“She’s not here, sonny. You’ll have to speak to me.”
“Okay. What is it, Pop? Are you sick?”
“You didn’t anwer my question,” Franklin said.
“Three minutes. Please signal when through,” the operator said.
“Operator?” Franklin Junior said. “Pop?”
Both were gone. Franklin had dropped the phone so he could pick up a glass he had dropped.
*
Beth Fisher did not know where Franklin was, and she didn’t care. What a mess that man was! He had convinced her that they should marry because it was in the stars: they had been born on the same day of March. He mentioned that first when he introduced her to his friends. Even Franklin had not been able to see anything more in the relationship to talk about. All those wasted years! She had called her daughter-in-law, lamenting her marriage to Franklin. The girl had told her that there was nothing as exhilarating as driving a rig. It was all she could talk about. And Linny — he was so full of questions about Franklin that he wouldn’t listen to her.
Beth got a job in the lingerie department of a store and prayed that Franklin wouldn’t come back. Women came into the department all day, holding up fluffy nylon nightgowns and admiring themselves in the mirror, buying matching satin slippers, wanting to appear beautiful for their husbands. Beth thought they were silly. She believed that she was becoming a feminist. She joined N.O.W. She ate what she wanted and thought that she looked healthier when she was heavy. By December she was quite fat; she often spoke in favor of abortions to the ladies buying the frilliest nightgowns. In January she was moved to the drapery department.
She went out a few times with a salesman from the drapery department, who said that the other women were spiteful. They went to a bar and ate pizza and drank Bass ale, and after that he took her home and didn’t kiss her. The salesman thought that she should file for legal separation. He said that men could be spiteful creatures. He gave her a kitten for Christmas. “This is Hildegaard,” he said as he handed the small white kitten to her. When he wasn’t there she called the cat Snowflake.
Shortly after Christmas, Beth came home and found Franklin in the living room. He was reading a novel. A shark, more teeth than body, lunged across the cover; to the side, a man was being slugged in the face, She had time to consider the book because Franklin didn’t put it down when she came in. His shoes were by the chair. His toes had broken through the sock of the right foot; they protruded in a tiny fan.
“I’m not exactly clear on what happened between us,” he said.
She went into the kitchen and got a beer. She came back to the living room.
“I realized that there was nothing I wanted to say to you and there was nothing I wanted to hear,” she said.
Franklin nodded.
“The movie theater manager keeps calling,” Beth says. “He sees great significance in the fact that you disappeared after seeing Dirty Harry.”
“Maybe I could get the job back,” Franklin said. The kitten hopped onto the footstool and bit at Franklin’s toes.
“What have you been doing?” Franklin asked.
“Working. In a store.”
“I’ve been living off a Puerto Rican woman I picked up outside a McDonald’s. She was making plans to go to Puerto Rico. When she went to work today I left.”
“I don’t believe you,” Beth said.
Franklin looked at the shark’s teeth.
*
Franklin and Beth were snowed in. He had spent the night (the cliché would be “on the couch”; he was sprawled in the Eames chair with his feet on a pile of magazines on top of the telephone book), intending to leave in the morning, but by morning he couldn’t have opened the front door if he had wanted to. Leave like Santa Claus? He looked up the chimney, full of soot, then made a fire and sat cross-legged, trying to think — he thought this was a position people got into to meditate — when Beth came downstairs, excited and surprised by the snow. They had celery and beans for lunch. Beth wore a thin blue bathrobe that made her hips look even more enormous. He thought of the horses, the racetrack … He wanted flan, he wanted his Puerto Rican lover back, to kiss her orange lips. The orange lipstick was flavored with oranges. His Puerto Rican lover wanted to go to Florida and eat oranges. More than that, she wanted to go to Puerto Rico: her sister the nun, her brother the blacksmith, the grave of her youngest sister, the other sister a cook for wealthy people, another brother — wasn’t there another one, or was that the one who was born dead? Born with the measles. He told her that that wasn’t possible. But a doctor had been there! Then he hadn’t known what he was talking about. Those big bright lips. He tickled them with a feather once when she was asleep. He pulled it out of his pillow and brushed it across her lips and she drew them together, sat up scratching herself. She wanted to be Eric Clapton’s lover. He had never heard of Eric Clapton. She said that Eric Clapton was addicted to heroin. She agreed with Franklin that his son was addicted to drugs; otherwise he would love his parents. She wanted him to call his son. What for? For reconciliation! But there had been no fight Nothing ever came entirely apart.
