Читать книгу The Annie Year - Stephanie Wilbur Ash - Страница 14

5

Gerald had a hot tub put in the backyard. Gary and some of his out-of-work friends from the railroad pulled a truck up to the backyard and dumped it out. It wasn’t one of those nice hot tubs either. It was one of those round, cedar-planked hot tubs that is basically a giant wooden can, kind of like the troughs farmers keep heated for cows in the winter. You had to walk up a little stepstool to get into it. And when you sat in it, the water came right up to your neck. You looked like a disembodied head.

That’s what I saw of Gerald for nearly a week. He sat in that hot tub every day after his after-school bus route, right up until Thanksgiving, stewing in his own juices. He stood up only to pee off the side of it, and he got out only to sleep and drive to Subway. The night before Thanksgiving he even ate a footlong meatball sub in the hot tub and then washed the sauce from his face with the water.

“It’s okay, Candy Cane,” he called to me through the kitchen window. “The chemicals in the water keep it clean.”

An hour later he was still calling to me: “Come out! Please?”

What choice did I have?

And besides, I was curious. In the interest of accuracy I can admit that now.

Haven’t you ever been curious in your life?

It was very hot. The air was cool. I was naked. We did make love in there. His theory about buoyancy was correct. And yes, I enjoyed it. Certainly I am allowed to enjoy myself occasionally.

But I did not enjoy it later, as I lay with Gerald in his bed. His drowning snore made me feel like I was drowning too. I got up and went to my own bedroom and lay down in my own bed.

But I was still drowning.

I was out the door before Gerald woke up that morning, even though it was Thanksgiving Day.

It was so pleasant! No one was up. No lights were on. There was no movement. I walked downtown. I got a story in my head: if anyone came out of their home and asked me why I was heading to the office on a holiday, I would tell them it was urgent work for Mueller. By the time I got to the office, I had even convinced myself of this story and I sat down and turned on my computer to do it.

I pulled the multicolored beaded belt out of the drawer, but instead of laying it on top of my computer, I threaded it through the belt loops of my black work pants.

Why not? It’s a holiday, I thought.

I was very productive that morning—I did all of Mueller’s payroll for the month, four days ahead of schedule.

At lunch I went to Prairie Lanes, which is always open on Thanksgiving, and I bowled the same way I always do: over the air vent, my first two fingers rubbing together until they make a whisper sound. My fingers into the ball’s holes, lifting it out of the ball return. Forward to the foul line, find the center, walk backward five steps. Three large steps forward. Swing the ball behind me, before me, release.

The ball: airborne, then dropping just right of center, which is how I avoid the 7-10 split. Then it rolls straight home, the little engraved 10 on the ball appearing and disappearing with no tilt until the ball hits pins 1 and 3 with a clean smack, followed by all the others.

Almost always. Sometimes the 10 pin is left behind.

That Thanksgiving of that Annie year, Cindy came down from behind the shoe counter and shook her finger at me. She said, “You could really be somebody big in bowling if you could put some spin on that thing.”

It was something she had said to me dozens of times. I nodded and smiled in the way that’s good for business. But I wanted to say, Why would I ever chase a wild spin, Cindy? If I ever got higher than a 260, you would take my picture with your little pink camera and pass it to Terry at the paper, who would put it in the sports page, which Pat Lancaster would read on the radio. And then Doc and Huff would crack loud jokes about it at the Chamber of Commerce meetings on Wednesdays. Doc might even get Mary Ellen at the Powerhaus to serve me a meat loaf in the shape of a bowling ball. Huff might show it to the whole bar. Clients of mine who weren’t even there might talk about how hilarious it was when they bring their receipts to me in January.

Do you know what would happen if I put a wild spin on the ball and started knocking that 10 pin down?

I would start to think I am something special.

Do you know what they do in this town to anyone who thinks she is something special?

They eat her for lunch.

I walked home after bowling and it was so warm I could smell myself inside my coat. I took off my coat and my blouse was soaked with sweat. As I walked up the rise to the go-around, I could see that someone—Huff probably—had attempted to string Christmas lights on the tree in front of my little cottage, but had got only halfway through the job, as many of the lights were just lying on the grass.

