That Night (14 page)

On a dull afternoon during the single winter they spent together, Rick stopped at his house for cigarette money or a stack of quarters to use in the pinball machines at the alley. It had been raining, that gray, un poetic rain of midwinter in a dreary suburb. The sky was a high and solid mass of featureless clouds, the rain steady but unenthusiastic:

Sheryl could barely hear it on the roof of his car. There were small streams of water running along the ragged curbs, and the shingles on some of the houses were stained like blotters with dark water lines At school that morning, the yellow lights of the classrooms had shone dirtily into the rain and the parking lot and she’d been tempted to skip, the sight of them so exhausted and discouraged her. But she knew Rick would be inside waiting for her by her locker.

The sound of the engine reared and the car shook a little. Sheryl touched the wheel and stretched her left foot to the gas pedal. She saw a white plume of exhaust rise into the rear-view mirror and watched it dissipate in the rain. Rick took longer than usual and she glanced toward his door. It was still partially open, as he had left it. She hoped his father wasn’t delaying him with his unending requests for another pillow or another station on the TV, a glass of milk, answer the phone, and why can’t he bring his books home with him just once? Her own father, she thought, had been kind and forgiving and funny—everything she did, it seemed to her now, had pleased and amazed him. She tallied, as she had been doing since his death, one life for another, who would have been missed more, her father or Rick’s. Rick’s was even older, she knew. He should have died so her father could have lived. No one would have felt that bad.

She looked toward the house, considered touching the horn, but instead reached again for the gas pedal. The exhaust cloud, pale gray but lighter and brighter than the air and the sky, filled the rear-view mirror once more and continued to grow, rolling and smoking as she pumped the gas again and again, the engine yelling, threatening, wanting to get away. She watched the rear-view mirror: the street and the black trees and the houses behind her were nearly obliterated by the exhaust. They reminded her of a child’s botched pencil drawing, now erased and made new again. Here, start over. Her father was alive and Rick’s had died, and since she hadn’t met him yet, she didn’t even know it.

She took her foot from the gas and sat back to watch the vapor slowly rise and disappear, the colorless street once again growing clear. Rick was at the front door, but he was turned away, talking to someone. When he stepped out of the house, she could see that he was angry. And then a woman stepped out behind him. She was small—Sheryl had always imagined that Rick’s mother would be tall and powerful, thick and ungainly dead weight—and dark, like Rick. She wore a raincoat that she held tightly closed at the waist and she ran after him in short, merry little steps. Rick ignored her until he got to the car and then he pulled open the door and said, “My mother wants to meet you,” quick and sullen. He got in and slammed the door—for a second Sheryl thought he was going to pull away—and then leaned forward to turn off the engine. He slumped behind the wheel. Sheryl touched his leather jacket, spattered with rain. There was no time for her to move to the far side of the seat.

The woman bent down to the window and smiled in at them. “Hello,” she called as if they were a great distance from her. “You’re Sheryl.”

Sheryl nodded and said hello. Rick stared at the windshield.

“Well, I’m Rick’s mom,” she said. She said it proudly, as if she’d just been awarded the title. Despite her illness, she looked younger than she was. Her straight brown hair was pulled off her face with a velvet hair band but the ends of it fell over her cheeks as she leaned toward them. Her eyes, Rick’s eyes, were dark and wide-spaced, obviously weak and yet somehow alluring. Only the deep vertical line between them, as dark as a scar, and the raw yellow patch of psoriasis on her forehead, as if to indicate the source of her troubles, reminded Sheryl of where she spent her weekdays.

She continued to grip her raincoat. Her pale throat was bare. “You’ll have to forgive me for coming out like this,” she said, her voice still calling. “But I just got home myself and I’m not resettled yet.”

Sheryl nodded. She saw a purple flush spreading across

Rick’s cheek and jaw. She wanted him to start the engine.

“I’m back and forth, you know,” his mother said.

Sheryl said, “Yeah.” She thought of reaching for the keys herself.

