What He's Poised to Do: Stories (P.S.) Page 3

  WHEN DAVE CAME TO LIVE in the barn, he told me he was going to start a new life. “No more drinking,” he said, “and no more girls.”

  “Good,” I said. “We can begin our new lives together.” He broke both rules the first week—I saw a small box of empty bottles stacked against the wall, and once I knocked on the barn door and heard noise inside, but no one answered.

  When I asked him about it, he denied that there were any girls. “I told you,” he said. “I have a new life now.” He was propped up on pillows on a narrow board he used as his bed, sketching with a piece of charcoal.

  “What are you drawing?” I said.

  “Pictures of the things I can’t do anymore,” he said.

  I didn’t care what kind of rules he broke. What did I care? Berne was less generous. He grumbled about Dave: Why would we let a man like that into our home, especially when we were trying to begin our own life together? I could see him getting angrier and angrier, but it wasn’t like Berne to do anything other than grumble. Finally, he asked me flat-out if there had ever been anything between me and Dave, and I said absolutely not, and he asked me if I was telling him the truth, and I just stared at him like he was crazy.

  Sarah asked me why I didn’t tell Berne the truth. “Because he wouldn’t understand,” I said.

  “I guess not,” she said. “Who would understand that a nice girl like you ever had a thing for that dirty little drunk?”

  “Are you still thinking of moving?” I asked Sarah. Ever since she caught the bouquet she’d been telling me she needed to get out of town. On weekends she went to Lincoln; she was seeing a guy there sometimes.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “This town isn’t doing much for me. I have a little money from selling the hardware store. I am seriously thinking about getting out of here.”

  “Would you go to Lincoln?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said again. “The problem with this guy is that he wants a family.”

  “Don’t you want kids?”

  “If I can have them.”

  “You can.”

  “Are you a doctor?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  FOR A LONG TIME, Berne and I weren’t getting pregnant either. He thought it made me sad, and he bought me lots of presents: another necklace (this one had a cross), another scarf (this one was blue), another hat (it looked just like the first). I didn’t like the necklace or the hat, but I loved the scarf. I wore it all the time, and even Sarah agreed that it looked like a dream on me. But then I lost it. Berne never seemed to notice, and I certainly didn’t mention it. Then I got pregnant, and it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Berne told me that the baby was a girl, that he was sure of it.

  “I want to name her Laurel,” he said, “after my father’s mother. If it’s a boy, I don’t have any ideas.”

  ONE DAY IN WINTER, I was out in town, getting some things for the house, and I came home to find a note from Dave on the counter: it was folded up and tucked inside an envelope, though the envelope wasn’t sealed. It said he couldn’t stay anymore. It thanked me for my generosity. It told me that we would always be special to each other, even without Ed, even without the hardware store. It said that there was a painting in the barn for me, the portrait of the woman that Sarah and I liked so much. It didn’t mention Berne.

  I went out to the barn. Even before I got there, I knew that there was someone inside. “Dave,” I said. “What’s with this note?”

  But it wasn’t Dave. It was Berne. He was standing over Dave’s bed, looking down on what was left there, the twisted bedsheets and the portrait of the woman Dave had known in Lincoln. As I came through the door, Berne turned and made a blue fist at me. I say a blue fist because that’s what it looked like. It was actually his normal-colored fist, but it was wrapped inside a blue scarf. “What is this?” he said.

  “It looks like my scarf,” I said.

  “I thought you lost that scarf,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I thought so, too. Where did you find it?”

  The fist tightened and took some of the creases out of the scarf. “I found it,” he said, “in here. With Dave’s things.”

  “Why would he have my scarf?”

  “That’s what I’m asking myself, Susan. Why would he have your scarf? And why would it be in the space between his bed and the wall?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know,” he said. “Do you know why he would write you a note saying that you would always be special to each other?”

  “No,” I said.

  “And do you know why some of the guys downtown made jokes when he moved in here?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, then you certainly don’t know why those guys would say that once upon a time Dave and you were sneaking around?”

  “No,” I said. “What guys?”

  “Ed,” he said.

  “Ed?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “He used to talk about you and Dave to anyone who would listen. He sounded proud. I think he imagined that you and Dave might end up together.”

  “When we were kids, maybe he liked me. Maybe he made up a story and told his father. But there’s never been anything between me and Dave,” I said.

  “Am I a fool?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  It must have been the wrong thing to say because he stepped forward and hit me. Berne had never hit me before, so I didn’t really understand what was happening. When I figured it out, I also thought that the scarf would cushion the blow. But his knuckle was poking out through a wrap, and it caught me right on the cheekbone, and I fell backward.

  Berne stood over me. He was trembling. Then he unwrapped the scarf and threw it into the air. It opened up and came down slowly, like a parachute, and before it hit the ground he was gone from the barn.

  I STAYED IN THE BARN for hours, sleeping on Dave’s board bed until Sarah came over. I was crying, surprised that I was crying, but I stopped when she showed up. She took one look at my black eye and walked right out. I started crying again. “Stop that,” she said, ducking her head back inside. “I’m just going to get something.”

