On the mornings he went fishing Beth rose late into a house as empty and quiet as a tomb. Despite the quiet she sometimes put in earplugs and moved around the house listening to nothing but the inner sounds of her own breathing and pulse. It was like being a ghost. She liked the idea of the houses we live in becoming our tombs. She said to the others, out at the bar:
“When we died they could just seal it off.”
Julie and May liked the idea.
“Like the pharaohs,” May said.
“Except I wouldn’t want to build a special house for it,” Beth said. “Just seal off the old one, it’ll be paid for.”
“Not mine,” May said. She tried to insert the end of a new cigarette into a cheap amber holder she’d bought at the convenience store, but dropped the cigarette onto the floor. She looked at the cigarette for a moment, then set the holder down on the table and pushed her hands into her hair and held her head there like that.
“And they shut up all your money in there, too,” Beth said. “Put it all in a sack or something, so you’ll have plenty in the afterlife, and they’d have to put some sandwiches in there. Egg salad.”
“And your car,” Julie said, “and rubbers, big ones. Nothing but the big hogs for me in the afterlife.”
“Is it heaven,” May said, “if you still have to use rubbers?”
“Camel,” Beth said.
“Lucky,” May said.
Julie doled them out. When they were in the bars, when they smoked, it was nonfiltered Camels and Luckies.
THEY WENT TO THE Chukker and listened to a samba band, the one with the high-voiced French singer. Beth danced with a student whose stiff hair stood like brown pampas grass above a headband, shaved below. Then a tall, lithe woman she knew only as Gazella cut in and held her about the waist as they danced, staring into her eyes.
“What’s your name?”
“Beth.”
Gazella said nothing else, but gazed frankly at her without flirtation or any other emotion Beth could identify, just gazing at her. Beth, unable to avert her own gaze, felt as exposed and transparent as a glass jar of emotional turmoil, as if the roil and color of it were being divined by this strange woman. Then the song stopped. Gazella kissed her on the cheek, and went back to the bar. Watching her, Beth knew only one thing: she wished she looked like Gazella, a nickname bestowed because the woman was so lithe, with a long neck and an animal’s dispassionate intelligence in her eyes. Powerful slim hips that rolled when she moved across the room. And like an animal, she seemed entirely self-reliant. Didn’t need anyone but herself.
She looked around. The pampas grass boy was dancing with someone else now, a girl wearing a crew cut and black-rimmed eyeglasses with lenses the size and shape of almonds. Beth went back to the table. Julie and May raised their eyebrows, moved them like a comedy team, in sync, toward Gazella. May had the cigarette holder, a Lucky burning at its end, clamped in her bared teeth. Then the two of them said the name, Gazella, in unison, and grabbed each other by the arm, laughing.
Beth said, “I was just wondering when was the last time y’all fucked your husbands?” May and Julie frowned in mock thought. May pulled out her checkbook and they consulted the little calendars on the back of the register. “There, then,” Julie said, circling a date with her pen.
May spat a mouthful of beer onto the floor and shouted, “That’s 1997! A fucking year!”
“I’M NOT GOING HOME now,” Julie said. “Let’s go where there’s real dancing.”
Because she’d been drinking the least, Beth drove them in the new Toyota wagon she and Tex had bought for parenthood. They went to Seventies, a retro-disco joint out by the interstate. There they viewed the spectrum of those with terminal disco fever, from middle-aged guys in tight white suits to young Baptists straight from the Northend Laundry’s steam press, all cotton creases and hair-parts pale and luminous as moonbeams. Beth watched one couple, a young man with pointed waspish features and his date, a plumpish big-boned girl with shoulder-length hair curled out at her shoulders. They seemed somehow designed for raucous, comic reproduction. The man twirled the woman. She was graceful, like those big girls who were always so good at modern dance in high school, their big thick legs that rose like zeppelins when they leapt. Beth indulged herself with a Manhattan, eating the cherry and taking little sips from the drink.
May now drooped onto the table in the corner of their booth before the pitcher of beer she and Julie had bought. Julie whirled in off the dance floor as if the brutish, moussed investment banker type she’d been dancing with had set her spinning all the way back to the booth. She plopped in opposite Beth and said, breathless, “Okay, I think I’m satisfied.”
“Not me,” May intoned.
“Words from a corpse,” Julie said. “Arouse thyself and let’s go home.”
“Oh,” May said, and spread her arms as she sat up, then slumped back against the seat. She was crying. Too late, Beth thought, she’s hit the wall.
“Better gather her in,” she said to Julie.
“No, no,” May said, shucking their hands off her arms. “I can get out by myself. Stop it.”
“All right, but we’d better go home, honey.”
“I just keep thinking something’s wrong with me.”
“Come on, none of that,” Beth said.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” May said. “I know! It’s not as bad as what happened to you. Shit. I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” Beth said.
“’Cause, like, no one had it worse than Beth.”
“May, shut up,” Julie said.
“I have to shut up, I know that,” May said, and let them guide her out to the car. They managed to tumble her into the back seat. Julie, drunker than Beth had realized, tossed a match from the flaming end of her Lucky Strike, spat tobacco flecks off the tip of her tongue, and said, “Let her sleep, let’s go over to the L&N and sip some Irish whiskey. Leave a note in her ear, she can wake up and follow us inside if she wants to.”
“She’ll throw up in the car,” Beth said.
They reached in and rolled May onto her belly.
“Okay, I’m all right,” May mumbled.
“Good enough,” Julie said. “She won’t choke.”
THEY DROVE TO THE L&N and plowed into the deep pea gravel covering the parking lot. The streetlights cast a dim, foggy light onto the building, an old train station that stood on the bluff above the river like a ruined cathedral. May’s voice came as if disembodied from the back seat, “I’m sorry, Beth, goddamn I really am sorry for that,” and Beth was about to say, That’s okay, but May said, “I need to talk about all that. But y’all won’t talk about it. Y’all won’t say shit about all that. Tough guys.” She laughed. “Tough gals.”
Julie said, “May, I don’t want to hear it.”
“See, like that,” May said, trying to sit up. “The strong, silent type. John Wayne in a dress. No, who wears a dress anymore? Why, only John Wayne. John Wayne with a big fat ass. John Wayne with a vagina and tits. John Wayne says, ‘Rock, I’m havin’ your baby — but there’s complications.’” She got out of the car and fell into the pea gravel, laughing. “It’s so soft!” she said, rolling onto her back. “Like a feather bed! Look, it just molds to your body!”