Safe from the Neighbors (13 page)

The deer was still breathing. Her eyes were open too but no longer looked glassy. Unfortunately, she was very much aware.

“They come out of them fuckin’ woods at the edge of campus,” the cop who’d shot her said. “Put me in charge, we’d cut every one of them trees down.”

The other cop looked at me, then at the guy who’d helped me drag her out the door, then at the group of students who’d emerged from the library. Jennifer wasn’t with them. I could see her standing inside, staring at the doe through the shattered plate glass. She wasn’t crying, but her shoulders were starting to shake. “We can’t let these deer roam around campus,” I heard the cop say. “They’re a danger. Y’all were nuts to touch her.”

I didn’t reply, just walked towards the door. As I passed through the crowd, a male voice observed, “Be a shame to waste good meat.”

I don’t know what I intended to tell Jennifer. I think maybe I meant to apologize for what the cop had done, or to apologize for masculine behavior in general. I probably hazily understood that she had briefly become my prey, even if all I wanted was to know her name.

But all I ended up telling her was
yes
when she looked up at me and asked, “Would you please walk me home?”

Lots of people have said they get extremely emotional when they see their children for the first time after sending them off to college. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the kids go two thousand miles away or, like our daughters, only a hundred and fifty: they just look different. It’s as if something has been altered in their DNA. But the question is whether the change is really in them or in you.

In my case, I think, the answer was both. Trish emerged from Stewart Hall—the same dorm I’d walked her mother home to
that night twenty-nine years ago—in frayed jeans, a ragged purple T-shirt I’d never seen before and a pair of Wal-Mart flip-flops. In high school she was fashion conscious, spending every cent she had in the Greenville mall or, when we agreed to drive her, in one of the bigger stores up in Memphis. Candace, on the other hand, never seemed to care much about her appearance. Now she was heavily made-up, with lots of blush on her cheeks, wearing a new skirt and a pair of high heels she still didn’t know how to walk in, looking like she might tip over at any moment. I suspected she’d gotten interested in a boy, whose height I would’ve pegged at six-foot-three.

And as for me, something was different, too. For eighteen years, every time I saw them, the word that entered my mind was
daddy
. Their presence defined me. In their absence I’d lost my prevailing sense of self. Simply laying eyes on them again couldn’t quite give it back.

Trish had never been as warm as her sister, always a little bit stiff, and that hadn’t changed. Rather than hug me, she leaned forward a little bit, guardedly preventing me from achieving much contact. But my nose brushed the top of her head, and her hair smelled of pot. I sniffed once or twice.

She laughed and said, “Relax, Daddy. It’s not the big deal it used to be. It’s actually kind of retro, like you listening to Chuck Berry.”

I glanced over at Jennifer, who was hugging Candace, both of them swaying, close to tears, Candace taller now than her mom because of those stilts. “What’s an ounce go for?” I asked.

I was trying to play the cool dad like I always had, but she shook her head as if at a kid who refused to grow up. She exchanged places with her sister and I threw my arms around Candace, noticing that her eye shadow was clumsily applied. “Who’s the guy?” I said.

She quickly pulled away. “There’s not one.”

To my surprise, Jennifer took mercy on me. “Be nice to your dad,” she told them. “He’s envious.” She paused, then added, “Your lives are just starting. His is starting to be over.”

I have to say, the day was by no means unpleasant. We decided to go to the square on foot and have lunch at Ajax Diner. While we walked, Trish’s mouth ran. She’s majoring in history—planning on law school one day—and was enjoying most of her courses, though she voiced strong dislike for the guy teaching her American survey. When I asked what was wrong with him, she said, “First of all, he’s from Indiana.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Indiana’s the cradle of Main Street conservatism—you’re the one who told me that, Daddy—and he’s always putting his own spin on things.”

If she’d found a conservative history professor, I figured she ought to at least appreciate the oddity. He was probably the only one she’d ever encounter. The last program I’d seen for the OAH’s annual meeting featured such session topics as Rewriting the History of Rape and Historical Perspectives on Masculinity and Empire Building. “What kinds of things?”

“Well, for instance, he brings in stuff about the war, which doesn’t have anything at all to do with what we’re studying, and keeps trying to draw these really tenuous links between figures he thinks we’ll admire, like Abraham Lincoln or FDR, and George Bush. He said the other day that when people rag Bush for what’s happening at Guantánamo Bay, they forget that Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus.”

“Well, that’s the truth.”

“You can’t separate a truth from the context in which it’s spoken. And you know who said
that
?”

We were walking east on University Avenue, Jennifer and
Candace in front, their arms around each other as they discussed an intro to lit class. It may sound too neat, but we’ve got an English major, too.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “But I didn’t say
a
truth, I said
the
truth. And I never argued that the context made it any less true. I was just pointing out that when you evaluate what purports to be a fact, you have to consider the environment that exists when you hear it. Schools of history come and go, and all of them reflect current biases. Every historian shades meaning to one degree or another.”

“Well, I don’t like the shades in this guy’s palette and hope he doesn’t get tenure. He needs to go teach at Bob Jones.”

The square was largely deserted, as it always is on a fall Saturday when the football team’s on the road. We took a booth at the diner, and I ordered myself a beer, Jennifer a glass of white wine. Hearing the girls talk about their classes, I think we both were pleasantly surprised that college seemed to be having the desired effect, increasing their interest rather than slowly draining it out of them, as it so often does. There at Ajax, I believe we felt—for lack of a better word—successful. Our kids were all right. They’d probably stumble at some point, but as long as they knew where they were headed, it looked like they’d most likely reach their destination.

