FROM Love Life (1989)
Donald is home again, laughing and singing. He comes home from Central City, near the strip mines, only when he feels like it, like an absentee landlord checking on his property. He is always in such a good humor when he returns that Jeannette forgives him. She cooks for him—ugly, pasty things she gets with food stamps. Sometimes he brings steaks and ice cream, occasionally money. Rodney, their child, hides in the closet when he arrives, and Donald goes around the house talking loudly about the little boy named Rodney who used to live there—the one who fell into a septic tank, or the one stolen by gypsies. The stories change. Rodney usually stays in the closet until he has to pee, and then he hugs his father’s knees, forgiving him, just as Jeannette does. The way Donald saunters through the door, swinging a six-pack of beer, with a big grin on his face, takes her breath away. He leans against the door facing, looking sexy in his baseball cap and his shaggy red beard and his sunglasses. He wears sunglasses to be like the Blues Brothers, but he in no way resembles either of the Blues Brothers. I should have my head examined, Jeannette thinks.
The last time Donald was home, they went to the shopping center to buy Rodney some shoes advertised on sale. They stayed at the shopping center half the afternoon, just looking around. Donald and Rodney played video games. Jeannette felt they were a normal family. Then, in the parking lot, they stopped to watch a man on a platform demonstrating snakes. Children were petting a twelve-foot python coiled around the man’s shoulders. Jeannette felt faint.
“Snakes won’t hurt you unless you hurt them,” said Donald as Rodney stroked the snake.
“It feels like chocolate,” he said.
The snake man took a tarantula from a plastic box and held it lovingly in his palm. He said, “If you drop a tarantula, it will shatter like a Christmas ornament.”
“I hate this,” said Jeannette.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Donald.
Jeannette felt her family disintegrating like a spider shattering as Donald hurried them away from the shopping center. Rodney squalled and Donald dragged him along. Jeannette wanted to stop for ice cream. She wanted them all to sit quietly together in a booth, but Donald rushed them to the car, and he drove them home in silence, his face growing grim.
“Did you have bad dreams about the snakes?” Jeannette asked Rodney the next morning at breakfast. They were eating pancakes made with generic pancake mix. Rodney slapped his fork in the pond of syrup on his pancakes. “The black racer is the farmer’s friend,” he said soberly, repeating a fact learned from the snake man.
“Big Bertha kept black racers,” said Donald. “She trained them for the 500.” Donald doesn’t tell Rodney ordinary children’s stories. He tells him a series of strange stories he makes up about Big Bertha. Big Bertha is what he calls the huge strip-mining machine in Muhlenberg County, but he has Rodney believing that Big Bertha is a female version of Paul Bunyan.
“Snakes don’t run in the 500,” said Rodney.
“This wasn’t the Indy 500 or the Daytona 500—none of your wellknown 500s,” said Donald. “This was the Possum Trot 500, and it was a long time ago. Big Bertha started the original 500, with snakes. Black racers and blue racers mainly. Also some red-and-white-striped racers, but those are rare.”
“We always ran for the hoe if we saw a black racer,” Jeannette said, remembering her childhood in the country.
In a way, Donald’s absences are a fine arrangement, even considerate. He is sparing them his darkest moods, when he can’t cope with his memories of Vietnam. Vietnam had never seemed such a meaningful fact until a couple of years ago, when he grew depressed and moody, and then he started going away to Central City. He frightened Jeannette, and she always said the wrong thing in her efforts to soothe him. If the welfare people find out he is spending occasional weekends at home, and even bringing some money, they will cut off her assistance. She applied for welfare because she can’t depend on him to send money, but she knows he blames her for losing faith in him. He isn’t really working regularly at the strip mines. He is mostly just hanging around there, watching the land being scraped away, trees coming down, bushes flung in the air. Sometimes he operates a steam shovel, and when he comes home his clothes are filled with the clay and it is caked on his shoes. The clay is the color of butterscotch pudding.
At first, he tried to explain to Jeannette. He said, “If we could have had tanks over there as big as Big Bertha, we wouldn’t have lost the war. Strip mining is just like what we were doing over there. We were stripping off the top. The topsoil is like the culture and the people, the best part of the land and the country. America was just stripping off the top, the best. We ruined it. Here, at least the coal companies have to plant vetch and loblolly pines and all kinds of trees and bushes. If we’d done that in Vietnam, maybe we’d have left that country in better shape.”
