FROM Love Life (1989)
On Friday, after Beverly dropped the children off at her former husband’s place for the weekend, she went dancing at the Paradise Club with a man she had met at the nature extravaganza at the Land Between the Lakes. Since her divorce she had not been out much, but she enjoyed dancing, and her date was a good dancer. She hadn’t expected that, because he was shy and seemed more at home with his hogs than with people.
Emerging from the rest room, Beverly suddenly ran into her ex-husband, Joe. For a confused moment she almost didn’t recognize him, out of context. He was with a tall, skinny woman in jeans and a fringed cowboy shirt. Joe looked sexy, in a black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped out to show his muscles, but the woman wasn’t pretty. She looked bossy and hard.
“Where are the kids?” Beverly shouted at Joe above the music.
“At Mama’s. They’re all right. Hey, Beverly, this is Janet.”
“I’m going over there and get them right now,” Beverly said, ignoring Janet.
“Don’t be silly, Bev. They’re having a good time. Mama fixed up a playroom for them.”
“Maybe next week I’ll just take them straight to her house. We’ll bypass you altogether. Eliminate the middleman.” Beverly was a little drunk.
“For Christ’s sake.”
“This goes on your record,” she warned him. “I’m keeping a list.”
Janet was touching his elbow possessively, and then the man Beverly had come with showed up with beer mugs in his fists. “Is there something I should know?” he said.
Beverly and Joe had separated the year before, just after Easter, and over the summer they tried unsuccessfully to get back together for the sake of the children. A few times after the divorce became final, Beverly spent the night with Joe, but each time she felt it was a mistake. It felt adulterous. A little thing, a quirky habit—like the way he kept the glass coffeepot simmering on the stove—could make her realize they shouldn’t see each other. Coffee turned bitter when it was left simmering like that.
Joe never wanted to probe anything very deeply. He accepted things, even her request for a divorce, without asking questions. Beverly could never tell if that meant he was calm and steady or dangerously lacking in curiosity. In the last months they lived together, she had begun to feel that her mind was crammed with useless information, like a landfill, and there wasn’t space deep down in her to move around in, to explore what was there. She didn’t trust her intelligence anymore. She couldn’t repeat the simplest thing she heard on the news and have it make sense to anyone. She would read a column in the newspaper—about something important, like taxes or the death penalty—but be unable to remember what she had read. She felt she had strong ideas and meaningful thoughts, but often when she tried to reach for one she couldn’t find it. It was terrifying.
Whenever she tried to explain this feeling to Joe, he just said she expected too much of herself. He didn’t expect enough of himself, though, and now she felt that the divorce hadn’t affected him deeply enough to change him at all. She was disappointed. He should have gone through a major new phase, especially after what had happened to his friend Chubby Jones, one of his fishing buddies. Chubby burned to death in his pickup truck. One night soon after the divorce became final, Joe woke Beverly up with his pounding on the kitchen door. Frightened, and still not used to being alone with the children, she cracked the venetian blind, one hand on the telephone. Then she recognized the silhouette of Joe’s truck in the driveway.
“I didn’t want to scare you by using the key,” he said when she opened the door. She was furious: he might have woken up the children.
It hadn’t occurred to her that he still had a key. Joe was shaking, and when he came inside he flopped down at the kitchen table, automatically choosing his usual place facing the door. In the eerie glow from the fluorescent light above the kitchen sink, he told her about Chubby. Nervously spinning the lazy Susan, Joe groped for words, mostly repeating in disbelief the awful facts. Beverly had never seen him in such a state of shock. His news seemed to cancel out their divorce, as though it were only a trivial fit they had had.
“We were at the Blue Horse Tavern,” he said. “Chubby was going on about some shit at work and he had it in his head he was going to quit and go off and live like a hermit and let Donna and the kids do without. You couldn’t argue with him when he got like that—a little too friendly with Jack Daniel’s. When he went out to his truck we followed him. We were going to follow him home to see he didn’t have a wreck, but then he passed out right there in his truck, and so we left him there in the parking lot to sleep it off.” Joe buried his head in his hands and started to cry. “We thought we were doing the best thing,” he said.
