The Early Stories (65 page)

Mark put the car into first gear. Snow had blown in beneath the sides of the automobile, so the momentum he had hoped to achieve was sluggish in coming. Though his front tires broke through the ridge, the underside dragged and the back tires slithered to a stop in the shallow gutter that ran down the side of Hillcrest Road. He tried reverse. The rear of the car lifted a fraction and then sagged sideways, the wheels spinning in a void. He returned to first gear, and touched the accelerator lightly, and gained for his tact only a little more of that sickening sideways slipping. He tried reverse again and this time there was no motion at all; it was as if he were trying to turn a doorknob with soapy hands. An outraged sense of injustice, of being asked to do too much, swept over him. “Fuck,” he said. He had messed up again. He tried to push open the door, discovered that snow blocked it, shoved savagely, and opened a gap he could worm through backwards. Stepping out, he took an icy shock of snow into his loose galosh.

His neighbor across the street called, “Good morning!” The sound, it seemed, made a strip of snow fall from a telephone wire.

“Isn't it lovely?” were her next words.

“Sure is,” was his answer. His voice sounded high, with a croak in it.

Her painted lips moved, but the words “If you're young” came to him faint and late, as if, because of some warping aftereffect of the storm, sound crossed the street from her side against the grain.

Mark slogged down through his back yard, treading in his own footsteps to minimize his desecration of the virgin snow. The bushes were bowed and splayed like bridesmaids overwhelmed by flowers. Chickadee feet had crosshatched the snow under the feeder. The kitchen air struck his face with its warmth and the smells of simmering bacon and burning waffle mix. He told his wife, “I got the damn thing stuck. Get out of your nightie and come help.”

She looked querulous and sallow in her drooping bathrobe. “Can't we eat breakfast first? You're going to be late anyway. Shouldn't you be calling the store? Maybe it won't be open today.”

“It'll be open, and anyway even if it isn't I should be there. Easter won't wait.” The precise shade of gray he had been mixing in his dream perhaps belonged to some beaverboard cutouts of flowering trees he was preparing for windows of the new spring fashions.

“The
schools
are closed,” she pointed out.

“Well, let's eat,” he conceded, but ate in his parka, to hurry her. As he swallowed the orange juice, the snow in his galosh slipped deeper down his ankle. Mark said, “If we'd bought that ranch house you were too damn sophisticated for, we'd have a garage and this wouldn't happen. It takes years off the life of a car, to leave it parked in the open.”

“It's smoking! Turn the little thing! On the left, the left!” She told him, “I don't know
why
I bother to try to make you waffles; that iron your mother gave us has never worked. Never, never.”

“Well, it should. It's not cheap.”

“It sticks. It's awful. I hate it.”

“It was the best one she could find. It's supposed to be self-greasing, or some damn thing, isn't it?”

“I don't know. I don't understand it. I never have. I was trying to make them to be nice to
you
.”

“Don't get so upset. The waffles are terrific, actually.” But he ate them without tasting them, he was so anxious to return to the car and erase his error. If a plow were to come along, his car would be jutting into its path, evidence of ineptitude. Young husbands, young car-owners. He wondered if the woman across the street had been laughing at him, getting it stuck. Just that little ridge to push through. He had been so sure he could do it. “I don't suppose,” he said, “this will cancel the damn church thing tonight.”

“Let's not go,” she said, scraping the last batch into the garbage, poking the crusts from the waffle grid with a fork. “Why do we have to go?”

“Because,” Mark stated firmly. “These Reformeds, you know, are high-powered stuff. They're very strict about things like the divinity of Christ.”

“Well, who isn't? I mean, you either believe it or you don't, I would think.”

He winced, feeling himself to blame. If he had given her a climax, she wouldn't be so irreligious. “This is a wonderful breakfast,” he said. “How do you make the bacon so crisp?”

“You put it on a paper bag for a minute,” she said. “Did you
really
get the car stuck? Maybe you should call the man at the garage.”

“It just needs a little push,” he promised. “Come on, bundle up. It'll be fun. Old Mrs. Whatsername across the street is out there with the birds, sweeping her porch. It's beautiful.”

“I
know
it is,” she said. “I used to
love
snowstorms.”

“But not now, huh?” He stood and asked her, “Where's the fucking shovel?”

She went upstairs, the belt of her sad bathrobe trailing, and he found the snow shovel in the basement. The furnace, whirring and stinking to itself, reminded him pleasantly that snow on the roof reduced the fuel bill. The old house needed insulation. Everything needed something. On his way out through the kitchen he noticed a steaming cup of coffee she had poured for him, like one of those little caches one explorer leaves behind for another. To appease her, he took two scalding swallows before heading out into the wilderness of his brilliant back yard.

By the time Mark's wife joined him, looking childish and fat and merry in her hood and mittens and ski leggings and fur-topped boots, he had shovelled away as much of the snow underneath and around the car as he could reach. The woman across the street had gone back into her house, the birds on her roof had flown away, and a yellow town truck had come down Hillcrest Road scattering sand. He had leaned on the shovel and waved at the men on the back as if they were all comrades battling together in a cheerful war.

