He didn’t know he was hearing music. The stuff they played in stores sneaked up on you like that. Music was only part of what you stepped into once you passed through the automatic glass doors and their obliging, unsealing, rubber-edged welcome. This was a big shopper’s paradise superstore, full of color and motion and noise, the cheerful abundance designed to encourage impulse buying. Jerry Hagen had filled his shopping cart with the items on his list but he was still rolling and strolling through the aisles, looking for things he didn’t yet know he needed — or maybe he was just putting off going home, often the case these days — when he found himself singing under his breath. “Solid, re-eal solid, solid as a rock,” with a little orchestral trill and shimmy. The next moment he was aware of himself and stopped. A quick look around to see if anyone in the Health and Beauty section — what was he doing here anyway? — had noticed. They hadn’t. They had their own problems which required scrutiny of products for foot odor, incontinence, embarrassing rashes. Jerry moved on, mouth clamped shut, a sober, unsinging citizen.
A shred or two of the song reached him from the ceiling speakers. Upbeat, fully orchestrated, solid, solid as a rock, something something hot hot hot hot hot. He knew it and he didn’t. It was some kind of duet. Get a move on. Jerry threw some antacids in the cart and pushed towards the checkout. He got lost in Hardware, where he noticed that the letter and number decals hanging on their little hooks had been rearranged to spell out FUCK YOU. Jerry considered setting them to rights, or telling an employee, then decided not to. It was the great all-purpose, universal message. FUCK YOU.
He paused at the tail end of the after-Christmas sales, a display of unfresh gift wrap and red felt elves and dinky red velvet bows and some Taiwanese manufacturer’s version of angels, fat-faced, plastic, smirking angels that aroused in Jerry a desire to smash them underfoot. It was an unwelcome reminder of the Christmas he had just endured. And the totally anti-climactic New Millennium, which had been billed as either something wonderful or a great, apocalyptic catastrophe and hadn’t turned out to be either, which was pretty much par for the course.
Everything was beginning to remind him of everything. He had to get out of this place. He could only take so much of these retail zoos before he began having jittery, Tourette’s-syndrome-on-caffeine reactions, and hating all of humanity. He hated the obese mothers with obese children and shopping carts full of junk food, and the bored teenage checkers who seemed to know their lives were never going to get much better, and the brittle old women regarding everyone around them as if they were purse snatchers. Where did these dreary people come from? Jerry never saw them anywhere else, as if they lived in the parking lot. Usually, when he had to buy groceries or whatever, he went to the pricier store farther up the road, where nobody clutched coupons or ate from cereal boxes in the aisles. He was a snob, sure. He owned up to everything these days.
The surly checker bagged his purchases. She had limp hair and a forehead like a billboard, stamped with acne and bad temper. Jerry made it out the door. Here was the melting Saturday morning, the snow tracked over and over, so soiled by tires and exhaust and boots that it resembled a canvas for filth. Each day the temperature slid up and down the same few degrees. Snow froze and unfroze and refroze, like a grade school science project. Jerry was used to being cold by now and he only shrugged himself a little deeper into his coat. In much the same way he’d accustomed himself to other austerities of body and spirit, damped his expectations down so that he was stolid, stolid as a rock.
Ashford and Simpson. That’s who sang the song. Some brain cell fired up and gave him that much as he started the car and pointed it towards the liquor store. It was an old song. Ashford and Simpson, a he and a she. There must have been a music video because he remembered both of them dressed in white? And maybe there was a piano in there somewhere? Singing to each other over a piano, their hair done up in long braids, he and she both
And nothing’s changed dear
The thrill is still
Hot hot hot hot hot hot
Well good for them. He hoped they were still going at it hot hot hot. The liquor store parking lot was crowded. It was drinking weather. He had to park at the far end. By the time he wrestled himself out of the car and walked even that little distance, he was winded. He’d let himself go and he was in truly piss-poor shape. For a while he’d indulged his vanity, tried to eat low-fat, had joined a gym, gotten serious about free weights and treadmills, had come to know the sacrament of sweat and the exaltation of well-worked, aching muscles. But all that had been for Joanna, and that was over. He was left with his inexplicably bad cholesterol and dodgy knee and the fatigue that staggered him when he least expected it. It was as if he’d used himself up, as if there was no longer any need for him to have vigor or comeliness or strength. Nobody would care if his ass flattened like a puddle or the slope of his gut began to resemble a ski run for beginners.
Now he was being pitiful. He adjusted his face into a preoccupied, business-like, liquor-buying expression, and pushed the door open. He purchased a fifth of expensive Grey Goose vodka, two bottles of merlot and a six pack of Bass Ale. His wife liked merlot. He was making an effort. Doing the grocery shopping and such. He would go through the motions of doing the right thing by her and if he did so long enough, his heart would catch up with the rest of him. While he was waiting for that to happen, he could drink the vodka. Lord help him, he couldn’t go home yet.
He knew Dee kept track of how long he was gone when he left the house, calculated how much time was necessary to do the announced errands plus screw somebody. He would be on probation for the rest of his life. He had fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.