Beverly stood behind him and draped her arms over his shoulders, holding him while he cried.
Chubby’s cigarette must have dropped on the floor, Joe explained as she rubbed his neck and shoulders. The truck had caught fire sometime after the bar closed. A passing driver reported the fire, but the rescue squad arrived too late.
“I went over there,” Joe said. “That’s where I just came from. It was all dark, and the parking lot was empty, except for his truck, right where we left it. It was all black and hollow. It looked like something from Northern Ireland.”
He kept twirling the lazy Susan, watching the grape jelly, the sugar bowl, the honey bear, the salt and pepper shakers go by.
“Come on,” Beverly said after a while. She led him to the bedroom. “You need some sleep.”
After that, Joe didn’t say much about his friend. He seemed to get over Chubby’s death, as a child would forget some disappointment. It was sad, he said. Beverly felt so many people were like Joe—half conscious, being pulled along by thoughtless impulses and notions, as if their lives were no more than a load of freight hurtling along on the interstate. Even her mother was like that. After Beverly’s father died, her mother became devoted to “The PTL Club” on television. Beverly knew her father would have argued her out of such an obsession when he was alive. Her mother had two loves now: “The PTL Club” and Kenny Rogers. She kept a scrapbook on Kenny Rogers and she owned all his albums, including the ones that had come out on CD. She still believed fervently in Jim and Tammy Bakker, even after all the fuss. They reminded her of Christmas elves, she told Beverly recently.
“Christmas elves!” Beverly repeated in disgust. “They’re the biggest phonies I ever saw.”
“Do you think you’re better than everybody else, Beverly?” her mother said, offended. “That’s what ruined your marriage. I can’t get over how you’ve mistreated poor Joe. You’re always judging everybody.”
That hurt, but there was some truth in it. She was like her father, who had been a plainspoken man. He didn’t like for the facts to be dressed up. He could spot fakes as easily as he noticed jimsonweed in the cornfield. Her mother’s remark made her start thinking about her father in a new way. He died ten years ago, when Beverly was pregnant with Shayla, her oldest child. She remembered his unvarying routines. He got up at sunup, ate the same breakfast day in and day out, never went anywhere. In the spring, he set out tobacco plants, and as they matured he suckered them, then stripped them, cured them, and hauled them to auction. She remembered him burning the tobacco beds—the pungent smell, the threat of wind. She used to think his life was dull, but now she had started thinking about those routines as beliefs. She compared them to the routines in her life with Joe: her CNN news fix, telephoning customers at work and entering orders on the computer, the couple of six-packs she and Joe used to drink every evening, Shayla’s tap lessons, Joe’s basketball night, family night at the sports club. Then she remembered her father running the combine over his wheat fields, wheeling that giant machine around expertly, much the same way Joe handled a motorcycle.
When Tammy, the youngest, was born, Joe was not around. He had gone out to Pennyrile Forest with Jimmy Stone to play war games. Two teams of guys spent three days stalking each other with pretend bullets, trying to make believe they were in the jungle. In rush-hour traffic, Beverly drove herself to the hospital, and the pains caused her to pull over onto the shoulder several times. Joe had taken the childbirth lessons with her and was supposed to be there, participating, helping her with the breathing rhythms. A man would find it easier to go to war than to be around a woman in labor, she told her roommate in the hospital. When Tammy was finally born, Beverly felt that anger had propelled the baby out of her.
But when Joe showed up at the hospital, grinning a moon-pie grin, he gazed into her eyes, running one of her curls through his fingers. “I want to check out that maternal glow of yours,” he said, and she felt trapped by desire, even in her condition. For her birthday once, he had given her a satin teddy and “fantasy slippers” with pink marabou feathers, whatever those were. He told the children that the feathers came from the marabou bird, a cross between a caribou and a marigold.
