rather, he had been an artist until he dropped out of school—and sometimes he found that he still arranged objects and landscapes, looking for a composition. He sat on the kitchen table and drank his tea. He often thought about buying a kitchen chair, but he told himself that he’d move soon and he didn’t want to transport furniture. When he was a child, his parents had moved from apartment to apartment. Their furniture got more and more battered, and his mother had exploded one day, crying that the furniture was worthless and ugly, and threatening to chop it all up with an ax. Since he moved from the country Robert had not yet bought himself a bed frame or curtains or rugs. There were roaches in the apartment, and the idea of the roaches hiding—being able to hide on the underside of curtains, under the rug—disgusted him. He didn’t mind them being there so much when they were out in the open.

The Yale catalogue he had gotten months before when he first came to New Haven was still on the kitchen table. He had thought about taking a course in architecture, but he hadn’t. He was not quite sure what to do. He had taken a part-time job working in a picture-framing store so he could pay his rent. Actually, he had no reason for being in New Haven except to be near Penelope. When Robert lived in the house with Johnny and Cyril and Penelope, he had told himself that Penelope would leave Johnny and become his lover, but it never happened. He had tried very hard to get it to happen; they had often stayed up later than any of the others, and they talked—he had never talked so much to anybody in his life—and sometimes they fixed food before going to bed, or took walks in the snow. She tried to teach him to play the recorder, blowing softly so she wouldn’t wake the others. Once in the summer they had stolen corn, and Johnny had asked her about it the next morning. “What if the neighbors find out somebody from this house stole corn?” he said. Robert defended Penelope, saying that he had suggested it. “Great,” Johnny said. “The Bobbsey Twins.” Robert was hurt because what Johnny said was true—there wasn’t anything more between them than there was between the Bobbsey Twins.