“Wasn’t Vietnam a long time ago?” Jeanette asked.
She didn’t want to hear about Vietnam. She thought it was unhealthy to dwell on it so much. He should live in the present. Her mother is afraid Donald will do something violent, because she once read in the newspaper that a veteran in Louisville held his little girl hostage in their apartment until he had a shootout with the police and was killed. But Jeannette can’t imagine Donald doing anything so extreme. When she first met him, several years ago, at her parents’ pit-barbecue luncheonette, where she was working then, he had a good job at a lumberyard and he dressed nicely. He took her out to eat at a fancy restaurant. They got plastered and ended up in a motel in Tupelo, Mississippi, on Elvis Presley Boulevard. Back then, he talked nostalgically about his year in Vietnam, about how beautiful it was, how different the people were. He could never seem to explain what he meant. “They’re just different,” he said.
They went riding around in a yellow 1957 Chevy convertible. He drives too fast now, but he didn’t then, maybe because he was so protective of the car. It was a classic. He sold it three years ago and made a good profit. About the time he sold the Chevy, his moods began changing, his even-tempered nature shifting, like driving on a smooth interstate and then switching to a secondary road. He had headaches and bad dreams. But his nightmares seemed trivial. He dreamed of riding a train through the Rocky Mountains, of hijacking a plane to Cuba, of stringing up barbed wire around the house. He dreamed he lost a doll. He got drunk and rammed the car, the Chevy’s successor, into a Civil War statue in front of the courthouse. When he got depressed over the meaninglessness of his job, Jeannette felt guilty about spending money on something nice for the house, and she tried to make him feel his job had meaning by reminding him that, after all, they had a child to think of. “I don’t like his name,” Donald said once. “What a stupid name. Rodney. I never did like it.”
Rodney has dreams about Big Bertha, echoes of his father’s nightmare, like TV cartoon versions of Donald’s memories of the war. But Rodney loves the stories, even though they are confusing, with lots of loose ends. The latest in the Big Bertha series is “Big Bertha and the Neutron Bomb.” Last week it was “Big Bertha and the MX Missile.” In the new story, Big Bertha takes a trip to California to go surfing with Big Mo, her male counterpart. On the beach, corn dogs and snow cones are free and the surfboards turn into dolphins. Everyone is having fun until the neutron bomb comes. Rodney loves the part where everyone keels over dead. Donald acts it out, collapsing on the rug. All the dolphins and the surfers keel over, everyone except Big Bertha. Big Bertha is so big she is immune to the neutron bomb.
“Those stories aren’t true,” Jeannette tells Rodney.
Rodney staggers and falls down on the rug, his arms and legs akimbo. He gets the giggles and can’t stop. When his spasms finally subside, he says, “I told Scottie Bidwell about Big Bertha and he didn’t believe me.”
Donald picks Rodney up under the armpits and sets him upright. “You tell Scottie Bidwell if he saw Big Bertha he would pee in his pants on the spot, he would be so impressed.”
“Are you scared of Big Bertha?”
“No, I’m not. Big Bertha is just like a wonderful woman, a big fat woman who can sing the blues. Have you ever heard Big Mama Thornton?”
“No.”
“Well, Big Bertha’s like her, only she’s the size of a tall building. She’s slow as a turtle and when she crosses the road they have to reroute traffic. She’s big enough to straddle a four-lane highway. She’s so tall she can see all the way to Tennessee, and when she belches, there’s a tornado. She’s really something. She can even fly.”
“She’s too big to fly,” Rodney says doubtfully. He makes a face like a wadded-up washrag and Donald wrestles him to the floor again.
Donald has been drinking all evening, but he isn’t drunk. The ice cubes melt and he pours the drink out and refills it. He keeps on talking. Jeannette cannot remember him talking so much about the war. He is telling her about an ammunitions dump. Jeannette had the vague idea that an ammo dump is a mound of shotgun shells, heaps of cartridge casings and bomb shells, or whatever is left over, a vast waste pile from the war, but Donald says that is wrong. He has spent an hour describing it in detail, so that she will understand.
