Suicide's Girlfriend (9 page)

Because he asks and asks, I do touch his penis for one second. A penis is soft and silky and sort of a friendly little pup, but this is an entire area I don't get: Are some people really interested in the parts of others except as those parts can give themselves pleasure? I mean, my true love acts very excited when he means to excite me, but isn't it the prospect of his own possible pleasure that excites him? I'm
happy
to make him happy and when he kisses my breasts, sometimes I want to weep with pained joy, almost the creepy way I feel like crying when something terribly corny happens, like they crown beauty queens or play the national anthem, but is this what people mean?

After what must be hours of grappling—my lips puffed, chin scraped—Dane drops one of his long arms over the side of the bed. His fingers scrabble around on the carpet for a minute, then he brings up his watch. “I guess we better go downstairs,” he says, quiet, lots of sighs. Like my parents when they feel let down: “We see you've lost all interest in the piano, Clare.” Or, “I guess a trip to the most beautiful beaches in the world wasn't special enough for you, hmm, Clare?”

Downstairs, Dane and I sit on the living room couch, in the dark, not talking. Mentally, I connect the flag pole of a motorboat parked in the neighbor's drive and the trellis of another neighbor and the Dorans' yard light: an isosceles triangle.

“Well,” Dane says, finally breaking the silence, “what if I gave you my ring?”

“What?”

“My ring. Would you like to have it?”

I smile as if he doesn't mean it, really, because maybe he doesn't mean it, really.

He shakes his head. “Would you like me to come back again next week, anyway?”

“Oh!” I say. I sound just like my mother. “That would be nice, wouldn't it?”

“Hey, Dane.” Rex stands in the doorway, Micki Traub leaning into him. They both look happy, worn. Rex does a little golf swing in the air. “Got to get going, buddy-o. Long way to Des Moines.”

Like we're all set to the same clock, at just that moment, Ann and Jimmy come downstairs, too.

“Hey!” Jimmy claps his hands. “Did everybody make sure they didn't leave any evidence for my poor, old, weak-hearted mother to find?”

“I'll make sure,” I whisper to Dane, relieved to get away. But then Jimmy says, “Uh-oh!” very stagey, like he's just remembered something incriminating himself, and up the stairs he pounces after me, and grabs hold of me in the hall.

“So what happened with Dane?” he whispers.

I shake my head. Jimmy knows me well enough to see I feel lousy. He brings his face close to mine and kisses me on the forehead. Then the cheek. Like I'm the most fragile thing in the world, and his lips are little powder puffs. I don't know whether he's being brotherly or what. Half the time when Ann leaves the two of us alone in a room, Jimmy teases me about my true love, and the other half of the time he tries to kiss me. “Come on over here, Clare,” he'll murmur, or he'll haul himself across the carpet to me on his knees, whatever. I'm sorry, but yes, I sometimes do kiss him. Mostly because I feel embarrassed for him. He really looks like he might cry when you say no. And you can see he figures he
has
to try to kiss you, so imagine the mess you get in when he's kneeling at your feet, and the TV is on, and you can't quite hear when Ann's coming back, and all he really wants is one kiss, please.

“Dane didn't hurt you or anything, did he, Clare?”

“He didn't hurt me,” I say, “but I don't ever want to see him again.”

Jimmy nods. “That's all I want to know. You're my kind of girl, Clare, you know? You're really the one.”

“Jimmy,” I say, “you are hopeless.”

“I am, aren't I?” Jimmy says. “No, that's not right! I'm
hopeful
, and
you're
hopeless, Clare!”

I don't laugh. I am tired to death of being misunderstood by not just strangers but the people who know me best, and I say, “It just so happens, Jimmy, that I've always believed things were about to get better soon.”

Jimmy nods. For a minute, I feel a little lurch of sympathy between us, but then he starts coming at me again with those lips, and this time I just move away, and I whisper, “Don't do that, Jim. You don't have to do that.”

