Mendocino and Other Stories (17 page)

The turkey smelled like turkey now. Sylvie was sitting at the kitchen table, arranging broccoli in a dish. She had to reach way across her belly. She looked up and smiled at him, her face a soft pink from the steam of the kitchen. She stopped working. “I've got this obstacle here,” she said.

“You shouldn't be doing that. It's awfully warm in here, isn't it?”

“It's OK. I promised Julia I'd sit.” She picked up a piece of broccoli, dropped it back and held her stomach. “Whoa,” she said, “he's full of beans today.”

“Kicking,” Henry said. “Does it bother you a lot?”

She smiled. “Actually, it feels great.” She patted her stomach. “Want to?”

“I'll take your word,” he said, blushing and turning away; it was like refusing to look at someone's family pictures. He took his empty coffee cup to the sink, then he turned around. “He?”

Sylvie's face filled with color. “Oops,” she said. “Sorry.”

“No, don't apologize,” he said. “You think it's a boy?”

She grinned. “I can just see you teaching him to catch.” Lowering her voice, she said, “OK, Hank, down thirty and out five.”

He looked at her curiously; what else had she imagined? He didn't know how to respond. “I don't think it would be Hank,” he said, finally. He glanced at his watch. “Where's Julia?”

THE GUESTS ARRIVED
shortly after one: just two other couples. Henry fixed drinks, and they ate Julia's soup in the study to be near the fire. It was the first time they'd had company since Sylvie's arrival, and he was relieved that she seemed to be at ease. She told a funny story about the nuns when she was a little girl, and Julia roared with laughter, leaning so far back in the rocking chair where she sat that Henry thought she would fall. It was this, Henry thought, her obvious affection for Sylvie, that was making everyone relax.

At the table they all admired Sylvie's napkins, and although Henry was afraid it would embarrass her, she seemed pleased. She stood up and gave a little demonstration of how she'd folded the pockets, and then, encouraged, went on to show how to make a flower out of a napkin; a bird, a bow. What are her other talents, someone wanted to know. There was an awkward silence and Henry cringed at the condescension. Then Julia rushed in with
“baking,” and Sylvie, crimson but laughing, patted her stomach and stunned Henry by saying, “Nothing's as loving as something from the oven.”

Everyone laughed, and the pie was served as evidence. Raising his wineglass, Henry toasted the crust with the cider in it, saying he'd always known he could count on Sylvie for the magic touch. At the other end of the table, Julia cupped her chin in her hand and smiled a smile of pure love at him, and it occurred to him that in a few weeks Sylvie would be gone and his life with Julia would close back in on itself. And he knew, too, that someday, in a month or a year or five, he would discover that he had begun to think of the child as
their
child; it would just take time.

As they were leaving, one of the guests, Ivy, whose three sisters had made her an aunt three times in the last year, asked Sylvie how much longer she had, and when Sylvie said “Two weeks,” ushered her into the hallway where she made her stand sideways, against the wall.

“What are you doing?” Julia asked.

Without thinking Henry said, “She wants to see if the baby has lightened.”

Julia stared at him.

“He means dropped,” Ivy told her. “Same thing.”

Still Julia didn't speak.

“The baby's head,” Ivy said. “It's in position for delivery, I can tell.” She wagged a finger at Julia. “You haven't done your homework.”

Now Julia turned away from Henry, and he saw the edge of a huge, gaping silence, and he knew he could do nothing about it. Then someone began taking coats from the coat closet, cheeks were kissed, good-byes said, and the door was opened onto the dark rain.

Julia went into the dining room and came back with her wine. She took a sip of it, her eyes on Henry. “Explain,” she said.

Sylvie touched Julia's shoulder. “You remember—when the baby's ready to come out its head moves down into the pelvis.” She smiled. “It presses on your bladder and you have to pee all the time again.”

Julia swallowed the rest of her wine. She stared at Henry, her lips narrowed into a thin line, and for a moment he was afraid she was going to throw the wineglass at him. “What I want to know,” she said, “is where you got that word.”

He hesitated. “I'm not sure,” he said. “I must have heard it somewhere.”

Sylvie put her hand on her stomach.

Julia turned to her. “Are you all right?”

“I think so. Maybe I should sit down.”

“All that rich food,” Julia said. “Let's put you in front of the fire.” She avoided looking at Henry; instead she guided Sylvie into the study.

He followed them. The fire had died down and he added a couple of logs, then stood watching until the blaze began to climb again.

Sylvie was in the easy chair, her eyes closed, one hand on her stomach. Julia sat on the chair's arm, stroking Sylvie's hair. “I'll do the dishes,” Henry said. He didn't wait for a response.

