Authors: David Gilbert
"Sounds like you and Mr. Burge have something in common," she said.
"What?"
"Both carpenters."
"Oh yeah, right."
She sat back. "Continue, please, and a little slower," she said. "Punctuate."
I read for over an hour, with my throat becoming increasingly dry and sore. Halfway through, as the sun lowered, lights clicked
on all over the house. "They're on a timer," Mrs. Freninger said. And after I finished the fourth chapter, "Home and Its Sorrows,"
I closed the book. It was time for work. "Well, thank you, Victor." She seemed pensive, a bit tired. Light reflected from
her glasses. I flapped my arms in a bad impersonation of a chicken, then I grabbed my crotch, but her face didn't change,
and the dog by her side hadn't moved since my arrival. As I was leaving, Mrs. Freninger asked me to come close to her. She
lifted up a small tape recorder. "Give me your phone number, Victor."
Alister, Vince and I shot hoops in the school gym that night. We played Horse. Alister couldn't sink a thing and was out almost
instantly, but he didn't care. Vince and I were even at H-O.
"So what's this blind lady like?" Vince asked.
"All right." I missed. H-O-R.
"Are her eyes all fucked up?" Before Vince shot, he bounced the ball against his head a few times. This annoyed me.
"No, she's attractive." I missed again. H-O-R-S. "Kind of like Barbara Stanwyck—an older Barbara Stanwyck, like when she was
in
The Big Walley."
"Huh?"
"You know, that
Bonanza
ripoff, with Lee Majors and Linda Evans."
"Ah, shit, too bad she's doesn't look like Linda Evans." Vince picked at his undershirt. "Then we could go over there and
do all sorts of nasty stuff. How'd she know who it was? The perfect crime." Vince winked at me, then shot and missed. H-O-R.
"Dammit." He retrieved the ball and slapped at it as if he were slapping a face. Then he passed it to me.
I missed.
Vince made an opposite hand layup, something I'm lousy at, and he won. "I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll give you an exclamation
point."
"That's all right, I'm done."
"C'mon, let's keep it going. How about a quick game of Pig?"
"Nope."
We had to help Alister to his feet; he'd been feeling dizzy. "Thanks, guys," he said. "For a second there I thought you were
throwing my head around."
"The mirror is doubtless defective. The outlines will sometimes be disturbed,
the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as
precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box,
narrating my experience on oath."
"Excuse me, Victor." Mrs. Freninger rose from the couch and straightened her skirt. "I hate to stop you, but I need to pee."
She left down the hall, each step confident. I heard a door shut.
I got up, moved a lamp, moved a side table, moved her glass of water to the farthest edge of the coffee table, moved a throw
pillow, moved a porcelain figurine, an elephant, to the middle of the room, moved the hour hand of the grandfather clock back
two hours, moved the couch six inches, moved a wastepaper basket. When Mrs. Freninger returned, she still maneuvered with
precision, still plopped down onto the couch, still found her glass of water. "Victor," she said.
"Yes."
"Have you been drinking?"
"Yes."
"Well, you stink. And your reading's a bit sloppy. Continue."
When I came back a few days later, the house had been returned to its original state. But Mrs. Freninger didn't say a word,
gave no hint of knowing anything.
I had started drinking during the day, at first in my apartment, then out at Red's. I met a woman there. She was paying for
her drinks in change pulled out of a sock. "I was going to do my laundry," she said. "But fuck it." I smiled. I was smiling
at everything. "
You
certainly could use a wash," she told me, and she reached over and grabbed me by the belt. Her name was Kat. The other people
at the bar looked over, shaking their heads while Kat and I hit it off. She giggled and leaned into the curve of my neck.
"You're funny," she said. I don't remember making any jokes, but I went with it. We left together. Back at my apartment, our
clothes off, she guided her tits into my mouth; they tasted of bleach. She wanted me to grab at the Saturn tattoo on her inner
thigh. "Pinch it," she said. And she wanted me to suck the Jupiter tattoo just above her collarbone. "That's right, suck it,"
she said. I felt as if I were hurling through space, untethered to the mother ship, my oxygen running out. "Bite Neptune,"
she ordered, but I couldn't spot the little blue planet eighth from the sun. "C'mon, bite it," she said. And I found myself
having momentary visions of my past. They came in little flashes, but they didn't make any sense to me. It was like watching
a stranger's slide show. "C'mon." She slapped me on the side of the head.