He refills the glass with ice, some 7-Up, and a shot of Jim Beam. He slams doors and drawers, looking for a compass. Jeannette can’t keep track of the conversation. It doesn’t matter that her hair is uncombed and her lipstick eaten away. He isn’t seeing her.
“I want to draw the compound for you,” he says, sitting down at the table with a sheet of Rodney’s tablet paper.
Donald draws the map in red and blue ballpoint, with asterisks and technical labels that mean nothing to her. He draws some circles with the compass and measures some angles. He makes a red dot on an oblique line, a path that leads to the ammo dump.
“That’s where I was. Right there,” he says. “There was a water buffalo that tripped a land mine and its horn just flew off and stuck in the wall of the barracks like a machete thrown backhanded.” He puts a dot where the land mine was, and he doodles awhile with the red ballpoint pen, scribbling something on the edge of the map that looks like feathers. “The dump was here and I was there and over there was where we piled the sandbags. And here were the tanks.” He draws tanks, a row of squares with handles—guns sticking out.
“Why are you going to so much trouble to tell me about a buffalo horn that got stuck in a wall?” she wants to know.
But Donald just looks at her as though she has asked something obvious.
“Maybe I could understand if you’d let me,” she says cautiously.
“You could never understand.” He draws another tank.
In bed, it is the same as it has been since he started going away to Central City—the way he claims his side of the bed, turning away from her. Tonight, she reaches for him and he lets her be close to him. She cries for a while and he lies there, waiting for her to finish, as though she were merely putting on makeup.
“Do you want me to tell you a Big Bertha story?” he asks playfully.
“You act like you’re in love with Big Bertha.”
He laughs, breathing on her. But he won’t come closer.
“You don’t care what I look like anymore,” she says. “What am I supposed to think?”
“There’s nobody else. There’s not anybody but you.”
Loving a giant machine is incomprehensible to Jeannette. There must be another woman, someone that large in his mind. Jeannette has seen the strip-mining machine. The top of the crane is visible beyond a rise along the parkway. The strip mining is kept just out of sight of travelers because it would give them a poor image of Kentucky.
For three weeks, Jeannette has been seeing a psychologist at the free mental health clinic. He’s a small man from out of state. His name is Dr. Robinson, but she calls him The Rapist, because the word therapist can be divided into two words, the rapist. He doesn’t think her joke is clever, and he acts as though he has heard it a thousand times before. He has a habit of saying, “Go with that feeling,” the same way Bob Newhart did on his old TV show. It’s probably the first lesson in the textbook, Jeannette thinks.
She told him about Donald’s last days on his job at the lumberyard—how he let the stack of lumber fall deliberately and didn’t know why, and about how he went away soon after that, and how the Big Bertha stories started. Dr. Robinson seems to be waiting for her to make something out of it all, but it’s maddening that he won’t tell her what to do. After three visits, Jeannette has grown angry with him, and now she’s holding back things. She won’t tell him whether Donald slept with her or not when he came home last. Let him guess, she thinks.
“Talk about yourself,” he says.
“What about me?”
“You speak so vaguely about Donald that I get the feeling that you see him as somebody larger than life. I can’t quite picture him. That makes me wonder what that says about you.” He touches the end of his tie to his nose and sniffs it.
When Jeannette suggests that she bring Donald in, the therapist looks bored and says nothing.
“He had another nightmare when he was home last,” Jeannette says. “He dreamed he was crawling through tall grass and people were after him.”
“How do you feel about that?” The Rapist asks eagerly.
“I didn’t have the nightmare,” she says coldly. “Donald did. I came to you to get advice about Donald, and you’re acting like I’m the one who’s crazy. I’m not crazy. But I’m lonely.”
Jeannette’s mother, behind the counter of the luncheonette, looks lovingly at Rodney pushing buttons on the jukebox in the corner. “It’s a shame about that youngun,” she says tearfully. “That boy needs a daddy.”
“What are you trying to tell me? That I should file for divorce and get Rodney a new daddy?”
