Extraordinary (2 page)

“He slipped over the window ledge backwards and fell onto the bed, his boots in the air. You could see them against the skyline.

“I heard my grandmother walk by my room. She said, ‘Everything okay in there, Sally?' She must have seen his truck in the driveway. And I said, ‘Grandma, just fine. I'm going to sleep now.' Those country people, they're a lot more sophisticated than you'd think. I never asked her and she never asked me, but every so often I'd catch her staring at me. Everybody gets up to something private, it's just that every generation thinks they're the first ones to do it right.”

“So did he write?”

“Never. Not a word. I used to go out to the mailbox—it was at the end of a long driveway—and throw stones at the power lines and the crows, even at the mailbox itself, while I was waiting. An old guy and his son delivered the mail in a car. I'd see the car at the far end of the highway where it broke through the cornfields. Walter, the son, would be in the passenger seat, his tanned arm hanging out the window with the mail in his hand. They'd slow down and I'd grab the mail. I think Walter had a tiny thing for me, but he had a kind of funny-shaped head, like a paint can. I suppose I was cruelly uninterested in him. I'd just snatch the mail, and without even saying goodbye I'd start to go through it—the local newspaper, ads for baking sales, bills from the local hardware store, even Christmas cards that had gotten lost for six months. I'd start off full of hope, there'd be all this stuff, but then there'd be five letters left, then three, then none, and I'd go through the pile again as though maybe I'd missed it.

“But never a letter. Once, I even waved down the car as it pulled away. ‘Are you sure there's nothing for me?' The father said, ‘Well, let's take another look.' And he did. ‘Maybe tomorrow, Sally,' he said.

“It was the longest walk back to the house—a hot day, cicadas roaring, those big pointless fields and nothing to look forward to. I let the screen door bang behind me. My grandmother said, ‘Sally, don't let that door bang, it scares the willies out of me.'

“I went back into my bedroom and lay down on the bed, the wallpaper with little wooden rocking chairs on it, the yellow fields outside. I thought, I've got to
do
something, read a book or write in my diary or play some records, and I kept thinking my way through it: open up the record box, take out a forty-five, put it on the record player and start it up. But it just seemed like too much work. Everything did. Everything seemed
exhausting.
I just lay there till supper.

“I never found out what the trouble was. He just vanished.”

“And your mother? Where was your mother,
our
mother, while all this was going on?”

“She was around. At her convenience, of course. Sometimes she'd come by in a grey car with a big grille with flies stuck in it and take me to the Tastee Freeze in town for a hamburger—it was a ritual we had—and then she'd take me for a long drive on backcountry roads, let me light her cigarettes for her. She was a great talker. A good listener too, to be fair—as long as you said what she wanted to hear.

“On one of these drives, just as it was getting dark and we were heading back to my grandfather's, I told her about Terry Blanchard, about that night he tumbled into my bed. It wasn't a confession, it was just that talking about it was as close as I could get to doing it again.”

“And what did she say?”

“She asked me if I felt better now that I'd talked about it. And I said yes. And then she said something that I have never forgotten. She said, ‘You're going to feel good about all this for a while and then later, when I'm gone and you're alone again and the excitement of talking about it has worn off, you're going to go back to feeling the way you did before. And that's normal. Just remember that that's normal. There's nothing wrong with you.' Then she told me about going out on a date with a Hollywood movie star when she was just nineteen.”

“Who was it?”

“I think it was Errol Flynn. She claimed to not know this from personal experience, but someone had told her his dink was so big he had to strap it to his leg. It made me laugh. A funny story to hear from your mother. But I don't know. You could never be sure with her. She told me she wrote a short story for the
New Yorker
once, too. But I never saw it. Maybe she did. But I doubt it.”

“The
New Yorker
? That's a pretty tall order.”

“It certainly is.”

“And was she right?” I asked.

“About what?”

“About how you were going to feel later.”

“She was. After she left, I kept looking at the clock. An hour later, I was still fine, happy even. Two hours later, same thing. But then later, after dinner, I was watching television with my grandfather, and I could feel things starting to darken again. It was as if some kind of poison was slowly creeping into my body, like some awful
leak
, and the whole good feeling I'd had with my mother just slipped away. I couldn't concentrate on the TV show, it was like the screen was a sort of anchor that allowed my thoughts to go in some very gloomy directions. I was afraid it would show on my face or that my grandfather would hear it in my responses. He liked to talk during television shows, but that night it was driving me crazy, as though I had something important to figure out and he was interrupting me from it with his chatter.

“So I went to bed. But here's something odd. Sometime near morning, it was just getting light, I found myself on the floor. I was soaked in sweat, I was menstruating, I thought I was dying. Dying of a broken heart. But then I thought about Terry Blanchard, about that night he came tumbling into my bed, and I didn't feel anything. And then, like sticking your hand in a basin of hot water to test it, I thought about him again. Nothing. I mean, absolutely nothing. Gone. I thought, I'm free of him! This is how you do it, this is how you recover from love. And little by little, I started to notice things in the world—a snowbank, a name written on the washroom wall—without all of it leading back to him.

“It must have been the next summer—I was seventeen—when a beat-up white car pulled into the driveway and a man with small ears and an acne-scarred complexion shambled up to the house. He was lost, he said. Was there an asbestos factory near here? He was late for a pickup. Could he use the phone? It was Bruce Sanders. Eight months later, I married him.”

“Eight months?”

“The details don't matter. Not now, not at this stage. But he was a great lover. A mind reader. You're surprised?”

“Why, yes. Yes, I am.” A childhood memory of Bruce slouching through our living room at a Christmas party turned over in my memory like a playing card.

“So was I,” she said, her eyebrows poised on a deadpan face. In that moment, in that light, she looked Asian. “Anyway,” Sally said, “I'm through with that stuff. I have been for a while. It all seems just so messy.”

