“Sweetheart, you’re making me a little crazy here. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in that hellhole, and to say he sounded like Bob isn’t helpful. What do you mean when you say he sounded like Bob? Did he sound upbeat? Did he sound serious?”
“Please don’t cross-examine me. You’re the one who was off enjoying yourself on the golf course. I was stuck with grumpy old Dorothy, who forced me to read about refugee camps in Kenya and that is not fun, like playing golf. And then my cell phone rings—you know, Beethoven’s Fifth that the kids fixed on my phone for Bob—so I knew it was Bob calling, and I had to sit there and talk to him like I was your secretary because he knew enough not to bother you.”
Jim sat down on the bed and stared at the rug. Helen recognized this look. They had been married for many years. Jim very seldom got angry with Helen and she appreciated that, because she always took it as a sign of respect. But when he looked as though he was trying to be reasonable in the face of her silly behavior, it was hard for her to take.
She tried being funny now. “Okay, strike that. Not responsive.” Her voice did not sound humorous. “Irrelevant,” she added.
Jim kept looking at the rug. Finally he said, “Did he, or did he not, ask me to call him back?”
“He did not.”
Jim turned his face to her. “That’s all I needed to know.” He stood up and walked toward the bathroom. “I’m going to shower, and I’m sorry you had to be with grumpy Dorothy. I’ve never liked Dorothy.”
Helen said, “Are you kidding? Then why are we here with them?”
“She’s married to the managing partner, Helen.” The bathroom door closed and in a minute there was the sound of the shower running.
At dinner they sat outside and watched the sun set on the water. Helen wore her white linen blouse and her black Capris and ballet flats. Alan smiled and said, “You girls look very pretty tonight. What do you have planned for tomorrow?” He kept rubbing Dorothy’s arm from where he sat next to her. His hand was freckled. His mostly bald head was freckled too.
Helen said, “Tomorrow, while you fellows are playing golf, Dorothy and I thought we’d try breakfast at the Lemon Drop.”
“Nice.” Alan nodded.
Helen touched her earring and thought: Being a woman sucks. Then she thought: No it doesn’t. She sipped her whiskey sour. “Want to try my whiskey sour?” she asked Jim.
Jim shook his head. He was glancing down at the table and seemed far away.
“On the wagon, are we, Jim?” Dorothy asked.
“Jim hardly ever drinks, I thought you knew that,” Helen said.
“Afraid of losing control?” Dorothy asked, and a needle of anger entered Helen. But Dorothy said, “Look at that,” and pointed. Close to them a hummingbird poked its long beak into a flower. “How sweet.” Dorothy leaned forward, clasping her hands on the arms of her chair. Helen felt Jim squeeze her knee beneath the table, and Helen pursed her lips just slightly in the brief sign of a kiss. The four of them ate dinner leisurely then, silverware clinking softly, and Helen, after a second whiskey sour, even told the story of the night she had danced on a table at a bowling alley after the Wally Packer trial. Helen had bowled one strike after another—unbelievable! And then she drank too much beer and danced on a table.
“Well, I’m sorry to have missed that,” said Dorothy.
Alan gazed at Helen with a vacant pleasantness that seemed to go on too long. He reached over and touched Helen’s hand lightly. “Lucky Jim,” he said.
“Believe it,” Jim said.
6
For Bob, it had been interminable—the day vast and empty as he had waited for Jim to call back. Other people would have done something. Bob did realize that. Other people would have gone to a grocery store and made a meal for Susan and Zach to come home to. Or driven over to the coast and watched the surf. Or gone up to a mountain and taken a hike. But Bob—except for his trips to the back porch to smoke—had sat in his sister’s living room and skimmed Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and then flipped through a women’s magazine she had. He had never read a women’s magazine before, and it saddened him, the articles on how to rev up your sex life with a husband you’d had for years (surprise him with sexy underwear), and how to lose weight at work, the exercises to help your flabby thighs.
Susan came home and said, “I didn’t expect to see you here. After the mess you managed to make with the morning paper.”
