Consumption (7 page)

“Sure, we'll go to the Festival,” said Star.

And maybe they would, Star thought, watching Mabel close the door as she exited. Maybe she and Mabel would go to the Festival together, and for a few, brief moments things could be as they had always been.

The fan above began to rattle with the intensity of its speed, and Star reached up to pull the cord, slowing its rotations to a steady hum. She crawled back under the covers and pulled them over her head.

Star hardly noticed as, turning over, her foot snaked loose and jarred the forgotten doll's teapot, spilling the rest of its liquid into a puddle on the floor.

Erma and John sat at Bunny's breakfast table, still picking the sleep out of their eyes. They watched as the older woman cheerfully bustled around the kitchen.

“I hope you slept well,” Bunny said, positioning a carafe of orange juice on the table. Beside the juice was a spread out of a magazine, with scrambled eggs, freshly baked bread, cinnamon rolls, and bacon.

“Like champs,” John said. “You must have gotten up before dawn to make all of this.”

“Oh,” said Bunny, waving the comment away, “today's Festival Day, so I want to get an early start, make sure I beat the crowds over there.”

“Yes, we keep hearing something about a festival. What is it?”

Bunny set a steaming mug of coffee in front of Erma. “The Black Squirrel Festival. It's Cavus's biggest happening.”

“Do I dare ask?” John looked to be in an especially good mood this morning, and Erma noticed the question came not with his usual sarcasm, but with a cheer behind it. He even seemed to be enjoying the food, shoveling it in in great bites.

“Have you seen any of our squirrels, Mr. Scott?”

“Can't say that I have, although I wasn't looking in the dark.”

Bunny nodded. “They're very special, our squirrels. We're one of the few places in the United States to have such a large population of black squirrels.”

“Black?” asked Erma.

“Completely.” Bunny nodded. “Cute little devils, actually.”

“I've never even heard of a black squirrel.” Erma turned to her husband. “It'd be fun to see one, huh?”

“Shouldn't be hard,” said Bunny. “Those squirrels just about seem to know when Festival time rolls around. They're all over the place, picking goodies right out of people's hands.”

“Sounds exciting,” said John. Erma couldn't tell if the comment was genuine.

“You're welcome to stay,” said Bunny, and her voice rose. “Oh, yes! Wouldn't that be fun? We so rarely have visitors here, and the Black Squirrel Festival really is something to see. It would be no trouble at all to put you up for an extra night.”

John met Erma's eyes over the table, and gave her a nearly imperceptible shake of his head. No.

“We need to get the moving truck back,” Erma said. “It costs extra to keep it longer.”

“Well, if you change your mind,” said Bunny. “Anyway, Riley just called. Said he'd be by in an hour with your dog. I guess Uncle Bob's buddies have kind of taken over the project of fixing your car. They called Riley from the garage and said they should have it ready by this afternoon and will bring it by. So if you want to, that gives you time to take a walk, and at least see the Festival getting set up and maybe catch yourself sight of a black squirrel.”

Erma waited for John to protest, to make up some excuse, but to her surprise, he didn't. “Sounds like a plan,” he agreed.

After breakfast, they went outside. John took Erma's hand, and they walked together, fingers interlaced. She couldn't remember the last time they had held hands, and it felt good.

Next door to Bunny's house, a man emerged carrying a briefcase. John lifted his free hand to wave and the man waved back as he got into his car. “Poor bastard. From the way Bunny talks, he must be the only man in all of Cavus going to work today instead of to the Festival.”

Erma laughed. “Maybe he's afraid of squirrels.”

As they walked on, Erma couldn't help but admire the town. On every lawn the grass grew a lush, vibrant green. Trees—some fruit, others cottonwoods and ash—shaded the streets. Some of the trees were foreign, a few cherry trees, for instance, and a very few were native to the hills, but whatever was planted here grew, and grew well. It was small-town life just as she'd always wanted John to see it. She smiled and squeezed his hand more tightly. All of the darkness from last night seemed to wash away in the morning sun. They were really going to make it. She knew this as suddenly and surely as the sun breaking through the clouds overhead.

When they hit Main Street, the pre-Festival activity was already in full force, people hustling back and forth setting up tents and tables, a steady hum of conversation buzzing excitedly amongst them. The buildings on either side of the street, in front of which the tents were being erected, displayed the old false storefronts popular at the turn of the century. Erma and John walked past the all-purpose drugstore, where, no doubt, community members picked up last-minute groceries as well as their prescriptions. Probably there was even a soda fountain inside, if it was anything like Erma's hometown.

