Beyond Deserving (24 page)

“Worrying?” Maureen asks.

“I woke you.”

“I'm a light sleeper.”

“I was thinking about selling my car. I can't stand having it to worry about. I was trying to think of all the times I've driven it in the past month. I could do without it.”

“Is it going to be expensive to fix?”

“I don't think so. It's only the starter. I'm silly.”

“Look at me.” Maureen doesn't own a car.

“This is the first time I ever had a car on my own. I never drove until I met Fish.”

“I thought all Texans were car nuts.”

“Myth. I took driver's ed in high school but my father always had the car. My mother said I couldn't bother him with it.”

“Want to hear how I started driving?”

“Sure.”

Through Maureen's filmy curtains Katie can see daylight.

“I started driving when I was twelve.”

“You didn't!”

“We lived in Prineville, you know where that is?”

“Sort of. Eastern part of the state.”

“Right. We'd need things in Redmond. There was my mother and me, and two littler kids. She had a boyfriend for a while. He teased me, said I was big for my age. Now I think he probably had something in mind, but he never made the move. He didn't stick around long enough. He said I ought to learn to drive,
the way my mother was
. The way my mother was, was some mornings she couldn't get out of bed. Some of the time she worked at a cafe. Some of the time we were on welfare. Anyway, he taught me to drive. Good thing, too. Once I took one of my sisters to the hospital by myself. She broke her arm on a swing.”

“Where are they now? Your sisters?”

“I'll tell you another time.”

“I should go home.”

“Give me half an hour and come back for coffee.”

“You do too much.”

“Come back. I hate Sunday morning.” Now that Katie looks at her, Maureen does look teary-eyed.

Katie reaches for her friend's hand. “Did I upset you? About your sisters? Are they okay?”

Maureen shakes her head. Which question she is answering, she doesn't say.
No
, she says and puts her finger to her lips. “Another time,” she adds.

When Katie comes back, dressed in loose old khaki pants, Maureen has put blueberry muffins in the oven, and made coffee. Katie reads a pink card on her refrigerator. It says, “My past is finished and I am free of it.”

“You know,” Katie says as they wait for the muffins, drinking the first cup of coffee, “you don't seem like a girl with a hard-luck background. You seem like, well, like anybody.”

“I was trash.”

“I wasn't much, either.”

“How old were you, you know, the first time?”

“My senior year. Seventeen. It was dumb, nothing awful.”

“I was fourteen. I was mad at my mother because she said I was acting slutty. I wore makeup and went around with older kids, but it was all put on. Then she made me mad. I brought a boy home, maybe nine o'clock one night. She was out cold on the couch. We went into my room. The next day I told her, before she was all the way awake. She acted like she didn't understand. ‘Now, Maureen, when you bring a boy home, you introduce him to me. Wake me up if I'm napping, now.' Napping!” She takes out the muffins. “Okay without butter?”

“Who needs butter?” They break apart the muffins, releasing the sweet smell and steam.

“What I hate,” Maureen says, “is that my little sisters were there too, in the living room watching tv, while I was in my room screwing. Like, I was doing to them what my mother was doing to me.”

“You were fourteen. They weren't your responsibility.”

They eat in silence. Shyly, Katie says, “I can't believe that I can talk to you about—I hadn't thought of that boy in a hundred years. It was in a park, behind some bushes, and I'm sure he thought I was wild and experienced, and he was upset when he found out I wasn't. He said he was sorry, and made me cry. I never talked to him again. Now, all these years later, I can see him. His short buzzed haircut and his nice big shoulders, and tight jeans. And I remember I wanted to tell my mother, too, I wanted to taunt her with it, but I knew it wouldn't hurt her, it would hurt me. What was better was having it secret from her. Having her ask where was I going and what was I going to do, and having curfews, while all the time I knew I could do whatever I liked. God. It comes back.”

“See? Memory's not a hole your life falls into. It's all there. You could get into it. We've got everything in this town. You could get into rebirthing, that far, or farther.”

Katie finds that funny. “I don't think there was a birth,” she says. “I don't think my mother had me. I think she spit me out.”