Her mother looks hurt. “No, honey,” she says. “You need to get Donald to seek the Lord. And you need to pray more. You haven’t been going to church lately.”
“Have some barbecue,” Jeannette’s father booms, as he comes in from the back kitchen. “And I want you to take a pound home with you. You’ve got a growing boy to feed.”
“I want to take Rodney to church,” Mama says. “I want to show him off, and it might do some good.”
“People will think he’s an orphan,” Dad says.
“I don’t care,” Mama says. “I just love him to pieces and I want to take him to church. Do you care if I take him to church, Jeannette?”
“No. I don’t care if you take him to church.” She takes the pound of barbecue from her father. Grease splotches the brown wrapping paper. Dad has given them so much barbecue that Rodney is burned out on it and won’t eat it anymore.
Jeannette wonders if she would file for divorce if she could get a job. It is a thought—for the child’s sake, she thinks. But there aren’t many jobs around. With the cost of a baby-sitter, it doesn’t pay her to work. When Donald first went away, her mother kept Rodney and she had a good job, waitressing at a steak house, but the steak house burned down one night—a grease fire in the kitchen. After that, she couldn’t find a steady job, and she was reluctant to ask her mother to keep Rodney again because of her bad hip. At the steak house, men gave her tips and left their telephone numbers on the bill when they paid. They tucked dollar bills and notes in the pockets of her apron. One note said, “I want to hold your muffins.” They were real-estate developers and businessmen on important missions for the Tennessee Valley Authority. They were boisterous and they drank too much. They said they’d take her for a cruise on the Delta Queen, but she didn’t believe them. She knew how expensive that was. They talked about their speedboats and invited her for rides on Lake Barkley, or for spins in their private planes. They always used the word spin. The idea made her dizzy. Once, Jeannette let an electronics salesman take her for a ride in his Cadillac, and they breezed down the wilderness road through the Land Between the Lakes. His car had automatic windows and a stereo system and lighted computer-screen numbers on the dash that told him how many miles to the gallon he was getting and other statistics. He said the numbers distracted him and he had almost had several wrecks. At the restaurant, he had been flamboyant, admired by his companions. Alone with Jeannette in the Cadillac, on The Trace, he was shy and awkward, and really not very interesting. The most interesting thing about him, Jeannette thought, was all the lighted numbers on his dashboard. The Cadillac had everything but video games. But she’d rather be riding around with Donald, no matter where they ended up.
While the social worker is there, filling out her report, Jeannette listens for Donald’s car. When the social worker drove up, the flutter and wheeze of her car sounded like Donald’s old Chevy, and for a moment Jeannette’s mind lapsed back in time. Now she listens, hoping he won’t drive up. The social worker is younger than Jeannette and has been to college. Her name is Miss Bailey, and she’s excessively cheerful, as though in her line of work she has seen hardships that make Jeannette’s troubles seem like a trip to Hawaii.
“Is your little boy still having those bad dreams?” Miss Bailey asks, looking up from her clipboard.
Jeannette nods and looks at Rodney, who has his finger in his mouth and won’t speak.
“Has the cat got your tongue?” Miss Bailey asks.
“Show her your pictures, Rodney.” Jeannette explains, “He won’t talk about the dreams, but he draws pictures of them.”
Rodney brings his tablet of pictures and flips through them silently. Miss Bailey says, “Hmm.” They are stark line drawings, remarkably steady lines for his age. “What is this one?” she asks. “Let me guess. Two scoops of ice cream?”
The picture is two huge circles, filling the page, with three tiny stick people in the corner.
“These are Big Bertha’s titties,” says Rodney.
Miss Bailey chuckles and winks at Jeannette. “What do you like to read, hon?” she asks Rodney.
“Nothing.”
“He can read,” says Jeannette. “He’s smart.”
“Do you like to read?” Miss Bailey asks Jeannette. She glances at the pile of paperbacks on the coffee table. She is probably going to ask where Jeannette got the money for them.
“I don’t read,” says Jeannette. “If I read, I just go crazy.”
When she told The Rapist she couldn’t concentrate on anything serious, he said she read romance novels in order to escape from reality. “Reality, hell!” she had said. “Reality’s my whole problem.”