In Huff’s house, Doc and Gerald were sitting around the kitchen table drinking Coors Light. Huff had his head in the oven but pulled it out when he heard the door shut behind me. His face was red and sweaty and smiling. He raised his whiskey, in that glass with a mallard on it that was perpetually fleeing a whiskey lake, and said, “Big turkey this year. Like there are two of them.” Then he squealed like a hog and pointed to my waist.

Gerald followed Huff’s hand. “Well. Isn’t that a lovely,” he said.

I had forgotten to take off the belt.

The laughter—it seemed to tip over chairs and go on for hours, but not from Gerald. Gerald just sat there, drinking his beer. Waiting.

I walked back down to my office and I cleaned the whole place with Formula 409. I fell asleep, scrunched up on the little green love seat in my waiting room, in sweaty clothes. When I woke up it was dawn and my cheek was stuck to the vinyl. But still I did not go home. I sat in my chair at my office and I waited for whoever would walk through the door.

I was hoping for the Vo-Ag teacher, but in the interest of clarity I can say that if it had been Clive, I would have been all right with that as well.

When the Vo-Ag teacher came, I let him in, and when he sat down across from me in the chair usually reserved for clients, I pulled the red ashtray off the shelf behind me and slid it toward him.

The Vo-Ag teacher put his big man clogs on my big wooden desk. Just like Clive, yes, but more compact, in control. He didn’t touch a single thing. He just lit a cigarette and waited.

“Would you like to hear a story?” I asked him.

“I’ve got all day,” he said.

So I told him.

There is a headstone out at the cemetery already engraved with my name. Before he died, my father had the prudence to purchase the plot right next to his.

There is more.

Immediately after my father’s funeral, when I was just eighteen years old, I was sitting in Huff’s dining room as blank as a new orphan could be. Huff was at the end of the table, cutting the obituary out of the paper and sticking it in a scrapbook with double-sided tape, muttering about how the whole world was going to shit and he was the only one who cared enough to document it. Doc was at the other end, alternating between staring at me and staring at the table, leaving giant drops of wetness on it from his eyes.

At some point, Doc reached into the pocket of his old denim shirt and pulled out his pack of cigarettes. There was one left. He tapped it on the table to set it, but he did it too hard and the cigarette snapped in half.

His face, it was like it melted. Then his body shook so hard the whole table shook, and, consequently, Huff’s scrapbook project shook, so Huff threw the double-sided tape at Doc and called him an old jackass and then shook with sobs himself.

I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I am just a good and helpful person. Maybe I have a natural inclination toward customer service. Maybe my father taught it to me. Maybe I will never know. But I picked up the double-sided tape and both ends of the broken cigarette and I taped the cigarette back together. Then I laid it on the table in front of Doc.

Doc looked at it and then he looked up at me with a kind of hopefulness, as if I had made some sort of important promise to him. I looked away to the double-sided tape in my hand. I turned it over and over.

Doc picked up the cigarette. He lit it. He smoked it all the way through the tape, which burned up with the cigarette, turned into smoke, and went up into the air and then into all of us.

“You’ll go far in this town,” I heard Doc say. I just nodded. I wasn’t proud or excited or even upset. I was relieved. It was done. I would go far in this town. This would be the town I would go far in.

I moved back into the little cottage next to Doc and Huff. My father owned it free and clear. I finished college by correspondence so I could work the business. When Gerald graduated high school, I married him because my father had once cheered loudly for him at a track meet. Gerald moved into the cottage and started driving school bus. For five years I did payroll for Mueller and under-the-table CPA work that one of Huff’s clients in Decorah signed off on because he owed Huff money, until I got my CPA license.

I never lost one business day, not counting my father’s funeral. Last year, the Chamber of Commerce elected me secretary and treasurer, my father’s old positions, vacant for almost seventeen years. By then the Chamber was essentially inactive—it was just me and Doc and Huff and Pastor Howie Claus, even though Howie often wasn’t invited because his righteousness was so tiresome and his church has tax-exempt status.

Mostly we just ate bean soup together on Wednesdays.

“So that’s what a nice girl like you is doing in a place like this,” the Vo-Ag teacher said.

“That is why I still live here, yes,” I said.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” the Vo-Ag teacher said. He was looking at me in a way that showed me he was serious, that he really cared, or at least that’s what I believed at the time.

“My husband bought a hot tub,” I said. “I will stew here until I die.”