Russell Banks - Continental Drift

“Honey, honey, honey,” she says. “It’s just because it’s Christmas and all. You’re worried. That’s all. And you’ve been working too hard, all these nights and Saturdays and Sundays being on call. It’s worse than being a doctor. You’ve just been working too hard. And we’re not like Eddie and Sarah, you know that. We don’t want to be, either. We love each other, Bob. We don’t need all those material things they’ve got, to be happy. We’ve always said that.”

He snorts and looks above the TV set at a spot on the wall, and though he is thinking of Doris Cleeve, he says to his wife, “Sure, we love each other. But if we had some of those material things Eddie’s got, if I had a fucking future, then maybe there’d be some kind of chance for romance. Hah! A chance for romance! Maybe we could go on a little vacation in the Caribbean, you know? Make love in the moonlight, drink rum punches from a coconut. Actually do the things we just get to think about. I wish you could understand what I’m trying to say to you.” He thinks of Doris Cleeve in her shabby apartment above Irwin’s, her thick legs and belly, her weary melancholy, her alcoholism, and he says, “It all started with those skates….” His shoulders sag, his eyes fill, and he shakes his head from side to side as if saying no.

Above and to the right of the television set, a small plaster crucified Jesus gazes sadly down. Bob studies the object, and as he does every time his gaze happens to fall on it, he wonders how he can improve the way it looks. By itself and because of its smallness, the crucifix looks isolated and pathetic. The way it looks now, has looked from the day years ago when Elaine first hung it on the wall, the thing bothers Bob. He’d change it somehow, but if he surrounded it with pictures or wall hangings, framed mottoes or bric-a-brac, he wouldn’t really be able to respect it. It would be a decoration, like everything else. On the other hand, if he swapped it for a larger crucifix, one of those massive and detailed crosses with a Jesus so large you can see the awful expression on His face, it would be scary. He’d think he was in a church or a priest’s house or a monastery. Better to leave the thing the way it is.

“Bob,” Elaine says quietly. “Bob, let’s move.”

“What?”

“I mean it. Let’s move, Bob. Let’s start over. Let’s move and start over.” She’s smiling up into his large, sad face. “Let’s just sell the house, sell the car and the boat, and even sell the furniture, and start over someplace else. Lots of people do it.”

Bob screws his face into a question mark. “Move?” He’s never really put the possibility to himself, never truly thought about it. Moving was what other people did, people who were just starting out in life, like Eddie back when he left for Oleander Park, or people without family responsibilities, like Ave Boone, or people who had no choice. “Now? Sell everything?” Would it be giving up, admitting defeat to everyone? “Not the boat,” he says. “I’ve only got three more payments on the boat.”

“Okay, fine, honey. Not the boat. And not the car, if you want. Things we need. But everything else. Then we can take the money and go to California, or go down to Arizona, if you want. Anywhere. I don’t care. Anywhere, so long as it’s somewhere else, where there’s a future for us. We’re not dead,” she says. “We’re not. It’s this place that’s dead.”

“I don’t know about California. I don’t know anybody out west, you realize. I mean, you can’t just wander into a town and start your life over,” he says. “What about Florida? Oleander Park. With Eddie. You know.”

Elaine lapses into silence and scowls slightly. She says, “Well …” then stops.

Elaine does not like Eddie, even though he’s her husband’s only brother, and she pities Eddie’s wife Sarah, because of the way Eddie treats her, and she thinks their daughter Jessica is stupid and a little on the homely side. Bob always insists that Eddie means well, and Sarah gets her kicks from suffering, she’s a whiner, and though whiners drive him crazy, that’s all she is, so he can ignore her, and Elaine should too, and Jessica, poor kid, she’s just going through an awkward stage. Consequently, Elaine rarely voices her feelings about them, and until now she has felt immense relief whenever, after Eddie has made his annual pitch, Bob has turned him down. The pitch runs like this: “Listen, Bob, you move the fucking wife and kids down, I’ll put your French ass to work tomorrow morning managing the fucking store in Oleander Park while I set up that new cocksucker I been planning over in Lakeland, and also I got a few cute little real estate deals on the back burner I can keep myself busy with and maybe cut you a piece of, and then in a few years, if you’re still interested, we can work out a parnership deal, maybe open a goddamned chain of stores, like Martignetti’s down in Massachusetts, and get cocksucking big, you know? Big. The fucking Dubois brothers. Like those Dunfey brothers from Hampton who run all those hotels now. The Dubois Boys. Right? Just like the old days, only now it’s palm trees and all that tanned pussy in bikinis. Sand in your shoes, Bob. Think about it. That’s all I’m asking, just think about it. Because if you ever get sick of shoveling all that fucking snow, all you got to do is call me up, brother, and you got a job in Oleander Park, a job that a hell of a lot of guys’d give their left nut for. So think about it, okay?”

Bob, as recently as a month ago at Thanksgiving, when Eddie last called, has always smiled and said thanks, but he spent ten years learning how to fix oil burners, a trade there wasn’t much call for in Florida, and besides, he was happy. He had a good job, a nice house, a loving wife and two healthy kids, a future too, one that was connected to his past and made sense to him. Throwing all that away and starting over in Florida didn’t make sense to him.

“Well what?” Bob asks his wife. “Eddie’s doing all right in Florida, you know that. He has from the first down there. And he wants me to come down. You know that.”

“Yes, sure I know. It’s just … we’ve talked about all this before. The Florida business and Eddie’s offers, and you were the one … it was always you, you were the one who said Eddie would be hard to work for, and the idea of running a liquor store always seemed boring to you, I thought.”

She stands and walks to the TV and snaps it off, and the room suddenly seems vacant, as if they have wandered into it in search of someone not at home. “Let’s go to bed, Bob.”

“I’ll get the skates for Ruthie tomorrow,” he says. “First thing in the morning.”

“I know, honey. I know.” She extends her hand, and he leans forward in the chair, takes her hand in his and rises. Together, they switch off the lights and slowly walk up the stairs to bed.

4

Before Bob and Elaine Dubois sleep on this snowy night in December, they have one more conversation that is of significance to them both.

They are lying on their backs side by side in darkness, he in his underwear, she in her flannel nightgown. She has wrapped her curlers in a nylon net. When, in a familiar form of invitation, he lays one leg over hers at the thigh, she quickly slides her hip against his.

Bob speaks first. “You know something? Ever since we were kids, I was the big silent one and Eddie was the little guy who did all the talking. But actually, I was a lot smarter than Eddie. In school, I mean. I was even smarter than Ave Boone, but he just never tried, he didn’t give a shit then, just like now. But I got things faster than Eddie did. He was always just this side of flunking, and I did okay in school. And he knew I was smarter than he was, so he was kind of jealous of me and got a real kick whenever he could make me look stupid, which was easy for him when we were kids, because he was almost two years older than me, even though he was only a grade ahead of me in school. But I was jealous of him, too, because he could talk so good, and all I could do was stand there like a big dummy.