“It’s too bad Rodney’s not here,” Donald is saying. Rodney is in the closet again. “Santa Claus has to take back all these toys. Rodney would love this bicycle! And this Pac-Man game. Santa has to take back so many things he’ll have to have a pickup truck!”
“You didn’t bring him anything. You never bring him anything,” says Jeannette.
He has brought doughnuts and dirty laundry. The clothes he is wearing are caked with clay. His beard is lighter from working out in the sun, and he looks his usual joyful self, the way he always is before his moods take over, like migraine headaches, which some people describe as storms.
Donald coaxes Rodney out of the closet with the doughnuts.
“Were you a good boy this week?”
“I don’t know.”
“I hear you went to the shopping center and showed out.” It is not true that Rodney made a big scene. Jeannette has already explained that Rodney was upset because she wouldn’t buy him an Atari. But she didn’t blame him for crying. She was tired of being unable to buy him anything.
Rodney eats two doughnuts and Donald tells him a long, confusing story about Big Bertha and a rock-and-roll band. Rodney interrupts him with dozens of questions. In the story, the rock-and-roll band gives a concert in a place that turns out to be a toxic-waste dump and the contamination is spread all over the country. Big Bertha’s solution to this problem is not at all clear. Jeannette stays in the kitchen, trying to think of something original to do with instant potatoes and leftover barbecue.
“We can’t go on like this,” she says that evening in bed. “We’re just hurting each other. Something has to change.”
He grins like a kid. “Coming home from Muhlenberg County is like R and R—rest and recreation. I explain that in case you think R and R means rock and roll. Or maybe rumps and rears. Or rust and rot.” He laughs and draws a circle in the air with his cigarette.
“I’m not that dumb.”
“When I leave, I go back to the mines.” He sighs, as though the mines were some eternal burden.
Her mind skips ahead to the future: Donald locked away somewhere, coloring in a coloring book and making clay pots, her and Rodney in some other town, with another man—someone dull and not at all sexy. Summoning up her courage, she says, “I haven’t been through what you’ve been through and maybe I don’t have a right to say this, but sometimes I think you act superior because you went to Vietnam, like nobody can ever know what you know. Well, maybe not. But you’ve still got your legs, even if you don’t know what to do with what’s between them anymore.” Bursting into tears of apology, she can’t help adding, “You can’t go on telling Rodney those awful stories. He has nightmares when you’re gone.”
Donald rises from bed and grabs Rodney’s picture from the dresser, holding it as he might have held a hand grenade. “Kids betray you,” he says, turning the picture in his hand.
“If you cared about him, you’d stay here.” As he sets the picture down, she asks, “What can I do? How can I understand what’s going on in your mind? Why do you go there? Strip mining’s bad for the ecology and you don’t have any business strip mining.”
“My job is serious, Jeannette. I run that steam shovel and put the topsoil back on. I’m reclaiming the land.” He keeps talking, in a gentler voice, about strip mining, the same old things she has heard before, comparing Big Bertha to a supertank. If only they had had Big Bertha in Vietnam. He says, “When they strip off the top, I keep looking for those tunnels where the Viet Cong hid. They had so many tunnels it was unbelievable. Imagine Mammoth Cave going all the way across Kentucky.”
“Mammoth Cave’s one of the natural wonders of the world,” says Jeannette brightly. She is saying the wrong thing again.
At the kitchen table at 2 A.M., he’s telling about C-5A’s. A C-5A is so big it can carry troops and tanks and helicopters, but it’s not big enough to hold Big Bertha. Nothing could hold Big Bertha. He rambles on, and when Jeannette shows him Rodney’s drawing of the circles, Donald smiles. Dreamily, he begins talking about women’s breasts and thighs—the large, round thighs and big round breasts of American women, contrasted with the frail, delicate beauty of the Orientals. It is like comparing oven broilers and banties, he says. Jeannette relaxes. A confession about another lover from long ago is not so hard to take. He seems stuck on the breasts and thighs of American women—insisting that she understand how small and delicate the Orientals are, but then he abruptly returns to tanks and helicopters.
“A Bell Huey Cobra—my God, what a beautiful machine. So efficient!” Donald takes the food processor blade from the drawer where Jeannette keeps it. He says, “A rotor blade from a chopper could just slice anything to bits.”
