She stares at what she’s written. She stares out the glass doors to the yard outside, but she doesn’t see anything. She hates the quiet. She doesn’t know how Francis can live with it. Once he played a classical album on his old record player, but he never turns on the radio or watches TV, and he only seems to use Aunt Beth’s computer in the dining room to play solitaire. She’d walked by and seen him doing it, the cards on the screen sitting there in bright, neat stacks.
She no longer wants a cigarette, and she’s had it with this. She rips her page from the notebook and balls it up and stands and shoves it into the front pocket of her shorts.
“You all through?” Francis’s voice drifts from the living room. She pictures him sitting in his chair, his thick glasses on his nose, the paper fanned out in his lap.
“I can’t do it.”
“I can’t hear you, Devy.”
“I can’t—” She turns toward the kitchen and the dim doorway of the room where he sits, but she can’t walk there. She won’t go in there and tell him she’s failed him, too. She cups her hand to her mouth. “I have to get ready for work!” And she’s down the cool hallway and into her room, locking the door behind her. She digs the balled-up paper from her pocket as if it’s a bruising stone, and she stuffs it into the trash basket, burying it beneath wadded tissues she’s blown her nose on, stiff and dry under her fingers.
IT’S HIS FAULT, of course. He should have run her through a few sentence diagrams, that’s all. Perhaps talked about the lyrical beauty of the rules of punctuation, how just because they were rules did not have to make them constraining. You can never leave well enough alone. One of Beth’s constant rebukes of him. After a family dinner or an outing with friends, Beth driving during his drinking years, she’d glance over at him and hiss those words. She’d tell him he was too nosy about other people’s opinions, that once they’d offered one, he was too pushy about wanting to know why they thought that way. John Brooks, long dead now, that night ending the way so many other nights had ended. Brooks was a corpulent accountant married to Annie Brooks, an RN Beth had befriended years earlier working the beds of St. Mary’s. At the restaurant Brooks had gone on and on about welfare cheats, an entire generation of lazy bastards our tax codes make us pay for. “But finally we’ve got a president doing something about it.” Francis sat quietly and buttered his bread. He sipped his gin martini. He lifted three speared olives to his mouth and tried to ignore that Brooks was wearing a navy sports jacket with an anchor insignia on the breast pocket simply because he co-owned a pleasure boat. He tried to ignore that Brooks had gone to Exeter and was most likely pledging a fraternity at Babson the same winter Francis was curled up in a wind-whipped tent just south of Kaesong, the ground under him so frozen it felt like buckled concrete, the howling 155’s overhead like some deafening blunder from God himself.
“As far as I’m concerned, they should just take a backhoe to all those neighborhoods.”
“With all those freeloaders still inside them, John?”
“You bet.”
Beth’s thumb had pressed into Francis’s thigh, but he ignored it. “Quote me some numbers, John. Lay out for me precisely how many of these poor people are actually faking their poverty.”
“Most of them, Francis. Look it up.”
Annie, her face small and nearly pretty, laughed as if her husband had just told an awkward joke. But Brooks’ face was flushed, the skin around his eyes drawn tight, and Beth’s thumb was pushing harder into Francis’s thigh. There was the pleasant rush of blood to his head. “Let’s talk about the rich, John, shall we? Do you know hHow much Exxon paid in taxes last year? Can you tell me? Because I can tell you: Zero. Zilch. Not a fucking penny. Now you tell me who’s cheating whom.”
“No politics, boys. Please,” Beth said. “Annie, tell us about the kids.”
“What’re you saying, Brandt? Cream can no longer rise to the top in this country? Is that what I’m hearing, comrade?”
“Kiss my ass, Brooks. I was fighting communists while you were swilling beer at frat parties.”
“All right, that’s enough. Any more from you two and Ann and I are leaving.” Beth’s tone was of uncompromising finality, the same one she might use on a man smoking at a patient’s bedside, and Francis had stood and dropped his napkin beside his uneaten salad and walked into the men’s room and splashed his face with cold water.
