The Time of Her Life (4 page)

“I don’t really need a sandwich,” Jane said. “I’m really not all that hungry.”

Claudia turned as she did at some point in each day to look at Avery in surprise. Jane saw it as an eternal motion, a profound
movement her mother would make time and again. Jane hoped desperately that her mother would not try to explain that she could,
indeed, make a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. But all Claudia did was look back out the window, and then she came to sudden
attention.

“Oh, God!” she said. “Look! The exterminator’s here. What’s he doing here on Saturday? I haven’t even made the bed. Did you
make your bed, Jane? Avery, don’t you want to get dressed? He’s going to be spraying in here first. Don’t you want to change
your clothes, Avery?”

Avery was quite comfortable just the way he was, and he stayed right there on the couch. It was Jane who left the room when
her mother opened the door for the Orkin man. She went to the kitchen and made herself a cheese sandwich.

The exterminator was a burly, bearded man who was wearing rubber surgical gloves and holding the nozzle end of a long piece
of tubing that wound its way over his shoulder where it was attached to a cylinder he wore strapped to his back. He was very
careful to stamp any debris from his shoes before he stepped into their living room. Avery liked him right away, and he was
entertained
for a little while, listening to Claudia speak with him and watching the precision with which the man fitted the nozzle against
the baseboard heaters in order to spray behind them from his canister of insecticide. As the Orkin man moved slowly along
the edges of the room, releasing the poison, its sweet, pungent odor filled the air. It was the scent of bubble gum.

“Ah,” said Avery, “it’s bubble gum. Dubble Bubble. Why would they scent insecticide like bubble gum?”

But the Orkin man seemed not to know that Avery was speaking to him. He continued to move deliberately along the wall. Avery
was slighted, and he spoke a little louder this time. “Do you know,” he said, “that roaches are as clean as their environment?”
There was no slur to any word, only the sly, wide vowels that could rivet Jane’s attention from two rooms’ distance. In fact,
she came into the room now with her sandwich on a plate.

“Janie, your father hates it when you bring food in here,” Claudia said, but Jane stayed where she was, taking note of the
descending scale of her mother’s tone that might soon drop right off into anger. The Orkin man only turned to Avery and nodded.
He was intent on what he was doing.

“I read that in
World
magazine, Dad,” Jane said. “They’ve taken roaches from the slums…” She tried to hold her father’s attention, but he wasn’t
looking in her direction; he was interested in getting his point across to this bearded man who was paying so little notice
to what he was saying.

“No, now that’s the truth,” Avery went on, running right over Jane’s words, although he spoke with great cordiality.

“Is that right?” the exterminator finally replied, but he didn’t turn around. He was moving the nozzle along the edges of
the bookcase beside the fireplace.

“Absolutely. That’s absolutely right.” Avery closed his eyes for a moment, but then he looked again at the industrious man
moving around his living room.

“Now this house. We’re very clean. Not obsessive. Not obsessively clean. Not
tidy
. I’m neat as a pin myself. My wife believes more in sanitation. Basic cleanliness. She lines the shelves in the door of the
refrigerator with aluminum foil.” Avery paused once more, this time long enough so that the exterminator shot him a polite
glance.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“Even in the refrigerator we are clean. We are clean right down to the bone around here. The roaches in this house are paragons
of insect sanitation. A credit to their species.”

“Well,” the exterminator said, “this stuff kills all your silverfish, too. And beetles.” He settled back on his haunches as
he came to the bottom of the bookcase and looked over at Avery. “It kills spiders. Your small bugs. Those little centipedes.
The ones people call doodlebugs.”

“Spiders,” Avery said. “Good. That’s fine. That’s okay. But what about the flies? Who will kill the flies?” He closed his
eyes in a long pause. “We have a lot of flies here in the summer.”

The Orkin man was readjusting his canister so that he could lower himself enough to reach up into the fireplace. He didn’t
say anything as he adjusted the harness that held the cylinder in place. “I don’t know much about flies,” he said with some
effort as he peered up into the vast fieldstone chimney. He drew his head
back out of the fireplace. “I just started this job. I got laid off at the printworks. They just don’t have the business they
used to.”

“That’s too bad,” Claudia said. “I’m so sorry.” It was all there was to say, but it made her daughter flinch. Avery lay back
on the couch again while the exterminator reinserted his torso as far as it would reach into their chimney.

No one in the room said anything more. But then the Orkin man called out from inside the chimney. “Hey,” he said, “do you
know what’s in here?” They watched him as he put down his canister and slowly backed into the room with Avery’s hunting rifle.
He brought it down into the room with a puzzled expression and held it out mutely to show the three of them. He had found
it on the inside ledge of the fireplace where Claudia had hidden it some long time past. The winter before, she had taken
the gun from Avery’s closet and slipped it in among his golf clubs, but when spring had come and the golf course reopened,
she had remembered to move it. She had forgotten all about it after that, however, and Avery had never missed it, or never
said so.

All three members of the Parks family stared back silently at the exterminator. All of them were at an absolute loss until
Avery gestured broadly in Jane’s direction. “You have to keep those things away from children, you know,” he instructed the
man earnestly, but the man gazed back at him a moment without comprehension, and he turned to Jane with curiosity. She was
a tall girl for an eleven-year-old, not really a child anymore.