You would expect him to make wide eyes of surprise. He does. He laughs. “Clare, Clare,” he says, and pats my cheek and hops and skips down the hall, and then back down the stairs.

Mr. and Mrs. Doran's room is very different with the light on: before, with Dane, it was a pool of dark, an island of mattress, but now it's filled with matching pieces of furniture and crispy curtains and
creamy graduation photos of Jimmy and his beautiful big sister, Margaret. I sit down on the mattress. My feet dangle over the edge as if I'm a footsore pilgrim sitting on the edge of a river.

“Oh, Clare!” The people downstairs call up to me, in a silly chorus: “Oh, Clare!” Then they all laugh, and do it again: “Oh, Clare!”

I roll onto my stomach. I dig my chin into the cool blue fabric of the mattress and, like an old dog, stare straight ahead.

Woof.

A little bottle sits on the bedside table: “Rx,” says its label. “Good for One Laugh.” Across the bottom, a cartoon doctor chases a cartoon nurse, her mouth open in a tiny black scream. The bottle contains M&M candies. I eat one as I read the gilt message looped across a photograph perched on the table: Season's Greetings from the Dorans in 1970!”

It's plain that the tiny children in the photo are Jimmy and Margaret, but even so it takes me a minute to straighten out the fact that the pretty woman who holds the kids is not the grown-up beautiful Margaret I have met, but Jimmy's young mother. Also, back then,
Mr
. Doran wore a mustache and a look of happy expectancy, both of which strike me almost as a disguise, something meant to throw off viewers of the future.

But, then, I suppose that's who he really was in those days, and I would like to warn him, and her, this sweet young mom and dad, “Look out, get serious now before it's too late!” but it's already too late.

I screw the lid back on the bottle. My fingers feel stiff and thick, as if I've suddenly grown a layer of bark. History, I think. I will look back at this night someday and hold myself accountable. I will say, as if I were someone else entirely, almost my own parent, “What on earth were you doing?”

This scares me, because
I
won't be there to answer, and I
know
the answer, right now, which is:

What was I doing? Don't you remember? I was doing the best that I could.

T
HE FIRST STORE
is no convenience market, no, not one of those weary laugh-getters of our time, symbols of the fast-paced nothing for something. The first store is old. Customers track in the snow, and the melt swells the wood floors to the dark, leaf-mold stain of footpaths in forests. Mousetraps and vegetable scubbers pinned to cardboards hang over the store entrance. Packed snow in the vestigial parking lot. It creaks when the man drives in, when he stops.

Crocker: his name.

Slick-bottomed shoes uncertain beneath him, Crocker crosses the lot, enters the above unnamed muggy store, and, with only a few turns of his head, locates the pastry racks. Fruit pies. Doughnuts in boxes shaped like tiny houses, blue curtains printed on either side of the cellophane picture windows.

Crocker does not buy doughnuts.

Crocker selects a see-through package of twin devil's food cakes, coconut-coated and shaped like small igloos. Crocker chooses white coconut for the modicum edge of dignity it holds over pink; believe me, he knows this is not much.

Outside again, he carries his paper bag a little in front of him so that he may not appear furtive.

A teacher. English as a Second Language. Large high school. Overworked, underpaid.

In his rusty car, as he drives, Crocker wrestles the pastries from their wrappers, takes a first bite. Really, he disapproves of them as much as anyone does. He knows their signals; made by an enormous company that does not care for the inventive, perishable life of the individual, the pastries are a puff of corporate America. Eating them is, in a sense, suicidal. And doesn't their comic-book ring of sweet and goo only
remind
one of something genuinely tasty, thus demonstrating how far from actual goodness we might stand and still move jaws, swallow?

A brand name for an article of food. Funny, and spreading. Chicken and bananas—whole in their various skins—might now appear the brainchildren of corporations named Country Pride and Dole.

