T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

He didn’t know what to say. She was accusing him, he knew it. And he had no defense. “I’m sorry,” he said. He stood to go.

The old woman was studying him carefully, her chin propped on one hand, eyes reduced to slits. “Your house,” she said, “the bungalow. Where do you sleep tonight?”

He didn’t answer. He was going to sleep in the car, in a rubble of crumpled newspaper and fast-food containers, the greasy sleeping bag pulled up over his head.

“I have a cot,” she said. “In the closet.”

“I was going to go over to my mother’s….” he said, trailing off. He couldn’t seem to keep his right foot still, the heel tapping nervously at the worn floorboards. “Sit,” she said.

He did as he was told. She brought him a cup of hot tea, a bowl of boiled cabbage and ham, and a plate of cold pirogen. Eating, he tried to explain himself. “About Naina,” he began, “I—”

She waved her hand in dismissal. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “I’m not the one you should tell.”

He set the cup down and looked at her — really looked at her — for the first time.

“Day after tomorrow,” she said, “the solstice, shortest day of year. You come to dock on river.” She held his eyes and he thought of the day she’d offered him the whole shabby pile of the house as if it were Hyde Park itself. “Same time as last year,” she said.

The day was raw, cold, the wind gusting off the river. A dead crust of snow clung to the ground, used up and discolored, dirt showing through in streaks that were like wounds. Marty got there early. He pulled into the lot and parked the Camaro behind a Lincoln the size of a Rose Parade float. He didn’t want her to see him right away. He let the car run, heater going full, and lit a cigarette. For a while he listened to the radio, but that didn’t feel right, so he flicked it off.

The lot gradually filled. He recognized some of the cars from the previous year, watched the white-haired old masochists maneuver over the ruts as if they were bringing 747s in for a landing. Mama Vyshensky was late, as usual, and no one made a move till her battered Pontiac turned the corner and jolted into the lot. Then the doors began to open and bare feet gripped the snow.

Still, he waited. The driver’s door of the Pontiac swung open, and then the passenger’s door, and he felt something rising in him, a metallic compound of hope and despair that stuck in the back of his throat. And then Naina stepped out of the car. Her back was to him, her legs long and naked, a flash of her blood-red nails against the tarnished snow. He watched her toss her head and then gather her hair in a tight knot and force it under the bathing cap. He’d slept in the car the past two nights, he’d hunkered over cups of coffee at McDonald’s like a bum. He saw her and he felt weak.

The crowd began to gather around Mama Vyshensky, ancient, all of them, spindly-legged, their robes like shrouds. He recognized the old man with red ears, bent double now and hunched over a cane. And a woman he’d seen last year, heaving along in a one-piece with a ballerina fringe round the hips. They drank a toast and shouted. Then another, and they flung their glasses. Naina stood silent among them.

He waited till they began to move down the slope to the dock and then he stepped noiselessly from the car, heart pounding in his chest. By the time they’d reached the dock, Naina and her mother at the head of the group, he was already passing the stragglers. “You bring a towel?” one old woman called out to him, and another tittered. He just gave her a blank stare, hurrying now, his eyes on Naina.

As he stepped onto the dock, Naina stood poised at the far end. She dropped her robe. Then she turned and saw him. She saw him — he could read it in her eyes — though she turned away as if she hadn’t. He tried to get to her, wedging himself between two heavy-breasted women and a hearty-looking old man with a white goatee, but the dock was too crowded. And then came the first splash. Naina glanced back at him and the soft smile seemed to flicker across her lips. She held his eyes now, held them across the field of drooping flesh, the body hair, the toothless mouths. Then she turned and dove.

All right, he thought, his pulse racing, all right. And then he had a boot in his hand and he was hopping on one leg. Then the other boot. A confusion of splashes caromed around him, water flew, the wind cut across the dock. He tore off his jacket, sweater, T-shirt, dropped his faded jeans, and stood there in his briefs, scanning the black rollicking water. There she was, her head bobbing gently, arms flowing across her breast in an easy tread.

He never hesitated. His feet pounded against the rough planks of the dock, the wind caught his hair, and he was up and out over the churning water, hanging suspended for the briefest, maddest, most lucid instant of his life, and then he was in.

Funny. It was warm as a bath.

(1988)

Abscissa, ordinate, isosceles, Carboniferous, Mesozoic, holothurian: the terms come to him in a rush of disinterred syllables, a forgotten language conjured by the sudden sharp smell of chalk dust and blackboards. It happens every time. All he has to do is glance at the bicycle rack out front or the flag snapping crisply atop the gleaming aluminum pole, and the memories begin to wash over him, a typhoon of faces and places and names, Ilona Sharrow and Richie Davidson, Manifest Destiny, Heddy Grieves, the Sea of Tranquillity and the three longest rivers in Russia. He takes his daughter’s hand and shuffles toward the glowing auditorium, already choked up.

Inside, it’s worse. There, under the pale yellow gaze of the overhead lights, recognition cuts at him like a knife. It’s invested in the feel of the hard steel frames and cushionless planks of the seats, in the crackling PA system and the sad array of frosted cupcakes and chocolate-chip cookies presided over by a puffy matron from the PTA. And the smells — Pine Sol, floor wax, festering underarms and erupting feet, a faint lingering whiff of meat loaf and wax beans. Wax beans: he hasn’t had a wax bean, hasn’t inserted a wax bean in his mouth, in what — twenty years? The thought overwhelms him and he stands there awkwardly a moment, just inside the door, and then there’s a tug at his hand and his daughter slips away, flitting through the crowd like a bird to chase after her friends. He finds a seat in back.

The big stark institutional clock shows five minutes of eight. Settling into the unforgiving grip of the chair, he concentrates on the faces of his fellow parents, vaguely familiar from previous incarnations, as they trudge up and down the aisles like automatons. Voices buzz round him in an expectant drone. High heels click on the linoleum. Chairs scrape. He’s dreaming a scene from another auditorium an ice age ago, detention hall, the soporific text, shouts from beyond the windows and a sharp sweet taste of spring on the air, when Officer Rudman steps up to the microphone.

A hush falls over the auditorium, the gale of chatter dropping off to a breeze, a stir in the rafters, nothing. His daughter, ten years old and beautiful, her feet too big and her shoulders slumped, strides up the aisle and drops into the chair beside him as if her legs have been shot out from under her. “Dad,” she whispers, “that’s Officer Rudman.”

He nods. Who else would it be, up there in his spit and polish, his close-cropped hair and custom-fit uniform? Who else, with his sunny smile and weight lifter’s torso? Who else but Officer Rudman, coordinator of the school’s antidrug program and heartthrob of all the fifth-grade girls?