Safe from the Neighbors (14 page)

“Was that the main problem in your marriage?”

“I think the main problem in my marriage was me. Or at least my expectations.”

“They were too high?”

“No, they were stratospheric. I wanted what you could get from being married to a man with that kind of drive and commitment, but I also wanted what you couldn’t. So from time to time I looked elsewhere.”

“I guess I’m the anti-Anthony then. Because I’m just a guy who gets up in the morning hoping to make it through the day.”

She climbs on top of me, locks her hands behind her head and closes her eyes. “Well, it looks like you’ve made it through this one,” she says. “The question is, will either of us survive the evening.”

•   •   •

The next morning, at breakfast, I’m so solicitous that Jennifer acts annoyed. “More oatmeal?” I ask while she’s sipping her tea. A book lies open on the table, one of those little thin ones the poetry presses publish, and she’s staring at it so intently she can’t hear me. So I repeat my question. “Want any more oatmeal?”

She looks up sharply. “What?”

I point at her bowl. “More oatmeal. I’d be happy to make some.”

“Why would I want more oatmeal? Have you ever known me to want more?”

The truth is that I’ve never noticed how much oatmeal she eats at breakfast, because for a long time now I haven’t noticed her. She eats, I eat, we rinse our dishes and leave, sometimes without bothering to say goodbye. “Just thought I’d ask,” I tell her.

“Well, now you know.” She dips her head and goes back to her book.

In the shower I lather up, remembering how Maggie’s face looked last night with her eyes wide open, the tight lines showing at the corners of her mouth. She remained completely silent the whole time, speaking only with her body. Towards the end she moved harder than I knew a woman could, as though her own rhythm was all that mattered. She rocked backwards, grabbing a fistful of her own hair in each hand, pulling at it like she meant to tear it out in clumps.

Afterwards, as we lay there listening to the rain, she said, “No one has ever made me feel like that except the man I married. I just thought you should know.”

I was reminded, in that instant, of Spiro T. Agnew, who told us, shortly before being indicted:
I try to be credible. I want to be believed
. I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing.

She was lying on her back beside me, her hand holding mine.
She let go and said sharply, “Why are you laughing at me?” Her eyes flashed, warning me that she wasn’t playing around. I felt sure I’d seen the same look on her face all those years ago, as I lay breathless on the ground after she sent me flying off that porch. She hadn’t been playing then, either.

“I’m not laughing at you,” I said. “I’m laughing at myself.”

“I didn’t see you do anything funny.”

“It’s just so strange for somebody, after all this time, to praise my lovemaking ability.”

“I’m not just
somebody.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t. And I wasn’t praising your
ability
. That’s not what I said.”

I understood right then what made her so different. It wasn’t the scent of her perfume, and it wasn’t that beautiful black hair, which, considering her age, must come in a bottle now. It wasn’t her wealth or worldliness, nor the thrill of a shared distant past. It wasn’t even how she made love, though nobody had ever made love like that to me. It was her hunger to have things a certain way. She knew how to want. And at the moment, that didn’t scare me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Could we back up?”

“Back up to where? To where we were before you climbed into my bed?”

She wasn’t touching me anymore, but even without direct contact I could feel the tension in her body. She’d gone rigid. “No,” I said, “just back to where we were when you were telling me how I made you feel. Could you say that again, and let me start over?”

I didn’t know whether she’d tell me to get my ass out of her house or punch me in the mouth. The expression on her face never changed, and her body remained stiff. “No one … has ever made me feel like that … except the man I married. I just thought … you should know.”

“And I’ve never made anybody else feel like that,” I said. “Not even the woman I married.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I just am.”

Finally, her face softened. “It
is,”
she said, “fairly easy to tell.”

I park in the teachers’ lot next to the Mercedes, get out and go inside. Driving over, I’ve convinced myself that what happened last night will not be repeated, that Maggie’s curiosity has now been satisfied. After all, she said she’d had similar experiences before. Her comment about how I’d made her feel was probably just out of kindness. Maybe she says it every time.

I tell myself that it really would be okay, that in fact it might be better. Jennifer and I have a history, and it lives in separate rooms in the same dorm at Ole Miss. The thought of getting caught, of having to face my wife and daughters after they’ve found out, is terrifying. You can’t hide an affair for long in a town like Loring. I’ve never had one, but there are just some things you know.

You know, for instance, that a few years ago, an English teacher got caught having sex with one of her students in a pickup parked down close to the Sunflower River. You know that the kid’s father wasted no time calling Ramsey Coleman and promising to kill the teacher if he didn’t run her off, and Ramsey was only too happy to oblige. She got a job over in Arkansas, in another little town, and it wasn’t a year before she had to leave there, too.

You know about other, similar scandals: Linwood Norris, head salesman at the John Deere dealership, a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the father of three boys between the ages of eight and thirteen, slept with one of the checkers out at
Wal-Mart and then became obsessed, following her home from work, tailing her around town, calling her at all hours of the day and night, even though she was engaged and told him that what happened between them was just a big mistake. Finally, she got a restraining order against him, and Linwood’s wife took the boys to her parents’ place in Jackson.

You know how these things go. Doesn’t everybody?

Still, I decide to stop by her room before the bell rings. That just seems like the decent thing. If she wants to smile, as I believe she will, and tell me that while it was really wonderful, it’s not something we’ll be able to do again, I’d rather hear it than wait till the end of the day.

