Ash Wednesday (8 page)

And now Brad was saying, wasn't he, that those dreams had been real, that he had
lived
them.

It couldn't be. That was all. It couldn't be. And the words struck her and moved, not through her, but around her, like a stream parting to either side of a great rock, to be deflected, divided, weakened. If she heard now, it did' not matter.

Brad finished. His face was solemn but not shaken by his tale of horrors. His cheeks were still ruddy, his hands steady. He looked at her coldly, appraisingly, and she smiled.

"But were you faithful?" she asked. "Were you true to me?"

He laughed as though he could not believe what she said, laughed and embraced her. "Oh, yes." He chuckled. " 'I have been faithful to thee,
Cynara
! In my fashion!' "

She did not ask who
Cynara
was, though she wondered about it.

~*~

They decided to get married in June. When, in a moment of doubt, she asked him
why
he wanted to marry her, he told her that he needed her. Not loved, not wanted, but needed, and he did. He longed for normality, stability, even mediocrity. He wanted to drown himself in dullness. Though his parents suggested returning to college under the GI Bill, he told them that he had had enough of college. "I already learned too much," he said. "It's not easy to learn things." His father didn't know what he meant, but did not press him for an explanation. Since his return from the service, it was difficult to talk to Brad. He would speak readily of inconsequential things—baseball, television, movies—but on more serious matters, such as politics, he seemed to have no opinions at all, and of his own past and future he would say nothing. When his father or mother broached such subjects to him, he simply would not respond, or would walk out of the room without speaking.

The week after he'd returned home he told them at the dinner table that he'd gotten a job that day at the Universal Shoe plant. They had not even known he was applying. "What kind of job, Brad?" his father asked.

Brad put down his knife and fork. "I stand in front of a machine. I push a button, and two metal plates come together in front of me. Hot liquid plastic pours into a mold, and in twenty seconds the plates come apart. There in front of me are two plastic soles and heels. I put them in a box, rip out what's left in the feed tube, and push the button again."

"A . . . machine operator," his father ventured.

"That's right. It's a job I think I'm going to like very much." He picked up his knife and fork and turned his attention back to his meat loaf, not saying a word for the rest of the meal.

Brad started working at Universal three days later, and with his first paycheck he made a security deposit on an apartment in the Shady Dell complex, a cluster of twelve newly built
pseudocolonial
buildings on the outskirts of town, each housing eight families. The rent for the one-bedroom unit was $175 a month, a third of what he took home from Universal.

The wedding took place in the second week of June, a justice of the peace presiding, and only the parents of the bride and groom in attendance. Bonnie was disappointed but uncomplaining. That fall, when she delightedly discovered she was pregnant, she quit her job at Allied Pressing after Brad assured her they could manage on his salary alone. Frank Donald Meyers was born the following May, a healthy eight-pound boy who resembled Bonnie far more than he did Brad. Brad began to work double shifts whenever he could to pay for the extra expenses the baby incurred. The extra work paid off in another way, for in early 1974 he was made assistant foreman. Mr. Rider, Universal's owner, liked the no-nonsense way in which Bradley Meyers handled himself. While the other workers seemed to use any excuse to indulge in horseplay, Brad was serious-minded, refusing to join in the pranks, choosing instead to keep working.

Bonnie became pregnant again in late 1974, and Linda Marie followed Frank the next summer. The apartment quickly became cramped, and Brad made a fifteen-percent down payment on a six-year-old house on Sundale Road, a middle-income development. He had had no trouble saving the $5,000, as he spent money on nothing but his family. He had quit smoking, did not drink, had no hobbies and no apparent vices. No longer did he go hunting with his father, as he often had before he was drafted. He came home, played with Frank until it was the boy's bedtime, then sat in front of the television until 11:00, when he would switch it off. He never watched the news, and he seldom laughed at any of the sitcoms. When he talked to Bonnie, it was about trivial things, and when he made love to her, he was curiously detached, almost clinical. She was not and had never been a bright girl, but slowly it began to dawn on her that something was wrong with the marriage. Yet she was incapable of dealing with abstractions, and so could not solve or even define the problems. Brad did not beat her, as some of her friends were beaten by their husbands. He seldom lost his temper, never came home drunk or spent money foolishly. It was just that sometimes, after a late night feeding, when she slipped back into bed beside Brad, she thought she was next to a stranger. And sometimes then, in the middle of the night, she would almost but not quite remember what he had told her that day in the clearing. But just as she was about to think of it, to really remember what he had said, she would fall asleep, or think about something she would have to do the next day, or worry if she was pregnant again, and the memory would slide into the dark.

She continued to be unaware of the condition of her marriage, even for a long time after Brad began to change. The first few incidents she dismissed as random flares of temper, things that she could have prevented. One morning just after six o'clock, she was fixing breakfast when Brad walked into the kitchen in his underwear. "Where are my socks?"

"Urn . . . in the dryer, honey. I'm sorry, I forgot to take them out," she babbled, moving to the basement steps. "I'll get them right away, I just hope they're not damp." She ran down the steps and opened the dryer. The socks and the other clothes were not merely damp, they were soaked. "Oh, God, Brad, I'm sorry," she called up the stairs. "Honey, they're still wet. But there's one pair left in your drawer, I think. . . ."

