That Night (15 page)

“I will,” Sheryl said, but she saw there would be no convincing her.

“Talk to me in six more months,” Pam said. “You’ll see.”

That evening, with her aunt and uncle safely in bed, Sheryl walked down the stairs to the hallway with the photographs and then down the second set of steps to the family room. She placed a pillow over the phone there, dialed the number she had written in ink on the inside of her arm, the same number she had dialed from the airport when she had told her mother she was going to the bathroom. Then it had rung and rung, but now it was snatched up before the first ring had barely begun, as if someone had been waiting for it. Not Rick, though; it was a woman’s voice that said hello. Sheryl asked for him in a whisper.

The only light in the room came from the bright spot outside and made the linoleum floor seem black, threw bars of light and shadow across the couch where she sat. There was too long a pause before the voice said another hello. Sheryl realized that this woman, too, was whispering.

“May I speak to Rick?” she said again, raising her voice a bit.

The woman, his mother, raised hers a bit as well. “He’s not here,” she said. “He’s gone out.” There was another pause, filled only with the hollow sound of the line, the distance between them. Sheryl imagined the woman in a darkened room like this one, cupping the receiver to her lips.

“This is Sheryl,” she said, and the woman softly repeated her name, exclaiming it in a throaty whisper. And then, as if they were exchanging secrets, “This is Rick’s mom.”

“Will you tell him I called?” Sheryl said. The woman was silent, and Sheryl rushed on, “Will you tell him I’m at my aunt’s house,” the receiver so close to her mouth she wondered briefly if it might have been stopping her words rather than carrying them, “in Ohio.” She paused and listened for her aunt or uncle’s footsteps. On the other end, beyond the static, she could sense Rick’s mother listening to the house behind her, too, touching her fingertips to the dry patch on her head.

“Will you tell him?” she said again, although she knew even then that she would not. “Will you please tell him?” It struck her as familiar, this repetition of what she knew already was a futile, a meaningless, plea.

“I don’t know where he is,” Rick’s mother whispered. “I’m back and forth, you know.”

“I know,” Sheryl said. “But tell him, will you? I don’t know when I can call again.”

“Sure,” the woman murmured, seeming to address someone else in the room, although Sheryl was quite certain there was no one else there, that Rick’s mother had been wandering like a ghost through her own darkened house when the phone rang; that she was as much a frightened stranger in it as Sheryl was in this one.

When the woman hung up, abruptly and without another word, Sheryl slipped quietly up the stairs and into her room, stopping for just a moment at the closet in the hallway to search the pockets of the coats hanging there for spare change, as Rick had told her his mother used to do whenever she was preparing to leave them.

The four acres, Sheryl learned, were not all barren, nor did they stretch evenly all around. She saw with the light that there were other houses on either side of her aunt and uncle’s and, at the far end of their property, a line of trees that marked the edge of a highway. She was not certain if it was the highway on which she had come, but it was a highway nonetheless and given enough time she could walk to it.

Pam drove her downtown to the doctor’s office the next morning, where the old man smiled at her with wet pale blue eyes. When he had finished his exam, he grasped her forearm and shook it a little, then patted her shoulder (the one gesture meaning bear up; the other, soon it will be over), just as so many people had done the day of her father’s funeral.

As they were leaving, he took her chin in his hand and ran a flat thumb over a spattering of pimples there. “Why do you want to hide such a pretty face behind so much makeup?” he asked her.

She lowered her eyes, her cheeks burning. What she had done with Rick, what had brought her here, had been done in darkness and without words and had made her feel completely adult. These men in their bright offices seemed bent on reversing that. As if humiliation, a confirmation of her immaturity, were part of her treatment and cure. Or as if their smiling ministrations would win her back her childhood.

When they left the office, Pam asked if she’d like to look at some patterns.