On Friday afternoon after work the week following the Paradise Club incident, Beverly picked up Shayla from her tap lesson and Kerry and Tammy from day care. She drove them to Joe’s house, eight blocks from where she lived.
From the back seat Shayla said, “I don’t want to go to the dentist tomorrow. When Daddy has to wait for me, he disappears for about two hours. He can’t stand to wait.”
Glancing in the rearview mirror at Shayla, Beverly said, “You tell your daddy to set himself down and read a magazine if he knows what’s good for him.”
“Daddy said you were trying to get rid of us,” Kerry said.
“That’s not true! Don’t you let him talk mean about me. He can’t get away with that.”
“He said he’d take us to the lake,” Kerry said. Kerry was six, and snaggletoothed. His teeth were coming in crooked—more good news for the dentist.
Joe’s motorcycle and three-wheeler were hogging the driveway, so Beverly pulled up to the curb. His house was nice—a brick ranch he rented from his parents, who lived across town. The kids liked having two houses—they had more rooms, more toys.
“Give me some sugar,” Beverly said to Tammy, as she unbuckled the child’s seat belt. Tammy smeared her moist little face against Beverly’s. “Y’all be good now,” Beverly said. She hated leaving them.
The kids raced up the sidewalk, their backpacks bobbing against their legs. She saw Joe open the door and greet them. Then he waved at her to come inside. “Come on in and have a beer!” he called loudly. He held his beer can up like the Statue of Liberty’s torch. He had on a cowboy hat with a large feather plastered on the side of the crown. His tan had deepened. She felt her stomach do a flip and her mind fuzz over like mold on fruit. I’m an idiot, she told herself.
She shut off the engine and pocketed the keys. Joe’s fat black cat accompanied her up the sidewalk. “You need to put that cat on a diet,” Beverly said to Joe when he opened the door for her. “He looks like a little hippo in black pajamas.”
“He goes to the no-frills mouse market and loads up,” Joe said, grinning. “I can’t stop him.”
The kids were already in the kitchen, investigating the refrigerator—one of those with beverage dispensers on the outside. Joe kept the dispensers filled with surprises—chocolate milk or Juicy Juice.
“Daddy, can I microwave a burrito?” asked Shayla.
“No, not now. We’ll go to the mall after-while, so you don’t want to ruin your supper now.”
“Oh, boy. That means Chi-Chi’s.”
The kids disappeared into the family room in the basement, carrying Cokes and bags of cookies and potato chips. Joe opened a beer for Beverly. She was sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette and staring blankly at his pocket-knife collection in a case on the coffee table when Joe came forward and stood over her. Something was wrong.
“I’m being transferred,” he said, handing her the beer. “I’m moving to Columbia, South Carolina.”
She sat very still, her cigarette poised in midair like a freeze-frame scene on the VCR. A purple stain shaped like a flower was on the arm of the couch. His rug was the nubby kind made of tiny loops, and one patch had unraveled. She could hear the blip-blip-crash of video games downstairs.
“What?” she said.
“I’m being transferred.”
“I heard you. I’m just having trouble getting it from my ears to my mind.” She was stunned. She had never imagined Joe anywhere except right here in town.
“The plant’s got an opening there, and I’ll make a whole lot more.”
“But you don’t have to go. They can’t make you go.”
“It’s an opportunity. I can’t turn it down.”
“But it’s too far away.”
He rested his hand lightly on her shoulder. “I’ll want to have the kids on vacations—and all summer.”
“Well, tough! You expect me to send them on an airplane all that way?”
“You’ll have to make some adjustments,” he said calmly, taking his hand away and sitting down beside her on the couch.
“I couldn’t stay away from them that long,” she said. “And Columbia, South Carolina? It’s not interesting. They’ll hate it. Nothing’s there.”
“You don’t know that.”
“What would you do with them? You can never think of what to do with them when you’ve got them, so you stuff them with junk or dump them at your mother’s.” Beverly felt confused, unable to call upon the right argument. Her words came out wrong, more accusing than she meant.
