The Times Are Never So Bad (7 page)

What she did believe through that winter and spring was that she had entered the real world of her town, its time and work and leisure, and she looked back on her years of growing up as something that had happened to her outside of the life she now lived, as though childhood and her teens (she would soon be twenty) were, like those thirteen summers from kindergarten until the year of college, a time so free of what time meant to her now that it was not time but a sanctuary from it. Now, having had those years to become herself so she could enter the very heart of the town, the business street built along the Merrimack, where she joined the rhythmic exchange of things and energy and time for money, she knew she had to move through the town, and out of it. But, wanting that motion, she could not define it, for it had nothing to do with place or even people, but something within herself: a catapult, waiting for both release and direction, that would send her away from these old streets, some still of brick, and old brick leather factories, most of them closed but all of them so bleak, so dimly lit beyond their dirty windows that, driving or even walking past one, you could not tell whether anyone worked inside.

On a Wednesday afternoon in May, at a bar in Newburyport, where the Merrimack flowed through marshes to the sea, she sat alone on the second-floor sun deck, among couples in their twenties drinking at picnic tables. She sat on a bench along the railing, her back to the late-afternoon sun, and watched the drinkers, and anchored sailboats and fishing boats, and boats coming in. A small fishing boat followed by screaming gulls tied up at the wharf beside the bar, and she stood so she could look down at it. She had not fished with her father since she started working; she would call him tonight—no, she would finish this drink and go there for dinner and ask him if he'd like to go Sunday after Mass. Then Raymond Yarborough came around the cabin, at the bow, swinging a plastic bag of fish over his left shoulder. One of the men—there were six-gave him a beer. Her hand was up in a wave, her mouth open to call, but she stopped and watched. He had a beard now, brown and thick; he was shirtless and sunburned. She wore a white Mexican dress and knew how pretty she looked standing up there with the sun on her face and the sky behind her, and she waited. He lifted the bag of fish to the wharf and joined the others scrubbing the cleaning boards and deck. Then he went into the cabin and came out wearing a denim work shirt and looked up and laughed.

‘Polly Comeau, what are you doing up there?'

She wondered about that, six years later, on the July afternoon at Timmy's; and wondered why, from that evening on, she not only believed her life had changed but knew that indeed it had (though she was never comfortable with, never sure of, the distinction between believing something about your life and that something also being true). But something did happen: when Ray became not the boy she had known in high school but her lover, then husband, she felt both released and received, no longer in the town, a piece of its streets and time, but of the town, having broken free of its gravity, so that standing behind the jewelry counter she did not feel rooted or even stationary; and driving to and from work, or pushing a cart between grocery shelves, were a new sort of motion whose end was not the jewelry store, the apartment, the supermarket cash register, but herself, the woman she saw in Raymond's face.

In her sleep she knew she was dreaming: she was waitressing at the Harbor Schooner, but inside it looked like the gymnasium in high school with tables for prom night, and the party of four she was serving changed to a crowd, some were familiar, and she strained to know them; then her father was frying squid in the kitchen and she was there with a tray, and he said
Give them all the squid they want;
then a hand was on her mouth and she woke with her right hand pushing his wrist and her left prying his fingers, and in that instant before opening her eyes, when her dream dissolved into darkness, she knew it was Ray. She was on her back and he was straddling her legs. She kneed him but he moved forward and she struck bone. He sat on her thighs and his right hand went to his back and she heard the snap, and the blade leaving its sheath; then he was holding it close to her face, his dark-bladed knife; in the moonlight she saw the silver line of its edge. Then its point touched her throat, and his hand left her mouth.

‘Turn over,' he said.

