One True Thing (28 page)

“You haven’t been in in a while,” Mark said, putting a bowl of Goldfish crackers in front of me.

“Christmas holidays, I think,” I said.

“You still at Mrs. Forburg’s?” he said.

“You’d read it in the paper if I wasn’t.”

“All I read’s sports,” he said.

“Bull,” I said. “Even if that’s true, you’d hear it in here twenty minutes after I pulled out of the driveway.”

“She’s a nice lady,” he said.

“Nobody could agree more,” I said.

“Yeah, well, if you think she’s so nice, why’d you go and get her in trouble? They’ve got a committee investigating her, some parents have transferred kids out of her classes, the other teachers are giving her a hard time.”

“Who says?” It took mc a moment to remember that Mark’s mother was one of those large and faceless women in hairnets who worked the steam table in the cafeteria. One of the nice ones, too, the ones who gave double mashed potatoes and big slabs of cake.

“That guy Murphy on the school board, who’s hated her since she stood up for the kids on the newspaper when they wrote that poem making fun of the superintendent? He’s been telling people she’s a dyke, that the both of you are dykes. Didn’t she say anything?”

“Maybe she doesn’t know.”

“She knows,” he said.

“She says she doesn’t care.”

“She cares,’ he said, wiping off the bar.

Another man slipped onto the stool next to mine. He was short and stocky, broad through the shoulders and torso, with the kind of build that would have guaranteed him a berth on the wrestling team in high school. Familiar strangers, I’d always called them, the dozens of people a year or so older or younger than I whose faces I knew from the halls of the high school but whose names I could rarely immediately place, so that my mother had become accustomed, during college and afterward, to those times when I would come back from shopping and blurt out “Lauren McNulty” or “Jim Bettman” at the dinner table.

This one ordered a shot and a beer, looked down one end of the bar and up the other, taking pains not to meet my eyes. He raised a glass to the four men in the corner, but they were of no help to me: “Hey” is all one of them called across the room. I thought he was older than I was, a year or two, and the longish hair meant he was a townie, probably a working man; all the college boys wore their hair short now. He kept his shoulders high so his head sank down between them, almost disappearing in the blanket plaid of his coat, like a turtle or an old man.

“Hi, Ellen,” he finally said, throwing back his longish hair with a peculiar twist of his head, and I thought about how much easier this would be in the city, where everyone wanted to establish their
bona fides: perhaps you don’t remember? we met at the Lincoln Center party for the anniversary of the magazine. I was with a friend of mine who’s at Jensen, Jensen and Bates, I think you knew his fiancée from college. The litany was endless—tangential relationships, friends of friends, restaurant near-misses—“I was just at Le Besoin last Tuesday!”

But not in Langhorne. “How are you?” he asked, and then he ducked his head and asked Mark for another shot of Wild Turkey. That Wild Turkey was the prettiest color in the muted bar light, the amber-brown of beautiful eyes. “I’ll have one of those, too, Mark,” I said, but when I put more money on the bar the man picked the bills up, folded them in half, and put them beneath my beer mug. “Chris,” I thought suddenly, and it was all I could do not to say it aloud. “Chris Somebody.” He lifted his glass of Wild Turkey and sipped for a second, then threw it down.

“Ah,” he said, a short burst of breath, and then grinned, still looking straight ahead, so that I could see the grin only in his eyes reflected in the mirror over the bar. The bottom part of his face, his mouth and chin, was blocked out by the wall of bottles, of Stoli and Bushmills and Courvoisier, another pretty color, darker than the Wild Turkey. Even the top of his head, his hair, was cut off because the mirror over the bar at Sammy’s was edged with college pennants, Langhorne hanging cheek by jowl with Michigan, Stanford, Yale, Penn, to show how important it really was. The little college that could, the last president had called it sometimes, and when he did my father had always rolled his eyes extravagantly. I lifted my own shot glass, and, closing my eyes, drank it off. A shiver shook me, the kind my mother used to tell me meant someone walking over your grave. When I opened my eyes Chris Somebody was looking at me in the mirror, and he winked, an insouciant gesture so obviously foreign—he did it too slowly, for one thing—that for some reason it made me feel warm, and my eyes filled. Or maybe it was just the Wild Turkey.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” he said, talking to my reflection in the mirror, as though secondhand was safe enough.

