The Stories of Richard Bausch (49 page)

He hesitates, glances down. “I—I’ll try and do better.” He seems about
to cry again. For some reason this makes her feel abruptly very irritable and nervous. She turns from him, walks into the living room and begins putting the sofa back in order. When he comes to the doorway and says her name, she doesn’t answer, and he walks through to the kitchen door.

“What’re you doing?” she says to him.

“Can you give me some water?”

She moves into the kitchen and he follows her. She runs water, to get it cold, and he stands at her side. When the glass is filled, she holds it to his mouth. He swallows, and she takes the glass away. “If you want to talk about anything—” he says.

“Why don’t you try to sleep awhile?” she says.

He says, “I know I’ve been talking about Wally—”

“Just please—go lie down or something.”

“When I woke up this morning, I remembered everything, and I thought you might be gone.”

“Well, I’m not gone.”

“I knew we were having some trouble, Jane—”

“Just let’s not talk about it now,” she says. “All right? I have to go call Eveline.” She walks into the bedroom, and when he comes in behind her she tells him very gently to please go get off his feet. He backs off, makes his way into the living room. “Can you turn on the television?” he calls to her.

She does so. “What channel do you want?”

“Can you just go through them a little?”

She’s patient. She waits for him to get a good look at each channel. There isn’t any news coverage; it’s all commercials and cartoons and children’s shows. Finally he settles on a rerun of
The Andy Griffith Show,
and she leaves him there. She fills the dishwasher and wipes off the kitchen table. Then she calls Eveline to tell her what’s happened.

“You poor thing,” Eveline says. “You must be so relieved. And I said all that bad stuff about Wally’s wife.”

Jane says, “You didn’t mean it,” and suddenly she’s crying. She’s got the handset held tight against her face, crying.

“You poor thing,” Eveline says. “You want me to come over there?”

“No, it’s all right—I’m all right.”

“Poor Martin. Is he hurt bad?”

“It’s his hands.”

“Is it very painful?”

“Yes,” Jane says.

Later, while he
sleeps on the sofa, she wanders outside and walks down to the end of the driveway. The day is sunny and cool, with little cottony clouds—the kind of clear day that comes after a storm. She looks up and down the street. Nothing is moving. A few houses away someone has put up a flag, and it flutters in a stray breeze. This is the way it was, she remembers, when she first lived here—when she first stood on this sidewalk and marveled at how flat the land was, how far it stretched in all directions. Now she turns and makes her way back to the house, and then she finds herself in the garage. It’s almost as if she’s saying good-bye to everything, and as this thought occurs to her, she feels a little stir of sadness. Here on the worktable, side by side under the light from the one window, are Martin’s model airplanes. He won’t be able to work on them again for weeks. The light reveals the miniature details, the crevices and curves on which he lavished such care, gluing and sanding and painting. The little engines are lying on a paper towel at one end of the table; they smell just like real engines, and they’re shiny with lubrication. She picks one of them up and turns it in the light, trying to understand what he might see in it that could require such time and attention. She wants to understand him. She remembers that when they dated, he liked to tell her about flying these planes, and his eyes would widen with excitement. She remembers that she liked him best when he was glad that way. She puts the little engine down, thinking how people change. She knows she’s going to leave him, but just for this moment, standing among these things, she feels almost peaceful about it. There’s no need to hurry. As she steps out on the lawn, she realizes she can take the time to think clearly about when and where; she can even change her mind. But she doesn’t think she will.

He’s up. He’s in the hallway—he had apparently wakened and found her gone. “Jesus,” he says. “I woke up and you weren’t here.”

“I didn’t go anywhere,” she says, and she smiles at him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, starting to cry. “God, Janey, I’m so sorry. I’m all messed up here. I’ve got to go to the bathroom again.”

She helps him. The two of them stand over the bowl. He’s stopped crying
now, though he says his hands hurt something awful. When he’s finished he thanks her, and then tries a bawdy joke. “You don’t have to let go so soon.”

She ignores this, and when she has him tucked safely away, he says quietly, “I guess I better just go to bed and sleep some more if I can.”

She’s trying to hold on to the feeling of peace and certainty she had in the garage. It’s not even noon, and she’s exhausted. She’s very tired of thinking about everything. He’s talking about his parents; later she’ll have to call them. But then he says he wants his mother to hear his voice first, to know he’s all right. He goes on—something about Milly and her unborn baby, and Teddy Lynch—but Jane can’t quite hear him: he’s a little unsteady on his feet, and they have trouble negotiating the hallway together.

In their bedroom she helps him out of his jeans and shirt, and she actually tucks him into the bed. Again he thanks her. She kisses his forehead, feels a sudden, sick-swooning sense of having wronged him somehow. It makes her stand straighter, makes her stiffen slightly.

“Jane?” he says.

She breathes. “Try to rest some more. You just need to rest now.” He closes his eyes and she waits a little. He’s not asleep. She sits at the foot of the bed and watches him. Perhaps ten minutes go by. Then he opens his eyes.

“Janey?”

“Shhh,” she says.

He closes them again. It’s as if he were her child. She thinks of him as he was when she first saw him, tall and sure of himself in his uniform, and the image makes her throat constrict.

At last he’s asleep. When she’s certain of this, she lifts herself from the bed and carefully, quietly withdraws. As she closes the door, something in the flow of her own mind appalls her, and she stops, stands in the dim hallway, frozen in a kind of wonder: she had been thinking in an abstract way, almost idly, as though it had nothing at all to do with her, about how people will go to such lengths leaving a room—wishing not to disturb, not to awaken, a loved one.