Just the week before, the mother of Jesus Aguasvivas—Dominican, no English at all—brought an exquisite coconut pudding to the ESL potluck. Crocker took three servings, entirely too much, and only guilt stopped his taking a fourth.
“Gordo,”
Crocker said to Mrs. Aguasvivas: fat. He patted his belly, and waited for the woman to say no, no. But she only laughed, held up her fingers in a small measure.
“Gordito,”
she said. A little fat.

Despite Crocker's protests, Jesus left his mother alone at the potluck: a small woman, smiling, folding and refolding a piece of aluminum foil. Jesus spent the evening with his hairdo—complicated, spray-stiffened—in front of the locker room's bright bank of mirrors.

What Crocker meant to do was to help people open a channel between themselves and others. Community. Fraternity. Instead, his best efforts trot off to the marketplace, enter into the service of compact disc sales, steamy bar dates at places with names like Beef on the Hoof.

“They don't take anything seriously,” he told his wife. “They think life here is one big amusement park and all you need is money for the
rides.” This was an exaggeration, of course, and though Crocker's wife knew Crocker to be a good man, she scolded him: “So go ahead and change jobs!” A smart and pretty woman, his wife has grown snappish. On that occasion, to show her exasperation, she threw the magazine in her lap at a foundering dracaena by the window. The distorted plant looked otherworldly to Crocker, like something out of the Dr. Seuss books of his little son.

“Did you think their lives would be one long barn-raising and potluck supper?” the wife asked. The look on her face was shrewd, appraising, something honed on the stonier parts of their marriage. “What's with you, anyway? Look at how you dress lately! Are you trying to be a model of worldly renunciation or what?”

Like a shedding dog or a snowstorm, the coconut pastries make a mess all over Crocker's sports jacket and car. He never ate these products as a child. He ridiculed them! His mother educated him in excellent pies under roofs of melted Vermont cheddar; a mother who baked Brownies Cockaigne so dense with chocolate and sugar and butter that they resembled the mud desserts Crocker (then a boy) once made in his backyard.

Coconut everywhere.

Coconut in his graying mustache, the cracks of upholstery.

With a jerk, Crocker stops at a car wash and in its gloomy parking lot he vacuums the seats, the carpet. He stomps his feet on the creaking snow and vacuums himself, too.

His wife would never in a million years guess that he might stop (stoop) to eat these pastries. What does his wife know about him, after all? She pays close attention to the child, a beauty of two with blond curls and every movement a dance, and for this Crocker is happy; but he also sometimes feels that he should have killed himself or entered the Peace Corps while there was still a chance, back when particular people did not need him quite so much.

As Crocker left the house this morning, his wife sounded both weepy and peremptory. “You come home
right
after you run tonight!”

(Around and around the dirt floors beneath the high school, alone in that panicky miners' dark, the ceiling lit only here and there with incandescents. He might have been on the lam in a future, subterranean world, running from something inexorable in its hunger.)

Mr. Fitness, his wife calls him, and it is true, even in high school, back in the days when no one ran except members of track teams, Crocker put on his grays, regularly, and ran to a neighboring burg, a round trip of fifteen miles. Other kids drove past, some kicking up slush and laughing, but most rooting on what he knew they considered bizarre behavior. In college, he kept at it even during that period when he wore hair so long it cupped at his shoulders and he resembled Buster Brown. He cut weight for the wrestling team while windowpane acid and his very own brain caused the fishnet hung from his ceiling to cast an entirely new order of shadow over the world. Somewhere in the duplex he shares with wife and son, there exists a maple rung from a dorm room chair that is pocked with the teeth marks of his former zeal. His wife believes the thing a memento of a favorite dog, but many people from Crocker's past have offered up for the delectation of more recent acquaintances a tale of a crazy, starving wrestler who paced dormitory halls, chewing on a piece of wood and spitting into a paper cup.

In three days, Crocker will be thirty-nine years old.

