“Just wondering. I figure most of the people you know have purebred dogs of one kind or another.”
For a moment she imagined the cockapoos, dachshunds, and shih tzus of Central Park stumbling through the forest, dried leaves caught in their silky hair, the Yorkshire terriers yapping as they turned in panicked circles: Help! Help! I’ve just come from the groomer! She tried to hold back a laugh and it emerged as something between a sneeze and a snort.
“Okay, forget it. It’s just the way I think of city people with dogs. Plus you’re famous. I looked you up. Three million hits.”
“Three million,” she repeated.
“That’s pretty famous.”
“I was well-known at one time. I wouldn’t say famous. I certainly wouldn’t say it any longer. It’s difficult to describe. First you have one sort of life and then you have another. I’m sorry, that must sound odd.”
“No it doesn’t. That’s what happens to everybody. You want a cruller?”
Each appreciated this about the other: that they set themselves exclusively to a given task. Photography. Roofing. Bird-watching. Eating. They did not talk while they ate. She ate one cruller, he two. They drank coffee. Neither one was uncomfortable with silence. Jim Bates didn’t find this especially notable. Rebecca, having spent her life in New York City, where to sit in the back of a cab without hearing a long list of grievances from either a new immigrant who felt discriminated against or a veteran New Yorker who hated new immigrants, did.
After he’d wiped his fingers on a napkin, Jim said, “Twenty years ago I was in the service in South Carolina. I was married to a girl named Laura.” He smiled. “She had blond hair and when she left the room, if I was looking, she’d do this wiggle thing with her butt.”
Rebecca had another sip of coffee. She could see her, Laura, wiggling. She could see her wearing blue shorts and a striped tank top. Blondes always wore blue. Rebecca never did.
“Then my father fell off a roof. It was the last thing in the world you’d expect. He’d been running around roofs since he was thirteen, you know. Then this one day he just slid down, fell flat, and died on the spot. I don’t know, maybe he didn’t fall off the roof. One of the ambulance corps guys said maybe he had a heart attack, or a stroke, and then fell off. Whatever. He died, so I came home. My mother was already gone by then. She got breast cancer. She was the seventh-grade teacher at the middle school. There were a thousand people in the street when she got buried. I don’t remember it much, but I remember all those people. She was a good seventh-grade teacher. She was my seventh-grade teacher. That was weird. ‘Mr. Bates, can you come up to the board and do problem number three,’ that kind of stuff.”
“That must have been difficult,” Rebecca said.
“I kind of loved it, to tell you the truth. Mr. Bates, and then I’d get home and turn back into Jimmy.”
“You loved her.”
He picked up the thermos and took a big gulp directly from it, without bothering with the cup lid. Rebecca watched his throat work, up and down, up and down. “Hell, yes,” he said, wiping his mouth with his hand, like he had to say and do a manly thing to offset the sentiment.
“She loved you.”
“Hell, yes. Well, my mom, you know. It goes with the territory.”
“My mother is not that sort of mother.”
“Got it,” he said. “I had a buddy who had that kind of mother. What about your dad?”
“Better. Good, I suppose. A little odd. Now he’s a little vague.”
“Yeah, I get that. My father wasn’t the sharpest knife, truth be told. I guess she married him because he was big and good-looking, one of those big blond guys, you know.”
Rebecca smiled slightly and cocked her head, and Jim Bates turned bright red. That look was one of the single most flirtatious things she had ever done in all the sixty years of her existence, and she hadn’t even meant to do it.
He flushed so that it looked as though his face had turned into a night-light. Rebecca found herself flushing, too. “What about yours?” he finally asked. “Do they get along? They still married?”
“Oh yes. They are still married. Until death do us part. Their marriage remains a mystery to me. But it was probably mysterious to them as well. Perhaps all marriage is.” Rebecca shrugged. “I don’t have much patience with how we all harp on our families.”
