You Are Not A Stranger Here (22 page)

Brickman's Funeral Home is still there, and the Catholic 228

church, and the convenience store at the top of the hill. Crossing the river, she walks by the old shoe factory, shops and apartments now, built on the ground of the ancient sawmill. She can barely feel her cheeks in the cold as she turns down her family's street.

The old house sits back from the road, steep front roof with the long sloping back covered in a layer of white; weathered shingles detached in places; the shutters the same dark red they've always been. Her brother has never been able to bring himself to sell it, so it's rented to people who usually don't stay long. The crab apple tree still stands in the front yard, buffeted by the winds of another snow, and she thinks the house looks much as it must have the night she lay upstairs in the front room. Once the doctor told Will and her parents that a third of babies were born with the cord wrapped once around the neck--twice less often but not never--whatever unspoken suspicion they had ended. But the trouble was Hester didn't leave that night. She stayed. And occasionally Elizabeth couldn't help yelling at her for not uncoiling her son as a midwife would. After a week, Will left to see his family. Her parents took her to the psychiatrist. In the fields she used to play in as a child--sold now--

there are other homes, outsized in every way, their wide circular drives paved, lights sprayed down over the yards as if from the walls of prisons. Huge, gaudy places that dwarf the crumbling saltbox.

At the end of the street, she sees Ted's car parked in front 229

of the blue imitation of a chateau. She walks up the drive, past an empty fountain.

" W H AT A B O U T Y O U R room?" he asks, passing it in the hall. She shakes her head. "We'll use my parents'."

They enter a room with dark satin walls, a canopy bed, undistressed, the carpet thick and plush. Lauren goes straight over and pulls the comforter off, throwing it onto the floor, leaving just the white sheets and lots of pillows. He wishes they were at least a bit drunk. This premeditation is unnerving. Standing beside the bed, they start to kiss. It's harder than they've kissed before, their teeth knock, their tongues squirrel deep into each other's mouths. The remove Ted felt on the highway is with him here again, his mind somewhere behind them, committing the scene to memory. She takes his hand, puts it on her breast. He starts unbuttoning her shirt, wondering if he's moving too fast, but her hands are rubbing the small of his back in encouragement and he guesses this is how it is done. The material is silky to the touch and the buttons come apart easily. When he has her shirt off, Lauren reaches over her shoulders and removes her bra. Her breasts are small, her nipples darker than he expected. He's not sure what to do. Neither of them is moving. He has no erection and doesn't know why. She bites her lip and stares at the floor.

"Don't you want to do this?" she asks.

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Suddenly, awfully, she doesn't seem older. Her knowing expression is gone. Replaced by awkwardness or confusion, maybe even anger, he can't tell. He feels alone. There's a halfnaked stranger in front of him. He's the desperate guy he always imagined he was. Being here feels wrong, but somehow too late. He's supposed to know how things go and he doesn't. He leans down and tries kissing the side of her face, which works more or less, their bodies moving closer, her breasts warm through his shirt. He never imagined she might not have done this before. The thought terrifies him.

"Yeah," he replies, "of course."

He sits on the edge of the bed and Lauren starts undoing his shirt. He doesn't want to take his T-shirt off, but she tugs at the back of it, so he pulls it over his head, exposing his slender chest. They shift farther onto the mattress and he lies back. He's expecting her to climb up and kiss him but she doesn't. She unzips his jeans, which finally gives him his hard-on back. It's almost as he imagined it: her on top of him, this inscrutable look on her face, only it's not distance, nothing like that, and he's not asking her about where she's been or what it's like to come back from faraway places, even though these childish questions are the ones he still wants to ask. He thought somehow he would ask them now. But neither of them speak. There is the weight of her crushing his leg, a mole his fingers discover on the back of her shoulder as she kisses his stomach. It is weakness and helplessness he feels as she pulls down his jeans and boxers. They haven't talked about sex, only Christmas night outside her house, as 231

