Be Mine (10 page)

We chatted about the cold, about classes, about deer and freeways and traffic. I felt lighter than I had for days, maybe even weeks. Such pleasant company. Such a polite, easy young man. We conversed effortlessly—not like mother and son, or student and teacher, but like friends. Old friends. He seemed genuinely relieved and astonished by my good luck, hitting a deer on the freeway and only having a bent bumper to show for it. He leaned back in his chair and said, "That must have been something, hitting an animal that big, that fast, in all that traffic." He slammed his fists together. "Lord, Mrs. Seymour, that could've caused a chain reaction. You were lucky you didn't see it coming, or you might have hit the brakes, the guy behind you would have hit you. Wow."

"I did hit the brakes," I said. "I think."

"Maybe not," Garrett said. "I think you didn't."

In only half an hour, Garrett had become the expert, the arbiter, of my accident. He shook his head as if to clear it, then talked about Hondas, the newer models, the steel frames, that I was lucky there, too. He compared my car to other makes and models. He sipped his coffee (black) from the Styrofoam cup, and I couldn't help but think to myself that what he was doing was a perfect impression of a man. Garrett (hands full of LEGOs and Matchbox cars, or standing on the back porch waiting for me to unzip Chad's coat so I could unzip his, too) pretending, so convincingly, that he was a man.

"Okay, Mrs. Seymour," he said, looking at his watch. "You'll bring the car by tomorrow?"

"Yes," I said. "In the afternoon?"

"Great," he said. "Just over to the automotive entrance. I'll tell Bram."

"Oh," I said. "Bram."

I put the top back on my bottled water and looked at it.
AQUA-PURA
. On the label, a little stream poured whitely down the side of a lush green mountain.

"We can't do any work on anybody's cars without our instructor's permission."

"Will he be there?"

Garrett smiled and put his empty Styrofoam cup down too hard on the table. It tipped over, but nothing spilled. "He might be," Garrett said. "Maybe I'll get extra points for bringing you over. Have you gotten any more notes?" he asked.

"I did," I told him, "get another note."

I looked down at the table and saw a smudged reflection of myself in the Formica—a younger woman, a college girl, without lines or details, talking about love notes and crushes with a friend—and then I looked back up at Garrett, and saw that he'd lifted his eyebrows, and suddenly we were both laughing. He was teasing me, the way Sue would have teased me, or Jon, or Chad. "Garrett," I asked, "do you have any real reason to think that Bram Smith is writing these notes?"

"Well, yeah. He talked about you again the other day," Garrett said, nodding. "This English department babe, and on and on," he said and made a hand gesture that indicated wheels turning, rolling into infinity. "I don't want to embarrass you, Mrs. Seymour, by saying much more."

"Isn't this Bram Smith married? Is something wrong with him? Why is he so interested in old English teachers?" I looked again at the label on my Aqua-Pura, projecting myself into the mountain scene. I was meandering along the stream. I was stopping to dip my hand into the chill waters.

"Mrs. Seymour, you're not old!" Garrett said it with such sincerity that I looked up. And there it was in his blue eyes—the little boy I'd asked not to smash his toy trucks into the legs of my furniture. Wide-eyed. Worried. A newcomer to this world.

"Thank you, Garrett," I said. "But I'm a lot older than your automotive instructor."

"Well, what can I say? He's got great taste in women?"

I blushed. I could feel it, mottled on my neck, and the heat of it in my cheeks. I felt like a little girl again, turning scarlet in the back of the school bus when a boy I liked said I was pretty. Garrett was standing up, pushing his chair into the table, smiling down at me, humoring me sweetly, sincerely, with tremendous kindness, and I thought of my father then, the way the nurses called out to him in the hallway, and how grateful and content he seemed—the child, among the children who had somehow become the adults.

"W
HO TOLD
you?" I asked Jon as he took my coat from me—graciously, gently, like a solicitor, or a parent.

"Chad did. He called."

"What?"

I could smell meat burning in the kitchen. Was Jon making dinner? How long since
that
had happened?

"How in the world did
Chad
know I hit a deer?"

"Garrett e-mailed him."