“Yeah, I do,” I said, feeling the Wild Turkey moving to my stomach, my groin, my joints. “Chris.”

“Chris Mortensen,” he said. “I was one of the guys who put the lights on the trees this year.”

I couldn’t remember even seeing the guys putting the lights on the trees. “Were you one of the guys who put in the poinsettias that year they all died?”

We were still talking in the mirror. Mark had moved down the bar and was arguing with two town kids who had produced fake ID. Only the stupidest or most naïve tried to get a drink in Langhorne, where everybody knew your high school class. Most of them went two or three towns away to drink, or had someone go into the state store and buy them a big bottle of sangria to drink sitting in the car or wrapped in blankets beneath the bridge. Jon had always stolen vodka from his father, poured it in a jar and then added water to what was left in the bottle.

When I asked about the poinsettias Chris ducked his head again, like I’d caught him in something.

“Long before my time,” he said. “But my cousin was on that crew. He said he knew they’d die but he just put them in anyhow.”

“The provost’s wife wouldn’t talk to my mother for years after that. She knew they’d die, too. My mother, not the provost’s wife.”

Chris looked down at his empty shot glass, then raised it so Mark could see. The bartender nodded down the length of the bar. “I’m not serving you no matter what, so you might as well go home or drive over to Montgomery Heights,” he said, and swearing under their breath, the kids left.

“You want another?” Chris said.

“Sure,” I said.

It went down easier for both of us the second time, and the beer felt sharp and tingly on my tongue right afterward, like needles on velvet. “That stuff is the prettiest color,” I said.

“Yeah, huh?” he said. His hands were laid flat on the bar, as
though he was bracing himself. They were like the rest of him, compact, thick. Across the back of one was an enormous scar, raised and pink, a bright ugly worm of a thing. I put out an index finger and touched it lightly, then looked at him in the mirror. He looked down.

“It was a real stupid thing,” he said. “I was cutting Christmas trees out at one of the farms for that big lot downtown, the one in the back of the market parking lot?” Everything he said was a question, as though it was up to me to correct him, to insist that there was no farm, no market, no lot. “The chain saw just slipped and
zippy whoa
, there it was.” This he seemed surer about, but not as sure as I, seeing the blood, the white bone, smelling the sweet smell of gore and the medicinal tang of the emergency room, the little plastic bags sealed with the sutures inside, a made-up memory more real than a true one.

I shivered again. “Jesus,” I said.

The men at the table were arguing about the upcoming baseball season and a skinny woman at the end of the bar was trying to talk Mark into selling her a six-pack. She had bad skin and her clothes hung loose on her, a pink sweater and jeans. “He’ll kill me,” she kept saying while Mark wiped the bar without looking at her and shook his head. Finally she left, the open door letting in fresh cold air, sweeping away the smoke and the warm stuffiness for a minute. I was beginning to feel very drunk, so drunk that when I looked toward the door and saw Jon come in, the collar of his down jacket pulled high around his neck, I thought I was imagining him, until I saw him stiffen at the sight of me. You could tell by the way his eyes moved, just for a minute, that he thought about turning around and going out again. But when we looked at one another I knew he’d never let himself do it.

“Ellen,” he said as he walked down the length of the bar and took a table near the back.

“Jonathan,” I said.

I looked at Chris in the mirror. He looked sad.

“Want another?” he said.

“Sure do,” I said. That one I sipped, but it didn’t really make much difference.

“Your boyfriend from high school, am I right?” Chris said. I nodded.

“I sort of remember you from high school,” he said, “but you were pretty much younger?” Again the question mark.

“High school wasn’t exactly the high point of my life,” I said, probing with my tongue to see whether I could still feel my gums.

“I liked high school,” Chris said, running one finger over the scar on the back of his hand. “It was the closest to being an adult without any of the bad things about being an adult, like rent and taxes and just responsibilities, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s how I felt about college,” I said.

“Oh, well, college,” he said, shrugging.

I had to go to the bathroom so badly that it was like a pain in my midsection, but I’d have to pass Jonathan’s table to get to it. Finally I slipped off the stool. The light in the bathroom hurt my eyes, and I leaned into the mirror over the sink after I’d washed my hands and looked hard at my own reflection. “Oh, Ellen,” I said out loud.

