The Collected Stories Page 24

  The woman who did not want to go to Paris said that she had to leave. “But I don’t want you to leave,” the man said, and she said, “Think of the kiss at the door.”

  Nobody thinks about the way sound carries across water. Even the water in a swimming pool. A week later, when her husband was away, the wife had friends to lunch by the pool. I didn’t have to hide to listen; I was in view if they had cared to look, pulling weeds in the raspberry canes.

  The women told the wife it was an opportunity for her. They said, “Fair is fair,” and to do those things she might not otherwise have done. “No regrets,” they said, “if you are even the type of person who is given to regret, if you even have that type of wistful temperament to begin with.”

  The women said, “We are not unintelligent; we just let passion prevail.” They said, “Who would deny that we have all had these feelings?”

  The women told the wife she would not feel this way forever. “You will feel worse, however, before you feel better, and that is just the way it always is.”

  The women advised long walks. They told the wife to watch the sun rise and set, to look for solace in the natural world, though they admitted there was no comfort to be found in the world and they would all be fools to expect it.

  The weekend the couple next door had moved in—their rental began on Memorial Day—I heard them place a bet on the moon. She said waxing, he said waning. Days later, the moon nearly full in the night sky, I listened for the woman to tell her husband she had won, knowing they had not named the terms of the bet, and that the woman next door would collect nothing.

  Jesus Is Waiting

  I didn’t want the sunroof or the luggage rack, but neither did I want to wait the three months not to have to have them. So I took the white one anyway and put fifty thousand miles on it in just about a year.

  Lincoln Tunnel to Baltimore, BWI: two and three-quarter hours; Holland Tunnel to D.C. (Connecticut Avenue exit): three and a quarter hours. In Virginia, anything over ninety is now reckless driving and reckless driving costs more than speeding does and they say no excuses, you have to show up in court, but don’t believe it; I phoned in sick the day I was slated to appear and a clerk told me where to send the check. One more reckless driving ticket in Virginia and I’ll have to find the place they have the safety class that, if you take it, knocks three points off your license. Or, I don’t know, your life?

  Maryland and New York are the states where I can push it.

  No blue highways, nothing scenic.

  In a tornado outside Baltimore, in a broken neighborhood off I-95, I asked the attendant in a Mobil station, “Where’s anywhere else?”

  The man didn’t even point.

  I write in pencil because a pencil is what is tied with string to the suggestion box. “We welcome your comments.” I write, “I went to the other place first, but got pissed off in line and came here and am glad I did.”

  I had not fared so well at the one off Exit 7. The ice machine was broken. Yes, I got more Dr Pepper in the cup, but the Dr Pepper I got was warm.

  I never eat in the place I stop for gas. I like to keep the odometer turning. Sometimes I will drive only as far as a local exit with a road or avenue in the name. Not a connecting artery. I will pull off into a community, find a cul-de-sac, stop the car, keep an eye on the trees that line the street. Maybe fill out a postcard bought at a rest stop, address it to the man who won’t speak to me, ask him “Is one of the symptoms that you’re thirsty all the time?”

  Or is one of the symptoms a rash? Is one of the symptoms dry mouth? That it’s hard to urinate? Maybe one of the symptoms is that you piss people off.

  Taking it more slowly since the spinout on black ice. Where were the famed antilock brakes? Traveling under the speed limit on a flat stretch of road, and all of a sudden a wreck that takes the luggage rack off. No visible injuries—you can’t see a sprain—but I had to make camp for days while the sunroof was checked out. There was a multiplex and a Mexican restaurant that used baked beans in their burritos. North Carolina, but nothing Carolingian.

  The guy who sold me a map in the Exxon in Greensboro asked me who I was listening to the next hundred miles. Before he had stopped speaking to me, the man back home made me a tape for the road. It’s the same cut over and over on both sides—“Jesus Is Waiting,” by the Reverend Al Green. Apart from those, the words you hear the most are “Thank you.”

