Trailerpark (11 page)

She built the shack herself, from stuff she dragged down the road and into the woods from the town dump—old boards, galvanized sheet metal, strips of tarpaper, cast-off shingles—and furnished it the same way, with a discolored, torn mattress, a three-legged card table, an easy chair with the stuffing blossoming at the seams, and a moldly rug that had been in a children's playhouse. It was a single room, with a tin woodstove for cooking and heat, a privy out back, and for light a single kerosene lantern.

For a while there were a few people from the trailerpark who went out there to the edge of the swamp and visited her. You could see her shack easily from the park, as she had situated it right where she had the clearest view of the charred wreckage of old number 11. Bruce Severance, the college kid, went fairly often to visit her, especially in early summer, when he was busily locating the feral hemp plants in the area and needed her expert help, and Terry Constant went out there, “just for laughs,” he said, but even so, he used to sit peacefully with her in the sun and get stoned on hemp and rap with her about his childhood and dead mother. Whether or not Flora talked about her childhood and her dead mother Terry never said, but then, no one asked him, either. It quickly got hard to talk about Flora. She was just there, exactly the way she was, the Guinea Pig Lady, even though she didn't have any guinea pigs, and there wasn't much anyone could say about it anymore, since everyone more or less knew how she had got to be who she was and everyone more or less knew who she was going to be from here on out. Merle used to walk out there in warm weather, and he continued to visit Flora long after everyone else had left off and had gone about his and her business quite as if Flora no longer even existed. The reason he went out, he said, was because you got a different perspective on the trailerpark from out there, practically the same perspective he said he got in winter from the lake when he was in his ice-house out on the lake. And though Marcelle never went out to Flora's shack, every time she passed it with her gaze, she stopped her gaze and for a long time looked at the place and Flora sitting outside on an old metal folding chair, smoking her cob pipe and staring back at the trailerpark. She gazed at Flora mournfully and with an anger longing for a shape, for Marcelle believed that she alone knew the woman's secret.

W
HEN
D
OREEN
T
IEDE MARRIED
B
UCK
T
IEDE
she did not have to change her name. Her grandfather Sam Tiede, a well driller from Northwood, and Buck's father Norman Tiede, a house painter from Catamount, were brothers. They had been born and raised in Catamount, along with a half-dozen more Tiedes of the same generation, and when Sam had moved to Northwood ten miles away and had become a well driller and after a few years had managed to borrow enough money from the bank in Concord to set him and his son up with their own drilling rig, he was regarded from then till now as the successful son of old Warren Tiede, for none of the remaining children had moved that far from Catamount and made money. Doreen, then, was descended directly from the Tiedes who had risen in the world, whereas her second cousin Buck was from the Tiedes who, generation after generation, had plowed the same old row. This is important to know, because it helps explain why Doreen didn't have to change her last name when, a seventeen-year-old virgin, she married, and it also helps explain why they acted the way they did after they were married and divorced. It doesn't much help explain Buck's alcoholism, of course, and it doesn't tell you why Doreen had such a craving for sexual love that Buck, who wasn't much interested in sex in the beginning, got to be obsessed with it, but it does tell you why Doreen thought Buck was a better man than he perhaps thought he was, and it tells you a little something about his anger.

In the first year of their marriage, Doreen made love with three men other than her husband, who knew about only one of the men, Howie Leeke, and when it came right down to it, didn't know about Howie for sure and was made to think that he was imagining the worst parts, the parts, that is, where Howie rides wildly atop Doreen on the waterbed he's supposed to have out there in his trailer on Cush Meadow Road, rides her bouncing, arching, tautly sprung, eighteen-year-old body as if it were a horse he were breaking, rubbing and drifting through her while she works against him the other way in perfectly thrilling counterline, until she can't control her movements any longer and… Well, you know the rest.

Buck knew the rest, too, but only from what he had read about sex in
Playboy
and other such magazines, not from what he had experienced with women himself, for he had very little experience when he married Doreen—teen-age sex in the back seat of his Chevy Nomad with girls he had gone to high school with, which meant mainly kissing and biting and then plucking and pulling and poking at each other's private parts and sometimes sucking on each other's private parts, which, even though such activities usually brought him and sometimes his girlfriend a deep shudder and a wet spot, nevertheless left him feeling dazed with guilt and overall feelings of inferiority; and then, later, in the service, sex with prostitutes in towns near the bases where he was stationed, in Texas and South Carolina, sex that left him feeling like a man who has just walked out to the neon-lit street from a pornographic movie; and after he had come back to New Hampshire and had gone to work for Doreen's father and grandfather, his cousin and uncle, drilling wells in Northwood and living at his parents' home in Catamount, sex with Doreen, who was then a senior in high school, five years younger than he. Because Buck was afraid he would get Doreen pregnant before she graduated from high school, and probably also because he wanted Doreen's father and grandfather to think well of him, Buck Tiede of the Catamount Tiedes who never amount to a tinker's dam anyway, sex with Doreen remained more or less of the back-seat kind, enlivened of course with a lot of talk, for they were, after all, in love.