As we waited for our food, I ordered a second beer and lapsed into an expansive, nostalgic mood. I waved my hand around the room, which was decorated with posters advertising blues performances from forty or fifty years ago, a bunch of old license plates, two or three big bottle-cap thermometers like you used to see hanging on country stores. “You wouldn’t believe what this place used to look like,” I said.

“Was it Ajax back then?” Candace asked.

“Nope, it was a pizzeria. Over there in the middle, where all the tables are, there was a salad bar.”

“It was some of the saltiest pizza you ever tasted,” Jennifer said. “When your dad and I came in here, the first thing we asked for was a pitcher of water.”

“That we always got refilled two or three times.”

“We ordered a large combo, even though your dad used to hate mushrooms. He’d pick them off his half and dump them on mine.”

“I’d eat a few from time to time. What I really wanted was the Hawaiian pizza, but the mere thought of it made your mother gag.”

Candace said, “What’s on that?”

“Ham and pineapple,” Jennifer told her, shuddering.

Both girls groaned.

“Did you eat here a lot?” Trish asked.

“Whenever we could afford it.”

“How often was that?”

Jennifer laughed. “Not very.”

They brought our plates—I got the catfish with sweet potato casserole, corn bread and fried okra—and Jennifer and I each ordered another drink. If I had to guess, I’d say we sat in that booth for pretty close to two hours.

It was what I’ve come to think of as our throwback day. We were as we’d been for countless thousands of meals—a family of four, parked around a table and making small talk. We were, to take the notion even further, parked around a table in the town where everything had started, where I’d helped a girl about the age of my daughters find details of a massacre, where everyone then stood and watched helplessly while a different kind of massacre occurred. If Evans Harrington hadn’t told his class about those murders in Carrollton, their mother and I might never have met. And if that deer hadn’t crashed through the glass and gotten shot, she wouldn’t have asked me to walk her home. One thing, as I saw it that day, led to another.

The fact that I’d been cautioning students against taking a
purely event-based approach to history, with its easy causal lines, didn’t come to me until later. There at Ajax Diner, surrounded by the three people who’d meant the most to me for most of my life, it all made perfect sense.

We spent the night at a local B and B. I happened to know that in the late nineteenth century, this was Oxford’s top brothel and owned by a notorious woman reputed to be quite handy with a straight razor. It still sported whorehouse décor: big heavy red drapes, a bidet in the bathroom, an enormous canopied four-poster that could’ve withstood the most rambunctious activity, if anybody put it to the test, but we didn’t. By the time I got out of the shower, Jennifer was fast asleep, a mask over her eyes and orange stopples in her ears.

T
HE FIRST TIME
Maggie and I make love, it’s raining. The limbs of the pecan trees in the backyard dip and sway, dropping brown hulls, and thunder shakes the walls and floor. It’s quite the storm.

By the time we climb the stairs and peel our clothes off, it’s after six on Wednesday and we’ve had a lot to drink, five or six glasses of wine for her and five or six shots of that awful VO for me. Later, she’ll joke that we got to where we were because I was full of Canadian courage.

Where we are is a rickety bed she rented with the rest of her furniture, in an otherwise empty room whose green wallpaper is water stained. There’s not even a bedside table. Her alarm clock stands on the floor alongside several stacks of books and magazines. I see a copy of
Les Misérables
down there and a few issues of the
New Republic
.

The bed smells like her, and not just because she’s in it. The scent of her perfume lingers in a room long after she’s left it, acting as her proxy. You can smell her in the hallways and the teachers’ lounge, too. For days I’ve been feeling like she’s worked herself inside me. I was drunk before I ever touched that VO.

For a long time nothing happens except I hold her and she presses her face against me. “You’re smooth here,” she says, running her hand over my sternum. “Like a boy.”

It’s true. I don’t have much body hair, and it’s soft, what little there is. In high school, when it started growing on the other guys’ chests, I felt self-conscious, but I haven’t thought about it in years. I never go swimming, and Loring’s too small for a health club, so there’s no occasion to get undressed in front of anybody who’s seeing me naked for the first time.

“You’re scared, aren’t you?” she says.

“Yeah.”

“You haven’t done this before.”

It’s a statement, not a question, and that spares me the need to answer. I don’t have to ask a question, either, but I do. “Have you?”

“Oh, I’m afraid I’ve done far too much of it.”

The crown of her head is touching my chin. I stroke her hair. “For your own good?”

“No.” She stifles what feels like a laugh. “For the good of mankind, obviously.”

“So why’d you do it?”

This is one of those times when she takes a while to answer. “Well, I was looking for something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I just know I never found it. Every time I tried, I promised myself it would be the last.”

“Hard to find it if you don’t know what it is.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

I know I should stop this line of inquiry. That, I feel sure, would be the smart thing to do. But being smart isn’t where I am. I’ve thrown intelligence out the window and it’s out there on the ground, getting soaked with the pecans. “Your husband wasn’t it?”

Her hand stops moving. “My husband was a wonderful man. I’d even say he was a great man, though I didn’t really understand that until he died. He influenced a lot of people, some of whom never even met him. A memorial service was held in Duke
Chapel, and you wouldn’t believe how many people attended. Former students came from across the country. One young man, some kind of official in the Indian government, flew all the way from New Delhi. And numerous old colleagues from CNN. Ted Turner showed up, with three or four bodyguards.”

“What about Jane?”

“No, they’d already divorced.” Once more her hand is moving. It slides down my chest, over my stomach, a distance you could measure in inches, so why does this motion last forever? “The young man from New Delhi came over, took my hand and said that if you added up all the hours he’d spent in my husband’s office, listening to Anthony talk about how he might influence the lives of poor people back in India, he bet it was several weeks, if not months. He had tears in his eyes when he told me this, and of course he expected me to be moved, and I was. But I couldn’t help thinking what all those hours added up to for me. Just a lot of time alone.”