Brooks was wrong, and he was a greedy and ignorant asshole, but this was also a night out with friends, and Francis knew he had to go back to the table and apologize and leave it at that. Which he did. And while John, Annie, and his wife went gamely on about one thing or another, the air thick with a polite stoicism, Francis had gotten quietly drunk.
On the dark ride home there was Beth’s prating voice, the headlights of their car lighting up the night ahead of them. Francis had to shut one eye to keep it all from crowding together in his head: tree branches and leaves, the red taillights of other cars, shadowed houses and aluminum mailboxes and a bright gas station Beth had pulled into, slamming the door behind her to pump the gas he was in no shape to. Those were his words, too.
“I’minoshape, Beth.”
The following morning he’d woken in sheets damp with sweat. His mouth was a desert sin. It was not a word he used or even thought of very often, but those mornings after drinking far too much yet again, he felt riddled with sin: weak, undisciplined, vaguely malicious, and therefore poisonous to all that is good and constructive.
If Beth was somewhere in the house, he’d make sure he was showered and shaved before she saw him. In the bathroom he’d pull down each eyelid and apply a dropper of Visine. He’d splash cologne on his cheeks and comb his hair back and tuck in his shirt. But his tongue would feel thick and useless, and there’d be the pulsing ache of his head because he’d so dehydrated himself with alcohol there was no longer enough fluid in his skull to float his brain. When he looked in the mirror he saw not Mr. B, the educator, but Francis, the degenerate, Francis, the afflicted.
If Beth had gone to church or was out running errands, it was always a relief. Francis would swallow a handful of aspirin and wash it down with two glasses of cold water. The thought of food left his stomach floating uncomfortably inside him, but it didn’t compare to remorse’s heavy hands pressing down on his shoulders, and he’d lift the kitchen phone from its cradle while he still had the nerve and Francis would call whomever he had to apologize to that day.
John Brooks was cleaning his boat. At least that’s what his wife had told Francis on the phone.
“Annie, I was a drunken fool last night. Can you forgive me?”
“You weren’t the only one, Francis. Next time, Beth and I will just do lunch together.” She’d laughed, but her words had lingered long after Francis hung up, and he could add them now to all the dozens and dozens of comments like that he’d heard from friends and family over the years. It was like having to carry a huge basket of roiling snakes on his back he somehow ignored every time he sat at a bar or restaurant table and ordered a drink or a beer which always led to more beers which led to more drinks which led to yet more mornings like these.
But the one after the Brookses, Beth had not driven off somewhere; she’d been sitting in the living room reading a book, and when Francis hung up the phone, she said:
“Aren’t you tired of making those kinds of calls, Francis?”
“Yes.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t drink so much.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t drink at all.”
She’d closed her book and was soon standing barefoot in the doorway. She was wearing a skirt and light blouse. Her hair was just beginning to gray, but it was still long enough she used a barrette to pin it away from her face. She was holding her glasses between two fingers at her side. “Your brother quit. Maybe you should, too.”
“I think you’re right.” Just saying the words did something. It was like being locked in a dark trunk, then the lid slowly opening, the shock of
sunlight, cool clean air seeping into his lungs. Beth stepped toward him and hugged him. The smell of her hair and the threshold they both stood on did something more to him and soon they were making love on the sofa and when Francis let go inside her he felt as if his seed was foul and dirty and not worthy of her but that he’d also been given a second chance to cleanse everything about himself and he would. They’d held one another without speaking. Beth’s skirt was still up around her hips, and Francis had sensed a return to how it was for them when it began twenty years earlier, that they liked and respected one another, that they had each other’s welfare in mind at all times, that they fit together as well as two people possibly could. He would be a new Francis—cleaner, healthier, clear of mind and heart, which would make her a new Beth, though it did not; she was always saying something: Don’t slouch. You’re tall, don’t be ashamed of it. Don’t put your dirty clothes in my hamper, you have one of your own, you know. Don’t eat so fast, enjoy your damn food, Francis. Don’t look around so much when you’re driving, for Christ’s sake. You never let the engine warm up enough first. I wish you wouldn’t leave the trash cans in front of my gardening tools. Can’t you put them somewhere else? Your brother’s a big blowhard, Francis. All he ever does is talk about himself. And his son Charlie’s a little shit. It makes me glad we never had children.
