The Boy With Penny Eyes (14 page)

To be a housewife.

"Jerk," she said, raising the glass to the crooked picture of Ralph on the wall.

He was a jerk. And it was all his fault. All of it. The man still lived in 1952, expecting her to play Lucy to his Ricky. She wouldn't have minded so much if he made a bundle, but he only brought home enough each month to barely cover their living expenses. Whenever she complained about it, which she did loudly and often, he put his hands out piously and said, "No wife of mine is going to work." "How many wives have you got?" she wanted to ask him, but the question was foolish, because Ralph was such a jerk he couldn't even keep one wife happy. Not in any sense of the word.

She sat down heavily in her TV chair and faced the set.
The Price Is Right
was on. But she didn't look at it.
Happy
, she thought, and that, of course, was the real problem. Because the fool couldn't even keep her happy in bed.

She knew part of the problem was that she was home all the time. But that didn't help. For a while she thought maybe there was something wrong with her. She'd be home all day, cooking (which she hated) and cleaning (which she despised), and the only thing she could think about was sex. While she made the bed, she'd fantasize about Ralph coming home unexpectedly. He'd sneak up behind her, throw her down on the half-smoothed sheets, and take her with a wild look in his eyes. Or she'd be cleaning the kitchen and the thought would come into her mind of him suddenly grabbing her, pushing her up against the refrigerator, and doing it right there, standing up. Or on the dining-room table. Or on the living-room couch, or the floor in front of the fire. Or in the hallway, or the garage.

Sometimes, in the beginning, she had been so horny by the time he got home that she had barely let him take off his topcoat before making little suggestions to him. He had frowned the first few times, saying he was tired, but she had been so insistent that he finally gave in one night. The experience had been so unlike what she had dreamed about (the bastard fell asleep right after!) that she had let him put her off after that, accepting his excuses when he said how hard his day had been, or his favorite, "Let's wait till Sunday afternoon, like we always do. I'll be up for it then." The idiot hadn't even seen the pun in his own words.

Eventually, she had stopped trying altogether, even on Sunday afternoons. And that seemed fine with Ralph, which only infuriated her. "What do you expect me to do around this goddamn place all day long, play tiddlywinks? If we had a kid, I could see staying home, but this is crazy!
And I'm going crazy!
" But he had only frowned and said, "No wife of mine—"

"This wife of yours isn't getting enough!"

"Well . . ." he'd started, going into his litany, and she'd just let the subject drop.

So she had started to fantasize about other partners. One day she got a piece of junk mail, which she tore open. Ready to throw it out, she saw that it was a sex catalog. There were books and movies advertised, and pictures of sex devices. Something in her recoiled, but then she sat down in front of the TV and flipped through, looking over each picture. The men all looked like they enjoyed what they were doing. The women looked . . .

Happy.

She threw the catalog out, partly out of fear that Ralph would find it, but she found herself dwelling on what had been in it. One of the picture books had been called
Hot Deliverymen
, and she imagined what it would be like to have the oilman come to the house and suddenly put the moves on her. She tried not to dwell on the fact that their own oilman was fat and dumpy, with a mole on the side of his nose. This one would be tall, with dark eyes. He would put his hand on her, and touch her there and there, and she would melt in his arms. She would fight to get her clothes off and he would take his off, and they'd do it on the rug, and in the bathroom on top of the sink, and then they'd go into different positions. He would know just what he was doing, touching her in that place, putting his mouth down there like Ralph wouldn't. ("It's . . .
dirty
down there," he'd said once, rising by rote into the boring missionary position.) The deliveryman would do those things for her, and she would be
happy
.

She looked down and saw that her glass was empty once more. Shit.
The Price Is Right
was over, the soaps coming on. She got up and flipped the channel to her favorite one. The voices were young, filled with just-suppressed sexual desire. ("You know how I feel about you, Amanda." "Do you?" "I wish we could . . ." "Yes?" "I wish we could make love right now. If only Roderick wasn't still in your life . . .") Eventually on the soaps they got everything they wanted. She knew it was all fantasy, but that didn't help. Her whole life had become fantasy.

She sidled back to the kitchen and made another drink.
Better ease up
, she thought. Normally she wasn't into her third bourbon until two in the afternoon. "Screw it," she immediately said, thinking of the pile of wash in the bathroom hamper, the dirty venetian blinds in the bedroom that Ralph had been getting after her about, the porch that needed sweeping, the walls, the floors, the rugs, the . . .

She poured an extra finger of alcohol into the glass, watching it spread like amber ink through the water.

She went back into the living room, sitting down with a sigh in front of the set. There they were on the screen, Roderick and Amanda, fighting again, fighting about Rick her secret lover, the man who made her happy. . .

The front doorbell rang.

"Oh, shit," she said, trying to get up with the drink still in her hand and splashing some of it onto her housedress.
"Shit. Shit!"
The doorbell rang insistently, and she shouted, "Just a minute, dammit!" while trying to wipe at the smelly bourbon on her sleeve. She put the drink down on the rug, where it tipped at a precarious angle on the shag. She reached the front door as the bell rang a fifth time.

"Dammit, what—" she began angrily, but stopped when she saw who it was.

