The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (9 page)

S
am had to make sure that no one took this feeling away from him. He had to be sure, too, that no one
saw
the feeling, for he sensed that its observation by another would spell its loss. So he ate his oatmeal fast and dumped the rest. He wanted to flee, could not bear this kitchen that seemed, in its order and familiarity, to challenge his ardent heart, to threaten to tame the chaos at the core of him. He would not be tamed. He would not allow anything to come between himself and his gluttony. That's how he felt upon waking: gluttonous. Not for food, not for his aunt's sticky oatmeal. He stood at the sink, forced himself to swallow a few bites. Helen's face remained in his mind the way sunlight stays in your eyes when you come into a dark room—it expanded hotly, everything else made vague in its swollen presence. He wished he'd dreamed about her so that he could say, simply, “I dreamed about you.” He wanted badly to say romantic things and for them to be true.

Finally he was out the door. It was starting. In his knapsack was a condom that had been given to him, more than six months before, by the pharmacist's son. Sam walked down Main Street, past weathered houses in their tidy lots. As he approached the school, saw its brick face, its quivering flag, its principal standing on the front steps, he wanted to cry with relief and terror. Now he was afforded a sharp, unsparing kind of vision. He saw things like the principal's plastic belt and his phony smile, and the chalky red berries on the bushes, the greenish hue of the granite steps, a girl's penny loafers fitted with dimes. He steadied himself, closed and opened his eyes. He scanned the crowd of students but didn't see her. A bell rang. The principal waved his hands like a traffic cop.

All his life Sam had been working. He worked on his grades and his manners and on being good to his aunt and uncle and, today, at last, worked on preparing himself for Helen. He thought this would be easy but it turned out to be work. It turned out to be letting a little furnace of desire warm his belly, letting the heat circulate, run a little up his throat, a little into his loins, but not too much, too much and you gave it away, too much and Mr. Waters saw your face and then you were clapping erasers after school, too much and they would know, the boys, the girls, they could see these things, they were dying to see. The waiting was not pleasure but work, an exhilarated and mammoth labor, and it took all his restraint to focus on his teachers' voices, to answer when called on, to keep his body in order. He was like a man on a horse—
steady, steady,
through gritted teeth. At lunchtime he splashed his face with water. He managed to eat half a sandwich.

“You wanna shoot a little pool after school?” Kip asked.

“I've got plans.” Sam looked away, aware that if he said any more he'd give it up.

He didn't see Helen all day, was starting to believe that she'd stayed home sick, succumbed to second thoughts, when there she was at the water fountain, leaning down to sip, one hand on the fountain's handle, the other holding back her hair, exposing the skin of her nape. She was wearing a pink dress, its hem loose in back. The whole thing felt so tenuous, so alarmingly fragile. It occurred to him that perhaps he should pray. But what did God care? God didn't step in to make sure boys got their rocks off. Later his math teacher touched his cheek with the back of her hand, said he looked flushed. He busied himself with his equations, trying to keep his face calm while his tongue scrambled the roof of his mouth.

Finally the day ended. The bell shot him into a new life. His pace was quick; he feared Kip might approach him, or the pharmacist's kid, and so he walked like he had an appointment, which was true, he did. He practiced things he might say if someone interrupted him.
I have a toothache. I have to run an errand for my aunt.
The worst part was having to pass the hardware store. If Joe was out front washing the windows, or greeting customers by the door…He feared his uncle would spot him, pull him inside, request he cut some lumber or sweep the storeroom, which was part of their arrangement; his allowance depended on Joe's odd jobs. But the store was dim, quiet. No one out front. And—look! There was a sign taped on the door, in Joe's ragged scrawl:
Closed Early—Sorry for Inconvenience.
So it was true. So it would happen. He was free. No one could stop him. Destiny, that boomerang, hit his gut, took his breath, spun away again.

It was a sunny day. The air felt clean. He breathed it in.
I have to run an errand for my aunt. I have a toothache.
His thoughts were moving too fast.
Settle down. Settle down.
And there it was, that collection of trees, that palace of new green, where inside would be the river, and would be Helen, and would be too, he realized, a new version of himself. He saw himself in those woods as if he were there already, saw a faint, blurry-edged Sam, a translucent form sitting by the river, flicking sticks into its gentle current. Then he saw his ordinary, opaque body approach this spectral one, saw the two of them join, as if one body were sewn into the other. He reasoned this was what love meant—a merger between one part of you that's been waiting for the other part. He stood on the cusp of the woods.
Settle down. Settle down.