He was saying, “Why don’t you move there, too? What would keep you here?”
“Don’t make me laugh.” Her beer can was sweating, making cold circles on her bare leg.
He scrunched his empty can into a wad, as if he had made a decision. “We could buy a house and get back together,” he said. “I didn’t like seeing you on that dance floor the other night with that guy. I didn’t like you seeing me with Janet. I didn’t like being there with Janet. I suddenly wondered why we had to be there in those circumstances, when we could have been home with the kids.”
“It would be the same old thing,” Beverly said impatiently. “My God, Joe, think of what you’d do with three kids for three whole months.”
“I think I know how to handle them. It’s you I never could handle.” He threw the can across the room straight into the kitchen wastebasket. “We’ve got a history together,” he said. “That’s the positive way to look at it.” Playfully he cocked his hat and gave her a wacky, ironic look—his imitation of Jim-Boy McCoy, a used-furniture dealer in a local commercial.
“You take the cake,” she said, with a little burst of laughter. But she couldn’t see herself moving to Columbia, South Carolina, of all places. It would be too hot, and the people would talk in drippy, soft drawls. The kids would hate it.
After she left Joe’s, she went to Tan Your Hide, the tanning salon and fitness shop that Jolene Walker managed. She worked late on Fridays. Beverly and Jolene had been friends since junior high, when they entered calves in the fair together.
“I need a quick hit before I go home,” Beverly said to Jolene. “Use number two—number one’s acting funny, and I’m scared to use it. I think the light’s about to blow.”
In the changing room, Jolene listened sympathetically to Beverly’s news about Joe. “Columbia, South Carolina!” Jolene cried. “What will I do with myself if you go off?”
“A few years ago I’d have jumped at the chance to move someplace like South Carolina, but it wouldn’t be right to go now unless I love him,” Beverly said. As she pulled on her bathing suit, she said, “Damn! I couldn’t bear to be away from the kids for a whole summer!”
“Maybe he can’t either,” said Jolene, skating the dressing-room curtain along its track. “Listen, do you want to ride to Memphis with me tomorrow? I’ve got to pick up some merchandise coming in from California—a new line of sweatsuits. It’s cheaper to go pick it up at the airport than have it flown up here by commuter.”
“Yeah, sure. I don’t know what else to do with my weekends. Without the kids, my weekends are like black holes.” She laughed. “Big empty places you get sucked into.” She made a comic sucking noise that made Jolene smile.
“We could go hear some of that good Memphis blues on Beale Street,” Jolene suggested.
“Let me think about it while I work on my tan. I want to get in here and do some meditating.”
“Are you still into that? That reminds me of my ex-husband and that born-again shit he used to throw at me.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Beverly said, getting into the sunshine coffin, as she called it. “Beam me up,” she said. She liked to meditate while she tanned. It was private, and she felt she was accomplishing something at the same time. In meditation, the jumbled thoughts in her mind were supposed to settle down, like the drifting snowflakes in a paperweight.
Jolene adjusted the machine and clicked the dial. “Ready for takeoff?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” said Beverly, her eyes hidden under big cotton pads. She was ruining her eyes at work, staring at a video display terminal all day. Under the sunlamp, she imagined her skin broiling as she slowly moved through space like that space station in 2001 that revolved like a rotisserie.
Scenes floated before her eyes. Helping shell purple-hull peas one hot afternoon when she was about seventeen; her mother shelling peas methodically, with the sound of Beverly’s father in the bedroom coughing and spitting into a newspaper-lined cigar box. Her stomach swelled out with Kerry, and a night then when Joe didn’t come back from a motorcycle trip and she was so scared she could feel the fear deep inside, right into the baby’s heartbeat. Her father riding a horse along a fencerow. In the future, she thought, people would get in a contraption something like the sunshine coffin and go time traveling, unbounded by time and space or custody arrangements.