“Well. I came up here to help.” Bob put the magazine down.
“Like I said, I didn’t expect to see you here.” Susan let the dog out, took off her coat.
“I have to see Charlie Tibbetts tomorrow morning. You know that.”
“He phoned me,” Susan said. “He won’t get back to town until the afternoon. He’s been delayed.”
“Okay,” said Bob. “I’ll see him in the afternoon.”
When Zach came through the door, Bob stood up. “Come on, Zachary. Talk to your old uncle. Start by telling me how your day went today.”
Zach stood, looking white-faced and frightened. His hair in its buzz cut made his ears seem exceptionally vulnerable, yet the angularity of his face was adult. “Um. Maybe later.” He went up to his room, and again, Susan took his food to him. This time Bob stayed in the kitchen, drinking wine from a coffee cup, eating frozen pizza heated in the microwave. He had forgotten how early some people ate dinner in Maine; it was only half past five. All evening Bob and Susan watched TV silently, Susan holding the remote and switching channels when any station was giving the news. The phone never rang. At eight o’clock Susan went to bed. Bob walked out onto the back porch and smoked, then returned inside and finished the second bottle of wine. He did not feel sleepy. He took a sleeping pill, then another. Again, he spent the night on the couch with his coat on, and again, the night was bad.
He woke to the sound of banging cupboard doors, and the morning light was strong from beneath the blinds. He felt the sickness of an early breaking of drugged sleep, and with this came the thought that his sister, in her fury yesterday, had sounded remarkably like their mother, who, when the kids were young, would have spells of loud fury herself (never directed at Bob, but aimed at the dog, or a jar of peanut butter that rolled off the counter and broke, or—mostly, usually—at Susan, who did not stand up straight, had not ironed a shirt properly, had not cleaned up her room).
“Susan—” He was thick-tongued.
She came and stood in the doorway. “Zach’s already gone to work, and I’m about to, as soon as I take my shower.”
Bob gave a mock salute, stood up, and found his car keys.
He drove carefully, as though he had been ill and housebound for weeks. Seen through the windshield, the world seemed far away. He pulled into a gas station that had a convenience store. Once he was inside, the store tossed into his vision an array of such variety—dusty sunglasses, batteries, locks with keys, candy—that confusion washed through him and he felt almost afraid. Behind the counter stood a young woman with dark skin and large dark eyes. In his stupefied mind she seemed out of place, like she might have come from India, but not quite. In a Shirley Falls convenience store the clerk was always white and almost always overweight; this is what Bob’s mind told him he expected. Instead, a tiny snapshot of New York seemed inserted here, where the clerk could have been anyone. But this dark-eyed young woman watched Bob without any hint of welcome and he felt like an intruder. He wandered stupidly through the aisles, so aware of her wariness that he felt he had shoplifted something, though Bob had never shoplifted anything in his life. “Ah, coffee?” he asked, and she pointed. He filled a Styrofoam cup, found a package of powdered doughnuts, and then saw on the floor yesterday’s newspapers: his nephew grinning at him. Bob groaned quietly. Passing the cooler he saw bottles of wine, and he stopped and took one, the bottle clinking against the others as he pulled it out to tuck under his arm. He was not staying—he hoped—after seeing Charlie Tibbetts this afternoon, but just in case he was stuck
at Susan’s again, he felt better knowing he’d have wine. He placed the bottle on the counter with his coffee and package of doughnuts, and asked for cigarettes. The young clerk did not look at him. Not when she dropped the cigarettes on the counter, not when she told him the amount he owed. Silently she pushed forward a flat paper bag and he understood he was to pack the items himself.
In the car he sat, his mouth warm from coffee. White powder from the doughnuts fell onto his coat and smeared into white streaks as he brushed at it. Backing up, the cup in its holder by the gearshift, he became aware of a sound, and there was a small, slow-moving pocket of time before Bob understood that what he heard was human screaming. He turned the car off; it lurched.
He seemed to fumble forever with the door before he could climb out.