“Don’t do that,” Jeannette says.
He is trying to spin the blade on the counter, like a top. “Here’s what would happen when a chopper blade hits a power line—not many of those over there!—or a tree. Not many trees, either, come to think of it, after all the Agent Orange.” He drops the blade and it glances off the open drawer and falls to the floor, spiking the vinyl.
At first, Jeannette thinks the screams are hers, but they are his. She watches him cry. She has never seen anyone cry so hard, like an intense summer thundershower. All she knows to do is shove Kleenex at him. Finally, he is able to say, “You thought I was going to hurt you. That’s why I’m crying.”
“Go ahead and cry,” Jeannette says, holding him close.
“Don’t go away.”
“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
In the night, she still listens, knowing his monologue is being burned like a tattoo into her brain. She will never forget it. His voice grows soft and he plays with a ballpoint pen, jabbing holes in a paper towel. Bullet holes, she thinks. His beard is like a bird’s nest, woven with dark corn silks.
“This is just a story,” he says. “Don’t mean nothing. Just relax.” She is sitting on the hard edge of the kitchen chair, her toes cold on the floor, waiting. His tears have dried up and left a slight catch in his voice.
“We were in a big camp near a village. It was pretty routine and kind of soft there for a while. Now and then we’d go into Da Nang and whoop it up. We had been in the jungle for several months, so the two months at this village was a sort of rest—an R and R almost. Don’t shiver. This is just a little story. Don’t mean nothing! This is nothing, compared to what I could tell you. Just listen. We lost our fear. At night there would be some incoming and we’d see these tracers in the sky, like shooting stars up close, but it was all pretty minor and we didn’t take it seriously, after what we’d been through. In the village I knew this Vietnamese family—a woman and her two daughters. They sold Cokes and beer to GIs. The oldest daughter was named Phan. She could speak a little English. She was really smart. I used to go see them in their hooch in the afternoons—in the siesta time of day. It was so hot there. Phan was beautiful, like the country. The village was ratty, but the country was pretty. And she was beautiful, just like she had grown up out of the jungle, like one of those flowers that bloomed high up in the trees and freaked us out sometimes, thinking it was a sniper. She was so gentle, with these eyes shaped like peach pits, and she was no bigger than a child of maybe thirteen or fourteen. I felt funny about her size at first, but later it didn’t matter. It was just some wonderful feature about her, like a woman’s hair, or her breasts.”
He stops and listens, the way they used to listen for crying sounds when Rodney was a baby. He says, “She’d take those big banana leaves and fan me while I lay there in the heat.”
“I didn’t know they had bananas over there.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know! Listen! Phan was twenty-three, and her brothers were off fighting. I never even asked which side they were fighting on.” He laughs. “She got a kick out of the word fan. I told her that fan was the same word as her name. She thought I meant her name was banana. In Vietnamese the same word can have a dozen different meanings, depending on your tone of voice. I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
“No. What happened to her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is that the end of the story?”
“I don’t know.” Donald pauses, then goes on talking about the village, the girl, the banana leaves, talking in a monotone that is making Jeannette’s flesh crawl. He could be the news radio from the next room.
“You must have really liked that place. Do you wish you could go back there to find out what happened to her?”
“It’s not there anymore,” he says. “It blew up.”
Donald abruptly goes to the bathroom. She hears the water running, the pipes in the basement shaking.
“It was so pretty,” he says when he returns. He rubs his elbow absentmindedly. “That jungle was the most beautiful place in the world. You’d have thought you were in paradise. But we blew it sky-high.”
In her arms, he is shaking, like the pipes in the basement, which are still vibrating. Then the pipes let go, after a long shudder, but he continues to tremble.
They are driving to the Veterans Hospital. It was Donald’s idea. She didn’t have to persuade him. When she made up the bed that morning—with a finality that shocked her, as though she knew they wouldn’t be in it again together—he told her it would be like R and R. Rest was what he needed. Neither of them had slept at all during the night. Jeannette felt she had to stay awake, to listen for more.
“Talk about strip mining,” she says now. “That’s what they’ll do to your head. They’ll dig out all those ugly memories, I hope. We don’t need them around here.” She pats his knee.