One winter afternoon two years ago: a time with Joe and the kids. Tammy was still nursing, and Kerry had just lost a tooth. Shayla was reading a Nancy Drew paperback, which was advanced for her age, but Shayla was smart. They were on the living-room floor together, on a quilt, having a picnic and watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Beverly felt happy. That day, Kerry learned a new word—“soldier.” She teased him. “You’re my little soldier,” she said. Sometimes she thought she could make moments like that happen again, but when she tried, it felt forced. They would be at the supper table, and she’d give the children hot dogs or tacos—something they liked—and she would say, “This is such fun!” and they would look at her funny.
Joe used to say to anyone new they met, “I’ve got a blue collar and a red neck and a white ass. I’m the most patriotic son of a bitch on two legs!” She and Joe were happy when they started out together. After work, they would sit on the patio with the stereo turned up loud and drink beer and pitch horseshoes while the steak grilled. On weekends, they used to take an ice chest over to the lake and have cookouts with friends and go fishing. When Joe got a motorcycle, they rode together every weekend. She loved the feeling, her feet clenching the foot pegs and her hands gripping the seat strap for dear life. She loved the wind burning her face, her hair flying out from under the helmet, her chin boring into Joe’s back as he tore around curves. Their friends all worked at the new plants, making more money than they ever had before. Everyone they knew had a yard strewn with vehicles: motorcycles, three-wheelers, sporty cars, pickups. One year, people started buying horses. It was just a thing people were into suddenly, so that they could ride in the annual harvest parade in Fenway. Joe and Beverly never got around to having a horse, though. It seemed too much trouble after the kids came along. Most of the couples they knew then drank a lot and argued and had fights, but they had a good time. Now marriages were splitting up. Beverly could name five divorces or separations in her crowd. It seemed no one knew why this was happening. Everybody blamed it on statistics: half of all marriages nowadays ended in divorce. It was a fact, like traffic jams—just one of those things you had to put up with in modern life. But Beverly thought money was to blame: greed made people purely stupid. She admired Jolene for the simple, clear way she divorced Steve and made her own way without his help. Steve had gone on a motorcycle trip alone, and when he came back he was a changed man. He had joined a bunch of born-again bikers he met at a campground in Wyoming, and afterward he tried to convert everybody he knew. Jolene refused to take the Lord as her personal savior. “It’s amazing how much spite Steve has in him,” Jolene told Beverly after she moved out. “I don’t even care anymore.”
It made Beverly angry not to know why she didn’t want Joe to go to South Carolina. Did he just want her to come to South Carolina for convenience, for the sake of the children? Sometimes she felt they were both stalled at a crossroads, each thinking the other had the right-of-way. But now his foot was on the gas.
Jolene was saying, “Get out of there before you cook!”
Beverly removed the cotton pads from her eyes and squinted at the bright light.
Jolene said, “Look at this place on my arm. It looks just like one of those skin cancers in my medical guide.” She pointed to an almost invisible spot in the crook of her arm. Jolene owned a photographer’s magnifying glass a former boyfriend had given her, and she often looked at her moles with it. Under the glass, tiny moles looked hideous and black, with red edges.
Beverly, who was impatient with Jolene’s hypochondria, said, “I wouldn’t worry about it unless I could see it with my bare naked eyes.”
“I think I should stop tanning,” Jolene said.
The sky along the western horizon was a flat yellow ribbon with the tree line pasted against it. After the farmland ran out, Beverly and Jolene passed small white houses in disrepair, junky little clusters of businesses, a Kmart, then a Wal-Mart. As Jolene drove along, Beverly thought about Joe’s vehicles. It had never occurred to her before that he had all those wheels and hardly went anywhere except places around home. But now he was actually leaving.
She was full of nervous energy. She kept twisting the radio dial, trying to find a good driving song. She wished the radio would play “Radar Love,” a great driving song. All she could get was country stations and gospel stations. After a commercial for a gigantic flea market, with dealers coming from thirty states, the announcer said, “Elvis would be there—if he could.” Jolene hit the horn. “Elvis, we’re on our way, baby!”