“It’s the most important thing there is,” he said flatly. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of my mother. My dad, too, but different—you know, more business, how he’d handle an overhang, whether he’d do the gutters a different way, that kind of thing. You have brothers? Sisters?”
“Neither.”
“Really?”
“And you?”
“I had a brother named Jack. He died of meningitis when he was seven. He was two years older than me. I have a sister who’s eight years younger. Her name’s Polly.”
“That’s a lovely old-fashioned name.”
“Her real name’s Priscilla. She wasn’t having that, once she got to first grade. She changed it herself. Our mom said she could do it as long as she kept the P. I think my mother was worried she’d name herself Nicole or Danielle or something.”
“Do you see her often?”
“Every day.”
Rebecca can imagine Polly Bates without even trying hard, Polly Bates or whatever her name is now because surely she’s married, her light hair a little darker, her pink cheeks a little fuller, two older kids and maybe a toddler keeping her too busy to do more than throw on sweatpants in the morning and pull her hair back into a ponytail. “Here’s Uncle Jim,” she’ll say when he shows up at the end of the workday. “Take them off my hands before I lock them out of the house, Jimmy. Give me five minutes peace.”
“Do you like her?” Rebecca said.
He took another cruller from the bag. Light was creeping through the tree canopy, but it was the flat surly light of an overcast winter day. It seemed to take him a long time to chew. “Yeah,” he finally said. “I do.” He took a deep breath. “She’s had some health issues. Just a whole bunch of stuff, for a long time.” The flushed and harried mother in the sweat suit disappeared; suddenly the children were quieter, more tentative, and she was wearing a head scarf. Breast cancer, Rebecca thought. Men hate to talk about breast cancer. His mother. His sister. She put a hand on his arm without thinking.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and he nodded.
She realized that this was the longest conversation she had had with anyone in quite some time. Perhaps the longest conversation she had ever had with a man, unless she counted Ben. She had imagined she would have nice long conversations with Peter after they were married, but it had turned out that marriage in the circles in New York in which they traveled consisted of men who pontificated publicly, and the women who let their faces go still while they did so. Maybe that was true of marriage everywhere. Between times, in their own living rooms, the men seemed to be resting for the next round of pontificating and so saved their strength by staying silent.
A bald eagle flew overhead, circled, and landed on a tree nearby. There was a branch from a big evergreen in Rebecca’s way. “That was a bad angle,” she said.
“Yeah, but, come on, great moment, right?” He passed her the thermos. She drank directly from it, too. It seemed rude somehow not to.
“Hey, we’re getting paid to sit here and talk like this,” Jim Bates said. “Don’t people like you usually pay someone else to listen to your troubles?”
“I’ve avoided that particular trap,” said Rebecca.
He smiled. “Atta girl,” he said.
“What happened to Laura?” she said after she took another sip of coffee, not wanting the conversation to end.
“She hated the cold,” Jim said. “She moved to Florida.”
SAFE AS HOUSES
When he was a kid his mother told Jim Bates that houses had personalities. It wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing that he would have thought of by himself, but o
nce it had been said it couldn’t be unsaid, or unthought, like realizing someone had nose hair or a slight limp and then seeing it every time you looked at them.
The house they had lived in was a friendly kind of house, a little too close to the road, with a porch running its whole width and a narrow dark blue door at its center. It was short and squat, and somehow that made it nice. It was like a lot of other houses on their road, and for a long time Jim thought of it as basically what all houses were like. Then one day they brought his father lunch at a house where he was doing the roof, and Jim realized that that wasn’t so. That house was a haughty house, with a stained-glass eyebrow window above the double doors. Maybe it felt haughty to him because he could tell it was old, Victorian, the big rambling high-waisted house of people who could afford someone else to sweep the stairs and vacuum the parlor. Or maybe it was because his mother had packed a picnic lunch and his parents had perched on the back hatch of the station wagon with their ham sandwiches while he and Polly sat on the ground. A woman had come out wearing white gloves with pink flowers on them—gardening gloves, his mother said, which he thought was just about the stupidest thing he’d ever heard—carrying a set of big savage shears. “I didn’t realize this was a family affair,” she’d said with a smile that wasn’t one, and his mother had flushed.
