Andre Dubus: Selected Stories (3 page)

Her parents and Michaelis wanted her to fly home at Thanksgiving but she went to Maine with Diane, a friend from school. Holly told her parents she was going too, and she went to Rhode Island with Tom. Diane’s parents lived in a large brick house overlooking the sea. They were cheerful and affluent, and they were tall and slender like Diane, who had freckles that were fading as winter came. There was a younger brother who was tall and quiet and did not shave yet, and his cheeks were smooth as a girl’s. Around him Miranda felt old.

She had never seen the Atlantic in winter. On Thanksgiving morning she woke before Diane and sat at the window. The sky was grey, a wind was blowing, the lawn sloping down to the sea was snow, and the wind blew gusts of it like powder toward the house. The lawn ended at the beach, at dark rocks; the rocks went out into the sea, into the grey, cold waves. Beyond the rocks she saw a seal swimming. She watched it, sleek and brown and purposeful, going under, coming up. She quickly dressed in corduroy pants and sweater and boots and coat and went downstairs; she heard Diane’s parents having coffee in the kitchen, and quietly went outside and down the slippery lawn to the narrow strip of sand and the rocks. But the seal was gone. She stood looking out at the sea. Once she realized she had been daydreaming, though she could not recall what it was she dreamed; but for a minute or longer she had not known where she was, and when she turned from her dreaming to look at the house, to locate herself, there was a moment when she did not know the names of the people inside. Then she began walking back and forth in front of the house, looking into the wind at the sea. Before long a light snow came blowing in on the salt wind. She turned her face to it. I suppose I don’t love Diane, she told herself. For a moment I forgot her name.

Then it was December, a long Saturday afternoon that was grey without snow, and Holly was gone for the weekend. In late afternoon Miranda left the lighted apartment and a paper she was writing and walked up Beacon Street. The street and sidewalks were wet and the gutters held grey, dirty snow. She walked to the Public Garden where there were trees and clean snow, and on a bridge over a frozen pond she stopped and watched children skating. Then she walked through the Garden and across the street to the Common; • the sidewalks around it were crowded, the Hare Krishna people were out too, with their shaved heads and pigtails and their robes in the cold, chanting their prayer. She did not see any winos. In warm weather they slept on the grass or sat staring from benches, wearing old, dark suits and sometimes a soiled hat. But now they were gone, and where, she wondered, did they go when the sky turns cold? She walked across the Common to the State House; against the grey sky its gold dome looked odd, like something imported from another country. Then she walked home. Already dusk was coming, and she didn’t want to be alone. When she got home Brian was ringing the doorbell.

‘Holly’s not here,’ she said.

‘I know. Are you here?’

‘Sometimes. Come on up.’

He was tall and he wore a fatigue jacket. She looked away from his face, reached in her pocket for the key; she felt him wanting her, it was like a current from his body, and she felt it as she opened the door and as they climbed the stairs. In the apartment she gave him a beer.

‘Are you hungry?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘I am. If I cook something, will you eat it?’

‘Sure.’

‘There’s chicken. Is chicken all right? Broiled?’

‘Chicken? Why not?’

He followed her to the kitchen. While she cooked they talked and he had another beer and she drank wine. She wasn’t hungry anymore. She knew something would happen and she was waiting for it, waiting to see what she would do. She cooked and they ate and then went to the living room and smoked a pipe on the couch. When he took off her sweater she nearly said let’s go to bed, but she didn’t. She closed her eyes and waited and when he was undressed she kissed his bearded face. Her eyes were closed. She felt wicked and that excited her; he was very thin; her body was quick and wanton; but her heart was a stone; her heart was a clock; her heart was a watching eye. Then he shuddered and his weight rested on her and she said: ‘You bastard.’

He left her. He sat at the end of the couch, at her feet; he took a swallow of beer and leaned back and looked at the ceiling.

‘I saw it downstairs,’ he said. ‘You wanted to ball.’

‘Don’t call it that.’

He looked at her; then he leaned over and picked up his socks.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Call it that.’ He put on his socks. ‘Say it again.’

‘What are you playing?’

‘I’m not. I don’t play anymore. It’s all—What are you doing?’

‘I’m putting on my pants.’ He was standing, buckling his belt. He picked up his sweater from the floor.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m cold.’

‘Get dressed.’

‘I don’t want you to go. Let’s get in bed.’

‘That’ll be the second time tonight I do something you want me to. Will I be a bastard again?’

‘No. I’m just screwed up, Brian, that’s all.’

‘Who isn’t?’

