The Journey Prize Stories 24 (9 page)

“You out for a stroll, Mandy?” Earl asks. The feebleness of his voice is disagreeable even to him, but that distaste is not new.

Amanda does not raise her eyes, but makes a sorrowful little grimace as if the question hurts her, physically, and says, “What?”

Watching her now, Millie could weep. Her splendid, beautiful daughter, the kindest person one could imagine. Earl tries to take her hand, lightly, when she passes him to get to the stove and fill her plate. “Oh, what,” she says, sighing. “Groucho Marx,” he says. He’s trying to tease. A friend of Millie’s, a therapist, told them once that they should try to coax her out of herself, not let her retreat. Still, this is painful to watch. Millie feels actual tears somewhere behind her eyes.

“We have to landscape the yard,” repeats Grace.

“Easiest thing,” says Earl. He is a professional landscaper. “I’ll do it in one or two afternoons.”

“We are so lucky with you two,” says Millie. Beyond the kitchen the sun is setting and they all have a golden glow.

Earlier, Amanda was walking through the ravine on the other side of the river; it was warm and there were joggers and cyclists and other strollers out. She could not stand to meet anyone’s eyes, not even the few side glances of men; she carried a notebook with her and waited for the urge to write to build
in her. She quickened her pace and at the next empty bench sat down and poised her pencil over an already half-filled page. Some time later she was startled by voices.

“Does she not hear? Miss, do you mind?”

“She’s pretending. Unbelievable. Hello, Miss, hello there?”

They were two joggers, hardly older than she was, and the man had one bloody knee and a scraped chin; they wanted to sit down and Amanda was sitting in the very centre of the bench. Horrified, feeling her face flush, she closed her notebook and walked quickly away. She walked until she was out of sight for them, and then walked farther to an empty bench. Now she sat on its edge, and opened her notebook again, keeping her pen poised while steadying herself. She could write only a sentence, and it said,
That was a nasty tone
.

Still thinking of it, thinking now of the streaks of blood running down the man’s shin, she is glad to be at home and walking upstairs, past the room she and Earl share, and to the guest room. This room is the only place she gets some relief. She lies down on the bed. They demand things of her each day, all day; things she can no longer give. She cannot eat dinner with Earl in a restaurant, can’t talk about films or about some friends’ breakup or drink wine at one of his friends’ house parties, or answer sincerely when he asks what she’s been thinking about. She cannot make love. She doesn’t know why, but she just can’t. She hasn’t been able to since before Barcelona, since before spring. The winter, when she was let go from her job at the photo shop, was bad. Neither can she sit with Millie on the sofa, watching some travel show and holding hands, like they used to do for hours in the time after Dan was sent to Pennybrooke. She can’t spend the afternoon
book shopping with Millie, nor work through an elaborate recipe with her, nor listen to a story from her and Dan’s past, some blurry and dreamy time. She can hardly bear the familiar old feeling she still sometimes gets around her mother: love that is a pulsating tenderness for her mother’s small frame and brown curling hair.

Oh, she knows that they think that she gets all the time she wants to herself. She knows they talk of her as if it is they who bend to her demands. She’s accepted that as just one unremarkable injustice that cannot be fixed. She is sorry for all the things she cannot provide. And she wants to express, somehow, that she is sorry: when the pulsating tenderness appears, it shames her. The shame needs either a dark room, or an action, a gesture. This morning she shocked Earl by making him breakfast – of waffles, bacon, poached eggs, croissants with cheese, and sliced nectarines – because she remembered that they used to, when he worked early mornings and she had early classes, cherish a chance to eat together and linger over coffee. Millie, Amanda can see, is also pleased to see them get along, and Amanda likes to provide some small pleasures for her mother, too.

Although she doesn’t begrudge Grace her happiness, she regrets that Grace and Larry will not move in here. Being out of the house, Grace cannot be counted on for her calm presence, her company for Millie, her evening drink with Earl, her general lack of demands, whether explicit or implicit. She reaches for her notebook. The time of Dan’s trials – the one that was declared a mistrial, then the second, then an appeal – was a line that split her and Millie’s life into two. She and Millie found consolation in long talks over coffee and waffles, or wine
and sandwiches, in the nook near the kitchen window. Their talk during that time hardly ever stopped – it seemed as if they were engaged in one permanent conversation, and coming home from work or school they could continue it without warm up, as if it were the real stuff of their lives and the other things were only the technical requirements. Arriving to pick up Amanda, Earl could see plainly that no detail or substance of the world Amanda and he had built was unknown or closed to Millie.

She remembers how she told her mom about Earl. Amanda was seventeen, and she and Millie were walking home from a thrift store, the one at which Earl worked occasionally to make extra money when painting work was slow. While paying at Earl’s till, Amanda said to Millie, “Mom, this is my friend Earl.” Millie shook Earl’s proffered hand. It had rained that day; on their way home, very near the house, Amanda stopped and told Millie that Earl was her boyfriend. She remembers her mother’s face, the curling wet strands of hair at her temples. Amanda didn’t know then that her dad would be arrested for fraud in a few weeks’ time. Millie had hardly ever been angry at her, but Amanda feared she would be angry now. Who is Earl, Millie demanded, and indeed Amanda hardly knew how to explain him. He was fourteen years her senior. He painted houses for a living, worked wherever else he could to help his mother pay off the farm he’d grown up on, the one his stepfather nearly gambled away. What else could she say about him?
I know the kinds of men my mother pictured. And she pictured a procession of them, one after another trying to impress her daughter. But I only wanted my stocky cashier
. Amanda was not only beautiful; there was something good and rounded about her
that gave the impression she deserved good things – good men, good jobs, good friends.

