Mendocino and Other Stories (2 page)

There's a delicious, spicy smell coming from the kitchen as Bliss heads down the hall. When she gets there, though, she stops in the doorway; Gerald and Marisa are standing at the sink, talking in low tones. Marisa has pulled her hair into some kind of bun, and Gerald is running his finger up and down her neck.

“Hi,” Bliss says.

They pull apart and turn to face her. “Hi,” says Marisa.

“Hungry?” Gerald asks. “I'm starved.”

Marisa pats his shoulder. “Lucky you,” she says. “Dinner's almost ready.” She smiles at Bliss.

“Almost?” he says in mock outrage.

She laughs. “It will be as soon as you get the salad out.”

Bliss stands in a corner and watches as they move around the kitchen, taking things from the refrigerator and stovetop and oven and putting them on the table. They don't look at each other or touch, but they're
connected
somehow—it's as if they were performing some kind of dance they'd been rehearsing for months.

They all sit, and Marisa serves their plates with rice and some kind of vegetable mixture—ratatouille, Bliss decides. They talk for a while about the things Gerald showed her—the chickens, the last of the tomatoes, the woodshop—and then Gerald asks about the bookstore. Bliss tells a story about a guy, Walter, whom she hired a few weeks ago to be a cashier. He seemed perfect—he lived around the corner, said he could work extra hours whenever she wanted, even volunteered to open the store for her one morning when she had to go to the dentist. Then one night she was on her way home from having dinner with a friend and decided to stop at the store for a book. When she got there she found Walter and three of his friends sitting on the floor eating take-out pizza,
passing around a fifth of vodka, and paging through bookstore books with their greasy fingers. “The thing that really got me,” Bliss says, “is that when I told them to get out, they just walked off and left the pizza lying in the middle of the floor.”

“That is terrible,” Marisa says. Her forearms are resting on the edge of the table and she has tightened her hands into fists. When Bliss looks at her face, she thinks she sees tears in her eyes. “People like that have no consideration.”

This seems self-evident to Bliss—obviously Walter is a jerk; that's the point.

But Marisa goes on. “He'll probably never learn, either. You know? He'll probably go through life trespassing on people's decency, never doing a single thing for anybody. Someday he'll marry some poor woman and ruin her life. God, that kind of thing makes me sick!”

Bliss is embarrassed. She looks away from Marisa's red face at Gerald; he's got such a worried look on his face that she wishes she could reach across the table and touch his arm. He looks the way he used to at the dinner table at home, toward the end, when her father was always angry at her mother. Is it not true, her father would say to her mother, that you told me you were going to finish that typing by dinner? Gerald, her father would say, what do you suppose could have happened? Do you suppose it just slipped your mother's mind that she had twenty pages to type for me today? Or do you suppose she was too God-damned busy talking to her friends at the grocery store to think of anything else? Well? Well, Gerald? Well?

Gerald looks up at Bliss, and she can see that his mind is whirling. She smiles at him—she will say the first thing that she can think of. But he beats her to it. “What kind of pizza was it?” he asks.

Then he gets up and goes around behind Marisa's chair and
leans down low, and when his arms reach around her, tears begin to stream from her eyes. Bliss looks down at her plate and pokes at the remains of her dinner with her fork. If this doesn't stop soon, she'll have to leave the room. When he looks up again, Gerald is staring at her, his face hard and challenging.

Finally Marisa reaches for her napkin and dabs at her face. She looks up at Bliss and says, “Sorry.”

Bliss smiles and shrugs.

Gerald gives Marisa's shoulder a final pat and straightens up. Then Marisa pushes her chair back and stands, too. “Well,” she says, as if nothing had happened, “are we done? I'll get going on the dishes. Why don't you two make a fire in the other room?” She carries a few things to the sink and begins to run the water. She turns back to Bliss. “I'm sorry we don't have any dessert,” she says.

“We've got fruit,” says Gerald. “Want a plum?”

“I'm fine,” says Bliss. “It was delicious.” She takes her plate to the sink and sets it down. This is not the right moment for the cookies.

THE LIVING ROOM
is sparsely furnished—just two armchairs and several large pillows on the floor.

“Sit,” Gerald says, coming up behind her. He pats one of the chairs.