her parents watched from the kitchen and she waved to them and then turned to Ted and whispered,
New Year's,
let's do it then.
Naked now before her, he wants to ask if he is actually male in the way other men are, or if he is missing something he's never been able to see. His back arches sharply at the moist warm touch of her mouth on the head of his penis and he senses he can't let her do this or it will be over, so he pulls her up by her armpits and rolls her onto her back. He looks at her mouth but avoids her eyes. Still they say nothing. Lauren slips off her pants and underwear. She makes no sound as he leans down to kiss her nipples, but once he's started, she puts her hands in his hair and guides his head into her chest. He shudders at the taste of salt on her flesh. For an instant, he's poised between drive and revulsion. He licks her breast. She presses his face harder against her skin. He
wants
it now, his whole body
wants
it. With his elbows, he presses against the inside of her knees, spreading her legs.

"Put it on," she whispers. He leans back to grab from his jeans the condom he bought that morning. He's never used one before but he's seen pictures; he rolls it on as fast as he can. Then he crawls forward and she takes his penis in her hand. There are long, hideously awkward seconds as she squiggles farther down on the bed and he tries to push. His eyes are clenched shut. He hopes hers are too. Lauren takes a sudden, sharp breath, shouts, "Ow!" He holds himself above her.

"It's okay," he says. "I can stop."

"No," she says, her voice so deep and determined he 232

doesn't recognize it. She puts her hand on his butt and pulls. He can feel her trembling. Her breath is short and tight as he uses the muscles in the backs of his legs to move in and then almost out of her. It feels involuntary. Beastlike. Good. He begins to shiver and then with no warning comes in a rush, collapsing down onto her, burying his sighs in the pillow over her shoulder.

For a few seconds he lies across her, then rises, slipping out of her, leaning back onto his ankles. She covers herself with a pillow. He feels a wave of misery and defeat.

"Are you okay?" he whispers.

Her expression is blank, a little stunned. As though she has arrived somewhere only to discover it is no different than the place she has come from.

He leans to kiss her, but she turns her head. A bit of the lipstick he gave her is smeared across her cheek. He wonders why she ever decided to wear it. They remain there on the bed, neither of them moving. Hot air streams from a vent somewhere on the floor. His lips are dry and cracked. From beneath the pillow, he notices a dark red stain seeping along the sheet. Looking down he sees his crotch is dark and wet. Lauren moves quickly off the mattress, wrapping herself in a towel, hurriedly moving to the bathroom. She closes the door behind her. He's kneeling there, on this enormous bed, staring into a circle of blood. T H R E E T I M E S S H E presses the bell, but there is neither sound nor answer. The downstairs lights are on, the shades up, snow 233

visible as it drops through the squares of brightness into the bushes. She is cold and would like to be inside. Trying the latch, she finds it unlocked.

"Hello?" she calls, standing in the huge front hall, beneath a sparkling chandelier. "Ted?" The only reply is a click followed by the soft rumble of the furnace.

The walk has tired her. She passes into the dining room looking for a place to rest. The table needs painting, though it looks like a fine, sturdy old piece of furniture. She sits at the near end, taking off her hat, opening her coat. They have gone for a walk, she decides, young lovers in the snow, walking this ground she used to play on. She feels herself kneeling on the veranda, her arms around Peck, the shaggy mutt, holding him as he barks at a bird in the yard, feeling the bark's reverberations in her chest, her brother yelling at a friend up in the copper beech, the drone of the mower in the back field, air scented with grass; and she wrestles on the lawn with her father, trying to pry a coin from his fist. Her fingers run over the dent in his thumbnail; her mother says,
Watch it, you two,
leaning down to kiss her father. On the floor of the upstairs landing is a grate just above where her grandmother sits at her desk, and with her ear against it, crouched on the floorboards, Elizabeth hears the steel nib of her grandmother's ink pen scratching the thick card stock she writes her thank-you notes on. She is playing by herself upstairs. The bedspreads have patterns of tufted cotton. The posts of her grandparents'

bed are of dark red cherry wood, tops carved in the shape of pineapples. Standing on the corner of the mattress, grasping the bedpost, her heels sink lower than the balls of her feet, 234

stretching the joints of her ankles. The knife she uses to stab at the wood is the knife her grandfather uses to carve roast chicken on Sundays. Beneath the quick jabs of the silver tip spots of lighter red blossom in the dark varnish. Her heart beats so fast she can hardly breathe. Her mother shuts her in the guest room and in the evening her father spanks her over the edge of the couch, though she tells him she didn't want to do it. The marks are still on the posts of the bed there in the candlelight, as the snow falls, and she lies grasping her mother's hand, wishing the doctor would come to make her baby safe.

