Sunburn: A Novel(26)

And so is he.

She finds herself looking for him, at work. Happy for a flash of his forearm as he hands plates through the pass-through. Wanting to make eye contact as she rattles off special orders, as if “Whole wheat, no mayo, no lettuce, extra pickles” is a love song. She tells herself sternly that she is not in love with him. How could she be in love? She doesn’t know him and he doesn’t know her. He will never know her. To be known—there’s nothing riskier. She stands behind the bar, listens to Max and Ernest say the same things they say every day, about the Orioles and the Phillies and how late the tomatoes are this summer and do you think OJ did it.

Burton—always Burton, never Burt, he got angry if you called him Burt—had known her since childhood. They had come up together in the same neighborhood, the good part of Dundalk, although some ignorant people laugh at the idea that Dundalk has a good part. But there are beautiful old houses in Dundalk and they were both the children of steel workers at a time when steel workers did quite well. Their families had nice two-story brick homes, memberships at the swimming club.

Five years apart in age, Polly Costello and Burton Ditmars hadn’t traveled in the same circles growing up. Five years is huge when you are a kid; it might as well be fifty. Then the summer she was fourteen going on fifteen, she bought a two-piece bathing suit. Yellow, no straps, scandalous by the standards of the day. And a bad choice for a girl who was a little overweight and always burned before she tanned. But she wasn’t fat, just not model thin, and Burton cared only about the top half of the bikini. He liked a little heft on the bottom, too. Later, when he began to cheat on her, it was always with bottom-heavy women. Prostitutes, usually. When he was caught, he insisted his choice was chivalrous, made in consideration of her feelings. Because no wife could be jealous of a Wise Avenue whore, right? That was sheer release, that was natural, and she was so exhausted all the time. It was the most considerate thing he could do, if you thought about it. Or so he argued. No, not even argued, said blandly as if it were a fact she had to accept. I don’t like onions. We’ll go to my mom’s for Sunday dinner. I’m going to cheat on you.

“You know why I’m exhausted, Ditmars,” she would say, sitting at their kitchen table, weeping. Early in their marriage, she had started using his surname, the way all his buddies did. Not that they were buddies. Anything but.

The house alone was enough to make her cry. It was okay, but small and cramped, with only one bathroom. She had thought they would enjoy a better standard of living, him being a cop. Crime, unlike the demand for U.S. steel, didn’t have huge fluctuations.

And crime didn’t crawl into the lungs and skin of men, destroying them. Her father had died before the young couple’s first wedding anniversary. Her mother had opted out of the class-action suit, accepted a settlement, moved to a small town on the Gulf Coast in Florida. When she died less than a decade later, people said politely that some marriages were like that, the partner can’t go on, but Polly knew she had killed her mother.

“It was your choice,” Ditmars said when she dared to feel sorry for herself.

“No, not this. You can’t say this is my fault.” She was scared to tell the truth, that she thought he was the one who was accountable, for his indifference and his slowness to respond that horrible day. If they had gotten there sooner, if he had been more forceful. But one night, she did, she said the things that were never supposed to be said and, sure enough, he hit her. Only once, but with a closed fist straight to her stomach, hard enough to double her over.

“I hope nothing ever grows in there again,” he said. “If it does, I’ll make sure it’s not in there for long.”

She would lie in bed at night alone, trying to remember Burton, the shy young nineteen-year-old who had dared to flirt with the fourteen-year-old in the yellow bathing suit. He hadn’t known she was fourteen, not at first. He assumed sixteen, would have been fine with fifteen, and, when he learned fourteen, he said, “Wow, there are laws.” Then he set out trying to persuade her to break those laws. All summer long, in the backs of cars, on blankets spread in spots he said no one could see. I’m dying. I’ll die if I can’t. No, really, I’ll truly die. I’d die for you. Always some variation of death. Until, finally, he decided he could not, would not wait. He raped her. Not that anyone would call it that. Not even her father would call it that. She had brought this on herself. Burton said as much, when he was finished: “I didn’t want to do that.” Weeping, as if she had forced him to be a lesser version of himself.

Then: “I love you.” So it was okay.

They went together for three years. She was too young to go on the Pill without her parents’ consent, but she was careful, truly careful. So they were both surprised when she turned up pregnant at age seventeen. He was twenty-two then, in his last year at UB. “There goes law school,” he said. He had never mentioned law school before. He joined the county police department, and they got married in her third month. In her sixth month, she lost the baby and he was enraged, accused her of faking the pregnancy. Then, he decided he wanted her to get pregnant right away. He didn’t want to admit he had made a mistake, that he could have gotten away without marrying her. He could never be wrong, about anything. In some ways, that was the most dangerous thing about him.

By the time she got pregnant again and had the baby at age twenty-one, he had lost all interest in her, left her alone to care for their child, began running after women. And it wasn’t just the whores of Wise Avenue. He slept with neighbors, a coworker’s wife.