Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Thank you for the bed.”

Smiling, and feeling fifteen, Jay went up to bed, and he was worried that he couldn’t feel more completely unhappy. Before he fell asleep, to the sounds of Jonas bumping into things in an unfamiliar house, he wondered if Jonas’s dilemma pleased him. He wondered if anyone ever recovered from being a brother, especially a younger one. He was certain that being the older was far from beneficial to the soul: no matter where in the world you lived, your younger brother, on entering some place or any time, was a stranger on terrain you might already have hoisted your flag above. You could not feel such confidence about your relationship to any other person’s life and still be decent, he thought. Feeling indecent, therefore, yet not so unhappy about all of it as he should, Jay fell into sleep. The whimpering woke him up almost at once. He listened hard, to be certain that Jonas was actually crying. He wasn’t. It had been Jay’s own noises calling him up and to the rescue. On and off, he kept himself company for long hours, or so it felt, because the sleep he fell to was so frightening, and its nature unnameable. Blinking against the dark, and rolling, rolling, he wondered whether he had taken some of Jonas’s troubles onto himself. That question was the answer. Hearing the word decent repeated by the secret self, he finally stayed asleep.

Next day, he spent fifteen minutes in the emergency room, instead of walking his ward, in explaining to two very well-read but misinformed parents that their little girl’s herpes simplex —the child had a lipful of cold sores — did not necessarily mean that she would come down with genital herpes and infected children and a sex life demanding a terrible precision and tact. He administered synthetic penicillin to one patient and took another off intravenous feeding. He dictated records and signed orders. He got hugged by children in pajamas and he hugged them back. He got hugged by a nurse who weighed fifty pounds more than he, and who smelled of soap, and they traded shocking stories while he helped her find the key to the drug cabinet. He fed the goldfish in the corridor of the ward and then, after checking his mail and gossiping with doctors who also drove European cars, he went toward home.

He kept going, though, and drove into Spruce Plains, which once had been a sleepy town inhabited by merchants and a few teachers from the local school and some antique dealers from New York who wanted privacy for their domestic arrangements. They all were still there, and the one or two artists who kept vacation homes. But there were also people who sold health foods, and tall bearded men who wore faded jeans and who made pots and rugs and furniture, and there was a bookstore. It had no cute name because it was Nell’s. The sign outside said BOOKS. That was what she sold — no art postcards, and not even witty place-markers, and no small anthologies of religious doggerel from greeting-card companies. She sold paperback books and clothbound books and she made enough money, along with a modicum of assistance from her former husband who taught history at Williams, to feed herself and her daughter, whose name was Rachel, and who was sitting behind the cash register when Jay came in.

“Hi, Jay.”

“Hi, Rachel. Where’s your mom?”

The child smiled all of her teeth. “Nellie!” she called. “Nellie! A man’s here for you.”

Nell came through the curtains at the back of the shop, glared at Jay, then harder at Rachel, and she marched the length of the store. Standing in front of the register, as if she were about to pay for something, she said, “Apologize. Apologize to Jay and then to me. Now. Now .”

Rachel got down from her wooden stool and stood on the other side of the counter. “How do you think I feel, being humiliated like this? I’m thir teen .” Her face frightened Jay because the eyes were like marbles in something shot and stuffed; only the lips and forehead moved.

“You’re grounded. You’re starving for a meal. Your goose is cooked, and I’m eating it. I mean it. Look at me: Do I mean it? Apologize.”

Rachel said, “Jay, I’m humiliated right now, but I’m also sorry. I didn’t mean to act like some adolescent creep. It just — Jay, when you come after her like that, you don’t know how crappy it makes me feel.”

“Didn’t mean to make you feel crappy, Rachel. But it isn’t entirely your problem. And you made me feel very peculiar when you said that. When you treated me that way.”

“I’m sorry, Jay. I didn’t mean to imply you were sniffing around Nellie’s legs.”

Nell squealed, swung at Rachel’s face, missed most of it, but caught enough to make a plopping sound of skin and to send Rachel into a fast pallor. “Ma!”

“That’s right,” Nell said, panting. “Try calling me Nellie again real soon, won’t you? And be a smart little shit in front of grownups again real soon. You think you will?”

“I apologize,” Rachel said, not crying, “all right?”

Nell said, “I mean, do you have problems, or what?”

“I think either I’m jealous of Jay’s affections for you or I’m unsettled by their implications for our family.”

“Will you stop sounding so gifted ?” Nell wailed. “Talk like the other kids. Talk like me .”

“I do apologize,” Rachel said. “I’ll go into the house and chew gum and watch bowling now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“No,” Nell said. “You’ll go wash your face and fix your hair and do chores.”

“Ma.”

“Now.” Rachel’s face changed, some of the stillness and sullenness leaked out, and she left, waving casually to both of them. Nell said, “Can you tell, I made the mistake of giving her some Salinger stories? They took her hostage, I think.”

“Is she going to stay a chowderhead like that?” Jay asked.

“Not if she wants to keep breathing. Hello.”

“You want me to take care of your kid? I’ll stay here and nurse her.”

“She isn’t sick. She’s just an adolescent.”

“Okay. You want me to stay here and take care of you?”

“What’d you have in mind?”

“I thought maybe one of us might want to sweep the other of us off of his or her feet.”

The door opened and two women in identical straw hats came in. One of them wore a patch over her eye, and its delicate yellow tone precisely matched her gloves, bunched in her hand and waved at Nell in greeting. “So much for the leisure to sweep,” Nell said, waving back.

“My brother showed up. He’s running away from home. I meant to tell you, but I was thinking about getting you to run away from home. Anyway, he’s here.”

“He’s younger than you?”

“He’s thirty-seven, and he’s running away from home.”

“To live with you and be a kid brother?”

“To tell me some of his troubles, maybe. Maybe today. I don’t know. Let’s not count on tonight, though, all right?”

“I didn’t know I was counting on tonight.”

“If I can put up with your kid, can we live together?”

“No.”

“Then we can get married?”

“No.”

“Can I nibble your toes in the village square?”

Nell giggled, then stopped herself. She said, loudly, “I don’t think there is a village square in Spruce Plains, Dr. Reese. Perhaps you had some other place in mind.”

He said, also louder, “Where I can nibble?” Nell colored, the woman whose eyepatch echoed her gloves looked over, and Jay left the store, making the sounds of chomping.

Jay drove back to the clinic he shared, in Millerton, with two other doctors, and he saw private patients until four, when he remembered that he had been expected at home for lunch. It was an uncrowded day, and his partners took his patients when he left and drove too quickly home. His brother was wearing the wrinkled seersucker pants and the wrinkled oxford shirt. He sat outside with Jay’s bottle of vodka and two glasses and a plate of rubbery egg-with-ketchup sandwiches. Without speaking, they ate and drank across the picnic table from one another, under the willow at the side of the house. Then Jay talked a little about his practice, and about the day, and, apologizing for his lateness, and gesturing with his full glass that Jonas should take his too, he led him from the table up the sloping small lawn toward the field that ran west from his house. They walked slowly, for their drinks’ sakes, climbed the wooden fence and then descended, walking through cowflop and high grass, through swampy ground and dense thistle and very uneven dry field, away from the house and finally uphill, toward nothing but long meadow and bright yellow flowers that Jay couldn’t name.