Though the lines of her face lost some of their sharpness when she said that, because for years she had wanted children fiercely and they’d tried everything to get them, including driving to Toronto for experimental surgery on her ovaries. But in the end, her body wanted nothing to do with making a baby, and even though they’d had Francis’s sperm checked twice, she seemed to blame him for her barrenness without ever using those words or talking about the subject directly. Then she turned on him in a hundred small ways, each of them minor and not unusual when one human being lived with another, but this was like saying that a typhoon was nothing more than single drops of rain pushed by a little wind.
Francis began to tell himself it was his wife who was making him drink so much. He’d have finished his preparation for the next day’s classes and, as a reward, he’d pour himself a bourbon on the rocks with maybe a beer chaser. He’d sip them in his chair in front of the TV, Beth on the couch with one of her paperbacks. But just about every time he sipped and the ice clinked in his glass, he could see her stiffen up and he knew she’d be saying something to him soon, and so he began to do it on the sly. He bought a case of Cokes and poured out half of each can, filling the rest with rye or rum, and he set the can of Coke on the lamp table where Beth could see it.
“Caffeine this late? What’re you thinking, Francis?”
But this lasted only a week or two for he must’ve been slurring his words one night when she picked up the can and smelled it and whisked it out of the room and poured it down the kitchen sink. Then she was standing in the doorway, saying, “Don’t you ever pull that kind of shit on me again, Francis. You need help.”
Sitting there, drunk yet again in his chair in front of the blabbering television, he knew she was right, that he probably did need help, but wasn’t it funny that for years nothing changed after that moment? Wasn’t it strange that neither of them did anything to get him some help?
To avoid her judgment, each and every day on his slow, careful drive home from the high school, he sipped vodka in a Dunkin’ Donuts Styrofoam cup. Three blocks from his house, he’d pull into the 7-Eleven lot and drop his cup and nips into the trash barrel beside the door. He’d walk in and buy breath mints and a bottle of water, and he’d be sipping it when he walked into his house carrying his briefcase, his tie loosened around his neck. Just another day, darling. Just another day working so hard on behalf of so many children.
For years, he and Beth were in the habit of eating their dinner in front of the nightly news, which made things easier. Not having to talk. Not having to look directly at his wife while she said to him whatever she had to say, which most often was a barrage of complaints about the administration at St. Mary’s, the absent doctors, the badly trained and lazy LPNs, the pushy families of her patients. She’d talk and sometimes he’d doze off, waking an hour or so later to an empty couch, her paperback open and facedown like a dead bird she’d left behind just for him.
Then for years Beth worked the night shift, and Francis could drink as much as he wanted right there in his own living room. Before bed, he would make his way out to the driveway and fumble with the key to open the trunk of his car. He’d lay the empty bottle or bottles or cans inside there, then get rid of them the next day or the day after that. He’d fall onto his mattress and wake hours later to his scolding alarm clock, his pulsing head, his wife’s warm sleeping body curled up away from him.
But after that final call to Annie Brooks, all that madness could be behind him. George had urged him to go to meetings with him, to read the Big Book and to begin the hard spiritual work of the twelve steps, but Francis couldn’t do it. Ever since Captain Hunt and the Ditch of the Bodos, a phrase that still shoots through his head as suddenly as pebbles from under a spinning tire, Ditch of the Bodos, a phrase he consistently wills to be nothing more than that, no images to follow, though he’ll begin to see that stand of pines on the ridge, the flat light of the July sun—ever since that unspeakable afternoon when he’d done nothing but obey the rules and regulations imposed upon him, he would have nothing to do with rules of any kind or the entities that created them. He would not be a member of this cult of steps and meetings his brother George was a member of; Francis would do it on his own, though he did borrow one of their slogans he found helpful: One Day at a Time. “Today is Monday. I will not drink on Monday, but on Tuesday I’m going to get stinko.” But on Tuesday he’d tell himself he would not drink until Wednesday when he would tell himself just what he did about Monday and Tuesday. And it worked. For three months. But on the half day before Thanksgiving, his fifty-third birthday, Rita Flaherty smuggled a bottle of champagne into the teachers’ lounge, and she poured six or seven of them a Dixie cupful and why not? It was his birthday, for Christ’s sake. It was Thanksgiving. And it had tasted awfully good going down. It was not unlike Beth, in those last three clearheaded months, offering him her body more willingly and more frequently, her womanly scent rising up to him like a slowly unwrapped gift he’d always deserved but had somehow been denied him.
