Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

The Chevy advanced under a sequence of darkened streetlights, and Patsy found herself in a blind alley. As she backed up and turned around, her headlights caught sight of three kids out on the sidewalk, three Himmel middle schoolers fooling around in the early dusk: bleached skin, bleached faces. Just like albinos, Patsy thought, putting the car into drive and accelerating. She shouldn’t have brought Emmy along on this errand, she thought, but after all, it was an emergency.

The street ahead of her extended and contracted in a kind of daze, prolonging itself and then foreshortening in a visual pattern associated with the vertigo that accompanies anxiety, but then, maybe what she was seeing and feeling was just a side effect of the Dorylaeum she was taking, those strange red-and-blue pills that came accompanied with the long sheet of warnings. The car accelerated into a pool of buttery light.

She drove past a parked car with a cracked windshield and a wire coat-hanger in place of the radio antenna. On the car’s bumper was a small sticker whose words had been printed with purple ink:

I’m so gothic

I’m already dead.

After she had found her way back to Strewwelpeter Street, she made quick progress to Brenda Bagley’s manufactured house. Saul had taken her past here twice during one of his obsessive weeks following Gordy’s death, and the house had a strange unmistakable individualized dreariness, easy to locate. You could spot it in a crowd of manufactured homes. Most of them were cheerful and simple, but an air of indescribable gloom hung over Brenda Bagley’s. It appeared to have been constructed out of stale, brittle candy left over from an unsuccessful birthday party: its exterior white vinyl siding looked like hardened cake frosting decorated with tiny highlighted splotches of chocolate mud. Moths threw themselves toward the exterior door light and then fell, burned and wounded, to the pavement. At the same time, the two front windows, facing the street, with their half-lowered windowshades, had the momentary appearance of hooded eyes examining her as she approached them. It was like the House of Usher in a trailer park.

She drew Emmy out of her child seat in the back, leaving Gordy Himmelman’s spirit-remains still there — if he wanted to follow her in, he would, but she doubted it — and, a few moments later, with her daughter in her arms, Patsy rang the bell of Brenda Bagley’s house. From inside she heard the happy cries of a singing television commercial. The doorbell tolled out in three tones, and its song was followed by a rumpus-like clatter of dishes and silverware. The door opened, and Brenda Bagley peered out through the gap.

“Brenda,” Patsy said. “It’s me. Patricia Bernstein. Patsy. You know, Saul’s wife.”

“Sure,” Brenda muttered, exhaling cigarette smoke as she nodded. Her florid face examined Patsy and Mary Esther. Brenda’s eyes were still red-rimmed. “Of course. What brings you here, Patsy?”

“May I come in for a minute? I have to talk to you. It’ll only take a second. I just couldn’t do it over the phone.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Brenda Bagley said. “But it’s kind of a mess in here. So it’s not a good time for visiting impromptu like you’re doing. Well, come in anyway.”

She opened the door, and Patsy followed her, carrying Emmy inside her left arm. Her daughter seemed to be getting heavier by the minute and reactively cried out with grief or shock, once she was inside, from the effect of the stale cigarette smoke and the squalor. On the other side of the living area, a gigantic television set facing the doorway enjoyed a regal presence, except that a dinner plate with crusted food rested on its uppermost flat surface, reducing its dignity. The TV had a screen that was too large for the home’s interior, and its volume had been set so high that it was hard to hear or even to see anything else in proximity to it. The chairs and side tables and lamps appeared to be dwarfed by the huge electronic apparatus. Patsy wondered how they had managed to get the TV in here. Its size seemed so gargantuan that it could not have been squeezed through the doorway — the enormous television set in the tiny living room had the visual effect of a clipper ship assembled piece by piece inside a glass bottle. Patsy had the momentary feeling that the smoky room was airless, or the air so thoroughly consumed that it would not sustain life. The television set had used up most of the oxygen, and the remaining air had acquired a blue smoky tint from Brenda Bagley’s cigarettes. It was positively industrial. Bunched-up pieces of facial tissue littered the floor. Had the woman been crying, alone, in the evenings, with the TV set on, thinking of Gordy Himmelman?

Just to the left of the door was a sofa on whose cushion a white cat slept nestled against a plain plastic box.

“I’ll turn that off,” Brenda Bagley said, reaching for the remote. She pressed a button, and the screen at once went dark with an angry static crackling, as if the beast had been told to start hibernating or had been hit with a stun gun. “I can tell what you’re thinking — you think it’s a big TV. That’s what everyone thinks. And you’re right. It is big. I won it at the State Fair, is why.”

“You won it?”

“I guessed at the number of marbles in a jar. They had this little booth for an appliance store, and I’ve always been good at guessing things like that ever since I was a girl. I’ve won staplers and telephones. This time, the prize was that thing. They couldn’t downscale it, they said. That was the one they had to give away because they advertised that particular model. They had to take the door frame off my house to get it in here.” She seemed to lose her train of thought. “I should’ve traded it for a smaller one. It’s a mess in here,” she said, glancing up in a vague manner. What appeared to be coffee stains dotted the ceiling tile. Perhaps the coffee had spilled upward. Perhaps the laws of gravity did not operate successfully here.

“It isn’t a mess in here at all,” Patsy said evasively, to be polite. She looked toward the television set and saw herself reflected in its dark, blank, sleeping screen.

“Nice of you to say,” Brenda noted. “Please sit down, won’t you? You must be tired out carrying that little one around.”

Patsy lowered herself and the still-crying Emmy onto the sofa on the opposite side from the white cat and the box. The cat, annoyed by the child’s noise, jumped off and away toward the kitchen. Emmy needed a diaper change and was being fussy. Patsy plugged her mouth with a pacifier.

Patsy could feel the words she wished to say making their way up her throat, but they seemed to stop before they could quite get out. While she waited, she studied a picture on the wall near the doorway to the kitchen where the cat had retreated, and she bounced Emmy in her lap. The photograph was a studio portrait of some man and Gordy: sitting in the man’s lap, Gordy was much younger, just a toddler in the picture, not that much older than Emmy was now, and he smiled a toothy, dimwitted smile. Emmy continued to fuss and to reach for Patsy’s breast, but Patsy had stopped breastfeeding and, in any case, wouldn’t have opened her bra to Emmy’s mouth in front of Brenda Bagley if the world had depended on it. Some free-floating malice in this room wouldn’t permit that physical openness, some starveling bitterness that permeated the walls and the air.

“Brenda,” Patsy said. “I just talked to somebody I know. Knew . Well, it doesn’t matter when I knew her. She said that people — you know, parents — are starting to blame Saul and me for Gordy’s death, and they’re blaming us for Sam Cole’s death, too, and now this Himmel craze that the middle schoolers have taken up.”