Soon, I began to change the story, at first bit by bit. Adam Bede loosens up, enjoying a laugh in the middle of stern pronouncements.
"It smells very sweet," he said; "those stripped uns have no smell.
Stick it up your frock and it will smell a plenty, and then you can put it in
water after."
Mrs. Freninger didn't seem to notice. After a while, I made up whole paragraphs, introduced new characters, and, in general,
caused chaos in the tiny village of Hayslope. Only once did she ever question anything.
"Victor."
"Yes," I said.
"Is there really a character named Dinah Shore?"
"Yes."
"I hated Dinah Shore, the singer Dinah Shore, not the young Methodist preacher. She I like. But the singer, too sunny."
It was on a Tuesday that I decided to stop showering for a while. And I didn't brush my teeth anymore. I also began to eat
meals heavy with garlic and onions and rarely changed my clothes. The odor that came from me was strong, like wet leaves burning.
"Jesus, you're ripe," Mrs. Freninger said at the door. "Can't you take a shower before coming here?"
"Sorry, I had to finish building a porch." I walked over to the chair and plugged in a tape player.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Just getting ready." I sat down.
She moved toward the couch but paused in the middle of the room, her chin slightly raised, the same way Grace Kelly raised
her chin to Jimmy Stewart. "Do you want anything to drink?" she asked.
"No, I'm fine."
"Some water?"
"No, thanks."
She took her seat. "Okay," she said. "I'm ready."
I pushed down the 'play" button. The cheap tape player's internal mechanism began to whirr. My voice emerged from the tiny
speaker; distant and breathless and secretive, as recorded that morning in bed.
"Book Five. Chapter XXXWI. The Journey in Hope. A
long, lonely journey, with sadness in the heart; away from the familiar to
the strange: that is a hard and dreary thing even to the rich, the strong, the
instructed; a hard thing, even when we are called by duty, not urged by
dread!'
I watched her face closely. She must have recognized the difference—it was obvious—but she didn't let on.
"A little louder, please," she said.
I reached over and turned up the volume. My voice rose.
"Thank you," she said.
A pair of binoculars hung around my neck, and I lifted them, focusing on Mrs. Freninger's face. I had to squint to smooth
the blurs. It was amazing to watch her so closely. She was in the adolescence of late middle age, where beauty turns sluggish
on its way to the shady side—or so George Eliot might have written. Faded freckles gave away an old love for the sun. Her
hair was trapped in a bun. And a mysterious scar, about a half-inch long, slanted into those heavily made-up lips, so thin
a scalpel seemed the only possible cause. On my lap was a leather photo album pilfered from one of the bookcase shelves. The
snapshots inside showed a younger Mrs. Freninger, reluctant to smile, as if she knew that such a display was too easy. She
was a woman quite used to the fact that people liked to look at her, and this allowed her a certain seriousness. Those eyes
staring at you, even then, held a coldness as if they had glimpsed their eventual fate in dim, ill-defined pictures. I tried
to see her as the reckless Hetty, the love of Adam Bede's life, churning the butter on Hall Farm and dreaming of Arthur Donnithorne,
that dashing squire.
"Victor."
I reached over and pushed down the "stop" button. It made a plastic click.
"Yes."
"Oh, nothing." She waved her left hand. "Go ahead."
I restarted the tape and continued to watch her reactions through the binoculars. I thought I caught a hairy arch of an eyebrow
above her dark glasses when Hetty met a poacher in the private game preserve called the Chase. He was smoking a cigarette
by a tree, a brace of pheasant at his feet, a can of beer in his hand.
"
'Hey there,' the poacher said.
"
'Hi,' Hetty answered. She was not unaccustomed to surprises, in fact
she quite enjoyed them. 'Who are you?' she asked.
"
'Your local poacher!
"Hetty stepped back, briefly afraid of such a man. The epithet, 'A thief,'
regretfully slipped from her well-formed lips.
"The poacher smiled without joy. 'Our deeds determine us, as much as we
determine our deeds, and until we know what has been or will be the
peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a
man's actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise to his character.'
He stubbed his cigarette against his clodhoppers.
'I read that somewhere,' he
said.
" 'Oh' was Hetty's reply. 'Oh,' she said again, and then she was offered
a beer."
We both listened with growing curiosity.