In the distance Erma could make out the outlines of a larger building beyond the town, resting in the hills, and she guessed this was the new factory, where Bunny's husband worked. Tendrils of smoke trailed lazily from the factory's two chimneys, forming snakelike tentacles in the sky.

Erma had to leap out of the way as a little girl, six or seven, came hurtling by on her bike, and then leap aside again as a pursuant, this one a boy the same age, came careening after her. Both children were laughing madly. “Sorry!” the little girl called over her shoulder. The girl only just turned back in time to avoid the large pothole in the middle of the street, but as soon as she saw it she maneuvered the bike expertly around it.

“Could give Mr. Knievel a run for his money, I bet,” said John.

“Cute, though,” said Erma. She took John's other hand and pulled him to her.

A grin flashed across his face. “And almost as wild as you were when I met you.”

“I was not.”

“No? Asking strange men to sleep with you?”

“It was a hypothetical question. In the name of science.”

“Didn't end up being so hypothetical, though, did it?”

He bent down and scooped Erma up into a cradle, tickling her hard under her rib cage.

She kicked at him, but she was laughing so hard that the kicks were mostly ineffectual. “Put me
down
!”

John bounced her up, and then acted like he was going to drop her. “Are you sure?” He bounced her again, threateningly.

“I'm serious. I'm going to pee my pants!” Tears streamed down her cheeks as John set her down and then pulled her roughly to him, kissing her in the middle of the street.

And there, in the foreign street in a town she'd never been in and yet was, she knew, as familiar as breathing, she understood a new truth. She wanted to try again. Was
willing
to try. Despite all her fears of what could be, she could find a way to want to have this man's child. She could take the risk.

Gently, he pulled away from her, leaving her feeling a little dizzy. She wanted to tell him,
needed
to…

Erma caught a movement out of the corner of her eye, and she turned to see what it was. “John,” she said. “Don't look now, but I think we've got an audience.” A group of kids stood on the street, just outside of the drugstore, staring at them, grinning. Two of the kids were holding ice-cream cones, and one of them grinned, pointing at her.

“He kisseded her!” the little girl said, ice cream from the cone dribbling down her cheeks as she squealed again in delight. “That man kisseded her!”

“A little early for ice cream, isn't it?” John called back playfully.

It could wait. Erma wanted to stretch this moment, stretch this unexpectedly beautiful morning into a sweet prelude of the revelation. Make this a day that they would both remember forever.

“I'm going to go do some investigative reporting concerning where those kids got their goodies,” Erma said. “Think you could handle an
A.M.
purple cow?”

“I haven't the faintest idea what that is,” said John, “but whatever you bring to me, oh, madam, I shall consume.”

“Be right back,” she told him. “Then we really should get to Bunny's before Riley brings Maxie over. With our luck, Bunny will feed her some table scraps and that will be that. Maxie will insist on staying here permanently.”

“If Bunny feeds me any more, I might decide to do the same.”

“Oh, no, mister. You're coming with me. Till death do us part and all that jazz.” Erma kissed him once more, wiggling her eyebrows at the kids as she did so, much to their amusement. They obliged by providing a soundtrack of
ooooew
s to the kiss. She pushed John toward a bench shaded by a large tree on the side of the street, and pointed at it.

“Sit right there, and don't move until I get back.” John sat, and Erma, her feet feeling like they had wings on them, crossed the street to the promised land of the drugstore.

John watched his wife walk across the street, and a moment of nausea shot through him. It was guilt, pure and simple. He'd never told his wife about the affair, and he didn't intend to. Not now.

He watched as Erma parted the crowd of kids, and saw her bend down to ruffle the hair of the little girl, a cute thing with cherublike curls. He had to swallow the lump in his throat. He could see now that everything was coming to an end, that the affair had been wrong. No matter how he had justified it at the time, he had betrayed her.

But then, she'd betrayed him, too. When Erma had gotten pregnant, at first she'd suggested getting an abortion. It had been evident from the beginning that she didn't want the child, even when she knew how badly he did. It was all he'd ever wanted. She pretended, later, after the miscarriage, that she was upset. That she had wanted it, but he knew better.