Both Doreen and Buck were good-looking, and people thought of them as sexy because they looked the way sexy people are supposed to look, clean and healthy and symmetrical. Doreen was tall and broad-shouldered with full breasts and a firm, round bottom. She had silky-smooth, dark brown hair that hung loosely over her shoulders, and in the summer she tanned easily and evenly to a shade that made people think she might have a little Mediterranean blood in her. Her face was large, with a full, broad mouth that was good-humored, and because of the crispness of her full lips, sensual, and her brown eyes, shaded by a prominent but serious-looking brow, were set wide on her face. Her nose wasn't quite right—a little short and narrow for such a large face, but it certainly was not unattractive. Buck's most unattractive feature in those days was the wide gap between his front teeth. The gap was wide enough for him to spit through, which he did habitually, wide enough even for him to clamp a cigarette with, which, as a joke, he sometimes did, so that he could go on talking while his cigarette remained attached to his upper jaw by the gapped front teeth. Then he would pluck the cigarette away, and you would see that the gap was actually kind of sexy, kind of inviting, like an open door or gate, and if you were a man, you'd think, “Hmmm, I bet old Buck gets a lot of women,” and if you were a woman, you'd think, “Hmmm, I wonder what it would be like to run my tongue into that gap between his teeth.” He was also tall, a little over six feet, and in those days in good shape from his work on the drilling rig, and with his ash-brown hair cut in the military style and his clear blue eyes and straight, narrow nose, he was clean-looking, too.

Their wedding night and honeymoon—a week in a motel near Franconia Notch in the White Mountains—weren't much fun for Doreen. They weren't much fun for Buck, either. He was awkward and too quick and then impotent for a while and then impatiently passionate and grabby, his head so full of blood from shame and lust that he couldn't think, so finally, because she could think, Doreen just gave herself over to him and, without feeling, let him have his ways with her. There were several ways, because of all the false starts and false stops and his difficulties with the condom, and it was with barely hidden relief for both of them when, finally, lodged up inside her, Buck grunted and his pelvis whimpered of its own accord, and he was freed to withdraw from her. Her hymen he had broken easily, without even realizing it, earlier, and though she had felt a stab of pain, it was a hot, quick and almost pleasurable pain, so she had said nothing to him. Then next morning when he got out of bed to pee, he saw the specks of blood on the sheet beneath where he had slept, and he quickly covered them with the top sheet and went straight into the shower, while she lay curled on her side sleeping peacefully.

Throughout the honeymoon week, Doreen watched and understood Buck, and she loved him. She hated to see him suffer so, and in a way she wished he would just forget all about making love to her and just let her look at him, as if he were a movie actor or maybe a stranger she had met here in the White Mountains while on vacation alone, a tall, athletic-looking man with bright blue eyes and a sexy gap between his front teeth. She could watch him at breakfast in the International Pancake House across the road from the motel. Or she could watch him in the chair in front of her as they both rode the aerial tramway to the top of Wildcat Mountain. Or, at the viewing platform at Echo Lake below the Old Man of the Mountain, he could be peering through the telescope next to hers. His quarter's worth of viewing and hers would run out at the same time, and both their telescopes would droop at the same instant. He would turn to her and their eyes would meet above their telescopes, and he would say, “I've been watching you all week. I think you're beautiful, and I want to make love to you.” The music would rise, she would let go of her telescope and take a single, delicate step forward, he would reach out his hand and take hers, and… Well, you know the rest.

