“Evenin’,” Norm said as I slid onto a bar stool, backing and whoa-ing like a trailer-shy horse. I had on my white linen wedding suit, which I was not going to ruin for no good reason. In fact I had on the entire ensemble, and was a blinding spot of light if I do say so. Our anniversary dinner was spoiled, but I looked fine. I always looked fine.
“Evenin’,” Norm said again, this time with the inflection usually reserved for the slow or hard of hearing. I examined a cuticle before answering “Evening” back.
“What can I do you for?” Norm stopped cleaning his ear and cocked his finger at me. “House red,” he said. “Am I right?”
“Beer.” That Norm even knew who I was depressed me, never mind what I liked to drink.
“Ain’t it kinda late for you to be all by your lonesome? Say, where is ol’ R.T., anyway?”
“R.T. who.”
“R.T. your dearly beloved who,” said Norm, sounding almost like we should have been married right here. Which seemed a sadly fitting idea, especially in light of a notion with which I occasionally toyed, that my husband was more fond of beer than of me. Everybody in Venada survived on mother’s milk of beer. Mama had even had drunk the occasional glass, warm, which agonized R.T. “Show me where it’s writ,” she would say, while he groaned and turned away.
“R.T. and I,” I said, “have agreed to disagree.”
“On?”
“On none of your business, Norm.”
“Hey, a guy can in-quire.” Norm drew another beer and moved down the bar in search of friendlier folk.
If I breathed a hint the news in Norm’s direction, R.T. would never forgive me. And Norm had that awful, canny intelligence, with nothing to do but gossip all night. But the moment when I might have told R.T., when he might have swept me up in his arms with a kiss, had come and gone in an instant, midst our quarreling. Faster than I could grab hold of it. These things take grace, and timing, neither of which, as Mama had liked to point out, was my forte. She liked this because her pronunciation of forte was correct, and this she wanted no one to forget.
After a while Norm came back, and I said, as one does on these occasions, more than I meant to. “We were going to drink our way around the plaza.”
This interested Norm. He got out a pencil and unfolded a napkin, the better to map our itinerary. ”Lemme see. You got your Guadalajara, your B&B.”
“John & Zeke’s.”
Norm nodded solemnly. “Can’t forget John & Zeke’s.”
“Zeke set our hay field on fire.”
Norm laughed. “You ain’t the only ones.”
Zeke cut hay on the side, but only when it had dried out so bad that his sickle bar was bound to strike sparks on a rock.
“Well I wish you told us!”
The ground fog, which was the color of smoke, had hung on that morning, blanketing the field, and it took Zeke a fair time, bouncing along on his tractor, to perceive the flames that licked at his boots.
I held out my glass, and Norm drew me another beer.
“We had this really stinking fight—”
“Sugar,” Norm said, holding up one hand, “what you and R.T. do in your own privacy, it’s none of my business, right?”
“Right.”
I should have realized this was no night for news when that raggedy edge appeared over dinner. For one thing, R.T. complained of the dog, the way its yellow eyeballs followed his fork to his mouth. I could see where this might be annoying, but when R.T. said, “Put him out,” I would not. What would Mama have said; the dew had fallen, and so had the twilight, two of the countless natural phenomena Peedro was not to experience first hand.
“Here, then, damn it,” R.T. said, setting his plate on the floor in front of Peedro. Who stared in disbelief for only a moment before wolfing down R.T.’s anniversary dinner. Made by my own two hands. Alright, only our six months anniversary, but I figured for us it was like dog years, a whole year married for anyone else. Maybe two.
I picked up R.T.’s plate, put it back down in front of him—and marched out and got in the truck.
The front door slammed shut. In a moment it opened again and Peedro skidded out in a way that made obvious the assistance of R.T.’s foot. Pretty soon R.T. stuck his head out the front door and hollered what in hell did I think I was doing. I stared straight ahead. The answer was obvious. I was all dressed up and nausea be damned, we were by God going to town.
Then R.T. himself appeared, angry, disheveled, his cowboy hat smashed down on his head. I rolled down the window and yelled, “Are you crazy?”
R.T. in response marched over to the Rose of Sharon he gave me and ripped it up by its roots. The poor baby thing.
“You are crazy!”
In response he swung the Rose of Sharon over his head and it sailed over the chicken yard fence. It was dusk, the chickens stayed on their roosts, only a few wing flaps and moans registering this disturbance that passed through their walls like a ghost.
R.T. climbed into the truck next to me. Breathing hard. Sweaty. Handsome.
“That was my Rose of Sharon,” I said.
“Well it’s the chickens’ now, ain’t it.” R.T. always did think he could maintain some existential hold over everything he ever gave me, to take back or redistribute as the mood struck him.