The Forest Preserve was handy — so handy, in fact, that he and Joanna had on two occasions driven there and had sex in the car. He wasn’t thinking about that now as he turned in the entrance, or rather, he was thinking about those times in the way he thought about everything that had been lost to him. They were like stones in his head, hard places his thoughts had to roll over and around. Jerry followed the curving drive back to one of the smaller parking areas. He stopped the car at the edge of the empty lot, engine still running, opened the vodka bottle and drank. It was like swallowing a mouthful of fire. When he’d bought it he guessed he’d imagined some liquor ad fantasy of polished wood and shining glassware and connoisseurship. But this would do just fine.
The snow was clean here. This was what winter ought to look like. The north faces of the trees still displayed sprays of wind-driven snow. The bare tangled branches turned the gray sky into a maze-like pattern. Jerry took another pull of the bottle. It made him cough so hard he felt the hot juices of his throat push into his nose. There were fumes in his eyes. He capped the bottle and put it back in its twist of brown paper and felt about in the grocery bags for something to take the taste away. Orange juice. He drank from the carton and watched a solitary crow flap across the screen of trees, very slowly, like something broken.
Joanna had called him at the office the week before Christmas. They’d put an end to everything by then, and they’d agreed they wouldn’t talk, but she said she just wanted to wish him Merry Christmas and see how he was doing.
“I’m merry,” he said. “Full of holiday cheer.”
“Yeah, me too.” Jerry assumed she was calling from her north side apartment some fifteen miles away, and that her ex-husband Bobby had the kids. She said, “Tell me this is going to get better.”
“It’ll get better. Just not for a while.”
She sighed into the receiver and Jerry felt a complicated irritation, as if she had called to remind him of the time she’d hooked her arms behind her knees and rolled herself open to give him entry, times she’d taken him into her mouth, or any other time there was no use in remembering now. He thought that to her this was another part of romance, the calling and the sighing and the yearning. She was still dragging it out. “How are you?” he asked, because he was meant to.
She said she was OK, she guessed. She was concentrating on the kids, trying to get it together so they’d have a nice Christmas. Her kids were six and four, a boy and a girl. Little, Santa-believing kids. They had a tree up and she was baking a million goddamn cookies and they watched “The Smurfs Christmas” video every night. Jerry said, “It’s nice when they’re young enough to get all caught up in the excitement.” He was thinking of his own kids, who for years had simply placed their retail orders in November. He didn’t want to think about his kids.
“I miss you,” Joanna said.
“I miss you too.” Saying it felt empty. He would only miss her if he allowed himself to miss her. But wasn’t that the point of ending things? He wanted to seal it all off. She wanted to keep the feelings rubbed raw, keep being all fond and sentimental. Maybe it was just the difference between men and women.
Joanna’s end of the phone line produced indistinct, rustling sounds. Jerry guessed she was lying in bed. He’d only been to her apartment a few times. Joanna hadn’t wanted to explain him to her kids, so they’d had to work around that. Yet those were times he’d lain in that same bed. Joanna said, “I hope . . . I mean, I know I’ve totally messed up your life.”
“You didn’t. And nothing’s your fault.”
“I hope it was worth it. Please don’t say yes right away, don’t just be polite. Because maybe it wasn’t worth it for you. Your family.”
She launched the words as an invitation. Jerry only said, “You didn’t have to quit work.”
“Yes I did.”
“I worry about you,” he said, and saying made it true, and the feeling welled up in him before he could shove it down.
“I’m fine. I got another job. I haven’t had a chance to tell you. I’m temping at this printing plant in Des Plaines. I’m pretty sure I can get on full-time, there’s some girls in the office going on maternity leave. It’s just a job, honey. Jobs come and go. But kids . . .”
“I’m all right,” Jerry said, to stop her. After a certain point in their affair, it was impossible to think of Joanna without thinking of Dee and his sons, and vice versa. Everything had become too crowded.
She was quiet. She could probably tell the call wasn’t going very well. She was good at reading things like that. She said, “OK, I’m going to hang up now. I’m sorry you’re unhappy. I guess it’s always worth it to me. Even when it turns out bad in the end. Like with Bobby. He was a mistake but loving him wasn’t. Good-bye, Jerry.”
“It was worth it,” he said, because his memory had opened up without his willing it, and here was the first time he ever saw Joanna, wearing a pink sweater and smiling up at him as she climbed a staircase. But the phone line was already dead, and besides, he wasn’t on the phone or descending those stairs towards her. He was sitting in his car and a sheriff’s deputy was tapping on the closed window.
Part Two
There was a moment or a series of moments when Jerry had no notion of what his face was doing, and then he attempted to get some kind of control and not look like a fugitive or a pervert or a man who’d been drinking vodka straight from the bottle. He rolled down the window.
“Good afternoon, sir. Everything OK?”
The deputy was young and red-cheeked from the cold and he looked good in his fur-edged cap and brown leather uniform jacket, rather like a dressed-up bear. Jerry said that everything was fine. “Is there a problem?”
“No sir, but we don’t get much traffic back here in this weather. So we like to check.”
Jerry noticed the we. We, the duly constituted and authorized killjoys of the world. He said, “I’m just waiting a little while before I go back home. Hiding out from my wife.”