Avery noticed that glance and gave the Orkin man a secretive, melancholy look, twisting his mouth to one side
and cocking his head. He gestured again toward Jane, a small indication, just a sad turning of his hand. “Not quite right,
you know,” he said in a parody of a whisper. “Doesn’t have both oars in the water, if you know what I mean.” By now Avery
was almost leering with intrigue, and he turned sideways to Jane and gave her a slow wink.

The Orkin man looked on at Avery for a moment, and he still held the gun flat out in front of him in his two hands. Finally,
with a good deal of trouble, he maneuvered himself back into the fireplace and replaced the rifle where he had found it, then
left the room to spray the kitchen.

Jane studied her half-eaten sandwich. When she did look up, she saw her parents each catch the other’s eye and quickly look
away. Both their faces were strained with an effort toward nonchalance. Jane’s parents looked off blandly into separate distances
in a tremendous effort to cover that shock of recognition. They had been terribly jolted precisely when their eyes met for
that one second in their insect-free living room. They didn’t glance at Jane. They didn’t say a word to her or to each other,
and the three of them stayed still and silent while the man sprayed insecticide around the kitchen cabinets and underneath
the stove.

Claudia and Avery were entirely overcome with the fact that two people such as they had been forced to such lengths. They
were each separately astonished at their own vulnerability and their escape from humiliation, and they didn’t think to say
anything to Jane when she left the room with her own face closed down in rage—her mouth tucked in at the corners and the skin
over her forehead and cheekbones pale and taut with
fury and terrible embarrassment. And there they sat, in odd solemnity, when she came down to tell them that she had packed
her overnight things and was walking over to Diana’s. She had decided to spend the night out after all.

In the night a severe cold front from Canada slipped under the warmer air lying over the central United States, and the dense
chill penetrated any small crack or fissure in the buildings in Lunsbury in the same way a heavy fog cannot be kept entirely
out of doors. The thermostats all over town had clicked on, and the houses were heated well enough, but Claudia and Avery
awoke simultaneously in their darkened bedroom. They lay side by side like gingerbread cookies, their arms and legs lying
flat on the bed, their faces staring straight up at the ceiling. It was unusual, because Avery generally slept late and roused
himself only with great difficulty. There was an eerie quiet within the room that had alerted them both, and they woke up
into instant attention.

They lay there like that for a while, each knowing that the other was awake. Claudia was selective enough in her attention
to the details of her life that when Avery finally spoke out loud, she didn’t take note of the words he was saying; she heard
only the unfamiliar tautness of his sober voice.

“We aren’t going to be able to do it, are we? There’s
no way to work this out. It’s just not going to work.” They both lay quite still, and neither of them spoke for a moment.
Nellie had heard their voices, and she came shambling into the room and put her head across Claudia’s arm while her feathery
tail swept across the floor in a soft whoosh.

“If I can’t get hold of myself pretty soon, I think we’ll all sink.” He raised his arm up and let it slowly fall back to the
mattress in illustration. “Right on down,” he said. “Right down to the bottom.”

For a few easy moments what Avery was saying was just a noise alive in the room, radiating out into the thick air to break
the peculiarly claustrophobic silence. Slowly, though, the energy Claudia thrived on early in the day slipped away from her.
She was so careful in the morning to have nothing in her mind but hopefulness, and as Avery’s words came together in their
intention, she silently squared off against them: I do work hard at the days. I work hard to make the days go by.

She really did believe it, too. She was quite certain that in her life there was a connection between the passing of time
and her need for it to pass. During any of the days when the pall of Avery’s rage or drunkenness hung over the hours, she
had the stray notion in the back of her mind that all the dreary time would pass them by. She had the idea that they were
going through something and would one day get to something else. If she had not thought she could force the pace of the days
along, sorrow would have caught her up for sure.

“I’ve got to get myself in shape, Claudia.” He crooked his arm over his face to cover it; he was so sorrowful, but Claudia
didn’t trust his sorrow to be in any way beneficial to herself. Besides, she never credited Avery
with all the regrets he claimed. She had known him too well for too long. And to possess so many regrets, she suspected, was
an evasive kind of self-indulgence. Claudia didn’t pity him at all; he was talking about going away from her.

She tried to see his expression, but only the sharp planes and angles of his turned head shone palely in the dark room, giving
him a frail and skeletal look. He was self-deprecating even in the way he drew himself aside, as though she might find his
presence offensive. He lay deliberately apart from her, so careful to enforce dignity upon this situation. It was all Claudia
could do not to roll over on top of him, spreading herself across him like a blanket over a horse, her thighs embracing his
hips.

When he was six years old and she was four, at least once he had bent his head down between her legs and nuzzled her—a gentle
touch of his lips brushing down the vulnerable ridge of her prepubescent genitals, a sweet familiarization. Surely
more
than once during the many hours in closets, locked bathrooms, someone’s garage when they had each explored the other and
Claudia had splayed herself out open-legged and urgent with the need to have Avery see her and touch her. Avery had been the
boy next door, but there had always been more between them than the ordinary curiosity of childhood. They had experienced
a thorough lust for the other one as soon as they had grown old enough to realize that they were two separate people sitting
in the communal sandbox in their adjoining backyards. There was no telling about this sort of thing. It had been an impulse
that overtook them so completely and so young that Claudia was sure it wouldn’t
have mattered if they had been male and female or the same sex; that impulse to know the other would have been as strong in
either case.