  She came back with a makeup case and started putting foundation on my eye. “What a bastard,” she said. “What a fool.”

  “He’s not a fool,” I said.

  “If you don’t think so, maybe you’re one, too,” she said.

  The makeup was cool on my skin.

  “Why do they call it black and blue?” I asked.

  “Is this a riddle?” she said.

  “No. I just want to know. It has red in there and brown, and when it heals, it will go to green and yellow.”

  “Tell me again what happened?” she said.

  I told her. When I got to the part about the note from Dave, she asked me what it said. I said I didn’t remember exactly. “I mean, did it say where he was going?” she said. I shook my head no. She kept on with the makeup.

  When I got to the part about the scarf, she stopped and closed up the makeup case.

  “What?” I said. “Do I look okay now? Because I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of going back in there looking like I got hit.”

  “I have to tell you something,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  “I have to tell Berne something, too,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  “It was my scarf,” she said.

  “What was your scarf?”

  “The scarf he found was mine.”

  “It was mine,” I said. “I lost it. Did you take it from me?”

  “No, Susan. You showed yours to me, and I liked it so much that I went and got the same one.”

  “So how did it end up in here?” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “I was here,” she said.

  “When? Since when are you and Dave speaking?”

  “We’r
e not just speaking,” she said.

  “I see,” I said.

  She could tell from my tone that I didn’t believe her. “What?” she said. “You think I’m trying to cover up for you? I’m telling you. Dave and I are having a little thing.”

  “A little thing?” I said. “Isn’t he your son?”

  She must have heard something funny in my voice because she took me by the chin and looked me straight in the eye.

  “My god,” she said. “You’re jealous.”

  Then she marched on up to the house to set the record straight.

  WHEN I CAME IN, Berne was standing by the kitchen table. Sarah was standing by the door. Both of them had crazy looks in their eyes. I didn’t know who had said what or who had done what, but I did know that there was a kitchen knife out on the counter about midway between them. The air was tight, like any moment one of them might go for the knife. I didn’t think they would. But you never know when family is involved. They stood facing each other like that for a long time. “So,” Berne said finally. “You expect me to believe that?”

  “I expect you to believe what’s true,” said my sister.

  “I believe what I know,” Berne said. “And I have had enough of hearing what’s true and what’s not true from this family, from you and from your sister and from your husband.”

  I didn’t dare say anything. I just kept edging toward the knife until I was the closest of the three of us. If there was sudden movement, I could lunge for it and throw it into the trash can, or run away with it, or threaten to do myself in unless they stopped fighting. I was concentrating so hard on the knife that I didn’t see Berne take a step toward me. I flinched, expecting another blow. Instead, he let out a soft cry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If you tell me to believe you, I should believe you. That’s where my father went wrong.”

  “Your mother was lying, Berne.”

  “That was only half of the problem,” he said. “The other half was that he didn’t believe her. There are two sides to every story, and you always have to listen to the other one.”

  I took a deep breath against his chest and held him tight. He felt like a good man to me, a man who had acted in error and was trying to set things right.

  “Laurel?” I said.

  “Laurel,” he said, and squeezed me close to him.

  MY SISTER LEFT TOWN. She called me and told me she was leaving, and I knew from her tone that it wasn’t just melodrama. “I’m going to Lincoln,” she said.

  “Are you looking for Dave?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “At least I don’t think so. I just need to go somewhere for a while that isn’t here.”

  Laurel was born six months later. Right up until the end, I thought she would be a boy. Berne never wavered on his prediction of a girl. When Laurel was only four months old, I got pregnant again. Now, I told Berne, I’ll be able to use the boy’s name.

  “How do you know it’s not another girl?” he said.

  “You think it’s another girl?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I think you’re right. I think it’s a boy.”

  I dreamed about the boy who would be Laurel’s little brother. I even had a name picked out. But then I got a card in the mail from my sister. I hadn’t talked to her in months. The card had a photo that slipped out when I opened it; in the picture, she was standing by a window, holding a little baby that looked just about the same age as Laurel. She and the baby were as beautiful as a painting. Can you imagine? Sarah wrote. Ed would be so proud. Not that he’ll ever know. Or Dave, for that matter. I haven’t seen him since I got to Lincoln. I heard he went to Boston or Philadelphia. So it’s just me and my family.

  You know what’s funny? she wrote. I’m the mother and the grandmother. How many women can say that?

  I miss you, she wrote, and I love you.

  I called the phone number on the card.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” Sarah said.

  “What’s his name?” I said. I already knew the answer.

  “Ed,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I figured. That was the name I wanted.”

  “You wanted for what?”

  “For my baby,” I said.

  “For Laurel?” she said. “What kind of sense does that make?”

  “No, the second baby,” I said.

  “You’re pregnant again?” she said. “Congratulations.”

  “But I wanted the name Ed,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “Maybe this one will be a girl also.”

  “Berne thinks it’s a boy,” I said.

  “How are things?” she said.