THERE WERE PLATES
and glasses and pots and pans all over the kitchen. He began stacking them next to the sink, then decided to take a quick walk first, just a minute or two to clear his head. He took his umbrella from the closet, made sure the door would lock when he closed it, and went outside. It was only then that he
patted his pocket and realized he didn't have his keys. He was about to knock on the door but stopped himself—they weren't going anywhere.

Walking through the quiet streets of his neighborhood, he breathed in the cold, wet air until his lungs began to ache. He found himself thinking of the night when he proposed to Julia. At the time, they'd known each other for only seven months, but the idea had been in his head for the last five; he would lose and regain his nerve several times a week. At one point he even bought a diamond ring only to return it the next day, telling himself it was absurd to think that to change your life all you had to do was buy a piece of jewelry. On the evening when he decided to ask her, she made dinner for the two of them at her apartment, and while they were eating he felt so sick with apprehension that he barely spoke. Finally, while she was in the kitchen making coffee, he couldn't take it anymore. He went and stood in the doorway until she turned around, and he said—and he hated this, what an oaf—“Julia, I want you to get married.” But she didn't laugh. He would always remember that—it had saved him. She didn't even giggle.

The rain was falling harder. In the distance, Henry could hear the occasional swish of a car driving through a puddle. He turned up his collar and headed back toward home. When he got there, he knocked at the door, but no one answered. He knocked again, harder. Finally he made his way around the side of the house to the study window.

Sylvie was still in the easy chair, but Julia was on the rug. She was leaning sideways against Sylvie's legs. Her shoulders were shaking. Henry took a step closer and one of the spokes of his umbrella tapped against the window, but they didn't even turn to look. Sylvie leaned over and put an arm around Julia's shoulder, but Julia pulled away. Her face was in her hands, and
she was shaking her head. Then she looked up and placed her hands flat on Sylvie's belly, and her face filled with all the anguish of a desire never to be satisfied. And Henry watched as Sylvie said the words that he had never once said—I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.

“
NAME THE QUAD CITIES
,” said Tillman.

It was the middle of the morning and we'd just crossed the Mississippi and entered Iowa. I tried to remember the highway signs we'd passed. “Moline,” I said. “East Moline.” I was stuck. “North Moline and South Moline?”

“I'm sorry,” said Tillman. “You do not win the walnut dinette set. The correct answer is: Moline, Rock Island, Bettendorf, and Davenport.”

“Rock Island sounds pretty.”

“It's the armpit of the Mississippi. How about a sandwich?”

I laughed. “Don't you want to save them for lunch?”

“No,” he said. “We'll stop for lunch in Iowa City.”

I reached for the cooler, which was sharing the backseat with our suitcases, a gift-wrapped bottle of Scotch, and Tillman's gun. The Scotch was for Tillman's brother, Casey, whom we were
going to visit. The gun was so Tillman—and I—could shoot some pheasants. “Or maybe some ducks,” he'd said. “We'll see.”

The trip had come about almost by accident. Tillman and I had been keeping company for only a few months, but one of the routines we had established was that on Sunday mornings when we woke up together we'd buy coffee to go from the local greasy spoon and walk out to look at the lake: I grew up forty minutes from the Pacific Ocean and went to college thirty minutes from the Atlantic, but Tillman was from the dead center of the country and Lake Michigan still thrilled him. One chilly October morning as we walked along the city streets Tillman sucked in his breath and put a hand to his chest as he let it out again. “It's a perfect fall day,” he said. “Makes me feel like killin' animals.” I laughed, but I had seen the gun and knew he liked to hunt. His hunting belonged in a category with former lovers and the most crushing adolescent humiliations: I didn't think we were ready for it yet. “You laugh now,” he said. “Wait till you try it. You're a lady who could shoot, I'd put money down.” I experienced the usual guilty pleasure his calling me a lady made me feel—it wasn't something I'd ever been called by anyone I hadn't irritated in some way. (“Lady, move your car” I had heard before I met Tillman, but not “You're a lady I could see having dinner with,” which he said about five minutes after we met.) I said I probably
wasn't
a lady who could shoot but that we'd never know, would we—and here we were.

I handed Tillman an egg-salad sandwich and took an apple for myself. “Isn't this fun?” he said. “And the great thing is, we've still got about six hundred miles to go.”

I moaned. “Maybe we should play a license plate game or something. Did you used to do that when you were little?”

“I was never little,” Tillman said. “You know those little white booties babies wear? I had basketball shoes.”

“Come on—when your family went on trips? We'd have races to see who could spell out the European capitals first.”

“That assumes someone knows them,” he said. “Anyway, we didn't go on trips.”

A light rain had begun to fall and Tillman switched on the windshield wipers. I looked at him. There was something in the way he held himself, in the relationship of head, neck, and shoulders, that made me very happy. And he had such a winning way of driving a car: one hand on the wheel, the other in his lap, an alert look on his face but not too alert—he wasn't looking for trouble but he could handle it.

