Authors: Jill McCorkle
It’s your mom
, she practices now.
Please talk to me, Preston
. She is dialing when she hears something down on her front porch. The wind? Her cat? There was a flyer in her mailbox just this evening saying how she should not leave the cat outside.
Lauren shivers as she
stands there on the corner. She expects to hear his car roar up near her any second from now and wonders what she will possibly do when that happens. She will have to tell her parents that she lost her purse, it got stolen, and her shoes and her jacket. She shudders with the thought of the boy pawing through her personal things, a picture of the track star cut from the school newspaper, a poem she was writing about the ocean, a pale pink rabbit’s foot she has carried since sixth grade when she won the school math bee with it in her pocket. The light is about to change and she concentrates on that instead of imagining her parents’ reaction. Just once she wishes one of them would pull her close and say,
Please, tell me what’s wrong
, and then she would. She would start talking and not stop, like a dam breaking through; she would tell them so many things if there were really such a thing as unconditional love. But instead they will say,
What is wrong with you? Why are you doing this to us? Do you know what people are saying about you?
“Do you need a ride?” A woman in an old black Audi leans out the window and motions her to hurry. “I know you from school.”
She does know the woman, the mother of a girl in her class, a girl who makes good grades and doesn’t get in trouble. Not a popular girl, just a normal girl. A nice girl who smiles shyly and will let you copy her notes if you get behind. Erin from Algebra I freshman year. This is Erin’s mother.
She hears a car slowing in the lane beside her and runs to get in with the woman just as the light changes. “Thank you.”
“My daughter goes to your school,” the woman says. She is wearing a low-cut camisole with a pretty silver necklace. Her black sweater is soft and loose around her shoulders. The car smells like crayons and the woman’s cologne. “I’m sorry my car is so messy. My husband’s car, that is.” Her cell phone buzzes in the cup holder but she ignores it. “Where are you going, sweetheart?” she asks. “It’s too chilly to be out without shoes and long sleeves.” Something in her voice brings tears to the girl’s eyes, and then her crying is uncontrollable. The woman just keeps driving, circling first the cinema and then many of the neighborhoods around the area. The girl sinks low in her seat when they pass the teacher’s house, that old Pontiac still parked behind the hedge. She can’t allow herself to imagine what he is doing, what he will do when he finds her gone. They drive out to the interstate and make a big loop, the woman patting her shoulder from time to time, telling her it’s okay, that nothing can be that bad. Every third or fourth time she
asks for the girl’s address, but for now she just wants to be here in this car riding. The woman’s cell phone keeps buzzing and buzzing. Once she answers it to the loud voice of her daughter from the movie lobby saying she will need a ride home after all. “Are you mad, Mom?” the girl screams. “Is that okay?” And the woman assures that it is okay. It is fine. She will be there. Then she answers her phone and says she saw their cat early this morning. And then, apologizing when it rings again, she answers and says little at all, except that so much has happened, she just might not get there at all. “In fact,” she whispers, “I know I can’t get there.” And Lauren knows there is a good chance that she is part of what has happened, but the heat is blowing on her cold feet and the woman has the radio turned down low with classical music and her eyelids are so heavy she can barely keep them open. When she was little and couldn’t sleep, her parents would sometimes put her in a warm car to ride her around. Her dad called it a “get lost” drive and he let her make all the choices, turn here, turn there, turn there again, and then she would relax while he untangled the route and led them back home, by which time she would be near or already asleep. There was never any doubt that he could find the way home and that she would wake to find herself already tucked in her bed or in his arms being taken there.
Preston’s answering machine
comes on and Agnes is about to speak but then she hears the noise again and
puts down the phone. She wishes she would find Preston there —Preston and Dee —waiting to embrace her and start all over again. Preston in his letter jacket like all those nights she waited up for him and said, “Where have you been, young man?” And Edwin would be in the basement smoking and Oliver would be rooting around at the foot of her bed.
Her chest is tight with the worry of it all. She swallows and opens the door.
Nothing.