He no longer dreams the dreams he could share with everyone he knew, dreams in which he must take a test in a class he never attended, or perform in a play for which he has not learned the lines. Worse, he now wakes terrified, sweating, and longs to cry out like his little son: Daddy! Mommy! The other night, his son awoke crying just this, and—not yet aroused by his own terrors, still half-asleep, terrified—Crocker sat up in bed, heart drumming for that cry in the distance. With hallucinogenic clarity, bare planets—rocks—hurtled through space, and Crocker was out there with them, and he knew as if he were God: There are no mothers and fathers.

“Daddy, Dad!” the child cried again.

And then Crocker settled back into his soul, became a father once more, took shape as if called into being by desire.

Beneath the driver's seat lies a fuzzed and sticky can-opener. Crocker nudges the repellent thing farther into the dark with the car wash vacuum, unaware that the opener pushes his missing chrome pen, too; the pen edges beneath a newspaper Crocker once saved. The newspaper features an article on one of Crocker's Vietnamese students and her family. The article tells, among other things, how Dep was forced to watch her mother and a younger sister be raped, thrown into the sea, devoured by sharks.

Why he saved the article Crocker no longer remembers. Some testament to the awful world? Or survival? A reminder that what private perversity invents to rack his own nights has no weight when poised beside the memories of others?

Dep in class today—silent, silent, her conversational partner waiting—and then: “She my best friend, but I never forget her.”

Crocker has abandoned the outmoded grammar drills; a good thing, yet sometimes the sluggish flow of student invention drives him to distraction. This morning, he corrected the girl, “That's ‘and,' Dep, not ‘but.'”

However, didn't an unvoiced thought make Dep's “but” sensible?
I know I will never see my best friend again, but I will never forget her.

He ought to apologize, really. For knowing what the girl meant but asking for greater precision.

And
asking for greater precision?

And
still
asking for greater precision.

Sometimes, Crocker wonders if Dep might be a grown woman, not a girl at all: a small woman in a high school full of big kids.

Once upon a time, this Dep had eight brothers and sisters; and, more important, a place in an immortal chain of ancestral graves and
rice fields. For a good long while—lacking a Vietnamese equivalent for the word “I”—Dep referred to herself as “your student.” These days, she resides in a county youth home, a yellowing building that appears to have been gnawed upon by its residents: besides Dep, five American girls and two American boys, all of whom either ran away from home or were kicked out.

“Do you practice your English at dinner?” Crocker once asked. Dep shook her head emphatically. Her shiny, chin-length hair flew out from her head and slapped at her cheeks. “They monsters,” she whispered. Crocker nodded in sympathy. He told her a story of how, once, after traveling home from college, he sat down at the supper table with his own nine brothers and sisters, and no one even noticed his presence.

Dep smiled into her hands. “Maybe, Mista Crocka, no one notice you gone!” she said.

Quite a bit of time passed before Crocka, understood that the girl did not tease him; that her words would be taken for comfort in her world, where the family made a circle that went around and around and around.

“Crocker!” Behind him, parked in the glare of one of the car wash stalls, two of his students—Pakistani brothers. The younger one, nicknamed Pop, waves from the backseat of a large red convertible; Ahmad smokes a cigarette and lolls against the car.

Do they know they must not begin to wash that car with its top down? What are they doing with the top down in this weather, anyway? And how could they possibly own such a car?

Crocker waves to the boys as he puts the vacuum hose back in place. He has gotten the best of the coconut, but feels absurd.

How could you redeem the world without putting out all human consciousness?

The sort of question that makes Crocker hungry.

“One minute!” he calls to the boys. “Wait one minute!”

A convenience market sits across the parking lot from the car wash, and Crocker walks rapidly in its direction.

Perhaps everyone feels vaguely criminal in a convenience market, where deterrence of crime affects everything: the layout, the friendliness masking raving suspicion, the lighting, the mirrors, the notes to potential robbers. Think of
that!
“Cashier keeps no more than twenty dollars in change. Cashier does not have access to safe.”