“That’s not what I was getting at. What did he tell you about meeting me?”
Cross had said something about her eyebrows and he’d remembered her height. He called her fearless.
“Did he tell you that when we met I’d just run away from home?”
Of course she’d run away. But for their eyebrows, they were nothing alike.
“Did he tell you that I related everything back to The Tempest? It was the only thing I’d read in junior English.”
Now Peter felt bad that he’d tricked her into telling this squalid story.
“I’m sorry.”
“We’re not done,” Judith said. “What did he tell you?”
“You were skinny.”
“And?”
“You didn’t want coffee. He brought you milk.”
Judith didn’t say anything to encourage him.
“I didn’t know you’d run away.”
“I was pregnant.”
“He told me.”
“How many mornings do you think he’s found a girl waiting on his steps?” Judith clucked her tongue. “I should get to work. The morning’s half gone and I promised Rolf I’d have fifty pendants done before he got home for lunch.”
Peter glanced at his watch; it was still a few minutes before noon. He wondered if all of Ohio smelled like smoked meat.
53
If I open my book about Cross with him staring at produce, the next chapter mustn’t follow him outside to the car waiting across the street. You can’t tell a story the way it happened; you’ve got to manipulate things so the reader finds entertainment in the untangling. For whatever reason, a story needs to be folded and flipped, like how an atlas will reorder the world so that adjoining states appear unrelated, or so a river concludes at the side of a page.
The reader needs to feel involved in the sense making of a story, or they’re not involved in the book. A book is a negotiation between what a reader wants to see and what the writer wants to show. Songs must satisfy and resist in a similar way. Cross’s voice isn’t seductive, but there’s a pleasure to be had in submitting to it. If a singer can get away with reading the phone book,39 what’s to stop them?
So the second chapter in the book about Jimmy’s life on the road will focus on me. Should my story not prove as interesting as the parts about Jimmy, that’s not such a big problem. That’s sort of the point.
So I will step away from a bodega and the threat of crime, away from an international recording star hiding in plain sight. I will open, instead, on July 27, 1988. I will open with a perfect kelly green square of lawn, a lush island bordered by two blue-black, almost iridescent driveways, bordered on another side by a freshly paved road, bordered on the last side by a 1,600-square-foot colonial. And attached to that house: a two-car garage. Inside of that garage: two cars (a nearly new Honda and a ruby-red Mercury), plus a push mower with a 5-hp Briggs & Stratton engine. Peering behind the house, the reader will see a shaded rectangle of lawn with an aluminum swing set painted like a maypole and, in the shade of an oak tree, a square sandbox ringed with sand, which if viewed from above might recall da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
And who lives in this house? Why, this nice couple named Arthur and Patricia, and their beautiful daughter, Gabrielle. And with them a dog, a tubby beast that likes to curl up beneath the kitchen table and nips at their feet if they accidentally step on him. A big farter, this dog; they are constantly saying “Oh, Cherokee” and “Not again, Cherokee.” The girl, especially, loves the dog. They’re not embarrassed by the dog’s name, won’t be for years and years, and by then there will be so much more they’re embarrassed by it will hardly matter.
On every side of this 1,600-square-foot colonial lurk other 1,600-square-foot colonials. In all, fifty-six houses on a cross-hatching of roads branching off a much, much older road, a road that, because it’s in Virginia, once hosted a battle that claimed 3,100 American lives. When boredom settles on the minds of the boys and girls living in the colonial houses, they dig in their yards and recover things that might have been horse tack or belt buckles or brass buttons. A junior-high boy from across the street, playing in the tangled roots of a white cedar — one of Hurricane Gloria’s many casualties — discovered the curving blade of a cutlass, which time and moisture had eaten until it was as brown and fragile as a dog turd.
The twenty-seventh is a Wednesday, so, if both cars are in the garage, it must be quite early. Think of morning light; think dew on the grass and stillness. In fact, Arthur is up. He is drinking instant coffee from an aluminum mug. Before him he holds a copy of one of the various mimeographed newsletters that he’s been contracted to print — catching typos reminds his clients that he cares. Gabrielle is at the kitchen table slotting checkers in a Connect Four game while her cornflakes disintegrate in their milk bath — she has taught her parents to appreciate this quiet interlude while she waits for the cereal to turn into a yellow slurry; the girl hates scratchy foods. Cherokee nuzzles his owners’ ankles.
Arthur’s thoughts drift from the document before him to the things he needs to do when he gets to the store. He’ll have to make room for their paper delivery. The shuffling wouldn’t be so problematic, but they’d given over half the back room to a large-format printer — they didn’t want to be caught flat-footed if, as seems inevitable, one of the national office-supply chains enters the market.
Using the checkers, Gabby constructs a red house with a yellow door on the Connect Four grid. She shrieks when she finishes, then tilts the grid so the pieces splash in the tray. “House,” she yells, but by then, of course, the house is gone.
With a blue pencil, Arthur makes a check on the top of the page to indicate that he’s looked it through.
Patricia comes in, her eyes half closed with sleep; she’s wearing striped pajama pants and a Van Halen concert tee, gifts from her stupid — as in, soon to be convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to three years in a federal penitentiary — brother.
Arthur pats the dog under the table, stands, kisses Patricia and Gabrielle good-bye, heads into the dark garage — how those unpainted rafters suggest a barn, how the line of windows in the garage door suggest a church. He thumbs the garage door opener, which causes the whole house to shudder — it’s a fine house, respectable, upright, but it doesn’t necessarily feel permanent, as though it might sail away in a strong breeze. Their first winter in the place, after a blizzard dumped a foot of snow, Arthur hadn’t been able to sleep for fear that the roof would collapse and bury the three of them; Cherokee, of course, would survive, would wind up in some clinic for tragic pets, abandoned, farting away his numbered days.
HE PARKS BEHIND the store, unlocks the back door, deactivates the alarm with the weird O-shaped key that reminds him, always, of a smallpox vaccination scar. The photocopiers hum and shake when he flips the main power. He goes through the orders awaiting pickup. Checks to see when their sole employee — what will they do if he decides to enroll full-time at the community college, or if his girlfriend infects him with ambition? — punched out, reads the kid’s entries in the job log.
This essential employee arrives before lunch, bringing with him, from the place near his house, two sandwiches, two sodas, two bags of chips. Then, while the kid watches the counter, Arthur wanders out back to consolidate paper stock, to break down boxes, to stack and shift. A few items for which Patricia had sought amnesty wind up in the Dumpster.
He hears the buzzer that means a customer has come in, figures the kid can take care of it. Arthur looks at his watch, knows the paper truck will be by soon, and pulls the chain to open the loading dock’s roller door. Scalded air rushes in, snatches up a cloud of dust as well as the confetti scraps from the binding puncher.