just say, "Hi, there George, this is Mr. Businessman's wife, and the guy I've been screwing on the side won't leave. Would you please come on up here and roust him?" That what you're going to say?'
The fright went deep now. Before marrying Vic, she had been a librarian in the Westchester school system, and her own private
nightmare had always been telling the kids for the third time - in her loudest speaking voice - to quiet down at once, please. When she did that, they always had - enough for her to get through the period, at least - but what if they wouldn't? That was her nightmare. What if they absolutely wouldn't? What did that leave?
The question scared her. It scared her that such a question should ever have to be asked, even to oneself, in the dark of night. She had been afraid to use her loudest voice, and had done so only when it became absolutely necessary. Because that was where civilization came to an abrupt, screeching halt. That was the place where the tar turned to dirt. If they wouldn't listen when you used your very loudest voice, a scream became your only recourse.
This was the same sort of fear. The only answer to the man's question, of course, was that she would scream if he came near her.
But would she?
'Go,' she said in a lower voice. 'Please. It's over.'
'What if I decide it isn't? What if I decide to just rape you there on the floor in that damned spilt milk?'
She looked up at him through the tangle of hair. Her face was still pale, and her eyes were too big, ringed with white flesh. 'Then you'll have a fight on your hands. And if I get a chance to tear your balls off or put one of your eyes out, I won't hesitate.'
For just a moment, before his face closed up, she thought he looked uncertain. He knew she was quick, in pretty good shape. He could beat her at tennis, but she -Made him sweat to do it. His balls and his eyes were probably safe, but she might very well put some furrows in his face. It was a question of how far he wanted to go.
She smelled something thick and unpleasant in the air of her kitchen, some whiff of the jungle, and realized with dismay that it was a mixture of her fear and his rage. It was coming out of their pores.
'I'll take the bureau back to my shop,' he said. 'Why don't you send your handsome hubby down for it, Donna? He and I can have a nice talk. About stripping.'
He left then, pulling the door which communicated between the living room and the porch to behind him almost hard enough to break the glass. A moment later the engine of his van roared, settled into a ragged idle, and then dropped to a working pitch as he threw it in gear. He screeched his tires as he left.
Donna finished wiping the milk up slowly, rising from time to time to wring out her rag in the stainless steel sink. She watched the threads of milk run down the drain. She was trembling all over, partly from reaction, partly from relief. She had barely heard Steve's implied threat to tell Vic. She could only think, over and over again, about the chain of events that had led to such an ugly scene.
She sincerely believed she had drifted into her affair with Steve Kemp almost inadvertently. It was like an explosion of sewage from a buried pipe. A similar sewer pipe, she believed, ran beneath the neatly tended lawns of almost every marriage in America.
She hadn't wanted to come to Maine and had been appalled when Vic had sprung the idea on her. In spite of vacations there (and the vacations themselves might have reinforced the idea), she had thought of the state as a woodsy wasteland, a place where the snow drifted twenty feet high in the winters and people were virtually cut off. The thought of taking their baby into such an environment terrified her. She had pictured -to herself and aloud to Vic - sudden snowstorms blowing up, stranding him in Portland and her in Castle Rock. She thought and spoke of Tad swallowing pills in such a situation, or burning himself on the stove, or God knew-what. And maybe part of her resistance had been a stubborn refusal to give up the excitement and hurry of New York.
Well, face it - the worst hadn't been any of those things The worst had been a nagging conviction that Ad Worx would fail and they would have to go crawling back with their tails between their legs.
That hadn't happened, because Vic and Roger had worked their butts off. But that had also meant that she was left with a growing-up child and too much time on her hands.
She could count her life's close friends on the fingers of one hand.
She was confident that the ones she made would be her friends forever, come bell or high water, but she had never made friends quickly or easily. She had toyed with the idea of getting her Maine certification - Maine and New York were reciprocal; it was mostly a matter of filling out some forms. Then she could go see the Superintendent of Schools and get her name put on the sub list for Castle Rock High. It was a ridiculous notion, and she shelved it after running some figures on her pocket calculator. Gasoline and sitters' fees would eat up most of the twenty-eight bucks a day she might have made.
