Richard Ford - Independence Day

Invisible on the beach, people say Ooooo and Aaahhh in unison and applaud each pop. Their presence is a surprise. We wait for the next boomp, whoosh and burst, but none occurs. “Oh,” I hear someone say in a falling voice. “Shit.” “But one was nice,” someone says. “One ain’t enough a-nuthin,” is the answer.

“That was my first official ‘firework’ of the holiday,” Sally says cheerfully. “That’s always very exciting.” Where she’s looking the sky is smoky and bluish against the black. We are, the two of us, suspended here as though waiting on some other ignition.

“My mother used to buy little ones in Mississippi,” I offer, “and let them pop off in her fingers. ‘Teensies,’ she called them.” I’m still leaned amiably on the doorframe, glass dangling in my hand, like a movie star in a celebrity still. Two sips on a mostly empty stomach, and I’m mildly tipsy.

Sally looks at me doubtfully. “Was she very frustrated with life, your Mom?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well. Somebody might say she was trying to wake herself up.”

“Maybe,” I say, made uncomfortable by thinking of my guileless parents in some revisionist’s way, a way that were I only briefly to pursue it would no doubt explain my whole life to now. Better to write a story about it.

“When I was a little girl in Illinois, my parents always managed to have a big fight on New Year’s Eve,” Sally says. “There’d always be yelling and things being thrown and cars starting late at night. They drank too much, of course. But my sisters and I would get terribly excited because of the fireworks display at Pine Lake. And we’d always want to bundle up and drive out and watch from the car, except the car was always gone, and so we’d have to stand in the front yard in the snow or wind and see whatever we could, which wasn’t much. I’m sure we made up most of what we said we saw. So fireworks always make me feel like a girl, which is probably pretty silly. They should make me feel cheated, but they don’t. Did you sell a house to your Vermont people, by the way?”

“I’ve got them simmering.” (I hope.)

“You’re very skillful at your profession, aren’t you? You sell houses when no one else sells them.” She rocks forward then back, using just her shoulders, the big rocker grinding the porch boards.

“It’s not a very hard job. It’s just driving around in the car with strangers, then later talking to them on the phone.”

“That’s what my job’s like,” Sally says happily, still rocking. Sally’s job is more admirable but fuller of sorrows. I wouldn’t get within a hundred miles of it. Though suddenly and badly now I want to kiss her, touch her shoulder or her waist or somewhere, have a good whiff of her sweet, oiled skin on this warm evening. I therefore make my way clump-a-clump across the noisy boards, lean awkwardly down like an oversize doctor seeking a heartbeat with his naked ear, and give her cheek and also her neck a smooch I’d be happy to have lead to almost anything.

“Hey, hey, stop that,” she says only half-jokingly, as I breathe in the exotics of her neck, feel the dampness of her scapula. Along her cheek just below her ear is the faintest skim of blond down, a delicate, perhaps sensitive feature I’ve always found inflaming but have never been sure how I should attend to. My smooch, though, gives rise to little more than one well-meant, not overly tight wrist squeeze and a willing tilt of head in my general direction, following which I stand up with my empty glass, peer across the beach at nothing, then clump back to take my listening post holding up the doorframe, half aware of some infraction but uncertain what it is. Possibly even more restrictions are in effect.

What I’d like is not to make rigorous, manly, night-ending love now or in two minutes, but to have already done so; to have it on my record as a deed performed and well, and to have a lank, friendly, guard-down love’s afterease be ours; me to be the goodly swain who somehow rescues an evening from the shallows of nullity — what I suffered before my nap and which it’s been my magician’s trick to save us from over these months, by arriving always brimming with good ideas (much as I try to do with Paul or anybody), setting in motion day trips to the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, a canoe ride on the Batsto, a weekend junket to the Gettysburg battlefield, capped off by a balloon trip Sally was game for but not me. Not to mention a three-day Vermont color tour last fall that didn’t work out, since we spent most of two days stuck in a cavalcade of slow-moving leaf-peepers in tour buses and Winnebagos, plus the prices were jacked up, the beds too small and the food terrible. (We ended up driving back one night early, feeling old and tired — Sally slept most of the way — and in no mood even to suffer a drink together when I let her off at the foot of Asbury Street.)

“I made bow ties,” Sally says very assuredly, after the long silence occasioned by my unwanted kiss, during which we both realized we are not about to head upstairs for any fun. “That’s your favorite, correct? Farfalline ”

“It’s sure the food I most like to see” I say.

She smiles around again, stretches her long legs out until her ankles make smart little pops. “I’m coming apart at my seams, so it seems,” she says. In fact, she’s an aggressive tennis player who hates to lose and, in spite of her one leg being docked, can scissor the daylights out of a grown man.

“Are you over there thinking about Wally?” I say, for no good reason except I thought it.

“Wally Caldwell?” She says this as if the name were new to her.

“It was just something I thought. From my distance here.”

“The name alone survives,” she says. “Too long ago.” I don’t believe her, but it doesn’t matter. “I had to give up on that name. He left me, and his children. So.” She shakes her thick blond hair as if the specter of Weasel Wally were right out in the dark, seeking admission to our conversation, and she’d rejected him. “What I was thinking about — because when I drove all the way to New York today to pick up some tickets, I was also thinking it then — was you, and about you being here when I came home, and what we’d do, and just what a sweet man you always are.”

This is not a good harbinger, mark my words.

“I want to be a sweet man,” I say, hoping this will have the effect of stopping whatever she is about to say next. Only in rock-solid marriages can you hope to hear that you’re a sweet man without a “but” following along afterward like a displeasing goat. In many ways a rock-solid marriage has a lot to say for itself. “But what?”

“But nothing. That’s all.” Sally hugs her knees, her long bare feet side by side on the front edge of her rocker seat, her long body swaying forward and back. “Does there have to be a ‘but’?”

“Maybe that’s what I am.” I should make a goat noise.

“A butt? Well. I was just driving along thinking I liked you. That’s all. I can try to be harder to get along with.”

“I’m pretty happy with you,” I say. An odd little smirky smile etches along my silly mouth and hardens back up into my cheeks without my willing it.

Sally turns all the way sideways and peers up at me in the gloom of the porch. A straight address. “Well, good.”

I say nothing, just smirk.

“Why are you smiling like that?” she says. “You look strange.”

“I don’t really know,” I say, and poke my finger in my cheek and push, which makes the sturdy little smile retreat back into my regular citizen’s mien.

Sally squints at me as if she’s able to visualize something hidden in my face, something she’s never seen but wants to verify because she always suspected it was there.