  On the New Jersey Turnpike, a box of animal crackers at the Walt Whitman rest area costs almost two dollars.

  Here’s something I didn’t know: the drag you get from open windows uses more gas than running the air conditioner does.

  The radio said Dorothy Love Coates died today. But I didn’t know she’d even been alive.

  A point of pride not to stop when tired. Drive a couple of hundred more miles. In St. Louis, they say when you hit Indianapolis, you’re home. Home is a Days Inn or a Comfort Inn, unless there is more than one of those big trucks in the lot. In the morning, in the lobby, there are free doughnuts and coffee. I like handing the sticks and the sugar and the cream around. There’s always a television going so we all have a place to look. Someone will always say to me, “Have a safe trip.” I’ll always say, “You too.”

  I keep meaning to pull off and visit an IKEA store.

  Before I took to the road, a friend tried to get me to go to a department store with him. He said it was to improve the place where I lived. He said, “I want to know you are reading beneath this lamp.” This fellow was dying. He knew it and I did not. I think he was tucking me in. He was making sure all of his friends had the right lamps, the comfiest pillows, the softest sheets. He was tucking us all in for the night.

  In a motel off an interstate, a breakfaster warns me about impetigo. But who in this century gets impetigo? The breakfaster says to avoid standing water. Or maybe she says standing in water.

  Avoid it, is the point.

  Listening to Al Green, I didn’t mind the smell of tar, a turn lane being paved. At a farm stand along a switchback road, I bought a bag of shiny red chiles. Wouldn’t they be good for whatever there was to be good for?

  It is the day before Thanksgiving. According to the radio, people travel to their destinations by car. One hundred percent if you count just me.

  A good feeling when I see traffic cones. They weigh next to nothing and cannot hurt a car. That’s not why I mow them down.

  A point of pride—to drive like crazy in the passing lane, or, alternatively, to sit in the fast lane stuck in traffic and not to register any change in heart rate or respiration. I am often moved to tears when the lane I am in merges with another. I can well up where the New Jersey Turnpike becomes 95 and where 95 becomes 85 just outside Petersburg, Virginia.

  On the day before a holiday, you feel you have a destination just by being on the road with so many people who do.

  Have a destination, that is.

  I write on a postcard, “Is one of the symptoms a fever of unknown origin?” I sign the card, “As ever.”

  I put a lot of money into tires. I don’t rotate—I replace, with the best new radials. I am never late for scheduled maintenance. I learned the hard way to watch that they do not dilute the windshield-wiper fluid. Except for the iffy antilock brakes, if something goes wrong, it is not the car that’s at fault. Bad form to blame something for the damage one does. I just mow them down—and drive on.

  Countryside: a blue-lit blue spruce in the center of a pond with swans. City: a blue neon cellular sign, pigeons pecking crumbs on the sidewalk. Did someone stand toy soldiers in wet cement? A small brigade marches around the corner.

  McDonald’s has better french fries and their orange juice comes in a cup that fits the holder in the car. Burger King’s orange juice comes in a carton, but their fish thing is better than the one at McDonald’s. I don’t know about the coffee at either place. I only know about the coffee if it’s in a lobby and free. I saw a forensics special on the TV at a Days Inn—it examined
the mystery of three hunters who were found dead at their campsite. Extensive testing revealed that there had been a newt in their coffeepot, and when they poured in boiling water, deadly toxins were released by the newt.

  Driving togs are usually black jeans and a cotton turtleneck, a wool-lined canvas jacket thrown across the front seat to put on when pumping gas. Do people still call them gas stations? Filling stations? Where are the people who call them service stations?

  If I had a gas station, would I name it Exxon or Hess?

  For shoes: anything that slips right off. I drive barefoot unless there’s snow.

