Fat Lightning (2 page)

Nancy was 28 years old, four years younger than Sam. At this point in her life, it was still her normal inclination, when someone told her to do something, to turn around and do the opposite. But something about Sam's unblinking eyes, something about the absolute calm with which he prepared to move them all out of Richmond, convinced her that, for the time being, his mind was made up. He was going to Monacan, and he just assumed that she'd wrap up Wade and go with him.

Nancy knew enough about Sam's family to understand the Putting-Your-Foot-Down tradition. The men didn't say much, didn't make many decisions and yielded frequently on day-to-day things. The few times they did clench their jaws, though, she saw that they were treated as if they were privy to divine wisdom. Later, Nancy wrote it off as either an unwillingness to trample on hallowed Chastain tradition or the nagging feeling that she should have been more of a trouper in her first marriage. So she went along.

Besides, she told herself, Sam is always threatening to move back to Monacan.

Sam turned off the new interstate and approached town from the north. He drove his family across the river and past the drive-in theater, and then the water tower came into view, its faded red letters promising: “Monacan: Your Future's Here.” Some high school kids had climbed it and painted “NOT” between and just above “Future's” and “Here.” Nancy wasn't sure which prediction was least ominous.

Sam had been silent since they left Richmond. Finally, as they made the 45 degree turn that led off Route 17 and on to the road that would soon, around the bend, be Monacan's main street, he spoke.

“I can take over for Daddy,” he told Nancy. “This is where we need to raise our family, right here where the kids can be with their Grandma and Grandy every day,” and he looked back at Wade for confirmation. Wade was asleep.

Nancy wanted to say, “What about my family?” but something told her that this was a day to let it ride. It would take her years to stop depending on little voices of unknown origin for her guidance.

When they first met, Sam seemed to Nancy as if he were content to spend the rest of his life in Richmond. He was in the last year of pharmacy school then. He was 26 years old, with straight, dark hair and a sharp, chiseled French look that Nancy would come to notice in all the Chastain men she would know. His weak eyes and habit of squinting were all that kept him from handsome. Nancy was taking 12 hours at Richmond Professional Institute, trying to finish a degree in English for no apparent reason other than to show that she could finish something.

Sam was a blind date, on Valentine's Day. He and Nancy rolled around in the mud at fraternity parties, went to Virginia Beach just to eat fried shrimp and made love on top of a rather small mountain. Nancy loved Sam's dry wit; he made her laugh more than anything had in a long, long time. She thought he was a gift.

He got on well enough with Nancy's parents, although Suzanne did ask her one time, “What do you use to get him to talk, honey? Bamboo splints?”

It was true that Sam had never been much of a talker, unless he'd had too many gin-and-tonics. He and Nancy's father, Pat, could sit and watch nine innings of baseball on TV without the conversation going much beyond “Beer?” and “Yeah, thanks.” He had a way, too, of getting up and walking out of the room at any time he was not being directly spoken to. This put off the O'Neils, or the female O'Neils at least, but Nancy explained to Suzanne and to her sisters, Marilou and Candy, that everybody in Sam's family was like that, even with each other. Nothing personal.

“It's just the Chastain in him,” Pat would say, partly, Nancy felt, to drive her crazy. Pat was a great believer in blood, and he'd had a couple of Chastain brothers work for him at the cabinet shop.

“I saw Frank Chastain cut an inch off his little finger one day with a circular saw,” he said, “and he didn't even yell. Just asked somebody to take him to the doctor. He was a smart worker, though.”

Sam's saving grace, even the first couple of years they were married, was his penchant for the outrageous, made all the more outrageous because it came from the most deadpan man in Richmond.

The day of her 25th birthday, Nancy had a 10 a.m. class. Sam kissed her goodbye and gave her a card on his way out at 7:30. They were to go out to dinner that night.