It is a cloudless day, not the setting for this sober journey. She drives and Donald goes along obediently, with the resignation of an old man being taken to a rest home. They are driving through southern Illinois, known as Little Egypt, for some obscure reason Jeannette has never understood. Donald still talks, but very quietly, without urgency. When he points out the scenery, Jeannette thinks of the early days of their marriage, when they would take a drive like this and laugh hysterically. Now Jeannette points out funny things they see. The Little Egypt Hot Dog World, Pharaoh Cleaners, Pyramid Body Shop. She is scarcely aware that she is driving, and when she sees a sign, LITTLE EGYPT STARLITE CLUB, she is confused for a moment, wondering where she has been transported.
As they part, he asks, “What will you tell Rodney if I don’t come back? What if they keep me here indefinitely?”
“You’re coming back. I’m telling him you’re coming back soon.”
“Tell him I went off with Big Bertha. Tell him she’s taking me on a sea cruise, to the South Seas.”
“No. You can tell him that yourself.”
He starts singing “Sea Cruise.” He grins at her and pokes her in the ribs.
“You’re coming back,” she says.
Donald writes from the VA Hospital, saying that he is making progress. They are running tests, and he meets in a therapy group in which all the veterans trade memories. Jeannette is no longer on welfare because she now has a job waitressing at Fred’s Family Restaurant. She waits on families, waits for Donald to come home so they can come here and eat together like a family. The fathers look at her with downcast eyes, and the children throw food. While Donald is gone, she rearranges the furniture. She reads some books from the library. She does a lot of thinking. It occurs to her that even though she loved him, she has thought of Donald primarily as a husband, a provider, someone whose name she shared, the father of her child, someone like the fathers who come to the Wednesday night all-you-can-eat fish fry. She hasn’t thought of him as himself. She wasn’t brought up that way, to examine someone’s soul. When it comes to something deep inside, nobody will take it out and examine it, the way they will look at clothing in a store for flaws in the manufacturing. She tries to explain all this to The Rapist, and he says she’s looking better, got sparkle in her eyes. “Big deal,” says Jeannette. “Is that all you can say?”
She takes Rodney to the shopping center, their favorite thing to do together, even though Rodney always begs to buy something. They go to Penney’s perfume counter. There, she usually hits a sample bottle of cologne—Chantilly or Charlie or something strong. Today she hits two or three and comes out of Penney’s smelling like a flower garden.
“You stink!” Rodney cries, wrinkling his nose like a rabbit.
“Big Bertha smells like this, only a thousand times worse, she’s so big,” says Jeannette impulsively. “Didn’t Daddy tell you that?”
“Daddy’s a messenger from the devil.”
This is an idea he must have gotten from church. Her parents have been taking him every Sunday. When Jeannette tries to reassure him about his father, Rodney is skeptical. “He gets that funny look on his face like he can see through me,” the child says.
“Something’s missing,” Jeannette says, with a rush of optimism, a feeling of recognition. “Something happened to him once and took out the part that shows how much he cares about us.”
“The way we had the cat fixed?”
“I guess. Something like that.” The appropriateness of his remark stuns her, as though, in a way, her child has understood Donald all along. Rodney’s pictures have been more peaceful lately, pictures of skinny trees and airplanes flying low. This morning he drew pictures of tall grass, with creatures hiding in it. The grass is tilted at an angle, as though a light breeze is blowing through it.
With her paycheck, Jeannette buys Rodney a present, a miniature trampoline they have seen advertised on television. It is called Mr. Bouncer. Rodney is thrilled about the trampoline, and he jumps on it until his face is red. Jeannette discovers that she enjoys it, too. She puts it out on the grass, and they take turns jumping. She has an image of herself on the trampoline, her sailor collar flapping, at the moment when Donald returns and sees her flying. One day a neighbor driving by slows down and calls out to Jeannette as she is bouncing on the trampoline, “You’ll tear your insides loose!” Jeannette starts thinking about that, and the idea is so horrifying she stops jumping so much. That night, she has a nightmare about the trampoline. In her dream, she is jumping on soft moss, and then it turns into a springy pile of dead bodies.