Cujo (7 page)

“Didn't you hear me? I want you
out
of here!”

“Now, what for?” he asked. “The little one is off making beaded loincloths or shooting apples off the head of counselors with his little bow and arrow . . . or whatever they do . . . and hubby is busting heavies at the office . . . and now is the time for Castle Rock's prettiest
hausfrau
and Castle Rock's resident poet and tennis bum to make all the bells of sexual congress chime in lovely harmony.”

“I see you parked out in the driveway,” Donna said. “Why not just tape a big sign to the side of your van?
I'M FUCKING DONNA TRENTON
, or something witty like that?”

“I've got every reason to park in the driveway,” Steve said, still grinning. “I've got that dresser in the back. Stripped clean. Even as I wish you were yourself, my dear.”

“You can put it on the porch. I'll take care of it. While you're doing that, I'll write you a check.”

His smile faded a little. For the first time since she had come in, the surface charm slipped a little and she could see the real person underneath. It was a person she didn't like at all, a person that dismayed her when she thought of him in connection with herself. She had lied to Vic, gone behind his back, in order to go to bed with Steve Kemp. She wished that
what she felt now could be something as simple as rediscovering herself, as after a nasty bout of fever. Or rediscovering herself as Vic's mate. But when you took the bark off it, the simple fact was that Steve Kemp—publishing poet, itinerant furniture stripper and refinisher, chair caner, fair amateur tennis player, excellent afternoon lover—was a turd.

“Be serious,” he said.

“Yeah, no one could reject handsome, sensitive Steven Kemp,” she said. “It's got to be a joke. Only it's not. So what you do, handsome, sensitive Steven Kemp, is put the dresser on the porch, get your check, and blow.”

“Don't talk to me like that, Donna.” His hand moved to her breast and squeezed. It hurt. She began to feel a little scared as well as angry. (But hadn't she been a little scared all along? Hadn't that been part of the nasty, scuzzy little thrill of it?)

She slapped his hand away.

“Don't you get on my case, Donna.” He wasn't smiling now. “It's too goddam hot.”

“
Me?
On
your
case? You were here when I came in.” Being frightened of him had made her angrier than ever. He wore a heavy black beard that climbed high on his cheekbones, and it occurred to her suddenly that although she had seen his penis close up—had had it in her mouth—she had never really seen what his face looked like.

“What you mean,” he said, “is that you had a little itch and now it's scratched, so fuck off. Right? Who gives a crap about how I feel?”

“You're breathing on me,” she said, and pushed him away to take the milk to the refrigerator.

He was not expecting it this time. Her shove caught him off balance, and he actually stumbled back a step. His forehead was suddenly divided by lines, and a dark flush flared high on his cheekbones. She had seen him look this way on the tennis courts behind the Bridgton Academy buildings, sometimes. When he blew an easy point. She had watched him play several times—including two sets during which he had mopped up her panting, puffing husband with ease—and on the few occasions she had seen him lose, his reaction had made her extremely uneasy about what she had gotten into with him. He had published poems in over two dozen little magazines, and a book,
Chasing Sundown,
had been
published by an outfit in Baton Rouge called The Press over the Garage. He had graduated from Drew, in New Jersey; he held strong opinions on modern art, the upcoming nuclear referendum question in Maine, the films of Andy Warhol, and he took a double fault the way Tad took the news it was bedtime.

Now he came after her, grabbed her shoulder, and spun her around to face him. The carton of milk fell from her hand and split open on the floor.

“There, look at that,” Donna said. “Nice going, hotshot.”

“Listen, I'm not going to be pushed around. Do you—”

“You get out of here!”
she screamed into his face. Her spittle sprayed his cheeks and his forehead.
“What do I have to do to convince you? Do you need a picture? You're not welcome here! Go be God's gift to some other woman!”

“You cheap, cockteasing little bitch,” he said. His voice was sullen, his face ugly. He didn't let go of her arm.