  “With Berne?” I said. “Oh, you know.”

  “That bad?” she said.

  “No, no,” I said. “They’re good. He is who he is. He works so hard to get things right. Do you know that he hung the painting?”

  “What painting?” she said.

  “That portrait Dave left for me,” I said. “One day I came home, and it was hanging in the kitchen. Berne went and got it framed and everything. I didn’t say a word about it, and then a few days later we were eating dinner, and he looked up at it and said that he liked it. ‘There’s something about it,’ he said.”

  “There is something about it,” Sarah said. “Listen, I should go. I’m glad you called. And I’m sorry I took the name you wanted.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “James isn’t such a bad name for a little boy.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not at all.”

  After I hung up, I went outside. It was cold, so I bundled up, and it wasn’t until I got out there that I realized that I was wearing the blue scarf Berne had found in the barn. I hadn’t been in the barn much since Dave left. Laurel was scared of it; I was, too, a little bit. But the cold stung, and suddenly the barn didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I went in through the main door, brushing a web out of my face.

  Dave’s bed had been in the back of the barn. I stood where his bed had been and fingered the scarf. Then I thought about taking it off, throwing it high in the air, and counting until it came down. I wondered how high I could count before it reached the ground. But I didn’t throw it. Instead, I imagined throwing it into the air, and counted in my head. I got to eight, then imagined throwing the scarf again. The second time I got to ten.

  AGAINST SAMANTHA

  THE YEAR KICKED OFF WITH AN EVENT THAT I FEEL CONFIDENT describing as godly. There were floods in London that grew the river to monstrous proportions; the banks were rendered meaningless. I had an acquaintance there, and I heard about the floods in a letter. “More than a dozen souls have perished in the Thames,” Edith wrote. “Strange as it may seem, all but one were malign. Nature did its part to sweep the city clean. It was a clarifying moment.” A few days later, the moat at the Tower of London, which had been drained midway through the last century, was completely refilled by the brute force of a flood wave. On this topic, Edith was droller. “I suppose it wished to visit the Tower,” she wrote.

  That was how the year began, and it continued on in that headlong spirit. In February massive hailstones rained down in both the south of England and the south of Nebraska, killing eight all told. In April, Chicago was host to what became known as the Pineapple Primary, in which more than sixty bombs were lobbed into polling places and the Nineteenth Ward committeeman was shot to death in front of his wife and daughter. The murderess Ruth Snyder was executed at Sing Sing. Edith commented upon these events in letters she sent me over the course of the spring and summer. She had a healthy appetite for both the global and the local, and a penchant for anything involving death, destruction, or disruption. As she wrote in one of her missives, “Estonia changed from the mark to the kroon; Chang Tso-lin was murdered in June. History is quite lyrical these days.” I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday in early July, and when I looked at that portion of life that stretched before me and that which trailed behind me, I realized that I was in no condition to do what I had prom
ised to do, which was to marry Samantha Noble, the beautiful girl who wanted to marry me, and who was, as luck would have it, Edith’s daughter.

  I was in good with the family, as should be clear. And why not? I had been good to their daughter. In return, she had been good to me, in some ways more than others. Over the course of the year, Samantha and I had courted, had promised ourselves to one another, and, formalities dispensed with, had proceeded to investigate one another carnally in a rather rapacious manner. We held the line against the most fearsome of intruders, of course, until we did not: the surrender (or conquest, depending upon your perspective) came shortly after my birthday, just as the Olympics were beginning in Amsterdam. (They followed the winter games in St. Moritz; I learned about both sets of Olympiads from Edith, who had a thing for them.) My parents had settled me into a small apartment in New York City that Samantha had never seen—how could she have?—and one fine afternoon, after a walk through Central Park, she sat on a bench and clutched her stomach with a loud cry. When I asked if she needed a doctor, she shook her head. “I just need to lie down for a few moments,” she said. “Isn’t your apartment nearby?” The pain on her face had to be seen to be believed—or rather, I should never have seen it, and then I could have disbelieved it.

  I led her upstairs. Her hand was hot inside mine. I put her on the daybed and sat down to read a bit of Calkins. I was deep into a chapter when I noticed that there were hands at the sides of my head, and that they were connected to arms, and that those arms were bare of any petticoat and connected to a body that was every bit as bare. “My stomach is feeling better,” said Samantha, and took my hand as if to show me, though she missed her stomach by a good half-foot: a very good half-foot, as it turned out. Amelia Earhart had successfully taken an aircraft across the Atlantic just weeks before, and that was what Samantha recalled to me as she piloted me toward the daybed. I was powerless to think of anything but what she was showing me, and yet I thought mainly of her mother, Edith, who was at that moment sitting in her drawing room in London, innocently considering the recent declaration of Malta as a British dominion, entirely unaware of the fact that I was accessioning her daughter. I felt for that woman and what she did not know. And yet, what matter? A tidal wave had filled the Tower moat, and now one filled me. I dreamed of an airship crashing into an icy plain. I knew that something like that had happened near the North Pole, but within my dream the event seemed fully original.