Late one summer
afternoon, Milly Harmon and her older sister, Meg, spend a blessed, uncomplicated hour at a motel pool in Philadelphia, sitting in the shade of one of the big umbrella tables. They drink tropical punch from cans, and Milly nurses the baby, staring out at the impossibly silver agitation of water around the body of a young, dark swimmer, a boy with Spanish black hair and eyes. He’s the only one in the pool. Across the way, an enormous woman in a red terry-cloth bikini lies on her stomach in the sun, her head resting on her folded arms. Milly’s sister puts her own head down for a moment, then looks at Milly. “I feel fat,” she says, low. “I look like that woman over there.”

“Be quiet,” Milly says. “Your voice carries.”

“Nobody can hear us,” Meg says. She’s always worried about weight, though she’s nothing like the woman across the way. Her thighs are heavy, her hips wide, but she’s big-boned, as their mother always says; she’s not built to be skinny. Milly’s the one who’s skinny. When they were growing up, Meg often called her “stick.” Sometimes it was an endearment and
sometimes it was a jibe, depending on the circumstances. These days, Meg calls her “honey” and speaks to her with something like the careful tones of sympathy. Milly’s husband was killed last September, when Milly was almost six months pregnant, and the two women have traveled here to see Milly’s in-laws, to show them their grandchild, whom they have never seen.

The visit hasn’t gone well. Things have been strained and awkward. Milly is exhausted and discouraged, so her sister has worked everything out, making arrangements for the evening, preserving these few hours in the day for the two of them and the baby. In a way, the baby’s the problem: Milly would never have suspected that her husband’s parents would react so peevishly, with such annoyance, to their only grandson—the only grandchild they will ever have.

Last night, when the baby started crying at dinner, both the Harmons seemed to sulk, and finally Wally’s father excused himself and went to bed—went into his bedroom and turned a radio on. His dinner was still steaming on his plate; they hadn’t even quite finished passing the food around. The music sounded through the walls of the small house, while Milly, Wally’s mother and Meg sat through the meal trying to be cordial to each other, the baby fussing between them.

Finally Wally’s mother said, “Perhaps if you nurse him.”

“I just did,” Milly told her.

“Well, he wants
something.”

“Babies cry,” Meg put in, and the older woman looked at her as though she had said something off-color.

“Hush,” Milly said to the baby. “Be quiet.” Then there seemed nothing left to say.

Mrs. Harmon’s hands trembled over the lace edges of the tablecloth. “Can I get you anything?” she said.

At the end of the evening she took Milly by the elbow and murmured, “I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive us, we’re just not used to the commotion.”

“Commotion,” Meg said as they drove back to the motel. “Jesus. Commotion.”

Milly looked down into the sleeping face of her son. “My little commotion,” she said, feeling tired and sad.

Now Meg turns
her head on her arms and gazes at the boy in the pool. “Maybe I’ll go for a swim,” she says.

“He’s too young for you,” Milly says.

Meg affects a forlorn sigh, then sits straight again. “You want me to take Zeke for a while?” The baby’s name is Wally, after his dead father, but Meg calls him Zeke. She claims she’s always called every baby Zeke, boy or girl, but she’s especially fond of the name for
this
baby. This baby, she says, looks like a Zeke. Even Milly uses the name occasionally, as an endearment.

“He’s not through nursing,” Milly says.

It’s been a hot day. Even now, at almost six o’clock, the sky is pale blue and crossed with thin, fleecy clouds that look like filaments of steam. Meg wants a tan, or says she does, but she’s worn a kimono all afternoon, and hasn’t moved out of the shade. She’s with Milly these days because her marriage is breaking up. It’s an amicable divorce; there are no children. Meg says the whole thing simply collapsed of its own weight. Neither party is interested in anyone else, and there haven’t been any ugly scenes or secrets. They just don’t want to be married to each other anymore, see no future in it. She talks about how civilized the whole procedure has been, how even the lawyers are remarking on it, but Milly thinks she hears some sorrow in her voice. She thinks of two friends of hers who have split up twice since the warehouse fire that killed Wally, and whose explanations, each time, have seemed to preclude any possibility of reconciliation. Yet they’re now living together, and sometimes, when Milly sees them, they seem happy.

“Did I tell you that Jane and Martin are back together?” she asks Meg.

“Again?”

She nods.

“Tied to each other on a rock in space,” Meg says.

“What?”

“Come on, let me hold Zeke,” Meg reaches for the baby. “He’s through, isn’t he?”

“He’s asleep.”

Meg pretends to pout, extending her arm across the table and putting her head down again. She makes a yawning sound. “Where are all the boys? Let’s have some fun here anyway—right? Let’s get in a festive mood or something.”

Milly removes the baby’s tight little sucking mouth from her breast and covers herself. The baby sleeps on, still sucking. “Look at this,” she says to her sister.

Meg leans toward her to see. “What in the world do you think is wrong with them?”

She’s talking about Wally’s parents, of course. Milly shrugs. She doesn’t feel comfortable discussing them. She wants the baby to have both sets of grandparents, and a part of her feels that this ambition is in some way laudatory—that the strange, stiff people she has brought her child all this way to see ought to appreciate what she’s trying to do. She wonders if they harbor some resentment about how before she would marry their son she’d extracted a promise from him about not leaving Illinois, where her parents and her sister live. It’s entirely possible that Wally’s parents unconsciously blame her for Wally’s death, for the fact that his body lies far away in her family’s plot in a cemetery in Lincoln, Illinois.

“Hey,” Meg says.

“What.”

“I asked a question. You drove all the way out here to see them and let them see their grandson, and they act like it’s some kind of bother.”

“They’re just tired,” Milly says. “Like we are.”

“Seven hundred miles of driving to sit by a motel pool.”

“They’re not used to having a baby around,” Milly says. “It’s awkward for them, too.” She wishes her sister would stop. “Can’t we just not worry it all to death?”