Another You (34 page)

Though the waitress paid no attention, the man at the table never took his eyes off their booth.

“I wait tables here on weekends,” Cheryl said. “During the week I’ve got a job in Lexington, working at a gift shop one of my cousins opened.” She looked at Marshall. “I haven’t thought about poetry in a while,” she said.

Marshall shrugged. “I can’t say I’ve thought about it lately myself. Cheryl—I thought McCallum told you I was going to be here.”

“She’s happy to see you. I knew she would be,” McCallum said.

“I’m not exactly
happy
to see either of you. I hope you don’t take that wrong.”

“We don’t understand why you left,” McCallum said. “It doesn’t seem right that because”—he lowered his voice to a near whisper—“because of what happened, you should be here, and Livan should have blown town, leaving whatever mess she left behind.”

“You came to Buena Vista to sympathize with me,” Cheryl said. It was the first time Marshall had heard the name of the town pronounced. It was “Buena” to rhyme with “tuna.”

“We’re stopping on our way to Key West,” Marshall said.

“No, we came because we wanted to see you,” McCallum said.

“Well, here I am,” Cheryl said.

“Though I didn’t know when I wrote I’d have the added benefit of meeting with your mother,” McCallum said.

What was this? Marshall thought. Her mother was suspicious about why two college professors would stop to see her daughter
who’d dropped out? It did sound strange. He could well imagine that Cheryl’s mother would want to check them out.

“Why?” Cheryl said, ignoring the remark about her mother. “Why do you care how I’m doing?” It was loud enough that the man eating with his family heard the question. Marshall saw him kick his wife’s leg under the table.

“I want to tell you the truth about the things Livan accused me of,” McCallum said. “At the very least, you deserve to have an idea of what was true and what wasn’t, and what was an exaggeration.”

“Forgive me,” Cheryl said, “but I’ve stopped thinking about the truth. She thinks what she thinks, and you say what you say. It’s all over, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Then what’s this about, that you drop out of college—”

“You worried about falling enrollments or something?”

“Worried about you,” McCallum said.

Cheryl sighed. She looked around the restaurant, taking it in as the odd place it was the same way they had when they’d first come in. Marshall could almost feel her sudden estrangement from the place. A woman came from the back and flipped the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
on the front door. She ruffled Cheryl’s hair but didn’t say anything. She looked through McCallum and Marshall as if they weren’t there.

“Listen, this isn’t about me. It isn’t even about me,” Cheryl said suddenly. “But since I’ve heard enough about you, and even from you, for a lifetime, let me tell you a couple of things myself. My mother has gray hair now, she had a baby last year, and she had to go half-time at the food plant. Daddy’s doing long-distance hauling on runs between here and Michigan. He’s got a girlfriend in Michigan my mother found out about, and she thinks it’s just a matter of time until he’ll find work out there and not come back. Since I’ve been home she’s had two operations to tie off veins in her legs, but she’s going back to work full-time next month. She needs the money. I’ve been taking the baby to my cousin’s shop in Lexington, because the lady who was coming in while my mother worked ran away with the Amway salesman. It’s not
The Bridges of Madison County
down here; everybody runs away all the time. It’s nothing special.”

“Makes it stranger you came back,” McCallum said.

“McCallum,” Marshall said, with exaggerated patience, “she wanted to help her mother out.”

“Which I very much approve of—the idea of her getting some help—because the woman was once the love of my life. When I was sixteen years old. Seventeen. Not that much younger than you are now, Cheryl.”

“I’m aware of that,” Cheryl said.

“What?” Marshall said.

“Your mother tell you we almost got married?” McCallum said.

“She’s got a picture of you two hidden in her dresser drawer. You probably know the one: the two of you in a canoe,” Cheryl said, evading the question.

“She got a scholarship to a camp in Virginia. It was my last year there,” McCallum said to Marshall. “I was a camp counsellor.”

“She told me when I was in high school,” Cheryl said. She looked at Marshall. “My mother and the guidance counsellor thought I should apply to Benson. That Professor McCallum here would be my ticket to getting financial aid.”

“What in the hell!” Marshall said, shaking his head. What was he doing here, as if he had any part in this? He hardly knew McCallum, and had no desire to know about the intricacies of his life.