“Don't you guys want the chairs?” Bliss says. “I'll sit on one of those.”

“Nonsense,” he says.

So she sits in one of the chairs and watches him build the fire. Marisa's scene has disturbed her—does she do this kind of thing a lot?—but curious as Bliss is, she hopes Gerald won't bring it up. She doesn't really want to talk about it.

“That was a good dinner,” she says.

“Thanks,” he says, without turning around. He lights a match and touches the flame to some newspaper, then sits looking into the fireplace. Finally he turns to face her. “Listen,” he says, “let's just drop what happened in the kitchen, OK?”

“Of course,” Bliss says. “I wasn't going to—”

“She's just a little on edge is all,” Gerald says. “Having a visitor.”

Bliss blushes. It wasn't
her
idea to come up here.

“I don't mean it like that,” Gerald says. “She just wants you to like her.”

He doesn't seem to expect a response; he turns back to the fireplace and pokes at the logs with a piece of kindling. She should say, “Oh, I do like her,” but it would sound so forced; her mother used to sit on the edge of her bed at night and say, “I love you, baby,” and then, after the slightest pause, “Do you love me?”

“That should catch,” Gerald says, standing up. He claps his hands together to get rid of the wood dust, then sits in the other chair. “We were thrilled when it started getting cooler again. There's a guy up the road who lets me chop firewood for free.”

“Just like that?”

“Well, I give him a hand when he needs it. I helped him build a new kitchen.”

“How'd you learn how to do all this stuff, anyway?”

“I must have a natural aptitude,” Gerald says. They both laugh; he was the kind of child who, in art class, used his Popsicle sticks for abstract sculpture when everyone else was making a birdhouse.

“No, really,” Bliss says.

“I wanted to,” Gerald says. “That's really all it takes.”

Marisa comes in from the kitchen carrying a tray. “I made some tea,” she says. She offers the tray to Bliss, and Bliss thanks her and takes a mug. It smells strange, and she decides that it's some
kind of herbal tea, made from their herbs. She would give anything for a cup of coffee right now.

Gerald takes a mug, and Marisa sets the tray on the floor at Gerald's feet. She pulls a pillow over and sits on it, leaning against his legs. No one says anything.

Bliss sips her tea, which tastes a little like almonds, and looks around the room for something to remark on. The walls are bare except for bunches of dried leaves—more herbs?—hanging in great clumps. There's a little stained glass something-or-other in one of the windows, and Bliss thinks, OK, that'll do; she's about to ask Marisa if she made it when Gerald clears his throat.

“So,” he says, “ten years.”

Bliss looks into her tea. It has been in the back of her mind that he might bring it up; she just hoped he wouldn't. She always thought they had a tacit agreement not to discuss it. She looks up and sees that Marisa has straightened a little, and she feels a flash of anger at her, as if she put the words into Gerald's mouth. They're both waiting for her to reply. “Yeah,” she says.

“I think it was even a Friday,” Gerald says.

“No,” Bliss says, “it was a Wednesday.” She remembers this distinctly. She was at home from college for the weekend and she'd driven back to school early on the Monday morning; then late that night her mother had called and said that her father hadn't come home, and she called again Tuesday afternoon to say he still wasn't home so Bliss drove back; and on Wednesday morning the phone call came from the police: a chambermaid at a motel a hundred miles away had found his body. “I'm positive it was a Wednesday,” Bliss says.

They are silent again. Bliss remembers driving over to the high school and waiting in the office while someone was sent to get Gerald from his class. Her old French teacher had come walking
in, and her face lit up at the sight of Bliss. “What a wonderful surprise,” she said. “How's school going? How are you?” Then Gerald appeared on the other side of the glass door, and for a moment, while Mlle. Barlow was still talking, Bliss looked through the glass at Gerald and realized from his expression that he had guessed why she was there.

She looks at Gerald now. She can tell that he's struggling with something—is he trying to get himself to say something more, or to keep quiet?

“Remember how I wanted to go back to school the next day?” he says. “What a jerk.”

“No,” Bliss says, “I completely understood how you felt. I had a paper due that Friday and I kept thinking, My paper, my paper, like someone was going to be mad at me if I didn't get it done.”