  The night before Thanksgiving, I turn onto an exit ramp for the Thomas Edison rest area. In the gift shop I buy a postcard with a picture of a dog trotting down Route 66. I ask if one of the symptoms is that you can’t get a song out of your head, and sign it, “More as ever than ever.”

  The roads on Thanksgiving Day are as quiet as they were packed the day before. Destinations must have been reached.

  I can still recognize a ’67 Mustang.

  I was not put on this earth to fill my own tank, but I have come to look forward to doing it. I like the smell on my hands from the pump, the restrooms never not out of soap. Each time I cross a state line, I visit the Welcome Center and ask for directions. What a laugh. Then back to the car, merging confidently into traffic, seeing how far I can go before racking up “Jesus Is Waiting.”

  It is Thanksgiving Day. I am driving the New Jersey Turnpike. Past the exit for the store where I once bought a hat made out of a Wonder Bread wrapper. Past the exit for the house where I was talked into playing a party game called “Empty Hands.” Three more exits. Past them all.

  The geographic cure, these bouts of driving, with the age-old bit built in: “Wherever you go, there you are.” Maybe people should be trained like dogs. But people aren’t dogs. Besides, a dog won’t speak to you, either.

  Is one of the symptoms restlessness? An inability to stay put?

  The calluses on the palms of my hands show that I have put in the hours, hit the road early and often, stayed flexible and ready to leave on short notice, on even no notice; packed in the car are clothes, bottles of juice, a pass for bridges and tunnels and tolls, assorted useless maps, and the tape he made for me—“Jesus Is Waiting.”

  I never stop for the night before filling the tank.

  In the back is a case with the word HELP on it. It contains jumper cables, flares, a flashlight, tire patches. I should add aspirin and a knife.

  God, it’s an ugly road.

  And now someone is following me. He’s driving a black car. It trumps the pickup that pulled up alongside me in Virginia, the guy turning on his inside light so I could get a look at him. This new guy isn’t bad-looking, but he has a ponytail and there is no desire in his gaze.

  In a pig’s eye.

  Soon I’ll have a chance of a bridge or tunnel. In these last years I’m talking about, I’ve driven a tunnel only once. Since I have a choice, when I have a choice, I choose a bridge.

  In the backseat of my car, a potted amaryllis blooms.

  Sometimes, if I were not ready to get back in the car, I would phone a realtor from my motel. I would pick a name from the phone book, and ask to be shown houses. I would give the broker a price range. I would be taken to see Colonials, a saltbox, Cape Cods. I keep the business cards in a pocket of the case labeled HELP.

  The drive is determinedly a drive. Mostly it is just about the sounds of the car, of driving, of the fade-in and fade-out of the radio, the removal from everything but the moving body in a vehicle, of the is-ness of passing from here to there, of not being where you were, of Jesus waiting. Call it a meditation. Call it drone. How else to approach Jesus than without history, without reason, without restraint? And buoyed by staying in motion away from everything, the mind become the traveling until wherever you stop, won’t Jesus be waiting there?

  Is one of the symptoms a loss of faith? Or faith in loss?

  On the way back into the city, I stop to fill up. I would like to be scrambled and served with sausages at an all-night diner.

  Is this what the world is?

  I smell my fingers. Nice.

  This time I use the telephone instead of sending a card. I leave him a message. I say I will be there in an hour. I say, “Can we take each other in?”

  Back in the car I adjust the seat so I will have to sit up straighter. I take a mint from the glove compartment and twist off the wrapper.

  I see myself in the rearview mirror.

  I give the car some gas, and merge with the other drivers who are heading into the city where Jesus is waiting—or isn’t.

  The Uninvited

  It was one and two and three and four and five o’clock in the morning. Whatever time it was, it was time to take the test. You did not have to wait until morning anymore; the instructions on the box said that for an accurate result you could dip the strip of litmus paper in a “clear stream of urine” any time of day. My waiting until morning was habit, a nod to the old days when “first morning’s urine” was going to give you the answer. Though not at home. You had to go to a clinic then. Sometimes on the ceilings of exam rooms was a sign: “A woman can never be too thin or too rich, or too close to the end of the table.”

