T. Boyle: T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II

But then it was September and it was raining and I had to go back to work. I was substitute-teaching at the time, a grinding chaotic thankless job, but I didn’t really have a choice — we needed money to stay alive, same as anybody else. Nora could have worked — she had her degree now and she could have substituted, could have done anything — but the idea didn’t appeal to her and so on the three or four days a week I was summoned to one school or another, she was at home, listening to the rain drool from the eaves and trickle into the pots we’d set out under the worst of the leaks. I sprang for a cheap TV to keep her company, and then an electric heater the size of a six-pack of beer that nonetheless managed to make the meter spin like a 45. But then, we weren’t paying utilities — the landlord was. I’d given him a lump sum at the end of May — for the season — and now we were getting our own back. One morning when I was at work, he used his key to let himself in and found Nora in bed, the blankets pulled up to her neck and the TV rattling away, and he’d backed out the door, embarrassed, without saying a word. The next day we got the eviction notice. The day after that, he cut off the electricity.

I was cooking by candlelight over the gas stove a few nights later (Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli, out of the can, with a side of iceberg lettuce cut in wedges), when Nora edged up beside me. We’d been drinking burgundy out of the gallon jug we kept under the sink as a way of distracting ourselves from the obvious. The house crepitated around us. It wasn’t raining, at least not right then, but there was a whole lot of dripping going on, dripping that had emerged as the defining soundtrack of our lives in the absence of music, and I couldn’t remember a time, not a single minute going all the way back to the day we first met, when there wasn’t a record on or at least the radio.

Her hair shone greasily in the candlelight. She’d twisted it into pigtails for convenience because the water heater, which ran not on gas but electricity, was defunct now, definitely defunct, and there was no way to take a shower unless we went over to a friend’s house — and that involved the hassle of actually getting in the car and going someplace when it was so much easier just to pile up the blankets on the bed, get stoned and watch the shadows creep over the beams that did such an admirable job of holding up the slanted portion of the roof. Nora gazed into the pot on the stove. “I can’t live like this,” she said.

“No,” I said, and I was in full agreement here, “neither can I.”

—

The first place we looked at was also a seasonal rental, but the seasons were reversed. It was another crumbling outbuilding in the same summer colony, but it had been tricked up with heat and insulation because the landlady — eighty, ninety maybe, with eyes like crushed glass and hair raked back so tightly you could make out the purple-splotched ruin of her scalp beneath — saw the advantage of renting through the winter and spring to whoever was left behind when the summer people went back to the city. I didn’t begrudge her that. I didn’t begrudge her anything. I didn’t even know her. Nora had circled an ad in the Pennysaver, dialed the number, and now here she was, the old lady, waiting for us on the porch, out of the rain, and the minute we pulled into the driveway she began waving impatiently for us to jump out of the car, hurry up the steps and get the business over with.

There were two problems with the house, the first apparent to all three of us, the second only to Nora and me. That problem, hovering over us before we even walked in the door, was that we were looking for a deal because we didn’t have the kind of money to put down for a deposit or first and last months’ rent, just enough for now, for the current month — enough, we hoped, to get us out of the converted chicken coop and into someplace with heat and electricity till we could think what to do next. The old lady — Mrs. Fried — didn’t look as if she would let things slide. Just the opposite. She gazed up at us out of her fractured eyes with the expectation of one thing only: money.

But then there was the first problem, which obviated the need to dwell on the second. The place was too small, smaller even than the shack we were living in, and we saw that the minute we stepped through the door. There were two rooms, bedroom and living room/kitchen, and to the right of the door, in a little recess, a bathroom the size of the sweatbox in The Bridge on the River Kwai. We never got that far. We just stood there, the three of us, and gazed into the bedroom, which was off the narrow hall. The bedroom was too cramped for anything but the single bed squeezed into it. A second single, made up with an army blanket and sheets gone gray with use, was pushed up against the wall in the hallway so that you had no more than a foot’s leeway to get around it and into the front room. The old lady read our faces, read our minds — or thought she did — and gestured first at the bed in the hallway and then the one in the bedroom. “Ven you vant,” she said, shrugging, her delicate wheeze of a voice clinging to the hard consonants of her youth, “you come.”

If Nora found it funny, laughing so hard she couldn’t seem to catch her breath as we ducked back into the car, I didn’t. I was the one put in the awkward position here, I was the provider, and what was she? It was the sort of question you didn’t ask, because it stirred resentment, and resentment was what had brought us down the first time around. I put the car in gear and drove down the dark tree-choked tunnel of the street, turned right, then right again, and swung into the muddy drive where the shack stood awaiting us. Inside, it smelled like a tomb. I could see my breath, even after I’d flicked on all four burners of the stove. Not sixty seconds went by before Nora said something that set me off and I came right back at her—“We wouldn’t be in this fucking mess if you’d get up off your ass and find a job”—and when we went to bed, early, to save on candles, it was for the warmth and nothing else.

There was no call next morning, and I had mixed feelings about that. I dreaded those calls, but they meant money — and money was the beginning and end of everything there was, at least right then. When the phone did finally ring it was half-past twelve and it went off like a flash bomb in the dream I was having, a dream that made me so much happier than the life I jolted awake to I wanted it to go on forever. My eyes opened on the slanted ceiling and my first thought was that even the chickens must have hated staring up at it, the sameness of it, day after day, until you lost your head and your feathers and somebody dropped you into a frying pan. Nora was propped up beside me, reading. Rain rapped insistently at the roof. “Well,” she said. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

The cold pricked me everywhere, like acupuncture, and I clutched my jeans to my groin, fumbled with a sweatshirt and hobbled across the room to snatch up the phone. It was my best friend, Artie, whom I’d known since elementary school. He didn’t bother with a greeting. “You find a place yet?”

“Uh-uh, no.”

“Well, I might’ve found something for you—”

I glanced at Nora. She’d put down her book and she was watching me now, her eyes squinted to slits in the fierceness of her concentration. Who is it? she mouthed, but I ignored her.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“I didn’t know if you’d be interested, because it’s not a real rental — it’s more like housesitting — and it’s only temporary, like from next week through the end of April. It’s a friend of my father’s. An old guy and his wife. They go to Florida every winter and they want somebody in the house — or the apartment, there’s an apartment in the basement, above ground, with windows and all — just so they don’t get anybody breaking in. I was there once when I was a kid. It’s nice. On a private lake. A place called Birnam Wood. You ever hear of it?”