Summerlong (7 page)

“Most likely. I’ll text.”

Maybe he could make a big sale that day, earn enough in commission to buy the family some time with the bank. If anybody can pull out a ninth-inning surprise, it is Don Lowry.

“Ruth,” Claire says. “Don’s leaving. Would you like a ride home? Ruth walked here.”

“You walked here?” Don says. “Why didn’t ABC drive you here?”

“Who’s ABC?” Claire says.

“She’s a woman who takes care of Ruth.”

“We take care of each other, mostly by staying out of each other’s way. And, yes, I would very much like a ride home. ABC loses track of me sometime. She does that. She’s in a fog. Some fogs you never get out of, do you?”

Sometime in that hot afternoon, Charlie ducks into the ice-cold air-conditioned dank of Rabbit’s and finds a beautiful woman, younger than him by a few years he estimates, sitting alone. He had expected the usual midday crowd, which his father had always referred to as the formers: former husbands, former farmers, former athletes, former fair queens, former meth heads, former everything.

She, in this case, he guesses, is a former student: she has thick unwashed dark hair, pulled back into a ponytail, wavy with humidity, fighting the rubber band and springing out behind her. She wears a kind of gray cotton sundress that ties in the back and flip-flops. She has dirty feet and a rubber band around one ankle. She has a beautiful, big smile, full lipped, and her skin is deeply tanned, though he can’t tell if it is always dark or if it is from a springtime of sun or if it is simply the dim light in the bar that makes everything seem darker. Her eyes are bloodshot.

“Is this seat taken?” he says, pulling out the stool next to him.

“Yes,” she says.

“Well, fuck that guy,” Charlie says and sits down.

The woman lets out a whoop of laughter.

“I’m ABC,” she says.

“ABC?”

“My initials. You are?”

“CG, I guess. Charlie Gulliver.”

“Gill’s son? I thought I recognized you from the pictures he used to have on his desk! I think you were a senior in high school in that picture—the framed one, on his credenza?”

“I never knew he had a picture of me in his office on campus.”

“Well, he did. How is he?”

“Not good, from what I’ve been told. I just got back. I haven’t seen him yet.”

The bartender, Rabbit himself, comes over and asks what they’re having.

“Whatever he’s buying,” ABC says.

“Two Mooseheads,” Charlie says.

“No Mooseheads,” Rabbit says. “I got Molson.”

“Two of those then.”

“I heard Gill sort of lost his mind,” ABC says. “Is that true? He was brilliant.”

“It’s a rare form of dementia. Apparently, he has great lucidity one moment and then is totally lost the next. Are you one of his students?”

“I was. I graduated a year ago, lost the love of my life in a freak accident, and came back here to be sad.”

“You came back here to be sad?”

“I wanted to be as sad as possible.”

“I want to know the story,” Charlie says.

“Which one?”

“The one in which your heart gets broken,” he says.

“Where to begin?” ABC asks.

“At the beginning,” Charlie says. “Because I have no plans for the day or for the next year or for the next forever.”

He leans in, and Jesus Christ, he thinks, I’d like to fuck her too. The truth is, he knows, this is when he feels most alive: when a woman is about to fall for him. He looks at ABC, a deep kind of gaze he’s mastered in the past year. He thinks it says this: I want to make you happy.

“Are you gonna puke?” ABC asks. “You look like you’re gonna puke. Let’s get some air.”

In college, ABC had come to Grinnell a bit overweight, wearing the same baggy T-shirts and jeans every day. She had oversize glasses and acne. She had been teased mercilessly in high school, the Mexican girls making fun of her bookishness, the white girls making fun of the same. She had never even kissed a boy, and was terrible at dancing and sports. When she had a chance to leave Los Angeles, on a scholarship, she cared nothing about how bad the weather would be and how strange the landscape would seem and how drab Iowa might be compared to where she lived in East L.A. She didn’t even worry that it’d be too white—she had met at least five students of color from L.A. who’d gotten the same scholarship she had from some foundation she had never heard of until her acceptance letter arrived. They’d all gone to an orientation together after they’d been accepted. And once, someone from the college had flown out to see them to help them prepare for the transition to college.

ABC cared only about leaving, about fleeing her neighborhood, where she never fit in, the girls at her school boy crazy and fashion crazy and money crazy. And she also wanted to, if she was honest about it, leave her exhausted and often drunk mother, a failed artist/waitress/cleaning woman/substitute bus driver, who took care of ABC and took care of ABC’s abuela, but did nothing to care for herself and was now entering the diabetic phase of her rum and Coca-Cola and Catholicism-fueled life.