“Here kitty,” she calls in a faint voice. She steps out on the stoop into the chilly air. The sky is clear overhead, a sliver of a moon. There is a car parked way down at the end of her drive, just the front bumper showing beyond the hedge. It wasn’t there when she came home. Perhaps someone had a flat or ran out of gas. She calls the cat again and hears leaves crunching around the side of the house. She waits, expecting to see it slink around the corner, but then nothing. But there is more noise beyond the darkness where she can’t see. And it is coming closer, short quick sounds, footsteps in the leaves. She is backing into the house when she thinks she sees something much larger than the cat slip around the corner near her kitchen door. She pulls her sweater close and pushes the door to, turns the dead bolt. The flyer talked about coyotes and how they have been spotted all over town.
The girl finally
tells Paula where she lives, a neighborhood out from town and in the other direction of the motel. Paula’s cell phone beeps with yet another message but now she ignores it. She doesn’t want to hear what he has to say now that he has had time to shape an answer to her standing him up yet again. She parks in front of a small stucco house. The front porch is lit with a yellow bulb; all the drapes are pulled closed.
“I’m happy to walk you up,” Paula says, but the girl shakes her head. She says thank you without making eye contact and then gets out, moves across the yard in slow careful steps. Paula waits to see if a parent comes out, but the girl slips in and recloses the door and everything is still.
Paula sits there in the dark as if expecting something to happen. And then she slips off the cardigan and pulls her turtleneck over her head. The message is waiting. He might be saying this is the last time he will do this, he has wasted too much time on her already.
Why are you fucking with me?
he might ask. Or
Who do you think you are?
The chances of him saying how he understands completely and they will try again some other better time are slim. She imagines him there in the room, bare chested and waiting, already thinking about his other options, his better options. And she imagines her own house and her return: sink full of dirty dishes, Power Ranger figures everywhere, a litter box that needs scooping and clothes that need washing and an empty
pantry that would have been filled had she not been out buying lingerie all day.
She saw a coyote just last week but she didn’t report it. She was standing at the kitchen window and glanced out to see a tall skinny shepherd mix, only just as her mind was shaping the thought about someone letting his dog run loose in the neighborhood, it came to her that this was
not
a dog. It was wild and fearful looking, thin and hungry, and she felt a kinship as they stood frozen and staring at one another. Everyone wants something.
The leader can see
her in there, old bat, holding her chest and shaking. She looks like a puppet, the jerks of her old bitch of a body in time with his jiggling the knob.
I wore your fucking boy’s shirt
, he will say.
Thank you so much. That little Polo fucker really helped turn my life around
. She lifts the phone and pulls the cord around the corner where he can’t see her so he jiggles harder, leans the weight of his body against the door.
Loafers! Neckties! F in fucking math
. He creeps around and climbs high enough on a trellis to see that she is slumped down in a chair with the receiver clutched against her chest. “Say the magic word,” he says and covers his fist with his shirt before punching out the window. “Say it.”
When Paula pulls up
to the theater, Erin and Tina are waiting. A tall thin boy in a letter jacket trails alongside Tina,
his hand in her hip pocket in a familiar way, and then they kiss before the girls get in the car. Paula is about to mention the girl she picked up but then thinks better of it. She wants to say things like
don’t you ever
but then the sound of her daughter’s laughter makes her stop.
“I can’t believe you, like, ate face in front of my mom,” Erin says, and Tina blushes and grins. She is a girl with cleavage and braces, betwixt and between.
“Jesus, Mom, let some air in this stinkhole car.” Erin laughs and then the two girls talk over the movie and everyone they saw there as if Paula is not even present. She can’t stop thinking about the girl and how she came to be on that busy corner with no shoes, how she looks so different from that clean-faced little girl in a library chair, and yet she is one and the same. And what will she write and slip to her coworker on Monday, or will she avoid him altogether and pretend nothing ever happened, that she never ventured from her own darkened den in search of excitement? She imagines the coyotes living as her husband has described, little nests under piles of brush, helpless cubs curled there and waiting for the return of their mother.
“I’m sorry if I messed up your time with your lame friend,” Erin says sarcastically and then leans in close. “Really, Momsy, I am.” She air kisses Paula and smiles a sincere thanks before turning back to her friend with a shriek of something she can’t believe she forgot to tell, something about cheating, someone getting caught
with a teacher’s grade book. She has licorice twists braided and tied around her throat like a necklace and her breath is sweet with Milk Duds.