"You call for a plumber, ma'am?" He was tall and black-haired. His eyes were dark gray, like those of the men on the soap operas. They were the kind of bright eyes that played with you, telling you things that the lips didn't. Mischievous. Toying. His eyes were smiling at her.

". . . a plumber?" he asked.

She said, "No," but immediately changed it to, "Yes. Yes, I'm having trouble with my . . . sink."

"Sure thing," he said, smiling; his smile was a bit tilted, making him look rakish when he used it. As he brushed past her, she felt a warm thrill course through her.

She closed the door and turned to him. He said, "Where's the problem?" But he had already put down his toolbox and was unbuttoning the top of his work shirt. "It's . . ." she said, but the answer to the question disappeared as he put his hand out and touched her dress gently, just above the waist.

"Why did you do that?" she asked, beginning the sentence with wonder in her voice, ending it trying to sound coquettish, like one of the girls on the daytime soaps. She still felt the place where his finger had touched, a warm glow budding out from it through the rest of her.

He had his shirt off. He had a well-muscled chest covered with soft black hairs—the way a man's chest should look.

"Just what do you think you're doing?" she asked teasingly, and he took her arms and drew her to him. She let out a shuddering sigh.

Happy.

She felt his hands working gently on her, moving around to unbutton her dress, slipping it down and removing it. Unhooking her bra, he cupped her breasts briefly as he brought it away from her body. He stepped back, drawing his pants off.

Heat moved through her. He lowered her to the rug. She felt the soft, long white knap of it moving against her back and buttocks (
I wish I'd vacuumed it like Ralph wanted!
).

"What are you doing to me?" she moaned, staring up into his playful dark eyes.

"This," he said.

He touched her
there
. She felt a bolt of pleasure, like a gate opening to let sunlight stream through. It was what she had dreamed of. He lifted her gently, easing her into one of those positions she had seen in the dirty catalog. She moved her hands underneath, helping him, looking deep into his marvelous eyes. . .

His eyes. There was something in them that made her hesitate. She stopped moving beneath him. She felt his hands freeze, then start to caress her again, moving where she wanted them to, doing what she wanted them to.

His eyes were not right. The gray had turned to copper. Suddenly, she saw what he really was, what he was really doing.

She screamed. She went stiff, throwing her hands at him.

He stood up. He was no longer the man with sultry eyes and muscled chest. Staring down at her where she lay drunkenly on the rug was a child with miniature suns for eyes, and a grim mouth.

"Ralph!" she screamed. "Help me!" The child stepped toward her.

She screamed again, peddling back on the rug until she came up against her TV chair, knocking the bourbon glass over on the rug, filling the room with a sickly sharp-sweet alcoholic odor.

"Take me, Allie," the child said, taking another step. "Have me." Its serious little mouth spread suddenly into a horrifying grin. Its eyes were sucking her in. "I'll be your lover. I'll be anything you want."

"What are you doing!" Allie shouted, trying to look away from those pitted eyes but unable to.

It smiled again, that horribly unfitting grin. "Be
happy
, Allie."

Allie screamed. The child bent down and touched her. Suddenly it was not the child anymore but the repairman. He smiled down into her face. His gray eyes danced as he moved her the right way, touched her where it was right. He said, "Yes, Allie."
Yes
. Her screaming had stopped; she was happy. They would do it here, and then they would go into the kitchen and climb onto the table, and then into the laundry room, and on the car in the garage, and then he would tie her to the bed and they would do it again and again and again until she wanted to . . .

"Die, Allie," he said sometime later, smiling his roguish soap opera smile up at her. She did. And the child, standing there in the dirty bedroom in the untidy house, said, "Happy."

The Mifflins arrived at two o'clock. Sharp. They climbed out of the same late-model black Chevrolet Billy had seen them in when they had come to take John away from Melinda's.

Billy saw them from the upstairs window in his room. They came up the walk, the girl and her mother in front, the man and John behind. The front doorbell rang. Mrs. Beck's footsteps sounded in the hall and then there were words of greeting. A little while later Christine knocked once on his door, telling him curtly to come down to dinner.

Billy went downstairs. They were already seated at the dining room table. He went to the single empty chair, between Reverend Beck and Christine. The Mifflins were at the far end, John and Martha sandwiched between their parents.

As Billy sat down, Richard Mifflin said, "This must be the young man I've heard so much about."

He smiled, but there were hard lines around his eyes. He glanced at John before turning his attention back to Jacob Beck. "I want to thank you again for asking us over, Reverend."

Beck nodded pleasantly. "I figured if you wanted to talk, we might as well do it with full stomachs."

At first it was another quiet meal. The adults exchanged small talk, but the children were, for the most part, silent. John sat looking down sullenly at his plate, occasionally trading glances with Christine, who made sure she was busy helping her mother in the kitchen as much as possible. Only Martha Mifflin showed any willingness to participate, insinuating herself into the conversation whenever possible.

"I did a school report on the stock market last week, didn't I?" she said brightly when the talk at the table turned to financial matters. She faced her mother, who smiled obligingly, and Jacob Beck felt compelled out of politeness to say, "That's very nice, Martha. Did you learn a lot about Wall Street?"