33

Katie, dressed for dinner at Jeff's, is standing with him in the driveway of Michael's house. They arrived to find Michael buzzing the lawn with edge-clippers. Michael turned the machine off and is now amiably listening to them.

“I don't understand this arrangement of vehicles.” Jeff says. He insisted on going for Katie's car. He has made arrangements for a friend to work on it in the morning.

Katie's car is in the front of the drive, by the garage. Behind it are both Ursula's car and Michael's pea-green pickup. “How are we going to get in there to give your car a jump?” he asks Katie.

Katie says nothing. Michael drawls, “I don't think a jump will do it.”

“I told you, it's not the battery,” Katie says. Her jaw aches from clenching her teeth. To please Jeff, who invited another couple, she is wearing a dress she bought a few weeks before, a mauve rayon print in a modified forties style, with a wide waist and buttons all the way down the front. She feels awkward in front of Michael, with Jeff, in a new dress.

“What it would need is a push,” Michael says blandly.

“A push!” Jeff explodes. “How the hell are we supposed to push a car that's between the garage and another car!”

“I don't think Fish figured on giving it any more pushes. He's going to repair the starter. The rest of us will be at work, and he can back right out.”

“If you move your cars now we can push it backwards into the street,” Jeff says. Katie is mortified. She can't imagine what Jeff is waiting on. Maybe he is starting to see how stupid he is being. Until today, Katie would have described Jeff as a calm and polite human being, not provoked by minor irritations, and predictably intelligent. A scientist. She seems to have brought out the worst in him.

“Ursula!” Katie calls out brightly as Ursula comes down the front steps.

Ursula looks rumpled and sleepy. Katie makes hasty introductions, which Ursula and Jeff barely acknowledge. “We've come for my car.”

“Fish has gone round to Bi-Mart. He'll be back any minute. Anybody want a beer?”

Jeff marches over to Katie's car and peers in. Katie says to Ursula, “Feels just like summer, huh?” She feels stupid.

Michael is winding the cord neatly around the handle of the edge-cutter and tying it with a length of wire. “Beer sounds good,” he says, and takes the edger down the basement stairs.

Fish pulls along the curb. He comes up the drive carrying a large brown paper bag of cans. “I thought since I couldn't work on the starter today, I'd change the oil and plugs and filter,” he says to Katie. He pretends not to see Jeff.

“We'd like to take the car,” Jeff says stiffly, coming closer. He glances at his watch.

“That'd be a real dumbshit thing to do,” Fish says to Katie.

“I've made arrangements.” Jeff is telling this to Katie, too.

“This is ridiculous!” Ursula snaps. Her glare takes them all in. Ursula's eyes narrow. It is unusual for her to be ill-tempered.

“There's plenty of help here. We just push the car into the street and get it started.” Jeff speaks as if they are all small children. “After the cars are moved.” He goes to his own car.

Katie sees Fish go from angry to hurt to perplexed, and back through again. He clasps the cans to his chest. “What is this shit about?” he asks Katie.

About MY business, Katie thinks angrily. About Jeff, whose business it is not, telling me what to do.

He was so insistent, rational, and cool. She should not be depending on the man she has just decided to divorce. She should learn to manage her own affairs. (And who is managing them now?)

“I've got to go,” she says.

“I'll push the fucking car down the drive,” Fish says. He throws the sack to the ground and the cans roll in the yard. “I'll push it through the fucking YARD—”

Ursula reaches out and grabs Fish by the shirt. “Hold on.”

Katie turns and walks back to Jeff's tidy little Nova. Standing in the street at the door, she smiles tensely at Fish. “Sorry,” she says. She doesn't know if he can hear her, but he is looking her way and he must get the idea. He picks the cans back up and stomps off toward the car.

Michael comes down the front steps with beer bottles. “Forget it,” Katie hears Ursula say.

“Hey thanks!” Katie calls inanely. Michael and Ursula are attending to some other matter between them It is a relief to slip away.