He could understand her hesitancy, really he could. After all those battered women she saw at work, the terrible life she saw their kids being forced into, it must be hard to imagine this world as a place worthy of bringing anyone into. But she also knew that ever since he could remember, John had wanted to be a father.

There were several ways, he was sure, a psychologist would try to explain his need for kids. John's own lack of a father figure when he was little, for one. His dad had always been away on business, flying to one meeting or another for his company, and his mother substituted food for that missed affection, deeding John a thoroughly miserable childhood. So, yeah, he probably wanted a kid so he could make sure its life was different, that it had the love and normal childhood he'd always wanted but never had. But it was more than that. He wanted a kid because he wanted to be a father, pure and simple. Always had. He couldn't understand why it was so easy for people to believe that women could have the urge, the biological desire to have a child, but when a man said the same was true for him, they looked at him strangely.

Whatever the case, when he met Erma, he knew that not only did he want a child, he wanted one with her. And she'd said that she wanted the same. Until it actually happened, and she found herself pregnant. Then things grew so cold between them that they might as well have been living in a meat locker. He still didn't know if she would have gotten the abortion against his wishes if the miscarriage hadn't happened, but he thought she probably would have. Then, though, he'd convinced himself of its certainty. So he'd had the affair.

It was easy. Far easier than he'd ever considered an affair might be. The woman had been a student of his. She'd had a crush on him from the beginning, he could tell, but hadn't thought anything of it. Many of his students had crushes on him—harmless things, those crushes. But Mary Jamison was different. For one thing, she was beautiful. Not just cute and bubbly pretty, but magazine gorgeous. She was a transplant from Seneca, South Carolina, and she spoke with a purr-like accent, thick with honey.

“Why, hell-oooo, Mr. Scott,” she'd say, sitting across his desk from him during office hours. Then she'd run one leg over the other, crossing then uncrossing them while he watched. She was making
sure
that he watched. When she took her paper out to show him she would always move her chair around the desk next to him. From there, she reached a hand out to pat his leg, lightly. “Thank you again for helping me,” she'd say. “You're so nice.”

The first few times, he'd ignored her advances, pushed her hand away. But then one day, the day Erma came home crying about a pregnant woman who'd just been beaten to a pulp by her husband, saying that she didn't plan on bringing a baby into a world like this, all the while the bump in her belly growing just a little bit more pronounced, and he'd had, finally, enough.

The next day, when Mary came in for help on another paper, and patted his leg with her soft hand, he didn't push her away. Instead, he surprised them both by standing up, going around his desk, and locking his door. Then he picked Mary Jamison up, sat her light, birdlike frame on the desk, and fucked her. The whole incident lasted no more than five minutes.

Now, across the street, the door to the drugstore opened, and Erma emerged, two paper cups in her hand, spoons sticking out. She looked up, saw him watching her, and waved, the paper cup still clutched in her fist. He saw something white dribbling from it, and watched as his wife grinned like a little kid, and licked it off her knuckles.

A pain as real and physical as a punch gripped his gut. They were beyond fixing, he knew that. He himself had put the wheels of their official separation into motion, but he could, at least, give her today. Give it to them both.

“Let's do it,” he said, when she came over. “Let's stay here for another night and go to the damned Festival.”

“Are you sure?” She handed him his cup, full, he saw, of a purple-and-white sludge of ice cream and something else.

He took the cup from her and spooned a bite into his mouth. The ice cream was cold and delicious, tasting something like grape juice and cream. Standing there, with the ice cream trailing down his throat and his wife looking, to him, more beautiful than he'd ever seen her, with the sunlight bouncing off the warm brown of her hair, making her outline fuzzy, he thought he would remember the taste of that grape ice cream for the rest of his life. “I'm sure,” he said. “There's no hurry. Besides, I think we deserve it, don't you?”

“I don't know what we deserve,” said Erma, lapping happily at her own ice cream. “But I'll take what we can get.”

As they walked away, the sound of the children jumping rope and singing followed them. John tried to pick out the words, but could only catch a few:

I'm hun-gry, I'm thirs-ty.

Lucy, Lucy, what did you say?

I'm hun-gry, I'm thirs-ty.

He wondered, briefly, who Lucy was, but then the voices faded completely, and he concentrated instead on his wife. Only the name Lucy stayed with him from the song. It was a pretty name. One that, once upon a time, he might have considered for their child.