Selected Stories (67 page)

“You never noticed anything that would’ve led you to think this could’ve happened?”

“We never noticed anything at all.”

R
OBERT
pictured the Weebles getting into and out of their car in the driveway. That was where he had most often seen them. He recalled their Boxing Day visit. Her gray legs made him think of a nun. Her mention of virginity had embarrassed Peg and the boys. She reminded Robert a little of the kind of women he used to know. Her husband was less talkative, though not shy. They talked about Mexican food, which it seemed the husband had not liked. He did not like eating in restaurants.

Peg had said, “Oh, men never do!”

That surprised Robert, who asked her afterward did that mean she wanted to eat out more often?

“I just said that to take her side. I thought he was glaring at her a bit.”

Was he glaring? Robert had not noticed. The man seemed too self-controlled to glare at his wife in public. Too well disposed, on
the whole, perhaps in some way too indolent, to glare at anybody anywhere.

But it wasn’t like Peg to exaggerate.

Bits of information kept arriving. The maiden name of Nora Weeble. Driscoll. Nora Driscoll. Someone knew a woman who had taught at the same school with her in Hamilton. Well-liked as a teacher, a fashionable dresser, she had some trouble keeping order. She had taken a French Conversation course, and a course in French cooking.

Some women here had asked her if she’d be interested in starting a book club, and she had said yes.

He had been more of a joiner in Hamilton than he was here. The Rotary Club. The Lions Club. Perhaps it had been for business reasons.

They were not churchgoers, as far as anybody knew, not in either place.

(R
OBERT
was right about the reasons. In Gilmore everything becomes known, sooner or later. Secrecy and confidentiality are seen to be against the public interest. There is a network of people who are married to or related to the people who work in the offices where all the records are kept.

There was no investment scheme, in Hamilton or anywhere else. No income-tax investigation. No problem about money. No cancer, tricky heart, high blood pressure. She had consulted the doctor about headaches, but the doctor did not think they were migraines, or anything serious.

At the funeral on Thursday, the United Church minister, who usually took up the slack in the cases of no known affiliation, spoke about the pressures and tensions of modern life but gave no more specific clues. Some people were disappointed, as if they expected him to do that—or thought that he might at least mention the dangers of falling away from faith and church membership, the sin of despair. Other people thought that saying anything more than he did say would have been in bad taste.)

A
NOTHER
person who thought Peg should have let him know was Kevin. He was waiting for them when they got home. He was still wearing his pajamas.

Why hadn’t she come back to the house instead of driving to the police station? Why hadn’t she called to him? She could have come back and phoned. Kevin could have phoned. At the very least, she could have called him from the store.

He had been down in the basement all morning, watching television. He hadn’t heard the police come; he hadn’t seen them go in or out. He had not known anything about what was going on until his girlfriend, Shanna, phoned him from school at lunch hour.

“She said they took the bodies out in garbage bags.”

“How would she know?” said Clayton. “I thought she was at school.”

“Somebody told her.”

“She got that from television.”

“She
said
they took them out in garbage bags.”

“Shanna is a cretin. She is only good for one thing.”

“Some people aren’t good for anything.”

Clayton was sixteen, Kevin fourteen. Two years apart in age but three years apart at school, because Clayton was accelerated and Kevin was not.

“Cut it out,” Peg said. She had brought up some spaghetti sauce from the freezer and was thawing it in the double boiler. “Clayton. Kevin. Get busy and make me some salad.”

Kevin said, “I’m sick. I might contaminate it.”

He picked up the tablecloth and wrapped it around his shoulders like a shawl.

“Do we have to eat off that?” Clayton said. “Now he’s got his crud on it?”

Peg said to Robert, “Are we having wine?”

Saturday and Sunday nights they usually had wine, but tonight Robert had not thought about it. He went down to the basement to get it. When he came back, Peg was sliding spaghetti into the cooker and Kevin had discarded the tablecloth. Clayton was making the salad. Clayton was small-boned, like his mother, and fiercely driven. A star runner, a demon examination writer.