On her way to the RPI campus, though, Nancy saw the first of the signs. She realized, by the time she got to the first main intersection, that there were three 25-mile-per-hour speed limit signs in their neighborhood, and that Sam had somehow managed to plaster a piece of white cardboard over the top of each, with black letters that matched those of the highway department, so that the signs read:

NANCY

CHASTAIN

IS

25

He never once conceded that it had been his doing, even after Nancy found the paint can in the basement.

“Must of been the birthday fairy,” he maintained.

Her last two birthdays, Sam had been predictable as clockwork. He seemed to be too old—or too tired—for pranks any more. Nancy wrote it off to parenthood.

“He's not deadpan, sweetie,” Suzanne told her over Thanksgiving. “He's just dead.”

None of her children, after puberty, ever called Suzanne “Momma,” and none of them, whatever age, called Pat anything except “Daddy.” But it never seemed to bother Suzanne. She was 24 when Nancy was born, but by the time her oldest child was in her 20s, people were mistaking her and Nancy for sisters.

They had the same ash-blonde hair, the same slightly wide faces that turned beautiful into something between pretty and cute, the same toothy smile, the same impish blue eyes. But there was more to it than that. Suzanne never got tired, never failed to laugh at a dirty joke, never thought the music was too loud. “If it's too loud,” she told Pat one time when he was complaining bitterly about the decibel level of one of Nancy's Buddy Holly records, “you're too old.”

When they left Richmond that April day, Nancy didn't know whether Sam was going to turn around and go back, or if they were gone to the country for good. She packed three dresses, four blouses, four skirts, and some underwear and sweaters. She threw two coats in the back and hoped she wouldn't have to go back for her fall wardrobe.

But she did pack her homing novel, just in case.

Nancy had always liked to write. She won a sixth-grade fiction contest for all of Richmond. If Buddy Molloy hadn't asked her to marry him the day after they were graduated from high school, and if Nancy hadn't accepted and gone with him to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, to make it official, she probably would've gone to Richmond Professional Institute then, as several of her college-bound friends had.

But Nancy was what Suzanne called contrary, which always made her daughter cringe because it sounded so country. After Buddy and Nancy told Suzanne and Pat that they were married, Pat ran Buddy off and told Nancy that he wasn't paying her way to college unless they got “the thing” annulled. So, of course, Nancy stayed married. She and Buddy hung on for three years, she working as a waitress in Shockoe Slip, Buddy as a pressman at the Times-Dispatch. Nancy would catch a bus or a ride with a friend every day from their one-bedroom apartment west of the Boulevard, and she'd take a course or two at a time from RPI, determined to graduate out of spite.

She and her family stayed unreconciled for six months, but after Pat and Suzanne came over and got them on a sleet-slick Christmas day and forced them to have dinner with the O'Neil family, even had gifts for Buddy, the worst of that was over. Robbie, the youngest, had made her a bookstand in Pat's shop, and inside the card he attached, he wrote, “Please don't leave again.” Pat even paid for some of Nancy's tuition. Later, Nancy wondered if she and Buddy would have done better if they'd had the common bond of railing against her hard-hearted family.

When Buddy and Nancy separated, she had 24 hours credit to show for three years of contrariness. She had $186 in a checking account and owed the school more than $1,000, even with Pat finally helping some. The only way her life had improved was that she was working in a higher class of restaurant.

But she had started to write. She would walk over to a restaurant three blocks away every weekday morning when Buddy had worked the night before and was sleeping late. It had red-and-white checkered window sashes and dark paneling, and some of the most interesting people in Richmond walked by on the sidewalk outside. If she was early enough, there'd be a seat by the window where she could drink hot tea. She would take out her lined notebook and write what she imagined was happening with all those people going by on the other side of the glass. After a couple of years, they'd reserve her a space—by the window on chilly days, near the shade in the back during the heat of summer.

The courses she took weren't a total waste, but there came a point where, in writing and in marriage, she realized that she was on her own. There was a brief affair that Buddy never learned about, with another student, but Nancy finally came to see infidelity as just more material, another character for another story.

