Russell Banks: Continental Drift

“Irwin’s for a while. That’s where I called you from. Then Sears. The skates at Sears were lousy … and expensive.”

“Oh,” she says. “I was worried. Because of the snow and all.”

An advertisement appears on the screen. A jubilant, pink-faced family in pajamas and plaid bathrobes gathered around a modestly decorated, dark green tree is being photographed by the father of the family with his new Polaroid camera. Elaine turns away from the screen and for the first time looks at her husband’s face and realizes that he’s been crying. He looks at her, and away. Then silence, and she goes on staring at him.

She says his name, as if not believing the man next to her is really Bob. Her hands move to her mouth, and she brushes her lips with her fingertips, as if trying to read unuttered words from them. In the nearly ten years she’s known him, she’s never seen him like this. She’s seen him angry, hurt, glad or sad, but she’s never seen him cry, though she has on a few occasions wished he would break down and cry. There was the time when his father finally died from the cancer, and the summer after that, when his mother died so suddenly, and the time Elaine confessed to having slept with Bob’s best friend, Avery Boone, and when they thought Ruthie would die from the spinal meningitis and she didn’t, and then they thought she’d never walk again but she did — all those times he had simply tightened up, like a man being photographed by the police, a man afraid of being identified later by witnesses as the rapist, the burgler, the driver of the getaway car.

Slowly, without looking at her, he lifts his swollen right hand, opens and extends it so she can see the swelling and discoloration along the heel of the hand. “I broke … I broke all the windows of the car.”

“You what ?”

“I said I broke all the windows of the car. Don’t worry, I’ll get ’em fixed. I’ll tell the insurance company some kids vandalized it or something.”

“Broke the windows? Why?” she asks calmly. This is her way. In a crisis she is calm and patient. She saves her rage and alarm, her joy and her grief, even, for later, when she has got all the information.

“I don’t know, Elaine. I don’t know, I just got … so damned … mad. You know?”

“Are you drunk?”

“No, no. I had a couple of beers at Irwin’s, that’s all. Nothing.”

“Then why are you … why were you so mad? Did you get fired? What happened , Bob?”

“Nothing. Nothing happened .” He finally turns and faces her. He knows she’s not angry at him, she’s only confused, and now he wants her to understand. He wants her to know what he knows, to feel what he feels.

Crossing from the couch to his chair, Elaine kneels and cups his injured hand gently in both of hers, as if confining a small, delicate animal there.

“I went to Sears. I went there and looked at the skates there, you know, for Ruthie, and came back to the car … and I got so damned mad … the skates were expensive … I got mad at everything, though, mad at everything … then I just got to pounding on the car windows, and they broke. And then coming home, I felt … coming home I felt worse than I’ve ever felt in my life. I can’t even say it, how bad I felt. And then all of a sudden I just … I just started crying. Me !” he says, almost shouting, his voice breaking, his face forcing a grotesque grin over its surface. “I mean, I don’t know what’s the matter with me, what was the matter, I mean, because I’m okay now, but just like that, all of a sudden I’m crying like a baby. Me! Crying like a fucking baby!”

“Oh, Bob, don’t,” she croons. “Don’t.” She strokes his hand lovingly.

“No, no, I’m okay now. No kidding, I’m fine now. It’s just that … it’s just I was so surprised , you know? Because I was so mad and all. And I have to tell you, I have to tell …”

“No, honey, it’s okay. I understand. Don’t worry, honey.”

“No, you don’t understand. I have to tell you how I felt.”

“I know, baby.” She goes on stroking his hand, soothing and trying to heal it with her touch.

“No, Elaine, you really don’t understand,” he says, pulling his hand away. “Listen to me. It’s this place. This goddamned place. It stinks. And it’s my job at Abenaki, that fucking job. And it’s this whole fucking life. This stupid life. All of a sudden, this whole life came to me, it showed me itself. I had the feelings before I saw it, and I didn’t know what the feelings came from, until I saw it, and then I saw this life, this whole fucking life, and I knew what the feelings came from. I saw that there’s no way out of it for me. It’s like I’m my father all over again. I’m all grown up now, and all of a sudden I’m my own fucking father over again. Just like by the time he was my age he got to be his father. The both of them, dumb Frenchmen down at the goddamned mill running a lathe, the both of them, their whole livelong lives! Only difference now, the mill is turned into a fucking pea cannery where only women work, so I’m fixing broken oil burners for Fred Turner, crawling in and out of boiler rooms and basements my whole livelong life!”

Elaine is silent for a second. Then in a quiet voice she says, “We have a good life, honey. We do.”

Bob looks at his feet. “My father, when I was a kid, used to play a record over and over, I don’t know where the hell he got it, he only bought the record player for Ma and me and Eddie to play, but he had this one record of his own, a forty-five by Frank Sinatra called ‘Destiny’s Darling,’ a really stupid song. But he loved it, and he used to have a few beers and play that record over and over, until he’d get this kind of dreamy look on his face, sitting there in his chair listening to this song and pretending he wasn’t who he was. And me and Eddie, we’d see him doing that and we’d laugh, you know? We’d laugh at him, because we knew we were different, we’d never do anything so stupid as our old man, work all day in a fucking mill and come home and have a couple of beers and play a goddamned record by Frank Sinatra about being destiny’s darling. I mean, Jesus! What an asshole, I’d think. I was only a kid, I was in high school then, me and Eddie, but being such hotshot hockey players and all, getting written up in the papers and all, we thought we were destiny’s darlings. Only now it’s fifteen years later, and here I am. Just like my old man. Only instead of coming home and sitting in my chair and playing ‘Destiny’s Darling,’ I’m watching fucking Hart to Hart or some damned thing on TV. And if my kids were a few years older, they’d be laughing at me, the way me and Eddie used to laugh at my old man. Look at the asshole, they’d say, Ruthie and Emma, bigshot cheerleaders in high school and all, look at the asshole, he thinks he’s Robert Wagner or somebody, they’d say, he doesn’t know he’s half drunk and covered with soot from other people’s furnaces and doesn’t have a pot to piss in and never will.”

“Oh, honey, we have a good life. We do.”

“Maybe you do. Or at least you think you do. Because you happen to be living the way you always wanted to live, the way when you were a kid you hoped you’d live. Because of your old man’s taking off on you and your ma like that, and your ma having to work herself practically to death at the cannery by the time she was forty-five. But me, I don’t know, I thought it was going to be different . Me and Ave Boone, we used to talk about building a boat and going to Australia or someplace in the South Pacific and making a killing. We used to say that, ‘We’ll make a killing.’ If I said those words now, it’d be like sand in my mouth, because I’d be lying and I’d know it. No fucking way I’ll ever make a killing. Ave, he did it. He got out. He built his boat, just like he always wanted to, and he got out. It took him till he was almost thirty, but he got out …”