What's eating Gilbert Grape? (26 page)

I come around the aisle. "Hi, Todd. Hi, Doug."

"Say hello to Gilbert Grape, boys."

They make no attempt at words.

The boys are dressed in these identical blue suits and Mrs. Betty Carver wears the sexiest black dress I've ever seen. Were it not a sad day and were her boys not in the store, I would take her by the hand, walk back to our small produce section, hike up her dress, and mount her from the rear.

"I told the boys they could have whatever they wanted. Please don't think of me as a bad mother."

"I never would think that," I say.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape

The boys look like they've been crying for days. Their arms are full of candy and chocolate bars and bubble gum cards. Mrs. Carver asks for a pack of cigarettes and wonders if menthol is what women should smoke.

"I don't know," I say.

She says she'd like a pack of Salem because it's the girls in those ads that she'd most like to resemble. She says this as if she truly believes smoking will make her more beautiful. "Ken would never let me smoke. It was a health risk. But we know what happened with Ken, don't we?"

I look at her, forgetting for a moment that this is the only woman I've ever seen naked.

"Gilbert, will you ring all this up? We need to get over to the church."

"It'll be no charge."

"Oh, please. I insist."

"No, ma'am."

She had started to open her purse but stopped after hearing me say "ma'am." "You seem to be forgetting something," she says.

I want to say. No way can 1 forget, no way will I ever forget the way we kissed that first time, the way you taught me how to hold you, the way your hands moved all over me. No way could I forget the gas-station bathroom, our spot at Skunk River, all those times on your kitchen floor. But I don't say anything. I look at her like we've never met. She is the customer and I am the worker. She smiles. She knows that I can't forget. Forgetting, in fact, will be much easier for her.

I begin ringing up the candy bars, the gum—every now and then letting a bar or two go by without registering it. Mrs. Carver pulls out two twenties.

"But your total is only twelve seventy-five."

"Keep the change."

If she wants me to feel like a prostitute, she's succeeding. "I can't accept this. "

"Yes, you can. You must. For me."

I press myself up against the checkout counter in an effort to hide my erection. She sends the boys out to a black funeral lim-

PETER HEDGES

ousine which I just realized has been waiting all this time. Bobby McBurney sits in the drivers seat. He would wave but he's working.

"They've taken this hard," she says, referring to the boys.

"Huh?"

"My boys have taken this hard."

"I bet."

"Yes, you know about such things, don't you?" She puts her left hand, the one with the wedding ring, on top of mine. "You were how old when your father ..."

"I was seven."

"Oh, the same age as Todd."

"Yes."

"So you understand what my boys must be feeling."

"Yeah, I guess."

"Of course you do," she says, cutting me off. She starts to tap the pack of cigarettes out on the back of her other hand. "Have you missed me?"

"I haven't seen you much lately."

"I know, but have you missed me?"

I say, "Yes."

Mrs. Betty Carver smiles. She knows when I lie, and starts to smack the pack harder. "I've seen people do this before they open the pack. Is this what people do?"

"Some people," I say.

"Are you one of those some people?"

I want to say that I don't know what I am but that I wish she would leave and I'm sorry that we ever got involved and another part of me wishes we had never stopped but I am twenty-four and you are significantly older, Mrs. Carver, and we probably learned all that we could, so let's get on with it and please take your change.

I've slowly gathered up the dimes, a nickel, two ones, a five, and the extra twenty. I reach out to give it to her but she refuses.

"A little thinking and you might realize that Mr. Carver was in insurance and one of the few fringe benefits, in fact, the only fringe benefit is that they give loads and loads of life insurance to the

What's Eating Gilbert Grape

survivors." Mrs. Carver smiles in a way that suggests she expects me to be impressed. I don't blink even. "Guess what Ken was insured for?"

I don't know and I say nothing.

"Let me just say that it's more than enough. A couple of commas, many zeros."

My face doesn't even move.

"You're wondering if it was an accident, aren't you? The people in this town are all wondering, aren't they?" She grows desperate. "Tell me what people are saying!"

"1 don't know what people say. I'm not the telephone operator."

"You hear things, though."

