The Times Are Never So Bad (12 page)

‘Wait,' he said. ‘Sit a minute and cool off.'

He shifted on the seat, hitching his right leg up, and faced her. At first she thought she would look straight ahead through the windshield but she didn't really know what she wanted to do, so-sitting straight—she turned her face to him.

‘When you come home you'll have to carry your load, the same as Mother.'

‘Meaning what?'

‘Meaning don't look at me that way anymore. Mother doesn't.'

‘She must be terribly hurt.'

‘The difference between you and your mother is she knows me and you don't. Here: take this.'

Now the letter was out of his pocket, crossing the space between them, into her lap.

‘Read it over tonight and see who you wrote it for.'

‘For
her
,' she said, looking down at her own handwriting of a week ago.

‘Think it over. And take this.'

Raising himself, he got his wallet; she was shaking her head as, barely looking at them, he pulled out some bills and pressed them into her hand. She left her fingers open.

‘Get a dress or take your boy friend to dinner. Go on, take it.'

The top one was a five, and it was a thick stack; she folded it and dropped it in her purse.

‘I'm not buying you, either. It's just a present.'

‘All right.'

She was looking down, her warm cheek profiled to him, knowing it was a humble posture, but she could not lift her eyes.

‘I want you to be straightened out by June.'

‘Maybe I shouldn't come home.'

‘Yes you will. And you'll be all right too. Now give me a kiss.'

She leaned toward him and kissed his mouth, then she was hugging him and, closing her eyes, she rubbed them quickly on his coat. He got out and came around her side, held the door open, and walked with her up the sidewalk and dormitory steps.

‘Be careful driving back,' she said.

‘Always.' Then he was grinning, shrugging his shoulders. ‘What the hell, I've been to confession.'

She smiled, and held it while he got into the car, put on his sunglasses, waved, and drove off. Then she went inside and took the elevator to her floor. Fran was lying on her bed, wearing a slip.

‘What happened?'

Jackie shook her head, went to the window, and looked down at the girls walking to class.

‘What did he say?'

‘He broke up with her.'

‘Great! So it's okay now.'

Jackie left the window and lay on her bed.

‘I'm going to cut this afternoon,' she said. 'do you think we can find Dick and Gary?'

‘Sure.'

‘Let's go someplace. Maybe to a movie, then out for dinner. It's on me.'

‘How much did he give you?'

‘I don't know, but it's enough.'

‘Okay,' Fran said. ‘We won't tell the boys how you got it, though.'

‘No,' Jackie said, ‘we won't.'

She closed her eyes. When Fran was dressed, she got up and they went down the elevator and out into the sunlight to find the boys.

Goodbye

O
N A
S
UNDAY
morning in June, Paul and Judith finished cleaning their apartment, left the key in the mailbox, and drove across town to the house Paul had left on a grey and windy day last March. It was the first house his father had ever bought: a small yellow one with a green door, a picture window, a car port. His father had bought it four years ago, when they moved from Lafayette to Lake Charles; it was a new house, built for selling in a residential section where at first there were half a dozen houses and wide, uncut fields where cottontails and meadowlarks lived. There were few trees.
My prairie
, Paul's mother called it. Now the fields were lawns and everywhere you looked there was a house, but still she said to friends:
Come out to the prairie and see us
. She said this in front of Paul's father too, her tone joking on the surface, yet no one could fail to hear the caverns of shame and bitterness beneath it.
Come to my little yellow house on the prairie
, she said.

Now, with hangered dresses lying on the back seat, and his new Marine uniform with the new gold bars hanging in a plastic bag from the hook above the window, he came in sight of the house, rectangular and yellow against the pale blue of the hot afternoon, and he felt a sense of dread, as though he were a child who had done something foolish and disobedient, and now must go home and pay the price. But he was also in luck (though he couldn't actually call it that, for he had planned it, and left enough cleaning and packing for after Mass so they wouldn't arrive in time to have lunch with his father): his mother's Chevrolet stood alone in the car port, his father's company car was gone, and glancing at his watch, Paul imagined him about now within sight of the oaks, the fairways, the limp red flags. He reached across the overnight bag and took Judith's hand, this nineteen-year-old blond girl who he knew had saved him from something as intangible as love and fear. He held her hand until he had to release it to turn left at what he still thought of as his street, then right into the driveway where, as though in echo of his incompetent boyhood, he depressed the clutch too late, and the Ford stopped with a shudder.

