“Anybody would be bitter just to be in prison.” Evelyn said, trying to reference something — she thought, perhaps, a study how prison actually created criminals — but it wouldn’t come. She remembered how having a husband in the penitentiary had changed her own status. It was an education she intended to remember.
“Paul did well in the general prison population. Plenty of people were afraid of him, which is surprising for someone in on fairly small charges. He had a lot of leadership. Depending on who you believe, it may be that he misused it. I’ve got to hand it to Paul, he makes his own trouble.” Geraldine was in full control of the situation.
“This is where it all turns into interpretation.” How Evelyn hated the defensiveness she heard in her own voice.
“Okay.”
“So, I guess that’s it for the facts.”
“You could say so. Some very informed people think he figured out how to burn through the Plexiglas on the guard shacks to release the secured wing. It cost some lives. But what do they know?”
Having heard all she could stand, Evelyn abruptly departed, driving toward home to the sound of hectic, disquieting jazz coming from some low-wattage station on the High Line, whose host implied he was broadcasting from a smokey, hip and urban dive—“bebop, fusion, acid jazz”—instead of this wind-blasted cow town on the Canadian border. Evelyn gave plenty of room to a Nova in the ditch, three annoyed young people regarding the car as though it were a bad dog. On the other side of the street were seasonal vehicles, hunting rigs, firewood trucks, covered in deep snow, that people didn’t care if they saw until spring anyway. Evelyn remembered one of Paul’s favorite pitches about liking women with ideas, and how unwelcome hers had been to him. Approaching her neighborhood seemed increasingly strange: trotting horse wind vanes, ferns crowding snow-covered windows, family names — KUCKER, ORDWAY, GOOLEY emblazoned on signs — amber icicles hanging from roofs bristling with antennas, uncollected newspapers, solitary figures smoking behind windows and watching the street, windowsill figurines, blue glow of TV. It was bewildering.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Paul and even remembered loving him, if that’s what you wanted to call that lurid abdominal yawning. Worse still, how spiffy and cool he was while making love, a stone-faced officer in some conquering northern army. She never doubted that her craving for him was a vice. She’d had crazy spells, telling people she was a cheerleader for the Calgary Flames, wearing a T-shirt with a snarling Rottweiler over the caption: I don’t dial 911. She also had an awful feeling her father was presiding, somehow, or conspiring with him. He would sit back and cast a cold eye on old relationships while Paul changed the rules, abandoned former restraints and undertook, far from federal regulations, the ruin of the competition. “Consolidate or die,” one or the other of them would say, folding up another mom-and-pop enterprise leaving a handful of shallow-margin bottlers stranded by the demographics, soon to be empty, bat-filled, broken-windowed hulls where winos, glue sniffers and unowned dogs could get out of the wind.
The last thing Geraldine had said to her was, “We’ll never really know, will we, Evelyn?” And how confidently she laughed!
“This cruise I’ve just been on was an absolute eye-opener,” Alice exclaimed, “a large group of average people who were quite wonderful. It must not have occurred to me that such numbers of people could be completely normal. I thought that half the world was sick, sick, sick. It turns out, if that cruise is any indication, significant numbers of persons are able to be grateful for life and each other’s company. They do not wish to humiliate one another for sport. My, did I enjoy learning that!”
Later, Natalie remarked that her mother was “just doing her number.” Evelyn found Alice’s diction loftier than normal, but said, “She has certainly conquered her grieving!”
Natalie got right to the point. “You want to tell us about him, Mother?”
Alice tried to look at her sternly, eyes grazing past Evelyn’s in a kind of warning. Then she looked at the ceiling as though pondering the best answer to Natalie’s question, but her mouth collapsed in a goofy, beaming smile. Finally, Alice Whitelaw collected herself.
“Bill Champion and I are together at last. I never thought I’d live to see it.”
All the meekness, all the compliance that had defined her life seemed to have evaporated. Her two daughters suddenly felt themselves to be in no position to ask questions.
Nevertheless, Natalie thought she’d try. “Do you think this is realistic, Mother?”
“Don’t be asinine.” Then she chuckled out of some deep reserve, some private enjoyment. It was all quite unnerving. The songs of humpback whales on the stereo, though scarcely audible, didn’t help a bit. Their mother was offering no direct statements whatsoever, and besides seemed transformed by this new daunting will of her own. She talked about anything she felt like talking about, regardless of her two daughters, who’d brought her a Sunday Denver Post, coffee and croissants, and now sat there among her plants in mild frustration.
“Everything about my school days is clear,” Alice happily proclaimed. “And my childhood is clear. I had a loving father and a very distant mother who always seemed destined for great things, but it stopped there.” She declined to mention that they’d lived on the edge of starvation, and that her father was rarely sober. “I was very popular in high school. Thank God I was pretty, though it brought so many temptations. I like to think I passed that test, because I failed conspicuously in so many other ways. But everything since school is a blur, a blur. Even your fa—, my husband is a blur. Don’t you think that when people take over your life, they really stop being people at all? They just become a… a situation. Still, I’m living in a whole new world now. I knew it would be and it is. I have learned one lesson from my girlhood, though: I’m not good at being alone.”
“So what do we do about that?” asked Natalie pointedly.
“Only time will tell,” said Alice, “but I’ve noticed a funny thing. There doesn’t seem to be a big difference between having your whole life ahead of you and having only a small part of it left. The amount of hope seems the same.”
It may or may not have occasioned the end, though it did give a serviceable signal that things were phenomenally askew. Natalie and Stuart had asked Evelyn to join them for drinks at the Bar and Grill in Livingston, where Stuart would give them the average man’s view of the latest developments.
It’s true that the big back bar facing into a room of diners had always invited theatrical drinking, but neither of them suspected its effects on Stuart. Both he and Natalie were mildly drunk when Evelyn arrived, but before long Stuart had a jar of jalapeños under one arm and he was strolling among the diners showing them how courageously he could throw down these extremely hot peppers. Evelyn had never seen him so aggressive.
“Wait,” said Natalie, “it gets worse.”
Stuart had passed beyond the usual offensive ken, and had brought the humped-over drinkers off the bar to demand his removal. By that point, Natalie had renamed him “Shit-for-brains.” He returned from his wanderings only long enough for another drink, then resumed by commandeering the dessert cart, wheeling it around while bellowing various sea chanties. “I signed aboard this whaling ship, I made my mark it’s true. And I’ll serve out the span of time I swore that I would do!”
Several diners began waving for their checks. Chanting rhymes about the capstan and raising the anchor from “Poseidon’s floor,” he attempted a sailors’ jig: arms akimbo, knees pumping, feet causing several of the desserts to fall onto the floor. When he threw his head back for a final “Way hey, blow the man down!” he lost his footing and, with a bounce, sent the dessert cart on a slow roll toward the toilets and not so much collapsed as gave up in a heap, perhaps struck down by returning self-awareness.