To think of them all now as they were then pains her. She will walk down the hall, down the stairs, to her mother’s room and stroke her hair. She will find Earl and tell him she loves him and that everything, after all, will work out. But she can’t. It is enough that she is supposed to call someone about renting chairs. She dreads this. Dreads the sound of her own voice hesitating and uncertain. She used to be able to do things. When Millie and she were left alone, she was good at calling the plumber, cancelling insurance, firing the accountant, talking to men who called even after Millie changed and unlisted the house phone number. She was good at talking with her mother, good at getting her to like Earl.

Her dad served nearly two years, after the whole process that also took nearly that long. After he was released, came home to a house that seemed emptied of his presence, Amanda moved out with Earl. She can remember those days: they lived in a small flat; Earl’s friends were always dropping in; there was a wallpaper photo on the living room wall. She liked Earl’s friends. She tries to count back the years to when precisely that was. That tires her. She puts the notebook down for a moment. Last spring her dad went to Phoenix on a business venture. He’s supposed to come back, but Amanda no longer waits for it. It seems to Amanda that around the time he left, Millie began to shrink. Her posture changed and she lost about an inch of height. She began to speak in a murmur, knock plaintively on doors, eat her meals out of small side dishes. She had survived the investigation and Dan being in prison, she had accepted Amanda’s imperfect lover, but there’s a limit to what one can take.

Instead of moving to a two-bedroom apartment downtown, Earl and Amanda moved into Millie’s house. None of them wanted to sell it. Amanda would again do – she thought she would, everyone did – what she used to be good at: taking care of things and cheering up her mother. She moved into the house so that she might one day find Millie baking a German chocolate torte, with one of those upbeat chirpy waltzes playing in the background, smoothing the icing patiently and almost hypnotically, winking at Amanda when she caught Amanda watching.
I used to endlessly come across one or both of my parents in some unaware moment, always the observer on the edge of the picture, surprising them – happily, it seemed – with my presence
. Every now and then Amanda and Millie do try to bake together, but Amanda has so little to say. The fake cheer exhausts them both and each needs a lie-down afterwards.

Amanda wants to return to Barcelona. It was with apprehension that she broke this news to everyone, at once, and explained taking the course. She should have told Earl first; she would have, if it weren’t so hard to talk to him. Sometimes if she looks him straight in the eye she feels that collapse is imminent. What form would the collapse take – that’s still vague for her. The only secret is that there is no Spanish language and culture course as she has told them; or rather, there is one, she’s looked it up, she knows how much it costs and what it involves, but she won’t be attending it. How she will explain it later she can’t quite think about; she hopes it will not matter once she gets away.

What Amanda remembers about the city is the smell of men. During mass at the Basilica, she noticed the discreet colognes emanating from the fresh, upright collars of the men
in the row in front of her. There were other smells: the colognes were beneath the smell of wood and old prayer books. She also loved the cafés, with the breeze carrying the scent of coffee, and the pairs and groups of men and women, packaged, perfumed, sometimes perfect and sometimes too worn; it all made her heady.

The rooms of the two-bedroom apartment they rented in Barcelona smelled of new furniture (the furniture was sparse) and of linden trees. They had to clean up after themselves, but a woman came and gave them washed and folded linens and towels, in various colours, every other day. The woman’s name was Lula and she was thin and stunningly pretty and looked perpetually fatigued. Whenever Amanda saw her, she either held her young boy at her hip or her posture alone suggested a great weight; her lids hung low and she gave the impression of a person continuously exhaling. She wore dresses in bold colours – fuschias, and blood reds, and aquas. Her dresses hugged her waist, hung below her knees, showed plump cleavage; her hair was thick and dark and curly and pushed back from her face. The combination of the mane, the bright colours, and the perpetual weariness affected Amanda as something beautiful and slightly disconcerting.

On the second day they passed by this woman while she was talking to an old man in the hallway. He was the owner of the apartment and his name was Arthur. The woman was his daughter-in-law, the wife of his son Jude. On the stairs Arthur invited them all for lunch and they obliged. Amanda liked old people and she liked Arthur; he was just the kind of old man she liked. Good-humoured and slightly satirical, as if one could not be otherwise having sampled the ways of the world.
He treated all of them with interest and politeness. He treated her, in particular, as someone who knows less than he knows of how the world breathes, but also like one who will soon figure things out. His courteousness flattered Amanda because it approached flirtation – or did it approach flirtation only in the mind of the generation that did not expect to have chairs pulled out nor coats taken care of? He liked talking to Amanda about the nineteenth-century French novel; rather, that was the foundation that allowed him to like Amanda. It happened to be one of the last courses she had taken in her degree and so the titles and the salons and the unhappiness were still fresh. Based on two or three informed responses he had assumed, probably, a much wider breadth of familiarity than actually existed. But having a common foundation meant they were free to talk of other things.

Jude was not intended to have a part at all; he was merely the son, beleaguered by a beleaguered wife who was waiting for him to become a lawyer so she might hire a sitter or housekeeper and get some sleep. He was not a man who needed diversion or stimulation or complication, but a man who needed a bigger apartment. He was young – as young as Amanda – but with a child, a toddler, and this small, tired, striking wife. His hair was the slippery blond hair of an infant and his face the kind that passed for good looking in television dramas about small towns – an earnest, manly, serious face. He was not supposed to be in the picture but he was in it, the poorly defined figure somewhere near the edge of it. He smelled like cedar, woody cologne with a whiff of something orange; on the two hottest days, she remembers also being able to smell his skin, coppery and yeasty. She remembers Arthur and Lula’s scents, too:
Arthur smelled like just-ironed clothes, and sometimes like caramels which he often chewed. Passing Lula in the hallway, Amanda smelled hair oil and lilac, and there was a whiff of orange around her, too.