When he was sick to his stomach, Aunt Constance poured him ginger ale and stirred the carbonation out of it. She would do it now, if she saw that the bridge of his nose and his cheeks were flushed, that he was sweating, she would pour him a cup of ginger ale, stir. He could hear the song of the spoon on glass. And she would place three saltines on a plate and she would touch his forehead, and maybe rummage in the cupboard for the thermometer. But if she knew what he was doing? That he was standing on the edge of the woods, standing on the edge of the woods and about to have sex with Helen. The Swimmer. He would see her breasts. He would marry her. Helen at the altar, awkward Helen in a big dress that hid her breasts and knees, her face restrained, her dress swallowing her up in heirloom froth. No one would know about this afternoon in the woods, no one in that church or anywhere would know. No one but he would know that the restrained face was not her real face, that it was a veil over her desire.

Sam's parents were dead. His baby brother was dead. He had been saved, miraculously, by God or whomever, from a terrible, bloody death by train. His life was meantime. He had suffered. He had suffered but quietly. He had asked no one to join him in his suffering. He showed the world a fine boy. Helen was the reward. Love was the reward, and he would have it, he would not squander it. He took a step into the woods.

W
ait.
Before she submitted to sex, before she married, before she gave birth, before she raised a daughter, before that daughter ran away without so much as a note—Grace was a girl.

Let her be a girl. Let her avoid her vegetables. Look at her sure, arrogant face. She clips her nails to the quick. She doesn't try to tame her cowlick. She doesn't care, not a bit, about boys. She never wants to touch a naked man. She never wants to get married, or wear an apron, or do the thousand things you're supposed to do in order to don the mantle of womanhood. Womanhood is, for all intents and purposes, a slog—oven mitts, sweet potato casserole, a dresser top spread with potions, endless frenzied ministering to the man. But you have to hide the frenzy. Frenzy can't been seen in a woman, though of course it's there. Is girlhood any better? No. Girlhood is waiting, is frenzied waiting, is needing permission, is the rude smacking of gum, always, in her ear. Grace wants to be neither girl nor woman. She wants to be an eye, an observer. She wants to notice and wander. She wants to take many trips on many boats to places where she can lie nude in the sunshine.

Grace was sixteen then. Good grief, where did she get her ideas? Nowhere. Or: everywhere. Vague, indestructible images: a woman in a yellow bathing suit lying on the deck of a boat in an advertisement for menthol cigarettes. The gentle sea. The flat, effortlessly pretty face of the reclining woman. Grace absorbed it all. Not the message about the cigarettes (smoke these for a glamorous, seafaring life), which she understood was a fiction. The real message was:
Go far away.
The message was:
Is there a man in sight? There is not.

Maybe she would be a biologist. Or maybe art school. Maybe Paris, where she would drink black coffee and sell her work on the street. She would wander the catacombs. She would scorn her old life, the whole town of Ringdale, all the faces that looked at her face, all the busywork and good manners and girls who made a list of the best boys at her school, the top ten, she would scorn especially those ten vaunted boys.

Hank Phelps was always number one.

Wait.
She hasn't married him yet. Let her be sixteen a little longer. Let her paint stag beetles and Black-Eyed Susans. Let her fantasize about Paris, the Galápagos, Jakarta, Berlin. See the books she reads: Amelia Earhart, Emily Dickinson, detective stories meant for prepubescent boys. She is so young. She is so wrong about herself. Give her the gift of false convictions, just a little longer, a paragraph.

At Ringdale High School, at the end of the 1960s, Grace was considered an oddball and a lesbian. Did she care? No. Oddball, lesbian, snob, teacher's pet, strange dresser. She wore boy's trousers and old silk blouses her mother didn't want anymore. She wasn't a lesbian; she wasn't one way or the other. She thought of herself as immune to love. She'd never had a crush, not boy or girl or teacher or uncle, no one, not a flicker. What a gift, to be spared love and its frivolous, chatty reverberations, to be spared the note-passing and bathroom-crying and awkward dancing. Grace would not be ruined by love. She would be asexual. Yes. The idea was so ennobling, so bracing, she mentioned it to her mother, who chuckled and said, “We'll see.”

Her mother was right, of course. Within a year Grace would be married and pregnant. She would marry the most popular boy at her school. They would have a daughter, and the daughter would grow, and one day the daughter would skillfully raise her brow and look at Grace as if to say:
Why did the cosmos curse me with such a dull mother?
and Grace would want to throttle the girl.

But Grace said, at sixteen, to her own mother, “I'll never, ever marry.”

