“Thirty, thirty-five . . . Close the freezer . . . forty . . . Out back . . . by the sink . . . fifty.”
“Ow! Who left this chair here, goddamn it!”
“You did . . . seventy . . . Turn on the light . . . seventy-five . . . Do I have to do everything? . . . eighty.”
“No, you don’t have to do everything.” He reached up and pulled on the light, careful not to grab the flypaper that hung alongside it. He’d learned that the hard way.
“Bring me a little dish, why don’t you? You can’t eat a whole half gallon by yourself. You
shouldn’t
anyway. . . . One hundred.”
“I thought it was too late for snacks.” Edward was pleased that he had turned her around.
“Well, it’s open, isn’t it? Don’t try to get my goat.”
Edward tried to think of something funny to say, to make Idella laugh, something about a goat, but he couldn’t. If it was Iris he was talking to, it would have just come to him and they’d be laughing already and both be eating out of the same spoon, passing cold lumps of ice cream between their mouths.
“One, t’, thr’, f’r, fv, sx, sev’, et, ni’, ten . . .” She was counting the ones. He got one of the white cardboard trays that Idella used to measure the hamburger into, and he started to scoop ice cream out for her. He was just as happy eating out of the carton.
The telephone rang.
“Holy mother of God, who could that be? Edward! Will you get that? Probably some kid asking if we have Prince Albert in a can. They think that’s so funny.”
It had rung three times now. Edward, thrown by the jangling noise, carried the carton and spoons in one hand and Idella’s cardboard dish in his other. “All right, all right, I’m coming. Damn kids!”
“Let him out, they say. Let him out of the can.” Idella was stacking quarters into piles of four. “It’s so annoying. We probably shouldn’t even answer it. . . . Four, five . . .”
“Jensen’s Drive-In.” Edward managed to put down Idella’s dish and spoon and pick up the receiver. “Hello!”
“Eddie Bear?”
It was Iris. Edward felt his face flush. He pressed the box of ice cream against him and clutched the phone. “Yes,” he said, using his cheerful salesman voice. “Yes,” he said again, as though in answer to a second question. Idella stopped counting. She leaned over and picked up her dish of ice cream.
“Eddie, is she there?” Iris’s voice was little, hard to hear, and slow coming. She’d been drinking.
“Yes, sir. Yes.” Edward nodded and held the ice-cream carton closer. Idella was watching him from behind the counter, eating her ice cream.
“Eddie Bear, I miss you
so
much. I want to see you. Can you come? Please? My mother’s asleep. She won’t wake up. I miss you already.”
“Is that so?” Edward’s voice was getting louder and cheerier. The ice cream was cold, pressed against his chest.
“Eddie, where will we go without our place? Without Naughty Pine? That’s our place.” Iris was crying.
Jesus, what was happening here? She’d never done anything like this before. He started nodding as though he were listening to something besides this crying into the phone.
“Who is it?” Idella was mouthing at him, waving her spoon to get his attention. “Who is it?”
“Eddie, I love you. I can’t go on living like this. You’ve got to leave her.”
“Oh, now, don’t you feel too bad about that.” Edward motioned to Idella to keep still.
“You got t’ tell her. . . . We b’long together . . . you and li’l ol’ me.”
“Yes, well, sure. Yes. Thanks for calling. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He hung up the phone. Jesus. His armpits were dripping, the ice cream was dripping. His face was burning.
“Who was that?” Edward stared back at Idella. She put down her empty dish. “Edward?”
“Murphy.”
“Murphy?”
“Yeah. He wanted to apologize.”
“Apologize?”
“For taking that sale. For taking my customer. Felt guilty.”
“Is that so?”
“Wanted me to forgive him.”
“Well, for God’s sake.”
“Been drinking.”
“Imagine that.”
“Yeah. Poor bastard.”
“I guess he’s got a conscience after all.”
Edward watched numbly as Idella went back to counting change, sliding pennies across the counter with two fingers into groups of ten.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Let’s close up and go for a ride up in Gorham.”
“That does sound good. I like a drive in the night air.”
“Put the money in the bag.”
“I’ll be done in a minute. Go take care of that ice cream. It’s dripping all down your shirt front.”