“There’s this record store I want to go to if we have time,” said Jolene. “It’s got all these old rock songs—everything you could name, going way back to the very beginning.”
“Would they have ‘Your Feet’s Too Big,’ by Fats Waller? Joe used to sing that.”
“Honey, they’ve got everything. Why, I bet they’ve got a tape of Fats Waller humming to himself in the outhouse.” They laughed, and Jolene said, “You’re still stuck on Joe.”
“I can’t let all three kids go to South Carolina on one airplane! If it crashed, I’d lose all three of them at once.”
“Oh, don’t think that way!”
Beverly sighed. “I can’t get used to not having a child pulling on my leg every minute. But I guess I should get out and have a good time.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“Maybe if he moves to South Carolina, we can make a clean break. Besides, I better not fight him, or he might kidnap them.”
“Do you really think that?” said Jolene, astonished.
“I don’t know. You hear about cases like that.” Beverly changed the radio station again.
“I can’t stand to see you tear yourself up this way,” said Jolene, giving Beverly’s arm an affectionate pat.
Beverly laughed. “Hey, look at that bumper sticker—‘A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE MALL.’”
“All right!” said Jolene.
They drove into Memphis on Route 51, past self-service gas stations in corrugated-tin buildings with country hams hanging in the windows. Beverly noticed a memorial garden between two cornfields, with an immense white statue of Jesus rising up from the center like the Great White Shark surfacing. They passed a display of black-velvet paintings beside a van, a ceramic-grassware place, a fireworks stand, motels, package stores, autobody shops, car dealers that sold trampolines and satellite dishes. A stretch of faded old wooden buildings—grim and gray and ramshackle—followed, then factories, scrap-metal places, junkyards, ancient grills and poolrooms, small houses so old the wood looked rotten. Then came the housing projects. It was all so familiar. Beverly remembered countless trips to Memphis when her father was in the hospital here, dying of cancer. The Memphis specialists prolonged his misery, and Beverly’s mother said afterward, “We should have set him out in the corncrib and let him go naturally, the way he wanted to go.”
Beverly and Jolene ate at a Cajun restaurant that night, and later they walked down Beale Street, which had been spruced up and wasn’t as scary as it used to be, Beverly thought. The sidewalks were crowded with tourists and policemen. At a blues club, she and Jolene giggled like young girls out looking for love. Beverly had been afraid Memphis would make her sad, but after three strawberry Daiquiris she was feeling good. Jolene had a headache and was drinking ginger ale, which turned out to be Sprite with a splash of Coke—what bartenders do when they’re out of ginger ale, Beverly told her. She didn’t know how she knew that. Probably Joe had told her once. He used to tend bar. Forget Joe, she thought. She needed to loosen up a little. The kids had been saying she was like either Kate or Allie on that TV show—whichever was the uptight one; she couldn’t remember.
The band was great—two white guys and two black guys. Between numbers, they joked with the waitress, a middle-aged woman with spiked red hair and shoulder pads that fit cockeyed. The white lead singer clowned around with a cardboard stand-up figure of Marilyn Monroe in her white dress from The Seven Year Itch. He spun her about the dance floor, sneaking his hand onto Marilyn’s crotch where her dress had flown up. He played her like a guitar. A pretty black woman in a dark leather skirt and polka-dotted jacket danced with a slim young black guy with a brush haircut. Beverly wondered how he got his hair to stick up like that. Earlier, when she and Jolene stopped at a Walgreen’s for shampoo, Beverly had noticed a whole department of hair-care products for blacks. There was a row of large jugs of hair conditioner, like the jugs motor oil and bleach came in.
Jolene switched from fake ginger ale to Fuzzy Navels, which she had been drinking earlier at the Cajun restaurant. She blamed her headache on Cajun frog legs but said she felt better now. “I’m having a blast,” she said, drumming her slender fingers on the table in time with the band.
“I’m having a blast, too,” Beverly said, just as an enormous man with tattoos of outer-space monsters on his arms asked Jolene to dance.