“Indian giver,” I said. “I hope you’re happy.”
“Ecstatic,” he said, flooring the gas abruptly so that we both lurched back in our seats.
We pulled up in front of Norm’s and sat in silence for a while.
Finally R.T. said, “What do you care about a damn bush anyway. I don’t see where you give a damn about the ranch. Hell, for that matter—me.”
“No, the question is how much you care about us … Being married and all.”
R.T. scowled into the darkness.
“Listen, I wanted to talk to you—”
R.T. leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “Honey,” he said, “When do you not want to talk. I need a somethin’ to eat. You want to go up to the Tip-Top?”
I got down out of the truck, slammed the door as hard as possible, and R.T. calmly drove off.
If only Mama were still around. Mama, actually my grandmother, but the only mother I ever knew. I’d call her to come get me in a fix like this. Though that would have interrupted her shows. She liked to watch the fights and crocheted afghans by heart in hideous colors like variegated chartreuse. Still, those were her pleasures, and I knew them to run as deep as any of mine.
And she did warn me, in her way, about taking up with R.T. Before love bloomed, when I lived in the city. Where I did paint, and painted well. All that cityness was exciting. Rows of rooftops marching up and down the hills, outlining what once was the landscape, now all nice and buried. Nature seemed wonderfully subordinated there, in favor of human potential.
I missed R.T., but we had not declared our feelings. I can’t say he waited for me with any patience. Mama kept an actual list, I believe, of the women she saw in his truck at the Safeway. Oh I knew those warm summer evenings, stopping for beer, a blanket stowed in the back. They drove up to the dam site, I bet, because that’s where he always took me, and because R.T., like most men, favored sameness and routine, no matter what he said. I expect the anatomical or sexual diversions mimicked our own as well, but I preferred not to think about it. I tried not to.
In fact, the evening I accepted R.T. had taken place at her trailer.
I had taken a walk down the road while R.T. and Mama watched the fights. The crickets sang their low thumping song, and the smell of the wild rose on the banks mixed with the damp that rolled out from the woods. It was warm enough that Mama left her sliding door open, the screen pulled across to keep out the moths. Also the mosquito hawks that, because of their size, aggravated Mama. She hated the skittery noise of their wings as they worked their way up and down the walls.
“Leave them alone,” I would tell her, “they’ll hang on the ceiling. You can sweep them out in the morning.”
But she would flap a dishtowel and yell “Shoo!” while her little dog snapped at the bug parts that floated down from above.
“Don’t you eat that nasty thing!” she would scream while Peedro cowered in only partial incomprehension.
I headed back up the driveway’s gentle slope. The night had turned a soft brownish-black, framing R.T. and Mama within a patch of faded light. Peedro heard my footsteps from where he dozed, snapping his tail in reflex only against the metal floor of Mama’s add-on veranda.
R.T. was saying, “You got to get your Mama a porch, babe. She can’t sit out there and fry all alone.”
We were at the World of Mobile Homes down by the freeway at the time, where the sign said “E-Z Return” and “Se Habla Espanol!” Mama was in the bathroom of a pink doublewide conferring with a criminally handsome salesman by the name of William as to the virtues of stall showers as opposed to tub-ettes.
It was more than I planned to spend, but I could see R.T.’s point. I couldn’t have Mama with no place to sit, no awning, no veranda. This was shaping up to be yet another case of adding more accessories than you previously knew existed and convincing yourself you were happy to do it.
Finally Mama and William emerged, blinking, into the light. William had his arm around Mama. “All right, folks, tell you what I’ll do.”
“This little lady,” William said, squeezing Mama’s shoulder so that she grinned nervously, showing her teeth, and I feared for her arthritis, “has touched my heart.”
“As you have touched my bankroll,” R.T. whispered towards me.
“It’s my god damn bankroll,” I whispered back.
“It could be our bankroll,” R.T. whispered louder. I turned and looked at him. “Our conjugal bankroll.”
“When did you start using big words like that?” I whispered.
“And from who in hell did you learn them?” I said right out loud.
R.T. grabbed my arm. Mama and William stared, fascinated.
“Look at them two lovebirds!” William cried.
“Tell you what!” he said, desperate to save his deal before R.T. and I quarreled it away, “how about I throw in the birdbath for free!”
R.T. let me go and shook William’s hand. “Sold,” he said.
William beamed, Mama looked pleased, and I stood there feeling I’d missed a certain crucial something. In one fell swoop I seemed to have gained the promise of a husband for me and an Expando-Doublewide for my grandmother. I think it was that night I packed for the city again.