In bed he was ribs and hip bone against her side and she liked resting her head on his long hard arm.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘You worried about that guy in California?’

‘He’s not there anymore.’

‘Where’d he go?’

‘He’s still there. Things happened.’

‘Have you had many guys?’

‘Just him and you. You won’t tell Holly, will you?’

‘Why should I?’

‘How long have you been in school?’

‘Six years, on and off.’

‘What will you do?’

‘They haven’t told me yet.’

‘Michaelis is going to be a lawyer.’

‘Good for him.’

‘I used to love him.’

‘Figures.’

‘He’s going to work with Chicanos. I won’t be with him now. For a whole year I thought about that. I was going to marry him and have a baby and carry it like a papoose on the picket lines. We wouldn’t have much money. That was it for a whole year and I was feeling all that when I made love with him, it was my first time and I hurt and I bled and I probably wasn’t any good, but my God I felt wonderful. I felt like I was going to heaven.’

‘You better cheer up, man. There’s other guys.’

‘Oh yes, I know: there are other guys. Miranda will have other guys.’

Her heart did not change: not that night when they made love again, nor Sunday morning waking to his hands. Late Sunday night Holly came home and Miranda woke up but until Holly was undressed and in bed she pretended she was asleep so Holly wouldn’t turn on the lights. Then she pretended to wake up because she wanted to talk to Holly before, in the morning, she saw her face.

‘How was your weekend?’

‘Fine. What did you do?’

‘Stayed in the apartment and studied.’

She lit a cigarette. Holly came over and took one from the pack. Miranda did not look at her: she closed her eyes and smoked and felt the sour cold of the lie. Holly was back in bed, talking into the distance of the lie, and Miranda listened and answered and lay tense in bed, for she was so many different Mirandas: the one with Holly now and the one who made love with Brian (balled; balled; she was sore) and the one who didn’t want to make love with Brian (b—); and beneath or among those there were perhaps two other Mirandas, and suddenly she almost cried, remembering September and October when she was afraid, but she was one Miranda Jones. She sat up quickly, too quickly, so that Holly stopped talking and then said: ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I just want another cigarette.’

‘You should get out next weekend.’

‘Probably.’

‘Come to Providence with me.’

‘What would I do?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever you do here. And we can get you a date.’

‘Maybe I will. Probably I won’t, though.’

Tuesday after dinner Brian came over. He sat on the couch with Holly, and Miranda faced them from a chair. She tried not to look directly at him but she could not help herself: she drank too much beer and she watched him. He kept talking. Her nakedness was not in his face. She felt it was in hers, though, when Holly’s hand dropped to his thigh and rested there. She was not jealous; she did not love Brian; she felt as though something were spilled in the room, something foul and shameful, and no one dared look at it, and no one would clean it up. I’m supposed to be cool, she told herself as she went to the refrigerator and opened three cans of beer. She opened Brian’s last. It was his because it was on the left and she would carry it in her left hand and she remembered his hands. I am not for this world, she thought. Or it isn’t for me. It’s not because I’m eighteen either. Michaelis is twenty-two; he will get brown in the sun talking to Chicanos, he will smell of beer and onions, but his spirit won’t rise; Michaelis is of the world, he will be a lawyer.

She brought Holly and Brian their beer. I’m supposed to be cool, she told herself as she watched Holly’s hand on his leg, watched his talking face where she didn’t live. And where did she live? Whose eyes will hold me, whose eyes will know me when my own eyes look back at me in the morning and I am not in them? I’m supposed to be cool, she told herself as she went to her room and felt the room move as she settled heavily under the blankets; she was bloated with beer, she knew in the morning her mouth would be dry, her stomach heavy and liquid. From the living room the sounds came. It’s not me. She was drunk and for a moment she thought she had said it aloud. It’s not me they’re doing it to. I don’t love him. She remembered his hard, thin legs between hers and she saw him with Holly and wary as a thief her hand slid down and she moved against it. It’s not me they’re doing it to. She listened to the sounds from the other room and moved within them against her hand.

