That Night (6 page)

He imagined how he would later see it around her throat or her waist, laugh and say, “When’d you buy this?”

She could be on the bus already, headed home.

He called again and caught her mother by surprise. Her voice was cheerfully formal when she said hello. He asked if Sheryl was home yet. There was a terrible pause. “No, Rick,” she said. “No, she’s not.”

At some time during that day he must have driven past her house. No sign of her, of course, but a startling memory of himself as he had been just days before: confidently climbing those steps, Sheryl there even before he had rung the bell. Himself stepping inside without thought or hesitation, without gratitude or, he realized, even pride. He would wait for her to finish drying the dishes or to run upstairs for her purse. He would stretch out in an armchair like the owner of the house, joke with her Polish grandmother like a favorite son. He would be as confident as a married man of how the evening would end.

Just days ago, he had climbed those steps and she had been there behind the screen. Although last time she had been ready when he arrived and had not invited him in.

He ate supper with his father and his sister that night, simply to define for himself the beginning of evening, the end of the lousy day.

His sister said, “To what do we owe the great pleasure of your company—run out of pizza money?”

He told her to stuff it, then added that she was becoming a bitchy old maid.

She called him a punk.

He said he didn’t see any boyfriends knocking down her door. “When was the last time you had a date?”

She said, “Oh, shut up.” But he leaned closer to her as she worked at the sink. He knew, unconsciously, that she would do anything for him. Long ago she had taken up their mother’s slack in compassion and care, taken up with a kind of fatalism what she saw as their consequences: she would never be loved sufficiently in return.

“Don’t you even wonder what it’s like to get laid?” he whispered.

“Go to hell,” she said.

“To have some guy slip it to you?”

She was silent, but her cheeks were burning.

“Make you feel so good you want to go crazy.”

“Drop dead,” she said.

He sighed. “Guess if you’ve never had it, you’ll never miss it.”

He turned from her. His father was leaning in the doorway. He had one crutch under his arm, and his free hand grasped the doorframe. “Knock it off, Rick,” he said. His father’s skin seemed tight on his skull. He seemed to be growing older and thinner by the hour.

“Christ,” Rick whispered as he brushed past him. “Nice to be home.”

He called again at about eight. Her grandmother answered the phone, and he said quickly, “Can I speak to Sheryl, please?” There was another pause. He could hear muffled voices, the sound of someone putting a hand over the receiver. Then her mother’s voice. “Yes?” As if she didn’t know who was on the other end.

“Can I speak to Sheryl?” he said again.

She hesitated once more and then simply said, “No, Rick. No you can’t.

And I think it would be best if you didn’t call here anymore.”

She hung up before he had shouted his reply. He dialed again, but the phone was once more off the hook. He pounded the metal wall of the booth, pulled open the doors.

“She won’t let me talk to her,” he told his friends at the pinball machines, his voice cracking with anger. “I’ll kill her.” He headed for the doors as if that’s what he would do. Some of the bowlers had turned around when they heard his shout. His friends put their hands on his chest. He tried to push them away. “I’ll kill that old bitch,” he said, and they all feared he was about to cry. They got him out the door. He pulled away from them and kicked at his own car. “What the fuck’s going on?” he said. “What the fuck is happening?”

Cautiously, they asked if he and Sheryl had had a fight, was there anything wrong between them. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, man, it’s her old lady. It’s that old bitch.”

He said it to protect himself, no doubt, to keep from having to admit to them that he feared everything had changed, that he feared she had changed her mind overnight, become, as his mother used to do, another person entirely—one whose strangeness was all the more terrible because of what part of him it hid: she had said she loved him and then become someone else.

His friends, who would have been more comfortable with his anger than with his tears, who would have preferred to say what should be done to the old bag than to offer their condolences over the loss of something as difficult as love, were no doubt willing to agree. Clearly, they said, she was keeping Sheryl from him, the jealous, horny old bitch. She had found out what Sheryl and Rick did. Her own husband had croaked (probably when he put his head between her legs, one of them said—they had left the bowling alley and were now leaning across their cars in another parking lot, drinking beer), so she’s jealous that her daughter’s getting what she’ll never get again, not unless she pays somebody. Sure, they said, that’s what’s going on. It’s the old lady, trying to make Rick think Sheryl’s stepping out on him. Probably keeping her locked in her room till Rick finds somebody else. Sure, that’s what’s going on.

They shook their heads. They believed it. They had heard enough stories about bitter stepmothers and ugly old queens who locked beautiful girls in dungeons and towers. They were willing enough to see themselves as handsome, persecuted princes whose very rights as men these women would deny.

The familiar, aimless evening took on form, took on drama as they talked. The dark summer trees were thick with it. The dim lights around the parking lot made the black asphalt a stage. They had seen movies with lighting like this. They worked themselves into their best emotions. Isn’t this what they’d always suspected: They were persecuted, wrongly accused, unfairly denied. They told the others who joined them what had happened, their voices rising with outrage.

“Gimme a dime,” one said, and, to Rick, “What’s her number?” The others watched him cross the street to a lighted telephone booth: spotlight. He dialed and hung up and dialed again. He came back. “She must still have the phone off the hook.”

Three others jumped in a car and took off. Minutes later, they returned with the news that there were lights on in Sheryl’s house, in the living room and in one window upstairs. Another went to the phone: still busy.

“Call Angie,” someone said.

Now the grouping of cars had become a command post. When the girls arrived, they stood to one side, looking sympathetically at Rick, who had once again become possible to them, more possible than ever, hurt as he was, or would soon be (because none of them believed Sheryl’s mother was keeping her from him—they had mothers, too; they knew it couldn’t be done).

Word came back that Angie and a friend had gone to the nine o’clock movie. Two boys were dispatched to wait for them outside.

