Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

“You can count me in,” said Kelly. “I don’t have anything better to do.”

“Or there’s a protest in Washington, DC,” said Penn. “What do you say we go to that?”

6.10 Danny Joiner

Danny arranged his uniform carefully on a hanger. After everything was in order, he noticed a thread hanging from the sleeve of the jacket, so he rummaged through the kitchen drawers for a pair of scissors, worried that Dolly would come home for lunch and surprise him. It was nearly noon. He had hidden the prescription bottles deep in the bathroom trash. If she thought he was sleeping, she would leave him alone, but if she saw the contents of the kitchen drawer in disarray, she might come into the bedroom to wake him up. He shouldn’t leave the uniform out either. If she came into the room, it would arouse her suspicion. He could put it on, but he worried that was disrespectful. Instead, he straightened the kitchen drawer. He tipped over the trash to make sure the two amber pill containers were all the way down at the bottom. Then he looked under the pillow to see if the locket his mother had given him was there.

— Why wouldn’t it be there?

He didn’t know why, but why had he been diagnosed with personality disorder? Why were Iraqis killing Americans, or was it the other way around? Why was Pig Eye dead and why didn’t he stay that way? Why did the postmaster insist on saluting whenever Danny went into the post office, and why did poor people keep voting to give rich people all of their money and their lives?

It seemed a shame to hang the uniform in the closet where he couldn’t see it, so he hung it on the back of the closet door. Then he pushed the discarded toothpaste tube and the wads of Kleenex aside to look for the two pill containers — just to make sure they were there — and then he covered them up again so they couldn’t be seen by anyone who was casually glancing in the direction of the wastebasket.

The contents of the kitchen drawer were as neat as a pin, but were they too neat? Before joining the army, Danny had been the messy one, but now it was Dolly who scattered things here and there. He decided that the neatness of the drawer would worry her. Just the other day she had called him a neatnik and made a comment about obsessive-compulsive disorder. “If only I had that,” he had told her. “Maybe that would be covered by the plan.”

Yes, the locket was there — at first he didn’t see it because it had slipped inside the pillowcase, so he slid it out again and tucked it farther toward the middle of the bed before fluffing the pillows over it. Then he went into the kitchen to mess up the drawer slightly — just enough so that it looked like Dolly had straightened it instead of him. Dolly didn’t care if the knives with the red handles and serrated blades were mixed in with the butter knives. Then he switched on the closet light to check the uniform for dust and stray threads and the bathroom light to check the wastebasket again before turning both lights off. Off or on? It hadn’t occurred to him to consider which was better. It was possible neither was better, but if one had even the slightest advantage, then that’s the way he wanted it. Everything as right as he could make it, even if he couldn’t make it perfect, which he realized with deep regret that he couldn’t. He knew that sometimes both options were good and sometimes neither was, but in either case, you had to choose.

As Danny considered this, his eyes strayed to the window, which admitted a rich band of late-summer sunlight into the room. Everything happens for a reason, he thought, for the sideways glance at the window was enough to convince him that natural light was eons better than artificial light, especially since Dolly had switched all of the lightbulbs over to compact fluorescents, which weren’t as soothing as incandescent. Not that he really believed everything happened for a reason. Some things just happened — what possible reason could he give for what he had done to Pig Eye and what he was about to do to himself? He believed in chaos, which might partly explain the OCD, which he decided he probably had, not that it made a difference now.

The ice had melted in the glass of water, so he thought about going to the kitchen and replacing it. Cold water would taste good, but why did it matter? He should get a fresh glass because he wanted to do things right. He also wanted to be kind to himself the way everyone he talked to said he should. It was too bad the melting ice made the glass sweat. The condensation would drip on the table and leave a stain. But then he told himself that nature wasn’t bad or good and that if he was going to try to change the actual physics of things, he was setting himself up for failure. Failure, he thought, and then he laughed.

It was 12:30. If Dolly were going to come home for lunch, she would have been there by now, so it was a pretty safe bet that she wouldn’t be home until after five — later if she stopped at the store. He had plenty of time to check for the two amber pill containers, but this time he found, buried underneath a folded piece of cardboard that he had thought was the bottommost piece of trash, a receipt from an expensive shop and a third container, the little round dispenser of the birth control pills Dolly used. When he peered down into the very depths of the trash can, he saw that the dispenser still contained some of the little pink pills, so he removed it, thinking they must be the placebos the manufacturer added on to the end of the month because it was easier to take a pill every day than to take them three weeks on, one week off. Just in case she had thrown it away inadvertently, he set it on the countertop where she would see it. As he did so, he counted more than seven days of sugar pills — almost half the pills were there. Why would Dolly throw away the medication she relied on? Was she trying to deceive him by getting pregnant without asking him first? Was she already pregnant, and if she was pregnant, was the baby his?

He rearranged the garbage in the can the same as it had been, exactly the same except that now the two amber containers with his name on them were wrapped together in a thick cocoon of tissue. He didn’t know if that was better or worse than wrapping them separately, but he couldn’t decide because now he was distracted by the new mystery of Dolly’s intentions regarding the birth control pills. Not that it mattered. He had already decisively concluded that Dolly would be better off without him, which meant that she would be better off without him with or without a baby and that he would have to trust her to make her own decisions from then on.

In the bedroom, the pillows were perfectly arranged. With the new quilt Dolly had bought, it looked like a bed in a magazine. He hated to disturb anything, but he picked up a corner of the pillow and peered underneath it, just to make sure the locket was there.

It made Danny sad to think that he would never see the locket again, that he would never see his mother even if he didn’t kill himself, because his mother was already dead. “Never forget who you are,” she had told him the last time they talked. But he had forgotten, and maybe he had never known.

He was wondering where dead people went when he heard a sound on the roof. It was probably a squirrel. He liked squirrels. He liked all animals. If he hadn’t been going to kill himself, he’d get a dog. He didn’t think they went anywhere, at least he hoped they didn’t. He didn’t want to go to all this trouble merely to wind up somewhere else. He checked the drawer again, separating the knives by color because that’s the way he liked them and then mixing them together again because that was more realistic. What was real? What did realistic even mean?