The deputy didn’t laugh. He was at least twenty years too young for that. Jerry watched him assessing the expensive car, the virtuous plastic bags ranged across the back seat. These foodstuffs which tell the tale of my people speak to my truth. Assessing Jerry himself. Creep, bad dad, slacker husband.
“Best not to sit here too long, sir.”
“I was just leaving.”
Busted, but not vanquished. He fastened his seat belt and backed out of the parking space, offered a cheery salute to the deputy, who wasn’t watching, and motored carefully home. He crossed the familiar streets, passed the familiar landmarks — his sons’ schools, the office park designed to look like a pretty college campus, the Congregational church and the Methodists. The upscale/quaint downtown where no chain store was allowed to come. This was a town which took zoning seriously. The main avenue was lined with showcase homes, some of them occupying two lots, 200,000 square feet of space, with garages that could accommodate fleets, with oversized verandas and banks of glittering windows and jutting wings. Jerry had long since given up envying these enormous piles of architecture. He couldn’t imagine how anyone’s life inside them could measure up. The vodka’s edge had worn off and he felt heavy-headed. He would live in this town for the rest of his life. It would be his penance.
His own neighborhood was quite a few modest notches to the east. The houses were older, solid rather than showy. Nothing wrong with them except by comparison to those obscene castles. The constant chafing of being less than. Jerry had lived for two months in a resident hotel with a television bolted to the wall and mingy towels and he’d been, all things considered, happy there. Now he took note of his unshoveled driveway — they simply wore the snow down with driving in and out — the bunched and uneven curtain at one front window, the way the front storm door seemed slightly sprung or off track. By God he was going to get the place in better shape. Reconstitute himself as Mr. Handyperson. Start somewhere.
That burst of energy and resolve carried him all the way up the driveway and sparked out as he rolled the garage door closed. Making entrances, walking in to greet his family, was always the hardest part, and he tried to remember if this had always been so, or if it was another side effect of the rupture. Somehow it was easier once he was just there, and nobody had to declare themselves by acknowledging, or failing to acknowledge, or acknowledging with contempt, his presence. He put the first armload of groceries on the kitchen counter — nobody came to greet him except the happy dog — then went back quickly for the liquor. He would rather not have any witnesses to the open vodka bottle. Daddy’s home.
Dee was in the basement. He heard her moving around, then she came into view on the stairs. Wife Ascending a Staircase. And how unfair was it to compare one woman to another. The smiling stranger and the one who already knew him down to his bones.
Jerry stepped aside to let her move past him. “Hi, honey.”
Dee allowed her cheek to be kissed. It was dry and cool, like kissing paper, although he considered that an unworthy thought. She was appraising the grocery sacks. “That all of it?”
“There’s a couple more.” He hurried out to retrieve them. There was a time when she wouldn’t have allowed him to do the shopping; now he had to remind her when they were low on groceries, ask her what she thought they needed. If someone said they were hungry, she cooked. Otherwise they got by on sandwiches and whatever could be pulled out of the freezer and microwaved.
“Want me to put this stuff away?” he asked, and Dee shook her head. She was already opening cupboards and shoving things around. She wore her usual sweatpants and ratty blue sweater. It had become her uniform. It was as if she punished him by turning herself into a slob. And the last thing Jerry was allowed to do was remark on this.
“It’s OK. I need a break.”
“How’s the dollhouse coming?”
“Slow.” She was waiting for him to move so she could get to the refrigerator, without impatience, as you might wait for a traffic light to change.
The dollhouse was her new project. She’d come up with it out of nowhere two weeks ago, bought plans and tools and a glue gun and paints. At different hours of the day and night, small whirring and tapping sounds rose from the basement. It was meant to be a farmhouse or an early American cottage or something of the cleaned-up rustic variety, if you could judge from the pictures that came with the plan. Whenever Jerry sneaked down to see it, there didn’t seem to be much progress, just sticks and plywood. Here and there a joined corner or a door frame. He didn’t know why it seemed creepy to him. Like it was some kind of voodoo. She’d build herself a little house, fill it with her every black thought and ill wish, then blow it up or burn it down.
Jerry stood back and watched his wife shoving packaged cheese and lunch meat into the refrigerator. He couldn’t always tell when she was trying to ignore him out of spite, and when she genuinely didn’t care or notice that he was in the room.
He said, “Hey. You. Move away from the groceries.”
“If you leave food out, it goes bad.”
“Dee, this stuff’s so full of preservatives and stabilizers, it won’t go bad for weeks. We aren’t talking about transporting milk across the Sahara in a goatskin pouch.”
“That’s appetizing,” she said without turning around. She’d stopped dying her hair. The gray was almost down to the tips of her ears. A line of demarcation that measured when she’d found out about Joanna.
“I just meant, ease up. I can handle this. Sit down, have some tea.” Or vodka. He wanted another drink. He didn’t dare.
“It’s under control, Jer.” At last she looked at him. Her lips were always chapped these days. Without makeup her face seemed smaller.
He stood there for another minute, pretending to sort through his wallet. More than anything, he wanted to escape the room, but that would have seemed inattentive or hostile. His genuine desire to make amends, to set things right between them, was often rendered false by his awareness of trying too hard to make the right gesture. “Where’s Corey?”
