Darling? (24 page)

“Those cops in Brewster, they’ll take you into custody for a bent license plate,” said Born Again, adding, “but the boyfriend, what about that belly? He’s a drunk. They’re both drunks, it’s pretty clear. And
Brad
—”

“We’re not supposed to speculate,” I said, though without speculation our hands would be tied. But this roused the old man.

“Speaking of which,” he said, a little color rising in his face. “The question
I’d
like an answer to is about the Dow Jones.… Wasn’t that
absolutely glorious
yesterday?” He sighed with a deep and sensual pleasure so that I pictured him stepping into a hot tub full of money. The others peered at him—to them the stock market was a notion on the order of intergalactic travel or the Follies Bergere. One had heard of it, had an image of some sort—a silver phallus speeding through the dark, a frothy pink centipede, a board with flickering numbers and orders to buy and sell—but no more. It was years before I’d realized that my friends’ trust funds made more money every year than my mother did working—we never spoke of such things, for fear we’d all have to despise each other. (My own shrink, who pouts when I won’t tell her my masturbation fantasies, said, “Oh, no, I don’t want to pry,” when I started talking about money one day.) So how could this man go on about the stock market in a room full of working people? He must be suffering from Alzheimer’s. I smiled at him, and he looked deeply comforted and closed his eyes again.

“Maybe we ought to take a poll,” I said. I wanted to get the thing accomplished, go home.

“Are we allowed to take a poll?” Foreman asked.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “We’re allowed to take a poll.”

“How
can
we take a poll?” he asked then, in despair. “We don’t know what happened!”

“The cop himself said he couldn’t make a determination of drunkenness right away,” Born Again said, and Dow Jones was suddenly wreathed in smiles.

“Could
not
make a determination,” he affirmed. “That’s what sticks in my mind.” The two of them gazed across at each other with delight, as if posing for a UNICEF Christmas card.

“I daresay he was trying to establish impartiality,” I said. “He was saying he didn’t jump to a conclusion just because this woman was giggling and wiggling her toes out the driver’s side window in the middle of the Pilgrims Highway at one
A.M
. in the morning.”

“How do
you
know what the cop was thinking?” Born Again asked. “I mean, do you know him? What I remember is that he said he could
not
make a determination.”

“So how can
we?
” asked the foreman. “We weren’t even there!”

“Let’s all go to the Myles Standish and hash it out over a couple beers,” the smart one said, laughing, and I felt cozy suddenly, back in Purmort with my friends, those guys who could fix anything, do anything, except find the road out of Purmort—they’re there fixing things now.

“I’ll go first,” I said, to set an example. “I would have to say not guilty, as things stand now.”

Smart One nodded.

“You can count me in,” Dow Jones said with great good fellowship.

Foreman shook his head. “I’m abstaining,” he said. He was right, too: it’s terrible to have decisive power, even in a matter as minor as this. Probably someone was being killed by a drunk driver even as we sat there, and somewhere else a woman was getting ten years without parole for carrying her boyfriend’s cocaine in her purse. And here was Dawn LaRue, a tired woman who’d done the best she could with her life, getting by on her miserable salary with a little help from codeine and beer … and she’d managed to get out of the dump for a week to see her family, dragging along the boyfriend, who she knew was no good for her but couldn’t help loving, bravely avenging the death of her granddaughter’s pet, had a few too many trying to get into the holiday mood and then Brad came in, and as the situation stood there was just no way to refuse, and when she finally got to feel the warm air on her toes here came some martinet cop …

“What if we let her off, and next year she smashes herself up and somebody else, too?” Smart One asked. “I mean, I feel for her.” He looked around the table, and catching my eye took a quick breath for courage and said, “I’m a recovering alcoholic myself,” with a great lightness, as if it was a privilege to be intimately acquainted with one’s own desolation, an active member of the great, striving, desperate world. My heart reeled: could it be, that someone else got out of Purmort alive? “But, she’s a grown-up, she’s got responsibilities,” he said.

Born Again was the last man in the circle, and as the question came around to him he put his hands over his face.

My heart went out. “I know it’s stressful,” I said. “But this isn’t the final vote after all. It’s only to get an idea, see how we’re leaning.”