Kevin was prowling around the kitchen, getting in the way, talking to Peg. Kevin was taller already than Clayton or Peg, perhaps taller than Robert. He had large shoulders and skinny legs and black hair that he wore in the nearest thing he dared to a Mohawk cut—Shanna cut it for him. His pale skin often broke out in pimples. Girls didn’t seem to mind.

“So was there?” Kevin said. “Was there blood and guck all over?”

“Ghoul,” said Clayton.

“Those were human beings, Kevin,” Robert said.

“Were,” said Kevin. “I know they
were
human beings. I mixed their drinks on Boxing Day. She drank gin and he drank rye. They Were human beings then, but all they are now is chemicals. Mom? What did you see first? Shanna said there was blood and guck even out in the hallway.”

“He’s brutalized from all the TV he watches,” Clayton said. “He thinks it was some video. He can’t tell real blood from video blood.”

“Mom? Was it splashed?”

Robert has a rule about letting Peg deal with her sons unless she asks for his help. But this time he said, “Kevin, you know it’s about time you shut up.”

“He can’t help it,” Clayton said. “Being ghoulish.”

“You too, Clayton. You too.”

But after a moment Clayton said, “Mom? Did you scream?”

“No,” said Peg thoughtfully. “I didn’t. I guess because there wasn’t anybody to hear me. So I didn’t.”

“I might have heard you,” said Kevin, cautiously trying a comeback.

“You had the television on.”

“I didn’t have the sound on. I had my tape on. I might have heard you through the tape if you screamed loud enough.”

Peg lifted a strand of the spaghetti to try it. Robert was watching her, from time to time. He would have said he was watching to see if she was in any kind of trouble, if she seemed numb, or strange, or showed a quiver, if she dropped things or made the pots clatter. But in fact he was watching her just because there was no sign of such difficulty and because he knew there wouldn’t be. She was preparing an ordinary meal, listening to the boys in her usual mildly censorious but unruffled way. The only thing more apparent than usual to
Robert was her gracefulness, lightness, quickness, and ease around the kitchen.

Her tone to her sons, under its severity, seemed shockingly serene. “Kevin, go and get some clothes on, if you want to eat at the table.” “I can eat in my pajamas.” “No.”

“I can eat in bed.”

“Not spaghetti, you can’t.”

W
HILE
they were washing up the pots and pans together—Clayton had gone for his run and Kevin was talking to Shanna on the phone—Peg told Robert her part of the story. He didn’t ask her to, in so many words. He started off with “So when you went over, the door wasn’t locked?” and she began to tell him.

“You don’t mind talking about it?” Robert said.

“I knew you’d want to know.”

She told him she knew what was wrong—at least, she knew that something was terribly wrong—before she started up the stairs. “Were you frightened?”

“No. I didn’t think about it like that—being frightened.”

“There could have been somebody up there with a gun.”

“No. I knew there wasn’t. I knew there wasn’t anybody but me alive in the house. Then I saw his leg, I saw his leg stretched out into the hall, and I knew then, but I had to go on in and make sure.”

Robert said, “I understand that.”

“It wasn’t the foot he had taken the shoe off that was out there. He took the shoe off his other foot, so he could use that foot to pull the trigger when he shot himself. That was how he did it.”

Robert knew all about that already, from the talk in the diner.

“So,” said Peg. “That’s really about all.”

She shook dishwater from her hands, dried them, and, with a critical look, began rubbing in lotion.

Clayton came in at the side door. He stamped the snow from his shoes and ran up the steps.

“You should see the cars,” he said. “Stupid cars all crawling along this street. Then they have to turn around at the end and crawl back.
I wish they’d get stuck. I stood out there and gave them dirty looks, but I started to freeze so I had to come in.”

“It’s natural,” Robert said. “It seems stupid but it’s natural. They can’t believe it, so they want to see where it happened.”

“I don’t see their problem,” Clayton said. “I don’t see why they can’t believe it. Mom could believe it all right. Mom wasn’t surprised.”

“Well, of course I was,” Peg said, and this was the first time Robert had noticed any sort of edge to her voice. “Of course I was surprised, Clayton. Just because I didn’t break out screaming.”

“You weren’t surprised they could do it.”

“I hardly knew them. We hardly knew the Weebles.”

