Valentine(49)

*

The great postwar boom is just getting under way, and the war is far enough behind them that people have started to look forward to things. Corrine and Potter stroll hand in hand through the new car lot on Eighth Street. They kick a few tires and take a couple of test drives then pay cash for a new Dodge truck, and they could not be more pleased with themselves. It is a beautiful machine, a new-model Pilothouse, flathead straight-six. Potter talks Corrine into spending the extra money for the long bed, so they can go for long drives and lie back there, and look up at the Milky Way.

*

The minute Corrine starts to show, the principal sends her home with a handshake and a jar of his wife’s locally famous chow-chow. What in the hell am I going to do at home for the next six months, she cries in the school secretary’s office, knit booties? The secretary has seen this before. Her own children have been out of the house for ten years, and while she loves them to pieces, she still wakes up every morning and thanks God she doesn’t have to make anybody’s lunch or help them find their homework. Honey, she says, you’re going to be out for more than six months.

Baby Alice cries every night from midnight to three. Potter and Corrine don’t know why, and they can’t make it stop. They are so tired that Potter develops a tic in his left eye and starts hearing things that aren’t there. Corrine cries and then hates herself for crying because until she became a mother, she never cried, never, never, never.

*

Nights like this, Corrine tells Jon, she can hardly stand to be anywhere in her house. Not the living room or kitchen, certainly not the bedroom. She can’t move any damned thing—not the stack of TV Guides sitting next to his chair, or the towel that still hangs on his hook in the bathroom. She can still see the mark on the carpet from the snuff can she spent forty years bitching about. She can still see the imprint of his thumb on his old steering wheel cover and the gentle impression of his body on their mattress. His shoes are everywhere. She can’t change the television station.

Would Jon like a drink? Because she sure would.

Jon picks up a small book of poems she left on the porch. He holds it carefully with his thumb and forefinger, as if it might go off in his hand. Live or Die. He laughs. Is that a serious question?

Hell, yes, she says. Would you like a cigarette?

*

All she and Potter talk about is money and the baby. Nights, they have fallen into the habit of lying in bed while they argue about everything that’s pissing them off. She is going out of her mind staying at home all the time. He is working sixty hours a week and can’t understand why Corrine doesn’t see how lucky she is that she doesn’t have to. She has discovered that she was completely unprepared for how boring motherhood is. He thinks caring for Alice and the house ought to be enough for her. Why doesn’t she find some other young mothers or go to the church meetings, or something? Corrine snorts and rolls her eyes. Well, that will take care of at least two hours in every day, she says. All this fiddle-faddle about women staying home with their babies, if they can possibly afford to do it, is a three-foot-tall heap of Grade-A bullshit. Potter says he can’t imagine what he’ll say to the fellas if his wife goes to work. Corrine couldn’t give two shits what the fellas think. They roll over and face their separate walls. And so it goes.

*

The shipping operator lost his balance, Jon tells Corrine. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he had a fight with his wife before he left for work, or one of the kids was sick, or some unpaid bill was keeping him up nights. Maybe he was working a double because a man called in sick and the shipping operator had been around long enough to know oil booms don’t last forever. When it came to overtime, he had a simple philosophy. Get it while you can.

Maybe it is as simple as this: he slipped, he fell. Because this was a job the shipping operator had done a hundred times before, and he could do it with his eyes closed, this routine check on a row of tankers parked next to the loading dock at the olefin plant, this last step before they began filling the tanks with liquid ethylene to ship to California. He was already standing on the top rung of the steel ladder, the other men told Jon, when an engineer far down the line gave the go-ahead to add an extra car, and the slack action from the coupling caused the small jolt that shook the shipping operator’s hands and feet loose and sent him rolling beneath the train. And on any other day, he might have been able to scramble away from the heavy wheels before they rolled across his thighs. Might have. But thinking about it wears Jon out, and it doesn’t matter now, not to this man who died tonight on Jon’s watch. It is my job to keep them safe, he tells Corrine.

*

Alice is six months old, and she doesn’t sleep. Corrine stands under a hot shower and leans against the wall, knocking her head against the tile just hard enough to make it hurt. She doesn’t sleep, she doesn’t sleep, she doesn’t sleep.

*

Their new truck drives like a dream, Potter tells her, even as he fights to loosen up the gearstick. And would she just listen to this radio! This is called high fidelity! He spins the volume knob all the way to the right. When Hank Williams and his Drifting Cowboys come on, he smacks the steering wheel and whoops. I been in the doghouse so doggone long, that when I get a kiss I think that something’s wrong— Potter falls silent.

Mm-hmm, says Corrine.

When they get home, she sends him to the store for something and lets Alice cry in her crib for a few minutes. She calls the principal at the high school. There’s a boom on, she tells him, and I’m thinking y’all might need some help down there. Corrine is right, enrollment has doubled and they are desperate for an English teacher. What does Potter think about her returning to work? the secretary wants to know. Maybe Corrine could ask him to give the principal a call?