In his bed in his apartment Michaelis held her and his large, dark eyes were wet, and she spoke to him and kissed and dried his tears, though she felt nothing for them; she gave them her lips as she might have given coins to a beggar. She could feel nothing except that it was strange for him to cry; she did not believe she would ever cry again; not for love. It was her first night home, they had left her house three hours earlier, left her mother’s voice whose gaiety could not veil her fear and its warning: ‘Don’t be late,’ she said, meaning don’t spend the night, don’t drive our own nails through our hands; already her mother’s eyes (and, yes, her father’s too) were hesitant, vulpine. How can we get our daughter back? the eyes said. We have saved her. But now how do we get her back? Her parents’ hands and arms were loving; they held her tightly; they drew her to their hearts. The arms and eyes told her not to go to Acapulco after Christmas; not to want to go. No matter. She did not want to go. Michaelis’s arms were tight and loving too, he lay on his side, his body spent from loving her, and now she was spending his soul too, watching it drip on his cheeks: ‘—It didn’t mean anything. Don’t cry. We won’t go to Acapulco. I don’t think I’ll sleep with Brian again, but we won’t go to Acapulco. I want to do other things. I don’t know what they’ll be yet. You’ll have a good life, Michaelis. Don’t worry: you will. It’ll be a fine life. Don’t be sad. Things end, that’s all. But you’ll be fine. Do you want to take me home now? Or do you want me to stay a while. I’ll stay the night if you want—’

She propped on an elbow and looked at him. He had stopped crying, his cheeks glistened still, and he lay on his back now, staring at the ceiling. She could see in his face that he would not make love with her again or, for some time, with anyone else. She watched him until she didn’t need to anymore. Then she called a taxi and put on her clothes. When she heard the taxi’s horn she left Michaelis lying naked in the dark.

THE WINTER FATHER

for Pat

T
HE JACKMAN’S MARRIAGE
had been adulterous and violent, but in its last days, they became a couple again, as they might have if one of them were slowly dying. They wept together, looked into each other’s eyes without guile, distrust, or hatred, and they planned Peter’s time with the children. On his last night at home, he and Norma, tenderly, without a word, made love. Next evening, when he got home from Boston, they called David and Kathi in from the snow and brought them to the kitchen.

David was eight, slender, with light brown hair nearly to his shoulders, a face that was still pretty; he seemed always hungry, and Peter liked watching him eat. Kathi was six, had long red hair and a face that Peter had fallen in love with, a face that had once been pierced by glass the shape of a long dagger blade. In early spring a year ago: he still had not taken the storm windows off the screen doors; he was bringing his lunch to the patio, he did not know Kathi was following him, and holding his plate and mug he had pushed the door open with his shoulder, stepped outside, heard the crash and her scream, and turned to see her gripping then pulling the long shard from her cheek. She got it out before he reached her. He picked her up and pressed his handkerchief to the wound, midway between her eye and throat, and held her as he phoned his doctor who said he would meet them at the hospital and do the stitching himself because it was cosmetic and that beautiful face should not be touched by residents. Norma was not at home. Kathi lay on the car seat beside him and he held his handkerchief on her cheek, and in the hospital he held her hands while she lay on the table. The doctor said it would only take about four stitches and it would be better without anesthetic, because sometimes that puffed the skin, and he wanted to fit the cut together perfectly, for the scar; he told this very gently to Kathi, and he said as she grew, the scar would move down her face and finally would be under her jaw. Then she and Peter squeezed each other’s hands as the doctor stitched and she gritted her teeth and stared at pain.

She was like that when he and Norma told them. It was David who suddenly cried, begged them not to get a divorce, and then fled to his room and would not come out, would not help Peter load his car, and only emerged from the house as Peter was driving away: a small running shape in the dark, charging the car, picking up something and throwing it, missing, crying
You bum You bum You bum
…

Drunk that night in his apartment whose rent he had paid and keys received yesterday morning before last night’s grave lovemaking with Norma, he gained through the blur of bourbon an intense focus on his children’s faces as he and Norma spoke: We fight too much, we’ve tried to live together but can’t; you’ll see, you’ll be better off too, you’ll be with Daddy for dinner on Wednesday nights, and on Saturdays and Sundays you’ll do things with him. In his kitchen he watched their faces.

Next day he went to the radio station. After the news at noon he was on; often, as the records played, he imagined his children last night, while he and Norma were talking, and after he was gone. Perhaps she took them out to dinner, let them stay up late, flanking her on the couch in front of the television. When he talked he listened to his voice: it sounded as it did every weekday afternoon. At four he was finished. In the parking lot he felt as though, with stooped shoulders, he were limping. He started the forty-minute drive northward, for the first time in twelve years going home to empty rooms. When he reached the town where he lived he stopped at a small store and bought two lamb chops and a package of frozen peas.
I will take one thing at a time
, he told himself. Crossing the sidewalk to his car, in that short space, he felt the limp again, the stooped shoulders. He wondered if he looked like a man who had survived an accident which had killed others.