Someone dialed Sheryl’s number again. The plan in the beginning was to ask for her politely; if questioned, to say, “I’m in her math class at school and I thought I’d say hello since I haven’t seen her all summer.” But as the hour grew late, they decided they would simply curse into the phone, “Listen, you old bitch.”

Rick was drunk by now and growing morose. By now he no longer understood what had happened to him—not merely in the past twenty-four hours, but in the past twelve months. She had said she loved him. She had promised him things he could hardly understand except as some kind of fulfillment of all that he knew he wanted, and then become someone else.

His two friends returned from the movies. They’d found

Angie and her girlfriend, but she said she hadn’t seen Sheryl in a couple of days. She and Sheryl weren’t that friendly anymore anyway.

Rick leaned against one of the girls who had pulled herself up onto the hood of his car and his arm pushed into her thigh. “I just hope she’s not pregnant,” he told her softly. “I just hope that’s not it.”

Later, he told them that he, and they, should just go right over there and pull her out of the house. Murder the old bitch if they had to. They agreed, but not tonight, they said. They needed a plan.

He drove himself home a little after three. He lightly sideswiped a car parked in the street, scraping paint. He called her again from the phone in the kitchen. This time it rang and her mother answered with a gasp, as if she had just struggled up out of the water.

“C’mon,” he said—he would not remember this in the morning—“let me talk to her. Come on.” But she hung up on him without a word.

It’s hard not to think of Sheryl’s mother as cruel in all this: hard not to think of her as the boys did, as the jealous queen, the wicked witch. She was the one, after all, who had swept her daughter out of the state the very day her pregnancy was confirmed, who chose to torment her boyfriend with these coy games. It was she who made sure her daughter had no chance to explain, to tell him goodbye. No doubt Sheryl tried to get past her, tried to call him from the supermarket on the last day she worked, from her own house as she quickly gathered her things together, from the airport, even, when she’d told her mother she wanted to go to the bathroom before boarding the plane and instead headed for the phones. But Rick’s house was often empty, or maybe his father couldn’t bring himself to move at that moment, or didn’t want to try; maybe his sister ignored the ringing phone, certain it wasn’t for her.

This isn’t news: the world is as indifferent to lovers as it is to the poor and the unlucky. Sheryl’s mother would have known this: it’s as indifferent to lovers as it is to the dead, and to those who mourn them.

Before her husband’s sudden death, she had always been known as a sweet, soft-spoken woman. She didn’t pick her nose or pepper her conversations with “Jesus Christ”; she said “sugar” and “fudge” when she drew the wrong cards at canasta, and even the dirty jokes she told were cute and inoffensive. She had curly brown hair and a round, dry face, what I used to think of as gumdrop eyes, as small as buttons.

But at her husband’s wake, my mother later told me, she screamed shrilly at a young attendant who placed a small arrangement of flowers on the floor by the casket rather than on a table top, where they clearly belonged. She sent Sheryl out of the room at one point to demand that the funeral director tell the group of Irish people in the next chapel to lower their voices and control their laughter.

“This is a funeral parlor,” she said to those who tried to calm her.

“Not some shanty gin mill.”

In the days that followed, she told the neighbors who asked, “No, there’s nothing you can do for me. What in the world can you do for me?”

Our mothers were hurt and puzzled by this. The sudden death of one of the block’s husbands had startled them, but Sheryl’s mother’s anger was even worse. They held their throats as they spoke of it, slid their hands over the kitchen table as if there was something they wanted to straighten and smooth. Their own plans for widowhood, which I sometimes heard them discuss in the same frightened, delighted way we children planned our encounters with vampires and communists, usually involved a gallant, tragic air, a nice secretarial job and the return to the house they’d been raised in. (Although Mrs. Evers, whose parents had both died of the same heart trouble that would eventually, when I was about twenty, free her forever from the risk of becoming a widow, had only cousins to go to.) Never this fury. They shook their heads. I remember them repeating the word distraught. I remember thinking that it meant not merely sorrowful but somehow emotionally skewed: you were angry when you meant to be sad, mean when you meant to be grateful; you cried when you were happy.

My father went to her house one evening not long after her husband died to help her with her income tax returns. He came back furious. At one point she had grabbed the pencil out of his hand and flung it across the room. She’d accused him of intentionally trying to confuse her.

“What can you do for a woman like that?” he’d asked.

My mother had shrugged. She seemed a little fearful, as if she were just realizing what being a widow might involve.

“Did she cry?” she asked, and my father said, somewhat indignantly, “She did not.” We all shook our heads. There was no forgiving her then.

I think of us as naive in those days. All of us. Years later, just a few months after Billy Rossi was killed, Mrs. Rossi turned a hose on a couple of little boys who had wandered onto her lawn. No one seemed surprised then, although Mrs. Rossi had always been known as easygoing, even kind. Then we merely shrugged and nodded as if we understood. We said seeing little children, boys especially, was rough for her.

But we resented Sheryl’s mother’s anger. We said (or our parents said and we children concurred), “She’s never going to find another husband with an attitude like that.”

We gradually replaced the word distraught with ungrateful and then bitter. Our mothers, who had begun by then to look for reasons to avoid her, said it was high time she pulled herself together and started being pleasant again. How long could they go on feeling sorry for her? How long could one person mourn?

By that summer, she had still not found the courage to look for a job. She had still not learned to change a tire or mow the lawn. She had handed all her finances over to an accountant. Her deliverance, no doubt, took the form for her as much as for us of another husband, but that must have seemed to her as impossible as her loneliness. By that summer she must have realized that she could not mourn forever, or rage forever, that she would have to do something to get on with her life and that still she had no idea what to do.