Devil House(84)

And so, you said, ten or so pages in, you had spent a number of years working on this letter, which you knew was long, but you figured that I, as a writer, would understand that sometimes a story takes as long as it takes to tell it, and while you no longer felt like I owed you a hearing—nobody owes anybody anything, you said—you hoped I was honest enough to give you the time you were asking for. The earliest drafts of your letter had been short and angry, with only a few details about your son, how special he had been to you when you were a new mother: those had seemed most important at the time. You were glad those versions hadn’t reached me; you didn’t believe in fate, but each time your envelope returned to you, you’d taken the opportunity to revisit your theme, to try to make it as clear as you could; and now, if this worked and I was still at this address, you felt you’d gotten to the center of it, and that if I would do my part now, that would be nice. Again quoting: That would be nice.

There was a tack hammer on the floor near me; I needed it to pull up the carpet. I looked up from your long letter to catch my breath, and I thought how it’s not every day that a writer like me has a primary text just land on his living room floor like this; and then I looked at the hammer and thought about the work that lay ahead, and I returned to you.





2.


YOU MET MICHAEL JENKINS in 1953, in the parking lot of the A&W where you worked as a carhop. He rolled up in a Dodge Custom convertible with its top down; there were a couple of guys driving newer convertibles around town, but he kept his clean. It looked cool to you.

A lot of people don’t remember how nice you had to be to everybody back then, if you were a young girl working at a diner, or in an office, or at a soda counter. They don’t remember, or they pretend it was different. But it was exhausting: smile all day, get slapped on the ass a few times when you turned your back on them walking back to the kitchen with their orders or after taking dictation at their desks—younger guys, older guys, they all did it. Even your own mother had told you, as soon as you took your first job, that you should be cheerful about it: nobody likes a complainer and it doesn’t do any good.

So you did as you were told, and, as a consequence, didn’t much like your job most days. It gave you a little walking-around money and sometimes your customers were friends from high school, so that was all right. And then Michael drove up in his Dodge, and even though everybody said he was a bad guy, he seemed sweet on you. He spoke gently and asked you questions, and, after a few more visits, he asked you out to the movies.

I don’t understand, you told me in your letter, because I couldn’t understand, what it meant to you when Michael Jenkins asked if you wanted to go with him to see Blood Alley at the Fremont Theater. You’d been serving him burgers and floats at his car about once a week for at least a month; he’d been so polite and friendly with you that you wondered whether it was all a gag. But it wasn’t, and he’d been a gentlemen the whole time at the movie, too. Which, you said, was a little weird; you had already done your share of making out at the movies by then and it wasn’t usually a big deal. Your mother always made sure you had a small, sharp pair of scissors in your handbag—another of her lessons—just in case. But Michael had to be goaded into kissing you good night for the first month or two.

It changed after you turned eighteen. You mentioned to him, one day, that you’d gotten a portable radio for your birthday, and he said he was sorry he hadn’t known, and that night, before you got out of his Dodge at the curb, near your house but not near enough for your parents to see him from the front window, he kissed you on the mouth, hard, and kept going when you didn’t offer any resistance. His hands didn’t wander, but, you said in your letter, they could have, you were all softened up by then.

I already knew much of the story that followed: How fast things seemed to move from there; how jealous of you all your friends were; how much your parents hated him. How he’d been careful, you saw in retrospect, to stop short of getting you pregnant. How this had only served to strengthen your resolve. Your other dates had been fumbling high school boys; Michael was full grown, and acted like it. Being part of the grown-up world, riding around with Michael, stopping by the garage where he worked, watching TV with him at his apartment on his couch: it felt both more real than the high school life you were preparing to leave behind, and like a dream.

You got married in a civil ceremony without your parents’ blessing shortly after graduation. As it turned out, you weren’t pregnant yet, but the way things were going, you figured, it was only a matter of time. You were right about that. After you moved in, all caution went out the window. Pregnant, you wondered whether Michael would start looking for a house, since the apartment seemed so small, but you didn’t want to be pushy. He’d begun showing a meaner side of himself—irritable, short-tempered—almost as soon as the wedding was over.



* * *



YOU DID NOT WANT TO MAKE THIS A WHOLE SOB STORY about yourself, you said, because that was not the point. The point was Jesse, your baby, who came into this world, and who, you thought, might bring the sweetness you knew was still within his father back out into the light. That sweetness had been hard to come by until you got pregnant; the first months of married life had meant getting yelled at a lot, for almost anything, it seemed. When he yelled, he would put his face up so close to yours that you could feel his breath, and hear the sounds, wet static and raw wood splintering, that a human throat makes when it yells. He yelled when you said something wrong, he yelled when you hadn’t said anything at all. He yelled at the black-and-white television when the sound was bad, and he yelled at you if you talked when he was trying to hear it. But he yelled less after you got pregnant. You noticed, and remembered the presence of Jesse inside your body as a time of reprieve, a more peaceful renewal of the happy times you’d known before you got married.