“What is going on?” Jeff demands as he slams his door. “This is the craziest damned divorce I ever saw.”

She is looking past him at the Fishers in their yard. Carter has come around the back and taken a beer from his dad. Ursula begins to talk intensely, shaking her hands at Carter, who looks, as he usually does, like he is about to laugh. Juliette is hanging out of the second-story window, waving toward Jeff's car. Her hair hangs loose, a Rapunzel's cascade. A year ago she was a child.

“I want to go!” Katie says.

Jeff starts the car.

“There are two ways to get through this evening,” Katie says. “Take me home or forget this scene.”

“I have a rack of lamb in the oven and good friends coming to dinner.” He looks at her glumly. It seems almost funny to hear him say, “I like your dress.”

A block or so later he says, “So that's the famous Fish.”

Katie ignores his contempt, though she feels defensive and angry. She says quietly, “He's a plain person, like me.”

Jeff's friend Oatley is a specialist in grains at the experimental station. His wife, Jane, is pregnant, just starting to show. They are at least ten years younger than Katie. Jeff puts on music that Katie doesn't like—something jazzy but quiet, muted, and dull. He and Oatley begin to discuss things she can't follow, while she and Jane sip their Chablis and smile now and then. Jeff's duplex is furnished comfortably. Katie sinks back into the big soft cushions of an armchair. Jeff says he has to see to the food, and Oatley follows him into the kitchen, talking about durum wheat.

“Do you—” both women begin at once, and laugh. “You first,” Katie says. She has been thinking that Jane's hair is expensively cut, in a precisely casual way that makes her look as though it isn't necessary to spend any time at all on her looks. Such easy beauty has always awed Katie.

“I was wondering if you have something to do with the station, too.”

“I met Jeff at a party. I work in the costume shop at the theatre festival.” Katie is sure Jane knows everyone who works at the experimental station. Why doesn't she just say, Who are you?

“How wonderful! How fascinating.”

Katie doesn't know whether to ask what Jane does.
She
did not do anything at all while she was pregnant. Maybe Jane is waiting for Katie to say more about her job. People think anything that has to do with theatre is exciting. In its way, it is. She does humble work, but she is fast and dependable. She sees the designs go from paper through all their hands to the stage. It is the only interesting work she has ever done. To think she learned what she knows from her mother!

Would Jane be interested in any of that?

Or would she want to talk about herself?

At the shop, Katie listens to the women talk about babies. Friends and sisters, one of the cutters, all expecting. They talk about whether the baby was planned or not, whether there will be a midwife or a doctor. They talk about prenatal yoga and bonding.

Jane, apparently cued by Katie's silence, says, “I do children's books. I think of myself as an illustrator, but we're so far from anywhere, I have to do the stories, too. I can't pair up with anyone from here.”

“That sounds like fun.”

“It is, though I don't do as well as I might, financially. I need to get to New York and make some contacts. Once people know me I can do a lot by phone and mail. I was thinking of spending some time there this winter, but now—” She pats her stomach.

“New York will always be there,” Katie says. It is the last place she would want to be.

The conversation, such as it was, dies. Katie offers to get them more wine but Jane pats herself again and declines. “I'm trying to do all the right things. After all, I'm married to a biologist.”

Katie supposes that was a witty thing to say, and she smiles at Jane, but she is starving, and she wonders if Jeff will stay angry at her. She hopes their tiff has not made Fish angry too, so that her car will still be sitting there tomorrow. She hopes Jeff will be himself again, but not amorous. She wants to eat and go home to sleep. Alone. She feels she has walked straight into a conflict not worth having, and she wants to forget it. She doesn't care if she ever sees Jeff again.

She is happy to see the food the men bring in: lamb and crusty peaked potato puffs, and the orange cauliflower she has been hearing about. She utters praise. She answers their questions briefly, and by the time the plates are emptied, she realizes the three of them are having quite a good time without her. They are friends, and they go easily from topic to topic, to which she has nothing to add. Most of the time she doesn't even know what they are talking about: old-growth forests, land-use planning, airline safety, a new museum site. She cannot stifle her yawns.