Not one week later I was back home. The city had smelled everywhere of buses, and my roommate had stolen most of my clothes. Sweaters, jeans, jackets, all funneled onto that long chain of goods on which she and her art student friends survived. She specialized in nearly new clothes, clothes sometimes so terribly close to being new that they still had their anti-theft devices hanging. Then she brought home a purebred dog whose collar plainly bore his name and address.
“This is the last straw,” I said firmly, but she looked up from her languid pose on the hearth and said, “Get fucked.” All right.
I found the Greyhound schedule on my desk under a pile of letters from R.T. Not so much letters, actually, as terse notes, yet that afternoon as I read them over, they seemed to suggest I might find a cleaner life in the country. I read love there, between descriptions of trees about to bud out and chicks about to hatch. He seemed to be saying that I had a place among these things, which I did not believe except inasmuch as he was promising to make me one. To fashion by force, if need be, an opening, a niche, where someone like me might feel at home.
I called Mama.
“Child,” she said, “you have to stop this coming and going which is so bad for everyone’s nerves.”
“Will you tell R.T. to meet my bus?”
“And just how am I supposed to accomplish that? He drove up the road this morning with a truckload a Mexicans. I ain’t seen him since.”
“Farm workers, Mama, farm workers. Never mind, I’ll call the cab.”
But when I got off the bus at seven, there was R.T., smiling. Mama had kept an ear out all afternoon.
“Your fiancée’s coming in!” she had hollered from the veranda.
R.T. turned down the engine of the tractor and spat reflectively. “Fiancée, hell. Why don’t she stay home.”
“I told you, she’s coming in tonight.”
“Yeah, but will she stay put? That’s the question.”
“Son,” Mama said, “maybe you can succeed where I failed. Though I don’t know how.”
R. T. swung my suitcases into the back of the truck.
“So what did you say then?” I asked him.
“I told her it was your life,” he said, which aggravated me no end. No end.
I sat on the top step next to the dog, who raised his little rat head, licking my hand in surprisingly slobbery fashion for such a tiny thing. Mama loved this sort of display, but I didn’t buy it and gave him a rap on the head for good measure. So he’d remember the difference between Mama and other, less dog-loving people, like me. He lay back down unbothered and went to sleep, twitching and dreaming his old dog dreams.
I looked out into the night, listening to the sounds from within. The naugahyde recliner protesting as R.T. shifted his weight, the rise and fall of the voices on TV. Mama and R.T. talking softly between rounds. At one point I heard her say, “My, he’s a big sucker, ain’t he!” and I knew that she was completely happy.
Then there was a terrible rain of blows, Mama said, “The poor thing,” and she got up and turned off the set.
She came to the screen door and peered into the dark. “You out there?”
“I am.”
“How was your walk?”
“Don’t tell me you two bloodthirsties missed me.”
R.T. came to the door beside her. “Naw,” he said, “not when I got my best gal right here.”
Mama smiled and looked shy, immensely flattered, and squeezed his hand. My heart began to swell. It looked like I was to be the glue that would cement this misbegotten family together. If I would stay put. I picked up the dog and hugged him. Yes, I said in my heart, I would.
Everybody had gone home except Norm and me. Norm was busy pouring all the uneaten pretzels back into his big bag. The ceiling fan had ceased its whirl, the cobwebs falling to their nightly rest. I felt pretty motionless myself, having achieved a gloomy kind of buzz, and put my head down on the lumpy pillow of my purse. I dreamt I could feel someone’s breath on the back of my neck, and opened one eye. The bar was nearly dark.
“Norm,” I said.
The breathing stopped.
“Turn on the lights.”
“Can’t.”
“Can too.”
“Ain’t legal. Past closin’. Want to get me arrested?”
“Yes.”
“Looks like nobody’s come to get you,” he said. Emboldened, he added, “Guess like you’re my prisoner now. Ha-ha.”
I gave him a look, put my head back down and sighed. Norm, daunted, went away. In a little while he came back again and tapped me on the shoulder.
“Norm!”
But he gestured toward his dirty front window, through which I could make out the gleam of R.T.’s truck. Then the truck lights blinked, on and off, on and off, bathing Norm and me and the empty bar room in a stagey light I knew was meant to guide me. I gathered my things and walked out.
“Come back anytime!” Norm called.
“Over my dead body.”
“Fine!” Norm cheerfully offered. “Cold or hot, don’t make no difference to me!”
I climbed in the truck. R.T. was smiling, and because I was happy, I said, “Take me home.”
Published long ago in Threepenny Review, and chosen as one of the Hundred Distinguished Stories of the Year in Best American Short Stories. This story became the first chapter of my novel, The Last Time Anyone Was Happy, which is currently, damn it, seeking representation.