“Well fuck you!”
She smiled again. “That’s the general idea, yes.”
And the fight was over.
When he woke the next morning she was playing with his hair.
“I like playing with your hair,” she said.
“You like my freckles, too.”
“I suppose Fran told you that.”
Fran was one of the mutual friends.
“Yeah, she did.”
She smiled, crinkling her chin. “I’d like to get my hands on the little bitch...”
“Me, too.”
She hit him with a pillow. Not hard.
“Don’t,” she said. Kidding on the square.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t be with anybody else. Not Fran or anybody.”
“I wasn’t serious...”
“I know. But I am. I won’t be with anybody else from now on, and you just be with me. Understand?”
He’d understood. They’d been together since then. Lived together, starting last school year. They’d had the normal squabbles any couple has, but nothing serious; Mary Beth had been loving and sarcastically cheerful throughout. Though they’d never met, Mary Beth’s mother (her father died a few years before) seemed to approve of him and of the relationship — which had become an engagement; his parents loved Mary Beth and even seemed resigned to the wedding being held in New Jersey.
But the need for both Crane and Mary Beth to work had separated them this summer. He’d been working construction, and she’d gone home, to Greenwood, NJ, where she had a summer job lined up. They’d spoken on the phone at least once a week, usually more often...
“Here’s that aspirin,” the bearded guy was saying. He was handing a paper cup of water and two packaged tablets to Crane, who said, “Thank you very much,” and meant it.
“Listen,” the guy said. “If I’m out of line, say so: but I can tell something’s bothering you, and it’s an hour and a half yet to New Jersey, so if you want to talk, it’s fine with me. And if not, that’s fine too...”
“Thanks, no,” Crane said. Then felt compelled — perhaps out of guilt for calling somebody this considerate a jerk, even to himself — to add, “I’m not on a vacation. Someone close to me died recently. I’m going East for the funeral.”
“Hey, man. I’m very sorry. Really.”
“It’s okay. I just need to sit here quietly — if you don’t mind.”
“You got it. Why not put on the ’phones and just relax?” The guy was referring to the headsets they’d been given that could be plugged into the armrest for a dozen channels of music and such.
“Maybe I will,” Crane said, taking the headset out of its plastic wrapper.
“There ya go,” the guy said, smiling, nodding.
It had been a week since he’d talked to her last, when she killed herself; razor blades... Jesus, razor blades.
She was still wearing his engagement ring; she’d be buried with it, tomorrow. No note. Nothing. No reason.
But there had to be. A reason. He had to know what it was. He wouldn’t leave that goddamn town till he knew what it was.
He put the headphones on and heard “You Light Up My Life,” as arranged for elevators. He switched channels, thinking, just my luck, I’ll get Phoebe Snow. He hit the comedy station and heard Rodney Dangerfield.
He began to weep.
Chapter Three
At the funeral, he didn’t weep.
Crane just sat there, feeling out of place. The people in the pews around him were strangers, and almost all of them old. He’d never met Mary Beth’s mother before, and she was as much a stranger as any of them; the fact that Mary Beth’s eyes were in the face of this plump, fiftyish woman seemed somehow nothing more than an odd coincidence. He was alone in a church full of people, none of whom he knew, except for Mary Beth. And she was dead.
Yesterday, he’d walked two miles into town from the truck stop where the bus from the airport had deposited him. He’d come to New Jersey expecting a landscape cluttered with fast-food restaurants, gas stations, billboards, one big sprawling city with no houses, just industries belching smoke, highways intersecting at crazy angles, traffic endless in all directions.
What he found was green, rolling farmland that could’ve been Iowa.
He’d come down over a hill, walking along a blacktop road, and there, in the midst of a Grant Wood landscape, was Greenwood. Or so the water tower said. He saw one gas station (Fred’s Mobil) and one fast-food restaurant (Frigid Queen) and a John Deere dealership, before reaching a single, modest billboard that welcomed him to “New Jersey’s Cleanest Little City,” courtesy of the Chamber of Commerce, three churches and two fraternal lodges. Just past the billboard was a power and water facility and a sign that gave the population: 6000.
Still on the outskirts, he passed twenty or so modern homes, off to the left; the land was very flat here, the only trees looking small and recently planted and underfed. The lack of foliage was emphasized by the homes being spread further apart than they’d be in a similar development in a larger city. Crane’s parents lived in a house like that, on the outskirts of Wilton Junction.
None of this made him feel at home; rather, he felt an uneasiness, and had retreated to a motel, barely within the Greenwood city limits, without even phoning Mary Beth’s mother to let her know he was in town. There he watched television till his eyes burned, none of it registering, but helping keep his mind empty of what had brought him here.
He even managed to sleep. Eventually.
The next morning, this morning, he woke at eleven and called Mary Beth’s house. He knew the funeral was at one, but he didn’t know how to get there. An aunt answered the phone and gave him directions. He showered, shaved, got dressed for the occasion, and sat in a chair and stared at a motel wall for nearly two hours. The wall was yellow — painted, not papered — and there was a window with an air conditioner and green drapes in the middle of the wall. There was also a crooked picture, a print, of a small girl sitting beside a lake under a tree in summer. It was a pleasant enough picture, but it bothered him it was crooked. He straightened it before he left to walk into town to the church for the funeral.
The casket was open, and he’d overheard several people saying how pretty Mary Beth looked, and, inevitably, that she looked like she was sleeping. But Crane had seen dead people before and none of them had looked asleep to him. The father of a close friend of his in high school had died in a terrible fiery car crash, and his casket had been open at the funeral, displayed up by the door as you exited, so you couldn’t avoid looking at the admirable but futile attempt the mortician had made at making his friend’s father look like his friend’s father.
He and his friend and his friend’s father had spent two weeks three summers in a row at a lodge in the Ozarks; the lodge was more an elaborate hotel posing as a lodge than a lodge, and his friend’s father, who had money from a construction business, the same construction business Crane worked for this and other summers, was generous and fun to be with. Crane had spent many hours with the man. But now, whenever he thought of his friend’s father, he saw the face of the car crash victim in the open casket.
So he did not go up to the front of the church to see Mary Beth one last time. In the future, when he thought of Mary Beth, he wanted to think of Mary Beth.
The wood in the long narrow Presbyterian church was dark; the stained-glass windows, with their stilted scenes, let in little light. Even the minister, a thin, middle-aged man, was making his innocuous comments about this young woman, with whom he’d barely been acquainted, in a deep, resonant voice, its tones as dark as the woodwork.