“I don’t know. Watching television.”
“He spends too much time watching television.”
“That’s what kids do.” She was finished with the groceries. She wadded up the mess of plastic bags and shoved them into the plastic bag drawer. Jerry thought there had to be some tidier way to store them. He said, “Sloth. The tragic affliction of our great nation.”
“If you say so.”
She was sidling towards the basement stair. “I thought you said you needed a break.”
“Had one.”
“What are you going to do with this thing anyway? When it’s finished.”
“Put little things in it. Little chairs and tables and lamps and rugs and little people.”
She might have meant it to be humorous or she might not have. She looked incapable of humor. He wasn’t ready to give up yet. To keep her from disappearing into the nether world of the basement, Jerry said, “How about if Corey and I shovel the drive. Get some of the crud cleared away before it freezes again.” As he spoke he had a vision of the two of them, side by side, engaged in wholesome, purposeful labor. Why not.
Dee shrugged. “First you have to get him off the couch.”
“I’ll make him a deal. Will work for food.”
“Like he’ll take that as a serious threat.”
“We keep him too well fed. A little bit of a hungry edge might make the kid more cooperative.”
“Hide the Doritos.”
They smiled and then dropped their eyes. Dee bit the smile off right away, but for a moment they’d sounded almost lighthearted. Like normal people. Because they needed somewhere to look, they both gazed out the kitchen window at the back yard and its variety of drifted and bare patches, its frozen flowerbeds, the sparrows energetically going at a space of exposed dirt.
Part Three
Feeling more cheerful, Jerry went in search of his youngest son. Of the two boys, Corey was the one he always had to make more of an effort with. Jake was simpler for him, maybe because Jake was more like him. Lunkier, more purely guy in his makeup. Corey was more like Dee. Nerve endings closer to the surface. Hurt feelings, anxieties he didn’t bother disguising. Jerry tried not to think of this as a negative, a weakness. But he worried more about Corey, hoped he’d grow a thicker hide, be able to stand up to every brutal thing the world was going to heap on him. Jerry guessed he was one of those things now.
He found Corey in the den, sprawled out on the couch, one leg ranged along the top cushions, the other on the floor. His head was propped up and the remote was cradled on his chest.
Jerry stood for a moment in the doorway, watching the television. It was some outdoor sporting even with crowds and bleachers. He couldn’t make it out. “What’s this?”
“The lumberjack championships.”
“The what?”
“Lumberjack games. It’s the championships.”
“You still aren’t getting through to me here.”
“It’s these guys — girls too, they’re the lumberjills — who do stuff like log rolling and tree climbing and wood chopping. They’re called timber-related sports.”
It wasn’t promising material for conversation. Jerry said, “You’re switching over from hockey, right?”
“Funny, Dad.” Corey sent one hand exploring the carpet below his line of sight, like a grappling hook, and came up with his bottle of Mountain Dew.
On the television a fatty man in a baseball cap and sunglasses hefted a chain saw. His arm was about an acre wide. Jerry said, “He doesn’t look like a lumberjack, does he?”
“You don’t know anything about lumberjacks.”
There was so much scorn, even hostility, in the way this was said that it took Jerry’s breath away. He had to wait a beat before he answered. “Well, he’s wearing shorts, for one thing.” The screen changed to a different event. Contestants were taking practice throws with. . . “What’s that?”
“The axe throw,” muttered Corey. He raised himself up enough to click the remote, as if his father’s presence had spoiled the solitude necessary for lumberjack viewing. On the new channel a rock band writhed and tried to shatter glass with their lungs.
Jerry said, “You ever hear of a group, I guess they were more of an act, Ashford and Simpson?”
“Who?”
“Never mind.” He tried to remember what it was like to be fourteen. The eruption of pimples and secret hair, the froggy new voice. The constant beating off. The process of turning into a monster with furtive powers. He wouldn’t want to live through it again. He was glad to have escaped it, finally grown up into . . . Negative thoughts. Focus here. “How about you get up and get some shoes on. We have a little chore to do.”
Corey sunk himself deeper into the cushions. His body language, Jerry realized, was saying FUCK YOU. “According to who?”
“According to me. We’re going to play lumberjack. The snow-shoveling competition.”
“Not funny.”
“Wasn’t meant to be. Get moving.”
Corey muttered again, something inaudible. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
“I said you should do it yourself.”
There was a moment when Jerry had to consider what he’d do if Corey outright refused to budge. How far would things go, get how badly out of hand. “Come on, buddy. It’s the championships. A two-man team event.” He was aware that his jolly tone was forced, that there was something peevish beneath it, and probably something desperate not very far underneath that. He summoned one last burst of cheery, skeleton-at-the-feast hilarity. “Take us twenty minutes, half an hour tops. Help me out here. I’m getting too old and feeble to do it alone.”
Once again he surprised himself by saying something he didn’t know was true. Weariness staggered him. The bleary sun reflecting from the snow in the window hurt his eyes. He had an impulse to take a place on the couch next to Corey, spend the rest of the day watching idiotic television. Call the whole thing off. Except he wouldn’t. It seemed important to keep doing all the things he had resolved to do. Follow his own orders. Forward into the valley of death rode the six hundred. One dumb foot in front of the other, march.
