David Gates - Jernigan

The ground wasn’t absolutely white yet, but white enough that our passing left dark footprints.

We bundled into the car like a family. Kids in back, parents up front, Dad driving. Family friend waving from an open door.

4

Out on the main drag, tires had made black ribbons on the white pavement and snowflakes boiled in the headlight beams. When we’d left to come over here, I’d given Martha an argument about taking her Reliant: a vote of no confidence, I thought, in my ability to drive home, whereas in fact I was a better driver when drunk, my concentration more nearly absolute. But now I was glad she’d insisted; her tires were a little less bald.

“How are you doing?” I said.

“Let’s just get home,” she said.

“I’m still not clear,” I said. “Is it stomach or what?”

“I just want to get home,” she said. “Is that a big crime?”

I checked the rearview mirror. Danny was whispering to Clarissa, who was staring at her fingernails.

“Maybe somebody,” I said, lowering my voice, “will kindly tell me what the hell is going on. Stud there announces he’s got a girlfriend, and you suddenly have to go home. Maybe you’d like to tell me what it is, exactly, with the two of you?”

“Not what I’m sure you think.”

“How do you know what I think?” I said. Shifting ground on her.

“Oh, don’t worry, Peter,” she said. “I don’t really know what you think. You’re still as inscrutable as you want to be. You’re not in any danger of anybody getting close.”

She clearly thought this was a home thrust.

“Hey, can we have the radio on?” said Danny. The other thing about the Reliant was that it had an actual radio.

“Not going to be much on but Christmas music, I don’t think,” I said.

“Right,” he said, “that’s what we want.”

I put the radio on, but it was just an AM one and damned if I could find any Christmas music on the whole thing. News Radio 88, Latin music, a bunch of call-in shows. “Big night for the lonely souls,” I said, and snapped the thing back off.

Martha started weeping.

“Fuck,” I said. At least this shut everybody up the rest of the way. After a few miles Martha’s shoulders even stopped heaving.

I pulled up in front of the house and turned the car off. They all just sat there. Without the engine going, it was as silent as it got in New Jersey. Snow hitting the windshield and melting. Finally Danny said, “We’re going to go in, okay?”

I just gave a good big shrug, meaning What the fuck difference did it make what anybody did. This was called not helping matters any.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Peretsky?” he said.

“I’m fine,” she said. “You guys run ahead in.”

That left the two of us.

Martha said, “He was Rusty’s best friend.”

So apparently we were now going to get the story of Tim.

“Like before high school,” she said. “And they both ended up back here after the army. I mean they weren’t like in Vietnam or anything. Tim actually was in the Air Force, and Rusty was in Morocco most of his time. Anyhow, they were sharing this house, and Rusty and I started going out. I was done college and I had my first real job, you know, that wasn’t like waiting tables, and now I had this cool boyfriend. And so eventually I moved in. I was the only one that had a job or anything. Once in a while Rusty would get like a package from Morocco, or he and Tim would go in on a key together and sell enough lids out of it to get their money back, but that was about as far as it went. The whole rent was like a hundred dollars. So Rusty and Tim would just kind of go around scrounging things, like I remember a lot of the wood we used to burn in the wintertime they got following these guys around from a tree service. I think Tim’s dad got him into raising rabbits. At any rate, that stuff gave him the idea to start the magazine, which Rusty thought was crazy. Like Rusty used to call him the PM? Because he was going to be the Publishing Mogul. But I used to do typing for him sometimes after I got done work and kind of generally help out. And I used to do like little drawings to go at the bottom of the pages and stuff.”

I suppose that was my cue to say Oh really, I’d love to see some . Didn’t know she ever did drawings. At this late date it was kind of a so-what.

Snow was starting to stick to the windshield.

“So then when I got pregnant with Clarissa,” she said, “Rusty and I were going to get married and everything, but we were going to all just keep living in the house like before. And then like a month before she was born Rusty sold some weed to an undercover cop and he got sent away for a year. This was, you know, ’72. So anyhow, Tim just stayed and looked after me and Clarissa for that whole year. ’Cause I’d quit my job and everything. For a while he was even pumping gas at night at this service area on the Garden State so there’d be money coming in. And the whole time nothing ever happened, and you can believe that or not.”

“Why shouldn’t I believe it?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Rusty sure didn’t. After he got out and everything, the three of us just kept living there, but he wouldn’t talk to Tim very much. Or me much, either. It like really changed him. I always wondered if guys maybe did something to him there. Though the really weird stuff didn’t start till we moved here and Tim got his own place.”

“The really weird stuff,” I said.

“Well he sort of hit me and stuff,” she said.

Figured.

“At any rate,” she said. “So after Rusty and I split up I started seeing Tim again. I mean, not seeing him seeing him, but we’d get together and talk and stuff, have dinner. So I’m sorry, I don’t know why I suddenly got so weird tonight. I think I’m premenstrual.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Don’t put yourself down.”

“Is that putting myself down?” she said.

The whole windshield was white by this time. You couldn’t see out.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just talking.” Truest thing I’d said in weeks. “It’s cold,” I said. “You want to go in?”

“It’s cold in there too,” she said.

“Unless the kids started the stove,” I said. “Little joke.”

We sat there with my little joke echoing.

“Well, look,” I said. “I’m going in.”

“Would you do me a big favor?” she said. “Could you just leave me the key and go in and start the stove and let me run the heater until it warms up in there? Just this one time? I really don’t think I can stand it tonight going in there and having it be cold.”

“What do you mean can you have the key?” I said. “It’s your car, right?”

“I really appreciate it,” she said. “I’m not going to make a habit of this.”

“Hey,” I said, and opened the door. “Christmas comes but once a year.” Mr. Gracious.

Snow was really coming down. The walkway was completely white, and just a few blades of grass were sticking up out of the white lawn. It was a little warmer inside than out, but the stove had cooled enough to put your hand on. You could hear the tv going in the kids’ room.

I got the stove started and sat there in my coat. First the heat hit my shins. Then I felt it on my face. Then I went out to fetch Martha. The car was throbbing away with the windows fogged up, and one of those impossible things crossed my mind: that she’d got a vacuum cleaner hose from somewhere and hooked it to the tailpipe. So did that mean that I wished her dead, or was it just one more thought?

I helped her up the steps so she wouldn’t slip. She went in and sat down on the floor by the stove, hugging her knees like the woman in that Edward Hopper painting. My father used to have a print of it hanging in the living room, back when I was a kid. Woman sitting on her bed, window open, face full of sun. He’d done such a convincing job of painting harlequin sunglasses on her that I’d grown up thinking that was what the thing looked like. I tried to give myself a gratuitous feeling of awe by thinking about the comparative pinprick of fire in the stove versus the unimaginably vast fire of the sun. But of course your mind can’t really leap magnitudes that way.