Mendocino And Other Stories Part 7

"What?" he calls.

She opens the door a crack. "I'm taking a bath," she says, and closes the door before he can respond.

She's not someone who takes baths, and the tub is not exactly clean, but she finds an old envelope of rose-scented bath salts, puts the rubber disk over the drain, and takes off her clothes.

LUKE FINDS WINCH in the living room, his tall frame folded into a low, narrow chair, his elbows held awkwardly at his sides. Luke sits on the couch and with the remote switches on the TV. Someone has turned the volume all the way down, and the football game on the screen seems absurd without the attendant noise-strange green shapes trying to knock over strange white shapes. When he reaches forward to put the remote back on the coffee table, he sees Winch's key right where he left it last night-in the little bowl. Luke fishes the key out and holds it up. "Look familiar?" he says.

Winch nods. "I forgot it this morning."

"I heard." Luke puts the key on the table and slides it toward Winch, but with too much force; the key goes off the table and lands near Winch's foot.

Winch doesn't move for a minute, and Luke's about to reach over and pick it up himself when Winch says, "Maybe you should keep it." He picks up the key and tosses it to Luke.

It's what he's been wanting, but Luke doesn't feel the relief he expected. Instead, he's worried-honestly worried-about what on earth will become of this man. Watching Winch sitting there in the too-small chair, Luke finds himself thinking back to the summer after their junior year, when he and Winch house-sat for Winch's advisor in the English department. Luke had been nervous about accepting Winch's offer of a free place to stay-he saw himself following Winch around, picking up towels and abandoned sandwich halves, putting coasters under Winch's beer bottles. But Winch was so excruciatingly fastidious that Luke took to leaving his own bed unmade, to waiting a day or two to wash dishes, just to keep some balance in the house. By the end of the summer Luke was wondering whether Winch had decided to abandon his direction-or his lack thereof-to become, after all, the thing his parents wanted him to be: someone who wouldn't be ashamed to call himself by his given name, Lewis Winch.e.l.l, Jr.; someone who would take the trouble to graduate with honors; someone who would throw away his half-finished, waterlogged copies of d.i.c.kens and Hardy, and move back to Buffalo, and get a respectable job.

Looking at Winch, Luke wonders, not for the first time, what it's cost his friend to go on rebelling long past the point where the rebelled against could possibly give a d.a.m.n.

IN HIS MIND, Winch is drawing a map of the Midwest. He lived in the Twin Cities for eight or nine months once, but for the life of him he can't figure out what's on the other side of Minnesota. Montana and Wyoming and Nebraska, but in what configuration? He's thinking west might be a good direction, with winter approaching: he likes the cold. Hitching, he could probably make it to Minneapolis in a day or two, and he's pretty sure some of the people he knew there would put him up for a while. And then-the Dakotas! That's what's west of Minnesota. After Minneapolis he could head for South Dakota. It's not something he would tell anyone, but he's always longed to see Mt. Rushmore.

He looks at Luke, who's looking at him. "Got to keep rolling," he says.

"Listen," says Luke, "you don't have to be in any hurry to leave." He leans forward, fiddling with the key. "Tonight was just, you know, weird. But if you're on to something job-wise, or if you think Madison's the place for you and you want to work on getting set up here ..." His voice trails off and he shrugs.

"I don't know," Winch says.

"In fact," Luke says, "I know this'll sound strange, but did you ever think of working at a zoo? I was thinking before-I mean, don't you kind of like animals?"

"They're OK," Winch says. He stands up and stretches. It's funny-but sad, too-that Luke of all people would suggest this. Working at the zoo! It's the kind of last-ditch idea people give you when they try to put themselves in your position and can't bear the desperation they feel. One thing Winch can say is that he's never felt desperate. Not ever.

SARAH LEAVES HER clothes on a chair in the bedroom and, in her bathrobe, heads toward the front of the house. She feels like a little girl going to say good night to the grown-ups. Then she thinks of Winch saying "You guys are older-maybe that's my problem" and she wonders whether it can be said that any of them are, after all, grown-ups. She and Luke are just doing a better job of pretending.

Winch is squatting next to his backpack, looking through an outside pocket. Luke gives her a look she can't quite read: some-thing's up.

"Taking a bath is kind of nice," she says. She sits next to Luke on the couch.

He leans over. "You smell good," he says. "Sort of like carrot cake."

"Luke." She gives him a friendly push. "Wild rose bath salts."

"They obviously marked it wrong at the factory." He takes her hand and holds it in his lap.