“No way!” Jolene said, cringing. On his forearm was an astounding picture of a creature that reminded Beverly of one of Kerry’s dinosaur toys.
“That guy’s really off the moon,” Jolene said as the man left.
During the break, the waitress passed by with a plastic bucket, collecting tips for the band. Beverly thought of an old song, “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.” Her grandmother’s kitchen slop bucket with its step pedal. Going to hell in a bucket. Kick the bucket. She felt giddy.
“That boy’s here every night,” the waitress said, with a turn of her head toward the tattooed guy, who had approached another pair of women. “I feel so sorry for him. His brother killed himself and his mother’s in jail for drugs. He never could hold a job. He’s trouble waiting for a ride.”
“Does the band know ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’?” Beverly asked the waitress, who was stuffing requests into her pocket.
“Is that a song, or are you talking about my big hoofs?” the woman said, with a wide, teasing grin.
On the way back to their motel on Elvis Presley Boulevard, Jolene got on a one-way street and ended up in downtown Memphis, where the tall buildings were. Beverly would hate to work so high up in the air. Her cousin had a job down here in life insurance and said she never knew what the weather was. Beverly wondered if South Carolina had any skyscrapers.
“There’s the famous Peabody Hotel,” Jolene was saying. “The hotel with the ducks.”
“Ducks?”
“At that hotel it’s ducks galore,” explained Jolene. “The towels and stationery and stuff. I know a girl who stayed there, and she said a bunch of ducks come down every morning on the elevator and go splash in the fountain. It’s a tourist attraction.”
“The kids would like that. That’s what I should be doing down here—taking the kids someplace, not getting smashed like this.” Beverly felt disembodied, her voice coming from the glove compartment.
“Everything is should with you, Beverly!” Jolene said, making a right on red.
Jolene didn’t mean to sound preachy, Beverly thought. Fuzzy Navels did that to her. If Beverly mentioned what she was feeling about Joe, Jolene would probably say that Joe just looked good right now compared to some of the weirdos you meet out in the world.
Down the boulevard, the lights spread out extravagantly. As Beverly watched, a green neon light winked off, and the whole scene seemed to shift slightly. It was like making a correction on the VDT at work—the way the screen readjusted all the lines and spacing to accommodate the change. Far away, a red light was inching across the black sky. She thought about riding behind Joe on his Harley, flashing through the dark on a summer night, cool in the wind, with sparkling, mysterious lights flickering off the lake.
The music from the night before was still playing in Beverly’s head when she got home Sunday afternoon. It was exhilarating, like something she knew well but hadn’t thought of in years. It came soaring up through her with a luxurious clarity. She could still hear the henna-haired waitress saying, “Are you talking about my big hoofs?” Beverly’s dad used to say, “Oh, my aching dogs!” She clicked “Radar Love” into the cassette player and turned the volume up loud. She couldn’t help dancing to its hard frenzy. “Radar Love” made her think of Joe’s Fuzzbuster, which he bought after he got two speeding tickets in one month. One time, he told the children his razor was a Fuzzbuster. Speeding, she whirled joyfully through the hall.
The song was only halfway through when Joe arrived with the kids—unexpectedly early. Kerry ejected the tape. Sports voices hollered out from the TV. Whenever the kids returned from their weekends, they plowed through the place, unloading their belongings and taking inventory of what they had left behind. Tammy immediately flung all her toys out of her toybox, looking for a rag doll she had been worried about. Joe said she had cried about it yesterday.
“How was the dentist?” Beverly asked Shayla.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Shayla, who was dumping dirty clothes on top of the washing machine.
“Forty bucks for one stupid filling,” Joe said.
Joe had such a loud voice that he always came on too strong. Beverly remembered with embarrassment the time he called up Sears and terrorized the poor clerk over a flaw in a sump pump, when it wasn’t the woman’s fault. But now he lowered his voice to a quiet, confidential tone and said to Beverly in the kitchen, “Yesterday at the lake Shayla said she wished you were there with us, and I tried to explain to her how you had to have some time for yourself, how you said you had to have your own space and find yourself—you know, all that crap on TV. She seemed to get a little depressed, and I thought maybe I’d said the wrong thing, but a little later she said she’d been thinking, and she knew what you meant.”
