Empire Falls (33 page)

J
ANINE
R
OBY SAT
at the end of the bar at Callahan’s drinking seltzer water with a squeeze of lime and practicing her new signature—
Janine Louise Comeau
—on a stack of cocktail napkins, while her mother changed a beer keg. Unless the damn courthouse in Fairhaven fell down, which it might, just to thwart her, Janine and the Silver Fox would be marrying soon, and she wanted her signature to be second nature when the time came, not like at the end of the calendar year when you kept writing the wrong year on your checks halfway through January. Or, if you were like her husband, Miles—correction: soon-to-be-ex-husband, Miles—halfway through March. Which made her smile. It was just as well he wasn’t the one who had to adopt a new name and signature, because she doubted he was up to it. If there was a worse creature of habit than her husband—correction: her soon-to-be-ex-husband—Janine sure hadn’t met him. A human rut was what he was, bumping along in his groove from home to the restaurant, from the restaurant to the damn church, from the church back to the restaurant, and from the restaurant back home (back when it
was
his home). One night, weeks after they’d separated and Miles had moved into the apartment above the restaurant, he’d turned up in her bedroom. It had given her a start, waking up like that and seeing him there at the foot of the bed, looming over her and Walt, and her first thought had been that Miles had come to kill them. Then she saw him pull his shirt over his head and toss it on top of the hamper, and she knew he’d closed the restaurant and made his exhausted way home by rote. He must’ve come to when Janine turned on the end-table lamp, because the light sent him scurrying after his discarded shirt like a burglar. Where another man might have taken advantage of his mistake by acting on the impulse to slit their throats, Janine could tell from the expression on his face that if he’d had a knife, the only throat he’d have slit would have been his own.

Actually, what Miles reminded her of was the plastic figures of her brother’s hockey game, back when they were kids. The surface of the board represented the ice rink and was full of slots, each one occupied by a stick-wielding plastic figure who moved forward or backward in his slot. This hadn’t been a terribly successful gift. Their parents had concluded that Billy wasn’t old enough for it, because the first thing he did was rip the plastic figures out of their slots, thinking, perhaps, that the game would be more fun if the players could go where they wanted, like real hockey players. How was the kid to know that underneath the board were big, bulging discs that kept the plastic men stable? Once liberated, they looked ridiculous, like a miniature platoon of clubfooted soldiers who happened, incidentally, to be armed only with hockey sticks. Worse, they simply could not be induced to stand up like men. Janine had understood long ago that if you somehow managed to extract her soon-to-be-ex from his ruts with the idea of setting him free, you’d have the same result. Free Miles Roby and he wouldn’t even be able to stand upright.

“Those cocktail napkins cost money, you know,” Bea said when Janine had gone through about half the stack. Janine could fit about three
Janine Louise Comeau
’s on the back of each napkin, but only two on the front, thanks to Callahan’s leprechaun logo. “What the hell’s the matter with you, anyhow?”

Janine took a fresh napkin and signed her new identity on it below the little Irish freak. “I was just thinking of Billy,” she explained. “Remember that hockey game you and Daddy bought him for Christmas?”

“Yes, I remember it,” Bea said, leaving about half a dozen napkins there on the bar by her daughter and moving the others out of harm’s way. “I remember every toy that child destroyed, which was every single one he touched. It took him about a New York minute to yank those little bastards out of where they belonged. Then he cried until we promised to buy him another one.”

Janine tuned out most of her mother’s nostalgic recollection. Her little brother had been killed at the age of nineteen when a car he’d jacked up crashed down on him, and she hadn’t meant to think about Billy at all. She’d been happily reflecting on the shortcomings of her husband—correction: soon-to-be-ex-husband, the Human Rut—when Billy just crept in. So, since thinking about her brother had made her sad and depressed, she went back to thinking about Miles, which made her happy and depressed. Depressed because he’d always be Miles, happy because she’d soon be shut of him.

