The Stories of Richard Bausch (55 page)

“Over and over,” she mutters, looking away again. “I just want to go to sleep.”

“You know what your problem is?” he says. “You’re a
critic.
That’s what your problem is. Everything is something for you to evaluate and
decide
on. Even me.

Especially me.”

“You,” she says.

“Yes,” he says. “Me. Because this isn’t about my father at all. It’s about us.”

She sits staring at him. She’s waiting for him to go on. On an impulse, wanting to surprise and upset her, he pulls the car into a 7-Eleven parking lot and stops.

“What’re you doing?” she says.

He doesn’t answer. He turns the engine off and gets out, walks through what he is surprised to find is a blowing storm across to the entrance of the store and in. It’s noisy here—five teenagers are standing around a video game while another is rattling buttons and cursing. Behind the counter an old man sits reading a magazine and sipping from a steaming cup. He smiles as Kenneth approaches, and for some reason Kenneth thinks of Shannon’s father, with his meaty red hands and unshaven face, his high-combed double
crown of hair and missing front teeth. Shannon’s father looks like the Ukrainian peasant farmer he’s descended from on the un-Irish side of that family. He’s a stout, dull man who simply watches and listens. He has none of the sharp expressiveness of his daughter, yet it seems to Kenneth that he is more friendly—even more tolerant. Thinking of his wife’s boredom as a kind of aggression, he buys a pack of cigarettes, though he and Shannon quit smoking more than a year ago. He returns to the car, gets in without looking at her, dries his hands on his shirt, and tears at the cigarette pack.

“Oh,” she says. “Okay-great.”

He pulls out a cigarette and lights it with the dashboard lighter. She’s sitting with her arms folded, still hunched down in the seat. He blows smoke. He wants to tell her, wants to set her straight; but he can’t organize the words in his mind yet. He’s too angry. He wants to smoke the cigarette and then measure everything out for her, the truth as it seems to be arriving in his heart this night: that she’s manipulative and mean when she wants to be, that she’s devious and self-absorbed and cruel of spirit when she doesn’t get her way—looking at his father like that, as if there were something sad about being able to hold a room in thrall at the age of seventy-five. Her own father howling with laughter the whole time …

“When you’re through with your little game, I’d like to go home,” she says.

“Want a cigarette?” he asks. “This is so childish, Kenneth.”

“Oh?” he says. “How childish is it to sit and
sulk
through an entire party because people don’t conform to your wishes and—well, Jesus, I’m sorry, I don’t think I quite know what the hell you wanted from everybody today. Maybe you could fill me in on it a little.”

“I want some understanding from you,” she says, beginning to cry.

“Oh, no,” says Kenneth. “You might as well cut that out. I’m not buying that. Not the way you sat yawning at my father tonight as if he was senile or something and you couldn’t even be bothered to humor him.”

“Humor
him. Is that what everyone’s doing?”

“You know better than that, Shannon. Either that or you’re blind.”

“All right,” she says. “That was unkind. Now I don’t feel like talking anymore, so let’s just drop it.”

He’s quiet a moment, but the anger is still working in him. “You know
the trouble with you?” he says. “You don’t see anything with love. You only see it with your
brain.”

“Whatever you say,” she tells him.

“Everything’s locked up in your
head,”
he says, taking a long drag of the cigarette and then putting it out in the ashtray. He’s surprised by how good he feels—how much in charge, armed with being right about her: he feels he’s made a discovery, and he wants to hold it up into the light and let her look at it.

“God, Kenneth. I felt sick all day. I’m pregnant.”

He starts the car. “You know those people that live behind us?” he says. The moment has become almost philosophical to him.

She stares at him with her wet eyes, and just now he feels quite powerful and happy.

“Do you?” he demands.

“Of course I do.”

“Well, I was watching them the other day. The way he is with the yard—right? We’ve been making such fun of him all summer. We’ve been so
smart
about his obsession with weeds and trimming and the almighty grass.”

“I guess it’s really important that we talk about these people now,” she says. “Jesus.”

“I’m telling you something you need to hear,” Kenneth says. “Goddammit.”

“I don’t want to hear it now,” she says. “I’ve been listening to talk all day. I’m tired of talk.”

And Kenneth is shouting at her. “I’ll just say this and then I’ll shut up for the rest of the goddamn year if that’s what you want!”

She says nothing.

“I’m telling you about these people. The man was walking around with a little plastic baggie on one hand, picking up the dog’s droppings. Okay? And his wife was trimming one of the shrubs. She was trimming one of the shrubs and I thought for a second I could feel what she was thinking. There wasn’t anything in her face, but I was so
smart,
like we are, you know, Shannon. I was so smart about it that I knew what she was thinking. I was so
perceptive
about these people we don’t even know. These people we’re too snobbish to speak to.”

“You’re the one who makes fun of them,” Shannon says.

“Let me finish,” he says. “I saw the guy’s wife look at him from the other side of the yard, and it was like I could hear the words in her mind: ‘My God, he’s picking up the dog droppings again. I can’t stand it another minute.’ You know? But that
wasn’t
what she was thinking. Because she walked over in a little while and helped him—actually pointed out a couple of places he’d missed, for God’s sake. And then the two of them walked into their house arm in arm with their dog droppings. You see what I’m saying, Shannon? That woman was looking at him with love. She didn’t see what I saw—there wasn’t any criticism in it.”

“I’m not criticizing anyone,” his wife tells him. “I’m tired. I need to go home and get some sleep.”

“But you
were
criticizing,” he says, pulling back out into traffic. “Everything you did was a criticism. Don’t you think it shows? You didn’t even try to stifle any of it.”

“Who’s doing the criticizing now?” she says. “Are you the only one who gets to be a critic?”

