Then she thought about her mother—that maybe her mother had been taught to read people’s thoughts, and was reading Rebecca’s thoughts right now. Rebecca closed her eyes as though she were praying. Fuck you, she said to her mother. Sorry, she said to her father. Then she opened her eyes, looked at the people in the church, as dull-looking as dry sticks. She pictured lighting little piles of papers in the woods; she had always liked the sudden small burst of a flame.
“What’ve you got there, Bicka-Beck?” David asked. He was sitting on the floor aiming the remote control at the television, switching channels every time a commercial came on. Above him on the windowpane were reflections from the television screen, jerking and dancing across the glass.
“A dental assistant,” Rebecca said, from where she sat at the table. She circled the ad with her pen. “Experience preferred, but they’ll train if they have to.”
“Oh, sweetie,” said David, looking at the television. “People’s mouths?”
There was no way around it, jobs were a problem for her. The only job Rebecca had ever enjoyed was a job she had one summer at the Dreambeam Ice Cream Machine. The manager was drunk every day by two o’clock and he let his help eat all the ice cream they wanted. They’d give the kids who came in huge ice cream cones and watch their eyes get big. “ ’S okay,” the manager would say, weaving between the ice cream freezers. “Run the place broke, I don’t give a shit.”
Right before Rebecca had moved in with David, she’d been a secretary at a big firm of lawyers. Some of the lawyers would buzz her on the phone and tell her to bring them coffee. Even the women lawyers did this. She kept wondering if she had the right to tell them no. But it didn’t matter—within a few weeks, they’d sent a woman over to tell her that she worked too slow.
“Remember, sweetie pie,” David said, switching channels again. “Confidence is the name of the game.”
“Okay,” said Rebecca. She kept on circling the ad for the dental assistant until the circle took up almost half the page.
“Go in with the attitude they’re lucky to get you.”
“Okay.”
“In a nonthreatening way, of course.”
“Okay.”
“And be friendly but don’t talk too much.” David pointed the remote control and the television switched off. The end of the living room was dark. “Poor old sweetie pie,” said David, standing up and walking to her. He put his arm around her neck and squeezed playfully. “We should just take you out to the pasture and shoot you, poor old thing.”
David always fell asleep right afterward, but a lot of nights Rebecca lay awake. That night she got up and walked into the kitchen. There was a bar across the street that you could see from the window, a noisy place—you could hear everything that happened in the parking lot, but Rebecca liked having the bar there. On nights when she couldn’t sleep, she liked knowing there were other people awake. She stood there thinking of the man in the story, the ordinary, balding man sitting alone in his office at lunchtime. And she thought of her father’s voice, how she had heard it in her head. She remembered how one time he had said to her, years ago, There are some men in the world that when they lie down beside a woman, they are no different from dogs. She remembered how once, a few years after her mother left, Rebecca announced she was going to go live with her. You can’t, her father said, without looking up from his reading. She gave you up. I’ve gone to court. I have sole custody.
For a long time, Rebecca had thought it was spelled s-o-u-l.
She watched a police car pull into the parking lot. Two policemen got out and the flashing lights stayed on, the edge of them zinging blue through the window, across the sink and the Maalox spoon. There had probably been a fight—a lot of nights there were fights in the bar. Rebecca, standing at the window, felt a tiny smile inside her getting larger—how delicious it would be: that one moment of perfect joy, propped up and righteous with booze, to let that first punch fly.
“Feel this,” said David, flexing his muscle. “Really.”
Rebecca leaned over her cereal bowl and touched his arm. It was like touching frozen earth. “That’s amazing,” she said. “That really is.”
David stood and looked at himself in the toaster. He flexed both arms together, like a boxer showing off before a crowd. Then he turned side-to and looked at himself that way. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Not bad.”