On the drive home, he stopped at the liquor store in Lafayette Square and bought a six-pack of Miller bottles and a fifth of rye. It was Thanksgiving Eve, his birthday a lifelong prelude to a day bigger and more important, and he’d had to wait in line behind a man who wore painter’s coveralls and a wool cap, the cashier glancing at Francis with eyes so neutral and empty of judgment that Francis felt he was easily getting away with something that maybe he never should have been deprived of in the first place.
A dank resentment settled over him. Walking with his beer and whiskey out of the package store into the cold, exhaust-smelling air, he was a man who’d been wronged, a man who had earned in every way his right to just this one, small reward.
These last three months, as if to accentuate the clarity of body and mind he woke to each morning, he’d gotten into the habit of sipping coffee on the eleven-mile ride to the high school. Beth had bought him an insulated thermos, and now Francis sat in his car behind the package store and poured the rest of his morning’s coffee out onto the cracked asphalt. His fingers were trembling as he poured rye into his thermos and twisted open a Miller and poured it in too. Then he took a long pull from his thermos—cold hoppy carbonation shot through with a leveling fire—and soon he was parked at the seawall down the boulevard from The Whaler. The other parking spots were empty for it was the off-season and from where he sat he could see just a lip of ocean on the other side of the seawall, but the song on the radio was an old one from an AM station in a holiday mood. He did not know what it was, but it was Big Band and had horns in it and the tempo was upbeat and he was fourteen or fifteen years old an
d his brother George was dancing with their mother in the small kitchen on Ginty Street. He was wearing his uniform, his collar open, and he was twirling their mother who was laughing, her hair coming loose, her eyes soft with something that never rose there. Then the music became a man talking about used cars and Francis was wiping his eyes so he could fill his thermos back up again and he was walking along the hard sand of low tide till he found a kelp-wrapped plank, its grain open cracks of rot he had to look away from for they were death itself and how long had he been weeping like a boy?
There was a woman before Beth. They’d both had too much to drink, and he’d driven her to her small apartment off Route 1 in Saugus. It was a trailer home really. She lived there with her brother, a merchant marine at sea, the shelf above his sofa weighted with shot glasses from all the bars he’d been in from New York to Naples, Italy, and back. Her name was Patrizia, but everyone called her Triz. Francis had been stateside for only a few weeks. Classes at Suffolk didn’t start for another month, and George had insisted that he stay in the guest room of his house. Francis was twenty-one years old, a war veteran, and he couldn’t just sit around George’s while his wife tended to little Charlie and the new baby. Francis didn’t like how George’s wife kept looking at him either. It was as if she were trying to measure whether the things he’d seen and done over there had made him somehow dangerous to her kids.
Every night George wanted to drink. He wanted to drink and “only talk about it if you fucking feel like it, Franny,” and George would talk about his own war as if he were the only soldier in it. They sat in lawn chairs in the small yard of the house George would later sell at a profit, and as the night grew cool and the mosquitoes became a problem, George came back to Francis about working with him selling insurance. But the idea was cold to Francis, all of it, from having to take orders from George to having to sell policies to people who did not want or need them. It seemed like a racket to Francis, and that’s the word he used in the bar in Boston on a Saturday in August talking to an Italian woman everyone called Triz.