She wrote short stories all the time, some of them good, some terrible. She'd turn a VCU professor with a Jewish last name into a survivor of the death camps who imported hams for a living; She'd remake the fat lady who cooked breakfast for early-bird workers into a former beauty queen living in the past; she even wrote a story from the viewpoint of the dachshund that hung around the back door whining for handouts.

At some undetermined time, it occurred to Nancy that she could put some of these characters together and maybe, just maybe, what she would have would be a novel. What came to her, offspring of a pair of short stories, was about a disintegrating family's trip to the New York World's Fair. She called it “Fair Chance.” It soon was occupying much of her waking time.

Buddy and she had shared bodily fluids since the 11th grade, but he really didn't care much what she was writing or whether she was writing. She never pushed it on him, because he was always worn out after work and she was afraid he might laugh at her. Buddy never had any intentions of going to college. His father was a pressman, and he always assumed he'd be one, too. After a while, his friends and Nancy's friends didn't seem to have much in common unless they were among the precious few they still saw from high school. After a while, Buddy and Nancy didn't have much in common, either.

They argued a lot, both of them too young to ever give in. He was a good-looking boy, mischievous Irish face all dark and mysterious after he'd showered and shaved at noon, sometimes pulling Nancy back into bed with him if she wasn't at work or at school. But Buddy was a rover, even when he and Nancy were going steady in high school. She answered too many phone calls where there'd be silence on the other end, then a receiver softly replaced.

By the spring of 1964, not three years after graduation, Buddy moved out, and Nancy never tried very hard to get him back. He joined the Army after they filed for divorce, just in time for Viet Nam, and she gave up the apartment to live with a girlfriend near the campus. Nancy typed the rest of “Fair Chance” in four months in the back bedroom of her shared place in the Fan District. Buddy wrote her once from Fort Polk, Louisiana. She didn't write him back.

She worked up the nerve to ask one of her younger, less-intimidating professors to take a look at her novel. He kept it for three months, then told her that it was “very interesting,” but that it started slowly and seemed not to go anywhere in particular. To Nancy, that seemed to pretty much cover things, but he said he thought it could be helped if it were written from the daughter's point of view.

So Nancy rewrote “Fair Chance,” trying to “punch it up a bit” without really knowing how to, retelling the story through the eyes of a young girl not unlike her youngest sister, Candy.

This time, she got a list of regional publishers and started writing them, one at a time. The first one sent it back three months later with a letter that started “Dear Writer.” “See,” said Marilou, “they know you're a writer.” The second one lost it. The third one actually sent a two-paragraph explanation of why “Fair Chance” was being rejected, which Nancy might have mistaken for progress if the letter hadn't noted that the story might best be told from the viewpoint of an omniscient observer.

“You know,” said Marilou, two years younger and the second oldest, one Sunday when Nancy was having dinner with her family, “this novel of yours reminds me of that old homing pigeon Candy used to have. No matter how far away you sent the fucker, it'd always find its way home.”

Suzanne tried to chastise Marilou, but everybody broke up, even Nancy. From then on, “Fair Chance” was known only as the homing novel.

Being the oldest, Nancy always felt guilty for setting what Pat had warned her once was a Bad Example for the rest. For years after Buddy and she got married and then slogged toward divorce court, she would try to impress Marilou and Candy and Robbie with how stupid they'd be to follow her sorry example. Whenever Robbie would get caught skipping school or Candy would get a “C,” she could almost feel Suzanne and Pat blaming her. It was a great relief to Nancy when the other three “buckled down,” more or less, even went to college and graduated, after which they hounded her to finish school.

That's OK, she thought. Better nagging than nagging guilt.

That day, turning off Route 17 onto the semicircular road that connected Monacan to the rest of the world, Nancy could only wonder what came next. She could find some solace in the fact that her husband had done something spontaneous for the first time in recent memory. She hoped that this was a good thing.

“We're going on an adventure, Wade,” she whispered to their son as she picked him up out of the back seat in Sam's parents' driveway. “Daddy's taking us on an adventure.”