Fitting Ends (13 page)

She got out her photo album to show me pictures of herself in Chicago. It was as if she wanted to prove that she wasn't lying, that she really was once the person she remembered. There was a photo of her standing in front of Union Station with her feet carefully posed, like in ballet position. It was taken by some old man she'd stopped as he was passing. She looked like Betty Grable, I told her.

“How come people don't look like that anymore?” I asked.

“Because they all look like me now,” she said, and laughed.

When I came home from work that night, all the lights were on. She'd usually go to bed long before I got home. Maybe, I thought, she'd fallen asleep in front of the TV or someone had come for a late visit unexpectedly.

But when I walked in the house, I heard her voice, loud and angry, and I thought she was arguing with someone.

“God damn it!” she was yelling. “God damn it!”

I took a tentative step, walking toward her voice. “Gram? . . .” I called out hesitantly. “Gram?”

She was lying on the floor of the bathroom in her floral nightgown, on her stomach. The nightgown was pulled up, revealing her bare legs and her panties. She looked up at me, and her eyes were wet and raw-looking from tears. “Kip,” she said. “God . . . damn . . . I slipped . . . I've been trying . . . Oh, I . . .”

I didn't know what to do. I opened my mouth and shook my head. “I'll call an ambulance,” I said weakly.

“No!” she cried, and her voice was ragged. “Just help me up! Please.”

I bent down and pulled her nightgown so that it covered her legs again. “I don't know how to do this,” I said softly. I grasped her under the arms, and she flailed, struggling.

“It hurts!” she shouted, like a little girl. “It hurts me!”

I was able to get her into a sitting position, and we rested for a moment. She was breathing hard, tears falling onto the lace around her neck. “What am I going to do?” she said, stuttering, small hiccuping sobs breaking into her words. “What's going to happen to me?” I touched her hair. I didn't know how to help her. “Some nights,” she whispered, “some nights I wake, and I can't move. And one night . . . I wet . . . and I couldn't get up to change . . . But then I was better in the morning . . . I was all right . . . but what's going to happen to me when I can't?” Her voice was drifting off, and then, slowly, the sobs drifted off, as well. She bowed her head, and the whole house was quiet.

“I think I can make it now,” she said at last. She held my arm tightly, leaning, pulling, and then, with terrible slowness, and with my arm around her waist, she was able to stand.

“Will you be all right?” I asked. “Should I call a doctor?”

“Let's go to bed,” she said quietly.

I dreamed that I got out of the car when we stopped along the road; we were going on a long trip, she and I—passing through miles of wheatfields on a dirt road. Something had fallen out of the car, and I had to get it. I waded knee-deep in grass, hearing it hiss around me, and then I turned to see the car was gone, a red blur through waves of heat. I ran, waving my arms, but the weeds were as thick as water. And then I was running along the middle of the highway, calling after the car, which always seemed on the verge of disappearing over a hill. The shadow of an airplane passed over me. I looked up, and that was when the car came from behind, blaring its horn. I covered my face with my arms, and the car hit me. A dull thump. I could see my shadow arcing over the asphalt, and then I landed on the ground. My grandmother was bending over me, and I could feel my spine moving around loose inside me. I wanted to tell her not to move me, but when I opened my mouth there was no sound.

When I woke, the sheets were knotted around my lower legs, and I kicked at them, then finally had to reach down and untangle them with my hands. The house was silent, and I got up and walked in the dark to the living room. The moon gave the room a pale glow.

The photo book was lying on the coffee table where she'd left it that afternoon. I turned on the light and picked up the book.

All those pictures, pictures of people waiting. I shook my head.

When I looked up, my grandmother was standing there, with her housecoat billowing around her, her hand moving like something gently swaying in an underwater current.

I turned to her. “You'll be all right,” I said softly, “won't you, Gram?”

“Sure I will,” she said.

I sat there for a long time, looking at the trees outside the window then down at the rows of photographs in the book. For that night, anyway, everything was still in order.

ACCIDENTS

C
harlie got his first car while his mother was still in the clinic. If it hadn't been for that car, he was sure that the dread of her eventual return would have driven him crazy. He might have just locked himself up in his room and never opened the door.

But driving was like a fever. After school, he would leave St. Bonaventure in a rush, passing trailer courts and truck stops that were clustered on the edge of town, pushing past each changing speed zone sign, out toward the country. Everything took on a kind of jittery excitement—the skittish horses along the fence, nipping each other playfully; the sudden yellow green of the ditches and the shimmering green rows of winter wheat; even the ghostlike, uneasy stares of white-faced Hereford cattle. His father's farm was about seven miles west of town, and by the time Charlie was out on the highway, he would have to keep glancing down at the speedometer, and, finding himself going seventy, seventy-five, eighty-five, slow with effort back down to fifty-five. While he was driving, all those thoughts about his crazy mother in the clinic could be brushed over while Charlie concentrated on enjoying the speed and his own vague recklessness, racing until the landscape blurred around him.