When she’d finished autographing the rest of the cocktail napkins, Janine consulted her watch. Her afternoon aerobics class was just shy of half an hour away, if she could last that long. For Janine, late afternoon was always the worst part of the day, the stretch she couldn’t handle alone, which was the only reason she visited her mother, who drove her nuts. She knew from experience that once she got back to the gym and got Abba pounding on the big speakers (“Mama Mia! How can I resist him!”), she’d be fine. There was no better appetite suppressant than vigorous exercise, and by the time she finished the high-impact aerobics session at four, and then the low-impact one at five, the worst of her inner demons would be back on the leash. She’d be able to sit down to a reasonable dinner with Walt, who’d taught her how to quit eating when she started to feel full instead of plowing on through until she was sated. After a sensible dinner she’d be content until bedtime, when the hunger dogs would start baying again, but by then she could make them heel because she’d be exhausted from the workouts. And as Walt was always reminding her, exhaustion trumps hunger. There’d also be sex, another excellent distraction.

Right now, though, she was hungry enough to eat the soggy lime wedge floating in her seltzer. The disgusting pickled pigs’ feet swimming in brine in a gallon jug halfway down the bar actually looked delicious, and Janine could imagine herself getting down on the floor and gnawing on one like a dog, cracking the bone with her back teeth and sucking out the marrow. Her mother, intuiting her misery, put a bowl of beer nuts in front of her, munching a small handful herself to demonstrate how good they were. “Mmmmm,” she said.

Janine was able to identify only three primal urges: to eat, to fuck, and to kill your pain-in-the-ass mother. She wasn’t sure which of these was the most powerful, but she knew the last was the most dangerous because there was so little to counterbalance it. “You know what, Beatrice?” Janine said. She never used her mother’s full name except to suggest her proximity to actual matricide. “You’re just jealous.” Of her weight loss and relative youth and sexual activity, it went without saying.

Standing up, Janine carried the bowl of beer nuts down the bar and handed them to the only other customers, two morose-looking unemployed millworkers who were nursing cheap draft beers and patiently awaiting happy hour. On the way back she snagged another short stack of cocktail napkins.

“I am,” her mother agreed. “I really do wish I could go through life blind and selfish. Did it ever occur to you that I’m sixty years old? That maybe I could use a hand changing these damn kegs?”

Janine Louise Comeau
, wrote Janine Louise Roby on the back of the first new napkin. Beneath her signature, the same thing, twice more. “Don’t tell me after all these years you finally decided you don’t like mule work,” she said.

“I like it fine,” Bea said, which was true. Until recently she used to pick
up
the damn kegs. Now she rocked them gently on and off the hand truck she kept out back, wheeling the full kegs in and the empties back out. “Nolan Ryan still likes to throw fastballs, too.”

Having tended bar for forty years, Bea had watched several thousand ball games she had no interest in, only to discover at this late date that she’d picked up so damn much knowledge about baseball that she halfway enjoyed it. And she’d come to believe life was like that: you could enjoy almost anything if you gave it enough time. “Including a man,” Bea always concluded. Meaning Miles, Janine understood. Her mother had little patience on the subject of her marriage. “If I could learn to love your father,” Bea never tired of reminding her daughter, “you could learn to love a man as good-hearted as Miles.” Which was a damn lie, Janine knew. Bea had loved her father from the start and continued loving him until the day he died. The fact that her father was no damn good was beside the point.

“You think Nolan Ryan likes pitching ibuprofen after pitching fastballs?” Bea wanted to know.

Janine Louise Comeau
, Janine wrote above another leprechaun. According to her watch, a minute and a half had passed. “I don’t have any idea, Mother. I don’t even know who Nolan Ryan is.”

“What I’m saying is, I could use a hand sometimes,” Bea told her. “If it’s an aerobic workout you’re after, I can help you out.”

Janine knew where this was heading, of course. What Bea was hinting at was getting her to work at the tavern, which wasn’t going to happen. Lately her mother had been thinking about reopening the kitchen for lunch. Back when Janine’s father was alive, Callahan’s had served sandwiches and done a decent lunch trade. Janine could make it work, too. She knew food from all those years wasted on the Empire Grill—but it was working around food all the time that had put an extra fifty pounds on her. Walt had come along and talked her into working at the club just in time. Another year or two and she would’ve looked just like her mother, who was built like a thumb, except not so flexible in the middle. The thing Janine couldn’t figure out was why her mother would
want
her at the bar. They’d just fight like cats the whole time, unable to agree on anything.

