Russell Banks - Continental Drift

For several seconds Bob studies the picture, then, in a violent move, his face stiffens and he crumples the entire newspaper into a large, loose bundle, pushes, crushes and crumples it again and again, until he’s made a dense, crinkly ball of it. He steps around the table and opens the cupboard under the sink, tosses the ball into the plastic trash bucket and closes the cupboard door.

Facing away from the kitchen, through the living room to the hall beyond, he hears Emma’s angry cry, almost a howl, as her mother rubs the child’s cheeks and chin, arms, hands and belly, with a rough, wet washcloth, and he hears Elaine order the child to be still, hold still, it’ll be over in a minute if you’ll only hold still and stop squirming.

Bob knows he loves the woman properly. And he loves the children properly too, though he’s never had to ask himself that one, thank God. Those are facts, though, and a man has to give himself over to the facts of the life he finds himself living, no matter how he’s living it.

He walks quietly back through the trailer to the bedroom he shares with his wife, to get ready for work.

5

Nevertheless. Bob is obsessed with Marguerite Dill, who is not at all as he imagines and supposes her to be. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to say here who or what she is, exactly, and probably beside the point as well, except to observe that Bob knows very little of what it is to be a woman, nothing at all of what it is to be black. He’s honest and intelligent enough to admit this and behave accordingly, but like most white men, he’s not imaginative enough to believe that being a woman is extremely different from being a man and being black extremely different from being white. If pushed, and he has been pushed now and then, at least by Elaine, he’d go only so far as to concede that the differences are probably no greater than those between child and adult, and because he bears within him the child he once was, and the child he once was carried within him the seed of the man he would someday become, then understanding between the two is an easily arranged affair of one’s attention. To understand your children, you attend to the child in you; and all your children have to do, if they wish to understand you, is project themselves twenty or thirty years into the future. Therefore, to imagine Elaine and Doris and now Marguerite, the three women who in recent years have mattered most to him, all Bob has had to do is pay attention to the woman in himself. It’s harder in the case of Marguerite, but all the more interesting to him for that, because with her he has to pay attention to the black man in himself as well.

When Bob talks to his wife, he is thinking about Marguerite. When he looks at his wife’s reddish hair, pale skin, rounding body, he thinks of Marguerite’s hair, skin, body — but not to the disadvantage of either woman. It’s just that hair, anyone’s, reminds him of Marguerite’s hair; skin, if he happens to notice it, reminds him of Marguerite’s skin; and breasts, belly, thighs and so on, remind him of Marguerite’s. Which aspects, of course, he’s never actually seen and therefore must imagine, relying for components on the occasional Playboy and Penthouse black centerfold he’s seen.

Elaine tells her new friends at the trailer park and her sister-in-law Sarah that Bob is distracted, preoccupied, worried, and she adds that she’s concerned. But in fact she’s more than concerned. She’s frightened. She believes he doesn’t love her anymore. And to make matters worse, she believes that it’s because she is pregnant. The sad truth of the matter, however, is that Bob often forgets she is pregnant, and when he remembers, it’s as if he’s remembering something that was true long ago.

His obsession with Marguerite has become his sole companion. He talks to it, argues with it, admires and respects it, gives it all the attention and time he can steal from his family and job. He’s almost grateful that he has no friends here and that his job, where he’s often alone for hours at a time, blocks him off from the voices and needs of his wife and children. Though he is not aware of it, he has recently taken up humming a tuneless tune, hour after hour, whenever someone else is within hearing range. As soon as that person, George Dill or Elaine or one of the kids, leaves his proximity or closes the door between them, he ceases humming and lets his obsession loose, as if it were a dog wanting exercise, to leap and run about the room, dart out the door and gallop in wild circles in the parking lot and across the marshy fields, until it’s almost lost from sight, where it wheels about and comes racing happily back to him, leaps into his arms and licks his face with joy.

Months pass, and little changes. Elaine’s body has gone on swelling steadily, and Emma, knowing something threatening is going to happen, has become sullen and withdrawn, not exactly a behavior problem, but not pleasant to be around, either, and Ruthie has complained increasingly of school, even feigning sickness to stay home, until it turns out that she has what’s called a learning disability, which, the school nurse tells Elaine, and Elaine reports to Bob, may be merely emotional or she may be slightly dyslexic. Time will tell, but not to worry, many children pass through phases like this, especially when adjusting to a new environment. But if it persists into the second grade, when reading is essential for learning, special instruction will be necessary. Bob barely hears the report, for he’s suffering from a learning disability of his own, a disability fed and encouraged by his Monday, Wednesday and Friday visits from Marguerite, which have become part of her weekly routine too, possibly rationalized as, but nonetheless essential to, her caring for her father, a man who drifts through his days as lost in his private past as Bob is lost in his private future.

Bob and Marguerite have become close friends. They gossip together. She tells stories about the three doctors she works for, calls them Winkum, Blinkum and Nod, a lecher, a crook and a lazy man. He counters with complaints about his brother, his job, his boring family life, and then one morning remembers Ruthie’s learning disability and shoves it into the conversation so as to elicit Marguerite’s professional opinion, which turns out to confirm the school nurse’s opinion, a fact that impresses Bob with Marguerite’s intelligence and education.

Now, for the first time, Marguerite seems genuinely curious about Bob’s wife and children. They’ve talked of many things before this, often matters of considerable intimacy, at least for Bob, such as when and how his parents died, which parent he resembles more, and how he is both different from and very much like his brother Eddie. She even asked him once if he had played any sports in school, which Bob took as a clear indication of her interest in his body, and as a result, he went into elaborate detail about the kind of body you needed if you were going to excel as a defenseman in hockey. “Lots of endurance,” he told her. “You gotta have lots of endurance. And big bones, it’s good to have big bones and flat muscles. You can’t have one of those muscle-man bodies, you know the type, muscles like grapefruit glued to skinny bones. ’cause you really get banged around, playing hockey. You go into the corner, digging for the puck, some big guy’ll come at you full tilt and lay a body check on you that slams you into the boards, and it’s legal, all legal, so you gotta keep on playing. No time to lie there and clear your head and check for broken bones. I still skate,” he told her, lying. “Leastways I did till I left New Hampshire. Pickup games, you understand, nothing organized. I’m still in shape for it all right, but I don’t have the wind anymore. Cigarettes,” he said ruefully, lighting one up.