His red Mustang was a wreck. There was a spidery-thin crack that ran the length of the windshield. Shallow valleys of dents sloped their way across its body. The gas cap was missing, left in one of a dozen possible gas stations and never retrieved. He had been in several small accidents with his car in the four months that he had had his driver's license. He'd bumped into a lamppost and knocked it over, and quite a few times he'd backed into other automobiles. He could remember his father's icy, understanding voice as he stood trembling into the pay phone after he had missed the entrance to an alleyway and hit the side of a building. His father had pulled up in front of the courthouse after Charlie had filled out the accident report. Charlie had run out and got in on the passenger side. When he remembered this, Charlie felt almost sick—the way his father just glared, not saying a word all that drive home. His father had turned up the radio, and humming, looking straight ahead, had pretended his son did not exist.

On the day that his mother was to come home from the clinic, Charlie had another small accident.

He was driving home as fast as he could, having succeeded in putting any thoughts of his mother out of his mind—it was the first genuinely beautiful spring day, and the smell of the air, the taste of it, had Charlie quivering. It felt as if a storm were coming. It brought back fond memories of other summers, memories of early childhood. He could remember watching the combines move across the long stretches of yellowed wheat as he stood along the dirt road by the mailbox, waiting for his father to come and pick him up, to take him in the truck or the cab of the combine. He remembered running a few steps, waving his arms over his head as his father rushed past him in the pickup, pulling a plume of dust around him. In the distance, he could see thunderclouds gathering.

Everything was being drawn into sharp vertical and horizontal lines: the cut wheat met the uncut; the road met the field; the horizon met the sky.

Then the sky grew dark. Great blue-black clouds rose like smoke, up out of sight. The thunder boomed once. A breeze rushed across the stillness with a drawn-out hiss. The wheat rippled, seemed to fatten. The combines looked as if they were rising, roaring, like sea monsters from a yellow water. Far away, Charlie remembered seeing what looked like a gauzy curtain billowing toward him; but before he could move, the hard rain and then the hail began hitting him—and then he was running, covering his head at first but then just holding his head up and squinting his eyes, laughing—there he was, he could remember the feeling, out there alone, the world moving fast, almost out of control.

It was disappointing, he recalled, that the hailstorm passed as quickly as it had arrived. Everything in the landscape was left quiet and noncommittal, even more so than it had been before.

What he had forgotten, while he was thinking of all this, was that his father's car was parked at the end of the long driveway. When he looked up again, he realized too late that he was going very fast—he stepped on the brake and heard an involuntary cry come from his mouth as the car impacted on the rear fender of his father's Buick, making a
whumph
sound that seemed horribly loud despite the fact that he was sure that he didn't hit it that hard. For a moment, it seemed to him that he was outside his car, looking in, for he clearly saw an image of himself tipping forward and then lightly back, like a dancer.

But the worst part, the most dreadful thing, was that his father was coming out of the barn just as it happened. He could hear, even as he stepped on the brake, his father yelling: stop, Stop, STOP, STOP!

Charlie's mouth hung open, and he sucked in breath. He tried to put the car in reverse, and then he realized the car had stalled. He turned the key and heard a grinding sound.

“This is the last time you ever sit behind a wheel,” he heard a voice say. He looked up and was startled when he saw his father peering through the window at him. He nearly fell out as his father yanked the door open.

“Just what are you trying to prove?” his father breathed.

“Nothing,” Charlie said. Already he was probing his mind for an excuse. “Dad, I didn't even see the car there, I don't know, I think there's something wrong with the brakes because I really wasn't going that fast, and I was trying to stop.”

“Back it up,” his father said, his voice hushed with rage. Charlie turned the key several times and got only a grinding sound. I've broken it, he thought. His father scowled in at him. “I don't know what's wrong with it,” Charlie said, shaking his head at his father. Then he noticed that the car was still in reverse. He pushed the gear stick back to park, smiling and trembling and stuttering: “Oh . . . uh . . . hm . . .” He started the car and slammed into reverse. The quickness with which the car sped backwards, toward the ditch, surprised him. He slammed on the brakes again, flushing when his father called after him: “How in the hell did you get your driver's license?”

His father stared down at the Buick's fender, looking from it to Charlie as if Charlie would suddenly attack it once again. Charlie ambled cautiously toward him, nodding his head as if to shake excuses out of it: “I'm sure it's okay. It was just a little tap, you know, I guess I wasn't watching, you know, I must've just turned my head for a minute . . . .”

“Here's the scratch,” his father said.

“I'll pay for it,” Charlie said. “I'll pay to have it fixed.” He looked eagerly at his father and received a cool smile. His father's calm withered him.

“Pay with what?” his father asked politely. “With your good looks?”

“I'll get a job!”

“Oh, really,” his father said. He took a step toward Charlie, showing his teeth. “And how do you plan to get to this ‘job'?”

“In my car,” Charlie said lamely.

“Charlie-O,” his father said, “I wouldn't trust you with a tricycle, let alone an automobile!”

The excuses started to slip out of his mouth again, uncontrollably. “Dad,” he said, “I was distracted. Just a minute. It could happen to anyone.”

“But it always seems to happen to you,” his father said. “Now I wonder what could have distracted you? The scenery, maybe?”

“I was thinking,” Charlie said, and then a sudden flash of brilliance came to him. “I was thinking about Mom, and her coming home and all.”

