Sweet Lamb of Heaven (24)
And I’m not so sure anymore I need to be hiding us. Increasingly my past interpretations strike me as arbitrary and I pick through them, second-guessing.
There’s a chance I could stand up to Ned, I thought, sitting in the car, a chance he couldn’t make Lena and me do anything we didn’t want to do. Maybe I’m just a coward, I thought, hunkering here, as I was a coward about divorcing him. The line between cowardice and caution was blurred to me.
For a moment, Ned started to look less like a threat than an inconvenience and the future seemed almost simple.
Sitting in Main Linda’s car I lapsed into a daydream of peaceful retreat—retreat to my parents’ house, their quiet street where snow fell in pristine layers over the lawns. Only the few residents of the block drove down that street in winter, only the neighbors’ footsteps marred the sidewalk; the snow lay pure and gently curved on the bushes and old trees of the neat gardens. There would be no cold cement catwalk stretching between the bedroom and dining room, as there was here—no questions to speak of, either, beyond the mundane questions of the design and order of days.
I didn’t relish the part where I, fully grown, would be choosing to live in my parents’ house again, but they would be good to me and I could help my mother with my father, when she needed me. In that way I could do my part. We would stay there and Lena would go to school; I could get a new job, though I’d long since fallen off the tenure track—a community college might have me, or maybe a private high school. I could almost believe in a return to routine, an end to stealth.
I felt the wings of the normal touch my shoulders, ready to settle on me with a bland, insulating protection. I felt hopeful.
“Here you go, dear,” said Main Linda, and I saw we were already at the auto shop. There weren’t many cars in the lot: Saturday. “You want me to wait here till you make sure your car’s ready?”
“No, that’s fine,” I said.
“You sure? It’s no problem.”
“That’s OK. I’ve wasted enough of your time already. He said it was all done. You go ahead, Linda, and thanks so much. I’ll see you back at the motel.”
I regret those words.
4
IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE
B.Q. WASN’T IN THE OFFICE; BEEFY JOHN WAS ALONE. HE HUNG UP the phone as I went in stamping slush off my boots, shuffling them back and forth on the black rubber mat and making the electronic doorbell chime.
“Enjoying your weekend?” he asked.
I leaned over and scanned the bill on the counter, trying to pay attention to the line items as he explained what had been wrong with my car’s workings.
As usual when a mechanic talks to me I put considerable effort into looking interested, even respectful. I was intent on that effort, though it warred against my instinctive dislike of John, when I detected someone behind me, felt or heard the brush of thick, expensive fabric against itself. I registered that the doorbell hadn’t chimed this time and there was a scent, subtle but clear, which I had to identify—much as I wished not to—as a familiar cologne.
Beefy John, still talking about the car, looked steadily over my shoulder; I turned.
“Hey there, honey,” said Ned.
THERE WERE THREE thinly padded, black folding chairs along the wall, beside a fake potted plant with dusty leaves. I sat down on one. The fake plant was two times a standin, I thought, as a fake plant it stood in for a real one, and then the dust on it, the full neglect, made it seem so purely symbolic that it became an imitation not only of a plant but of an imitation plant.
I wished I could stare at that homely fake plant forever, and never, ever look upon Ned’s face.
I was ignoring Beefy John too, or ignoring the blank space left by him, because he must have retreated into the private recesses of the establishment. I felt a vacancy in the space over the counter. Had he given me back my car keys? It was as though I’d lost time, I’d skipped some minutes and found things changed. Instead of looking up I was staring at the fake plant and at myself—but from a great lunar or stellar distance, across a reach of airless space. I might have been a pushpin on a map, a piece on a board game, any tiny, manufactured item on a wide background.
I couldn’t choose a direction for my attention. I failed to assimilate.
“Relax, sweetheart, it’s all good,” said Ned.
His presence and the vapid words were separate—the words, I thought as I gazed at a streak in the plastic leaves’ dust, an impressively hollow comfort. In the instant when I turned from the counter I’d caught a flash of his handsome face, enough to register his features; but now I was insanely reluctant to raise my gaze to him again.
It was insane, I realized that—some kind of rapid breakdown. But I couldn’t change the angle of my head. I sat heavy in the chair, sack-like. After a minute he lowered himself into a squat in front of me.
And even squatting he stayed graceful, not subordinate the way a squat can make you. I kept my head bowed as long as I could, avoiding the solid offense of his beauty. Before me rose an immaculate camelhair coat, unbuttoned; a well-cut dark-blue suit beneath it, complete with downy-white shirt and silver tie; crisp, businesslike wrinkles on each side of his knees where the cloth was stretched taut. Yes: even the wrinkles in his slacks possessed a symbolic efficiency. They bracketed his sculpted knees concisely, minutely telegraphing competence, even mastery.