But that wasn’t it. He kept talking and kept talking and kept talking, and I could see that behind the bland cheerful exterior he was very very nervous, very very embarrassed and ill at ease, and when it finally occurred to me what he was talking about I couldn’t at first believe it.
But he didn’t know about us, you see. The facts of the case, I mean.
The Reverend R. Eugene Plunkett was talking to us about planned parenthood!
I looked at Betsy and she hadn’t gotten it yet. She was sitting there looking at Rev Plunkett with glazed eyes, and I knew she wasn’t hearing a thing. Inside there she was asleep, drugged, mesmerized.
I suddenly felt close to her, I felt as though we were a team, I felt combined with her. For one of the few times in our life together, I felt as though it was us against the world.
I wanted her to share the feeling, I wanted our eyes to meet and our understandings to merge. So I put out my hand and closed it over hers.
She started. Her eyes suddenly focused, a change so great that Rev Plunkett faltered in his maundering, looking at us with bovine alarm. I gave him a reassuring smile, and I guess Betsy did the same, and he smiled back and went on.
Under cover of his fog, I turned my head and looked at Betsy again and now she was looking at me. I still held her hand. In her eyes I could see the question: Why did you wake me? I winked the off-eye, the one Rev Plunkett couldn’t see, and turned to look at him again, meaning Betsy to understand that she should listen to what was being said, there was something in there of interest.
I don’t know if she followed my meaning or not, but she did listen, because when Rev Plunkett, getting closer and closer to the heart of his topic, said “the importance of the size of the family,” her hand, still held in mine, suddenly jerked, then turned and gave my hand a squeeze of comprehension.
I looked at her again, and around the corners of her lips she was grinning. Her eyes were full of mischief, but only I would have known her well enough to recognize it.
So there we were, a team, united by the absurdity of anybody pushing planned parenthood to a girl two months pregnant and her shotgun beau. The delight this gave us cemented us just barely in time for the ceremony and the honeymoon.
Honeymoon? Yes, we had a honeymoon. Birge and Johnny owned a fallen-down shack up near the Canadian border, and Betsy’s family stocked this with booze and canned goods and blankets. Johnny drove us up there after cake and coffee at the house following the ceremony and we were left there three days. Then Johnny came up and got us again, told a lot of dirty jokes, and drove us back down to Monequois in time to get the Albany bus.
The glow of union the minister had so unwittingly given us — the marriage ceremony itself was a bore — carried through the wedding, the bitter coffee and dry cake back at the house, the drive through twilight and night up to the shack, and the first few moments of silence and solitude when we were (at last?) alone.
The shack was one large square room. There was water, but no toilet, that being a privy out back, complete with halfmoon slit in the door. Only time in my life I ever used an outhouse. There was no toilet paper, so we used some old True Detective magazines that were lying around under the bunks.
There was a sink in one corner, with ice cold water coming from the single faucet. Near the sink there was a gas stove, and beyond it a gas refrigerator, both served by the big canister of bottled gas against the outer wall. There was no electricity, so we made do with kerosene lamps and the light from the fireplace. On those rare occasions when I managed to get a fire going, that is.
The shack was slab-sided, so that it looked like a log cabin on the outside and like an ordinary wooden shack on the inside. There were two double bed bunks on opposite walls, wooden, built in. There were a couple of old dressers, an old library table with four kitchen chairs in the middle of the room, and a stone fireplace against the wall opposite the door. The whole thing was very rustic and woodsy, and looked like the set of half the vaudeville routines and stage melodramas of all time.
What we were engaged in was a vaudeville melodrama, though neither of us more than barely suspected it.
Why do I speak for Betsy? How do I know what she suspected, what she thought, what she knew or didn’t know? I can’t speak for her, and there’s no sense acting as though I can.
So. I didn’t more than barely suspect what I was involved in, and I didn’t spend any time thinking about it. Johnny lit a couple of kerosene lamps as I carried our luggage in from the car, then he leered one or two bits of country humor and left. Betsy and I stood in the doorway, watching his red taillights flicker away through the trees, jouncing along the grassy dirt road back the two miles to the highway, and then he was gone and we were alone and the overcast night was pitch black everywhere except for the dim yellow glow of kerosene lamps in the room behind us. We stood looking at the darkness, stood in the doorway with our arms around each other’s waist, and the knowledge of being alone and being tied together and being shackled suddenly for life began to creep in toward us from the dark — began to creep in toward me from the dark — sanity coming out of the darkness (which is the only place you ever find sanity, and why the lost and the crazy and the screwed-up need so much light), and I felt myself thickening, like a can of paint when the lid’s been left off.
Then Betsy, far too brightly, said, “Well! Guess we better unpack!”
So that was the beginning of it. Busy work. Doing things. Bather than stand in that doorway and face the darkness and think our thoughts until we came to truth and comprehension, we turned our backs, we shut the door, we began to scurry about and do things. Unpack the suitcases. Study the refrigerator. Build a fire. Show each other the kerosene lamps. Poke the fire, that’s something you can do often when your wood is so green it hisses. Look at the food in the cabinets. Plan a snack. Cook the snack. Eat the snack. Make love. Make plans. Busy busy, that’s the ticket.
I wonder how many people there are like that. They made a wrong turn somewhere back along the trail, they are hopelessly lost in the woods, and so they keep busy busy busy so they won’t have time to notice. Because noticing won’t do any good, noticing will just make you feel bad, since there’s nothing to be done. Nothing to be done.
And after a while you get used to the wrong road, you get to like it, it’s the only road you’ve got. So then, if something else goes wrong and you lose that road, too, you begin to miss that road. Like I miss Betsy. I shouldn’t have married her, she shouldn’t have married me, whatever love we had for each other was too fragile and too febrile to build anything on, but I got used to the wrong turning, used to the life we lived together, it was the only life I had, most of the time it was pleasant, it was easy, if it wasn’t great at least it wasn’t horrible, and now there’s a great empty hole in the world in front of me, a hole in the future, and I’m marching into this great black pipe with nothing in it but me. All alone. Me.
There was one great thing that happened in the shack. I’d rather think about that than about the future, so that’s what I’ll think about.