As I went back to the bar, Jonathan called my name again, this time with urgency, but I just waved him off over my shoulder.

“You want to get something to eat?” Chris said.

“Here?”

“Somewhere else?”

When we went out into the night it was so black we could scarcely see each other, which was just as well. In the cab of his truck he tuned in the radio before we drove away and the little yellow-green backlights from the tuning bands lit up his scar so it looked lavender, like a ribbon.

“I’m not really hungry,” I said.

“No? Me neither.”

I don’t remember much about the ride, except the cold, how my fingertips ached, how our breath came puffing out white in the closed cab even though the heat was on, making my toes
burn. I sang along to the radio, loud. It was as if I was alone when I did it.

I remember a trailer, a double length made over to look like a ranch house, with shutters and even a little porchlike thing appended to the front, and Chris saying that his father was gone—“Good riddance and sayonara and all that,” he said, but there was nothing blithe in his voice, I do remember that—and his mother had moved to California and left it all to him. I think he said that proudly and then tentatively, still with the questions in his voice. He gave me a drink, and then another, vodka this time, with no color to it at all, clear as ice.

The only thing I remember really clearly is the quiet in the trailer, as though nobody lived there, the quiet outside deep in the pinewoods, and my own voice as he got on top of me in the bedroom where the double bed filled nearly every inch of space, so the bureau served as kind of footboard. I turned my head away from his face as it came closer, closer, and on the edge of the bed I could see his hand, the one with the scar, and at some point I said, “I just want to feel something.” I thought I was thinking it, but it came out in words, and in that way they do when you’re drunk, the words vibrated in my head. I heard them as though from far away, and they seemed to hang in the air like mobiles, each one turning slowly over the bed. “I just want to feel something,” I said again, and I did feel something, but it was happening far away, down nearer to the foot of the bed, where the bureau was.

It was just before dawn when I woke up. The pain was starting behind my eyes, and my tongue was fuzzed. I lay for a moment and tried to remember where I was. The windows in the trailer were squat and narrow, so that only a sliver of sky, still dark but beginning to lift just a little, was visible between the trees. The room smelled of sex, used sheets, and space heaters. I got up and went to the bathroom, drank two glasses of water and stared at myself in the mirror. Then I put on my old underpants, the ones with the run in the back, and my cords and my sweater. My bra
was in the living room. I put it in my purse, thought for a moment, then picked up the keys Chris had laid on a small table by the door, the kind of little table that Langhorne High boys sometimes made in shop class, with bright brown stain and a high gloss coat of polyurethane. There were two framed photographs on the table, a portrait of Chris in a tie and plaid shirt that had to be his high school graduation picture, and a hand-tinted old-fashioned head and shoulders of a girl who had his eyes and mouth.

I went out to the truck and started the engine, but it was sluggish because of the cold. Twice I had to pump the gas pedal to stop it from idling low and then dying. The second time I heard a knocking noise and jumped when I saw a face on the other side of the steamed glass. Chris was wearing only his pants, and the hair on his chest sprang up from the goose bumps.

“Where you going?” he said. “It’s five o’clock.”

“I have to go back,” I said. “I shouldn’t have fallen asleep.”

“Well, hey,” he said, moving from one foot to another on the cold ground. “I mean, hey, who wouldn’t?”

I gunned the engine.

“You want to go to the movies tonight?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Dinner maybe?” The pain behind my eyes was getting worse.

“Look,” I said, “my life is strange now and I don’t have the energy or the patience to turn a passing conversation in a bar into some big enormous deal. Because it’s not.” You could see him flinch, almost as though I’d hit him, and I knew that that was exactly what he’d done, that in between that first shot of Wild Turkey and the moment when he’d pulled my sweater over my head he’d probably spun himself some homey fantasies about dinner, conversation, confidences. It had to be lonely, nights out here alone in the trailer, the paneled walls of the tiny bedroom with no pictures. It was deep dark out here, like the inside of a closet when you were playing hide-and-seek and the others had stopped looking for you. Later, when I thought about it, I imagined he mainly wanted the sex for the sake of the company.