“She’s smart,” Beverly said. Her cheeks were burning. She popped ice cubes out of a tray and began pouring Coke into a glass of ice.
“She gets it honest—she’s got smart parents,” he said with a grin.
Beverly drank the Coke while it was still foaming. Bubbles burst on her nose. “It’s not crap on TV,” she said angrily. “How can you say that?”
He looked hurt. She observed the dimple on his chin, the corresponding kink of his hairline above his ear, the way his hat shaded his eyes and deepened their fire. Even if he lived to be a hundred, Joe would still have those seductive eyes. Kerry wandered into the kitchen, dragging a green dinosaur by a hind foot. “We didn’t have any corny cakes,” he whined. He meant cornflakes.
“Why didn’t Daddy get you some?”
After Kerry drifted away, Joe said, “I’m going to South Carolina in a couple of weeks. Check it out and try to find a place to live.”
Beverly opened the freezer and took chicken thighs out to thaw, then began clearing dishes to keep from bursting into tears.
“Columbia’s real progressive,” he said. “Lots of businesses are relocating there. It’s a place on the way up.”
The foam had settled on her Coke, and she poured some more. She began loading the dishwasher. One of her new nonstick pans already had a scratch.
“How was Memphis?” Joe asked, his hand on the kitchen doorknob.
“Fine,” she said. “Jolene had too many Fuzzy Navels.”
“That figures.”
Shayla rushed in then and said, “Daddy, you got to fix that thing in my closet. The door won’t close.”
“That track at the top? Not again! I don’t have time to work on it right now.”
“He doesn’t live here,” Beverly said to Shayla.
“Well, my closet’s broke, and who’s going to fix it?” Shayla threw up her hands and stomped out of the kitchen.
Joe said, “You know, in the future, if we’re going to keep this up, we’re going to have to learn to carry on a better conversation, because this stinks.” He adjusted his hat, setting it firmly on his head. “You’re so full of wants you don’t know what you want,” he said.
Through the glass section of the door she could see him walking to his truck with his hands in his pockets. She had seen him march out the door exactly that way so many times before—whenever he didn’t want to hear what was coming next, or when he thought he had had the last word. She hurried out to speak to him, but he was already pulling away, gunning his engine loudly. She watched him disappear, his tail-lights winking briefly at a stop sign. She felt ashamed.
Beverly paused beside the young pin-oak tree at the corner of the driveway. When Joe planted it, there were hardly any trees in the subdivision. All the houses were built within the last ten years, and the trees were still spindly. The house just to her left was Mrs. Grim’s. She was a widow and kept cats. On the other side, a German police dog in a backyard pen spent his time barking across Beverly’s yard at Mrs. Grim’s cats. The man who owned the dog operated a video store, and his wife mysteriously spent several weeks a year out of town. When she was away her husband stayed up all night watching TV, like a child freed from rules. Beverly could see his light on when she got up in the night with the kids. She had never really noticed that the bricks of all three houses were a mottled red and gray, like uniformly splattered paint. There was a row of vertical bricks supporting each window. She stood at the foot of the driveway feeling slightly amazed that she should be stopped in her tracks at this particular time and place.
It ought to be so easy to work out what she really wanted. Beverly’s parents had stayed married like two dogs locked together in passion, except it wasn’t passion. But she and Joe didn’t have to do that. Times had changed. Joe could up and move to South Carolina. Beverly and Jolene could hop down to Memphis just for a fun weekend. Who knew what might happen or what anybody would decide to do on any given weekend or at any stage of life?
She brought in yesterday’s mail—a car magazine for Joe, a credit-card bill he was supposed to pay, some junk mail. She laid the items for Joe on a kitchen shelf next to the videotape she had borrowed from him and forgotten to return.