Sheryl said, “I really don’t care,” and then followed her into a large old variety store where the floors were wood and almost soft with wear and the air smelled of plastic and popcorn. Sheryl went to the makeup counter first. Her mother had given her a twenty-dollar bill when she got on the plane, promising to send more later. Sheryl’s father used to say that money burned a hole in her pocket, but when she handed the bill to the cashier (she bought lipstick and turquoise-blue eyeshadow, another mascara and a thick blue compact, daring her cousin to repeat the doctor’s words), she felt a real sense of loss, almost a fear, and she quickly folded the change, the broken bill, into her palm.

In the notions department, Pam led her to three pattern books as big as dictionaries, with thick, glossy pages. She flipped them over expertly, found the right section and then turned the pages for Sheryl as if she were a child.

“Just stop me when you see something you like,” she said, but then paused at every other page herself to coo over the pastel drawings of pregnant women in loose blouses and skirts, dresses as wide and roomy as tents, all with bows and ruffles and appliques, all somehow infantile.

“This would look cute on you,” Pam would say. Or, “Oh, I like this one.”

Sheryl stood at her side, watching silently. At the end of the section (Sheryl noticed that formals were next, prom gowns and bridesmaid dresses, as if the pattern people had gotten their chronology as backward as she had), Pam turned to her. “Anything?” she asked brightly.

Again she merely shrugged. Pam went to the next book and repeated the process, but silently this time. As she moved on to the third, she said, her eyes on the pages and her voice low for what seemed the first time, “You know, Sheryl, I’d really like to be your friend.” She paused and there was only the sound of the store: a cash register ringing and someone calling, “Miss, Miss.” “I know you’re having a hard time right now. And I know you think you don’t need anybody else, but let me tell you, you do.” She laughed, almost bitterly. “Believe me, even under the best of circumstances you need a friend, a girlfriend, to help you through what you’re about to go through. You really do.” She turned to look at her. Her small eyes were green and there was a dimple in her round fleshy chin. She had a fine yellow moustache. “I’m trying to be your friend.”

Sheryl stepped back a little, aware already of all that had begun to insinuate itself between them: her cousin and her uncle and her aunt, their big house, this town, the baby to be born, even the hours since she’d last seen him—all coming between them when she’d promised it couldn’t happen.

She spoke sullenly. “I know it,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me, I know it.”

She felt Pam watching her for a moment and then heard her sigh, impatiently, and continue turning pages. Suddenly and almost against her will, Sheryl raised her hand. She saw her own round finger on one of the glossy pages. She had not been spoken to so directly, had not had anyone but Rick so directly meet her eye, since her father had died.

“I like this one,” she said quickly.

That night they gathered early, in the middle of a deserted dead-end street by the reservoir. This was the starting point for drag races, the scene of a much talked about rumble between another set of car-driving hoods and a motorcycle gang from the next town, the place where many of them, Rick included, had once crashed through the high weeds and fallen flat on their stomachs, walkie talkies and toy machine guns in their hands. (And one of them always stepped in dog dirt; one of them always found something odd and evil: an old rubber glove, a toilet seat, a damp and muddy magazine.) It was a no-man’s-land, a blank space in the neighborhood. A street with a broken curb but no sidewalks, no driveways, no homes. Just tangled grass and trees and tall yellow weeds and a high chain-link fence beyond which the earth seemed to end, dipping as it did into the steep-sided and dried-out reservoir. Years and years ago, a child had drowned there and so all the following generations of children—including my own—were told it was off bounds. It still retained that sense of the forbidden.

By now they had a plan. First, Rick wouldn’t take his own car. The old lady would recognize it in a minute and maybe call the cops. He’d ride in the back seat of the middle car. They’d cruise by a couple of times just to check the place out, make sure they were home. They’d drive real slow, just kind of loop around. If somebody called the police, no problem. “”Hey, officer.”” Rick held out his hands innocently. His dark glasses reflected the pale blue sky, the faces of the others as they leaned over the opened doors of their cars. “”We’re just practicing our driving skills, that’s all. We’re just killing time until the nine o’clock movie, that’s all.” What are they going to do, say you can’t drive on this street—“Which street? We’ve been on every one of them.””