"They have holes in them." She looked up the stairs. He was standing at the top, looking vaguely threatening even in his near-nudity.

"Well,
hon
, couldn't you just wear them today, and I'll—”

“Fuck!" He spat out the word so gutturally that it was almost unintelligible, and slammed the cellar door on her.

Her first thought was gratitude that the children were still sleeping; her second was a flash of concern that Brad might have awakened them. Not until these primarily maternal reactions were gone did she think of Brad's response at having to wear socks with holes in them as irrational overkill, and then only for an instant. He had a
right
to get angry, she told herself. He did so much for all three of them and expected so little in return. It was the least she could do to make sure his clothes were clean and dry, the house was picked up, the kids were quiet when he wanted to sleep late on weekend mornings.

Brief outbursts of rage followed, randomly at first, then in a continuous pattern, and it seemed as if the most insignificant affronts received the most intense reactions. The inability to find a bottle opener in the kitchen, when all he had to do was ask Bonnie, drove him into a barely suppressed fury. A missing section of newspaper resulted in the paper being torn into shreds and scattered around the room. When Bonnie reused the coffee grounds because they'd run out, Brad took one sip and hurled the pot into the sink, where the glass shattered, nearly spraying Frankie and the baby with the steaming liquid. He seemed to come to his senses then, and while Bonnie held the baby to stop its crying, Brad put an arm around Frankie, who started to shy away from him in fright. A look of great sadness came over Brad, and he straightened up, watching the boy go to his mother's arms.

"Take the kids in the living room," he said softly. "I'll clean this up." He did, and didn't speak of it again, never saying that he was sorry.

Before long the invisible gate that had kept his temper from touching the children had opened, and though he did not strike them, Bonnie giving the spankings when they'd been earned, his words cut and tore them more than a heavy ring-fingered hand could ever have done.

The Christmas of 1976 Frankie received from Brad's parents a battery-operated police car. The top of the car was rounded, and underneath was a plastic flap that was forced out during the motor's cycle, making the car flip over completely as it rolled along. On the day after Christmas the flap got stuck halfway, unable to flip the car or to let the wheels keep moving it. "Daddy," Frankie whined, "my car don't work."

"Doesn't," Bonnie corrected.

"
Doesn't
work."

"Let me see." Brad took the car and opened the battery case underneath. The batteries were alkaline, put in the day before, and the contact points were all right.

"It's stuck there, Daddy. That thing's stuck."

"I see that, just shut up a minute."

Bonnie could see the anger rising. "Honey," she said to Brad, "maybe your dad could take it back where they—"

"Just let me
look
at it for a minute, for Christ's sake!"

Frankie turned and looked at his mother, uncertain of what to do. When he looked back, Brad had his fingers in the small hole between flap and underbody, his teeth gritted with the effort to grasp a small metal spring that had somehow become twisted. "Daddy, don't break it!"

"Do you want me to
fix
it or
don't
you?" Brad snarled, and the boy quailed.

"Y-yeah . . ."

"Okay, then,
here!
" He grabbed the plastic flap in one hand and snapped it off like a dead twig. The boy's face melted,
butterlike
, trembling with weeping, staring unbelievingly at his broken toy. "It'll run
now
," said Brad defensively. "It won't flip, but it'll
run!
Goddamn Hong Kong crap anyway.
Here
"—he thrust the car into Frankie's hands—"and don't ask me to fix your shit again." He stalked into the kitchen, and Bonnie heard the refrigerator door open, the metallic rattle of the nearly depleted six-pack, the door slam, and the pop and hiss of a ring tab being pulled.

She hadn't really been aware of when the drinking had started in earnest. One Friday he'd come home from work a little high—he'd stopped at the Anchor with a few of his friends, since one of them was getting married that weekend—and she'd thought nothing of it. She'd seen her own father far worse every weekend when she'd lived at home. That next week he brought home a six-pack, and on the weekend, a case. Then slowly he began to drink more and more beer. At first a case had lasted two weeks, then a week and a half, and now he would drink four or five bottles in a single night, more on weekends. Instead of relaxing him, it seemed to Bonnie to make him more irritable, more impossible to talk to.

Now Frankie's crying brought her back to the present, and she hugged the boy, looking sadly at Linda's wide puzzled eyes staring up from the floor where she played with her pop-beads. Bonnie didn't mind it when he got mad at her—she was a big girl, she could take it—but the kids were something else. She had to try to talk to him. Now, before he got too many more beers inside him.

"Honey," she said to Frankie, whose cries had shrunk to soft, high-pitched sniveling, "you take Linda Marie to your room, okay?"

"You mad at me too?" the boy asked.

"No,
hon
, I'm not mad at you. I just want to talk to Daddy, that's all." The boy took his sister's hand and led her down the short hall to the room they shared, while Bonnie walked into the kitchen.

Brad looked at her from under glowering brows. "Well?" he said with a surly cockiness that set her teeth on edge.

"I don't want to fight," she said.

"Who does?" He took a deep swig from the can. "What do you want?"

"I . . . I just want to know why you picked on Frankie like that."

He belched. "
Scuse
me. And excuse me for picking on Frankie. God forbid I should ever harm the little darlings.”

“
Stop
it."