He didn’t move. “We’ll have more discussions,” I said. “You don’t have to worry, we can all change our minds.…”

He looked up. “I’m having a dosebleed,” he said, and blood coursed down over his lip on cue, so that he covered his face again.

“I guess we’re a hung jury,” Foreman said happily.

“We are
not
a hung jury,” I retorted, while Born Again gazed upward and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’re an undecided jury … and one of us is having a nosebleed … but we have a job and we’re going to do it. Now it
does
sound as if we all have some doubt—”

“Not me!” Foreman declared. “I just have to abstain, that’s all.”

“What about the Breathalyzer?” Born Again asked the ceiling.

“She wasn’t
driving,
the car was
parked!
” Smart One said suddenly.

“Someone was going to drive that car somewhere,” I said. They didn’t want to deal with it and would do whatever I said, so I wanted to think it through.

“Why did it take so long for the trial?” asked the foreman. “Two months, it’s inexcusable.”

“Five months,
five months
it was!” I said. “From August to January is
five months!
Ever heard the phrase ‘the wheels of Justice turn slowly’? For God’s sake, read the paper once in a while!”

“No, I never
have
heard that phrase,” Foreman said stiffly, but under the table he was counting on his fingers.

“And why couldn’t the cop form an opinion about her drunkenness?” Dow Jones asked for the fifth time.

“He was saying he didn’t
jump to a conclusion,
” my smart darling explained.

“Didn’t form an opinion,” said Dow Jones. “And didn’t use the Breathalyzer. I just keep coming back to that.”

“Any of us could be in her place,” I said.

“You can say that again,” said Smart One, and I laughed happily. We’d lived through it, we understood.

“What if she’s got three drunk driving convictions on her record? What if she goes out and runs over some kid tonight?” he asked, and relief poured over me. There were two of us, it wasn’t all up to me. I thought of the day the police finally came for my stepbrother; my mother said she couldn’t bear to see it and left me there to look in his eyes while they put the handcuffs on. I wondered if Smart would like me to bear him some children—he was so solid and unadorned—so deeply, beautifully familiar; I felt I knew exactly what it would be like to kiss him, how in him my whole life of longing would be turned to sex and assuaged.

“You’re so right,” I said. “It’s a serious thing.”

Everyone made a long face, and Born Again said, “You gotta take the snake into account—I mean, I can’t condone animal cruelty. If she did that, what else is she capable of?”

“It’s not a charge of animal cruelty,” Smart One pointed out.

“Humans can fight back, but a poor defenseless bunny…”

“It was a
snake!
” I said, feeling like a racist.

“Is it two-thirty yet?” Foreman asked. “I really gotta go.”

It was 4:45. My husband would be picking Victoria up from Girl Scouts and going home to set up his telescope (he’s an amateur astronomer and something was about to happen in the Orion Nebulae) and start dinner—chicken breasts and mesclun; he’s got a state pension coming, so he’s very conscious of his health.

I polled the group again and we acquitted—against the pain conviction would have caused us, the evidence was not enough. That, apparently, is the definition of reasonable doubt. I wrote a note to the bailiff and gave it to the foreman to sign, and we scrambled into our places—in the right order now.

“Foreman, how say you?”

“Not guilty,” the foreman boomed.

“How say you all?”

“Not guilty.”

Dawn LaRue directed a shy smile to Smart One, then a quick sharp glance at me, as if she imagined, with the prosecutor, that I’d been against her. But the prosecutor looked at me with what seemed to be contempt—why had I given in and betrayed her? The bailiff stood stoically still, as if he himself had been convicted, sentenced to stand there day after day up to his neck in the American muddle. Sitting at the side now was a woman who must have been Dawn’s daughter Sherry, with Tiffany, clutching a stuffed parrot, on her lap. The little girl was wreathed in pink ruffles, which did nothing to mitigate her watchful expression and I thought that years from now when all this was forgotten, she’d hear metal tearing or a man’s anguished voice, and feel a fearful anxiousness so deeply familiar it was almost a comfort, the way the things of childhood always are.

Oh
I wanted a cigarette, all of a sudden.

“Great job, Foreman,” said the Smart One as soon as we were back in our quarters. I glared at him and he winked.

The door opened and the judge blew in, saying, “Don’t get up, don’t get up, please.”