Her mother smiled. “I thought the same thing. Did you know that? I wanted to be a—”

“No!” Grace cried, because her mother had wanted nothing else than this house and her father and Grace. That was how it had to remain.

A few weeks later came the encounter that would mean the undoing of Grace's plan. It was her senior year. So close to the end; she had nearly made it out. But walking home from school one day she passed Hank Phelps and his best friend Joe the Lug sharing a cigarette on the stone wall that girded the cemetery. They were an odd pair: crow-haired Hank, the breezy, worshipped idol of the school; Joe, aloof, sheepish, in his eyes the dull, affable gleam of the middle-aged.

Hank raised a hand, said, “Hey there, Gracie.” He had a jocular sneer and the solid haunches of a cowboy. Everyone knew he did two hundred sit-ups each night before bed.

Joe the Lug just offered his abashed half-smile.

A certain feeling rose into her body, began at her feet, traveled up her shins, into her thighs, into—

“Don't call me ‘Gracie,'” she snapped.

She knew what it meant instantly.

“Sure thing,” Hank said. “Righto. How's the world treating you today,
Grace
?”

His cocky, mocking tone, his cheekbones, his shiny boots with their two-inch heels. No one wore boots like that! He sauntered down the hallway. He once kissed the French teacher on the hand and didn't get in trouble.

“I'm fine,” Grace said. She aimed for disdain but heard a throaty creak behind her words, like a boy trying to disguise his changing voice.

She would not want Hank. Hank was too obvious. Hank was wrong on so many levels. But she couldn't deny the feeling; it was like a long, high, quivering note held inside her body. It rang. It lasted. It made her shaky, woozy, sentimental. It made her want to hug her mother and nap and sneak into her father's basement workshop to page through the dirty magazine he hid in the bottom drawer beneath a tangle of extension cords. So if the feeling couldn't be denied, and if it was too unbearable to attach to Hank, she would attach it to the other person in whose presence she'd been when it first showed itself: Joe the Lug.

Joe no longer the Lug. All right then. If she had to have one, she'd have a strange crush. She knew from other girls that you were supposed to collect details, everything, even the most mundane, so she willed herself to watch him. Joe, of all people. He wore a plaid shirt in Christmas colors, fraying at the wrists. His hands were huge, hairless, with nails opaque as piano keys. A broad face, a softening in the jaw that presaged jowls. Small, sweet mouth, thin upper lip. Somehow he'd befriended Hank, the most popular kid at school; he wore the strangeness of this fact on him, a faint sadness in the eyes, like premature nostalgia, like he knew his luck couldn't hold. At lunch he'd pull an apple out of a brown bag, bite into it daintily, like a woman trying to preserve her lipstick. Two cartons of milk. Hunk of salami. Sugar cookies saved for last.

Grace watched, she studied, but really wasn't moved. She suspected it was the act of watching—not the subject being watched—that intrigued her. Finally she had to tell someone. This was the next part. First, you collect details about the boy. Then, breathless, slightly frantic, you confess all in the bathroom. Though she had never joined in, Grace witnessed this many times before. When one day she came upon Dee Lutz fixing her bangs in the bathroom mirror, she knew it was time. They greeted each other. Grace washed her hands, dried them. She looked in the mirror, pretended to pick something from the corner of her eye. She straightened her collar. Finally, aiming to sound breezy, her heart picking up, she said, “If I tell you something, promise you won't laugh?”

Dee gave the assurance, but as it turned out she did laugh. “Joe's a nice enough kid,” she said when she'd gathered herself. “But I just can't see you two together. I heard Constance Griffin has her heart set on him.”

“Constance?”

“It's pretty widely understood.”

“Oh.”

“We're all rooting for her, poor girl.”

Dee was looking at Grace with curiosity.

“Well,” Grace said, trying to sound unbothered, “Constance does seem to make a lot more sense for Joe.”

Dee nodded pityingly. “But you'll find someone else,” she promised. “You just need to keep your eyes open. He'll show up. Your prince. He's around here somewhere.” And she swept her hand before her, across the bathroom, as if her future boy might be hiding in a stall.

Grace thanked Dee for her encouragement. She wanted to leave the bathroom now, but Dee had begun to talk. She had taken Grace's admission as an invitation to speak about her own crush, a boy named William Timpokin who was famous for his impersonations of their flabbergasted principal. Had Grace noticed that William's pimples had recently cleared up? And was she aware that he could run a mile in six minutes flat and had a cousin who was a real albino?

Grace was not aware.