“So you're ready for me to meet your brother,” I said.

He pressed his lips together in a sly smile. “Amy. It's hunting we're going to do. Pretend it's a coincidence my brother'll be there.”

“OK,” I said, nodding. “That's what I'll do.” And in that way we continued to keep on hold any discussion of our, as my friends called it, feasibility.

AN HOUR OR
so later we began to see exit signs for Iowa City. Tillman had spent eight years there, first as a student at the University of Iowa and then working in a bakery, baking muffins from four in the morning until noon. It was hard for me to reconcile that Tillman with the one I had been getting to know, who worked as a lab technician at Northwestern Hospital, but he insisted the two jobs weren't very different: he liked his hours better now was the main thing.

We ended up in a crowded little diner where our waitress was actually a waiter: a man with a shaved head wearing a flowered dress of the type someone's mother might have worn to a garden party in the fifties.

Tillman looked up at him and smiled. “Howdy.”

“Two fried eggs, corned beef hash, and coffee?” said the man.

“Sounds good.”

The man looked at me. “Sugar?”

“He takes it black.”

“You've got to love her,” he said, winking at Tillman.

“My sentiments exactly,” said Tillman.

“I know how he
takes
it,” the waiter said to me. “What would you like, dear?”

“Grilled cheese,” I said.

“Still in the windy city?” the waiter asked Tillman.

Tillman nodded.

“How is it?”

“Windy,” Tillman said. “Meet Amy. Amy, Pruney.”

Pruney held out his hand—more as if he expected me to kiss it than to shake it. I slipped my hand into his and wagged it back and forth.

“Delighted,” he said. He turned back to Tillman and held his dress out at the sides. “What do you think?”

“It's a nice one,” Tillman said. He reached up and adjusted the neckline, which came down just low enough to expose Pruney's wiry grey chest hair. “I really think you need some pearls or something, though.”

“Baby, baby, don't I know it and haven't I tried.” Pruney leaned forward and lowered his voice. “There are jewelry police all over this joint. Don't think I haven't already been busted.” He shook his head and hurried back to the kitchen.

“Somehow,” I said, “this isn't how I pictured Iowa.”

“This is just Iowa City,” Tillman said. “The Greenwich Village of the Midwest. Or is it the Paris of the Midwest? Anyway, wait'll we get to Nebraska—it out Iowas Iowa.”

I nodded and smiled, but I felt myself slipping into dreaminess.
I was thinking about what Tillman had said: “My sentiments exactly.” Well, I thought, love! We hadn't talked about that so far, hadn't mentioned it. It would've been Talking, which Tillman seemed to regard as superfluous at best, a weakness at worst. A few weeks before, we'd taken a drive into the country; standing on the edge of a field, Tillman did a perfect bird whistle that brought answering calls from several nearby trees. “That was mean,” he said. “Getting their libidos going.” “Maybe it was an unsexual call,” I said. “Like, ‘Hey, nice day’ or ‘Who wants to fly south with me?’ ” Tillman shook his head, a smirk appearing in the corners of his mouth. “Nope,” he said. “Birds have it made. Once they've mated, they get to stop talking.”

“Tillman,” I said now, leaning across the table to touch his arm. “Seriously—are you glad you moved to Chicago?”

He shrugged. “Sure. But I also think it's sort of beside the point to ask yourself that kind of question. I mean, you're there, right?”

“The unexamined life—”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “You want to buy a microscope cheap?”

Our lunches arrived a few minutes later and we ate quickly, without talking—it was the kind of food you have to face down in a hurry if you're going to manage it at all. I finished first and pushed the wilted pickle chips around on my plate while Tillman mopped up his hash with a piece of toast.

As we were leaving the diner Tillman slung his arm over my shoulders. “I can't believe I'm going hunting in Nebraska,” I said happily.

“Why not Nebraska?”

“Ha ha,” I said. “The emphasis in that sentence was on hunting. When I was little I went to this day camp where one of the activities was riflery, and my parents were so freaked out they had a meeting with the camp director to make sure I wouldn't have to
do it. They wouldn't even let me watch. I had double sessions of lanyard-making while everyone else learned how to shoot.”

Tillman laughed. “Don't worry—you'll get something.”

“That's not really the point,” I said. We had reached the car and I turned to face him. “It's the moral question.”

“Worse comes to worse,” he said, “we'll let you shoot Patsy.”

Tillman
, I thought. “Patsy?”

“Casey's dog.”

“That's disgusting. That's terrible.”

“I was joking.” He unlocked the car door and held it open for me. “Patsy's Casey's girlfriend. We wouldn't let you shoot a dog.”

