That Night (5 page)

Outside, some girls had arrived and he questioned each of them—quickly, not even attempting to seem casual, but making sure that tomorrow, when she rejoined him, he would not be ridiculed. They shrugged. None of them knew Sheryl better than he did.

At midnight, with all of them waiting for him in their cars, he called again. Her mother said this was no time for a boy to call. They were all in bed. She would not wake her.

In the bowling alley, the stale cool air seemed hardly to exist, except as a smell and a chill from no particular source. Outside, without a breeze, only the summer heat, the lingering odor of sun-warmed parking lot, of cars and litter, he might have felt this sudden silence had stopped whatever it was that turned and refreshed the earth.

Like most kids who can’t get along in high school, Rick had trouble at home. His mother was a strong woman with frail sensibilities who had decided on a fairly regular basis throughout his childhood that she would prefer not to live. She would then either swallow a bottle of aspirin or a box of baking soda or gather up as much cash as she could, combing the house for lunch money and pocket change, and leave town, often with a baby in the crib and the other children still in school.

She would choose obscure, unpredictable routes: board a bus for Baltimore or Pittsburgh or take a train to some wealthy suburb of Connecticut or New Jersey. She would check into motels that faced six others on busy interstates or find a place that was an anomaly to its area: a tiny motor inn in a declining middle-class development, an eight-room hotel over a beauty parlor in a small working-class city.

Rick’s father was a doctor then, although he’d long stopped practicing by the time Sheryl came around. He was a tall, heavy-boned man, either weary or kind, and he somehow brought his wife back home or back to life every time. Once or twice there had been a piece in the local paper: “Doctor’s Wife Sought / Doctor’s Wife Found,” but apparently the last, discreet line of these articles, “Mrs. Slater was reported missing once (twice, three times) before last year (January, month) and was once (twice, three times) again returned to her home,” became too vexing to compose. Or perhaps the editor realized that this was simply the difficult, enduring stuff of daily life, not news, and so the less said the better.

When Sheryl met Rick, his mother was in a flexible main streaming program at the state hospital and was home most weekends, “doing okay,” her need to disappear or die somehow met by the distance between the sprawling campus of the hospital and the untidy lawn of her four-bedroom house.

Rick’s father by then was almost always on crutches. A botched disc operation the same year he had abandoned his failing practice had set off a slow deterioration that subsequent operations only momentarily forestalled, as if the brief recoveries they brought about were mere missteps in the steady progression of his decline.

There was some money from a lawsuit, and at the time Sheryl knew Rick, his father was working for a local medical lab. Two of Rick’s sisters had married strangers before they were twenty, and a third took care of things at home and worked part-time in a department store at the mall.

I have never quite gotten straight what happened to Rick’s father’s medical career. My mother had visited him once, when I was young, as she had visited every doctor in the phone book in those days, wondering what had happened to her talent to conceive, but she only made the connection months after that night. His office had been in a part of our town that had somehow escaped new development if not rezoning and so still retained a battered and incongruous trace of the farm. There were two or three people who still kept chickens in that area, and here and there you could still find narrow wooden-frame houses, some of them abandoned, with old wells and useless water pumps in their tiny yards. Dr. Slater’s office was one of these. A green-shingled place with a grape arbor and a sloping porch caught, as touches of paint and threads of old carpeting might be caught in the corners of renovated houses, between a drive-in Dairy Barn store and a stucco ranch given over to card reading and TV repair.

He was a GP, but according to my mother approached his profession with the pride and the disdain of a haughty artist. He wanted nothing to do with money, either taking it in or paying it out. He hired no nurse, no receptionist, no interior decorator to choose couches for his waiting room or paintings for his walls. He used the kitchen and the dining room of the old house for his office and examining room and lined the living room with unmatched stuffed or stiff back chairs. A handwritten index card on the front door told what time he’d be there, and patients simply arrived with their own magazines and ashtrays and waited their turn. He would stay for as long as it took to see everyone, sometimes letting patients into the dining room long after midnight.

When my mother’s visit had ended, she had asked him if he would send her the bill. He seemed offended, she said, or embarrassed, and gruffly told her, “Six dollars.” He took out his wallet to make change, and when he saw that he didn’t have enough singles, made it five. He put the cash in his wallet and the wallet into his pocket, as if, my mother said, he would spend it at the grocery store that very evening. As he probably had.

What his intentions in all this were, no one was sure. A kind of purity, I suppose—medicine alone, medicine as it might have been in older, simpler days of the American frontier, or in some suburban doctor’s dream of it. A one man effort at National Health. My mother had liked him, although the stark and dusty waiting room and especially the old yellow refrigerator she had stared at while he examined her had startled her a bit. When she went back to him a second time, every chair in the living room was taken and people were standing out on the porch. She had me and my brother with her then and had neither the time nor the endurance to wait. She went on to another doctor, one with a motherly nurse receptionist and an appointment calendar and a collection of his own paint-by-number oils on the bright walls, and never returned to Dr. Slater again.

I suppose it’s possible that his other patients did the same, as the low fees and the down-home feeling gradually lost their novelty or as the doctor’s obvious lack of prosperity began to seem to them a reflection of his skill. Or maybe his scorn of paperwork got him in trouble with the IRS or the AMA or the local hospital. Perhaps his mad wife drove the patients away; or his own wistful and deliberate pursuit of a time that had never been his to begin with had finally appeared even to him as another kind of madness. It hardly matters. His back went out and his operation went haywire. His practice ended.

On the night of the fight, the night Rick came to claim her, he was home with his eldest daughter, who had just returned from her job at the store. She answered the phone, still in her stockings and dress, her name tag still pinned to her collar. He got up slowly, a big man with pale, heavy limbs. He leaned against tables and held on to walls as he made his way to the telephone. His daughter put out her arm for him. Her pity at times like this seemed cloying.

