Russell Banks - Continental Drift

The woman enters first, wearing a nurse’s uniform with a light, pale blue cardigan sweater over it. “Well,” Bob says, “you’re safely back. That’s good.”

“We are.” She smiles lightly. Her dark brown face shows her fatigue. She has ashen circles under her eyes, and when she smiles, the skin over her high cheekbones tightens.

“I’ve missed you, George,” Bob says heartily. “You never realize how much you need someone until they take a vacation. ’Course, I know this wasn’t a vacation.”

“No, Mistah Bob, it weren’t no vacation. Dead and buried and resurrected and up in the Kingdom of Heaven now …” George says, his voice trailing off, his gaze starting to wander across the store.

“Daddy wants to come back to work right off, Mister Dubois. He’s not really … right yet, you know, but I thought, if it was fine with you, that it would be good for him to come back to work, maybe get his mind off his brother that way.” She ends her sentences with a lilt, a slight upturning of tone, so that she seems to be asking a question, a question that Bob feels compelled to hasten to answer.

“Oh, yes, sure, of course. I understand. Beautiful. Let him get right back to work. Be good for him. George,” he says, “the broom’s back by the stockroom door. You might’s well take over where you left off.”

The woman watches her father hurry off, her expression an odd mixture, odd to Bob, of relief and irritation. Bob has never seen an attractive black woman up close before. That is, he’s never really looked into her eyes, never studied the curve of her lips and let his gaze fall along her long, tense throat. He’s never allowed himself the pleasure, never subjected himself to the threat, of her beauty. In the past, whenever he’s happened to find himself standing next to an attractive young black woman in line at the supermarket, for instance, or facing one of the two black women tellers at the bank in town or a customer, a housewife from the project asking for a six-pack of Colt 45, he’s either dimmed his gaze or else has turned away altogether, embarrassed and frightened.

He hasn’t been aware of that, of course, until now, when he unexpectedly finds himself staring at Marguerite, examining her boldly but nonetheless innocently, for at last his curiosity has overcome his fear and at this moment, but only for this moment, he has not yet made himself sufficiently familiar with her darkness to begin to long only for her, to touch and hold her, lick and kiss her, to lie down and fuck her and her alone and not just any tall, slender, attractive black-skinned woman, which is the way it has been until this moment, impersonal, abstract, pornographic and racist. Here I am on a white shag carpet fucking a beautiful black woman, me, Bob Dubois, for God’s sake, pale and hairy, muscles tensed, cock swollen, red, stiff, while the beautiful, smooth-skinned black woman shakes her round buttocks in my face and peers back at me and offers me some more of her marijuana cigarette.

George has started sweeping in the far corner of the store, out of sight beyond the head-high shelves of gallon jugs of cheap wine, and the woman turns back to Bob. “I think I’ll be picking him up and leaving him off for a while,” she says thoughtfully, biting her lower lip with large, widely spaced upper teeth. “He’s still not … like he was yet. I’m a little worried about his getting the right bus home and all, you know? And getting off at the right stop? You know?”

“Oh, sure, sure, I understand. I mean, it’s a hell of a shock to his whole system, probably.” Bob feels himself stumbling after the words he wants to say. He wants to be both suave and consoling, as reassuring as he is seductive, but he knows he sounds instead like a man who’s busy and hasn’t quite heard what’s been told to him.

“So … you’re a nurse,” he finally says. Her hair, cut in a short, loose Afro, is black and shiny and prematurely flecked with gray.

“Yes, I work for three doctors, out at the Westway Clinic.”

“Ah,” Bob says, as if gaining an insight.

“You know it? You live out there in Auburndale?”

“No, no. It’s just … that’s a nice job, a nurse in a clinic. Better than a hospital, right?”

“Better hours. But that’s about all,” she says. Then, “You got a nice smile, you know that?”

“Ah,” Bob says again. Suddenly he asks her, “Are you married? I mean, George never mentions a son-in-law. Only you. He talks about you a lot. So I wondered …” Her skin is clear, unblemished and roan-colored, dark brown with a slight reddish tinge brought forward, Bob notices, by lipstick and the makeup on her cheeks. She’s wearing perfume, lilac, and when he sniffs for more of it, he looks at her nose, broad, symmetrical, functional. A true nose, he thinks. Not a large, pointy, phony nose like his, not a dog’s nose. Elaine’s nose he hasn’t looked at for years, although he used to wonder at it, because it was so perfectly shaped, or so it seemed to him then — slightly curved, short and narrow, giving to her small face the look of a fierce bird, like a falcon or hawk — but now he can’t recall it. His memory is only of having paid attention to something that has disappeared, swallowed by her eyes, so that now, when he looks at his wife’s face or remembers it, all he sees is the center of her eyes, as if her face has somehow gradually become invisible without his ever having noticed until after it was gone, lost to him, he is sure, forever.

Marguerite answers his question as directly as he asked it, as if she is used to having white men she barely knows ask her if she is married. She was, she tells him, but not now, not for over five years. Her husband was in the air force and stationed here at Shure. “But,” she says, shrugging, “that didn’t work out so good. But I liked it here, and I had a better job than the one I used to have in Macon, so I stayed. And the next year my mama died and Daddy came down.”

“It doesn’t make sense, your being alone,” Bob says with great seriousness.

She laughs. “Yes, it does, Mister Dubois …”

“Bob.”

“Okay, Bob. Yes, it does make sense! A lot of sense.” Then, turning to leave, she smiles and says, “Besides, I’m not alone, you know.”

“You’re not? I thought …” He doesn’t know what he thought.

“I got my daddy!” she calls from the door. Then, to the old man, “Bye, honey! I’ll pick you up at five, okay? You remember, now, y’ hear?” And then she is gone, leaving Bob Dubois standing at the cash register, his heart thumping, head abuzz, hands, he suddenly notices, wet with sweat.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Bob looks forward to seeing Marguerite twice, in the morning when she brings her father to work and again in the late afternoon when she picks him up. She could more easily drop the old man off in the morning, and later, sitting in her car outside, signal with the horn for him to come out, but she doesn’t. She gets out of the car and comes into the store and talks with Bob. Bob believes she does this because she is falling in love with him. He believes this because he thinks he is falling in love with her, and just as his days have now taken on an unexpected yet longed-for significance, at least his Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays have, so, too, he believes, have her days, once tedious and bland as boiled potatoes, now come to seem intense, shapely, piquant.

At home, Bob merely waits for time to pass. He withdraws from his nightly conversations with Elaine, leaves off, or treats as a chore, reading stories to the girls before they go to bed, and usually ends up falling asleep on the couch before the eleven o’clock news comes on. Naturally, Elaine resents and then quickly fears the change in him, for she does not attribute it to anything other than to the change in her, that is, to her pregnancy, which, she thinks, has made her more sensitive than usual, more demanding and more easily hurt.