“But getting better all the time,” the woman said with a laugh. The rain was beginning to dampen her hair. “Or so they tell me.” She smiled. “Or so they want to believe.” She suddenly looked up at the sky. “It’s too bad about this rain,” she said.

Sheryl nodded. “I hate it.”

Rick’s mother dropped her eyes to the girl, seemed to look into her face and her lap and then her face again. A tremor, as quick and delicate as a pulse, passed over her features, through her lips and her cheeks and across her eyelids, so quickly it seemed a drop of rain had simply moved like a shadow across her face.

“I hate it too,” she said. “It makes me think we’ve lost the sun and don’t even know it.”

Rick shot forward then, as if he’d had all he could bear, and started the car. The cloud of exhaust rose like a sail behind them. “We’re going,” he said.

She stepped back from the door, still smiling, but didn’t say another word.

When they stopped at the end of the block, Rick said, “Did she go in?” Sheryl turned to look over her shoulder and his. She expected to see her there for some reason, if only because crazy people were supposed to be unreliable. Were supposed to stand out in the rain.

Through the thin white exhaust she saw only the empty sidewalk and the street. “Yeah,” she said. “She’s gone.” She saw him raise his dark glasses and peer under them into the rear view mirror, his eyes startling in their resemblance to hers.

“She just asked me for money,” he said when they had begun driving again.

Sheryl sank down beside him and put her cheek to his wet coat. “What for?”

She watched the leafless trees pass and then the tall lampposts along the boulevard. “She wants to get out of here,” he said, and they both knew that he meant not merely out of our town or our state or the wet midwinter climate, but the world itself.

When Sheryl arrived in Ohio, her aunt and uncle were waiting for her at the airport, smiling reproachful but sympathetic smiles. Her aunt kissed her. Her uncle took her flight bag, which was nearly empty and marked with the name of another airline but which she had believed to be as requisite as a ticket and a seatbelt. “Well,” her aunt and uncle said together, recognizing in one word the severity and complexity of her problem but saying also that they would make the best of it. “Well, well.”

Outside, the sun had nearly set. Sheryl had to turn to look behind her to see the clear streak of scarlet at the horizon and, pressing down upon it like a hand, the dark blue sky. In it, the evening star seemed a tiny keyhole that gave promise of a wide, white-silver room. She did not wonder what Rick was doing at that very moment (he was pulling into the parking lot outside the supermarket where she had worked, tossing a cigarette from his window), if he gazed at the same star, but thought instead that the sun set in the west and so this road took them east. Faced her toward home. She watched the road signs carefully as they passed.

She had expected a farmhouse. Not because her uncle was a farmer, she knew he did something for GM, but because her mother had told her they lived on four acres. Sheryl had no clear idea of how large an acre was, but she associated them with farming and couldn’t imagine any other reason for having four.

But instead they pulled into a long flat driveway that led to a new raised ranch, sparsely landscaped and lit like a car lot. Bright spots illuminated the driveway and the garage and hung from under the eaves all around the house: two shone on the huge front door. With them, and the flat treeless land that stretched unbroken for as far as she could see in the new darkness, Sheryl felt for the first time that she had been exiled, sent to an outpost, to the very edge of something she could only define as home.

Her uncle slammed the trunk of the car and the sound seemed final and remote in the summer air.

The front door opened before she and her aunt and uncle had reached it, and their daughter, Sheryl’s cousin Pam, called a mellifluous “Hello.” She was in her late twenties or early thirties, pretty and wide-bottomed, with a round, dimpled face that for a moment as she smiled in the spotlight seemed stark white. She embraced Sheryl lightly but kept an arm around her as she led her into the house.

Inside, the hallway had a high ceiling and ended in a pair of steps, one that went down to a family room, another that led up to the rest of the house. Its walls were lined with family photographs, a gallery of sorts, meant either to give a new visitor an immediate one-stop introduction to the entire family and its history or to remind the family members themselves, each time they passed through the door, of the complex weave of faces and lives that had been spun to produce them. Sheryl saw her parents in their wedding clothes, the familiar, old-fashioned studio portrait of her grandmother at twenty-five, newly arrived in America. And again her parents, sitting on a couch somewhere, holding her, a toddler, between them.