“And take the bureau with you. Pitch it in the dump.”

She pulled free of him and got the washrag from its place, hung over the sink faucet. Her hands were trembling, her stomach was upset, and she was starting to get a headache. She thought that soon she would vomit.

She got down on her hands and knees and began wiping up the spilt milk.

“Yeah, you think you're something,” he said. “When did your crotch turn to gold? You loved it. You screamed for more.”

“You've got the right tense, anyway, champ,” she said, not looking up. Her hair hung in her face and she liked it that way just fine. She didn't want him to see how pale and sick her face was. She felt as if someone had pushed her into a nightmare. She felt that if she looked at herself in a mirror at this moment she would see an ugly, capering witch. “Get out, Steve. I'm not going to tell you again.”

“And what if I don't? You going to call Sheriff Bannerman? Sure. Just say, ‘Hi, there, George, this is Mr. Businessman's wife, and the guy I've been screwing on the side won't leave. Would you please come on up here and roust him?' That what you're going to say?”

The fright went deep now. Before marrying Vic, she had been a librarian in the Westchester school system, and her own private nightmare had always been telling the kids for
the third time—in her loudest speaking voice—to quiet down
at once,
please. When she did that, they always had—enough for her to get through the period, at least—but what if they wouldn't? That was her nightmare. What if they absolutely wouldn't? What did that leave? The question scared her. It scared her that such a question should ever have to be asked, even to oneself, in the dark of night. She had been afraid to use her loudest voice, and had done so only when it became absolutely necessary. Because that was where civilization came to an abrupt, screeching halt. That was the place where the tar turned to dirt. If they wouldn't listen when you used your very loudest voice, a scream became your only recourse.

This was the same sort of fear. The only answer to the man's question, of course, was that she would scream if he came near her. But would she?

“Go,” she said in a lower voice. “Please. It's over.”

“What if I decide it isn't? What if I decide to just rape you there on the floor in that damned spilt milk?”

She looked up at him through the tangle of hair. Her face was still pale, and her eyes were too big, ringed with white flesh. “Then you'll have a fight on your hands. And if I get a chance to tear your balls off or put one of your eyes out, I won't hesitate.”

For just a moment, before his face closed up, she thought he looked uncertain. He knew she was quick, in pretty good shape. He could beat her at tennis, but she made him sweat to do it. His balls and his eyes were probably safe, but she might very well put some furrows in his face. It was a question of how far he wanted to go. She smelled something thick and unpleasant in the air of her kitchen, some whiff of the jungle, and realized with dismay that it was a mixture of her fear and his rage. It was coming out of their pores.

“I'll take the bureau back to my shop,” he said. “Why don't you send your handsome hubby down for it, Donna? He and I can have a nice talk. About stripping.”

He left then, pulling the door which communicated between the living room and the porch to behind him almost hard enough to break the glass. A moment later the engine of his van roared, settled into a ragged idle, and then dropped to a working pitch as he threw it in gear. He screeched his tires as he left.

Donna finished wiping the milk up slowly, rising from time
to time to wring out her rag in the stainless steel sink. She watched the threads of milk run down the drain. She was trembling all over, partly from reaction, partly from relief. She had barely heard Steve's implied threat to tell Vic. She could only think, over and over again, about the chain of events that had led to such an ugly scene.

She sincerely believed she had drifted into her affair with Steve Kemp almost inadvertently. It was like an explosion of sewage from a buried pipe. A similar sewer pipe, she believed, ran beneath the neatly tended lawns of almost every marriage in America.

She hadn't wanted to come to Maine and had been appalled when Vic had sprung the idea on her. In spite of vacations there (and the vacations themselves might have reinforced the idea), she had thought of the state as a woodsy wasteland, a place where the snow drifted twenty feet high in the winters and people were virtually cut off. The thought of taking their baby into such an environment terrified her. She had pictured—to herself and aloud to Vic—sudden snowstorms blowing up, stranding him in Portland and her in Castle Rock. She thought and spoke of Tad swallowing pills in such a situation, or burning himself on the stove, or God knew what. And maybe part of her resistance had been a stubborn refusal to give up the excitement and hurry of New York.