“You had an incomplete case,” he said. “You did the right thing. She doesn’t have any other DWI’s. She was polluted, it’s true—she refused the Breathalyzer, but we can’t tell you that.”

He started laughing—“I do wish you could have seen the mug shot,” he said. “But she’s suffered plenty, her daughter’s got boyfriend trouble, the family pet passed away, she got lost on Cape Cod in the tourist season, spent the night in jail, she had to hire a lawyer—those Breathalyzers don’t tell the whole story. A real drunk can drive fine with a stratospheric blood level, it’s only the amateurs who get impaired. That touch-your-nose test, I can’t do it either. These cops get a little overenthusiastic sometimes—you know how it is.”

“But why did it take so long?” Foreman asked. “I mean it’s two months since it happened.…”

“Four months, actually,” the judge said, though it was five, five! Foreman gave me a spiteful glance, which I returned in kind. “You did good, jury. You can sleep well tonight. By the way, does anyone have jumper cables?”

Foreman, looking stricken, admitted he did.

“Would you mind?”

“No, no, of course not,” he said, looking terrified, so that I wondered what else he had in his trunk. Probably
Hustler
magazine, or a Mars Bar—people don’t need to do much to feel desperately ashamed, God knows.

“Let’s be candid, it was a matter of the lint between a woman’s toes,” the judge said, but I was thinking—suppose it had been a matter of life and death? Juries just like us decide those all the time. “I shouldn’t laugh,” he went on as he left. “I know I shouldn’t, but if
you’d seen
the mug shot!” And he was overcome, wheezing as he tried to get his breath, while the foreman walked stiff as a puppet behind him.

Out we went into the frigid evening, calling good-byes across the parking lot as if we’d come from a choir rehearsal. “Sometimes you have to go with the flow,” the foreman was explaining to the judge.

“Cigarette?” Smart asked, tapping two out of a pack and holding one out to me. The thrill that ran through me was wildly out of proportion to the offer, but I managed to shake to my head.

“Did that seem at all …
odd
 … to you?” I asked him as the others drove away.

“I have to admit,” he said, “that since I got sober
everything
seems kind of odd. It was nice meeting you, though.”

“And you!” I said. We were standing beside his truck and I patted it tenderly, thinking he probably had another at home in the driveway, for parts. “Brandy,” I said.

“Excuse me?” he said, looking puzzled, even embarrassed.

“My name … I mean, you said you were glad to meet me, so I—”

“Oh! That’s your
name!
I thought … I…” A wide grin began to spread over him. “I’d figured you for an Elizabeth, or a Caroline.”

“Fooled you,” I thought of saying, but then I’m always thinking of saying that. “Afraid not,” I said instead, giving him a complicit smile, with a memory of waiting for Butchy on the corner on a frozen winter night, watching the lighted tip of his cigarette swing up, glow, and fall as he came toward me. There were cornfields on one side of that road, and the roadhouse my mother worked at, on the other, and me named after a song on a jukebox … was it different, really, than being named Swift Water, or Lily, or Joy? It has the sound of real life in it—a woman weeping, a cash register ringing in back—to say “I’m Brandy” is to say “I’ve known things, taken part in the world.”

“Frank,” he said. “Frank Wills.”
And that’s it, I thought, the name, the truck, the hands, that’s all he has—enough to build a solid life on, if you work at it day by day.
I slipped my car keys back into my purse—I didn’t want him to know about the Volvo. The sun was nearly down and it blazed out for a minute between the heavy gray sky and the horizon, flushing the soft dry heads of the marsh grasses red all the way to the sea. It was one of those instants so beautiful that everything stops breathing to attend: in that perfect stillness you can feel the pulse of longing that’s always there beneath the ordinary movement of life. Then it was over and I was standing there shaking Frank’s hand.

“Hello, Frank Wills,” I said, feeling a signal flash in my mind—
Alert! Family! Remember that family!
They were waiting for me—they needed me, at home, where nothing is ever as ardent, as arduous, as it ought to be. I’ll never get used to it, I’ll always feel there’s something missing, something false in the simple good of my life. My husband calls me honey, as if the name Brandy is a little secret we needn’t mention. All evening he’d be checking his telescope, to be sure it was focused exactly where his stars were going to be. It’s his great source of astonishment—the way, if you keep steady night after night, watching, a galaxy begins to sort itself out in your eyes.