At Grinnell though, with its clear, clear skies, she met others who wanted to be smart. They devoured scholarly articles and philosophical novels like candy, drank coffee under the trees, and pondered the historical forces that still worked against feminism. They got stoned before attending French films at the Harris cinema.
They proclaimed themselves atheists and vegans. They dressed in an eclectic blend of hip grunge;
sexy shlubbery
, Philly had called it. They debated the causes of poverty in America, took a break for Frisbee, and then debated the causes of civil strife in Syria. In the cafeteria over large bowls of ice cream, they discussed the reading for the next morning’s seminar. They felt everything so intensely, the strange flattening golden hues of the sunsets in September and the rainbows that appeared almost weekly in the post-shower skies above Old Main. They attended office hours in small groups, bringing their questions and thermoses of tea to intense professors who got almost teary over the students’ earnest enthusiasm. They baked cakes for each other’s birthdays, they babysat for the children of their faculty advisers, and they alternated between the ravages of smoking, poor nutrition, and sleep deprivation and periods of juice fasts, mindfulness meditation, and workouts at the rec center. It was all so heated and perfect and what ABC loved was that it was no longer shameful to be smart and different and to question everything relentlessly. How weird could you be? Simply as weird as you wanted to be, provided the weirdness was the result of resisting social convention rather than conforming to it. This was the heart of Grinnell. And this was the life she had always wanted, and here it was, before her, a gift.

By the end of her four years of college, it was as if her happiness extended into her physical body. She almost effortlessly lost weight that first year—giving up Coke and McDonald’s was easy to do—and she got contact lenses through the student health plan, and her skin cleared up and developed a healthy glow. By her second year, ABC had gone from kissless to making out with half a dozen other students. She went on dates. She liked the heat she could feel between bodies. She liked how everyone tasted different. She had a few bouts of strep throat and one of mono. Still, she savored all of the affection. Her professors liked her and treated her with enthusiastic kindness. They invited her to their homes for dinner with their families. Her female friends confided in her, brought
her small presents whenever they traveled, and stayed up late in her dorm room drinking tea and sometimes smoking weed and always spilling their guts. She was secretary of the Latino/a Students Association. They would cook together on Sunday nights and listen to
ranchera
music. She even went to the dances at Harris—twice she had made out with women and found it as pleasurable and more thrilling than making out with men—and found she liked dancing and had a reasonably good rhythmic sense about her. She could work her hips and her newly slimmed legs in a manner that made people watch her and often they would try to dance with her. She’d dance with anybody if they could keep up with her. Who knew? ABC was an excellent dancer!

Philly was her best friend though. It was Philly she often danced with at these events. She and Philly ran in the same social circles, but some weekends the closeness of the campus was overwhelming, and, since Philly had a car, she and Philly would drive to Iowa City or Des Moines, or, if they were feeling more ambitious to Madison or Chicago or Minneapolis. They’d rent a cheap motel room if they had the money and crash in a king-size bed in some Red Roof Inn or they’d stay up all night and doze in parks during the day. One night they slept at a lakeside park in Madison, huddled together in a double sleeping bag, shivering, ABC burying her nose in Philly’s chest for warmth—or was it for warmth? Was she trying to crawl inside Philly?

She loved the Midwest instantly, in a way that made her feel like she had always loved it. She loved it for its openness and because it was hers alone and because her mother and the bullies from high school and the teeming crowds of California could not follow her there. She had not sat in traffic once in Iowa. People told her it would be too white, and sometimes it was, sometimes her brownish skin and blackish hair and faint accent would cause some clerk or passerby to ask her where she was from, but then again, she wasn’t from Iowa, and so why not ask her where she was from?

Philly said the question was racist; ABC wasn’t as sure.

In the same way she instantly fell in love with Iowa, she knew now, she had always been in love with Philly. She loved her from the moment, during freshman year, when Philly had sat across from ABC at a two-top table in the dining hall. They were already roommates, but in the whirlwind of that first week, they had not done much socially. ABC was in orientation with the other Posse Foundation scholars; Philly was busy meeting every fucking student on campus. Left and right, people were falling in love with her.

ABC had been reading a book at lunch one day—
The Stranger
—and Philly had sat across from her suddenly and said, “Howdy, Stranger.”

ABC looked up at her, startled.

“The book,” Philly said. “Get it?”

ABC smiled.

“How’s it going?”

“Fine. You?”

“I’m homesick,” Philly said. “Aren’t you?”

“God no,” ABC said. And Philly laughed. Philly was from Philadelphia. Hence the name. It was her given name; her parents had been in graduate school there and had not planned on staying, but they had stayed. Her mother worked at a museum, her father at a radio station. They were divorced. And Philly grew up with the odd experience of having a first name that was the same as the city she lived in.

“I love that. I love that you’re not homesick,” Philly said.

“Thank you,” ABC said and looked over at Philly’s plate. It was nothing but a huge heap of chocolate cake drizzled with vanilla soft-serve ice cream from the giant machines near the dessert table.