To his surprise Corey whined a little more, then complied. He asked what was in it for him, this shoveling business, and Jerry said college tuition, ha ha. Corey pried himself upright. Jerry went in search of his own boots and heavy coat.
Outside, waiting for Corey, he turned his face away from the discouraging wind. He paced off the driveway, gave it a measuring eye. It never seemed like an especially long driveway until you had to shovel it. The real ballbuster would be where it joined with the street, and snow plows had deposited lumps and shelves of ice, pushed them into knee-high walls the cars barely cleared. The layer of frozen sludge at that end of the drive looked antarctic, durable. He’d never had a conversation with Corey or Jake, trying to explain the last few months. That would have meant explaining it to himself. Or admitting what he already knew, that it wasn’t very tough to explain after all, the screwing-around part of things.
They owned two shovels, a lightweight aluminum scoop, a proper snow shovel, and a smaller but heavier square-edged steel one, technically a planting spade. Jerry used this spade to go at the rock pile at the end of the drive. It was murder. It was convict labor. Solid as a. Still singing his little song.
We build it up
And build it up
And now it’s
Solid
Etcetera. There must be some reason it kept playing in his head. It reminded him of something? A memory? There were a million million reasons he didn’t want to remember things any more. It only brought pain. The only way out was forward, march. Live the life he’d resolved on. And why had he decided what he’d decided? That was another remember he didn’t want. In case he’d made either the worst or second-worst mistake in his life. He jammed the spade into the middle of the gray ice, tried to work it around. When you waited too long to shovel, as they had, your best hope was the spring thaw. Time, his last, best friend.
Part Four
When Corey finally appeared, underdressed in a denim jacket he hadn’t bothered buttoning, Jerry had cleared a space about the size of a tire width. Corey snickered. “You weren’t kidding. You really are old and worthless.”
Jerry handed the spade to him. Sweat crawled under his clothes and his ears rang. He hoped Corey would believe he was ignoring him in a dignified, pissed-off manner, rather than seeing he didn’t have enough breath to answer. Already he was scaling back the project, giving up on the idea of getting everything cleared away. The best they could do was to get rid of some of the lighter stuff farther up the drive. Corey was trying to make a dent in the ice pile by jumping on top of the spade and using his weight as leverage. He was wearing sneakers. Jerry passed up the opportunity to point out that they were the wrong kind of shoes, and the jumping wouldn’t accomplish anything. He should stop fighting against futility, learn to embrace it. Become one with futility. He took up the aluminum scoop and started in on some of the easier parts, the snow between the tire tracks that hadn’t yet hardened.
And he had to quit making these little self-pitying announcements. He didn’t want his life to be futile. He didn’t want to believe it was. He scraped away at the drive until the shovel rang against the cement. He’d ended things with Joanna for the sake of his family and he felt hugely sorry for himself. A woman he loved. He didn’t mind saying that, love, now that it was too late to make any difference. She’d given him back his body, the joy of it. He’d imagined a life with her, and it hadn’t happened, and he wasn’t sure whose fault that was, if it wasn’t his own.
Corey had grown tired of trying to get the spade to budge in the piled-up ice rocks, and was chipping away at the surface of the ice itself. They worked silently for a time. Corey was digging furiously. Jerry shoveled harder, put his back into it, angled himself so he could watch the boy. It shouldn’t be a contest but it always was. The war between fathers and sons. Might as well call a spade a spade. Another not-joke he couldn’t tell anyone. His boys were getting big. Jake already had him by a good inch. Corey was starting to fill out. Another few years and they’d both be able to beat the crap out of him. He assumed they’d want to. Even without Joanna. That was the nature of the war. The young grew and triumphed over the old. He wasn’t that old. Forty-nine. But his arms and legs were leaden and if he closed his eyes he saw sparks of orange light and a white inchworm making its way from one corner of his vision to the other. He wondered what old felt like. He straightened, propped himself up on the shovel. “That’s looking good,” he called to Corey.
The boy gave him a swift, involuntary glance. “Uh huh.” Either pleased or disbelieving.
Jerry walked over, presumably to inspect, but really to give himself a rest. “I wasn’t sure if some of that frozen solid stuff was going to come up.”
“Yeah, you have to crack it before you can get to it.”
Corey kept on working the space beneath the ice crust. Jerry looked on. Supervising. Every job needs a boss. He wanted to say something more. Some approving, comradely thing. He hadn’t set out to be a bad father. He didn’t think he had been, not outright bad. Impatient, critical, grudging. From time to time. Who wasn’t. It had been easier when the boys were younger. When they didn’t remind him so much of himself, and their flaws (inattention, discourtesy, lack of initiative), had seemed a kind of mockery, a failure of his own. Now that, as Jake would say, was wack.
“So, what do you hear from your brother?”
“Was I supposed to hear something?”