I've become the fabled Great American Housewife, she had thought dismally one day last winter, watching sleet spick and spack down against the porch storm windows.
Sitting home, feeding Tab his franks and beans and his toasted cheese sandwiches and Campbell's Soup for lunch, getting my slice of life from Lisa on As the World Turns and from Mike on The Young and the Restless. Every now and then we jive it up with a Wheel of fortune session. She could go over and see Joanie Welsh, who had a little girl about Tad's age, but Joanie always made her uneasy. She was three years older than Donna and ten pounds heavier. The extra ten pounds did not seem to bother her.
She said her husband liked her that way. Joanie was contented with things as they were in Castle Rock.
A little at a time, the shit had started to back up in the pipe. She started to sharpshoot at Vic about little things, sublimating the big things because they were hard to define and even harder to
articulate. Things like loss and fear and getting older. Things like being lonely and then getting terrified of being lonely. Things like hearing a song on the radio that you remembered from high school and bursting into tears for no reason. Feeling jealous of Vic because his fife was a daily struggle to build something, he was a knight-errant with a family crest embossed on his shield, and her life was back here, getting Tad through the day, jollying him when he was cranky, listening to his raps, fixing his meals and snacks. It was a life lived in the trenches. Too much of it was waiting and listening.
And all along she had thought that things would begin to smooth out when Tad was older; the discovery that it wasn't true brought on a kind of low-level horror. This past year he had been out of the house three mornings a week, at jack and Jill Nursery School; this summer it had been five afternoons a week at playcamp. When he was gone the house seemed shockingly empty. Doorways leaned and gaped with no Tad to fill them; the staircase yawned with no Tad halfway up, sitting there in his pajama bottoms before his nap, owlishly looking at one of his picture books.
Doors were mouths, stairways throats. Empty rooms became traps.
So she washed floors that didn't need to be washed. She watched the soaps. She thought about Steve Kemp, with whom she'd had a little flirtation since he had rolled into town the previous fall with Virginia license plates on his van and had set up a small stripping and refinishing business. She had caught herself sitting in front of the TV with no idea what was going on because she had been thinking about the way his deep tan contrasted with his tennis whites, or the way his ass pumped when he moved fast. And finally she had done something. And today She felt her stomach knot up and she ran for the bathroom, her hands plastered to her mouth, her eyes wide and starey. She made it, barely, and tossed up everything. She looked at the mess she had made, and with a groan she did it again.
When her stomach felt better (but her legs were all atremble again, something lost, something gained), she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her face was thrown into hard and unflattering relief by the fluorescent bar. Her skin was too white, her eyes red-rimmed. Her hair was plastered to her skull in an unflattering helmet. She saw what she was going to look like when she was old, and the most terrifying thing of all was that right now, if Steve Kemp was here, she thought she would let him make love to her if he would only hold her and kiss her and say that she didn't have to be afraid, that time was a myth and death was a dream, that everything was okay.
A sound came out of her, a screaming sob that could surely not have been born in her chest. It was the sound of a madwoman.
She lowered her head and cried.
Charity Camber sat on the double bed she shared with her husband, Joe, and looked down at something she held in her hands. She had just come back from the store, the same one Donna Trenton patronized. Now her hands and feet and cheeks felt numb and cold, as if she had been out with Joe on the snowmobile for too long.
But tomorrow as the first of
July; the snowmobile was put neatly away in the back shed with its tarp, snugged down.
It can't be. There's been some mistake.
But there was no mistake. She had checked half a dozen times, and there was no mistake.
After all, it has to happen to somebody, doesn't it?
Yes, of course. To somebody. But to her?
She could hear Joe pounding on something in his garage, a high, belling sound that beat its way into the hot afternoon like a
hammer shaping thin metal. There was a pause, and then, faintly:
