“Need a ride?”
“Yup.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I checked my wallet. I was running low. Perhaps I’d have to do more money at work tomorrow. Just once more, and then that would be it. Then I’d stop forever.
I went back and sat at the table across from Mike, waiting for my ride. The Ress had strung chili-pepper lights above and across the patio section of this place, but there was no one sitting out here in the buggy night but us, and the forced exuberance of the lights seemed mocking and depressing. Steppenwolf blared from the jukebox inside.
“Are you going to stay here or go back in, or what?”
“Aw. Are you concerned?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything.
“Arnie’ll probably show up later,” he said teasingly.
“Where’s Sils tonight?” I asked.
“Ha! It only took you an hour to ask. I must be having some success with you. Do you realize I never used to be able to say two words to you without you twisting around going ‘Where’s Sils?’ ”
Now I just looked past Mike out toward Beach Road. I stared out into the night, in silence, until I could see Humphrey driving slowly past in his cab, looking for me.
“Gotta go,” I said. I waved. I patted him on the hand, squeezed his shoulder. Nobody kissed cheeks then; it would have been a joke.
“Yeah, go,” said Mike, some new blame in his voice. “Yeah, go on in your expensive little Killer Cab.”
“Oh, Christ,” I said, and turned on my heels and left, trotted out toward the intersection, waving a hand to signal Humphrey, who was now turning around and driving back toward the Ress parking lot.
“Where’s your friend?” he asked when I got in.
“It’s just me tonight,” I said. At last I had a man driving me, waiting down the street just for me, though of course I had to pay him.
The next morning it was eighty degrees by seven o’clock. We were in a heat wave; all the fans my parents owned were on and swirling the thick air around our house. At seven-thirty the phone rang, and I stumbled out into the hallway to get it.
“What did you tell Mike last night?” It was Sils. Her voice was chilly but edged with hysteria.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I told him anything. What did he tell you? What did you tell him?”
“Arnie just called. He said last night you and Mike met for drinks and afterward he was drinking and yelling loudly. He took off half-cocked and got into an accident on his motorcycle.” Here Sils began to cry in a light, shell-shocked way. “He’s in intensive care with tubes and everything. He might die.”
Mike: what a stupid jerk. “Oh, my god,” I said instead. The car and motorcycle accidents of the local Horsehearts boys were the staple of the community news and drama. Yet I had never known anyone who had been killed, or anyone who had died, not really, not well. My grandfather had died when I was three, but I couldn’t remember it.
“Is he conscious?” was all I could think of to say.
“No.” Now something caught in Sils, something realized, and she began to cry in an insistent, bleating way. “I’ve got to go see him.”
It was a three-mile walk to the county hospital. “I’ll call Humphrey,” I said. “I’ll have him meet us by the park pond at what — nine o’clock? That way we won’t have to walk in this heat. You won’t be all sweaty and gross when you see Mike.” I don’t know why I said the last part; I just threw it in.
“Berie, he’s unconscious,” she said sternly.
“I know that,” I said. Nothing anyone said that morning made any sense to me.
Thus began a two-week period when, every other day, either before or after Storyland, and always on our days off, in the sweltering heat, we took Humphrey’s cab to the county hospital, stayed for an hour, then phoned Humphrey again and had him come pick us up. This let my mother off the hook a bit (“I’m getting a ride to work with Sils and her brother,” I’d call from the front door), but it took money. So I managed to acquire a little extra at my register.
After two days Mike had returned to consciousness, “or his version of it,” I said to Sils, and in her relief she actually laughed; by the second week he was giving Sils come-hither looks, saying things like “Gedover ’ere, you,” wanting her to snuggle next to him amid the tubes.
I got in a wheelchair and for fun trundled up and down the corridors. Mike and Sils shared an understanding, newly worked out in Mike’s hospital bed, amid the sheets and TV and bad fluorescent lighting, that the accident had been caused by a combination of her abortion and a truck.
I didn’t say a word. I zoomed up and down the hallways in the wheelchair, nodding good morning to everyone. I smiled in a cheerful but authoritative manner. One time I accidentally backed into an elevator and went all the way down to the lobby. Once I was there, I decided to see how far I could go. I pushed through the revolving door. I hit the street.
No one stopped me. I wheeled myself halfway downtown — past the hospital gardens, past the guest houses and the Grand Union and the junior high. I even tried a wheelie off the curb, which spilled me out into the street and scraped my knee, but still no one was looking. Finally, I turned around and pushed the thing back. I stopped at the Grand Union and got a Coke.
“Your father’s worried about you,” my mother said to me one night, in her nightgown, standing over me in a looming way.
“Dad?” I was clipping my toenails, sending hard yellowed crescents flying through the room with each clip.
“Will you stop that while I’m speaking to you? Have you no respect for anything?” She stepped in from the doorway and swatted my thigh.
“What?” I looked up. Her formerly bleached blond hair was now a tigerish mix of black and white; she was getting a mustache. Her hazel eyes flashed with hate.
“When I bring you to or from work, you’re sullen in the car, half the time we don’t see you at dinner, you haven’t spoken to your father or brother or LaRoue for weeks, or been to church in months, and how about your grandmother? Have you taken the time to go visit her? She doesn’t have that much longer to live, you know!”
My Grandmother Carr lived in a large Victorian house in the middle of Horsehearts. It was a house full of what my grandmother called “davenports” and “chesterfields.” “Don’t put your feet on the chesterfield, dear.”
“You mean the couch,” my brother, Claude, always said, to be rude.
There were three cellos in the house; one had belonged to my grandfather. The other two belonged to my grandmother, who often gave lessons in town, and whenever we visited she got out one of the cellos and played a piece for us, while we sat on one of the davenports, squirming and pinching each other when she couldn’t see. Later, when I was older, I realized how beautifully she’d played. But when I was little, most of the interest such an event held for me was in watching such a formal woman—“a true Victorian lady,” as my father worshipfully described her — place this large woman-shaped object between her legs and hold it there with her knees, her finger vibrating along the neck in an insectlike movement up and down, the bow in a slow saw across the strings, angling this way or that, gently, to find the note. My grandmother always gazed down upon her cello, like the Holy Mother upon the Holy Child, or perhaps like one woman beholding another at her knees.
“Are you done?” Claude was often the first to ask, and my grandmother would smile with a kind of wan forgiveness and say, “Yes. I’m done.”