A woman wearing a long red robe and a gauzy scarf covering her head and most of her face stood behind the car, crying out at him in a language he didn’t understand. Her arms flew up and down, and then she reached and struck his car with her hand. Bob moved toward her and she waved both arms. All of this, for Bob, seemed to happen slowly and in silence. He saw that behind the woman stood another woman, dressed the same way though in darker colors, and he saw her mouth moving, shouting at him, he saw her long and yellow teeth.
“Are you okay?” Bob was yelling this. The women were yelling. For Bob came the sudden sense that he could not breathe, and he tried to indicate this with his hands moving in front of his chest. And now the clerk from the store was there, taking hold of the first woman’s hand, speaking to her in the language Bob didn’t understand, and only then did Bob realize the clerk must be Somali. The clerk turned to Bob and said, “You were trying to run the car over her. Go away from us, crazy man!”
“I wasn’t,” said Bob. “Did I hit her?” He was gasping. “The hospital is—” He pointed.
The women spoke among themselves, rapid, foreign sounds.
The clerk said, “She’s not going to the hospital. Go away.”
“I can’t go away,” Bob said, helplessly. “I have to go to the police and report this.”
The clerk raised her voice. “Why the police? They are your friends?”
“If I hit the woman—”
“You didn’t hit her. You tried to hit her. Go away.”
“But it’s an accident. What’s her name?” He went to the car to find something to write on. By the time he was stepping back out of the car the two women in the long robes and long headscarves were running down the street.
The clerk was back inside the store. “Leave,” she yelled through the glass door.
“I didn’t see her.” He raised his shoulders and turned out his palms.
A bolt was turned. “Leave!” she said.
Very slowly Bob drove back to Susan’s. He heard the shower running. When Susan came downstairs she was in her bathrobe, rubbing a towel over her hair. Bob said, still feeling breathless, watching Susan stare at him, “Ah, so listen. We have to call Jim.”
7
Helen sat on the patio of their hotel room holding a cup of coffee. From down below came the sound of the fountain as it splashed; honeysuckle vines covered each patio she could see. Helen stretched her bare feet into a patch of sun and wiggled her toes. Breakfast at the Lemon Drop had been canceled. Alan had phoned earlier to say that Dorothy was choosing to spend the morning resting in her room, Helen should not take offense. Helen did not take offense. She ordered breakfast to be brought up, and ate her fruit and yogurt and roll with a clarity to her gladness. Jim was only going to play nine holes, he would not be gone long. They could be together then; Helen felt the sweet compression of desire waiting within her.
“Thank you so much,” she said to the polite man who answered when she called to say her breakfast tray could be removed. She took her straw bag and went down to the lobby, stopping in the gift shop to buy a gossip magazine, the kind she used to read with her girls, cuddled together on the couch looking at the gowns of the movie stars. “Oh, I like that one!” Emily would say, pointing, and Margot would sigh, “But look—that one’s reeeeally nice.” Helen also bought a women’s magazine because on its cover was an article headline “The Joys of Empty Nesting.” “Thank you so much,” she said to the woman behind the counter, and wandered out through the pathway between flowering trees and rock gardens to the beach, to stick her ankles into the sun.
Looking each other in the eye, the article counseled, that was important in aging relationships. Write a sexy email. Give compliments. Grumpiness is contagious. Helen closed her eyes behind her sunglasses and let her thoughts glide over to the Wally Packer days. What Helen had never told anyone was that those months had taught her what it must feel like to be the First Lady. One had to be ready for a camera click at any moment. One was building an image always. Helen had understood this. She had been excellent at the job. That some in their circle in West Hartford had become cool to her did not bother Helen. With her entire soul she believed in Jim’s defense of Wally, and in Wally’s right to have that defense. Any photo taken of her—she and Jim in a restaurant, at the airport, stepping from a cab—had, she felt, hit the right note each time, in her variety of tailored suits, cocktail dresses, casual slacks. What easily could have been called a circus was given gravitas by the dignity of Jim and Helen Burgess. Helen felt it then, and she believed it now, remembering.