She wonders what other people's lives are like. Ted halts at the entrance to the dining room, slack jawed. Mrs. Maynard sits in her fur coat at the far end of the table, staring out the window, a bleary, ruined look on her face.

"Mrs. Maynard?"

Elizabeth turns to see Ted standing in the door to the living room. He's not wearing a shirt, only jeans. His hair is as messy as she's ever seen it.

"Mrs. Maynard, what are you doing here? How did you get here? What's going on?"

"I thought you'd gone for a walk," she says. "It's snowing, you know. I thought you and Lauren were on a walk." She looks about the room as if searching for something. "I used to play on the ground this house is built on. Did you know that? Some say this place is an offense--ugly--that most all of what we've done since the beginning is ugly. But you're not, Ted. I told you. You're beautiful. The dead don't remember you. It's better that way. Will you come here and sit?"

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Ted watches Mrs. Maynard lean forward and pull a dining room chair up beside her. She's had some kind of break, he thinks. The woman must be with her. He crosses to the chair and sits.

From her coat pocket, Elizabeth takes the folded piece of notepaper on which she's kept her list of questions. She pauses, then reading from the page, asks in a quiet voice,

"Did you ever think you meant more to your mother than her own life?"

It's some nonsense she's written down, Ted says to himself. He still can't figure out how she got here. He'll have to drive her back.

"I'll just read them, Ted, and then you can . . . What is your mother's name?"

The roads will be bad by now; he doesn't have snow tires. It will take time.

"Mrs. Maynard--"

"Do you exist as a judgment of her? What does it feel like to be in her arms?"

Ted would like her to be quiet now. There is so much to think about. For ten minutes he stood by the bathroom door, calling softly, "Are you all right?" but Lauren said nothing, and all he could think of was her disappointment.

"Can you see your mother's face, or is it so familiar you don't see it? Do you feel that you know her?"

Elizabeth looks up and sees tears running from Ted's impassive eyes. She puts aside her list and lifts her hands to his cheeks. At her touch, his mouth trembles and he starts to sob. 236

You and all the inheritors of wealth who think life is a matter of perfected sentiment. You are wrong.

Elizabeth is exhausted. She does not argue. The lights in the room stream into her eyes like refulgent dawn. At last, she feels the warmth of her son's tears in the palms of her hands. 237

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

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F O R T H E I R S U P P O RT during the writing of this book, I would like to thank the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Michener/Copernicus Society of America, and the MacDowell Colony. I would also like to thank my editor Nan Talese, my agent Ira Silverberg, Frank Conroy, Marilynne Robinson, and Connie Brothers at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Sandy McClatchy at
The Yale Review,
and Adrienne Brodeur and 239

Samantha Schnee at
Zoetrope
for their encouragement. For helping to improve various stories in this book, I owe thanks to Allan Gurganus, Nick Sywak, Minna Proctor, Justin Tussing, and Jacob Molyneaux. Finally, for making sure I left the apartment now and again, my thanks to Adam Hickey and David Grewal.

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A N O T E A B O U T T H E A U T H O R

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A D A M H A S L E T T is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His work has appeared in
Zoetrope
All-Story, The Yale Review, BOMB
magazine, and National Public Radio's
Selected Shorts
series. He has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award and has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Michener/Copernicus Society of America. He is currently a student at Yale Law School.

A N O T E A B O U T T H E T Y P E

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This book is typeset in Simoncini Garamond.

This version of Garamond was designed by

Francesco Simoncini and W. Bliz between 1958 and 1961, for the Italian type foundry Simoncini.