“Just wondering.” Jake had left for school the week before. A full ten days before the start of classes. The kid couldn’t wait to get himself gone. Jerry couldn’t blame him. Christmas had been celebrated with all the warmth and ease of an industrial accident. Jake had spent every night out with his friends, either driving around or hanging out in someone else’s less toxic house. In three weeks he might have sat down to dinner with them on four occasions. Still, Jerry wished his oldest son was still here. Jake didn’t seem to be as mad at him, probably because he could retreat to his own life at school. And Jake didn’t hold grudges, at least, didn’t hold on to them as hard. He was the only one of them who’d spoken directly about Jerry’s leave of absence from the family. Dee and Corey had behaved as if he’d simply re-materialized at the breakfast table, in the bathroom, on the stairs. “Are you living here now or what?” Jake had asked.
“Just wondering,” Jerry repeated. He still wasn’t used to Corey being the only kid in the house. Corey probably wasn’t used to it either. “How about we go for the kill here. Clear all the way up to the garage. That’ll make it a lot easier for your mom.”
Corey gave him another sideways glance. Jerry recognized it as his signal for suppressed speech. “What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
Jerry let that one go. Yeah, like you really care about Mom. If he could have dragged words out of Corey’s head, they would have been something like that. Jerry bent to get started on his portion of the drive. Deeds not words. Shouldn’t he be given some kind of lame, partial credit for being here now, going through the motions? He guessed not. Corey was working the snow like it really was the championship event, or more likely, he just wanted to finish and get away from him. Was it always going to be this bad? Would he ever be forgiven, or was worn-down anger and indifference all he had to look forward to? His back was sprouting new, painful parts, grating metal cogs and wheels. His waterproof boots weren’t waterproof and his feet were icy. “Hey,” he called to Corey. “Want to trade shovels?”
“I’m OK.”
“Here, this one’s easier.”
“I’m fine.”
“Take you twice as long.”
“No it won’t.”
It infuriated Jerry that the kid wouldn’t accept anything from him. Not even a lousy shovel. Or no, he would accept food, shelter, clothing, Game Boys, activity fees for hockey, computer upgrades, and anything else he really wanted, but only after demonstrating his total contempt for the giver. Corey swung the spade over his head. An unimpressive pile of snow accumulated to one side. “Christ, Cor, you’re wasting time with that. Give it over.”
Corey didn’t bother turning around, just kept flailing away. “You wanted me to shovel the stupid drive. I’m shoveling.”
“I don’t like your attitude, buddy.”
Half-audible, smart-ass reply, something that sounded like, “Who cares.”
“Corey.” His warning, ten-ton father voice. He felt a nervous, electric pulse skitter through him, the body tanking up on adrenaline in case it was necessary to begin shouting or throwing shovels. He felt ill with rage and disappointment. He lived in a house where no one wanted him, he paid for the goddamn house, here he was knocking himself out to keep it from falling into rack and ruin and the least he might expect was a little cooperation. But no, they weren’t ever going to cut him any slack, meet him halfway, were they? They hated him. They took pleasure in hating him. If this was war, he was always going to be the Nazis.
Then he calmed himself and took a step back from the place these thoughts were taking him. And because in spite of everything he still believed in a version of himself that was capable of wisdom, patience, peace, of comforting and being comforted, he shook his head, something Corey could not have seen, and said, “I’m sorry. Sorry.
“I’m -
Solid
Solid as a rock
Part Five
And now he had it. The memory opened up inside him. Fifteen years ago when he and Dee took their trip to Barbados. The song had played everywhere, in bars and hotels and from radios on the street. Relentless American pop music. The whole world loved it. They’d never taken a trip like it before. The extravagance of it was daunting. They were savers, not spenders. But it was the 80s. They had a lot of big new money. Everybody did. It was time to live a little.
They left Jake with Dee’s mother. From O’Hare they took a plane to Miami, then boarded a smaller, slower plane for the island. Neither of them had been to the Caribbean before. They had their fantasies. Someone they knew had vacationed on Barbados and liked it, and that seemed enough of a recommendation. From the window of the little plane they watched the green ocean rise to meet them, then the white frill of surf, and a beach, and before they had time to worry about the distressingly short runway, the plane was bumping along the ground.
Dee put her hand in the crook of his arm as they moved towards the exit. He turned around to look at her eager, apprehensive face. He felt the promise in that hand, that face. A sexual promise, sure, but something else as well. They were adventuring together in a strange place. They had often talked about the need to get away, by which they meant, leave behind the shock of parenthood, and all the other trappings of their adult lives. Peel back the layers of impatience (with themselves and each other), the money chase, the dread that they were turning into one more pair of dull young marrieds. They had five days.
It had been winter when they’d left home. They walked out into warm air edged with scents they couldn’t put a name to, fruit or flower or ocean or all of them combined. They picked up their bags and moved quickly through the efficient customs line. There was the initial unease and perplexity travelers like themselves felt at being surrounded by a great many very polite black people. They waited outside for a cab. There was a stone planter full of tall red flowers. Dee asked somebody what they were. Ginger. Ginger was a flower. It was just after sunset. They couldn’t see the ocean from where they stood, but flocks of seabirds wheeled and dove against the ribbons of orange and lavender light.
In the cab Jerry asked the driver, “What’s all that? These fields?”
