Frederick Busch: Girls

I poured coffee for us, then let the dog in and rewarded him with a biscuit for identifying his own door. He lapped a lot of water from his dish, groaned, and lay down under the table. I knew he was on Fanny’s feet. She lifted her head and looked at her coffee, then leaned back in the chair.

“And you’re only tired?” she said. “Not sick?”

“Not sick. I started in doing the room.”

She put her cup down.

I said, “We’d pretty much decided.”

“Pretty much,” she said. “I thought we might talk about it again.”

“All right,” I said.

“Well, there isn’t much point. Not if you’ve begun. What’d you do?”

“There is a point. We can talk. I can stop. It doesn’t have to happen.”

“What made you begin?”

I shook my head. I shrugged.

“And what did you do?”

“I took a lot of wallpaper down.”

“The Bambi?”

“That’s the wallpaper.”

“Why does it have to come down? ” Her eyes were full.

“So I can build the bookshelves we talked about.” I sounded to myself like a reasonable man, but I’m not sure that’s who she heard.

“But Bambi doesn’t have to come down for us to make bookshelves. We could’ve seen the paper through the shelves. That wouldn’t have hurt anybody, Jack. She used to look at the wallpaper. She used to make noises at Bambi, Jack. She would have learned to talk to him. How can you take it down?”

I did not tell her that I’d done only two walls and that there were plenty of fawns with big eyes. I took a sip of coffee and I sat an instant. Then I said, “I’m sorry. I think I didn’t understand. I have to get a shower and change my clothes.” I went upstairs.

When I came down, the dog was lying behind the living room sofa, slapping his tail against the floor, which meant Fanny was on it and blowing her nose. I put my boots on and I went out to shovel snow. It took me an hour of sweating in the very cold, very still day to clear the area between my car and the road. I dug around the axles to make sure they were clear. Then I started up the old bomber and went in to tell Fanny she was snowbound. The tow truck had left her car in the road, and the plows had gone around it, sealing it behind a thick wall of snow. She wasn’t in the living room. I heard her upstairs, and I heard the dog’s nails. I tracked the sounds and knew she was in the room, looking at what I’d erased.

I heard something shatter and I figured it might be a coffee cup. I hoped it wasn’t a window. I heard objects against a wall. I heard — I barely could hear it — the sound of Fanny breathing hard while she lifted things. The studs clattered and there was a thick, solid noise that could have been a sheet of plasterboard getting holed. I knew what she looked like. Her eyes would be huge. Her face would be wet with her tears. It would be very pale. She would lift and push like a man. She was trained to be physical. She knew about wreckage. Right now, she wanted some. When she went like this, her lips curled in on each other and she looked through whatever she was moving into the air and onto walls and floors. She was there, but she also wasn’t, and her empty eyes were frightening.

I knew she had waited until she thought I was gone. She was never not fair. She had waited so that I wouldn’t think of what she did as warfare. It wasn’t. I knew that. It was mourning. It was grief. It was some kind of general rage. I thought there had to be a difference between those feelings. I thought I could ask Archie Halpern what the difference might mean. Or Fanny, I thought. Archie would tell me how she’d be someone to ask. I sipped a little hot coffee and I called Strodemaster. He shouted into the phone. I took one of our telephone pads and a pen. It seemed to make sense to take notes. You take notes, I’d learned on my jobs, and you can focus on something besides your feelings. That would be a sound idea today.

The tiny village Janice Tanner’s parents lived in was like a long crossroads separated from an ice-choked river by a cornfield that ran about a third of a mile. Under all that heavy whiteness was corn stubble. In the spring, I thought, deer would wander down from the hills and across the river and into the field. It would be good to see them doing that if spring ever came. I didn’t believe it would.

Most of the population here was in the houses that lay parallel to the river on either side of the road. I’d seen dozens of hamlets like this one. The children, some very young and some almost teenaged, shifted in clusters from lawn to yard to lawn to yard, from game to game. Kids grew up here, before they moved to driving and drinking and sex, by fishing together and torturing frogs and picking the worms from tomatoes in gardens, and when you drove through and saw them in noisy clusters, it occurred to you that human life was possible.

I drove to Strodemaster’s house and went in the back door. He was in a heavy blue woolen bathrobe and unlaced boots. “ Here he is!” he called. He acted embarrassed. He didn’t want to meet my eyes. I tried to think of a way to get him off the hook, but I couldn’t. I’m not very good at that. He shouted, “Damn it, Jack, I’m glad as hell. Good man!”

He brought me coffee I didn’t want, and breakfast cake in a supermarket wrapper. When I looked at his kitchen and the toothpaste stains down the front of his bathrobe, I remembered that his wife had left him. She had taken their kids, a daughter and a son. I remembered that gossip had him driving her out. He periodically moved in local women, but they left promptly enough, and he was a handsome-looking, lonely-looking, shabby middle-aged man. Let that be a lesson to you, I thought, tracking the green-white drip marks on his bathrobe.

There was a stale, sweet smell in the kitchen, or leaking into it from elsewhere in the house. He might have profited from taking the garbage out, I thought. I got used to it soon enough. The birch-veneer kitchen suite had been bought at Sears, I figured, with a coupon booklet for paying it off. The floor was linoleum, a kind of vines and sticks pattern that made me feel I was going to fall through the flimsy sticks. The wallpaper complemented the floor, though there seemed to be very large bugs on whatever the tiny white flowers were. I didn’t want to know about wallpaper. He was talking about the police, finding it necessary to call them “the fuzz,” and I realized that at about the time I was doing my work in the war, he was probably calling me some kind of killer.

On the far wall, next to the telephone, was a large black chalk-board surrounded by cork. There were curled notes and cartoons tacked in the cork. A piece of chalk attached to the board by red string hung straight down. On the board, someone had written “Oregano” and, under it, a different hand had written “de Bergerac.”

Strodemaster called, “ Here they are!” and Janice Tanner’s parents came in. They were shy-looking people, tall and a little stooped. They looked like brother and sister. I could see the daughter’s pointed chin in their faces, and her large eyes, though neither of them had eyes that drew you as hers did. The husband had very long arms and legs, a short torso, and a long neck. The wife was better proportioned, and at first I thought she was tanned. I realized, after a while, that she was brown-yellow from cancer or the treatments.

They sat at the table and we all had to have cups of coffee and doughnuts and pastry. Mr. Tanner nodded at the plate before him and said, “Piece of cake, you could say.”

Mrs. Tanner ignored him. Strodemaster said, “You’re a gutsy man, Reverend.”