He rose to his knees, and she turned on her stomach, her back and throat waiting for the knife, but then his knees were between her legs, his hand under her stomach, lifting: she kneeled with her face in the pillow, heard his buckle and snap and zipper and pants slipping down his legs; he pushed her nightgown up her back, the knife's edge touched her stomach, and he was in, rocking her back and forth. She gripped the pillow and tensed her legs, trying to remain motionless, but his thrusts drove her forward, and her legs like springs forced her to recoil, so she was moving with him, and always on her tightened stomach the knife flickered, his breathing faster and louder then Ah Ah Ah, a tremor of his flesh against hers, the knife scraping toward her ribs and breasts, then gone, and he was too; above his breathing and her own she heard the ascent of pants, the zipper and snap and buckle, but no sheathing of the blade, so the knife itself had, in the air above her as she collapsed forward, its own sound of blood and night: but please God oh Jesus please not her gripping the pillow, her chin pressed down covering her throat, not her in the white Mexican dress with her new sunburn standing at the rail, seeing now Christ looking down through her on the sun deck that May afternoon to her crouched beneath the knife—

‘Good, Polly. You got a little juiced after a while. Good.'

His weight shifted, then he was on the floor. She heard him cut the telephone cord.

‘See you later, Polly.'

His steps on the floor were soft: he shut the door and in the corridor he was quiet as night. Her grip on the pillow loosened; her hands opened; still she waited. Then slowly and quietly she rolled over and got out of bed and tiptoed to the door and locked it again. She lit a cigarette, sat on the toilet in the dark, wiped and flushed and went to the window beside the bed, where she stood behind the open curtain and looked down at the empty street. She listened for his jeep starting, heard only slow and occasional cars moving blocks away, in town, and the distant voices and laughter of an outdoor party, and country music from a nearby window. She dressed and went down the hall and three flights of stairs and outside, pausing on the front steps to look at the street and parked cars and, on the apartment's lawn and lawns on both sides of it and across the street, the shadowed trunks of trees. She could not hear the sounds of the party or the music from the record player. Then he was dripping out of her and she went up the stairs and sat on the toilet while he pattered into the water, then scrubbed her hands, went out again, down the walk, and turned left, walking quickly in the middle of the sidewalk between tree trunks and parked cars, and looked at each of them and over her shoulders and between the cars for two and a half blocks to the closed drugstore, lighted in the rear where the counter was. In the phone booth she stood facing the street; the light came on when she closed the door, so she opened it and called her father.

She knew his steps in the hall and opened the door before he knocked. He was not in uniform, but he wore his cartridge belt and holstered .38. She hugged his deep, hard chest, and his arms were around her, one hand patting her back, and when he asked what Ray had done to her, she looked up at his wide sunburned face, his black hair and green eyes like her own, then rested her face on his chest and soft old chamois shirt, and said: ‘He had his knife. He touched me with it. My throat. My stomach. He cut the phone wire—' His patting hand stopped. ‘The door was locked and I was asleep, he doesn't even
have
a credit card, I don't know what he used, I woke up with his hand on my mouth then he had that big knife, that
Marine
knife.'

His mouth touched her hair, her scalp, and he said: ‘He raped you?'

She nodded against his chest; he squeezed her, then his hands were holding her waist and he lifted her and his shoulders swung to the left and he put her down, as though moving her out of his path so he could walk to the bed, the wall, through it into the third-story night. But he did not move. He inhaled with a hiss and held it, then blew it out and did it again, and struck his left palm with his right fist, the open hand gripping the fist, and he stood breathing fast, the hand and fist pushing against each other. He was looking at the bed, and she wished she had made it.

‘You better come home.'

‘I want to.'

‘Then I'm going look for him.'

‘Yes.'

‘You have anything to drink?'

‘Wine and beer.'

When he turned the corner into the kitchen, she straightened the sheets; he came back while she was pulling the spread over the pillows.

‘I'll call Mom,' he said. He stood by the bed, his hands on the phone. ‘Then we'll go to the hospital.'

‘I'm all right.'

He held the cord, looking at its severed end.

‘They take care of you, in case you're pregnant.'

‘I'm all right.'

He swallowed from the bottle, his eyes still on the cord. Then he looked at her.

‘Just take something for tonight. We can come back tomorrow.'