Doreen knew the rest, too, but she wasn't all that interested in the rest. And everything she was going through in bed with Buck only served to formalize her lack of interest. When they returned to Catamount and moved into the trailerpark at Skitter Lake, it only got worse. Buck tried to make love to her about once a week at first, and then once every two weeks, and then only once a month, always with the same frustrating results for her, the same depressing results for him. It wasn't that either one of them was technically incompetent in the act. What was wrong was inside their heads. Her fantasies and his fears had no way of meshing together or of helping one another go away or even of becoming known to one another. The one thing that kept their attempts at lovemaking even remotely tender was her understanding of his fears, for when he grew angry at himself for his awkwardness or the unpredictability of his body, its sudden flights from itself, he would turn on her, suddenly snarling through the darkness that lay between them, “Goddamn it, Doreen, if you didn't just lay there like a log I might be able to get myself more excited about the idea of making love to you,” and if, as a result of that scolding, she started licking him over his chest, fondling his inner thighs, grasping his muscular buttocks in her hands, digging into his white, tight flesh with her sharp fingernails, he'd slump and say in a low voice, “I don't know, Doreen, it frightens me when you're like this. All I can think of is your doing it with another man.” Doreen understood these remarks and during the days while Buck was at work in Northwood drilling artesian wells with her father and grandfather, she plotted strategies that she hoped would allay Buck's fears at last and thereby would make him into the kind of man who could lift her up and out of her real life into the world where she knew she truly belonged, the world in which she was the recipient of a handsome stranger's utter devotion.

Within six months, however, the only time Buck would make love to her was when he was drunk, but not every time he was drunk, for by that time he was getting drunk often. All Doreen's strategies had failed by then—filmy negligees, soft music, flattery, faked orgasms, even marijuana. But nothing she did allowed Buck to come to her directly, good-humoredly, with simple hunger and tenderness and admiration neatly intertwined. If anything, her strategies only made it worse, because Buck always noticed them immediately and grew either desperate to respond to them or else grew angry and accused her of accusing him of being unable to function sexually without atmosphere and stimulants. That was when she committed adultery for the first time—after Buck had grabbed the two marijuana cigarettes from her hand and had flushed them down the toilet and stomped out of the trailer, leaving her alone in bed. She had got out of bed and had walked to the trailer next door in her nightgown, barefoot, to the kid she had bought the marijuana cigarettes from, Bruce Severance, thinking that what she wanted was to buy another cigarette, this one to smoke alone, defiantly in front of the TV, so that when Buck came back smelling of booze and still angry at her, she wouldn't much care. But she and Bruce had got to talking, he loved to talk, especially about marijuana, and she had not realized that marijuana was such an interesting subject, that there was so much to know about it, and for about five minutes, standing against the wall of his trailer, the kid had made love to her. He had simply come up against her when she had started to leave, had pulled her nightgown to her hips, and then, with one quick hand, had unzipped his fly, releasing his erect penis, which he had inserted. It was over before she had realized it had begun.

“What … what if I get pregnant?” she whispered into his ear.

“Don't worry, man. You won't.”

“I won't?”

“Tantric birth control, man. It takes years to learn, but it works. You won't get pregnant,” he promised.

She felt his semen dribbling down the inside of her thigh, and she drew her nightgown back down and stepped away.

“Just don't forget to wash, man,” the kid said, and he asked if she wanted to use his bathroom.

She stammered no, no, she'd better get back, because her husband could be coming in any minute and he would be drunk and mean.

The kid agreed and opened the door for her. He kissed her on the nape of her neck as she passed by him and went out, but she barely felt his kiss, for she was terrified that she had been impregnated by him.

For a month after that night she felt dirty and almost evil, but when she discovered that she was not pregnant, she no longer felt dirty or almost evil. In fact, she felt downright eager to do it again. Not with Bruce Severance, however, for, even though he was a few years older than she, he was a kid to her, a long-haired pretentious kid, and what she wanted was a man, a grown man who was sure of himself and had a broad smile and could explain things to her and would be kind and tolerant and patient with her when she could not understand what he explained. That was why she made love to Leon LaRoche, who lived in number 2, two trailers down from where she lived with Buck.

Leon was in his late twenties then, and he dressed nicely, because of his job as a teller at the Catamount Savings and Loan, and he was a bachelor who smiled easily and who liked to explain things slowly, methodically, calmly, with tolerance and even affection for Doreen when she seemed not to know what he was talking about. He talked politics with her, for there was an election that fall, and though her family had always voted Republican, Doreen was thinking of registering as a Democrat for this, her first election, and Leon explained to her what she should tell her family when they found out she had registered as a Democrat, which they surely would do, since the lists of registered voters and their party affiliations were required by law to be posted in public places. He told her about Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy and civil rights, which she thought fascinating, for, even though she had heard of all three, no one had ever explained them to her slowly, carefully, and with a sure, precisely accurate knowledge of what she did not know, which meant that no one had ever told her about these things without confusing her or else condescending to her.