Winch stands up, a tiny red book in his hand. "What's that?" she says, smiling at him.

He won't meet her eye. "My bible."

"His address book," Luke says. "Winch is thinking about moving on."

Sarah looks back at Winch. He holds the address book in his palm and tosses it up just far enough so it can flip over before he catches it again. She moves to stand up, but Luke still has her hand and won't let go. "Winch, you're really welcome to stay," she says. "I apologize for what I said. I-I had a bad day."

He tosses the book again, and again. "Well, I'm thinking I might go back to Minneapolis."

Sarah looks at Luke, who shrugs. "Not right away?" she says. "Not tomorrow?"

"I think tomorrow might be good," Winch says. "Get there by Wednesday night."

"I feel terrible," Sarah says.

"Don't," Winch says.

"No," Luke says, tightening his grip on her hand. "Don't."

THEY SAY GOOD NIGHT to Winch, promising to send him off with a big breakfast. Luke follows Sarah to their bedroom, his hands on her shoulders.

"I do feel terrible," she says, once the door's closed.

"But not that terrible?" Luke says.

She sits on the bed. "I never say things like that to people. I felt so strange afterward-too powerful."

"It's a lot easier being the victim," Luke says. "Isn't it?" He takes off his sweatshirt and jeans and drapes them over a chair. He stretches, yawns. She's got a strange, intense look on her face-as if she were trying very hard to hear something in another room. "You know what?" he says, going over to the bed. "I'm not going to brush my teeth tonight." He gets under the covers; she hasn't moved. "What do you think about that?"

"Vile," she says, standing up. "Disgraceful."

She goes over to the chair where his clothes are and starts picking them up. He's about to tell her that she shouldn't be putting his clothes away when he realizes she's not: she's getting hers out from under them. She shakes out her sweater, folds it, puts it in a drawer. Then she picks up her skirt and shakes it out, too.

"Hey, is that new?" he says. "I like it."

She doesn't say anything for the longest time. She just looks at him. Then she gives him a peculiar smile. "Thanks," she says.

She hangs up the skirt, takes off her robe, and climbs into bed. "What do you suppose he'll do in Minneapolis?" she says.

Luke thinks about it for a while. Over the years he's gotten dozens of postcards from Winch, and from the strangest places, but they never really say anything; they make jokes. The one announcing Winch's imminent arrival came from Texas and featured a man standing next to a giant replica of a ten-gallon cowboy hat. On the back Winch had written: "Everyone here's got a swelled head. I tried to get work ropin' cattle but the d.a.m.n outfit didn't look good on me. Watch your front door."

"Maybe he has a girlfriend there," Sarah says.

"A port in every girl," Luke says. Then, before she can respond: "Sorry." He takes her hand.

"I have a question," she says. "Say-just say-you guys had decided to drop acid this weekend. Where would you have gotten it?"

Luke loves that she said "drop": it's so her. "Well, honey," he says, "a man just knows a thing like that."

"Come on."

"I don't know," he says. Then he remembers something Doug Kaiser told him the last time he was busted. "You know those sneakers you sometimes see hanging from power lines? They're supposed to mark dealers' houses. I guess we could've just knocked on doors until we got lucky."

"What?" Sarah says. "You're kidding. There's a pair outside our house. Jesus."

"Well," Luke says. "It's not me. Is it you?" He rolls onto his side and brings his hand up to touch her hair. "I always had a funny feeling you weren't telling me something."

WINCH CAN'T SLEEP. For one thing, the couch is too short for him-he won't miss it. But he's also got agitation of the brain: he feels like he's just on the edge of understanding something important. He starts running through some of his more long-standing questions; but he still doesn't know why people in the South pretend to be so friendly when they're really not; or why so many women who sit next to him on busses act so cold for the first fifteen minutes and end up pressing legs with him for the better part of the trip; or why, when he gets picked up hitchhiking, guys in hats usually wind up angry at him for some reason. He still doesn't know why six months working outside somewhere is OK while six months indoors cooks his goose. Or why being really cold is kind of pleasant but being really hot is like being visited by a terrible illness. And he still doesn't know why his parents continue to send him money to go home for Christmas, or why he continues to go.

He sits up on the couch, swinging his sleeping-bagged legs onto the coffee table. Thinking of Luke and Sarah, Winch decides that the next time he's in love he will pay closer attention. To make it last maybe all you've got to do is be super vigilant, stand there looking for the small, misleading shapes of problems that are destined to grow. Or maybe what you've got to do is turn your back on them: whistle past those graveyards.