“Give it up, Beatrice,” Janine advised. According to her watch, only twenty-two minutes to go. “I got a job at one of the few successful businesses in Dexter County. I’ve lost fifty pounds and I feel good about myself for the first time in my whole damn life. You aren’t going to bring me down, so don’t even try, okay?”

The two mopers at the other end of the bar had stopped pretending they weren’t eavesdropping, so Bea switched on the TV to a talk show, loud enough that she and her daughter could continue their conversation in private. The men were clearly disappointed. “If we got to listen to a fat woman talk, can’t she at least be the white one?” one of them complained.

Reluctantly, Bea did as requested, though in her opinion these particular men would’ve benefited more from watching Oprah than Rosie. “Oprah’s smarter than any five white men you can name, Otis.”

“She ain’t smart enough to be white, though, is she?” he countered, eliciting a bitter chuckle from his companion.

The argument Bea wanted was with her daughter, not these two reprobates, but she couldn’t let Otis have the last word, either. She considered herself one of the few unprejudiced people in Empire Falls by virtue of the fact that she took a dim view of practically everyone, regardless of their race or gender. “Unlike some people,” she said, “Oprah’s content in her own skin.”

“I’m plenty content in my own skin too,” Otis said, not understanding that her remark was directed at her daughter.

“Now
that’s
a tragedy,” Bea replied, then turned away to face Janine. “And I’m
not
trying to bring you down, little girl. You’re always accusing people of that, as if everybody in the world’s only got one thing on their mind. You. It’s a mother’s duty to point out when her child is acting dumber than usual, and that’s all I’m doing.”

Janine tore the napkin with a vicious stroke of the “u” in
Comeau
. “Can we just drop the whole thing, Ma?” she suggested, wadding up the ruined napkin. “There’s no point in us discussing what isn’t any of your damn business to start with. If you can’t understand why I might want something better than going through life fat and miserable, then that’s too damn bad. Maybe someday I’ll give up—like you—but not today, all right? People can change, and I’m changing.”

“You aren’t changing, Janine,” her mother said. “You’re just losing weight. There’s a difference. If you woke up one morning thinking of somebody but yourself,
that
would be a change. If you thought for two seconds about the effect of all your foolishness on your daughter, that’d be another.”

“Like I said, Ma,” Janine replied, grabbing the last of the napkins, “you’re just jealous, so let’s drop it before one of us says something they’ll regret, okay?”

“I’m not even close to saying anything I’ll regret,” Bea assured her. “What I’ll regret is holding my tongue.”

“How would you know? You’ve never even tried.”

Down the bar, Otis snorted at that one. Which meant that the television’s volume wasn’t up high enough. Which Bea remedied.

“What I’m trying to tell you,” she continued, “is that all you’re doing is shoveling shit against the tide. A person is what she is.”

Janine was tempted to tell her mother about all the orgasms she was having now, how Walt had found the spot whose existence Miles had never even suspected, how
nice
it felt to be desired for once. Except what was the point of trying to explain this to a woman who wouldn’t even know orgasms existed if Oprah didn’t tell her? “I don’t need you to tell me who I am, Beatrice. For the first time in my life I have a pretty good idea.”

“You do?” Her mother was grinning now in that superior way of hers.

“You’re damn right I do,” Janine said, autographing the last of the napkins. After all, there was no point in getting angry. The argument had done exactly what she’d hoped, distracting her from her hunger. According to the clock over the register, it was now ten till four, time to head back to the club.

“Well, I don’t believe you,” her mother said. “And what’s more, I can prove you’re full of it.”

Sliding off her stool, Janine shouldered her tote bag and pushed her glass, now empty except for the soggy lime wedge in the bottom, toward her mother. “Yeah, well, I’m not interested in your proof, Beatrice. I’m going to work.”

“Who’s
going to work?” Bea said, covering the napkin with her rough hand. “The woman whose name is on this napkin?”