Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Elaine is home, and the screened door slaps shut behind her, opens again and slams as each of the girls follows her inside. “Oh, Jesus, Bob!” Elaine cries. “You left the stove on!” She rushes to the stove, grabs at a smoking pan, yelps in pain, snatches a potholder and takes the pan off the stove. She tosses it into the sink and turns on the water, shouting to the girls, “Open the windows! Get the windows open!” The pan hisses and smolders in the sink, while Emma and Ruthie race through the trailer opening windows. Elaine turns off the stove, shifts the baby around from her hip, where he’s been riding, terrified and silent, and begins to comfort him. “There, there, honey, everything’s okay now, everything’s okay.”

Then the girls are back, Ruthie sucking intently on her thumb, her younger sister prowling through the refrigerator. “I’m hungry, Mama. I want somethin’ t’ eat,” she whines. Ruthie stands off to one side of Bob, works her thumb and drifts into a dreamy-eyed state that in recent weeks has come to be characteristic, though Bob has not seen that yet. To him, her thumb-sucking and dazed expression and silence are merely embarrassing and somewhat irritating, and he treats her behavior as if she were doing these things on purpose, just to antagonize him.

Elaine says quietly, “Ruthie, please, take your thumb out.” Then, to Bob, who has swung his legs off the couch, planted his feet on the linoleum-covered floor and squared to face her: “You could die that way, Bob, falling asleep with a pan on the stove. Asphyxiated in your sleep. It’s lucky I came home when I did….”

“I forgot. I was warming up some hash, you know? And I was tired, so I just lay down for a minute, and then, pop, I was gone.”

“You got up early,” she says, wiping off the baby’s mouth with her fingertips.

“I get up early every day. I don’t know why I’m so tired lately, though.” He stretches and yawns, as if to back his claim.

“It’s not like you’re overworked,” she says, adjusting Robbie’s diaper.

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Sure.”

“It’s just that the ‘fishing business’ is not exactly booming these days.” She always says it that way, with quotes around the phrase, and Bob cringes when she utters the words, as if she were drawing her fingernails across a blackboard. He knows what she means, knows that she fully intends for him to cringe and feel guilty, she desires it, because she’s angry at him, she’s angry for his having quit the job at Eddie’s liquor store and joining up with Ave, for having sold their mobile home and put the money into the Belinda Blue, buying 25 percent of the boat and splitting profits and costs with Ave, three parts to Ave, one part to Bob, though, as Ave says, anytime Bob wants, he can buy the whole thing and keep all the profits, which, Elaine knows, would not get them out of this ramshackle trailer at the end of a dirt road at the edge of a tiny town filled with tourists and fishermen. She is angry, and she has long days and nights when she is depressed. She is lonely, overworked, without money, she hasn’t lost the weight she gained during the pregnancy, and both she and Bob know that everything, all of it, is Bob’s fault.

His tee shirt is sopping wet, and his hair is plastered against his head. “We all oughta go out on the boat,” he announces. “You know? Just go out for the rest of the day and fish a little and cool off, like we used to, the whole family. Remember those trips we used to take up to Sunapee in the whaler? What do you say, honey?”

“Not interested.” She gets up, walks past him with Robbie and disappears behind him, returning a few seconds later without the baby. “He should sleep till supper now. He took a lot of sun,” she says to no one in particular, as she begins trying to clean out the burned pan. “I don’t think I can save this….”

“How come you’re not interested in us going out on the boat for the afternoon? This is more fun?” Bob asks. He spreads his arms and peers around at the dim interior of the tiny trailer. In a corner of the crowded living room, Ruthie and Emma are seated on plastic mesh folding chairs in front of the television set that Eddie gave them a year ago, watching a soap opera, General Hospital .

“Tell you what,” Elaine says, not looking up. “You take the kids out for the afternoon.”

“What?”

“Yeah, you go out on the boat. Leave me here for the afternoon, alone.”

“Wha …?”

“You watch out Emma doesn’t fall overboard and drown, though,” she goes on. “And keep Ruthie from getting too much sunburn, and change Robbie’s diapers and make sure he gets his bottle on time. You be the one to make sure the kids don’t stick themselves with fishhooks. You do that, and I’ll take a cool shower, read a magazine, sit out by the water and watch the seagulls. How’s that sound?”

“C’mon, Elaine. I mean, I got to run the boat, you know that. I mean, I can’t run the boat and watch the kids at the same time. We should all go out together,” he says. Why does she always have to make these things complicated? Why can’t she just say, “Fine, let’s go,” or “No, thanks, I’m too tired,” or something? It should be that simple. Instead, she’s coming on all sarcastic, suggesting absurd, impossible alternatives, and Bob is feeling guilty.

He stands and walks to the screened door and looks out at the yard, sand with bits and patches of witchgrass scattered through it. Across the road, Allie is still seated on her stoop, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. She’s got her wig on again, and it makes her look younger, just as she said. Bob thinks, I should have gone ahead and fucked her. Then he thinks, It’s a good thing I didn’t. I could’ve, but I didn’t, and he walks to the refrigerator for a beer.

“I’m just trying to come up with something to make you and the kids happy,” he says. “That’s all I’m doing. It’s not like I’m trying to think of ways to make you more miserable than you already are. So for Christ’s sake, please stop acting like I’m some kind of bastard, will you?”

She scrubs furiously at the blackened pan, her face twisted and red and sweating from the effort. “God damn. You really ruined this pan.”

“The hell with it. Throw it out.” He pops the top of the can of Schlitz and takes a long gulp.

“Sure, I’ll throw it out. Just like everything else when it breaks or won’t work anymore. Only we can’t afford to replace anything now when we throw them out, so after a while there won’t be anything to throw out,” she says. Frantically, she scrubs at the pan in the sink. “Just toss it out with the garbage! Easy! Except that next time I want a saucepan to cook supper in or maybe just to heat up the baby’s bottle, I won’t have any!”

Bob moves away from her, backs to the door, pushes it open with one hand and steps outside. “I’ll be back in a while,” he says softly.

“Fine.”

“Anything you want in Islamorada?”

“Nope. Nothing.”

“Thought I’d buy me a dip net for shrimp. The shrimp’re running out by the bridge. All you got to do is stand there and scoop ’em up. Maybe I’ll get nets for all of us, you know? So we can go out there on the bridge below Moray Key after dark tonight.”

“Fine.”

“You kids want to come up to Islamorada with me?” he calls.

They don’t answer. Ruthie leans forward and turns up the volume on the television.

“Hey, I’ll buy you a new pan,” Bob says to Elaine. “Ave’s got a charge at the tackle shop up there, and they got pots and pans and stuff like that.”