  I was fifty years old, and ten days late.

  If menopausal, go on estrogen; if pregnant, go on welfare.

  If I was pregnant, I did not know who to blame—my husband, whom I did not live with, or the man in the auditorium, whom I did not report.

  I did what I had always done the night before taking the test: I watched The Uninvited.

  “The cold…is no mere matter of degrees Fahrenheit, but a drawing of warmth from the vital centers of the living.”

  The Uninvited, made in 1944, stars Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as the English brother and sister Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald, who happen upon a stately empty house on a cliff in Cornwall when they are on vacation. The two are so won over by the place they decide to buy it and leave their London lives—he a composer and music critic, she a budding homemaker—for these “haunted shores.”

  “That’s not because there are more ghosts here than in other places, mind you, it’s just that the people who live hereabouts are more…”

  I am courting ghosts at a place where ghosts are studied as a subset of the paranormal. I participate in experiments at an institute in the South. Last week I was placed in a private room and given a photograph to hold. I was supposed to try to “send” the image to a woman in another room down the hall. The photograph I held was a likeness of Frankenstein, a still from the movie. For nearly half an hour I stared and directed the thought: Frankenstein, Frankenstein, at the woman down the hall. A researcher came to get us and took us downstairs to appear before the staff.

  “Well?” the researcher prompted.

  The woman from down the hall said, “I don’t know, I kept getting Frank, Frank—Frank Sinatra?”

  And I screamed, “That’s a match!”—wanting so much the unexplainable in my life.

  I had not been living in my house for months. I had accepted a job house-sitting, if you can call that a job, for a professor on sabbatical from a university in the South. He had hired a cleaning lady and a gardener, so all I had to do was occupy space and forward his mail. He would return for spring break, at which time I was to return to my house up North. Since it was winter up there, I returned for a night every three or four weeks; I had to check for burst pipes and whatever else could happen in my absence.

  When I was back home, I read the local newspaper’s weekly police blotter. It featured the usual thefts—houses closed for the winter are routinely broken into—as well as a range of conceptual crimes. Someone had turned up the thermostat in a beach house in the dunes. This person took nothing, but turned the temperature to ninety degrees, which, by the time it was discovered, had badly warped the floors. In another house, the owners discovered that someone had emptied the kitchen cabinets. Noth
ing had been stolen, but every item in the cabinets had been lined up neatly on the counters.

  One kind of damage presented itself on my first visit home: the house smelled of mice, and when I lay still on the couch, I heard them scrabbling in the cabinets and behind the walls. There was no point setting out traps—I would be leaving the next day and anything caught would decompose in the weeks until my next visit. I could hear mice in a drawer. I yanked it open and found droppings like fat, dark grains of rice surrounding a diamond-and-sapphire pin my mother-in-law had given me when I married her son. When the marriage ended, I thought of giving the pin back to my husband; his parents had since died, and the pin had been a gift to his mother from his father. I thought about it, but I did nothing about it, and now the timeworn jewelry was in this sorry setting when it should have been safe in a tiny velvet pouch.

  All of us should be safe in a tiny velvet pouch.

  Well, I left the thing loose in the drawer.

  And of course a pipe did burst, but luckily one outside, positioned to irrigate a cutting garden long since abandoned, the garden my husband’s project, so I kept the water turned off except to flush a toilet when I would turn the relevant lever in the basement, go back upstairs and flush, then turn off the water again. Think of it as fancy camping, I told myself, and it was fine, this manner of thinking.

  For instance, storm doors and windows had never been put up, so, like clocks not changed from Daylight Savings Time, wouldn’t the absence of these fixtures be just right in a few more months?

  Lightbulbs, that was a different matter. They were often burned out, however much they had not been used. So I just as often had to stand on one foot to change them in the kitchen.