She’s not there. I hang around near the door until two minutes before eight, nodding at the students as they file past, a couple of them giving me funny looks, wondering what I’m doing here. When I finally give up and head for my own room, at the far end of the west wing, I see her: like me, she’s been standing outside the door, this small, trim woman in the same white slacks and purple blouse she wore the first day of school. She looks anxious, her hands working nervously as they hang by her sides. She has no intention of leaving. The bell rings, but she doesn’t move.

She watches while I walk towards her. When I’m four or five feet away, she says, “Yes?”

I don’t know how I know this, but I do:
yes
with a question mark after it doesn’t mean yes and it doesn’t mean no. It’s not a statement, but neither is it a question. What it is is an opening, a space you can either fill in or choose not to.

I don’t look over my shoulder to see if anybody’s in the hallway behind me, and I don’t glance up to check the angle of the nearest security camera, which allows Ramsey to keep an eye out for drug deals, vandalism and knife fights. What I do is eliminate the distance between us just as fast as I can.

M
Y FATHER NEVER LIKED THE FALL.
A lot of farmers feel the same way, and even though he hadn’t been one for many years, to some extent he still behaved as if he were, watching the Weather Channel like a suspense movie, tracking October cold fronts as they swooped down off the Great Plains bringing rain and, sometimes, ruination.

As much as he disliked that particular season, my mother always loved it. She never understood a thing about football but enjoyed going to the games, back when I played in high school, and I’d heard her go on and on about the wonderful aroma of burning leaves mixed with the odor of lint from the cotton gins. She even professed to like the smell of defoliant. And while most people were annoyed if they got caught behind a four-row picker on a narrow country road, creeping along at ten miles an hour, it never bothered her. Fall is the busiest time of year in the Delta, and she loved all the activity.

She hadn’t often been outside in the last couple of years and not once since coming home from the rehab center back in July. But their van was equipped with a lift, and though I didn’t find out about it for a couple months, sometime around the middle of October Dad began taking her out for a ride every few days.

He kept quiet because he knew if he told Jennifer or me, we’d insist he first check with her doctor, who almost certainly would
have forbidden it. Sometimes her head lolled forward, sometimes off to the side. If they’d had a wreck, I imagine her body would’ve behaved about like a rag doll’s. But by then that wasn’t the worst possibility Dad was facing.

The first time they left the house, it was around ten in the morning. I’d have been at school for two hours, and Jennifer would just have left to drive the twenty-eight miles to Delta State. The van—a twenty-year-old Ford Econoline that he’d repainted fire-engine red a few years ago because my mother loved that color—was the only one of its kind in town. We couldn’t have mistaken him for anybody else.

That first day he drove out towards the old place. There would’ve been a few pickers on the road, a couple of trucks moving the pallet modules that have replaced cotton trailers, a live-haul tanker headed for the Southern Prime processing plant. I doubt that anybody waved, like everybody used to. There weren’t that many folks left who even knew him.

All along, he acted as tour guide, slowing from time to time, calling attention to points of significance. Where Parker Sturdi-vant’s house used to stand, a mile or so from town—now in the middle of a catfish pond. Another couple of miles down the road, the overgrown landing strip where military planes took off back in the ’60s, making the house shudder. The Fairway Baptist Church, a little rundown now but still holding services just as it has every Sunday for going on eighty-five years. Not too far beyond that, the remains of the old Fairway Crossroads gin.

Finally, inevitably, they reached sixteenth-section land and stopped across the road from the place where I grew up. As I said earlier, the house itself burned down many years ago, so there wasn’t much to see besides a couple of concrete blocks standing in the tall grass near the edge of the road, a few pieces of rusty tin siding, several rotten two-by-fours and a good bit of broken
glass. Otherwise, nobody driving by would’ve known that a home ever stood there. But he knew and, in some sense, he believed, so did she.

She lifted her head and was gazing out the window. That high-pitched keening began, and while her doctor had maintained that the tune was mostly in my father’s imagination, that it was highly unlikely she could retain so many sounds in melodic succession, he believed otherwise and supplied the lyrics for her, singing along in his husky voice:

Afterwards, he couldn’t say how long they’d sat there. But at some point he restarted the motor and pulled off down the road. My mother was dozing, chin against chest, and didn’t even wake when the van started to move.

Driving back to town, he passed the house where the Calloways used to live, at the intersection of two country roads. The backyard has never been fenced, so when you’re driving by you can see what, if anything, is going on, and turning towards town you can see the north side and then the front. There’s nothing very fancy about it, just a ranch-style with a carport and that little pool out back. He didn’t know who lived there anymore, and I don’t either, but whoever it is must have a kid or two, because there’s always a trike lying in the driveway and, in
the front yard, a football or basketball. The window trim could use a coat of paint, three or four shingles are missing from the roof, and the concrete’s cracked in the driveway.

He recalled that there was a time when he wanted a house like this more than anything in the world. He wanted it not for himself but for Momma and me, and I believe he came to think of it as some kind of ideal, something that was out there waiting somewhere if only you could satisfy a certain set of requirements. The problem was, he could never figure out exactly what the requirements were, let alone how to meet them. I doubt it would be accurate, though, to say he had no clue.