"It is suspicious. Drowning in a wading pool. That's not an easy thing to do."

"Mr. Carver didn't know how to swim. Did you know that?"

"No. That subject never came up."

"Well, he couldn't swim. I hope you'll let people know. ..."

"I'll tell all my friends."

"Don't get smart with me, young man." Her skin is beginning to change color. She explains that Ken drove to Motley and bought a wading pool. "He was filling it with a hose, had a heart attack, and fell in the water. The boys thought their daddy was playing a joke on them and by the time they came and got me and we pulled him out, he was gone. " She has opened her pack, awkwardly. That same kind of awkwardness I felt the first time she undid my pants. This time, though, with the smoking, she's the virgin. I take a book of matches from the cash register and light her cigarette. She coughs slightly and says, "You don't believe my story? You think I killed him, don't you?"

I'm silent. I'm more enamored with the way she holds her cigarette. Her fingers are afraid. This is more interesting than whether she's a murderess. To me, the man deserved death but perhaps a more violent, gruesome end would have been more appropriate.

Phyllis Staples, the town's piano teacher and mother of Buck, who works for the Standard station, enters the store. Mrs. Staples goes back to the dog-food section. She has a collie named Lassie.

PETER HEDGES

That's the kind of original thinking that just makes this town such an exciting place.

Mrs. Betty Carver continues in a whisper. "Gilbert, the last time Mr. Carver and I made love was the night I got pregnant with Doug. No kidding. To Ken, sex was for making boys. The second boy was a kind of human insurance. Fortunately, for me, there was another little boy. You."

I say, "Oh." This all might be too deep for me. My erection is gone and I look for something to act as an ashtray. 1 find an empty Coke can and hold it out and she flicks her ashes in the opening. She's standing with the cigarette, not smoking it, and I think an onlooker, peeking through the store window, not hearing the conversation, would probably chuckle. The sight of this woman, dressed in her funeral black, holding a cigarette, talking to Gilbert Grape, while Mrs. Staples struggles up to the counter with a ten-pound bag of Gravy Train—the sight is too much. Mrs. Staples pays for the dog food; I offer to carry it out. She says that she can manage, that she's always been able to manage. She doesn't offer any condolences to Mrs. Carver, which seems rude. But then again, there are meiny who don't ever acknowledge death.

As she leaves with the dog food, 1 almost let out a bark.

"Phyllis is angry at me. She plays all the funerals, you know, but I don't want music at Ken's. She thinks I've got something against her. But my problem is not with her at all. It's with my late husband. Doesn't that sound odd? Late husband?"

1 say, "Maybe you can tell her after this is all over."

"No, I'll be gone after this is over. I'm thinking about taking my boys to St. Louis. How does St. Louis sound?"

I shrug.

"Ken hated St. Louis. 1 think it has a nice ring to it."

Mrs. Betty Carver's hair has been unraveling since she walked in the door, giving her that crazed look that makes her killing him conceivable. Part of me wonders what took her so long. "You're thinking I killed him. I can see you thinking it in your eyes. I've always been able to tell everything from your eyes."

I say, "1 guess I've been thinking that it's possible. Your killing Mr. Carver, that is."

What's Eating Gilbert Grape

"Gilbert," she says—and she says this hke she's asking for another loaf of bread or checking the price of Rice-A-Roni—"how can you kill a man who'd already been dead for years?"

"Good point, " I say. And she knows it. She completes winning this round by putting out the cigarette in the can which I still so dutifully hold. Doug comes back in the store. He's got chocolate on his lips.

"Mommy," he says.

"Mommy's coming, honey."

Smoke starts to billow out of the can.

"Good-bye, Gilbert."

She leaves the store. Bobby McBurney holds open the limousine door for her and before getting in, she pulls down her widow's veil.

40

£\my and I go straight home after the funeral.

Momma asks, "How was it?"

Amy says, "Good. Not the crowd we had at Daddy's but a lot of people just the same. There wasn't any music, so the service was short."

"Like life," Momma says.

I'm heading for the stairs, hiding the Coke can behind my back.

"What you doing with that can?" Momma calls out.