The plastic thing on the cord of his sleeping bag has worked its way into the small of his back. He twists out of the bag altogether and stands up. On tiptoe, he goes to the kitchen and fetches a beer. He waits until he's back in the living room to open it; then he pulls on his jeans and goes out to the porch. He sits on the top step. The cold beer and the wind on his bare chest feel just right. He looks up at the shoes dangling from the wire, and he's happy to find that he no longer really cares what they mean. If he were someone else he might take them as a signal: Walk. But he's going to walk anyway-just because he wants to.

WHEN I ENTERED the ninth grade I had just turned fourteen and I wanted more than anything to be a pompon girl. My desire had formed over the course of the summer: my friends and I customarily ate lunch on the benches near the English office, but during the long idle months I had taken to imagining myself moved as if by magic to the picnic table in front of the snack machines, which was handed down, with all the arrogance and inevitability attached to the turning over of a monarchy, from one pompon squad to the next. Our school colors were red and yellow-crimson and gold, we called them-and by the end of the first day of school the idea of owning one of those short, flip-skirted red and yellow dresses had taken over my mind. The football season pompon girls had shown up in their new outfits, and I was enamored even of the spotless white Keds they wore. Tryouts for the basketball pompon squad weren't until the beginning of October, but within days I had cleared out our garage and claimed it as my practice area. I set up my record player on the shelf where my mother kept the tools, and I listened to all of my alb.u.ms, over and over again, in an effort to find a song that would inspire me to make up a winning routine. The routine, according to the printed rules I got from the girls' P. E. office, would be composed of a series of "steps"-dance steps, I decided-of my devising. The only fundamental thing about pompon was pompon step itself, a kind of miniature running in place that would form the basis of everyone's routine. The rest was up to me.

One Sat.u.r.day morning, as I pa.s.sed through the kitchen on my way to the garage, my mother cleared her throat and said she wanted to talk to me. She was sitting at the table, stacks of envelopes and her big, ledger-style checkbook lined up in front of her. She was paying the bills.

She pulled her reading gla.s.ses down onto the tip of her nose and looked up at me. "Found a song yet?" she asked evenly.

"Not yet," I said.

She nodded, and I wondered whether she was finally going to condemn my pompon dreams. So far, she hadn't come out against them-she hadn't, for instance, told me that she thought the whole concept was s.e.xist or exploitative or elitist or even just plain silly-and because of her very neutrality I'd been a.s.suming the worst. It wasn't like her not to comment.

"I got a call last night from Jim Baranski," she said, naming our down-the-street neighbor, who coached basketball at the local college. "One of his players needs a place to live and Jim thought we might let him have the guest room."

"Why would we do that?" I said.

"That's what I asked Jim. I'm not looking to be anybody's frat mother."

"So that was that?"

"The poor guy was supposed to have a full scholarship, but it fell through. If he can't find a place to live for free he's going to have to leave school. Jim says he's willing to do yardwork in exchange for a room."

"If we need yardwork done," I said, "maybe we should just get a gardener."

"We're not exactly rich at this point," my mother said, her voice tight and controlled. She cleared her throat and went on in a friendlier tone. "Jim said it might be nice for Danny to have a guy around. You know, an older guy-someone he could do things with. Play basketball and stuff."

Now I understood; and I understood that she wasn't asking my opinion so much as pleading with me not to say no. My father had died a year earlier, a heart attack at forty-five, and my ten-year-old brother Danny had become a big source of worry to her. He spent all his time in his room, reading Planet of the Apes books and drawing highly detailed maps of outer s.p.a.ce. The maps were really good: all the lines were meticulously drawn; the planets were colored in to look like real spheres; and everything was carefully labeled in his tiny, scientist's script.

"When's he moving in?" I said.

"Elizabeth."

"Well?"

She began flipping through the bills. "I told Jim we'd try it for a month. And if any of us doesn't like it that'll be that." She looked up at me, a small, desperate smile on her lips. "His name's Bobby. He's going to bring his things over tomorrow."

"OK."

"Really?"

I forced a smile. "Sure," I said. "It'll be good for Danny." But I thought, A basketball player? It seemed like an insult to my father's memory: he had taught philosophy at the college, and his favorite and only sport had been speed-reading paperback mysteries.

THE GUEST ROOM was right next to my room, and I got up early the next morning to take a last look at it. My room had been deco-rated-very decorated-according to my specifications six or seven years earlier; it was all pink and white, and whenever I felt the girlishness of it too keenly I would go into the guest room and lie on the bed in there. It was a big, square, airy room, full of plain oak furniture. The only adornment was an elaborate cut gla.s.s water pitcher on the dresser; anywhere else it might have looked gaudy, but it was the perfect touch in that austere room.