She packed an overnight bag and he took it from her; in the corridor he put his arm around her shoulders, held her going slowly down the stairs and outside to his pickup; with a hand on her elbow he helped her up to the seat. While he drove he opened a beer she had not seen him take from the apartment. She smoked and watched the town through the windshield and open window: Main Street descending past the city hall and courthouse, between the library and a park, to the river; she looked across the river at the street climbing again and, above the streetlights, trees and two church steeples. On the bridge she saw herself on her knees, her face on the pillow, Ray plunging, Ray lying naked and dead on her apartment floor, her father standing above him. She looked at the broad river, then they were off the bridge and climbing again, past Wendy's and McDonald's and Timmy's, all closed. She wanted to speak, or be able to; she wanted to turn and look at her father, but she had to be cleansed first, a shower, six showers, twelve; and time; but it was not only that.

It was her life itself; that was the sin she wanted hidden from her father and the houses and sleeping people they passed; and she wanted to forgive herself but could not because there was no single act or even pattern she could isolate and redeem. There was something about her heart, so that now glimpsing herself waiting on tables, sleeping, eating, walking in town on a spring afternoon, buying a summer blouse, she felt that her every action and simplest moments were soiled by an evil she could not name.

Next day after lunch he brought her to a small studio; displayed behind its front window and on its walls were photographs, most in color, of families, brides and grooms, and what she assumed were pictures to commemorate graduation from high school: girls in dresses, boys in jackets and ties. The studio smelled of accumulated cigarette smoke and filled ashtrays, and the woman coughed while she seated Polly on a stool in the dim room at the rear. The woman seemed to be in her fifties; her skin had a yellow hue, and Polly did not want to touch anything, as if the walls and stool, like the handkerchief of a person with a cold, bore traces of the woman's tenuous mortality. She looked at the camera and prepared her face by thinking about its beauty until she felt it. They were Polaroid pictures; as she stood beside her father at the front desk, glancing at portraits to find someone she knew, so she could defy with knowledge what she defied now with instinct, could say to herself:
/ know him, her, them; they're not like that at all; are fucked up too
, and, her breath recoiling from the odor of the woman's lungs that permeated the walls and pictures, she looked down at the desk, at her face as it had been only minutes ago in the back room. With scissors, the woman trimmed it. She watched the blade cutting through her breasts. The black-and-white face was not angry or hating or fearful or guilty; she did not know what it was but very serious and not pretty.

At City Hall they went to the detectives' office at the rear of the police station. Two detectives sat at desks, one writing, one drinking coffee. They greeted her father, and she stood in the doorway while he went to the desk of the coffee-drinker, a short man wearing a silver revolver behind his hip. Then her father leaned over him, hiding all but his hand on the coffee cup, and she watched her father's uniformed back, listened to his low voice without words. The other detective frowned as he wrote. Her father turned and beckoned: ‘Okay, Polly.'

The detective rose to meet her, and she shook his hand and did not hear his name. His voice was gentle, as if soothing her while dressing a wound; he led her across the room and explained what he was doing as he rolled her right forefinger on ink, then on the license. There was a sink and he told her to use the soap and water, the paper towels, then brought her to his desk where her father waited, and held a chair for her. It had a cushioned seat, but a straight wooden back and no arms, so she sat erect, feeling like a supplicant, as she checked answers on a form he gave her (she was not a convicted felon, a drunk, an addict) and answered questions he asked her as he typed on her license:
one twenty-six, black
(he looked at her eyes and said: ‘Pretty eyes, Polly'),
green
.He gave her the card and signed the front and looked at the back where he had typed
Dark
under Complexion,
Waitress
under Occupation, and, under Reason for Issuing License:
Protection
. He said the chief would sign the license, then it would go to Boston and return laminated in two weeks; he offered them coffee, they said no, and he walked them to the office door, his hand reaching up to rest on her father's shoulder. The other detective was still writing. In the truck, she said: ‘He was nice.'