“I’m still ashamed,” McCallum said to Cheryl. “I dumped your mother for no good reason and broke her heart. It’s still painful to think about.”

“Unbelievable,” Marshall said. “Why couldn’t you have given me a little background before we showed up here? What is this about that I’m constantly dragged into your life and your problems like my feelings don’t matter? You think I love your revelations, or do you have trouble levelling with anybody?”

“Cowardice,” McCallum said. “You continue to misunderstand me.”

“We’re both cowards,” Cheryl said. “I didn’t tell her you were coming.”

“You didn’t?” McCallum said. “You said you would.”

“I changed my mind. I thought I’d leave it up to you—have you call her yourself if you were so sure it was the right thing.” She looked at her untouched coffee as if she were considering something small and sad. “She has ten children, you know. She’s at the free clinic with one of my brothers tonight, waiting to get his arm x-rayed. She’s got
enough troubles. I don’t know how to say this except to say it: I don’t know what happened in Boston, in spite of the fact that Livan turned out to be a real nut case. On the chance that you did that, though, I could hardly want you back in my mother’s life. Your track record is that you proposed to her, asked her to wait for you, then took off with somebody else.” She looked around the restaurant. The dancing man and his friend were sitting slumped forward with their arms around each other’s shoulders. No sign of any waitresses, as they waited for everyone to clear out. “What do you think can happen?” Cheryl said. “You think you two are going to fall into each other’s arms like all these years never happened? If she’d wanted to do that, why didn’t she make an attempt to get in touch with you when she drove me to Benson?” She didn’t wait for McCallum to answer. “I told her about Livan Baker—what she accused you of. She wanted to know why I’d felt under so much pressure; I told her exactly what I’d been through. Courtesy of her white knight.” Cheryl shook her head. “She was so horrified. I guess—” She pushed the coffee aside. “She clearly didn’t think you would have done such a thing,” Cheryl said, in a very matter-of-fact tone. “You say you didn’t. Let’s say you didn’t.”

“Let’s take her home and give her a bowl of cornflakes,” the woman said to the man. “Tomorrow’s a workday.”

“Don’t need to remind me of that,” the man said.

“They’re closing,” Marshall said, stating the obvious, looking around at the too-bright, sparsely populated restaurant.

“I want to say one more thing,” Cheryl said. “Two things, actually. Up until a few years ago she was still very pretty. Her hair’s gray now. She hasn’t lost the weight she gained with the last baby. She’s had one medical problem after another since Sara was born. I don’t want you to be unprepared. The other thing I want to say is something I’ve already told Marshall. If you don’t talk to him about what’s so meaningful in your life, maybe he doesn’t keep you posted. It’s not such a big thing, but I think you need to hear it. The things Livan said you did to her. Does he know where she got a lot of those things from?” Cheryl said.

“No,” Marshall said.

“Does he know you kissed me that night in the car?”

McCallum smirked, raising an eyebrow in Marshall’s direction.

“He didn’t until now,” Marshall said.

“Well, the thing is, I’m pretty sure my mother had a lover. Either
that or she and this man had a crush on each other. My mother got religion a while back, and she had me baptized. She would have baptized the older ones, but two brothers are gone and the other one put his foot down, and Daddy backed them up. I wrote Marshall that this boyfriend, or whatever he was—he was somebody she’d met at church. She got all excited about the idea that he become my godfather. When I was going to look at colleges, he drove me to a couple of places not too far away—we’d go there and come back the same day. I didn’t like him. On one of the rides, before we got there, he said he felt sick; he pulled off the highway and said he needed to take a walk. I went with him. He raped me in the woods.”

“They don’t talk to you in school about being a vegetarian, do they?” the man at the table said to his daughter.

The answer was inaudible. The two men from the counter picked up their jackets and started out, slapping each other on the shoulder, trading insults about how ugly the other one was. One waved to the man at the table, the other picked up a free real estate guide from a stack inside the door. “Put that back, you ain’t buying nothing,” the man at the table hollered. “You expect some tree to have got chopped so you can wipe the ice off your window?” Behind them, the waitress sponged the counter.