As Dee spoke she applied lipstick, blotted it with a square of toilet paper, applied more, blotted, applied. Finally, stepping back, she frowned, wiped her mouth clean, and began the process again. Grace watched in irritated awe. All the silly, wholehearted machinations of love. All the
work.
Was there anything more unflattering than frosted lipstick? And yet Grace felt for the first time a flutter of pity, and she knew that she, too, was done for.

A month later Grace found herself in Hank's attic bedroom, a wood-paneled cavity with sloping ceilings, pennants on the walls, magazines about radio-making and car repair in tall piles. A mattress lay on the floor against the wall, no bed frame, no box spring, just this mattress on the splintering floor. It was like a monk's bed. She could tell he'd sprayed something lemony in the air, which endeared him to her a little.
Oh Hank.
He was practically illiterate, yet he had a miraculous confidence. He was a poor student but his teachers loved him. He touched Grace like he knew how but also like he'd never touched a girl before. How did he manage that? She knew for a fact that he'd touched several girls. She wanted to be a scientist, detached, disinterested, she wanted to be mean and brilliant, but in his little bed the scientist in her fell away. She didn't even care. There was no data to analyze, no hypothesis to prove or disprove, just his heart whose knocking she felt on her breasts. His legs were long, lean. His penis was what the girls called a gasper.

At the end of their senior year Hank was offered a deal. His Uncle Clyde owned a bar in a farming town called Copper Junction, a sleepy place a couple hours north. This uncle had no children of his own and saw in Hank's fine bones and bad jokes the boy he'd always wished for. Ready to retire, to free himself from darts and drunks and aching feet, he asked Hank to take over the bar so he could decamp to Florida with a woman called Betty-Lynn. Hank, in turn, got down on one knee and extended a bunch of flowering weeds (this was like him—he was fond of half-considered romantic gestures, and of gestures that put him on the level of her crotch), and asked Grace in a panting voice to marry him, to move with him to this bumfuck town, be the wife of the town's new bartender. They'd get a house, too—that was part of the uncle's deal, a small house on a hill with a view of some strawberry fields. So what did she say? Would she marry him and whelp his pups and make him the gladdest son-of-a-biscuit on this sad old earth?

She could not think.

She looked down at his handsome face, his eyes which had widened like a child's, the blades of his cheekbones, the pulse in his neck.

The Eiffel Tower and the Seine receded.

“Well? What do you say?”

More than anything she was amazed: how swiftly things change—how wickedly little control she possessed over herself—how only yesterday she'd been so convinced of the golden, inward, directionless course of her life.

Her mouth was empty of words.

She allowed herself to imagine the Galápagos, dazzling white light, silent ambling tortoises.

A good, simple life, he promised. They'd get a dog—whatever kind she wanted, though he was partial to shepherds. He'd learn to make a gimlet. A sidecar. Polish punch. The jukebox would be
theirs.
Think about it. No parents. No curfew. They could stay up all night whenever they wanted.

Now she felt her face perform a new expression.

Is that a yes? Does that mean yes?

It did. A yes, a yes.

They married. The house turned out to be little more than a shack, and the bar was a terrible place with a ceiling the uncle had painted black, a nudie calendar, a couple finicky pinball machines. “It's an adventure,” Hank kept saying. At first this soothed her, but then she started hearing the word
adventure
as
crime
. His handsomeness had become incidental. Did she love him? The scientist returned. She began to see everything in exacting detail. The floors in the house weren't level; anything you spilled ran west. The kitchen window had a feed bag for a curtain. A toilet plunger with no handle. A toilet that flushed by lifting a damp chain in the back.

It was not a place she could bear to call home. Still, they fixed it up as best they could. Her parents gave her a little money, enough for a few gallons of paint, a sofa, a set of curtains with pom-poms dangling from the hem. But even after these improvements, Grace had the uneasy feeling that she'd been kidnapped, carried away against her will, and that by staying, fixing the place up, it was like she was an accomplice—like she'd relinquished the right to cry to be rescued. When, a few months later, she got pregnant, these feelings overwhelmed her.

She heard there was a doctor in Beetle who could help.

She hitchhiked there one day while Hank was at work, brought all their money, took Hank's stash of bills from the coffee can hidden in the attic crawl space. The doctor, an old man, looked over his glasses at her. He said he could help her, said he believed in personal freedom and self-determination, but his expression was one of barely concealed disdain. He took her pulse with cold fingers. He palpated her stomach so roughly she found herself thinking:
He'll hurt the baby!
Once she thought such a thing, once that nascent protective impulse went off in her, she couldn't go through with it anymore. It was as if the doctor's cold, vigorous hands brought the baby to life and tamped out her own.