“Ice princess,” his mother had muttered as she pulled away once lunch was done, looking in the rearview mirror.
“I liked her dress,” Polly had whispered. She was four then.
From that day on Jim had really believed that people lived in houses that looked like them. Tad looked like one of the square Cape Cod houses in a patch of lawn on Upper Main, at least when he was in civilian clothes, and it so happened that that was where he lived and always had. Sarah should live in one of those tight little Dutch colonials with the sloping roofs, the ones that looked like their windows were winking at you, but she lived in a nondescript rented A-frame down a pitted gravel drive outside of town. Jim figured she lived in the A-frame because it looked like her husband, who was cheap and poorly made and beneath notice in exactly the way that house was.
“Forty-five dollars,” he’d said, standing in front of Kevin at the gas station, and he could tell by the skittish way Kevin’s eyes moved around that he knew exactly why Jim Bates was standing there with his big scarred palm out right under his nose. Kevin didn’t have the money on him, which later, with a couple of beers in him, he’d convinced himself meant he would never have handed it over.
“You ever sell that woman, or anyone else, cheap fir as good firewood again, and you’ll have to pull a log out of your ass to sit down,” Jim Bates told him. Jim Bates never talked like that. He was famous for having a clean mouth in a dirty-mouth business.
“Screw you,” Kevin said after the truck had already driven away.
Jim had seen houses that were a match for Rebecca only in photographs, the kind of upright, well-proportioned city house of brick or limestone that faced the street, faced right onto it but didn’t give much away. Maybe she lived in a house like that in New York City. The house that she lived in here had no personality because it had never really had time to develop one. A local man had built it as a hunting cabin just after he got mustered out at the end of the Korean War, then decided what he really wanted to do was move south. He’d sold it to a couple who planned to start a camp in the area, but the strain of starting the business split them apart, and he went farther upstate (and started a lamp store) while she stayed for a year and then put the place back on the market.
It wasn’t exactly insulated and it wasn’t at all pretty, so it sat on the market for three years, more or less, and then a pair of young schoolteachers bought it because it was all they could afford. They toughed it out for ten years, but three bad winters in a row drove them into one of those small boxy houses in town, the kind of house that holds the heat in a tight fist. They rented the other place to some colleagues who stayed there two years and then bought forty acres farther out and built a big ranch house with a horse barn, although taking care of horses was a lot more work than they’d figured.
Then a book editor from New York had rented the house for the summer, and then for a year, then two, and finally bought it to use on weekends. When he’d died he left it to his lover, an architect. People said the architect sat on a stump in the woods all day long and sobbed. (It happened that this was true. He had loved the editor well and truly, although he frequently had sex with others.) So he decided to rent it out, and had, to a series of artists. Rebecca was the most recent short-term tenant.
It was like a foster house, passed from person to person without any love, maintenance, or decoration, a brown wood box with rattling windows and a toilet whose handle needed to be held down to flush. If Jim Bates owned it, he thought each time he pulled up at the door, he’d put a long porch on the front and a screened one on the back, put in bigger windows and add a kind of sunroom that would get light through the trees. Then he’d hang a bird feeder outside the sunroom, although he knew the bears would be inclined to tear it down.
As it was, it wasn’t the right house for Rebecca Winter. It was too insubstantial, too unmarked. Jim liked objects that were what they seemed—a cookie jar that said COOKIES, not one designed to look like a bulldog, or a fat French chef. He thought Rebecca Winter looked like what she was. Maybe it was the dark clothes with no ruffles or fancy buttons, the shortish nails with no polish. Maybe it was her hair. He liked that it was plain, that she didn’t do anything to it except stick it behind her ears when she was busy. As far as he could tell she didn’t wear any makeup, although every once in a while she put stuff from a little round tin with roses on it on her lips, and when she did Jim always looked away, as though he was seeing something private.