I shrug and laugh because no reasonable answer comes to me and I continue up the stairs. In my room, 1 dust off a corner on my lowest shelf. I look in the can and see that the cigarette butt has her lipstick on it. I remember the feel of her lips. I've never won a prize or a blue ribbon or a plaque, but as I set the can in its new home, next to the Styrofoam cup filled with Becky's watermelon seeds, I think that maybe, finally, I've won something.

PETER HEDGES

In the bathroom, I look at myself In the mirror. Not bad. I undo the belt to my polyester brown pants, I unclip my tie. I am twenty-four years old and my only tie is a clip-on. I refuse to learn how to tie a real one. The reason is that my father set a precedent for tying knots around the neck and it's an example I choose not to follow. This line of thinking has gotten me out of wearing ties except at the most festive of occasions—funerals. And I've only been to three. The first was my father's, when I was seven. The second was my Grandfather Watts's, when I was ten. He lived across the state in Martinsburg and he died when a tractor fell over on him.

I turn on the shower and step under the water.

It occurs to me as the water pours on me, my funercil clothes scattered all over the bathroom floor—it occurs to me that my brothers, sisters, mom, and me are the last of the Grapes.

Momma was an only child and her mother died when she was a little girl. My other grandpa, Lawrence Grape, drank himself to death; this happened before I was born. Apparently he was mean and bitter. He had two boys—my dad, Albert Lawrence, and Gilbert Palmer Grape. Gilbert Palmer died in World War II. He was shot down in a plane and he's buried with the other Grapes, about four graves from my dad. It seems my other grandmother, Dottie Grape, blasted my mom and dad for not naming Larry after Gilbert Palmer. So when 1 came along, the family was in ecstasy, because they could appease my Grandma Dottie, who lived alone in Alden, Iowa. Grandma Dottie has lived, if that's what you'd call it, in a nursing home for the last eight or nine years. She's forgotten everything and everyone. My mother despises her and the only memory any of us has of her is how when she'd blow smoke in our faces, we'd cough, and she'd just blow some more. For all practical purposes. Grandma Dottie is dead. We have no aunts, uncles or cousins.

I turn my shower into a bath by lifting the stopper above the faucet. I pour in Arnie's bubble bath. The pink bottle is still almost full from lack of use. It's been almost a week since his last cleaning.

I sit down slowly in the hot water, the bubbles cover me, only my head sticks out. The ends of my hair get wet. The heat from

What's Eating Gilbert Grape

the late-afternoon sun and the hot water makes my face sweat; breathing in the air burns my throat. It's at times like these when I can perfectly understand why so many need Jesus or drugs or Burger Barns, anything to make the day bearable. I touch myself until I've an erection. I let the water out of the tub and stay there as it drains. When the water gets to the side of me, then below me, I relieve myself. I make a moan sound that hopefully no one heard.

After dinner I put on clean clothes, comb my hair, and slap on some of Larry's aftershave that he left behind. I go down and out to my truck. Ellen is on the porch marking verses from a brand-new white Bible that she now carries with her everywhere. "Where you off to?" she asks. "1 can smell you miles away."

I laugh off the smell comment. She's one to talk about smells.

"I'm highlighting the good parts," she says. "The pertinent parts and I hope when you've a minute you'll thumb through this because I think it will give you some compassion for your sinful self. ..." She continues talking, chalking up points for heaven, she must think, as I get in my truck and drive away.

At the Carver house, I knock on the door. There are relatives still inside, boxes for packing, too, and Neil Diamond plays on a stereo. An older woman who looks like Mr. Carver in drag opens the door. She must have been his mother.

"Could I speak with Bett . . . Mrs. Carver?"

She turns on the porch light. She looks me up and down; obviously something about me truly disgusts her.

"I can't look any better than this, lady," I want to say. But I smile the I'm-sorry-Mr. Carver-died smile and this seems to make things better, for the moment.

The woman shuts the door. The wait must be five minutes. When Mrs. Betty Carver opens the door, I expect to see her still dressed for the funeral. She wears jeans, though, and one of Mr. Carver's T-shirts that is baggy. It looks sexy on her.

"Gilbert," she says.