When he had unloaded what they needed for the night, he went to the kitchen. In the refrigerator were two six-packs of Busch-Bavarian beer. There were also cantaloupes, which he and Judith could not afford, and for a moment he allowed himself to believe his last day and night at home would be a series of simple, tangible exchanges of love: his father, who rarely drank beer, had bought some for him; he would drink it, as he would eat the roast tonight and the cantaloupes tomorrow. But when he took a beer into the living room, where his mother and Judith sat with demitasses poised steady and graceful above their pastel laps, his mother said: ‘Oh, you found your beer.' Then to Judith: ‘His Daddy brought two six-packs home yesterday and I said those children will never drink all that, but all he said was Paul likes his beer. And I got some cantaloupes, for your breakfast tomorrow.'

‘Good,' he said, and sat in his father's easy chair.

After a while his mother went to her room for a nap. Judith got a magazine from the rack and sat on the couch, under a large water-color of magnolias, painted long ago by a friend of his parents. Paul was looking at
Sports Illustrated
when his mother called him to the bedroom. She stood at the foot of her bed, wearing a slip and summer robe.

‘Would you get my pen from under the bed?' she said loudly, motioning with her head toward the living room and Judith. ‘Your young body can bend better than mine.'

‘Your pen?' He even started to bend over, to look; he would have crawled under the bed if she hadn't stopped him with a hand on his arm, a finger to her lips.

‘I went to see Monsignor,' she whispered. ‘To see if you and Judith were bad. I—'

‘You did
what
?'

Her hand quickly tightened on his arm, her fingers rose to her lips; he whispered: ‘You did
what?
'

‘I had to know, Paul, and it's good I went, he was very nice, he said you were both very good young people, that the bad ones don't get into trouble—'

‘You mean pregnant?'

Nodding quickly, her finger to her lips again: ‘—that only the innocent ones did because they didn't plan things.'

‘Mother—Mother, why did you have to ask him that? Why didn't you
know
that?'

‘Well because—'

‘What's
wrong
with you?'

But he did not want to know, not ever—turning from her, leaving the room, down the hall past the photographs of him and his sisters, Amy and Barbara; he had only this afternoon and tonight to be at home, and he did not want to know anything more. Judith was looking at him.

‘I think I'll go run,' he said.

‘In this heat? After drinking a beer?'

‘Yes.'

‘But your things are packed. And they're clean.'

‘I'll unpack them and you can throw them in the washer when I finish.'

Under the early afternoon sun he ran two miles on hot blacktop; for a while he ran in anger, then it left him when he was too hot to think of anything but being hot. When he got back his mother was sleeping. He took a beer into the shower and stayed a long time.

At six-thirty his mother began watching the clock, her eyes quick and trapped. She was in the pale green kitchen, moving through the smell of roast; Paul and Judith sat at the table, drinking beer.

‘Don't y'all want to go to the living room instead of this hot old kitchen? You don't have to stay in here with me.'

Paul told her no, he didn't like the smell of air-conditioned rooms, he wanted to smell cooking. He was watching the clock too. Certainly she must remember the meals after Amy and Barbara had gone: if she didn't talk, the three of them ate to the sounds of silverware on china. There was nothing else her memory could give her, unless she had dreamed this night of goodbyes out of some memory of her own childhood, with the five brothers and four sisters, the loud meals at that long table where he too had sat as a child and watched black hands lowering bowls and platters, and had daydreamed beneath the voices, the laughter of the Kel-leys, who had once had money and perhaps dignity and now believed they had lost both because they had lost the first. The lawyer father had died in debt, with his insurance lapsed, and the sons had sold their house, whose grounds were so big that, when Paul played there, he had not needed to imagine size: it seemed as large as Sherwood Forest. Jews bought the house, tore the vines from its brick walls, and painted the first story pink. Maybe they had got around to painting the top story; he didn't know. He hadn't been to New Iberia in years, and when his mother went she refused to pass the house.