"Oh," I said. E-mail. I'd forgotten about it, forgotten that Chad spent hours every day now checking messages, sending messages. I'd forgotten that the world had shrunk to this, that he and Garrett didn't need pens or phones to talk to one another anymore.

"And, Sherry, neither Chad or I is too thrilled to be getting this vital information about our wife and mother from an outsider."

I said, "I'm sorry. I had to teach, and then I forgot, and—"

"It's okay," Jon said. "I'm just glad you're all right."

He pulled me to him. I put my face into his chest, into his T-shirt, then pressed my ear just above his heart and listened to the steady humid thump of it.

"I guess you need to get a place in the city after all, to cut down on the commuting, Sherry. That's fine with me, a couple nights a week, if that's what you want to do, honey. I'm sorry I didn't insist on it before."

He pulled back and looked into my face.

"Besides, it'll be a good place for you to rendezvous with your lover."

He was smiling. He moved his hand up to my neck, then down to my chest, unbuttoned the top button of my dress, and slid his hand to my breast.

B
Y THE
time we were done making love, the roast Jon had tossed in the oven to surprise me with—at a hundred degrees higher than it ought to have been because he hadn't bothered to put on his glasses when he turned the temperature dial—had blackened and shrunk down to the size of a fist.

We'd been lying on the bed, Jon still on top of me, when the smoke detector went off, and we had run down together, naked, laughing, to turn the oven off, open the windows, waving our arms around in front of our faces to clear the air. Then, when he'd pulled the roast out and thrown the ruined thing into the garbage, we realized we were hungry and the only thing there'd been in the refrigerator to eat was wrecked.

"Let's go out," Jon said.

"But it's so late," I said.

Jon looked at his watch, the only thing he was wearing. "Since when," he asked, "is 9:30 too late to go out?"

He was right, of course. Since when
was
9:30 too late to go out?

But I knew since when—since eighteen years ago, when Chad had to be nursed and put to bed by eight o'clock.

How was it, I thought, that such a brief period of time—that year of his infancy—had caused us to form habits that had lasted this long? I remembered Jon joking on the phone with his sister, leaving a message on her machine the day we brought Chad home from the hospital:

"Hey, Brenda, we had that baby we were talking about. If you want more details, give us a call. We'll be home now for about the next eighteen years."

It had been a joke that had taken on a life.

"Get dressed," Jon said. "We're going to Stiver's."

Stiver's, a truckers' bar down the road. Hamburgers. Beer. Karaoke. I'd never been there, but it sounded to me like the right thing to do. I said, "I'll take a shower first."

Jon said, "To hell with that. Just put on your sexy new dress."

W
AS STIVER'S
like anything I'd imagined it would be, all those years passing it on the way to the freeway?

By the time Jon and I had stepped inside, I'd forgotten whatever those years of accumulated impressions had been. Driving by it, I'd always marveled that there were people in a bar at six o'clock on a Tuesday night, at two o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Driving by it with my child strapped into his car seat behind me, or on my way to pick him up from school—hurrying,
flying,
off the freeway, I'd glance at it and marvel:

People with nothing to do on a Thursday afternoon but drink beer in a dumpy bar.

No children waiting for them. No dinner to be made. No homework to help with.

Did I feel sorry for them, or did I envy them?

Stepping into Stiver's with Jon for the first time, I could no longer remember what I'd felt about the place and its patrons then—only the vague impression of a kind of vast expanse of exemption from motherly duties going on in there. Deserts, prairies, contained inside its badly sided exterior,
KAREOKE NIGHT
misspelled on the rollaway board at the door.

It must have been someone's house at one time—a doublewide trailer. There was a window box under the one big, blacked-out window that faced the road (nothing in it but cigarette butts) and a screen door with no screen in it. I'd known it would be crowded inside because there were so many cars in the parking lot (Jon had to circle it several times before deciding just to park at the edge of the lot, in the dirt) but still I was surprised by the crowd, the closeness, and it seemed to me that every person in that room turned to look at us as we walked in, emerging from the cold outside into the smoke and dimness of the bar, and continued to watch us as we made our way to a table crammed into a corner.