More trouble, he must have thought when he heard his boy’s muffled, sullen voice. More bad luck. At some time during that night he must have thought it overwhelming, the bad luck, the series of mistakes that plagued his family. His wife on the edge of some hotel bed in a strange city, her pocketbook on her lap, her eyes passing over him. His youngest daughter already trapped in a bitter, childish marriage; the middle one pregnant and broke, on the road somewhere with her brute; the oldest steeped in a dutiful loneliness. And now his intense and restless son playing out some B-movie drama over the love of a skinny girl.

He must have wondered at some point if they drew the bad luck to them, even unwittingly welcomed it. Or if they were simply, merely, hopelessly badgered. Plagued by invisible, arbitrary demons, by chance alone. Always in the wrong place at the wrong time, the place where a thousand others before them had stood unharmed.

Or is it only that their bad luck seems all of a piece only in the recounting of it?

Would it have seemed to him, even on that night, that his family’s history of misfortune was, if not fair, at least reasonable—the good with the bad—when held beside, scattered among, all the days when his wife was well and his children untroubled, when his patients waited for him on the porch of the small house, watching the sunset, smelling the grass, speaking softly to one another as neighbors should. Would it have seemed to him, even on that night, more appropriate to ask, as Sheryl’s mother might have asked the morning she fled our street, as lucky as whom? Whose luck is unending? Whose luck has lasted as long as mine has, till now?

When the phone rang that night, he was watching the way the living room light played prettily over his daughter’s plain features. She was telling him about a customer and laughing. Her toes in their shiny stockings were round and perfectly shaped. The room, which she had polished and vacuumed that morning, had finally given up the day’s heat and grown cool. He was thinking about his wife, who would be home again on Friday, doing better, and how he had loved her when she was his daughter’s age. Loved her the way Rick loved his girl now: crazy cross-eyed with it, a little unreal. He had finally found a good position on the couch and for the past hour or two had felt no pain.

When Rick called Sheryl’s mother again the next morning, prepared to be relieved, she said her daughter had gone out for the day. He would have recognized the change in her voice from the night before. The night before, she had been hesitant, a little curt, but now she used the sure tone of a person who has long and gleefully rehearsed the way to say, “Gosh, I hate to tell you this ...”

“She said if you called I should just say she’d gone out for the day. I don’t know where she’s off to, Rick. You know I’ve never made her tell me her every move. You know that.”

He went to the supermarket, but they told him she hadn’t come in to work. He headed for the mall. Neither of their birthdays was coming up, and their one-year anniversary had already passed. What surprise could she be planning for him; what present was worth all this?

He was young enough to fear that he had simply become unlovable to her overnight, and he began his search casually, self-consciously, just in case it was true. Just in case somewhere someone was watching him, someone who knew.

He walked slowly through the mall, his arms loose at his sides, the sun warm on his shoulders and hair. This was in the earlier days of shopping malls, when they still attempted to resemble cluttered Main Streets, not sealed airplane hangars and Disney World bazaars. There were large concrete planters regularly spaced down the center, filled with hedges and begonias and sad-looking trees. Some were surrounded by small groups of teenagers, who held cups of soda or slices of pizza wrapped in greasy wax paper. The girls wore pale, chalky lipstick, their hair was teased, some had pink or turquoise combs slipped into the back pockets of their jeans. He scanned them all quickly—he would know her in a second. He would put his hand to the back of her neck, “Where the hell you been, babe?” If he saw her with someone else, he’d just walk by. Hope his legs would hold him until he got to his car.

He looked carefully into the shoe store, where the customers, lined up neatly in their seats, were easy to see through the plate-glass windows and doors. He dismissed the paint stores, the men’s shops (unless she was buying him a present?), made one quick pass through Sam Goody’s.

He began to walk more quickly, sensing she was there but also feeling still the wise, amused eyes of whoever it was who was watching him, knowing the truth. He was young enough to believe that his foolishness, his humiliation in love, could not go unnoticed and once noticed could never be forgiven.

He set his face into a smirk, even chuckled as he pushed through the door of Newberry’s. He passed the counter where she sometimes bought earrings, hit the curtain of the instant photo machine. He passed the bins of white and beige pocketbooks whose odor filled the store, of plastic sandals, of discount makeup and perfume. He checked the wall of birthday and anniversary cards.

In Woolworth’s, he paused at a table of scarves. They were piled loosely, bright and tangled and so thin that it seemed only their white price tags kept them from rising like smoke into the cooled air. He touched one—a pale yellow with almost colorless white polka dots—and its rough, familiar feel already seemed a reminder of something lost. He had untied the scarves she sometimes wore around her throat. Once, she had draped one across her bare shoulders like a stole.

Again he checked the jewelry and the makeup. At the lunch counter, a child had just gotten sick. She stood pale and dazed as her mother seemed to beat at the front of her sun suit with a wet paper towel. A black janitor was wheeling a bucket and a mop to the spot. The other customers had scattered to either end of the counter.

When he turned away, he found two teenage girls watching him. “Oh, sickening,” one said directly to him, and he recognized the invitation. He could talk to her, take her telephone number. He could bury his face in her stiff hair.

“You’re ugly,” he said and saw her face change, just slightly, as if some small thing behind her makeup had slipped. He left the store.

Now he was jogging. The big stores seemed to mock him with their narrow aisles and invisible doorways, their elevators and dressing rooms. He realized that he could just be missing her at every turn. She could be just on the other side of the mall sitting with her back to the trees, smoking a cigarette. She could stand and wander away just as he left the escalator in Klein’s. She could be fingering the very scarf he had touched just as he emerged into the sunlight once again.