Edward sat in the car waiting for Idella to make the night deposit. Christ, she acted like a criminal, looking both ways when she crossed Main Street to be sure no one was watching, holding the locked deposit bag up under her armpit. And so slow. Poking, poking. He wanted to get going.
“There,” she said when she finally climbed in next to him. “That’s safely done.” Edward started out onto Main Street as she closed the door. “Hold your horses, Edward! Let me get in, why don’t you? You trying to kill me?”
“Pretty good deposit?”
“Tolerable. We sold a lot of beer. That makes all the difference. Am I tired! I had all them deliveries at once. I thought I’d lose my mind. And in come a big troop of kids to buy penny candy. Them Forrest kids. Someone ought to do something about them. They’re wild.”
Edward got to the light on Main Street as it turned red. Damn! Wait, wait, wait, and wait some more! Idella was going on next to him—what customers come in and who said what. Usually he liked hearing about it, but tonight he needed to move.
There was no traffic driving through town. Everyone was in bed or watching TV. Steve Allen would be bringing on the guests now, the opening jokes were over. He could see the flickery gray lights of the screens as he drove past houses on Gorham Road.
“All watching
The Tonight Show,
” Idella said, “watching Steve Allen.” It was like she’d read his mind.
They got to the open country roads, the farms near where he grew up and first learned to drive a car. He loved driving these country roads at night. It calmed him.
“Don’t that cool air feel good after being cooped up all day?” Idella had the window down and was sticking her hand out. “Look at them horses over there, Edward, with their heads sticking over the fence. You can just make them out. Black horses.” Edward knew that horse farm. Gillie’s Stables, they called it now. When he was a kid, it was the Bracket place. They didn’t have but two or three big old workhorses back then, like his father’s horse had been.
“Don’t them horses look pretty?” Idella reached down, picked up a can of Budweiser from the floor, and popped it open. They always passed a beer or two between them on these evening rides, keeping the can low so as not to get seen by the police. “Mmmmm. Nice and cold.” She reached over toward him. “You want a sip?”
Edward grabbed the can and took a swig. What was he going to do about Iris calling like that? And getting boo-hooey—he hated that. He’d have to talk with her. She couldn’t be calling up at the store. He didn’t know where that was coming from. He wasn’t in this for that kind of trouble.
“You’re awful quiet.”
“Just driving.”
“I know it’s hard sitting in that showroom all day long. I don’t know how you do it. Waiting and waiting, never knowing if anyone’s going to come in. It’s so queer, the way Mr. Murphy called like that. Late at night, too. Do you really think he’d been drinking?”
“You know them Irish. They’re worse than the French.”
“My family was mostly Irish, Edward.”
“And they drank anything that wasn’t glued down.”
“That’s so.” Idella sighed and took a sip from her can. “That’s so.”
Idella and Iris. Most men go their whole life and never even meet a woman whose name starts with
I.
He had two of them on his hands. Idella and Iris. Two
I
s. Christ. What a world. He kept driving, farther and farther up onto the back roads.
He hadn’t meant to get involved with Iris. It just happened—she got thrown at him. It was Dickie, her ex-husband, that got her to come in. Knew she needed a good salesman. Edward had sold him two cars in the past five years, both good deals. When you give someone a good deal, they come back to you. They trust you. They tell their friends. Edward had more people come in and ask for him, by name, than Murphy’d ever have at his funeral. So Iris’d come in and asked for Edward Jensen. Heads turned plenty when she walked in. She was wearing that dress she had with all the buttons. Edward smiled, thinking of that dress. Some kind of green. Or blue.
Iris still trusted Dickie to steer her in the right direction on some things. He wasn’t a bad sort. Dickie. They’d laughed about that nickname plenty, him and Iris. Poor bastard was a drinker. Couldn’t hold his liquor for nothing and lost one job after another. A welder. You can’t be operating a blowtorch and be drinking at the same time. He got canned one too many times, and Iris’d had enough. She left him. Collecting alimony from the poor bastard. Living with her mother, though. Christ.