And at the end of the chapter Mrs. Freninger asked me for a cigarette. "I used to smoke," she said.
I lit two cigarettes, borrowing Paul Henreid's technique in
Now, Woyager.
I placed one of them in the waiting V of her fingers. She brought it to her lips and inhaled, then exhaled expertly through
her nostrils. The smoke seemed suited to her, reluctant to dissipate. "I quit years ago," she told me. "And all my ashtrays
became decorative."
"Uh-huh."
After every few drags, I guided her hand to the ashtray, tapping off the ash for her. Lipstick stained the filter. "It was
once glamorous, Victor. Now it's disgusting and offensive. Maybe I'll take it up again."
"Why not," I figured.
"A bit of a head rush," she said. "Like I'm a teenager again."
We smoked until the feet of the Camel emblem burned. Then I left.
While cleaning the classroom one night, Alister fell to the floor and started to roll as if on fire. He shouted at things
I couldn't see. I dropped on top of him and restrained him. He battled me all the way. "I'll bend you across this classroom."
"Bend" was his new word.
"Just calm down," I whispered in his ear. Foam started to spill from his mouth. I didn't think humans actually did that. I
tried wiping the stuff away—it was warm on my hand—but he seemed to have an endless supply. "Just calm down," I said over
and over again.
"I can bend it all, Dave," he shouted. A beard of froth hung from his chin; he was a crazed Rip Van Winkle struggling against
his sleep.
"Of course you can." I began yelling for help, hoping Vince would hear.
A light flickered. "I did that," Alister told me.
"Sure," I said.
And later, before the ambulance arrived, a bird flew into one of the windows. "I did that," he told me again.
At our next reading, with the tape player on, I began to write notes to Mrs. Freninger along the baseboards, in the corners,
on sills.
Please recycle. Free Tibet. Down with meat.
I wrote my words in a crimped hand, the letters blocked and unidentifiable. I'd walk around the room and choose a particular
spot. "I hope you don't mind me moving, I need to stretch my legs."
"No, not at all."
I used a felt-tip pen.
UNICEF. March of Dimes. Save the Children.
From a distance the phrases looked like resting centipedes. And sometimes they seemed to scurry. While I wrote, I heard myself
describing poor Hetty's murder trial. No matter how much I tried to change the story, Hetty still ended up killing her illegitimate
newborn in a fit of hopeless despair. And now she was doomed to the consequences of her vanity and lust. Only her prison-cell
confession could salvage her soul.
"Hetty was silent, but she shuddered again, as if there was still
something behind; and Dinah waited, for her heart was so full that tears
must come before words. At last, Hetty burst out, with a sob,
"
'Dinah, do you think God will take away that crying and the place
in the wood, now I've told everything?'
"
'Let us pray, poor sinner. Let us fall on our knees again, and pray to
the God of all mercy!
"
I stopped the tape and said, "End of Chapter X-L-V," pronouncing the Roman numerals, as if describing the size of the tragedy.
"Pretty heavy." Mrs. Freninger stretched her neck left, then right, her muscles stiffened by listening. "Of course that lech
Arthur Donnithorne gets off scot-free while beautiful Hetty has to hang. Typical." She leaned forward, her hands crossed over
each other and her dark glasses fixed on me. "Hey, Victor."
"Yeah."
"When does that poacher return?"
I unplugged the tape player, wrapping the cord in a lasso. "I'm
not sure."
"I liked him," she said.
"Don't know, I haven't finished the book either." I got up from the chair.
"How much longer do we have?"
"After 'The Hours of Suspense,' seventy more pages."
"The end is near."
"Yes," I said.
For the next two weeks, I avoided Mrs. Freninger, not showing up at the usual time in the afternoon. I wasn't in the mood
to go on, preferring Hetty trapped in jail, the gallows still pages away, the exact conclusions of that world unknown to the
two of us. During the day I treated my apartment as a cell, not leaving, just watching soap operas. It didn't take long to
reacquaint myself with the plots. And the talk shows were all the same. Everything passed as intrigue, and deceptions sold
products. "Money-back guarantee!" "First month free!" "Zero down!" The announcers shouted at me, their voices perfect for
the pitch. "It's just that easy!" At night I worked with a new guy at the school, Stan, a humorless sort who made comments
about secondhand smoke and poor health coverage. His only delusion was that he thought this job was temporary. I missed the
fuller delusions of Alister.