The music was deafening, all-encompassing. I couldn't see where it was coming from, but a wildly out-of-tune voice, a woman's, was wailing a country song. Jon shouted over it, "I'll go to the bar and order," after pulling out my chair for me to sit.

While he was gone, I looked around. Over at the bar, two men (in their fifties?)—one in a cowboy hat and one in a cap—had turned all the way around in their chairs, beer bottles in their fists, to look at me. They smiled and nodded. I smiled back, then looked away. When I glanced back at them, they were simply staring. They turned around when Jon came back to the table with two beers.

"All they had was Old Milwaukee," he shouted over the music. "I ordered us two burgers." He shrugged. "We'll see."

The singer had changed. Now, a man was bellowing "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain." Over Jon's shoulder I could see the heads and shoulders of dancers on the little dance floor, moving in time to the man's bellowing. Jon reached over and squeezed my hand. "Having fun yet?" he shouted.

Was I?

Yes, I was.

The beer tasted metallic on my teeth. It reminded me of high school, drinking cheap beer in my boyfriend's basement while bis parents slept upstairs, directly over our heads. There was always a swirl of steam that rose when one of those cans or bottles was opened, and it always made me think of genies, spirits, smelling of skunk, yeast—a spirit that never rose from a bottle of good wine or when the seal was broken on a bottle of expensive cognac.

How long had it been since I'd drunk a bottle of cheap beer?

Jon laughed when he saw I'd finished it already, and got up to get me another.

I watched the dancers.

One woman, in a silvery tank top, was moving so sensually—grinding, slinking, against her dance partner—that it was impossible not to watch. Another couple danced stiffly, not looking at each other, as if they were having an argument while dancing. Two women in their twenties danced together as their boyfriends watched from the bar.

"Excuse me, miss?"

It startled me to look up and find the man in the cowboy hat standing over me.

"If your date wouldn't mind," he shouted down, "would you like to dance?"

I looked from the man back to the dance floor. I looked over my shoulder and saw Jon's back at the bar, then turned to the man again and said, "Sure. He wouldn't mind."

A
N ICY
rain had fallen outside while we were inside Stiver's.

They never brought us our hamburgers.

Instead, we drank four beers each, and by the time we left I'd danced with the trucker and his friend through seven or eight songs—several slow ones, in their arms.

The one in the cowboy hat, whose name was Nathan, was a huge, lumbering dancer. I felt like a child in his embrace. He smelled like my father—smoke and aftershave—but under his khaki jacket, he had on a tight T-shirt, and his muscles were surprisingly solid. He was a strong man. And I was right, he was a trucker. He was from Iowa, on his way to Maine with a load of something. He had no idea what it was, and didn't particularly want to know, he said.

But the other one danced as if he, like I, had taken lessons all through childhood. It was studied dancing—although, unlike me, he had a natural affinity for it.

He was graceful. He could hear the music, it seemed, in his limbs. I felt awkward at first, dancing with him. He rocked on his heels and watched me for a while, waiting for me to begin a rhythm, or a style, and at first I wanted to turn, go back to the table, ask Jon to take me home.

But then I saw the appreciative look he had on his face, watching me dance (was I good at this?) and at my body, and I couldn't help it, I slipped out of my self-consciousness like a sheath, and then, as if we were having a conversation, he began to dance in response, his body close to mine, brushing up against me. At one point I felt the back of his hand brush against my breasts. Surely, I thought, it was an accident, but my whole body responded to it—and then a slow dance started up, and without asking me, he took me by the waist, his hands pressing into the small of my back, and my face pressed into his shoulder.

The man singing the lyrics to the country song was belting them out with such passion I felt the intensity of it move down my neck, down my spine, to the place where this trucker, whose name I never learned, had his hands.

His face was next to my ear, and I could hear him breathing.

It was like making love in public, with a stranger, and every once in a while we turned so I could see Jon over his shoulder—and Jon was staring, sipping his beer, leaning back in his chair, watching me in the arms of another man in front of him with a look on his face I'd never quite seen before—as if he were a stranger, watching strangers, but also as if he were a part of it, as if he could feel that trucker's hands on my hips, his body hot and moving against mine.