Alice McDermott - After This

Ralph touched his crotch, shook his head, and then turned to reach into the cooler for two long-neck bottles of beer. He made his way around the bar just as Caroline moved to meet him. He took her under his arm, the two beer bottles resting just over her shoulder, and had his face in her hair before they’d reached the stairs.

Bean murmured, “Oh man,” as if he were in some mortal pain. Charlie Hegi had bowed his head and was twisting the Hershey wrappers into little bows.

Michael stepped behind the bar, but for a moment no one was ordering.

Then Terry returned. “I’m leaving,” he told Michael, as if he were obliged to. Michael shrugged. He felt sorry for him, in his student-teacher clothes. By the look of his eyes, he’d either been crying somewhere or throwing up.

He put a shot glass on the bar. “Have a drink,” he said. “And take off that fucking tie.”

“The guy’s a creep,” Terry said after he swallowed. “He’s old enough to be my father.”

“He’s old enough to be dead,” Bean said. And then added, “He probably is,” pleased with himself. “Probably sleeps in a coffin.”

Terry said again, “He’s a creep.”

But Charlie Hegi looked up to the ceiling. His teeth were full of chocolate. “He’s a lucky son of a bitch at the moment,” he said.

The place got busy then and Charlie stepped behind the bar to help out. Michael was pouring drinks and shots and slapping the cash register with the flat of his hand and the more time Ralph took with Caroline upstairs, the more the place became his own. What he was thinking of, he found himself telling a girl with a small face and short hair and dark eyebrows that were alternately appealing and weird, was teaching for a year or two and then heading south, maybe Ft. Lauderdale or Daytona, maybe even Key West, to open a bar on the beach-work his tail off over Christmas and spring break and then kick back the rest of the year, go fishing, travel, maybe write. Not for him, he said, polyester pants and short-sleeve dress shirts and the scorn of thirty inbred seventh graders for the next forty years. Not his old man’s Robert Hall suits five days a week, either, and the Long Island Rail Road to the city, the subway to the cubicle. Someone else’s shot glass on your forehead when you’re dead.

The girl was pretty enough, petite. She said something about wanting to be an artist as well as a kindergarten teacher. When Ralph returned, he slapped Michael on the back and said, I owe you, man. The scent of the pot they’d smoked was on him and Caroline took a bar stool in the corner and drank another beer, her hair still mussed in the back and her lips kind of blurred. Her friends seemed to stay away from her, but Ralph walked to that end of the bar every chance he got and leaned there next to her, watching the crowd, playing with her hair, not saying much.

Michael left with the short-haired girl. She was from Commack. In his room they smoked a joint and listened to Pink Floyd and then he showed her some glow-in-the-dark chalk he’d bought for his class. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it yet, he told her, he just thought it would get their attention. Later, with all the lights out, she stood naked on his bed and drew all over the wall-pretty good drawings, he thought, some of them fairly obscene. He told her she was going to make one hell of a kindergarten teacher and then pulled her down again and wrapped his legs around her-she couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds.

When he finally took her home late Saturday afternoon, the sky was slung so low over the rusty city and everything looked so beat up and damp it seemed more like the end of winter, the beginning of mud season, than the height of fall. He went out for subs with some of his housemates and ended up at a Halloween party in one of the Main Street bars. Bean was there and at one point stumbled over to ask if Michael had a shovel in his car. He was wearing a girl’s hoop earring and a bandanna. A pirate, Michael supposed, digging for treasure. “This is upstate New York,” he said. “Everybody has a shovel in his car.” Bean asked if he could borrow it and Michael asked if he was snowed in. They both glanced through the crowd to the orange light of the plate-glass window, to the brown and desolate street. “No,” Bean said. “I’m not snowed in.” “Then you can’t have it,” Michael told him.

After last call, he went by Damien’s. He went in the back way-a set of wooden steps beside the garbage cans. This door was always open. It led to a small screened porch and what had been the original kitchen, which now stank of wood grown moldy with spilled beer. There were still plenty of people inside. Ralph had an arrangement with the police that usually allowed him to serve all night as long as he flashed the lights at one and cleared the place of most of the younger kids, and then locked the front door and turned off his sign. Michael didn’t see the short-haired girl, Beverly was her name, but Caroline was there, behind the bar with a couple of girlfriends. Ralph was at a table playing chess. Michael had a beer and watched him for a while. Then he had another and played some pool. At one point, about ten of them did shots of schnapps, simultaneously, up and down the bar, laughing like this was the wackiest college stunt ever. When Michael finally left, Ralph was still at his game and Caroline was curled up in a corner under her own parka. The sky just beyond the ball field was beginning to lighten-nothing spectacular about it, just the darkness turning into a queasy kind of pink. He could see a couple of neighborhood dogs running together across the outfield, noses to the ground. He could hear some poor working stiff trying to get his car started in the cold.

There was no food in the house on Sunday and there was no use bemoaning, yet again, this part of the state’s lack of decent delis and diners. Hungover, all any of the downstaters wanted was a chocolate egg cream and a buttered roll. But they drove over to campus anyway and paid three bucks for brunch in one of the dining halls. They watched the residents, mostly freshmen and sophomores, move around the table with their trays-some of them still joined to last night’s date, most of them stuck in same-sex groups of friends or roommates who also hadn’t scored. A girl walked by wearing torn fairy wings. Another had a tall striped hat. There was a subdued murmur throughout the room, the smell of steam-table scrambled eggs and burning toast and bins of bacon and beef bourguignonne. The staff had hung cardboard skeletons from the window of the dish room; one of them wore an apron and a hairnet. Michael noticed that most of the kids eating had wet hair and damp clothes, just out of the shower, and it made him think how young they looked, half formed. Outside, the campus, too, seemed sodden, the leaves gone from every tree but still lying in black heaps and scattered rags across the grass and along the walkways.

Then a roll of laughter came from the far end of the room. And then, following one another at a run, three guys dressed as the Marx Brothers-Harpo, Groucho, Chico. They climbed over tables, sat in girls’ laps, chased one another, the whole routine. Groucho put his arms around one of the fat dish-room ladies and did the eyebrow thing. Harpo had his bicycle horn. Their costumes were excellent-theater majors, no doubt-and all their gestures dead-on. People began standing on their chairs to watch, some of them shouting jokes or bits of encouragement or merely caught up in the growing, crazed enthusiasm that made Michael think of his own students when some glorious distraction disrupted the day and sent them all to the windows-a sudden hailstorm, a screaming fire engine, the milk delivery truck backing itself into a basketball hoop on the playground.