THE INTERSTATE WAS
a straight shot across Iowa. I followed our progress on the map for a while, but it was depressing ticking off the little towns—eighteen miles, twenty-seven miles, forty-two miles and we stopped for gas. I offered to drive but Tillman said I might make a wrong turn.

We got back on the highway and I stared out the window. “This is my first time in Iowa,” I said. “Where's the corn?”

It was the kind of question I was always asking him, one we both recognized as a little obvious, a little dumb. I couldn't help myself: he was an encyclopedia of exotic knowledge—what the bark of an elm tree looked like, how to tie a knot that would hold when a square knot wouldn't, the names of specific nails and bolts and screwdrivers—and I loved to hear him speak those slightly foreign languages. Or was it more than that? I was pretty sure I knew where the corn was: right there, everywhere, bearing little resemblance to corn as I knew it but corn nonetheless. Disturbingly, I realized that I enjoyed this appearing a little dumb: there was something protective about the boundaries of Tillman's knowledge surrounding me, making a little house for both of us to live in.

“Corn grows seasonally, Amy,” Tillman said with a grin. “See the leafy brown stuff in that field?”

Somewhere west of Des Moines, out of desperation, I decided to attempt a nap. I reminded myself and Tillman that success was unlikely—I was a restless sleeper at best, and Tillman was the pea to my princess.

Suddenly it was dark. “Wait,” I said. “I'm sure I had my mail forwarded. What?”

“Are you awake?” said Tillman.

I sat up quickly.

“You're cute when you sleep,” he said. “Your mouth falls open and there's this little bit of drool on your chin.”

I swiped at my face. “Liar.”

“It's true,” he said. “And you talked. Just now you said something about your mail.”

My dream dashed in front of me and was gone. Then I caught a piece of it. “I was moving. Weird—to Nebraska.”

“You're there,” said Tillman. “Although we've still got a ways to go. Do you want to: A, stop for dinner; B, stop for the night; or C, press on?”

I peered out the window but it was completely black—not a light in sight. We could have been anywhere. “Press on?”

“Good idea.”

I leaned over the seat for the cooler. We each had half of the remaining sandwich, then took turns taking bites from an apple.

“Amy Levin,” he said. “Tillman Crane and Amy Levin on Interstate 80.”

“Getting philosophical, are you?”

He reached over and laced his fingers through mine.

“Maybe we should tell people my name is Amy Smith or Amy Johnson or something.”

“You really are nervous about this, aren't you?” He pulled his fingers away, then put his hand on top of mine and curled it into a fist; he held my hand captive under his, as if it were a tiny animal that might dart away.

“I don't know,” I said. “It's just—families. God, isn't it hard enough without having to contend with someone's family? If we were going to California I'd be nervous, too. I'd probably be more nervous.”

He laughed. “You have a lot of faith in me, I see.”

“That's not how I meant it,” I said. In fact, I'd spent a good deal of time imagining just such a meeting: the two of us sitting side by side in my parents' living room, a convivial discussion of something other than the sorry state of the nation, during which my father would not raise his voice. I'd present Tillman to them as a kind of gift
qua
challenge: Look here, it would say, his parents didn't march on Washington or wear sunglasses for three days when Martin Luther King was shot.
And he hunts.
But I was afraid that, once I was back at home, some part of me would be in their camp with them, looking for the bright side.

Tillman let go of my hand, returning his to the wheel. “It's just my brother,” he said. “You have nothing to be nervous about.”

“I know,” I said. “I guess I'm just nervous that I'll be nervous.”

“Amy, Amy, Amy,” he said. “Where did I find you?”

“At a boring party.”

We were silent for a while. Then Tillman said, “I don't think it's so hard. Am I missing something? I thought we were having fun.”

“Fun?” I said. “Fun? Is that the point?” I pulled my feet up onto the seat and wrapped my arms around my knees. “I've often wondered.”

TILLMAN'S PARENTS HAD
died four years earlier, when Tillman was twenty-seven, within four months of each other. He was flip with me about it at first, saying his mother had died of boredom causing his father to die of anger. Finally, in a bar one night, I told him that I thought it was strange he hadn't told me what really happened. I said it quietly, eyes downcast—I didn't want him to miss that he'd hurt me by not telling me. “You want the gory details, do you?” he said, and I blushed; but he didn't give me a chance to respond. He said in a rush that his mother had had a surprising, fatal stroke when she was sixty-one, and that after that his father just gave up on life. “Packed it in,” he said. “Threw in the towel.” I asked him what he meant and he took a sip of beer and gave me a look of such intense melancholy that I was certain I'd made a terrible blunder, one he could never forgive. In the moment before he spoke again I wanted to take it all back, to be someone other than myself—not just someone who could stop herself from prying, but someone who wouldn't even
want
to know.