The old woman
is dead or acting dead, the recorded voice from the receiver on her chest telling her to please hang up and try her call again. It’s one of those houses where everything is in place, little useless bullshit glass things nobody wants. She looks as miserable dead as she did alive. It makes him want to trash the place, but why bother now? He didn’t kill her. He didn’t do a thing but pop out a pane of glass. He searches around and then, carefully, using his shirt so as not to leave a print, takes a golf ball from the basket beside the fireplace and places it down in the broken glass. Television is too big to lift, no purse in sight, not even a liquor cabinet. She gives him the creeps and so do all the people looking out from portraits and photographs. He’ll tell the girl that he just scared the old bitch, threatened to tie her up and put a bullet in her head until she cried and begged his mercy and forgiveness. He’ll say he left her alive and grateful.
The moon is high
in the bright clear sky when Paula ventures outside to look for their cat. She pulls her sweater close and steps away from the light of the house, the woods around her spreading into darkness. Her husband is sleeping and Erin is on the phone. There were no messages other than the one on her
cell phone, still trapped there and waiting. She hears a distant siren, the wind in the trees, the bass beat from a passing car.
Please
, she thinks.
Please
. She is about to go inside for a flashlight when she hears the familiar bell and then sees the cat slinking up from the dark woods, her manner cool and unaffected.
INTERVENTION
The intervention is not
Marilyn’s idea but it might as well be. She is the one who has talked too much. And she has agreed to go along with it, nodding and murmuring an “all right” into the receiver while Sid dozes in front of the evening news. They love watching the news. Things are so horrible all over the world that it makes them feel lucky just to be alive. Sid is sixty-five. He is retired. He is disappearing before her very eyes.
“Okay, Mom?” She jumps with her daughter’s voice, which is loud to be heard over the noise at her end of the phone —a house full of children, a television blasting, whines about homework —all those noises you complain about for years only to wake one
day and realize you would sell your soul to go back for another chance to do it right.
“Yes, yes,” she says.
“Is he drinking right now?”
Marilyn has never
heard the term
intervention
before her daughter, Sally, introduces it and showers her with a pile of literature. Sally’s husband has a master’s in social work and considers himself an expert on this topic as well as many others. Most of Sally’s sentences begin with “Rusty says,” to the point that Sid long ago made up a little spoof about “Rusty says,” turning it into a game like Simon says. “Rusty says put your hands on your head,” Sid said the first time, once the newly married couple were out of earshot. “Rusty says put your head up your ass.” Marilyn howled with laughter just as she always has. Sid can always make her laugh. Usually she laughs longer and harder. A stranger would have assumed that she was the one slinging back the vodka. Twenty years earlier, the stranger would have been right.
Sally and Rusty
have now been married for a dozen years —three kids and two Volvos and several major vacations (that were so educational they couldn’t have been any fun) behind them —and still, Marilyn and Sid cannot look each other in the eye while Rusty is talking without breaking into giggles like a couple of junior high school students. And Marilyn knows
junior high behavior; she taught language arts for many years. She is not shocked when a boy wears the crotch of his pants down around his knees and she knows that Sean Combs has gone from that perfectly normal name to Sean “Puffy” Combs to Puff Daddy to P. Diddy. She knows that the kids make a big circle at dances so that the ones in the center can do their grinding without getting in trouble and she has learned that there are many perfectly good words that you cannot use in front of humans who are being powered by hormonal surges. She once asked her class, “How will you ever get ahead?” only to have them all —even the most pristine honor roll girls —collapse in hysterics. Just last year —her final one —she had learned never to ask if they had hooked up with so and so, learning quickly that this no longer meant “locating a person” but “having sex.” She could not hear the term now without laughing. She told Sid it reminded her of the time two dogs got stuck in the act just outside her classroom window. The children were out of control, especially when the assistant principal stepped out there armed with a garden hose, which didn’t faze the lust-crazed dogs in the slightest. When the female —a scrawny shepherd mix —finally took off running, the male —who was quite a bit smaller —was stuck and forced to hop along behind her like a jackrabbit. “His thang is stuck,” one of the girls yelled and broke out in a dance, prompting others to do the same.