It was almost a pleasure to watch the smile on his father's face droop. “Oh,” his father said.

Eventually, the damage evaluated, his father went back into the house. As the screen door closed, Charlie had the sinking realization that another lane of communication between his father and him had been permanently closed.

He stood for a moment, staring out at the interstate that divided their property. Sometimes, it was hard to imagine the world beyond except as lines upon lines, the rim of sky underlining the flat stretch of horizon. He could stand at one point, and out there in some other place was another point where he could be standing, and in between those two points was an infinity of points which were places he might have been. So why was this place, out of a million possible choices, where he had to be? Some days, he wished he was going away, not driving off to school again, but out onto the interstate, headed off toward one of those points, or all of them.

Nothing ever changed. There was something maddening, hopeless in the sameness—the miles of flat horizon, the endless drift of his father away from him. Every time, it seemed, that there was a chance for them to finally be close, another door would shut, and his father would be as far away as ever.

And then there was his mother. She would never change. And it wasn't even that she was crazy—there was something unpredictable about real crazy people. But with her it was just that determined glaze, tracing over the same routines until they didn't mean anything to anyone. How many times did she think she could run off to the Greyhound depot with her grocery bag full of hastily packed clothes and expect them to go trailing after her? She would never really get on the bus. He could remember how she kept calling and calling, one night when she had left, his father had gone out searching for her, and Charlie was alone in the house. Every time he picked up the phone, it was that nasal, uninflected, insistent voice: “You'd better say what you have to say to me now, because you'll never have another chance.” He would just let the phone fall back onto its receiver. Then it would ring again, and after a while he would know it was her even before she opened her mouth. He'd hang up before she said a word. When he woke up the next day, there she was, wearing the same clothes she'd had on the night before, smoking cigarettes and letting the ash grow so long that it dropped off and lay like a caterpillar on the table, on the rug, on the stove. It was that look of dull triumph—as if she expected him to run and catch her in his arms, as if she expected him to be happy—that made him hate her.

The second time she came back from the clinic, she told them never again. “Oh, I'll never let that happen again,” she said.

And now she was going to be home again. But he could still remember that puckered smile as she told him, mornings before school, that he better take a good look at her because she wouldn't be there when he got back. She was always smiling, as if she were about to get some kind of well-deserved revenge, holding her long-ashed cigarette between her fingers like a movie star with a long cigarette holder. So what could he say to her now? “Of course I still love you,” he would tell her. But the real thought was the one that kept turning over and over in his mind: “You'll never change. You'll never be any different.”

Trust, Charlie thought, watching his tennis shoe toe the gravel. We should have never taken her back. No more chances. He watched as cars rushed by on the interstate, passing through their plot of land, becoming dots in the distance. I wish I were leaving, Charlie thought, I wish I were going somewhere, just like them. Then he turned and went into the house.

“Charlie-O,” his father said as he came into the kitchen. “What do you want for supper?”

“I don't care,” Charlie told him.

“Hamburgers okay, Charlie-O?” he asked.

“Fine.” His father always called him Charlie-O or some other nickname. There were dozens of them—Chip, Chas, Charles, Broadsides (after he started wrecking his car), Chally, Char, names that no one but his father called him. Sometimes Charlie thought it was because his father really wished that he were a different person; by calling him by a different name, he could somehow change Charlie himself. He knew well that his father tired quickly of people. His father had lots of friends, and they would come over almost every weekend for beers and cards, but the friends were always different. It was mysterious that he had remained so constant toward Charlie's mother.

“You don't know anything about me,” Charlie had once said, when his father, trying to get Charlie to mow the lawn, had gone into a calm, smiling tirade about how irresponsible Charlie was.

“I know all I need to know,” his father had responded. That had stuck with him, as if it were an accusation, proof that his father had found that bland sameness in Charlie himself.

“Dinner's ready,” his father said, and Charlie looked up.

The argument came easily during dinner, in between small talk about the weather and football. “How many minutes do you give her before we have to ship her off again,” Charlie asked his father. One of those calm discussions ensued; Charlie was a smart-mouth, his father told him, it never failed, he was always disrespectful and he should take a moment to be thankful for what he had. Count your blessings, his father advised, and Charlie, by this time so worked up that he wasn't even afraid of his father or worried that his father would suddenly quit loving him, looked into his father's face and counted each blessing: “Zero,” he said. Then he got up and walked out.

He sat in his car, with the doors locked, and the exhilaration of telling his father what he thought wore off quickly. He began to wish that his father would come outside and say, “Charlie-O please come back inside, let's talk this through, please, Charlie,” but he was becoming more and more sure that his father wouldn't come outside at all. In fact, he was beginning to think that his father didn't care whether he came in or not. He felt as if he might start crying.

Why did you do that? he kept asking himself. So often, so often, he just kept his mouth shut; all those wrecks, with their subsequent discussions in which his father told him over and over: “You've got a lot of growing up to do, Charlie-O,” or “I think you are the most irresponsible person I have ever known.” Charlie had been quiet, penitent. “I'm sorry, Dad,” he kept saying. “It won't happen again.”