Peter Orner: Esther Stories

Barry and Diane Swanson lost a child nine years ago. The story is simple. Barry, Diane, and Gene, who was then seven years old, were window-shopping along High Street in Dedham, Massachusetts. Gene kept bouncing a small orange rubber Superball he’d bought from a machine at Cookie’s Table for a quarter. He was walking behind his parents. The ball ricocheted off a crack in the sidewalk and bounced into the street. Gene chased it. It’s happened before. A blue Plymouth going too fast for High Street on a Saturday. Screech and a dull thud. Diane shrieking. Barry’s already bloody hands holding Gene, and his pleading, God, please, no, no. And when eternity was over, and Barry was hovering over Gene in the back of an ambulance, Diane ran across the street and found the ball near the rim of a sewer grate. She stooped and picked it up. The slippery little ball, now worn down from years of rubbing, has remained in her purse ever since.

Barry tossed Gene the quarter to buy the ball.

Diane told him twice to stop bouncing. He was a spunky kid who’d liked to test his parents. He kept doing it. Diane did not take the ball away.

Barry was looking at a suede jacket in the window of Slaxon’s, and in mid-comment about the hideousness of its color when Gene’s ball sprang into the street.

The ball bounced just to the right of Diane’s shoulder. Couldn’t she have grabbed Gene as he bumped past her in pursuit?

Couldn’t Barry have put his foot down, said enough’s enough? Give me the goddamn ball, Gene.

Around and around and around. Four days after the funeral Barry went to work. It took Diane a full week, but then she too was back, back behind her desk at State Farm, taking calls, making referrals, seeing clients, listening to the void in her voice as she answered question after question.

Here they sit. Friday nights they eat out. They can afford better, but they feel more at ease in places like this. More anonymous. Less exposed. Silence is not wrong here. No one waits on them. Nobody chats them up. They place their orders at the counter and stand with a slip of paper that tells them their pickup number in red ink. You can see the lights of the highway from the window. I-95. The plastic tabletop has been made to look like a red-and-white-checked table-cloth. There are few sounds. The fuzzled ping-pang of a video arcade game playing itself in the corner. Muzak so low it sounds like somebody humming. Quick shout of a cook behind a red fake-brick wall—“Line on!” Soft yellow blankety light. Harsh if you look at the bulbs above straight on, but as a whole they combine to form a buttery glaze that drifts about the room. It is after nine and only two other tables are occupied, one by a counter girl on break. She is resting her chin on an outstretched arm and rattling her nails on the tabletop. A boy is mopping a closed section in a dark corner of the restaurant. Smell of tomato sauce and bleach. Barry and Diane eat a pepperoni with half mushrooms. Almost ten years ago, and that Saturday could just as well have been last week. Friday nights have always been tough.

They made love for a year after Gene’s funeral. They made love for a year and nothing happened, nothing. They saw two doctors who told them nothing was wrong, that Diane was getting on but that all the parts were certainly in working order. “Go home and do it” is what the second doctor advised. “What else can I say?” That night they slept at the Comfort Inn, but it didn’t make any difference. Then one morning, a few weeks later, Diane watched Barry come out of the shower with a towel loosely slunched around his waist, and she started to despise his body, his flubby folds, his thinning hair, his clumsy fatty hands, his sweaty naked squirming over her in the dark, like the wet glob of a seal. She could think of nothing but the man Gene would have grown into.

Barry didn’t fight her. He simply watched her recoil and endured the silence. He had lost his mother when he was thirteen, and there were afternoons in the weeks following her death when he would come home from school and creep around his parents’ room and steal things, a locket, an earring, even a bra once, which he kept hidden under his mattress. He was used to making do. So for years now Barry has been rubbing his big forehead, sighing, wandering the house, masturbating quietly in the bathroom, and reading.

Diane takes a sip of Diet Coke and clears her throat, but doesn’t say anything. She looks at her reflection in the big window. Barry wipes his mouth with the corner of a paper napkin and slides his left hand across the table, palm up. Some nights she covers it with her own.

