Homesick for Another World(27)
Those strange painted eyebrows crimped and settled. When she brought the plate of cake, her grubby hand cupped around the lit candle, Paul pushed himself up and scooted out from the booth and stood next to her, staring down at the flame, and she sang to him in Spanish, softly, beautifully, glancing bashfully up into his small, swollen eyes.
? ? ?
At home that night, I sank deep into a bath, played a cassette tape of golden oldies, watched the water turn milky and still between my knees. I got wistful remembering how my wife would stand at the vanity in a pink satin robe, fixing her hair as though I’d care what she looked like when we got into bed. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but she dressed well and had small, sparkling eyes. Emerald eyes, I called them when we first started dating. “Honey” was what she called me. When she first started calling me that, I felt it was dismissive, that she was using the pet name as a way to blanket over everything that was good and distinctive about me, that by calling me “honey” she might as well have been addressing a servant or a dog. But after a while I began to hear the love in it, to yearn for it, and eventually it felt so good, so soothing, that when she used my name, Lawrence, it sounded dry and cruel, and my heart would flinch as though it were being pinched and gouged by her long, cherry-colored fingernails. I slept on the couch that night, the TV flickering like a flame over my shoulder, the succulents creeping in cups and saucers across the mantle, the coffee table, all the window sills, the whole house full of them, my perfect little children.
SLUMMING
You could tell just by looking—grape-soda stains on their kids’ Tshirts, cheap dye jobs, bad teeth—the people of Alna were poor. Some of them liked to huddle on turnouts or thumb rides up and down Route 4, sunburned and tattooed, but I never thought to stop and pick one up. I was a woman alone, after all. And I didn’t want to have to talk to them, get to know them, or hear their stories. I preferred to keep the residents of Alna as part of its scenery. Wild teens, limping men, young mothers, kids scattered on the hot concrete like the town’s lazy rats or pigeons. From a distance I watched the way they congregated, then dispersed, heads hung at midlevel, neither noble nor disconsolate. The trashiness of the town was comforting, like an old black-and-white movie. Picture an empty street with a broken-down car, a child’s rusty tricycle abandoned on the curb, a wrinkled old lady scratching herself while watering her dun-colored lawn, the hose twisting perversely in her tight fist. Crumbling sidewalks. I played along when I went up there, slipping pennies in and out of the dish on the counter of the Gas Plus on State Street as though a few cents could make or break me.
I made an abysmal living back home teaching high-school English, and my ex-husband rarely paid his alimony on time. But by Alna’s standards, I was rich. I owned my summerhouse up there. I’d bought it from the bank for next to nothing, full of cobwebs and tacky wallpaper. It was a one-and-a-half-story bungalow overlooking the Omec River, a sloshy milelong tributary to a lake twice the size of Alna itself. The real-estate taxes were negligible. The cost of living was a joke. The teenage boys in the sandwich shop in town remembered me from summer to summer because I tipped them the fifty cents change they tried to give me. Otherwise I didn’t mingle. I’d made the acquaintance of a few of the neighbors—mostly single moms whose teenage children smoked and strollered their own babies around the graveled driveways. An old man across the street had a long beard stained brassy from cigarette smoke. “Hey, neighbor,” he’d say, wheezing, if I saw him out walking his dog. But I never felt I was anybody’s neighbor. I was only ever just visiting Alna. I was slumming it up there. I knew that.
Clark supplied a steady stream of coeds to occupy the house during the school year. He taught computer programming at the community college ten miles away, in Pittville. I paid him to look after my place. I sometimes got the sense he was overcharging me, inventing problems and costs to inflate his monthly bills, but I didn’t care. It was worth the peace of mind. If something went wrong—if the pipes froze or the rent was late—Clark would handle it. He’d wrap the windows once it got cold, fix a leaky faucet, a short circuit, a broken step. And I was glad I never had to deal with any of the tenants. Each summer I drove up to Alna, I’d find the house altered—a new perfume lacing the humid air, menstrual stains on the mattress, hardened bacon grease splattered on the kitchen counter, a fleck of mascara on the bathroom mirror like a squashed fly. I mostly didn’t mind these remnants. Having a tenant kept the vagrants out of what would otherwise be an empty shelter from September to June. The street people of Alna were notorious for taking up residence wherever they could find it and refusing to leave, especially during the winters, which were, in Alna, deadly.
There was no scenic hike or museum to visit, no guided tour, no historic monument. Unlike where my sister summered, Alna had no gallery of naive art, no antique shop, no bookstore, no fancy bakery. The only coffee to buy was at the Gas Plus or the doughnut shop. Occasionally I drove to Pittville to see a movie for two dollars. And sometimes I visited the deluxe shopping center on Route 4, where the fattest people on Earth could be found buzzing around in electronic wheelchairs, trailing huge carts full of hamburger meat and cake mix and jugs of vegetable oil and pillow-size bags of chips. I only shopped there for things like bug spray and batteries, clean underwear when I didn’t feel like doing laundry, an occasional box of Popsicles.