“The reason I’m telling you is because considering that man, and considering my father, it makes me think she doesn’t have great taste in men. I’m not saying you’re that man. Livan apparently thought you were, or decided to make you into him. But she didn’t even know him, and I did. He was singing in the choir the next Sunday, and afterwards when we were filing out, he looked right at me when she stopped to talk to him, swung one of my little brothers up on his shoulders and looked at me like nothing had happened. A whole year went by before he tried it again. That time I told him I’d tell my brother in the marines, and my brother would kill him. He would have, too. He was betting on me being too ashamed to tell anybody, but when he found out I would, that was the end of it. I’m over it now. He comes in here and I let somebody else wait on his table. I mention all this because I still have that brother in the marines, and if you do anything that upsets her, you’re going to wish you’d died when your wife meant you to.”

“Think about it,” McCallum said. “She’s still got my picture, she’s having a rough time—how could I come all the way here and not call
her? What’s that look for? She got in touch with me when she needed a favor, didn’t she?”

“You know, Marshall,” Cheryl said, touching her scarf, “it would be bizarre if I hadn’t stopped kissing you. If I’d gone to bed with you”—she looked at Marshall, whose attention had been drifting, but whose eyes immediately shot open—“and then, after that, if my mother got together with your best friend. Everybody willing to fuck everybody else. It could have been the way it probably was for you guys in the sixties.”

“It was such an awful night,” Marshall said. “It was one quick kiss. You only imagine we might have slept together.”

“Describe it to your wife,” she said. “See if she’d draw the same conclusion.”

“Temper, temper,” McCallum said.

“It really is unbelievable that you’d think about coming back into her life,” Cheryl said to McCallum. “She’s married. She has—” she faltered. “She has a life, and everything about it is difficult enough without you.”

“Think about it: you want to maintain the status quo. You’re also pretending I have power I don’t have. Do you really think that against her inclinations I could take her away?”

“You’d have to take her away, because you could never hack it in Buena Vista,” Cheryl spat out, gesturing around her as if the restaurant represented the entire town. Which it might, Marshall thought. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine his house in New Hampshire. Instead, what came back to him was the green bedspread in the motel room, the bed sagging under him like a badly inflated float.

“Cheryl,” McCallum teased. “Have I made you feel insecure? Are you afraid you won’t be my Dulcinea?”

They’d snapped at each other so fast Marshall hadn’t been able to interject a word; he hadn’t been able to object to McCallum’s pushing this frightened girl too hard—couldn’t he see this was her notion of protecting her mother? All she must feel she had at this moment was her mother, her life with her mother—the same person who had compromised her without realizing it.

“Cheryl,” Marshall said, “I’m going to do my best to see we leave without any call being made to your mother. I want you to know I agree with you.”

“Can you imagine it?” Cheryl burst out. “Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza at Dolly’s restaurant in Buena Vista, Virginia? I mean, poverty like this would bring down even Don Quixote. How would anybody”—she looked at McCallum—
“nobody,”
she said, “could believe in resuming a great romance in Buena Vista. I’m here while she recovers from her leg surgery, and that’s the end. In another few months, I am out of here.”

It was the first time Marshall had the sinking feeling that she was trapped.

McCallum paid the bill, smoothing wadded-up bills on the table-top. “You might both dislike me right now, but at least it should prove to you that I can be transparent,” he said, putting a saltshaker on top of the money. “See? Willing to let my friends know my failures, see my flaws. Willing to admit my shortcomings, to try to make amends.”

“I don’t see it that way,” Cheryl said. “I don’t believe what you say. You’re a barnacle. You attach yourself. You stick on, like a parasite. That’s what’s most important to you.”

“I had no idea in hell about any of this,” Marshall said to Cheryl.

“You seem not to have an idea in hell about a lot of things,” she said.

“You’re mad at him. Don’t be mad at me,” he said.

But her comment had been on target: he had no idea what Sonja was doing tonight; he’d never had a clear idea about what to do in the face of Livan Baker’s problems. He remembered the night he’d talked to McCallum about their talking to someone in an official position, when McCallum had derided the entire concept, saying, “What is ‘the record’? Is it like ‘the Force’?” All his life, he’d stayed the younger brother, looking to someone else for cues. Two days into the trip, he didn’t know whether he’d done the correct thing in leaving New Hampshire, or if Gordon was really looking forward to seeing him. There seemed every chance Gordon had called the other night half hoping Marshall’s plans had fallen through. He was also unsure whether, the more he knew him, McCallum receded farther or began to seem more comprehensible.