Pam was talking about her obstetrician. “He got me through three kids and one almost,” she said. “He looks like Dr. Zorba, doesn’t he, Mom? But he’s as nice as he can be.” She said he had agreed to squeeze Sheryl in tomorrow morning.

They went up the stairs and down a short hallway to the room, between the kitchen and the bathroom, where Sheryl was to stay. The TV room they called it, although the TV had apparently been removed and replaced by a small set of cardboard drawers covered in pink satin. The fold-out couch had already been opened and made up, and someone had put a can of hairspray and a number of half-empty perfume bottles on a table near the bed.

Pam helped her unpack her clothes, pausing more than once to hold up a skirt or a pair of jeans and to squeal, “How do you get into these?” She herself wore a pale blue shirtwaist with a thin plaid belt, loafers and white bobby socks. Her hair was a perfect flip. “Believe me,” she said. “They won’t fit much longer.”

She asked if Sheryl sewed, and the girl shook her head. “I’ll teach you,” Pam said. “It’s not worth buying maternity clothes when you can just run something up on the machine. It’ll be fun.”

She sat on the edge of the bed. She talked incessantly in a bright, warm voice. Her younger brother, she said, was away at camp for the summer, a counselor. The older one lived in St. Louis. Her own house was just a mile or two away. She’d bring her kids over in the morning. She couldn’t wait for Sheryl to meet them. She said she knew three kids weren’t that many, compared to some people, but it was enough to make her feel she could answer any questions Sheryl had. “For instance,” she said, “I had a saddle block for the last one.” She arched her back and reached behind her. “That’s when they put a needle right into your spine. You don’t feel anything from the waist down and it’s marvelous. But you’re awake enough to actually see the baby be born. I mean, if you want to.”

Sheryl watched her from the other side of the room, her brush in her hand.

“Of course,” Pam went on, “you can just be knocked out. That’s not bad either.”

Until this moment, Sheryl had not thought seriously about the baby to be born. Until now, she thought of the pregnancy itself as her dilemma, as if it were, in itself, a complete fact, without implication. All she had feared in the past two months was the moment she would have to walk into her mother’s bedroom to tell her, and she had considered her punishment, the consequence of her confession, to be only the cold, humiliating examination she had had that morning, and then this exile.

Now she saw it was endless. It stretched infinitely before her, as fully burdensome as all the years she had yet to live.

“Father Tom at the church,” Pam went on, adding to it, “will put you in touch with a wonderful agency, and you can be sure the family will be Catholic. He’ll tell you all about it if you want. Whenever you’re ready. He’s a doll.”

Sheryl turned to place her brush on the flimsy dresser.

“I’ll make some calls about your school situation. You can probably do something like a correspondence course while you’re here. You could get books from the high school here in September. I’m going to see if a friend of mine can come over and help you out. She taught before her kids came.”

Sheryl heard her aunt in the kitchen, dropping ice cubes into glasses. She heard a sound, remote and faint, like the rumble of trucks on some distant highway. She would have to get up early to see where the sun rose.

“What would you like to have,” Pam asked softly just as the aunt called, “Girls—iced tea!” “A boy or a girl?”

Sheryl paused for a moment. She had heard the word whispered among the neighborhood women from time to time, on those mornings when my own mother had returned from the hospital empty-handed, and had slowly come to understand its meaning. She had learned there was a sense of disappointment in it, but no threat or damage. It meant simply that a certain future had failed to arrive. That all had gone back to what it was, to what it had been before.

She tossed her hair defiantly and turned to face her cousin. “I’d like to have a miscarriage,” she said.

Even as Pam flinched, her mouth closing with the shock of the word, Sheryl saw that she also forgave her. “You say that now,” she said softly. “But just wait. You won’t always feel that way.”