Any Bitter Thing (15 page)

Sometimes Andrea just plain broke my heart. What did this sopping slice of girl think I could possibly want from her?

“Take this,” I said, offering her the blanket. She slung it over her shoulders. “Your mother know you’re out here?” I asked.

She looked me over. “Maybe. Maybe not. Either way she’ll figure out a way to blame this on me.”

“Who else should she blame it on?”

Andrea leaned sideways, making sure I could catch the theatrical roll of her inked eyes. “Are you winding up for one of your little treasure hunts?”

“There’s no such thing as a free ride, Andrea. Buckle up.”

Andrea paused, thinking it over. Then, apparently deciding that beggars couldn’t be choosers, she buckled up, loosening the belt just enough to fall halfway between the letter and the spirit of the law.

I pulled onto Random Road and headed south along the river, the noise of the wipers making the car seem quieter by contrast.

“You’re soaking wet,” Andrea said. “I can’t stand the smell of rained-on clothes.” She herself smelled of discount wine, though she appeared to be sober. She pulled her own wet shirt away from her skin, then flinched as it slopped back into place.

“Would you care to wait by the road until a more appealing driver happens along?”

“Not really,” she said sullenly.

“Where are your shoes?”

She ignored me, picking at her nail polish, humming something just under her breath.

“Did somebody hurt you, Andrea?” I asked, measuring my volume.

“I had a fight with my boyfriend, all right?”

“And he took your shoes?”

“They were already off.”

“Your jacket, too?”

She nodded. I was beginning to get the picture.

“Do I know him?” I ventured.

After a moment, she said, “Seavey.”

“Glen Seavey? Seriously?”

Her chin jutted out preemptively. “He can’t stand you, either.”

“Imagine that,” I said. Glen Seavey was a nineteen-year-old senior who had not once condescended to
sit
in my office. He elected, always, to stand, all six feet of him, one hammy fist anchored on my desk, the other jammed provocatively into the pocket of his too-tight jeans. It did not surprise me one bit that Andrea Harmon had scraped up a boyfriend from the dry-rotted bottom of the barrel.

“How long have you been seeing Glen?” I asked.

“Six days.”

“Why did you get out of the car?” “He called me a bitch.”

“Why?”

“Because I wouldn’t suck his you-know-what.”

I slid my eyes sideways. She was testing me, but also telling the truth.

“Then I’m glad you called me, Andrea.”

She let go a conciliatory sigh. “I’m sorry if you were right in the middle of a dinner party or something.” I realized then how important it was for her to imagine me presiding over a long
table, a ring of faces flashing in candlelight, a burble of congenial wordplay. My guess is that she wanted to be anchored, however tenuously, to the kind of person who gave dinner parties.

“We were just wrapping up anyway,” I said.

“Was it fun?” she asked.

I nodded. “You have to spend time with decent people, Andrea.”

“I don’t know any decent people.”

I found Andrea’s driveway, a rutted gravel lane with a prefab house of discolored planks sagging at its bitter end. Her mother had parked a rusting Escort so close to the door that the car’s front bumper appeared to be resting on the steps. She’d left a lamp on in one window, a cold yellow square crossed by a flickering bluish light from a
TV
. From inside came the yapping of the jittery, unhinged terrier that Andrea adored.

“Look, Andrea,” I said. “I’m assuming you’ve got enough sense to be using birth control.”

She gave her eyes a long, exaggerated roll. “Haven’t we had this conversation, like, six hundred times?”

“Yes,” I said pointedly.

“I’m not a moron. You think I can’t learn from my sister’s mistakes?” She stroked her neck absently, darkening a hickey I’d just noticed at the top of her collarbone. “There hasn’t been one single solitary minute of silence in that nuthouse since the second her kids were born. They’re always howling and yowling, either they fell down, or they dropped a cookie, or somebody had the nerve to say ‘no’ when they tried to put the dog in the hamper.” She looked at me. “I guess your nerves kind of short-circuit after a while, because she doesn’t even hear it anymore. Or maybe she’s just gone deaf—as a whaddyacallit, defense mechanism.”

“Which is the long way of saying you
do
use birth control?”

Andrea pursed her used-looking lips. “Usually. It’s kind of a pain.” She swiveled her head toward her house.

“I’ll walk you in,” I said.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Andrea, I’ve been in your house before.”

She hesitated, then got out; we had to step over the bumper of her mother’s car to get to the steps, keeping one hand on the hood. The rain had stopped altogether, leaving a greasy film over everything in the yard.

Mrs. Harmon grunted when Andrea crowded through the too-small kitchen door. She was making a potholder at the kitchen table, on which rested a year’s worth of newspapers and a portable
TV
broadcasting a middle-of-the-night infomercial for a hair-removal system. She looked up and saw me. “What’re you doing here?”

“I brought your daughter home, Mrs. Harmon,” I said. I had to shout a little over the
TV
and a lot over the dog, who was yapping psychotically, jouncing side to side. Cat-sized, with a dirty muzzle and hardly any tail, he jounced and yapped:
Ark ark ark ark ark ark ark!

“I suppose this is my fault?” Mrs. Harmon yelled.
Ark ark ark ark ark ark ark!
“This is all my fault, right? My daughter trots her backside all over two counties and you figure out a way it’s my fault, right?” Her swimmy eyes bulged; she pointed a crochet hook with an alcoholic’s self-righteous bravado. On my previous occasions here she’d been sober and edgy, quoting accurately from the state’s toothless truancy code. I decided I preferred her drunk.