He had had to hound her and hound her to be his lover. For almost a week after first seeing her he sat in his car, parked outside McDonald’s, and waited, and then he hounded her, offered his car, which was all he had with him. She refused. She was not a whore, she was a clerk. He didn’t want a whore, he wanted a clerk. This made her eyes big, like her mouth. She wore such high heels. She was as tall as he was in those shoes, and without them she was just a tiny woman. He offered his belt or shirt, if she would not take the money or the car. “Okay,” she said. “Which?” he asked, “The belt or the shirt?”, wondering where he would get a belt to keep his pants up late at night after she put him out. She had a girlfriend who walked into her apartment in the morning and beat his head with the pillow when she saw him sleeping there. What an odd person the friend was, and his lover — what a strange woman, comparing him to Eric Clapton, saying that she never had a chance in hell with Eric Clapton anyway.
Beth said that they would have to feed the birds. Feed the birds? He lived in suburbia. In the grocery stores there were little bells of suet and birdseed that women brought home and hung in trees. Beth didn’t have one of those; she wanted him to tear up bread, put it in a pan, take it to the birds. He told her that he couldn’t get out the front door because the snow had drifted. She said that the birds would die. He climbed out the bathroom window. The breadcrumbs were blown out of the pie tin, mixed with the snow, disappeared. He climbed back in through the window. He wrapped a towel around his head and sat in front of the fire.
“Being born on the same day seemed a very good thing to go on,” he said.
He examined his wife. He thought the bathrobe peculiar, had no idea that she had gotten it very cheaply: marked down to seven dollars by the buyer after Beth jabbed a pen through the back of it. From forty-five dollars to twenty-five (small hole) to fifteen-fifty (large hole, two runs) to seven dollars (hole, runs, hem coming loose).
“It’s hard to imagine that somewhere in the world it’s warm today,” Beth said, forehead against the foggy window. She was chewing celery, heavily sprinkled with chili powder.
Wolf Dreams
when Cynthia was seventeen she married Ewell W. G. Peterson. The initials stood for William Gordon; his family called him William, her parents called him W.G. (letting him know that they thought his initials were pretentious), and Cynthia called him Pete, which is what his Army buddies called him. Now she had been divorced from Ewell W. G. Peterson for nine years, and what he had been called was a neutral thing to remember about him. She didn’t hate him. Except for his name, she hardly remembered him. At Christmas, he sent her a card signed “Pete,” but only for a few years after the divorce, and then they stopped. Her second husband, whom she married when she was twenty-eight, was named Lincoln Divine. They were divorced when she was twenty-nine and a half. No Christmas cards. Now she was going to marry Charlie Pinehurst. Her family hated Charlie — or perhaps just the idea of a third marriage — but what she hated was the way Charlie’s name got mixed up in her head with Pete’s and Lincoln’s. Ewell W. G. Peterson, Lincoln Divine, Charlie Pinehurst, she kept thinking, as if she needed to memorize them. In high school her English teacher had made her memorize poems that made no sense. There was no way you could remember what came next in those poems. She got Ds all through high school, and she didn’t like the job she got after she graduated, so she was happy to marry Pete when he asked her, even if it did mean leaving her friends and her family to live on an Army base. She liked it there. Her parents had told her she would never be satisfied with anything; they were surprised when it turned out that she had no complaints about living on the base. She got to know all the wives, and they had a diet club, and she lost twenty pounds, so that she got down to what she weighed when she started high school. She also worked at the local radio station, recording stories and poems — she never knew why they were recorded — and found that she didn’t mind literature if she could just read it and not have to think about it. Pete hung around with the men when he had time off; they never really saw much of each other. He accused her of losing weight so she could attract “a khaki lover.” “One’s not enough for you?” he asked. But when he was around, he didn’t want to love her; he’d work out with the barbells in the spare bedroom. Cynthia liked having two bedrooms. She liked the whole house. It was a frame row house with shutters missing downstairs, but it was larger than her parents’ house inside. When they moved in, all the Army wives said the same thing — that the bedroom wouldn’t be spare for long. But it stayed empty, except for the barbells and some kind of trapeze that Pete hung from the ceiling. It was nice living on the base, though. Sometimes she missed it.