I wasn't sure how to answer and looked into my glass. A car honked three times eighteen floors down. I heard a jet passing over. “I didn't know we were so close to the airport,” I said.

Picking up on my discomfort, and probably sorry she'd thrown that in, Sally went on. “Bruce Sanders was certainly nothing to look at, on the surface anyway. He wore a kind of military brush cut that stuck up like a raccoon's pelt. But he had a wiry little body with deep tan lines from working outside. He was very strong, deceptively so. There was a lot of dangerous leverage in those arms. I saw him lay his forearm across the throat of some local lacrosse hero one night and lift him up the wall, right off the ground.

“There was something about Bruce I admired, some old-fashioned, tight-lipped masculinity. They are a rare thing these days, real men. Too many sissies eager to get on the right side of women.” Pause. “What women like about men is that they're
not
women. And they don't think like women.”

“We're simple creatures,” I said, and we both laughed. We were having a preposterous time. I caught myself thinking, Should we be doing this? Or should we be doing something else? We are talking about what we're talking about because that's what she wants to talk about. But is this really going to happen? Now that we're here? Is she waiting for me to say stop, or am I waiting for her? Is this going to happen because we're both waiting for the other to say something? And if I were to say something, what would it be? What would I
mean
? If I were in her place, what would
I
want?

“Sally . . .” I began, but her hand fluttered me to silence. I had not considered this part, at least not the way it now presented itself.

She went on: “That said, Bruce was not very socially
able.
Sulked in public gatherings. I think he felt out of his intellectual league if the conversation ever steered toward movies or even the Beatles. For some reason, he found them especially infuriating.”

“The Beatles?”

“He said the only reason they get to be the Beatles is that other people don't get to be. Whatever the hell that means. Anyway, it annoyed him when I talked too much at parties. When I got excited. Excited because I was so hungry for talk that I'd drink too much sometimes and get very, very talkative. He'd sulk for days afterwards. That was my punishment.

“Anyway, I married him. I looked out my bedroom window one afternoon and saw all those flat fields and thought, Why not? We had a wedding in a small country church with a graveyard you could see from the pews. Afterwards, we went to a party in town. You know why? Because someone told me they'd seen Terry Blanchard outside the hardware store and that maybe he'd be there. Isn't that pathetic? God, what was I thinking? Going to a party on my wedding night because this other guy might be there! And here I'd thought I was over him.”

“Was he there?”

“No, thank God. I couldn't relax until I was sure. I kept peeking at the door every time someone came in. I suppose that's how you know you're with the wrong person—when you keep looking to see who's coming in the door. It wasn't a bad party, if you were drunk enough. Which I was.”

“And did things get better?”

“Your body always tells you where you belong—and where you don't. Sometimes when I was having Sunday dinner with Bruce's parents, who were perfectly decent people, by the way, salt-of-the-earth types, I'd feel this sensation in my body, a sensation that said simply,
You don't belong here, these are not your people
.”

“Did you ever find your people?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Who?”

“You. Among other people.”

After a pause, I said, “Tell me you had a good life, Sally.”

“I was lucky in a lot of ways. I just used up my luck early. But yes, I had a good life.”

“With happy moments?”

“Many,” she said easily. “Everyone does.”

“Tell me one.”

“Leaving my husband. I enjoyed that.”

“Was it precipitous or gradual?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your decision to leave. It took a long time.”

“Years. Are you sure you're interested in this?”

“Very.”

“There's something numbing about disappointment. You have to act on it quickly or time begins to gallop,” she said.

“You'd like Chekhov,” I said.

“Can you put a cube of ice in this? But no more vodka. I'll be up peeing all night.”

“How are your legs?”

“The same. But only at night.”

I came back in from the kitchen.

“Will you turn the light out in there?” she said.

I went back and did it.

“Where was I?” She had slipped off to other thoughts. “Oh yes. By now I had two kids, Chloe and Kyle. We had a narrow little house in Toronto. Nice place. I did the interior myself. It was my birthday, I was thirty-three. Yes, yes, I know what you're going to say: the age that Christ was crucified. I didn't see things quite so grandly. Although it turned out to be a big year indeed. The kids were old enough to look after themselves, and that night Bruce took me to an Italian restaurant, a new place I'd read about in a magazine.

“Our table wasn't ready, so they sat us in the bar. We had a martini and looked out over the restaurant, all the people eating in this lovely copper light, and suddenly, I could barely believe my eyes, there, facing me, sitting not ten feet away, was Terry Blanchard. I'd heard he was in the Middle East working for an oil company. But no, there he was. He was sitting with a thick-bodied woman, the sort of woman whose nylons you can hear cracking when she walks across the room. Confident. Talking. Terry listening. And I thought, He cannot love her.”

“How'd he look?”

“Wonderful. Those men age so well. He was snappily done up, a tie, white shirt. And I had the ridiculous, ever-so-quick thought that somehow he had known he was going to see me and had gotten, you know,
dolled up
for it. Does your generation use that word, ‘dolled up'?”

“Not really. But I know what you mean.”

“Anyway, I know it's nonsense, but that's what I thought. Meanwhile, I could hear Bruce chewing on his olive and breathing through his nose.”

“Did you say anything?”

“No. I just kept taking these little mouse-peeks at him. And I think he was doing the same to me, but we never did it at the same time.”

“Why didn't you go over?”

“Too shy.”

“Too shy?”

“No, that's not true. The fact is, I didn't feel especially pretty. I felt like I'd put on weight, that there was something clumsy about how I looked, and that he'd be disappointed. But I wanted
him
to come over. I could feel the skin on my face go very tight, like I was sitting in a high wind. It was awful. But sort of wild, too.”