He turns down the city street that leads home. He’s looking at the lights going off in the shining, rainy distances. Beside him, his pregnant wife sits crying. There’s not much traffic, but he seems to be traveling at just the speed to arrive at each intersection when the light turns red. At one light they sit for what seems an unusually long time, and she sniffles. And quite abruptly he feels wrong; he thinks of her in the bad days of her growing up and feels sorry for her. “Okay,” he says. “Look, I’m sorry.”

“Just let’s be quiet,” she says. “Can we just be quiet? God, if I could just not have the sound
of talk
for a while.”

The car idles roughly, and the light doesn’t change. He looks at the green one two blocks away and discovers in himself the feeling that some momentous outcome hinges on that light staying green long enough for him to get through it. With a weird pressure behind his eyes, everything shifts toward some inner region of rage and chance and fright: it’s as if his whole life, his happiness, depends on getting through that signal before it, too, turns red. He taps his palm on the steering wheel, guns the engine a little like a man at the starting line of a race.

“Honey,” she says. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

He doesn’t answer. His own light turns green, and in the next instant he’s got the pedal all the way to the floor. They go roaring through the intersection,
the tires squealing, the back of the car fishtailing slightly in the wetness. She’s at his side, quiet, bracing in the seat, her hands out on the dash, and in the moment of knowing how badly afraid she is he feels strangely reconciled to her, at a kind of peace, speeding through the rain. He almost wishes something would happen, something final, watching the light ahead change to yellow, then to red. It’s close, but he makes it through. He makes it through and then realizes she’s crying, staring out, the tears streaming down her face. He slows the car, wondering at himself, holding on to the wheel with both hands, and at the next red light he comes to a slow stop. When he sees that her hands are now resting on her abdomen, he thinks of her pregnancy as if for the first time; it goes through him like a bad shock to his nerves. “Christ,” he says, feeling sick. “I’m sorry.”

The rain beats at the windows and makes gray, moving shadows on the inside of the car. He glances at her, then looks back at the road.

“Honey?” she says. The broken note in her voice almost makes him wince.

He says, “Don’t, it’s all right.” He’s sitting there looking through the twin half-circles of water the wipers make.

She sniffles again.

“Shannon,” he says. “I didn’t mean any of it.” But his own voice sounds false to him, a note higher, and it dawns on him that he’s hoarse from shouting. He thinks of the weekend mornings they’ve lain in bed, happy and warm, luxuriating in each other. It feels like something in the distant past to him. And then he remembers being awakened by the roar of the neighbor’s power mower, the feeling of superiority he had entertained about such a man, someone obsessed with a lawn. He’s thinking of the man now, that one whose wife sees whatever she sees when she looks at him, and perhaps she looks at him with love.

Shannon is trying to gain control of herself, sobbing and coughing. The light changes, but no one’s behind him, and so he moves over in the seat and puts his arms around her. A strand of her hair tickles his jaw, a little discomfort he’s faintly aware of. He sits very still, saying nothing, while in the corner of his vision the light turns yellow, then red again. She’s holding on to him, and she seems to nestle slightly. When the light turns back to green, she gently pulls away from him.

“We better go,” she says, wiping her eyes.

He sits straight, presses the accelerator pedal carefully, like a much older man. He wishes he were someone else, wishes something would change, and then is filled with a shivering sense of the meaning of such thoughts. He’s driving on in the rain, and they are silent for a time. They’re almost home.

“I’m just so tired,” Shannon says finally.

“It’s all right,” he tells her.

“Sweet,” she says.

The fight’s over. They’ve made up. She reaches across and gives his forearm a little affectionate squeeze. He takes her hand and squeezes back. Then he has both hands on the wheel again. Their apartment house is in sight now, down the street to the left. He turns to look at her, his wife, here in the shadowed and watery light, and then he quickly looks back at the road. It comes to him like a kind of fright that in the little idle moment of his gaze some part of him was marking the unpleasant downturn of her mouth, the chiseled, too-sharp curve of her jaw—the whole, disheveled, vaguely tattered look of her—as though he were a stranger, someone unable to imagine what anyone, another man, other men, someone like himself, could see in her to love.

I came back
in no time with the burgers, and when he reached into the bag I smelled it on him. I didn’t say anything. He got his burger and opened it, talking goofy like he does. “Best car ever made was the Studebaker, Baker.”

“Right, Dwight,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it.

He sat on the stairs and I sat in the window seat of this place. We’d got the walls and the first coat of trim. There was a lot of touch-up to do, and if he was going to start drinking, it wasn’t going to get done. Outside, we still had the porch railing. It was a big wraparound porch. Two days’ work at least, with both of us pushing it.

“Dad,” I said.

He was chewing, shaking his head. He liked the hamburger. All his life, I think he enjoyed things more than other people. “Man,” he said.

It was getting dark. We still had to finish the trim in the dining room—the chair railing. “Well,” I said. I was watching his eyes.

“You know,” he said. “I do good work. Don’t I do good work?”

“The finest,” I said.

He smiled. “And you help me.”

I concentrated on my food. I could’ve maybe figured I’d made a mistake until now. But this was the way he talked whenever he was on the stuff. I started looking around casually for where he could hide it.

“You’re a good son,” he said.

I might’ve nodded. I was eating that hamburger and trying not to show anything to him.

“Twenty years ago I painted my first house,” he said. “Helped a friend one summer. I told you this. Never dreamed I’d have a son to help me. You ought to be in college, son. But I’m just as glad you’re here.”

It was like he might start crying.

“Best get back to work,” I said.

He was sitting there thinking. I knew what he was seeing in his mind. “Your mother sure can pick them,” he said. “I don’t know what she saw in me.”