She turned the washer dial to Gentle and pushed it in. Warm water rushed into the machine like a falls, like a honeymoon, recycled, the same one, over and over.
WHEN MILLIE picked John up at the station, he told her about the buildings again.
“You probably didn’t get a chance to see a play, then,” said Millie, but he didn’t seem to hear her.
“Going in tomorrow to look some more,” he said. He flicked his lighter until it lit. He smoked nervously. “Great cars there, too.”
“Well, wonderful,” said Millie. But when she looked at him there was a grayness in his face. His life seemed to be untacking itself, lying loose about him like a blouse. A life could do that. Millie thought of people in the neighborhood she might introduce him to. There was a boy of about twenty-two who lived down the street. He worked at a lawn and seed company and seemed like the friendly sort.
“There’s someone on the street I should introduce you to,” she said. “He’s a boy about your age. I think you’d like him.”
“Really don’t want to meet anyone,” he said. He pronounced it mate. “Unless I off to.”
“Oh, no,” said Millie. “You don’t off to.” Sometimes she slipped accidentally into his accent. She hoped it made him feel more at home.
In the morning she drove him again to the station for the ten-o-two train. “I’m getting fond of this little jaunt every day,” she said. She smiled and meant it. She threw her arms around the boy, and this time he kissed her back.
AT MIDNIGHT that same day, Ariel phoned from Europe. She was traveling through the Continent — English universities had long spring vacations, a month, and she had headed off to France and to Italy, from where she was calling.
“Venice!” exclaimed Millie. “How wonderful!”
“That’s just great, honey,” said Hane on the bedroom extension. He didn’t like to travel much, but he didn’t mind it in other people.
“Of course,” said Ariel, “there’s an illusion here that you are separate from the garbage. That the water and food are different from the canal sewage. It’s a crucial illusion to maintain. A psychological passport.”
A psychological passport! How her daughter spoke! Children just got so far away from you. “What’s the food like?” asked Millie. “Are you eating a lot of manicotti?”
“Swamp food. Watercress and dark fishes.”
“Oh, I so envy you,” said Millie. “Imagine, Hane, being in Venice, Italy.”
“How’s John Spee?” asked Ariel, changing the subject. Often when she phoned her parents, they each got on separate extensions and just talked to each other. They discussed money problems and the other’s faults with a ferocity they couldn’t quite manage face to face.
“All right,” said Millie. “John is out taking a walk right now around the neighborhood, though it’s a little late for it.”
“He is? What time is it?”
“It’s about midnight,” said Hane on the other extension. He was in his pajamas, under the covers.
“Gee, I miscalculated the time. I hope I didn’t wake you guys up.”
“Of course not, honey,” said Millie. “You can phone anytime.”
“So it’s midnight and John Spee’s walking around in that depressing suburban neighborhood? How frightening.” Ariel’s voice was staticky but loud. The thoughtless singsong of her words sunk its way into Millie like something both rusty and honed. “Is he alone?”
“Yes,” said Millie. “He probably just wanted some fresh air. He’s been spending all his days in the city. He keeps going to the top of the Empire State Building, then just walks around looking at other tall buildings. And the cars. He hasn’t been to any plays or anything.”
There was a silence. Hane cleared his throat and said into the phone, “I suppose I’m not the best sort of person for him. He probably needs a man who is better with kids. Somebody athletic, maybe.”
“Tell us more about Italy, dear,” Millie broke in. She imagined Italy would be like Florida, all colors and light, but with a glorious ruin here and there, and large stone men with no clothes but with lovely pigeons on their heads. Perhaps there were plays.
“It’s great,” said Ariel. “It’s hard to describe.”
At twelve-fifteen they hung up. Hane, because he was reading the Scripture the next morning in church, went off to sleep. But Millie was restless and roamed the house, room after room, waiting for John to return. She thought about Ariel again, how much the girl’s approval had come to mean to her, and wondered how one’s children got so powerful that way. The week before Ariel left for England, the two of them had gone to a movie together. It was something they had not done since Ariel had been little, and so Millie had looked forward to it, like a kind of party. But during the opening credits Millie had started talking. She started to tell Ariel about someone she knew who used to be a garbage man but who was now making short industrial films for different companies. He had taken a correspondence course.
“Mom, you’re talking so loudly,” Ariel hissed at her in the dark of the movie theater. Ariel had pressed her index finger to her lips and said, “Shhhh!” as if Millie were a child. The movie had started, and Millie looked away, her face crumpling, her hand to her eyes so her daughter couldn’t see. She tried to concentrate on the movie, the sounds and voices of it, but it all seemed underwater and far away. When afterward, in a restaurant, Ariel wanted to discuss the film, the way she said she always did — an intellectual discussion like a college course — Millie had just nodded and shrugged. Occasionally she had tried to smile at her daughter, saying, “Oh, I agree with you there,” but the smile flickered and trembled and Ariel had looked at her, at a loss, as if her own mother were an idiot who had followed her to the movie theater, hoping only for a kind word or a dime.
Millie looked out the guest room window — John Spee’s room — into the night to see whether she might spy John, circling the house or kicking a stone along the street. The moon was full, a porthole of sun, and Millie half expected to glimpse John sitting on someone’s front step, not theirs, kneecaps pressed into the soft bulges of his eyes. How disappointing America must seem. To wander the streets of a city that was not yours, a city with its back turned, to be a boy from far away and step ashore here, one’s imagination suddenly so concrete and mistaken, how could that not break your heart? But perhaps, she thought, John had dreamed so long and hard of this place that he had hoped it right out of existence. Probably no place in the world could withstand such an assault of human wishing.
She turned away from the window and again opened the blue notebook on the desk.
More Crazy People I Have Seen in the States (than anywhere).
11. Woman with white worms on her legs. Flicking off worms.
12. Girl on library steps, the step is her home. Comb and mirror and toothbrush with something mashed in it laid out on step like a dressertop. No teeth. Screaming.
13. Stumbling man. Arms folded across his chest. Bumps into me hard. Bumps with hate in his eyes. I think, ‘This bloke hates me, why does he hate me?’ It smells. I run a little until I am away.
The front door creaked open, and shut with a thud. Millie closed the notebook and went out into the living room in just her nightgown. She wanted to say good night and make certain John locked the door.
He seemed surprised to see her. “Thought I’d just hit the hay,” he said. This was something he’d probably heard Ariel say once. It was something she liked to say.