That was on a Thursday. When he woke Saturday morning, his first thought was a wish: that Norma would phone and tell him they were sick, and he should wait to see them Wednesday. He amended his wish, lay waiting for his own body to let him know it was sick, out for the weekend. In late morning he drove to their coastal town; he had moved fifteen miles inland. Already the snow-ploughed streets and country roads leading to their house felt like parts of his body: intestines, lung, heart-fiber lying from his door to theirs. When they were born he had smoked in the waiting room with the others. Now he was giving birth: stirruped, on his back, waves of pain. There would be no release, no cutting of the cord. Nor did he want it. He wanted to grow a cord.

Walking up their shovelled walk and ringing the doorbell, he felt at the same time like an inept salesman and a con man. He heard their voices, watched the door as though watching the sounds he heard, looking at the point where their faces would appear, but when the door opened he was looking at Norma’s waist; then up to her face, lipsticked, her short brown hair soft from that morning’s washing. For years she had not looked this way on a Saturday morning. Her eyes held him: the nest of pain was there, the shyness, the coiled anger; but there was another shimmer: she was taking a new marriage vow: This is the way we shall love our children now; watch how well I can do it. She smiled and said: ‘Come in out of the cold and have a cup of coffee.’

In the living room he crouched to embrace the hesitant children. Only their faces were hesitant. In his arms they squeezed, pressed, kissed. David’s hard arms absolved them both of Wednesday night. Through their hair Peter said pleasantly to Norma that he’d skip the coffee this time. Grabbing caps and unfurling coats, they left the house, holding hands to the car.

He showed them his apartment: they had never showered behind glass; they slid the doors back and forth. Sand washing down the drain, their flesh sunburned, a watermelon waiting in the refrigerator …

‘This summer—’

They turned from the glass, looked up at him.

‘When we go to the beach. We can come back here and shower.’

Their faces reflected his bright promise, and they followed him to the kitchen; on the counter were two cans of kidney beans, Jalapeño peppers, seasonings. Norma kept her seasonings in small jars, and two years ago when David was six and came home bullied and afraid of next day at school, Peter asked him if the boy was bigger than he was, and when David said ‘A lot,’ and showed him the boy’s height with one hand, his breadth with two, Peter took the glass stopper from the cinnamon jar, tied it in a handkerchief corner, and struck his palm with it, so David would know how hard it was, would believe in it. Next morning David took it with him. On the schoolground, when the bully shoved him, he swung it up from his back pocket and down on the boy’s forehead. The boy cried and went away. After school David found him on the sidewalk and hit his jaw with the weapon he had sat on all day, chased him two blocks swinging at his head, and came home with delighted eyes, no damp traces of yesterday’s shame and fright, and Peter’s own pain and rage turned to pride, then caution, and he spoke gently, told David to carry it for a week or so more, but not to use it unless the bully attacked; told him we must control our pleasure in giving pain.

Now reaching into the refrigerator he felt the children behind him; then he knew it was not them he felt, for in the bathroom when he spoke to their faces he had also felt a presence to his rear, watching, listening. It was the walls, it was fatherhood, it was himself. He was not an early drinker but he wanted an ale now; looked at the brown bottles long enough to fear and dislike his reason for wanting one, then he poured two glasses of apple cider and, for himself, cider and club soda. He sat at the table and watched David slice a Jalapeño over the beans, and said: ‘Don’t ever touch one of those and take a leak without washing your hands first.’

‘Why?’

‘I did it once. Think about it.’

‘Wow.’

They talked of flavors as Kathi, with her eyes just above rim-level of the pot, her wrists in the steam, poured honey, and shook paprika, basil, parsley, Worcestershire, wine vinegar. In a bowl they mixed ground meat with a raw egg: jammed their hands into it, fingers touching; scooped and squeezed meat and onion and celery between their fingers; the kitchen smelled of bay leaf in the simmering beans, and then of broiling meat. They talked about the food as they ate, pressing thick hamburgers to fit their mouths, and only then Peter heard the white silence coming at them like afternoon snow. They cleaned the counter and table and what they had used; and they spoke briefly, quietly, they smoothly passed things; and when Peter turned off the faucet, all sound stopped, the kitchen was multiplied by silence, the apartment’s walls grew longer, the floors wider, the ceilings higher. Peter walked the distance to his bedroom, looked at his watch, then quickly turned to the morning paper’s television listing, and called: ‘Hey!
The Magnificent Seven’s
coming on.’

‘All
right
,’ David said, and they hurried down the short hall, light footsteps whose sounds he could name: Kathi’s, David’s, Kathi’s. He lay between them, bellies down, on the bed.

