So we bask for a while, but Jill thinks I’m not trying hard enough, and when she’s listened to about as many of my sobs and slobbers as she can stand, she says, Forget it, and starts sweeping up the kitchen. She has to work around the patch of floor where I’m regressing to my fetal self with the Harvey’s Bristol Cream. She bends the rod in half and shoves the whole thing — curtains and all — into the garbage. Meanwhile I’m watching her feet from eye-level, the hems of her slacks, her cable-textured trouser socks. And I’m also thinking about how, before she married the old man next door who died and left her with an ample trust, she told me she used to go around robbing mini-marts.
Tell that story again, I say.
Which story?
The one where you’re in the car with the boys back East, and the boys have the gun.
She harrumphs a little, says, Why don’t you tell it? Since you’re the one who’s always bringing that old warhorse up.
But I wasn’t there.
Jill lets the contents of the dustpan clatter. I wasn’t there either, she says. My brain was never in the same time zone as the parts of my body below my neck.
Jill’s the only woman my age I know who has a hairstyle that requires curlers — in her sweater and pearls, she could be Lassie’s mom. I offer her the bottle, but she insists on making herself a proper drink, her back turned to me, the glassware clinking against the counter.
So you walk into the gas station. . I say to get her started.
I was never the one who went into the gas station, she corrects. I was always the one who drove.
Okay, I say, you’re driving. You’re in Amish country and it’s midnight. And the boys are in the back seat, bouncing the gun around like a hot potato. They’ve just come running out of the mini-mart with a big stack of money.
You got it. See? You don’t need my help.
Jill stirs her drink with a cocktail fork. An olive floats like a tiny zeppelin between the ice.
That’s it? I ask, thinking there must be more to it than that.
That’s it.
You’re driving?
Hey, I’m driving fast as hell.
She drags a chair over to sit near where I’m curled up on the floor. Jill’s sheltie, whose name is Lois, has all this time been lying in the entryway, on the mat that’s made of woven weeds. She’s been to obedience school, and the way she locks up on command for some reason frightens me. When Jill whistles, the dog instantly unfreezes. Dragging her red leather leash, she trots over to lie against Jill’s shins.
So what about when you drive by one of those Amish guys? I ask. One of those Amish guys riding along in a buggy.
You don’t worry about them, she says as she reaches down to scratch Lois under the collar. You pass them in the oncoming lane and leave them in the dust.
But what about the horses? Weren’t you afraid of scaring the horses and making them bolt in your path?
Jill shrugs. Sometimes you’d look out and straight into the eye of the horse and you could see yourself as you went zooming past. But this would take place in the flash of an instant. And you couldn’t really tell if you were just so high you were imagining it.
The kitchen falls quiet again, except for the sound of the baby upstairs on his planet far away, his cries coming in a language that I do not speak. All I can decipher is that he has one idea and that idea concerns rescue, and he knows how to bypass the brain and shoot straight for the glands, producing two wet spots on the front of my blouse that I don’t want to think about quite yet. I’m still trying to imagine myself in the car, with the boys and the gun and the money and the horses, and this means stepping out of my whole life.
I think you’re going to explode, Jill says, pointing to my shirt.
First tell me how the story ends.
It doesn’t end, she says. You use the gun to get the money. You use the money to get the drugs. You use the drugs to get the boys. You use up the drugs and need more money. So you get out the gun and you do it again. It goes on and on and on.
Lois’s tail thumps on the floor. Her one idea is happy happy happy.
But it ended, I say. I mean, you’re here.
I just got old is all, and then Jill laughs. She is, after all, almost thirty.
But here’s one thing I remember, she says more brightly. Here’s one thing I never will forget. Once we were driving through this tiny town outside of Chambersburg; the only thing this town’s got going for it is a pool hall sitting directly across from the courthouse. The boys are in back and they’re scared, because tonight for the first time they’ve had to fire the gun. They had to let the clerk know they were playing for real, so they fired a shot over his head and broke one of the plate-glass windows, which hung for a split second before it fell like a sheet of ice sliding off a barn roof. And then we lit out down the state road, which before long led us through this tiny town, where they’ve got the speed limit bumped down to twenty-five, only we’re cruising through at fifty. And all this time I’ve been trying to talk the boys down, when suddenly we pass the pool hall with its door flung open on a rectangle of light. It looks sort of like water, and there’s this girl standing in it, wearing one of those filmy Amish caps, the ribbons untied and dangling around her breasts. She must have ditched the rest of her Amish gear after she left her parents’ house; she’s wearing a green dress that’s short and slinky, her legs bare underneath — made me wonder why on earth she kept the hat. Something about wanting to flaunt the way all the rest of us think that we’re stuck with the cards that we’ve been dealt, but I don’t have time to work it out because I’ve got to concentrate on driving because suddenly there’s cars parked along both sides of the street. There was a guy running his hand up her leg, only I couldn’t see the rest of him; everything but the hand was cut off by the doorframe. And she was smoking a cigarette and looking straight at me, like she’d been standing there all her life, waiting for someone like me to come along.
Then suddenly Jill stops talking, her fingers buried in the dog’s deep fur. I can hear the baby, my Martian, making the noises that are making me leak. To him I am just a bag of milk, I know this. A giant milk bag, with a pink-brown bull’s-eye at its center.
So how does she fit in? I ask, wanting to get back to the girl though it’s too late — I know she’s gone. My question will only cause Jill to uncross her legs and smooth her wool slacks before taking up the leash.
I just think of her often is all, she says. You were the one who asked.
A GHOST STORY
This happened back in the days when the girl was working as a flagger, which paid ten dollars an hour back when ten dollars an hour was a lot of money, though perhaps the job was damaging what we would now call the girl’s “self-esteem”—she’d just graduated from college, she’d not expected that she’d have to stoop to flagging. Which meant standing for hours with a sign in your hand, one side saying STOP and the other SLOW, the same two speeds she saw her life operating in. She wasn’t even allowed to make the decision about when to show the STOP and when to show the SLOW; the boss, who mostly stood at the edge of whatever hole they were making, leaning on a shovel, decided that.
It was the kind of job the girl couldn’t function in unless she was wasted; she tried a few times and by the end of the day the cartilage inside her knees developed a serrated edge and her arms filled with ball bearings that rattled down against her lungs whenever she lifted the sign above her head. By three o’clock she’d be pounding on the door of the Port-O-Let until whichever of the guys was in there let her in and toked her up. Then suddenly the texture of everything became more vivid; an oily puddle could occupy the better part of an afternoon. And she was proud of the fact that she never killed anyone, though perhaps this was only a matter of luck. Luck and the fact that the girl was willing — whenever she sent people down the road SLOW when the sign should have said STOP—to throw herself onto the trunks of cars, sounding a thunk loud enough to make them halt.