And the excitement! Helen flexed her ankles. The late nights spent talking with Jim once the kids had gone to bed. Going over what had happened in the courtroom that day. He asked her opinion. She gave it. They were partners, they were in collusion. People said it must be a stress on the marriage, a trial like that, and Jim and Helen had to be careful not to burst into laughter, not to let it show: just the opposite; oh, it was just the opposite. Helen stretched, opened her eyes. She was his one and only. How many times had he whispered this over the last thirty years? She gathered her things and wandered back toward their room. Beside the croquet lawn, water fell gently over a little pile of rocks in a stream. A couple—the woman wearing a long white skirt and a pale blue blouse—was playing croquet, and there was the quiet thwack as a ball moved across the green. Along with the tumbling tropical blossoms, the blue sky seemed to whisper to the guests moving about, Now be happy. Be happy, be happy. Helen thought: Thank you, I will.
She heard him before she entered the room. “You’re a fucking mental case, Bob!” Her husband was repeating this over and over. “You’re a fucking mental case! An incompetent fucking mental case!” She slipped the key into the door and said, “Jim, stop.”
Standing by the bed, he turned to her with a face bright red; he waved a hand downward as though he would have hit her had she been closer. “You’re a fucking mental case, Bob! An incompetent mental case!” Dark patches of sweat unevenly patterned his blue golf shirt, and drops of sweat ran down his face. He yelled again into the phone.
Helen sat across from the bowl of lemons. Her mouth—like that—was dry. She watched her husband throw the phone onto the bed, and he kept yelling: “A mental case! Oh my God, Bob is a fucking mental case!” A scrap of a memory hurtled across her mind: Bob telling about his neighbor who screamed the same thing over and over to his wife. You’re driving me fucking crazy, isn’t that what he said? Before he was taken away in handcuffs. And she was married to a man like that.
A queer calmness descended on her. She thought, There is a bowl of lemons right in front of me, and yet the idea that it is a bowl of lemons cannot seem to make it into my mind. And her mind answered back: What do you want me to do, Helen? Stay calm, she told her mind.
Jim was punching a fist into his palm. He walked round and round in circles while Helen sat without moving. Finally he said, “Do you want to know what happened?”
Helen said, “I want you never to scream like that again. Is what I want. And if you do I will walk out of here and fly myself back to New York.”
He sat down on the bed and wiped his face with the bottom of his shirt. In a tight, precise v
oice, he told her that Bob had almost run over a Somali woman. That Bob had caused Zach’s smiling face to be plastered on the front page of the newspaper. That Bob had not even talked with Zach. That Bob refused to get into a car again, that he was going to fly back to New York and leave their car in Maine, and when Jim asked, How is the car supposed to get back?, Bob said, I don’t know, but I’m not driving it, I’m not getting behind a wheel again, and I’m flying home tonight, this Charlie Tibbetts will have to do his job without me. “Bob is,” Jim said, quietly, “a fucking mental case.”
“He is,” Helen said, “someone who was traumatized at the age of four. I am really surprised, and really put off, that you can’t figure out why he would not want to get behind the wheel of a car right now.” She added, “But it was incredibly stupid of him to run over a Somalian woman.”
“Somali.”
“What?”
“Somali. Not Somalian.”
Helen leaned forward. “You’re correcting me in the middle of this?”
“Oh, sweetheart.” Jim closed his eyes briefly, opened them; it seemed a dismissive gesture. “Bob’s screwed everything up, and if we have to go up there to help out, it’s best if you know what they’re called.”
“I’m not going up there.”
“I want you to go with me.”
Helen felt a huge, sudden envy of the couple playing croquet, the woman’s long white skirt rising in the breeze. She pictured herself in this room a few hours earlier, waiting for Jim, waiting for the way he would look at her—
He did not look at her. He looked toward the window, and in his profile she saw the light catch the blue of his eye. A slackness invaded his face. “Do you know what Bob said to me when I got an acquittal for Wally?” He turned to Helen briefly, then looked back out the window. “He said, ‘Jim, that was great. You did a great job. But you took the guy’s fate from him.’ ”