The driver said they were sugar cane. He went on to say something else about them which Jerry and Dee couldn’t understand. He had an absolutely impenetrable accent. They looked at each other, nodding, both of them exulting at the fact of an actual sugar cane field.
The hotel was plain, even something of a disappointment, with its tile floors and cinder block walls. The landlord provided two green mosquito coils to burn when they went to sleep. When they were alone, Jerry said, “I can’t believe Bob and Patty stayed here.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s depressing.”
Dee was inspecting the bathroom. Her voice echoed back to him. “It’s probably better housing than most of the population lives in.”
“Yeah, but we aren’t the population. There’s not even carpeting.”
“Down here they have to worry about bugs.” Dee came out of the bathroom. She was wearing jeans and a green tank top, clothes that didn’t make her look like anybody’s mother, and Jerry decided to let her convince him about the room. He didn’t want to spoil things with sourness or an argument. He didn’t know how Dee knew anything about bugs in the tropics, though he was inclined to trust her on it. Jerry’s own travels were limited to three weeks in Europe after college graduation, which had seemed at the time like something worth bragging bout. But Dee had spent some portion of her twenties hitch-hiking and sleeping on floors and eating grubby brown rice casseroles at communal pot lucks. She’d been to Alaska and Mexico and points in between, in the company of other hippie oddballs. Most of the time Jerry found her history, its rough and ready aspect, its casual, gamey sexuality, disturbing, something Dee might measure him against, to his disadvantage. But now he wanted to match her as best he could, and so he said, “I hadn’t thought of the bug thing. You’re right. It’s fine.”
Downstairs, Dee used the hotel phone to call her mother, tell her they’d arrived safely, and send kisses through the wire to Jake. There was a bar attached to the hotel, open-air with a roof trimmed in artificial palm fronds. A string of pink Christmas lights burned against the pink twilight sky. There was a crowd of lively drinkers, and music bouncing from the television above the bar, tuned to MTV. It was a party in celebration of nothing in particular. You could sense quick, alcoholic friendships and assignations forming. Jerry was beginning to see why Bob and Patty had recommended the place. Everyone was drinking rum — rum and coke, rum and orange, rum and water, rum and rum — so rum was what they drank too, and the bartender brought them fried fish sandwiches from the kitchen, and when they were more than a little drunk, Dee said, “I want to see the ocean.”
They held hands again as they crossed a road and walked past walls covered in papery bougainvilla. “I miss Jake,” said Dee, and Jerry squeezed her hand. He knew she really did miss him, but that saying so was giving herself permission to forget about him for a time. There were other bars, other groups of people drinking and eating in the delicious night air. At the grander hotels that fronted the beach there were torches set out along terraces, and pools of colored lights, and tall potted palms, and calypso bands, and Jerry had a moment more of doubt, of quiet envy that they were not among the guests being so expensively gratified. Perhaps they should have gone for broke, booked one of the grand resorts.
Then Dee said, “It’s sort of like Disneyland, isn’t it?” and Jerry agreed that it was. The fancy hotel took on an aspect of falsity, slickness, an overpriced joke compared with their own more authentically ramshackle lodgings. He was grateful that she’d turned things around for him. Usually he was the one reassuring her about finances and real estate and taxes, things she claimed to have no understanding of. Here, she could lead the way. She didn’t care that much about money or appearances, not really. She never had. Bless her little hippie oddball heart.
They scuffed their way through the white sand and stood at the water’s edge. The ocean was the color of deep blue ink, the sky a shade darker. A line of small tame waves rolled and foamed at their feet, over and over. Although the night was overcast, a full moon must have been trapped behind the clouds, because a spooky, indirect brightness made the beach glow and the shapes of the clouds visible. The sky and the ocean were an immense darkness and they stood on this tiny, glowing space, and Jerry knew for the first time what an island was. A something in the middle of a nothing.
Another couple had wandered down from the hotel behind them. They were talking overloudly in an accent that Jerry placed as Australian. If he and Dee were drunk, this pair was drunker. The man lost his footing in the deep sand, stumbled and recovered. “Hold up here, girl.” He leaned into the woman, who pushed him back again and said, “Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. You’re full as a boot.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“Oh I am not. At least, not as full as you.”
Neither of them seemed to be aware of Dee and Jerry until they were almost on top of them. “Whoa,” said Jerry, throwing out an arm like a crossing gate.
“What the hell! Sorry! We break anything?”
“Not on us,” said Jerry,
“How about on me, you great turd,” said the woman. “Oh! I meant him, not you,” she apologized.
“That’s all right. No harm, no foul.”
“What’s that?” Kevin’s face swung towards them. He was tall, and in the odd, glowing half-light, he looked almost as if he was wearing a mask, a drunk mask.
“It’s basketball,” said Jerry.
“Oh. American.” The mask waggled.
There was a moment when they all could have walked away form each other without more being said, and that would have been the end of it. But they started in talking. The woman’s name was Lorelei. They were from Perth. Did Jerry and Dee come to Barbados often? Well they were going to have to come back again and again. They did, did Kevin and Lorelei. They were mad for it. You couldn’t top the beaches. They knew a thing or two about beaches. And the natives. So polite and orderly. That was the Brit influence, didn’t you know? The flaming Commonwealth. God save the Queen. They sniggered at this, Kevin and Lorelei, as if it was a kind of joke you were allowed to make if you were part of the flaming Commonwealth.