MORE THAN HALF a lifetime away, and even now his mind wanders back to a weekday morning on a bridge in 1948. He was unemployed then, the only time in his working life that he wasn’t at a job on a weekday morning, and walking along Postal Route 31 with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, alone. Twenty-six years old and a veteran, still humbled by the things he saw in Germany and Poland at the end of the Hitler half of the war. He hadn’t seen much combat himself, but he knew then, as he knows now, that what he saw as part of the 222nd Infantry, “The Mop-up Crew,” as he called it, could never be compared to shooting at people or getting shot at. Human beings who didn’t look like people, shriveled hands grasping and fisting, like the tiny fingers of dolls, and sometimes, but not always, ditches of bodies. A place called Nordhausen, where he and another soldier found the corpse of a pregnant woman in a bloody latrine. An army interpreter told them that an SS had tried to force the birth by stomping on her with his boots. He and the other soldier, whose name he never knew, buried her. The other soldier said a prayer, which he repeated.

A year and a half later, there he was — amazed that such a thing as quiet could exist again in the world — rambling down Route 33 in Sibley, Mississippi, ten or so miles from his mother’s place at St. Catherine Creek, in the middle of the morning. He took long walks that year, mostly to think about the things he’d seen and to get out of the house, away from his mother’s hasty breathing and droning. Someone who’s done for country as you’ve done deserves to rest, and don’t for twelve seconds believe you’re lazy, or not worthy, or that you haven’t done your share. Fists jammed into pockets, surrounded by the desolation of home, the woods, the gurgle of the Homochitto River. He turns off the road and begins to cross a bridge. A simple, twin I-beam girder, wood-planked, unscuffed, about the width of a truck. Back then it was still some optimistic architect’s fancy. A little bridge to nowhere really, no houses up the hill that way, just a dirt road that ended a hundred feet from the end of the bridge on the other side of the river. Beyond the end of the road, woods and a steep grade upward, what his father used to call Steve Glower’s Hill. Maybe they’d planned to do some building up there, but that never came to pass.

Nothing is left now but the crumbled ruins of the two arches of a bridge that has fallen into a river.

But that morning long ago he’d stood at the railing of the little bridge, his chin resting on the backs of his hands, and looked down at the water and dreamed of a girl, not a particular girl, not one he could describe or name, but a formless one, hair and smile, quick-tongued and laughing. He saw her and didn’t see her, and it was safer that way. But then, as if nudged out of the woods by the finger of God, she came out of the trees upriver, naked and white as vanilla pudding, followed closely by a man, dark-skinned, but not black, Indian maybe, naked too. For a moment the girl looked familiar, a little like his cousin Jackie, the one with all the curly sticking-up hair everybody teased her about, but this one was older than Jackie, maybe a lot older. This girl could have been thirty. It was hard to tell from up there. He watched her step fast across the rocks by the water’s edge and plunge in with a wordless shout. With much more hesitation, the man followed her across the rocks and stepped off, without a peep, into the water. Neither of them looked up at the bridge. Maybe for the same reason he didn’t look away. Who’d have expected the other? Who’d be standing on a bridge that didn’t lead anywhere? Who’d be swimming, naked, in March? He watched her breasts float above the water; he watched the man watch her, not smiling, as though he was already counting the seconds he had left with her, with this woman who was so obviously — even from up there on the bridge — someone else’s wife. (Her flailing joy in the water too free to be everyday.) Which is why both men, the man in the water and the man on the bridge, stared with such useless desire. The couple didn’t speak. This he remembers — cherishes, really. That neither of them succumbed to the temptation of lying about what they didn’t have. Just the heavy pant and flap of swimming in the wrong season. He remembers the pressure of his erection and the awkwardness of walking away with it down the road. He remembers the man’s hands as they reached out over the water and how for a single moment he wanted nothing more than to murder him so those could be his hands.