And I said, “Were you ever married before?”
My mother looked at me strangely. Her eyes got small, and for a moment she looked the way I was used to seeing her — sharp-faced, her mouth set and taut. “No,” she said. “Who told you that? That isn’t true. I never was. Did Jack say that to you? Did your father say that? That’s an awful thing to say. I haven’t been that bad.”
“He didn’t say that,” I said.
“Oh, of course he did,” my mother said. “He doesn’t know just to let things go when they’re bad enough.”
“I wanted to know that,” I said. “I just thought about it. It doesn’t matter.”
“No, it doesn’t,” my mother said. “I could’ve been married eight times. I’m just sorry he said that to you. He’s not generous sometimes.”
“He didn’t say that,” I said. But I’d said it enough, and I didn’t care if she believed me or didn’t. It was true that trust was not a big issue between us then. And in any event, I know now that the whole truth of anything is an idea that stops existing finally.
“Is that all you want to know, then?” my mother said. She seemed mad, but not at me, I didn’t think. Just at things in general. And I sympathized with her. “Your life’s your own business, Jackie,” she said. “Sometimes it scares you to death it’s so much your own business. You just want to run.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“I’d like a less domestic life, is all.” She looked at me, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t see what she meant by that, though I knew there was nothing I could say to change the way her life would be from then on. And I kept quiet.
In a while we walked across 10th Avenue and ate lunch in the cafeteria. When she paid for the meal I saw that she had my father’s silver-dollar money clip in her purse and that there was money in it. And I understood that he had been to see her already that day, and no one cared if I knew it. We were all of us on our own in this.
When we walked out onto the street, it was colder and the wind was blowing. Car exhausts were visible and some drivers had their lights on, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon. My mother had called a taxi, and we stood and waited for it. I didn’t know where she was going, but I wasn’t going with her.
“Your father won’t let me come back,” she said, standing on the curb. It was just a fact to her, not that she hoped I would talk to him or stand up for her or take her part. But I did wish then that I had never let her go the night before. Things can be fixed by staying; but to go out into the night and not come back hazards life, and everything can get out of hand.
My mother’s taxi came. She kissed me and hugged me very hard, then got inside the cab in her powder-blue dress and high heels and her car coat. I smelled her perfume on my cheeks as I stood watching her. “I used to be afraid of more things than I am now,” she said, looking up at me, and smiled. “I’ve got a knot in my stomach, of all things.” And she closed the cab door, waved at me, and rode away.
I walked back toward my school. I thought I could take the bus home if I got there by three. I walked a long way down 10th Avenue to Second Street, beside the Missouri River, then over to town. I walked by the Great Northern Hotel, where my father had sold ducks and geese and fish of all kinds. There were no passenger trains in the yard and the loading dock looked small. Garbage cans were lined along the edge of it, and the door was closed and locked.
As I walked toward school I thought to myself that my life had turned suddenly, and that I might not know exactly how or which way for possibly a long time. Maybe, in fact, I might never know. It was a thing that happened to you — I knew that — and it had happened to me in this way now. And as I walked on up the cold street that afternoon in Great Falls, the questions I asked myself were these: why wouldn’t my father let my mother come back? Why would Woody stand in the cold with me outside my house and risk being killed? Why would he say my mother had been married before, if she hadn’t been? And my mother herself — why would she do what she did? In five years my father had gone off to Ely, Nevada, to ride out the oil strike there, and been killed by accident. And in the years since then I have seen my mother from time to time — in one place or another, with one man or other — and I can say, at least, that we know each other. But I have never known the answer to these questions, have never asked anyone their answers. Though possibly it — the answer — is simple: it is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a border between two nothings, and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road — watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire.
Sweethearts
I was standing in the kitchen while Arlene was in the living room saying good-bye to her ex-husband, Bobby. I had already been out to the store for groceries and come back and made coffee, and was drinking it and staring out the window while the two of them said whatever they had to say. It was a quarter to six in the morning.
This was not going to be a good day in Bobby’s life, that was clear, because he was headed to jail. He had written several bad checks, and before he could be sentenced for that he had robbed a convenience store with a pistol — completely gone off his mind. And everything had gone to hell, as you might expect. Arlene had put up the money for his bail, and there was some expensive talk about an appeal. But there wasn’t any use to that. He was guilty. It would cost money and then he would go to jail anyway.
Arlene had said she would drive him to the sheriffs department this morning, if I would fix him breakfast, so he could surrender on a full stomach, and that had seemed all right. Early in the morning Bobby had brought his motorcycle around to the backyard and tied up his dog to the handlebars. I had watched him from the window. He hugged the dog, kissed it on the head and whispered something in its ear, then came inside. The dog was a black Lab, and it sat beside the motorcycle now and stared with blank interest across the river at the buildings of town, where the sky was beginning to turn pinkish and the day was opening up. It was going to be our dog for a while now, I guessed.
Arlene and I had been together almost a year. She had divorced Bobby long before and had gone back to school and gotten real estate training and bought the house we lived in, then quit that and taught high school a year, and finally quit that and just went to work in a bar in town, which is where I came upon her. She and Bobby had been childhood sweethearts and run crazy for fifteen years. But when I came into the picture, things with Bobby were settled, more or less. No one had hard feelings left, and when he came around I didn’t have any trouble with him. We had things we talked about — our pasts, our past troubles. It was not the worst you could hope for.
From the living room I heard Bobby say, “So how am I going to keep up my self-respect. Answer me that. That’s my big problem.”
“You have to get centered,” Arlene said in an upbeat voice. “Be within yourself if you can.”
“I feel like I’m catching a cold right now,” Bobby said. “On the day I enter prison I catch cold.”
“Take Contac,” Arlene said. “I’ve got some somewhere.” I heard a chair scrape the floor. She was going to get it for him.
“I already took that,” Bobby said. “I had some at home.”
“You’ll feel better then,” Arlene said. “They’ll have Contac in prison.”
“I put all my faith in women,” Bobby said softly. “I see now that was wrong.”