They were both of them a little older than Jerry and Dee. Kevin’s scalp poked up through his thatchy hair. Lorelei, even drunk, had that preened and groomed look that marks the passage from youth to maintenance. They had money. There were enough careless references to money to establish that. Jerry and Dee never found out what sort of money, where it came from. Enough to travel halfway around the world for a beach. They should all go back up to the old watering hole and have a drink, what say?
Jerry looked over at Dee, who moved a bit closer to him, in reassurance or encouragement, smiling up at him as if to say, where else but on such a vacation would you encounter people like this, these walking Australian cartoons, invitations like this, hadn’t they wished to be this impulsive, this careless, this open to circumstances? And so they walked up the mild, sandy slope to the terrace of the hotel they had just been making fun of, with its swim-up bar and its pretty landscaping, and Kevin and Lorelei knew everyone there and introduced them all around, and here too everyone was having an excellent time, and Kevin ordered them some tall, potent drinks that tasted of fizz and melon and they ate plates of coconut shrimp and barbecue from the buffet and then Kevin and Lorelei said they must, simply must come with them to see some friends who lives on the island, their oldest, dearest friends, who were always up late and welcomed company.
And here the picture grew blurred. Because of the alcohol. Because it was such a long time ago. Because he was not really in Barbados but lying in his own driveway with his fact turned to the wintery white sky. They were riding in one of the low, open vehicles they’d seen all over the roads, a kind of touristmobile that offered absolutely no safety features, and Kevin took off at lethal, rip-roaring speed on the wrong side of the road but not really because that was another Brit thing. They were out in the country, traveling narrow roads lined with drooping trees or cane fields, and people emerged in the headlights, solitary figures, men and women both, dark people walking between nowhere and nowhere in the dark. A mystery! Yet he was aware that they must have destinations and purposes, as well as names and histories and opinions and griefs he would never learn, because the world went by so quickly. Slow down! Dee shrieked, but she was laughing with pleasure, and she clung to him and her hair draped itself across his face. Her hair smelled of sun even though the sun was long gone. And here was a house, a grand house with pillars at the entry and porticos and the house was full of yet more people in an advanced state of drinking and revelry, and Kevin and Lorelei introduced them all around and everyone was glad to see them and they would all be friends forever. What a wonderful place! He was having the time of his life, whatever that meant, since his life was already half — less? more? — over all over.
And later there was dancing to a hi-fi and he danced with Dee and with Lorelei and with a big-faced, red-haired woman who waltzed and swayed with her drink still in her hand. And later still there was a bus crash on the road outside the house, although no one seemed injured or very much perturbed, and they all went out to look over the wall of the terrace and exchange cheerful greetings with the passengers on the bus, which was eventually righted and sent on its way. Jerry fell asleep on the couch, or rather he woke up there, Dee curled up next to him and her bright hair tumbled loose and wild. There was no sign of Kevin or Lorelei or anyone else. Jerry considered what to do and came up with the reasonable notion that this was an island, after all, and if they set out walking they would sooner or later come to the ocean, and if they walked on the beach in either direction they would arrive, sooner or later, at their hotel.
But there was no need. Kevin and Lorelei appeared in a doorway, carrying their shoes and whispering, and they all piled into the touristmobile and set off in the gray, just-dawn light. The people they’d seen walking the roads a few hours ago were out again, this time walking to work, Jerry tested himself for damage and found surprisingly little. He was not hung over. He decided that he was still drunk. The air smelled of green earth and wood smoke and Dee put her head against his chest and he tasted salt when he bent to kiss her neck. The road made turns and changed directions in ways he never could have followed, even in sober daylight. It was as if the house and everything in it existed in some filmy, drunken neverland accessible only through charms or spells. Kevin asked if anyone was keen on brekkie, and Jerry and Dee said no thanks, they could just hop out at the hotel. They were anxious to be alone.
They extricated themselves from the touristmobile and made promises to get together for dinner that night or the next night or some other time. Keven and Lorelei wandered inside and Jerry and Dee walked across the sleeping terraces with their furled awnings and stacks of chairs damp with gray dew. They sky was pearl streaked with silver and rouge. No one seemed to be awake or about, but just in case they walked a little ways down the beach to a more private stretch. Dee took off her jeans and Jerry stripped down to his underpants and they waded in.
The water was perfectly cool and they swam a few strokes and then stood where they could just touch bottom, Dee wriggled out of her panties and Jerry worked himself free and she wrapped her arms around his neck, the water buoying them, The east coast of the island faced the Atlantic; the west and south, their coast, was the Caribbean. So that the sun rose in one ocean and set in another. Wasn’t that extraordinary? What a thing to be thinking about now, Except that now was then. He planted his feet more firmly and Dee arched her back and he bore down. It was like making love to the ocean. He would never forget this. The surface of the water took on the colors of the brightening sky. His skin was all those things, light and color and liquid. Everything dissolved. His heart’s frantic clenching stilled. Then was really now. The son he was about to conceive was kneeling over him in the cold of the driveway, calling his name.