“I guess they had a fight,” said Clayton.

“We don’t know that,” Peg said, stubbornly working the lotion into her skin. “We don’t know if they had a fight, or what.”

“When you and Dad used to have those fights?” Clayton said. “Remember, after we first moved to town? When he would be home? Over by the car wash? When you used to have those fights, you know what I used to think? I used to think one of you was going to come and kill me with a knife.”

“That’s not true,” said Peg.

“It is true. I did.”

Peg sat down at the table and covered her mouth with her hands. Clayton’s mouth twitched. He couldn’t seem to stop it, so he turned it into a little, taunting, twitching smile.

“That’s what I used to lie in bed and think.”

“Clayton. We would never either one of us ever have hurt you.”

Robert believed it was time that he said something.

“What this is like,” he said, “it’s like an earthquake or a volcano. It’s that kind of happening. It’s a kind of fit. People can take a fit like the earth takes a fit. But it only happens once in a long while. It’s a freak occurrence.”

“Earthquakes and volcanoes aren’t freaks,” said Clayton, with a certain dry pleasure. “If you want to call that a fit, you’d have to call it a periodic fit. Such as people have, married people have.”

“We don’t,” said Robert. He looked at Peg as if waiting for her to agree with him.

But Peg was looking at Clayton. She who always seemed pale and
silky and assenting, but hard to follow as a watermark in fine paper, looked dried out, chalky, her outlines fixed in steady, helpless, un-apologetic pain.

“No,” said Clayton. “No, not you.”

R
OBERT
told them that he was going for a walk. When he got outside, he saw that Clayton was right. There were cars nosing along the street, turning at the end, nosing their way back again. Getting a look. Inside those cars were just the same people, probably the very same people, he had been talking to during the afternoon. But now they seemed joined to their cars, making some new kind of monster that came poking around in a brutally curious way.

To avoid them, he went down a short dead-end street that branched off theirs. No houses had ever been built on this street, so it was not plowed. But the snow was hard, and easy to walk on. He didn’t notice how easy it was to walk on until he realized that he had gone beyond the end of the street and up a slope, which was not a slope of land at all, but a drift of snow. The drift neatly covered the fence that usually separated the street from the field. He had walked over the fence without knowing what he was doing. The snow was that hard.

He walked here and there, testing. The crust took his weight without a whisper or a crack. It was the same everywhere. You could walk over the snowy fields as if you were walking on cement. (This morning, looking at the snow, hadn’t he thought of marble?) But this paving was not flat. It rose and dipped in a way that had not much to do with the contours of the ground underneath. The snow created its own landscape, which was sweeping, in a grand and arbitrary style.

Instead of walking around on the plowed streets of town, he could walk over the fields. He could cut across to the diner on the highway, which stayed open until midnight. He would have a cup of coffee there, turn around, and walk home.

O
NE NIGHT
, about six months before Robert married Peg, he and Lee were sitting drinking in his apartment. They were having an
argument about whether it was permissible, or sickening, to have your family initial on your silverware. All of a sudden, the argument split open—Robert couldn’t remember how, but it split open, and they found themselves saying the cruellest things to each other that they could imagine. Their voices changed from the raised pitch and speed of argument, and they spoke quietly with a subtle loathing.

“You always make me think of a dog,” Lee said. “You always make me think of one of those dogs that push up on people and paw them, with their big disgusting tongues hanging out. You’re so eager. All your friendliness and eagerness—that’s really aggression. I’m not the only one who thinks this about you. A lot of people avoid you. They can’t stand you. You’d be surprised. You push and paw in that eager pathetic way, but you have a calculating look. That’s why I don’t care if I hurt you.”

“Maybe I should tell you one of the things I don’t like, then,” said Robert reasonably. “It’s the way you laugh. On the phone particularly. You laugh at the end of practically every sentence. I used to think it was a nervous tic, but it always really annoyed me. And I’ve figured out why. You’re always telling somebody about what a raw deal you’re getting somewhere or some unkind thing a person said to you—that’s about two-thirds of your horrendously boring self-centered conversation. And then you laugh. Ha-ha, you can take it, you don’t expect anything better. That laugh is sick.”