I stood in the doorway and tried to imagine a college basketball player living next door to me. The room was empty except for when my grandmother came to visit, and although I could never really hear her, I always felt aware of her when she was there-of her breathing, of her sighing, of her rolling over in bed in the middle of the night.

I went down to the garage and, as I had every day for the past two weeks, I worked on my pompon step. It wasn't, I had quickly learned, as easy as it looked. You had to jump from foot to foot, pointing first your left toes, then your right toes, then your left toes, then your right toes, and all the while you had to keep your hands at your waist, but not around your waist: they had to be bent at the knuckles so your fingers and thumbs wouldn't show. It was a little boring, but I didn't mind spending so much time on it because the next thing I had to do was settle on a song and start working on my routine. I knew it would have to involve some kicking, some little flips of the shoulder, and, most important, the splits, and although I'd been stretching every day I could only get down to about eight inches off the ground.

Early in the afternoon, a car came up the driveway and stopped just on the other side of the garage. I turned off my music. A couple of doors slammed; then I heard a deep voice.

"Nice deal, Bobby. Maybe they'll go away a lot and you can have some parties."

"Quiet." His voice was clear and rather high for a man's. "They might be able to hear us."

I lowered the arm of the record player back onto the alb.u.m I was playing, turned the volume up, and sat down on the garage floor, my bare legs touching the cold concrete. I listened to the m.u.f.fled sounds of people going back and forth, from car to house, for the next five or ten minutes. After a while the commotion stopped, and I knew my mother and Danny were talking to Bobby and his friend. She had probably offered them iced tea, maybe even sandwiches. The only thing I had with me to read was the pompon tryouts instruction sheet, and I read it through several times, trying to concentrate on all the details-what kind of gloves you were supposed to wear, how long your routine should be, when the winners' names would be posted. There was one paragraph that I kept going back to. It said, "The pompon girls represent everyone at Murphy Junior High. They are our amba.s.sadors to schools all over the county. Even when they're not in uniform they feel like pompon girls, and it's important that they look that way, too. This means extra special attention to personal hygiene and grooming. Any girl who doesn't know what this means should speak to Mrs. Donovan in the P.E. office as soon as possible."

I didn't know what it meant-I a.s.sumed it had something to do either with shaving under your arms or getting your period-but I wasn't about to ask Mrs. Donovan. With my mother I had only recently managed to shut down communication about such things; as far as I was concerned, we had covered what needed to be covered. The occasional appearance on my desk of pamphlets ent.i.tled "Your Changing Body" or "A Single Egg" suggested that she disagreed.

Finally, I heard the car starting up again, and I turned the music off in time to hear the low-voiced guy say, "Later, bro."

"See you at practice," Bobby said.

They said a few more things, but in voices pitched so low I couldn't hear them. I imagined they were talking about me: saying how strange it was my mother hadn't made me say h.e.l.lo, that I must be one of those shy girls who couldn't look anybody in the eye. Either that, or they were wondering what I looked like, what color hair I had. What my body was like.

AT SIX DANNY came out to tell me dinner was ready.

"What are we having?" I asked.

"Steak," he said. "Baked potatoes with sour cream. Corn on the cob with b.u.t.ter. Chocolate cream pie."

He was joking. All we ever had now was fish. Sometimes she put a sauce called Mock Hollandaise on our vegetables, but usually it was just lemon juice and pepper. There was no salt in the house anymore, no b.u.t.ter.

I laughed. "What'd you read today?"

"I didn't really read."

I turned from him and began stacking my records together.

"She invited him to eat with us," he said.

I didn't reply.

"That guy. Bobby."

I wheeled around. "I know who you mean. What do you think I am, stupid?"

His face turned a delicate shade of pink, the color he used to get when he had a fever. He was wearing a nerdy little plaid shirt with a too-big collar, and his head looked unbearably small to me.

"I'm sorry, Dan," I said. I took hold of his shoulders and pulled him to me. "You're almost as tall as I am, sonny-boy."

"Won't be long now, moony-girl." He pulled away from me and I followed him into the house.

BOBBY JOHANSEN WAS very tall: six foot four, I later learned. His hair was pale blond, almost colorless. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, wearing shorts, and I thought his legs would probably come up to my chest if we stood close.

My mother was washing lettuce. "Here she is," she said, as if my whereabouts had been a mystery. "Elizabeth, this is Bobby Johansen."