Well, face it—the worst hadn't been any of those things. The worst had been a nagging conviction that Ad Worx would fail and they would have to go crawling back with their tails between their legs. That hadn't happened, because Vic and Roger had worked their butts off. But that had also meant that she was left with a growing-up child and too much time on her hands.

She could count her life's close friends on the fingers of one hand. She was confident that the ones she made would be her friends forever, come hell or high water, but she had never made friends quickly or easily. She had toyed with the idea of getting her Maine certification—Maine and New York were reciprocal; it was mostly a matter of filling out some forms. Then she could go see the Superintendent of Schools and get her name put on the sub list for Castle Rock High. It was a ridiculous notion, and she shelved it after running some figures on her pocket calculator. Gasoline and
sitters' fees would eat up most of the twenty-eight bucks a day she might have made.

I've become the fabled Great American Housewife, she had thought dismally one day last winter, watching sleet spick and spack down against the porch storm windows. Sitting home, feeding Tad his franks and beans or his toasted cheese sandwiches and Campbell's Soup for lunch, getting my slice of life from Lisa on
As the World Turns
and from Mike on
The Young and the Restless.
Every now and then we jive it up with a
Wheel of Fortune
session. She could go over and see Joanie Welsh, who had a little girl about Tad's age, but Joanie always made her uneasy. She was three years older than Donna and ten pounds heavier. The extra ten pounds did not seem to bother her. She said her husband liked her that way. Joanie was contented with things as they were in Castle Rock.

A little at a time, the shit had started to back up in the pipe. She started to sharpshoot at Vic about little things, sublimating the big things because they were hard to define and even harder to articulate. Things like loss and fear and getting older. Things like being lonely and then getting terrified of being lonely. Things like hearing a song on the radio that you remembered from high school and bursting into tears for no reason. Feeling jealous of Vic because his life was a daily struggle to build something, he was a knight-errant with a family crest embossed on his shield, and her life was back here, getting Tad through the day, jollying him when he was cranky, listening to his raps, fixing his meals and snacks. It was a life lived in the trenches. Too much of it was waiting and listening.

And all along she had thought that things would begin to smooth out when Tad was older; the discovery that it wasn't true brought on a kind of low-level horror. This past year he had been out of the house three mornings a week, at Jack and Jill Nursery School; this summer it had been five afternoons a week at playcamp. When he was gone the house seemed shockingly empty. Doorways leaned and gaped with no Tad to fill them; the staircase yawned with no Tad halfway up, sitting there in his pajama bottoms before his nap, owlishly looking at one of his picture books.

Doors were mouths, stairways throats. Empty rooms became traps.

So she washed floors that didn't need to be washed. She watched the soaps. She thought about Steve Kemp, with whom she'd had a little flirtation since he had rolled into town the previous fall with Virginia license plates on his van and had set up a small stripping and refinishing business. She had caught herself sitting in front of the TV with no idea what was going on because she had been thinking about the way his deep tan contrasted with his tennis whites, or the way his ass pumped when he moved fast. And finally she had done something. And today—

She felt her stomach knot up and she ran for the bathroom, her hands plastered to her mouth, her eyes wide and starey. She made it, barely, and tossed up everything. She looked at the mess she had made, and with a groan she did it again.

When her stomach felt better (but her legs were all atremble again, something lost, something gained), she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her face was thrown into hard and unflattering relief by the fluorescent bar. Her skin was too white, her eyes red-rimmed. Her hair was plastered to her skull in an unflattering helmet. She saw what she was going to look like when she was old, and the most terrifying thing of all was that right now, if Steve Kemp was here, she thought she would let him make love to her if he would only hold her and kiss her and say that she didn't have to be afraid, that time was a myth and death was a dream, that everything was okay.