She asked, “Do you want me to steer?”

“No, you push. It'll just take a tiny push now. I'll drive, because I know how to rock it.” He stationed her at the rear right corner of the car, where there happened to be a drift that came up over her knees. He felt her make the silent effort of not complaining. “The thing is,” he told her, “to keep it from sloughing sideways.”

“Sluing,” she said.

“Whatever it is,” he said, “keep it from doing that.”

But slue was just what it did; though he rammed the gearshift back and forth between first and reverse, the effect of all that rocking was—he could feel it—to work the right rear tire deeper into the little slippery socket on the downhill side. He assumed she was pushing, but he couldn't see her in the mirror and he couldn't feel her.

His stomach ached, with frustration and maple syrup. He got out of the car. His wife's face was pink, exhilarated. Her hood was back and her hair had come undone. “You're closer than you think,” she said. “Where's the shovel?” She dabbled with it around the stuck tire, doing no good that he could see.

“It's that damn little gutter,” he said, impotently itching to grab the shovel from her. “In the summer you're not even conscious of its being there.”

She thrust the shovel into a mound so it stood upright and told him, “Sweetheart, now you push. You're stronger than I am.”

Grudgingly, he felt flattered. “All right. We'll try it. Now, with the accelerator—don't gun it. You just dig yourself deeper with the spinning tires.”

“That's what
you
were doing.”

“That's because you weren't pushing hard enough. And steer for the middle of the street, and rock it back and forth gently, back and forth; and don't panic.”

As she listened to these instructions, a dimple beside the corner of her mouth kept appearing and disappearing. She got into the driver's seat. A little shower of snow, loosened by the climbing sun, fell rustling through a nearby tree, and the woman across the street came onto her porch without the broom, plainly intending to watch. Her lipstick at this distance was like one of those identifying spots of color on birds.

Mark squatted down and pressed his shoulder against the trunk and gripped the bumper with his hands. A scratch in the paint glinted beneath his eyes. How had that happened? He still thought of their car as brand-new. Snow again insinuated its chill bite into his galosh. Nervous puffs of dirty smoke rippled out of the exhaust pipe and bounced against his legs. He was aware of the woman on the porch, watching. He felt all the windows of the neighborhood watching.

The woman in the driver's seat eased out the clutch. The tires revolved, and the slippery ton of the automobile's rear end threatened to slide farther sideways; but he fought it, and she fed more gas, and they seemed to gain an inch forward. Doing what she had told him, she rocked the car back, and at the peak of its backward swing gunned it forward again, and he felt their forward margin expand.
Good girl
. He heaved; they paused; the car rocked back and then forward again and he heaved so hard the flat muscles straddling his groin ached. Mark seemed to feel, somewhere within the inertial masses they were striving to manage, his personal strength register a delicate response, a flicker in the depths. The car relaxed backwards, and in this remission he straightened and saw through the rear window the back of the driver's head, her hood down, her hair loosened. The wheels spun again, the car dipped forward through the trough it had worn, and its weight seemed to hang, sustained by his strength, on the edge of release. “Once more,” he shouted, trembling through the length of his legs. The car sagged back through an arc that had noticeably distended, and in chasing its forward swing with his pushing he had to take steps, one, two … 
three!
The rear tires, frantically excited and in their spinning spitting snow across his lower half, slithered across that invisible edge he had sensed. The ridge was broken through,
and if he continued to push, it was with gratuitous exertion, adding himself through sheer affection to an irresistible momentum. They were free.

Feeling this also, she whipped the steering wheel to head herself downhill and braked to a stop some yards away. The car, stuttering smoke from its exhaust pipe, perched safe in the center of the sand-striped width of Hillcrest Road. It was a 1960 Plymouth SonoRamic Commando V-8, with fins. Its driver, silhouetted with her nose tipped up, looked much too frail to have managed so big a thing.

Mark shouted “Great!” and leaped over the shattered ridge, brandishing the shovel. The woman on the porch called something to him he couldn't quite catch but took kindly. He walked to his car and opened the door and got in beside his wife. The heater had come on; the interior was warm. He repeated, “You were great.” He was still panting.

She rosily smiled and said, “So were you.”

Giving Blood
 

The Maples had been married now nine years, which is almost too long. “Goddamn it, goddamn it,” Richard said to Joan, as they drove into Boston to give blood, “I drive this road five days a week and now I'm driving it again. It's like a nightmare. I'm exhausted. I'm emotionally, mentally, physically exhausted, and she isn't even an aunt of mine. She isn't even an aunt of
yours
.”

“She's a sort of cousin,” Joan said.

“Well, hell, every goddamn body in New England is some sort of cousin of yours; must I spend the rest of my life trying to save them
all?
”

“Hush,” Joan said. “She might die. I'm ashamed of you. Really ashamed.”

It cut. His voice for the moment took on an apologetic pallor. “Well, I'd be my usual goddamn saintly self if I'd had any sort of sleep last night. Five days a week I bump out of bed and stagger out the door past the milkman, and on the one day of the week when I don't even have to truck the brats to Sunday school you make an appointment to have me drained dry thirty miles away.”