Philly looked down at her own plate. “I guess I’m sort of depressed,” Philly said.

“Who isn’t?” ABC had said and then she did something that was completely out of character for her as a freshman. She set down her book, slid over her tasteless salad, and reached across the table,
fork in hand, and took an enormous bite of Philly’s cake. When she put it in her mouth, a drizzle of vanilla ice cream ran down her chin and Philly reached across the table with a napkin and wiped it clean.

“I’m so happy to be your roommate, ABC,” Philly had said. “I’m so glad.”

All of that had happened at Grinnell, here in the middle of nothing, where everything important that had ever happened to ABC had happened and she was never going to leave it, she was never going to go away from it again.

Don helps Ruth Manetti into the house.

“Do you want the TV on?” Don says.

“No. No, just quiet is fine. I’m exhausted.”

“You overdid it,” Don says.

He helps her into the bed, helps her remove her shoes, and gets her some water from the kitchen, a cold bottle of it.

She closes her eyes now and she seems so tired. The air-conditioning is on in the house, and he draws the blinds shut for her, then covers her legs with a quilt that is folded on a chair next to the bed.

“Should I try to find ABC?” Don says.

“Why? For me? Or for you?”

“I have to go to a showing, but, well, I don’t think you should be alone.”

“Why?”

“I’m, well, you’re so tired.”

“That’s true. I’m also old. Tired is normal.”

“And I just don’t think you should be alone.”

“In case I die? I’ve been alone a long time now. People are scared of dying alone, but . . .”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t mean you’ll die.”

“I’m not afraid of death, Don. Would you bring that book from the desk? It’d be nice to die reading.”

Don does. It’s an old book club edition of
Madame Bovary
, probably fifty years old.

“You’re not gonna die, are you?” he says.

“Not intentionally,” Ruth says, “though I would if that were possible. This would have been a nice last day.”

“You plan to read?” Don asks. “I can open the blinds then.”

Ruth says nothing. She opens the book to reveal a hollowed-out chunk of pages, a square cut out with a razor blade. Inside, a few rolled joints and a lighter.

“I used to love this book, Don,” she says. “I used to read it every summer. That and
Anna Karenina
.”

“I see.”

“Your wife was reading that.
Anna Karenina
.”

“Was she?”

“People aren’t fair to women, Don. They don’t want us to have inner lives after a certain age. They don’t want us to have time for it.”

“Claire has an inner life. She’s a writer.”

“It’s been over a decade since her last book, Don. I’ve waited for it. Did you know that? I’ve read her book. My book club did, at the library, because she was local. Everyone found it depressing but me.”

“She’s a good writer.”

“I don’t think she is a writer anymore. I think you think she’s a writer.”

“Is ABC around?” Don asks. “I could use . . .”

Ruth picks up a lighter from the nightstand.

“Burn?” she says.

“Yeah,” Don says, though he has a showing and there’s no way he should be here, doing this. “I feel like my life just caught fire,” he says.

“That can be good,” she says.

He lights the joint and Ruth shuts her eyes as Don tells her all of his troubles—the foreclosure, the funds, the fact that he knows in his heart of hearts that his wife no longer loves him and that it is
in the shadow of this unspeakable truth that he must conduct the rest of his life.

“Do you know ABC wants to die?” Don says.

“She thinks she does,” Ruth says.

“You don’t think she’ll actually do it, do you?”

“Kill herself? No.”

“You sure?”

“You’ll save her, Don. That’s why you’re here.”

“I can barely save myself, Mrs. Manetti. My life is in trouble.”

“Every life is in trouble, every minute of the day. Sometimes we are keenly aware of this fact, and sometimes we can ignore it.”

Don feels his head lighten from the weed; his hands seem to fill with air.

“I’m not sure how to help her.”

“You’re here to lead her to something. Back to something.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Before Philly died, Philly told ABC that she’d send you. She’d send you to lead ABC to a sacred place where she could be with her again.”

“Ruth?” Don says.

“Yes.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“You’re Don Lowry.”

“And you think Philly sent me to ABC?”

Ruth doesn’t say anything, he is not even sure if she is awake, and soon her breathing slows and he knows she is asleep. Was she dreaming? Is she senile? He wonders if he should wait there, for ABC to return from wherever it is she is, but eventually Don Lowry knows he must wander out into the summer’s staggering brightness and meet with clients, in hopes of making a desperately needed sale.

For a moment, Don Lowry feels invincible: he can make Claire love him again.

“I’m going to go now. I’m going to sell a house today, Ruth,” he
says, though he knows she is sleeping, “I’m going to make enough money to save everything, including my marriage.”

Ruth doesn’t open her eyes. She barely moves, but she answers him: “Most marriages are never saved, Don Lowry. Most marriages are just kept afloat. That’s much different.”