He watched her at the stove. If his father missed the cocktail hour, Paul would be spared while she suffered; and more: he knew by now, after those nights—one or two a month—that when his father came home late for dinner, drunk (she called it tight), gentle, and guilty, Paul sided with him; and in the face of his mother's pique they played a winking, grinning game of two men who by their natures were bound to keep the sober women waiting at their stoves. He even drew pleasure from it, though as a boy he had loved his mother more than anyone on earth, he loved her still, he had always been able to talk with her, although now he had things to say that she didn't want to hear: hardly reason enough to make her the sheep he offered for a few warm and easy (not really: faked, strained) moments with his father. But he would probably do it again. Since waking from her nap, she had not tried to speak to him alone; she had kept them with Judith; and her voice and eyes asked his forgiveness.

By seven-thirty, when the roast was done, they had moved with their drinks to the living room: Paul in his father's chair, his head resting on the doily, on the same spot (from Vaseline hair tonic, two drops a day, and Paul used it too) faintly soiled by his father's head. His mother, sitting wtih Judith on the couch, was not wearing a watch; but at exactly seven-thirty, she asked Paul the time.

‘All right, he'd rather drink out there with his friends than with his own family. All right: I'm used to that. I've lived with it. But not the dinner. He can't do this to the dinner. Call him, Paul. I'm sorry, Judith: families should be quiet about these things. Paul, call your father.'

‘Not me.' He shook his head. ‘No: not me.'

When he was a boy in Lafayette she had sometimes told him to call the golf course and ask his father how long before he'd be home. He did it, feeling he was an ally against his father, whose irritation—All
right: tell her I'm coming
—was not, he knew, directed at him; was even in collusion with him; but that knowledge didn't help. Also, at thirteen and fourteen and then fifteen his voice hadn't changed yet, so he was doubly humiliated: when he asked for his father the clerk always said:
Yes ma'am, just a second
—

‘Then I'll call,' his mother said. 'should I call him, Judith, or should we just go ahead and eat without him?'

‘Maybe we could wait another few minutes.'

‘All right. Fifteen. I'll wait until quarter to eight. Paul, fix your mother a drink. I might as well get tight, then. That's what they say: join your husband in his vices.'

‘Drinking isn't Daddy's vice.'

‘No, who said it was? It's that
golf
that's his vice. I might as well have married a sea captain, Judith, at least then I wouldn't be out here on my prairie—'

‘You could live by the sea,' Judith said, ‘and have a widow's walk.'

Paul took his mother's glass and pushed through the swinging kitchen door, out of the sound and smell of air-conditioning, into the heat, and the fragrance of roast.

At twenty before ten, they sat down to dinner. His mother set Paul's plate at the head of the table, but Paul said no, Daddy might come home while we're eating. He sat opposite Judith. His mother said they should have eaten at eight-fifteen. It took fifteen minutes to drive home from the club, and at eight o'clock she had gone to her room, and slid the door shut in a futile attempt at privacy in a house too small to contain what it had to. They heard her voice: hurt, bitter, whining. And at once—though his mother was right, his father wrong by something as simple as an hour and a half—he was against her. Maybe if she didn't whine, if she had served dinner at seven-thirty and said the hell with him, the old bastard can eat it cold when he gets home, maybe then he would have joined her. But he knew that wasn't true either, that it wasn't her style he resented so much as her vision—or lack of it—which allowed her to have that style and feel it was her due. When perhaps all the time his father, by staying away, was telling her:
You shouldn't have planned this, you are not helping us all but failing us all, and I choose not to bear the pain of it
. But if that were true, then his father's method was cowardly, and his cowardice added to or even created the problem he couldn't face.