The other boys nodded, or simply stirred in agreement, as the fathers would later do.

“And when do we make our move?” one asked.

Rick turned his head slowly, looking at them all. “Let’s just see,” he said. “Let’s just get over there and check it out.”

They slapped the roofs of their cars. “Right,” they said.

C’mon. Let’s go.

Rick slipped into the back seat of the middle car. Two boys slipped in on either side of him. Already he was staring straight ahead, like someone trying to out psyche a roller coaster. The two boys glanced at him and then at one another. One of them touched the chains piled on the floor with the toe of his black boot.

“We’re out of here,” the driver said.

They followed the side streets toward Sheryl’s house, looping around them, doubling back. The streets near the reservoir were a bit less prosperous; there were smaller, pre-war houses with high windows and doors, narrow alleyways between them. There were gnomes and bird baths in many of the front yards, or statues of Mary or Saint Francis tucked into egg-shaped grottoes painted sky blue within and covered without by sea shells pressed into the cement. There were clotheslines, like the skeletons of umbrellas, stuck into every side yard.

It was still dinnertime and so there were few people on the street. Whiffs of garlic and grilled meat came across the summer air. A young woman wearing a plaid bathing suit sat in a lawn chair on her narrow driveway, a baby with a saggy diaper standing before her. She looked up as they passed. They circled her block and went by her again.

They headed east, away from the sun, which was still fairly high. Past a man in a brown business suit who was closing the gate that crossed his driveway, his car humming behind him. Past three children riding tricycles along the sidewalk, who only slowed their pace as the cars passed, in an odd counterpoint.

South now, through the oldest part of town, passing within two blocks, and then one, of Rick’s father’s old office. And then back again, briefly paralleling the boulevard. Inside, they were uncomfortable without their radios on, with the windows only partway down.

Now the neat and shaded streets. More dinnertime smells. They passed a grandmother standing out on a lawn, watering a flower bed filled with bright impatiens. She watched them over her shoulder. “Yeah, you too,” one of the boys whispered.

At the next corner, they turned onto our block. As they approached her house, only Rick, pushed back between them, turned his head. The front door was wide open; the window fan was moving. There was no sign of her.

They paused at the stop sign, moved around the corner, one, two, three.

“Nothing,” one of the guys said.

Rick said, “It’s all right. Keep going.” He folded his arms across his chest, his leather jacket creaking a little, popping as it pulled away from the shoulders of the other two boys. The car smelled of musk.

They continued on, around two blocks, turning off onto another. There was an ashtray built into the back of the front seat, and one of the boys suddenly leaned forward and popped it open, then pushed it closed. Rick looked at him, his mouth drawn.

“Just checking for scumbags,” the boy said.

Rick gave a half smile.

“Left?” the driver asked.

“Yeah,” Rick said. He watched him make the turn. “You ever get laid in this back seat, Victor?” His voice was low.

The driver glanced in the mirror. “Yeah,” he said. “Every night.”

“By what?” the boy beside him asked. “Your dog?”

“By your mother,” Victor said.

“Victor gets laid,” Rick told them generously. “He gets laid by all kinds of girls. He gets laid almost as much as I do.”

They all chuckled, a little embarrassed, sensing he was hardening his heart.

Victor looked in his mirror again. “Nobody gets laid as much as you do, Rick.”

It was no less a consciously kind statement because it was, or had been, true.

They turned onto her street again and made a left this time. A bald man stepping out of his car paused to look at them. Further down, a woman holding a white cake box and filling her back seat with little boys did the same. They passed the grandmother again who was now talking across a hedge to her neighbor, the green garden hose curled neatly against the side of her garage. They passed Angie’s house. Its wrought-iron railing and front door and drainpipes were painted pale pink. Her father was out mowing the lawn. They made a group of kids playing baseball in the street step out of their way. The kids moved only as far as they had to. They looked into the cars like curious, defiant natives, knowing that they would soon be teenagers too, that they would replace them.