Edward turned right onto Standish Road. He liked to drive by where the old house used to be. It was just a field now, nothing there. All that work Dad did to make a living. Just lying there flat, something you go by on the road.
“There’s the old place,” he said as he drove past. “That’s where the farm was.”
“Yep.” Idella was rattling paper, opening up something.
“What have you got?”
“Nothing. Just one of them Ring Dings.”
“You got some for me?”
“Of course. You don’t think I’d take one just for myself, do you? Here, hold out your hand.”
“This is a nice surprise.”
“I thought we could use a little something, a treat. It’s been such a day.”
Edward stuffed the disk of cakey chocolate into his mouth. He liked the cream part they put in the center. Idella would eat hers with little mouse bites. She ate everything with them little bites, chewing and chewing.
Edward hadn’t meant to get involved with Idella either. He sure wasn’t looking for what he got when he went to that dance at the Grange hall that night out in Scarborough. Who was he with? Eva Gallant? Cora somebody? Maybe he’d come alone. There’d been quite a few willing to go out with Edward Jensen. They were all glad to be seen with him. He knew that much.
He’d been at the dance for a while before he even noticed her. She must have seen him, though. He was a good dancer. The best thing there. She was sitting alone in the corner with her ankles crossed, her foot wagging back and forth, going along with the music. And her hands were cupped together on her lap as if she was holding some little animal. “What you hiding in there?” he’d asked her. “A mouse?” “Why, nothing,” she said to him, “just air.” She took her hands apart to show him, and they laughed. She had a sweet smile, Idella, a real sweet smile. She was tall and skinny, he could tell that even with her sitting. Taller than him. Edward looked over at her now, in the car seat next to him. He laughed. She still sat the same way. Her ankles were crossed, and she was cupping that pocket of air.
“What are you laughing at?” Idella turned toward him.
“The way you’re sitting. You were sitting like that the first time I saw you.”
“Was I?” She smiled and looked out the window again at the passing fields.
Edward found out from Stanley Hillock that she’d come down from Canada on the train to find work in the States. Idella, Stan said her name was. He’d never heard that name before. He didn’t know he’d be hearing it the rest of his life.
He drove on into the sweet June night. He’d cut in on Raymond Tripp when he was dancing with her. Poor Raymond. Lived with his mother all his life and still sold fish door-to-door. Idella got haddock from him and scallops when he had them. Edward knew she’d like that, being cut in on at the dance. They all did. He’d danced a few dances with her, and then he’d led her out the back door of the Grange and down the steps and out to the trees, where he kept his flask. Just one little sip won’t hurt you, he’d told her. He knew he looked good. Dark hair, all slicked back, blue eyes. The girls always went for that. They always let him know. Idella had been shy, but she didn’t say no. Course, she knew more about whiskey than she let on. He hadn’t met her father and brother yet.
She had that job working as a cook out in Cape Elizabeth. Wealthy people. But nice. They had a little girl named Barbara. Like Shirley Temple, she was. She’d come down to the kitchen when he was visiting Idella and sit on his knee, and he’d bounce her. Pretty little thing. So when Idella was pregnant with their first child, he’d wanted to call the baby Barbara if it was a girl. Which it was. Which they all four were. ’Cause that little rich girl was so nice to him. Idella’d named the others. He’d let her choose what she wanted.
“That Ring Ding made me thirsty.” Idella reached down and got the second beer from the floor and popped it open. She always brought two on these rides, just in case. “This beer is so cold it stings my fingers. You want a little sip, to wash that Ding Ring down with?” Idella giggled. “That Ring-a-Dingy? That thingy?”
“Give me that Bud.” The first beer already had her feeling better. He thought he’d have some fun with her. He took the can and put it against his crotch. “I’ll warm it up for you with my thingy—my ding-a-lingy.”
“Why, Edward.” Idella laughed. “You damn fool.”
“Whenever you want a sip, see, you just reach over and grab what you can.”
“You mean the can.”
“I mean what you can.”
“What kind of talk is that when you’re driving?”
He laughed. “You want it warmer, don’t you?”
“Not really. I don’t want it
so
cold, is all.” She laughed. “Well, give it to me. I want a sip.”
“You’ll have to grab it. I’m driving.”