“Ma! “Andrea hollered. “Ma, shut up!”

Ark ark ark ark ark ark ark!

Mrs. Harmon teetered in my direction, her boxy figure taking all the space between the refrigerator and the stove. There were so many pots and pans—clean ones, incongruously shiny—stored on the stove top that you couldn’t see any of the burners. The place smelled faintly of propane. “You people keep your nose stuck out of my business, why don’t you,” Mrs. Harmon
said. She’d been drinking long enough that her voice could rise only so far, for which I was grateful. The dog was springing up and down, but not toward me, more like a jack-in-the-box, stuck in a witless boomerang. “If you people had kids of your own” she added “you wouldn’t be so stick-your-nose about mine.”

The dog kept at it, a persistent pitch that lodged just behind my eyes and grew nails. “Your daughter is a tenth-grader, Mrs. Harmon,” I said irritably. “It’s twelve-thirty in the morning.”

“Aren’t you one to talk,” she said. “Aren’t you a fine and dandy one to talk.” She grabbed two pans from the stove and banged them at the dog, who turned tail for about a fifth of a second, then resumed barking. Andrea scooped him up, and he finally stopped. For a moment we all stood there, blinking in the silence.

“Ma, will you just shut up?” Andrea lumbered to her room, a long groan trailing her as she picked her way through hillocks of laundry, the dog tucked mutely under her arm. Her door slammed with a cardboard-sounding clunk.

“At some point,” I stammered, “at a more appropriate time, Mrs. Harmon—“As a rule, I didn’t like to confront parents; they either blew up or shriveled before your eyes and neither scenario made for sunny times. Mrs. Harmon didn’t say anything, so I added, quietly,” Andrea’s a bright girl, Mrs. Harmon, but she’s barely—”

“Who do you think you are, telling me how to raise my kid?” she snarled. “You think I don’t know you got tried out by a priest?”

I was so stunned that my ears rang. I started to speak, but the saliva caught in my windpipe and I began to cough, first lightly,
hic-hic-hic
, then hard, helpless. Mrs. Harmon waded through a cymbal-crash of fallen cookware, yelling, “Andrea get out here your teacher’s about to croak,” and there was Andrea appearing out of nowhere, hammering on my back with her
bony fist, rejuvenating my healed wounds and releasing spirals of pain as the
TV
show droned in the background and the dog resumed its electroshock barking and a glass of water was thrust into my hands and I stopped coughing and the room righted itself and I found myself outside again, climbing back over the bumper of the Harmons’ low-hipped car as the barking came to a stunning, merciful stop.

“She wasn’t this bad before my father left,” Andrea said. She stood in the open doorway, her silhouette wiry, tough, rigid, mitigated by the frizzy outline of the dog hanging purselike over her arm. “It’s my father’s fault I’m turning out like this.”

“Get some sleep,” I told her. “We’ll talk on Monday.”

“Okey-dokey,” she chirped. “We’ll talk on Monday.”

“Andrea,” I said, turning into the dark. “You mean something to me.”

The house blazed behind her, but her face consisted only of shadow. I believe I saw her eyes move. “Oh,” she said, then slipped inside, the door catching so quietly that a moment passed before I understood she was gone.

By the time I got home I had bitten my lips nearly numb. Drew came out of his studio and studied me.

“I had a dustup with Gwen Harmon,” I told him.

He was pulling off my coat. “I told you not to go.”

“I wish I hadn’t. She said something really hateful.”

“You want a bath? I’ll run you a bath.”

“I don’t want a bath. I want a gun.”

We looked at each other, time stretched briefly, and we laughed a little, another one of those connecting moments.

“I want you to go back to that counselor,” he said.

“I will. I know.” I kicked off my shoes and sloshed into the living room, Drew trailing me.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “Anyone would be a little at sea.”

He was trying to help me. I let him hold me for a while as if I were any ordinary wife. Then, after a long silence in which I felt his body adjust and readjust against mine, his voice re-emerged from the muted dark. “People have things, Lizzy,” he said. “Things that kill them a little. They find ways to keep going”

I nodded, my face resting on his chest. “Were you going to leave me?” I asked him. I tried to imagine a woman Drew might leave me for, but came up empty, just a dim, see-through figure, weightless and floating, nothing real.

“I don’t know,” he said. His shirt smelled like us. “I was thinking about it.”

“Are you thinking about it now?”

“What kind of man would leave you now?” His breath warmed my temple. “What kind of man would I be?”

As dislocating as it was to stand in my house with this man who wanted to leave but wouldn’t, I didn’t push him any further. I did not want to be the kind of woman who got left.

“You coming up?”

“In a minute,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

We extricated ourselves—awkwardly, it seemed. I followed him only so far; he paused on the stair, but maybe he saw in my face that now was not the moment if he cared to seize one.

I was on my way upstairs, I believe I was on my way upstairs, but instead I fitted myself into the double chair and wrapped myself in the throw Mrs. Blanchard had given us for our wedding. It shimmered with white flowers.

I turned off the lights and sat in the dark, trying to conjure the feeling of angels’ wings near my hospital bed, the flash of ring. The weightless woman Drew might have left me for vanished utterly, replaced by the more tangible specter of a black sleeve, a freckled hand marked with downy red hairs, a hand that looked as if it might actually weigh something, a ring so real it took the color of earth itself.

The Little Hours

SEXT

TWELVE

From
The Liturgy of the Hours:
My soul yearns for you in the night;
yes, my spirit within me keeps vigil for you
. . .