John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

One night she said, “Where are you going, Ben? There a track meet tonight?”

He glanced at her, thoughtful, then grinned. “A practice, sort of.”

“I hear you’re very good,” she said.

He laughed. “People lie. I’m miserable, but the others are even worse.”

“I wish I could see you sometime,” she said. (She had seen him many times, in fact — watching from the end of the football field. He had powerful shoulders and powerful legs and a waist like a girl’s. When he stabbed the pole in the box and twisted upward, his bare feet pointed like a diver’s, rising smoothly, as if in slow motion, his dark hair would fly over his face and stay there until he was above the bar, turning and arching over, quick, like a fish leaping, and then when he snapped back his head and shoulders, his hair would fall into place again, as though the whole trick were not missing the bar but preserving one’s grooming. She had seen him flip off balance once and drop flailing into the sawdust, and she had seen that when he got up he was limping and one leg was bleeding, spiked. She had wanted desperately to run to him, but she had been afraid. She had covered her eyes, sick, and that night, walking alone in the pasture, she had cried, and had called in the darkness courageously, “Ben! Oh, Ben, Ben!”)

Ben said, “Believe me, you’re not missing a thing.” Then, quickly, as though the talk made him nervous: “How’s class?”

“It’s awful,” Millie said. She added at once, because she’d let out more emotion than she’d meant to, “But no doubt it will improve my character. I’m going to be much, much nicer once I learn French. You wait and see.”

He laughed. After a minute he said, “Why French, though?”

Her cheeks burned and she wanted to say something withering, but she could only say, defiantly, “Why not?”

He smiled as if from infinitely above her. “Everybody who’s anybody speaks French, right? And you want to be anybody.” He shook his head.

“Anybody but who I am,” she said, confused. Again she knew she ought to lighten it, but she couldn’t seem to think clearly. Ben looked at her as if studying her features closely for the first time.

At last he said, his voice strangely like his father’s all at once, “You’re a nice girl, Millie.”

She thought her heart would break. “No I’m not,” she said. “I’m a bitch.”

He said nothing. The Hodges didn’t use words like that. The mistake reawakened her to the abyss between them: she might as well have decided to fall in love with a statue of King Edward. She remembered — this time with more horror than usual — the victory party her father had taken her to at Stony Hill. There were lanterns along both sides of the road and over the gates and hanging from the huge dark trees in the yard. On long white tables beside the driveway there were cider barrels and paper cups — the first paper cups she’d ever seen — and wherever you looked there were women in beautiful long colored dresses and men with suits on. Even the boys had suits — Ben, Art Jr, Taggert, and the oldest, the funny one, Will — suits from Washington, D.C., her father told her, and their sister had a full-length gown (it was pink), like the grown-ups. Their father the Congressman stood on the porch, white-headed and terrifying, as big as a house, shaking hands and offering sweet cider toasts and laughing like a railroad engine. And her father — oh honey-sweet balls of Christ! — stood spitting tobacco, his striped Sunday pants tied on with a rope, his hair sticking up like the bright blue bristles of a burdock.

She said, “Excuse my French.”

Ben laughed. “No harm. I know how you feel.”

“You don’t,” she said. “You really don’t know at all.”

“Don’t be too sure,” he said, smiling. It was merely a pose, and he knew it as well as she did. Nevertheless, she was flattered and excited. He was so handsome she thought she might die of a heart attack.

They’d come almost to Batavia, to make things worse, and she was feeling the sensation like homesickness that always came when she knew her ride with Ben was almost over. The rolling hills were cleanly outlined and oddly close in the moonlight. It was late May, a scent of orchards in the breeze.

He said, “I was lying before.”

“What do you mean? About what?” Her mind plunged into confusion. She felt shaky with guilt, about to hear her worst fears about herself put into words.

He walked his finger up the steering wheel for the turn leading into the railroad crossing. “About track practice,” he said. “There really isn’t one tonight. But I knew you’d need a ride to town.”

“Why, Ben!” she said. Her reeling thoughts fell into sense, as though she were thinking clearly all at once, and more swiftly than ever before. She said, “Why, thank you!”

He laughed. “There, I feel better. Would you like me to pick you up, after?”

He loves me, she thought. Could he?

Her heart was beating so hard it hurt. “Well — if it’s really no trouble …” She pressed her fingertips to her chest to calm the beating, thinking, If this is love, give me aspirin. She said, “I really would be pleased, Ben.”

“Then I’ll be there,” he said.

They jounced across the tracks and had half a mile of city streets to pass before they reached the school and the night class, half a mile with nothing to say because they’d gone as far as either of them dared. She sat primly erect, her hands folded (her mother’s voice: “Don’t you ride with no stranger. Your father’s out of his mind, that’s all, girl your age running all over the county in the dead of night. Oh what are we comin to! Lord have mercy! And I sweat and I slave and a daughter of mine known far and wide as walking the streets in the dead of night! Your father’s out of his mind, he’s lost and damned, and us confounded!”). Ben walked his fingers on the wheel and studied each passing tree as if watching for a squirrel, and he whistled “Jesse James.” He was safely around the corner, out of sight, and Millie was standing clutching her notebook on the high-school steps, when she began, helplessly, to laugh.)

Luke was scowling at her, irritated by the smile, and she felt old. But he said nothing, turned to look out his window and down the dark hill falling away toward the lights of the prison. His protruding ears were elephantine when you saw him from behind. How sad for a would-be Romantic hero, she thought, and smiled again, detached and wearily fond, as though she were looking at her son from beyond the grave. They turned off the dirt road onto the narrow bumpy driveway that lifted them past the cowbarn and chickenhouse and the parked tractor-trailer to the weedy yard and the house. He stopped the pick-up beside the gas pump, beside the old car, and turned off the motor but left the lights on, shining into the cluttered garage. Unreal. Like looking into a cave by torchlight, or knowing the thoughts of a horse. With the junk out of it, the garage would be wide enough for three good-sized cars, but Luke kept open only space enough for his Chevy coupe, no space for the truck or for tractors. There was an old wooden hammermill — it had been here when his father had bought the place for him — or rather when he’d seized it by foreclosure (Will Hodge Sr was a whiz at that) — huge stacks of half-rotten burlap bags, piled-up used lumber, balls of string, baling wire, axe-handles, rusted milkcans, oil barrels, boxes of bolts, an electric fan for the cowbarn, old radios, frocks, boots, an acetylene torch, bedsprings — the ones the Runians had died on. Here, as at Ben’s place, there were swallows’ nests on the beams. The whole garage, in fact, showed Ben’s fine hand — as though working those summers for his Uncle Ben, Luke Hodge had learned to scorn all his sober, potching father represented, had turned with sudden violence on his father’s deliberate, painstaking life of ugly, neat repair: repainted banisters, plugged up holes, jacked up floors, wired up chairs, new lintels for sagging doorways. No doubt it was because of his Uncle Ben, too, that Luke had gotten the Indian. All their lives Ben and Vanessa had been taking in strays — from prison, from the Children’s Home, from friends with troubles. And so Luke must do it too, of course. Pass on the kindness, emulate the hero. (It had not occurred to her before. She had taken Luke’s own explanation, that Will Jr had badgered him into it. But she knew she was right: it wasn’t his brother’s fault but his Uncle Ben’s; and she was sorrier for him than ever: as always, she’d been there before him.)