Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

But it was stupid to try to link together those two Helens, she thought. She went back to the row of seats and sat heavily. If the old woman was still watching, she did not care. A sailor in a soiled white uniform sat nearby, smoking, watching her but not with too much interest; he had other girls to recall. Helen opened her purse and looked inside at nothing and closed it again. The man she had been living with in the city for four months had told her it was stupid — no, he had not used that word; he said something fancy like “immature”—to confuse herself with the child she had been, married woman as she was now, and a mother, adulterous married woman… and the word adulterous made her lips turn up in a slow bemused smile, the first flash of incredulous pride one might feel when told at last the disease that is going to be fatal. For there were so many diseases and only one way out of the world, only one death and so many ways to get to it. They were like doors, Helen thought dreamily. You walked down a hallway like those in movies, in huge wealthy homes, crystal chandeliers and marble floors and… great sweeping lawns… and doors all along those hallways; if you picked the wrong door you had to go through it. She was dreamy, drowsy. When thought became too much for her — when he had pestered her so much about marrying him, divorcing her husband and marrying him, always him! — she had felt so sleepy she could not listen. If she was not interested in a word her mind wouldn’t hear it but made it blurred and strange, like words half-heard in dreams or through some thick substance like water. You didn’t have to hear a word if you didn’t want to.

So she had telephoned her father the night before and told him the three-fifteen bus and now it was three-thirty; where was he? Over the telephone he had sounded slow and solemn, it could have been a stranger’s voice. Helen had never liked telephones because you could not see smiles or gestures and talking like that made her tired. Listening to her father, she had felt for the first time since she had run away and left them all behind — husband, baby girl, family, in-laws, the minister, the dreary sun-bleached look of the land — that she had perhaps died and only imagined she was running away. Nobody here trusted the city; it was too big. Helen had wanted to go there all her life, not being afraid of anything, and so she had gone, and was coming back; but it was an odd feeling, this dreamy ghostliness, as if she were really dead and coming back in a form that only looked like herself… She was bored, thinking of this, and crossed her bare legs. The sailor crushed out a cigarette in the dirty tin ashtray and their eyes met. Helen felt a little smile tug at her lips. That was the trouble, she knew men too well. She knew their eyes and their gestures — like the sailor rubbing thoughtfully at his chin, now, as if he hadn’t shaved well enough but really liked to feel his own skin. She knew them too well and had never figured out why: her sister, four years older, wasn’t like that. But to Helen the same man one hundred times or one hundred men, different men, seemed the same. It was wrong, of course, because she had been taught it and believed what she had been taught; but she could not understand the difference. The sailor watched her but she looked away, half-closing her eyes. She had no time for him. Her father should be here now, he would be here in a few minutes, so there was no time; she would be home in an hour. When she thought of her father the ugly bus station with its odor of tobacco and spilled soft drinks seemed to fade away — she remembered his voice the night before, how gentle and soft she had felt listening to that voice, giving in to the protection he represented. She had endured his rough hands, as a child, because she knew they protected her, and all her life they had protected her. There had always been trouble, sometimes the kind you laughed about later and sometimes not, that was one of the reasons she had married Paul, and before Paul there had been others — just boys who didn’t count, who had no jobs and thought mainly about their cars. She had called her father from a roadhouse sixty miles away once, when she was fifteen; she and her best friend Annie had gotten mixed up with some men they had met at a picnic. That had been frightening, Helen thought, but now she could have handled them. She gave everyone too much, that was her trouble. Her father had said that. Even her mother. Lent money to girls at the telephone company where she’d worked; lent her girl friends clothes; would run outside when some man drove up and blew his horn, not bothering to get out and knock at the door the way he should. She liked to make other people happy, what was wrong with that? Was she too lazy to care? Her head had begun to ache.

Always her thoughts ran one way, fast and innocent, but her body did other things. It got warm, nervous, it could not relax. Was she afraid of what her father’s face would tell her? She pushed that idea away, it was nonsense. If she had to think of something, let it be of that muddy spring day when her family had first moved to this part of the country, into an old farmhouse her father had bought at a “bargain.” At that time the road out in front of the house had been no more than a single dirt lane… now it was wider, covered with black top that smelled ugly and made your eyesight shimmer and sweat with confusion in the summer. Yes, that big old house. Nothing about it would have changed. She did not think of her own house, her husband’s house, because it mixed her up too much right now. Maybe she would go back and maybe not. She did not think of him — if she wanted to go back she would, he would take her in. When she tried to think of what had brought her back, it was never her husband — so much younger, quicker, happier than the man she had just left — and not the little girl, either, but something to do with her family’s house and that misty, warm day seventeen years ago when they had first moved in. So one morning when that man left for work her thoughts had turned back to home and she had sat at the breakfast table for an hour or so, not clearing off the dishes, looking at the coffee left in his cup as if it were a forlorn reminder of him — a man she was even beginning to forget. She knew then that she did not belong there in the city. It wasn’t that she had stopped loving this man — she never stopped loving anyone who needed her, and he had needed her more than anyone — it was something else, something she did not understand. Not her husband, not her baby, not even the look of the river way off down the hill, through the trees that got so solemn and intricate with their bare branches in winter. Those things she loved, she hadn’t stopped loving them because she had had to love this new man more… but something else made her get up and run into the next room and look through the bureau drawers and the closet, as if looking for something. That evening, when he returned, she explained to him that she was going back. He was over forty, she wasn’t sure how much, and it had always been his hesitant, apologetic manner that made her love him, the odor of failure about him that mixed with the odor of the drinking he could not stop, even though he had “cut down” now with her help. Why were so many men afraid, why did they think so much? He did something that had to do with keeping books, was that nervous work? He was an attractive man but that wasn’t what Helen had seen in him. It was his staring at her when they had first met, and the way he had run his hand through his thinning hair, telling her in that gesture that he wanted her and wanted to be young enough to tell her so. That had been four months ago. The months all rushed to Helen’s mind in the memory she had of his keen intelligent baffled eyes, and the tears she had had to see in them when she went out to call her father…