“You always think that,” Laura used to tell him, in the laughing voice that sounded a little too much like it was laughing at him. “You think women aren’t wearing any makeup when the truth is that we just wear makeup in a way that looks like we’re not wearing any makeup at all. That’s the point.”
If that was the point Laura had missed it. She wore stuff that turned her lashes navy blue and her eyelids lavender and her cheeks pink and her mouth pinker. Still, when he first met her he’d honestly believed she was a natural blonde.
If his theory about houses was correct, he should have known it wasn’t going to work out, even though she brought him pancakes in bed and then did things with syrup she’d read about in a magazine, even though she took Polly to the nail parlor for her first pedicure and bought her a flowered bikini from a surf shop. Laura wanted one of those new houses that looked like nobody had ever lived there because nobody had, a two-story foyer with a big showy brass light fixture on a chain, and a kitchen that was part of a dining area that was part of a family room. She took him to tour a model once, and he kept thinking of a sci-fi film he’d seen when he was a kid, a guy in a room where the walls and the ceiling were closing in on him in a way that was meant to be scary. Jim actually wanted a house where the walls and ceiling closed in a little bit more, like the house where he grew up, with a kind of black scratchy mark in one corner of the living room that showed the spot where the top of the Christmas tree always grazed the ceiling and left a tattoo of evergreen gum.
When they’d wound up in that house after his father died, Laura’s beloved velvet sectional in the small square living room had looked like a fat man in a shrunken suit. She’d tried, she said, she’d really tried. But she wasn’t cut out for
• small-town life,
• six months of winter,
• a teenage girl in the house.
Having his sister around had put a bit of a damper on the stuff with the syrup, which had accounted for a fair amount of the basis of their marriage, Jim discovered. Sometimes that was the trouble, that Polly was there. And sometimes it was that Polly was nowhere to be found and Jim had to go roust her from some bar where she was using an ID she’d bought for twenty bucks and dancin
g in a corner in a sports bra, whipping her shirt around over her head. And that was on a good night.
Sometimes now it was like his marriage to Laura had never even happened at all, and he thanked God for the invention of the birth control pill, which meant neither of them had wound up enmeshed in the kind of petty warfare over the hearts and minds of little kids Jim saw all around him: Mom says we can’t have candy, Dad bought us Oreos, Mom says you didn’t send the check, Dad says your boyfriend is an idiot. He’d been waiting in line at Arby’s one day and he’d heard a little boy with a voice like a cartoon kitten say to the girl in cutoffs holding the hand of the man across the table from him, her chin in her hand, her foot tapping the vinyl tile floor, “My mommy says you’re a hoochie.”
He was sorry he’d never had kids. He was more than sorry; he was pretty brokenhearted about it, when he thought about it hard, which he tried not to do. But he was glad he hadn’t had kids like that. It had been surprisingly easy; Laura had gone to see her mother in Nags Head and never come back. He’d packed up her stuff. “You can keep the sectional,” she’d said. He hadn’t, although it had been a bitch getting it out of the house, and he finally used a chain saw, which somehow made him feel better about things.
He got a Christmas card every year, first week in December like clockwork. Long blond hair (long fake-blond hair), serious tan, four authentically blond kids, balding husband with a gut in a golf shirt, big house, all in Orlando. The whole family, ranged along an aggressively ceremonial staircase in the two-story foyer with a tree in the curve of the stairs at the bottom. He wondered whether they put the tree up in October so they could take the picture, then put it away, then put it up again, like a dress rehearsal. No sap on the ceiling; the tree was silver, not even a second cousin of anything that grew in the forest. Laura looked like someone he’d never even met. He bet she’d say the same about him.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!