‘Is this our third time or fourth?’ Kathi said.

‘I think our fourth. We saw it in a theater once.’

‘I could see it every week,’ David said.

‘Except when Charles Bronson dies,’ Kathi said. ‘But I like when the little kids put flowers on his grave. And when he spanks them.’

The winter sunlight beamed through the bedroom window, the afternoon moving past him and his children. Driving them home he imitated Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Charles Bronson; the children praised his voices, laughed, and in front of their house they kissed him and asked what they were going to do tomorrow. He said he didn’t know yet; he would call in the morning, and he watched them go up the walk between snow as high as Kathi’s waist. At the door they turned and waved; he tapped the horn twice, and drove away.

That night he could not sleep. He read
Macbeth
, woke propped against the pillows, the bedside lamp on, the small book at his side. He put it on the table, turned out the light, moved the pillows down, and slept. Next afternoon he took David and Kathi to a movie.

He did not bring them to his apartment again, unless they were on the way to another place, and their time in the apartment was purposeful and short: Saturday morning cartoons, then lunch before going to a movie or museum. Early in the week he began reading the movie section of the paper, looking for matinees. Every weekend they went to a movie, and sometimes two, in their towns and other small towns and in Boston. On the third Saturday he took them to a PG movie which was bloody and erotic enough to make him feel ashamed and irresponsible as he sat between his children in the theater. Driving home, he asked them about the movie until he believed it had not frightened them, or made them curious about bodies and urges they did not yet have. After that, he saw all PG movies before taking them, and he was angry at mothers who left their children at the theater and picked them up when the movie was over; and left him to listen to their children exclaiming at death, laughing at love; and often they roamed the aisles going to the concession stand, and distracted him from this weekly entertainment which he suspected he waited for and enjoyed more than David and Kathi. He had not been an indiscriminate moviegoer since he was a child. Now what had started as a duty was pleasurable, relaxing. He knew that beneath this lay a base of cowardice. But he told himself it would pass. A time would come when he and Kathi and David could sit in his living room, talking like three friends who had known each other for eight and six years.

Most of his listeners on weekday afternoons were women. Between love songs he began talking to them about movie ratings. He said not to trust them. He asked what they felt about violence and sex in movies, whether or not they were bad for children. He told them he didn’t know; that many of the fairy tales and all the comic books of his boyhood were violent; and so were the westerns and serials on Saturday afternoons. But there was no blood. And he chided the women about letting their children go to the movies alone.

He got letters and read them in his apartment at night. Some thanked him for his advice about ratings. Many told him it was all right for him to talk, he wasn’t with the kids every afternoon after school and all weekends and holidays and summer; the management of the theater was responsible for quiet and order during the movies; they were showing the movies to attract children and they were glad to take the money. The children came home happy and did not complain about other children being noisy. Maybe he should stop going to matinees, should leave his kids there and pick them up when it was over.
It’s almost what I’m doing
, he thought; and he stopped talking about movies to the afternoon women.

He found a sledding hill: steep and long, and at its base a large frozen pond. David and Kathi went with him to buy his sled, and with a thermos of hot chocolate they drove to the hill near his apartment. Parked cars lined the road, and children and some parents were on the hill’s broad top. Red-faced children climbed back, pulling their sleds with ropes. Peter sledded first; he knew the ice on the pond was safe, but he was beginning to handle fatherhood as he did guns: always as if they were loaded, when he knew they were not. There was a satisfaction in preventing even dangers which did not exist.

The snow was hard and slick, rushed beneath him; he went over a bump, rose from the sled, nearly lost it, slammed down on it, legs outstretched, gloved hands steering around the next bump but not the next one suddenly rising toward his face, and he pressed against the sled, hugged the wood-shock to his chest, yelled with delight at children moving slowly upward, hit the edge of the pond and sledded straight out, looking at the evergreens on its far bank. The sled stopped near the middle of the pond; he stood and waved to the top of the hill, squinting at sun and bright snow, then two silhouettes waved back and he saw Kathi’s long red hair. Holding the sled’s rope he walked on ice, moving to his left as David started down and Kathi stood waiting, leaning on her sled. He told himself he was a fool: had lived winters with his children, yet this was the first sled he had bought for himself; sometimes he had gone with them because they asked him to, and he had used their sleds. But he had never found a sledding hill. He had driven past them, seen the small figures on their crests and slopes, but no more. Watching David swerve around a bump and Kathi, at the top, pushing her sled, then dropping onto it, he forgave himself; there was still time; already it had begun.