“And who do you suppose that someone was?” Gerald says.

“No kidding.”

“It was different, though,” Gerald says. “I just wanted to get out of the house.”

Bliss nods. It was different and it was the same. Who didn't want to get out of the house? Even her mother kept saying she had to get to the store so she could make dinner, when all afternoon people were coming over with casseroles and stews, more food than they could eat in a week.

“Why do you think he did it?” Marisa says, and Bliss closes her eyes.

Why did he do it? This is the central question of Bliss's life. It's so central that it's no longer really a question at all, so much as a state of mind. She has made her accommodation to it: it's as much who she is as anything else—her name, her face in the mirror. She has always thought Gerald felt the same way, that there was no real answer. Now she can't help thinking that Marisa has
asked this question for him, that he asked her to ask it, and the idea of the two of them going over it all—late at night, in the dark—makes Bliss want to get up and run. Leave it alone, she wants to say. Leave it
alone.
But then she opens her eyes and wonders whether she's wrong: Gerald seems surprised, almost fearful. Is he as reluctant to say anything as she is? She looks at Marisa and realizes that she's
curious
—she asked because she really wants to know.

For every answer, there's another question.
What
was he so angry about?
How
did that turn into despair?
Why
did he finally give up? Out of nowhere Bliss remembers a time when she was thirteen or fourteen and so awkward and shy about going to school dances that she wouldn't tell her mother about them until the last minute, when it was too late to buy a new dress; she'd pretend to be disappointed that she couldn't go because she didn't have anything to wear. Her father got wind of it somehow, and at five o'clock on the afternoon of the Christmas dance he offered to drive her to the shopping center; he took her from store to store, waiting patiently until she found something she liked. He was so
nice
about it—it was a dark green velvet dress and he told her it was perfect because it matched her eyes and made her skin look luminous. He actually said that—“luminous.” How does this fit in?

“I guess,” Bliss says, “he didn't want to go on living,” and although this is so much
not
an answer, Marisa nods, as if she's satisfied.

Gerald puts his hand on Marisa's shoulder and she nestles between his legs and rests her head on his knee. He starts playing with the hair that's come out of her bun, twisting it around his finger, and it comes to Bliss all at once: her brother loves this woman. The business with the boots, his confession about the
meatball sub, her outburst in the kitchen—they don't mean anything; they're the tiniest of truths about these people. He loves her.

Bliss sinks back into her chair and sips her tea, which has grown cold. She looks at the fire. It's a perfect fire, really: the flames are spread evenly across the logs and leap to a dramatic peak in the center of the fireplace. She's not sure she even knows how to make a fire; isn't there some special way you have to place the logs so there's just the right amount of space between them?

“Are you tired?” Gerald says. He's smiling at her, a sad kind of smile, and although she's not tired—she feels absolutely wide awake—she nods and yawns and stands up.

“It was a long drive,” she says.

Marisa moves as if to stand, and Bliss says, “No, don't.” She walks over and kisses Gerald on the cheek, hesitates for a moment, then leans down and kisses Marisa, too. “Good night,” she says.

SHE LIES ON
the bed in her room without undressing. She keeps seeing the morning with Jason when she first knew how it was going to be. They were at her apartment and they'd finished their coffee and were standing in the kitchen. She was waiting for him to suggest that they spend the day together, thinking, Say something, say something, until it was like an incantation in her mind. When he finally spoke, though, and said, “Bye, I'll call you,” instead of disappointment she had felt an enormous rush of relief—a feeling, she thinks now, of things falling back into place. She doesn't know what her reason for living is, but it could never have been him. He was never her reason for anything except wearing more makeup than she felt comfortable in and pretending, for a few months, that she was part of something serious.

She changes into her nightgown and goes into the bathroom to
brush her teeth. Lying on the counter, still in its wrapper, is a brand-new bar of scented soap. She's sure it wasn't there before. She picks it up and brings it to her face; through the blue paper she can smell the rich aroma of sandalwood. Marisa must have brought it in while she and Gerald were outside. It's an expensive soap, and she has a hard time imagining Marisa in one of those drugstores that call themselves pharmacies and sell imported brushes and combs one aisle over from the Maalox. She can't help feeling flattered—did Marisa buy this soap expressly for her?