The only mirror Rebecca’s father had in their house was the one that hung over the bathroom sink. If she wasn’t brushing her teeth or washing her face, she wasn’t supposed to be near that mirror; vanity was a sin. “Your mother ran away from one cult just to join another,” her aunt Katherine had said. “For God’s sake, no Congregationalist lives like this.” Except Rebecca did. She wished her aunt would stop it, just go away and stop saying those things. “Do you want to come live with us?” her aunt asked her once, and Rebecca shook her head. She didn’t want to mention the soul custody. Besides, her Aunt Katherine made her anxious, the same way her math teacher, Mrs. Kitteridge, did. Mrs. Kitteridge would look at her hard sometimes, when the class was supposed to be working. Once she had said to Rebecca in the hallway, “If you ever want to talk to me about anything, you can.”
Rebecca hadn’t answered, had just moved past her with her books.
“All right, I’m out of here,” David said, zipping his workout bag closed. “You got the number for the dental assisant?”
“Yes,” Rebecca said.
“Good luck, Bicka-Beck,” said David. He went to the refrigerator and drank from the orange juice carton. Then he picked up the keys and kissed her goodbye. “Remember,” he said. “Be confident, and don’t talk too much.”
“Right, got it,” Rebecca said, nodding. “Goodbye.” She sat at the table with the dirty cereal bowls in front of her, and thought about her urge to talk. It had come over her soon after her father died, and it had not gone away. It was a physical thing, really; she wanted to give it up the way people gave up smoking.
Her father’d had a rule—no talking at the table. It was a strange rule, when you thought about it, because there had been only the two of them sitting in the little dining room of the rectory each night. It could be that her father was tired at the end of his day after visiting the sick and the dying—it was a small town, but there was usually someone sick, and quite frequently someone dying—and he wanted it quiet so that he could rest. At any rate, they had sat there night after night, the only sounds being silverware touching a plate, or a water glass being put back on the table, and the soft, too-intimate sounds of their chewing. Sometimes Rebecca would look up and see how her father had a piece of food caught on his chin, and she wouldn’t be able to swallow, she’d feel such a sudden love for him. But other times, especially as she got older, she was glad to see all the butter he used. It was his love for butter she was counting on, hoping that would do him in.
She stood now and washed out the cereal bowls. Then she wiped the counter and straightened the chairs. A pinprick of heat started up in her stomach, so she got the Maalox bottle and the Maalox spoon, and as she was shaking the bottle, she got an image of David leaning toward her, reminding her not to talk too much, and it came to her then that of course the large would be too big.
“No problem,” the woman said. “I’ll just check and see if the order’s gone out.”
Even scraping with her fingernail, there was a layer of dried Maalox that wouldn’t come off the spoon. Rebecca put the spoon back onto the counter. “I thought I probably wouldn’t get the same person again,” she said. “Wow. Or maybe you’re just a small outfit.” There was no answer. “I mean, being a small outfit’s just fine,” said Rebecca, ripping two pages of the story out of the magazine. There was still no answer, and finally Rebecca understood she’d been put on hold. She watched the pages go up in flames—the section where the wife just left. The flame was higher than the sink. A thrill of anxiety rose in Rebecca; she waited—her hands on the faucet—but the flame dipped down.
“Never mind,” the woman said, back on the phone. “The order’s already gone out. Just send it back if it’s too big, and we’ll send out a medium. Tell me, how’s your headache today?”
“You remember?” Rebecca said.
“Well, of course I remember,” the woman said.
“No headache today,” Rebecca said. “But I have a problem. I have to get a job.”
“You don’t have a job?” the woman asked, with her lovely Southern voice.
“No, I have to get one.”
“Well, sure,” the woman said, “a job is real important. What kind of job are you looking for?”
“Something low stress,” Rebecca said. “It’s not that I’m lazy or anything,” she said, and then she said, “Well, maybe I am, maybe that’s true.”
“Don’t say that,” the woman said. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
She was a wonderful woman. Rebecca thought about the man in the story—he should meet this woman.
“Thank you,” Rebecca said. “That’s really nice.”
“Now, you send it back if it’s too big. It’s no problem,” the woman assured her. “No problem at all.”
The death of Rebecca’s father was not the saddest thing. Nor was the absence of her mother. The saddest thing was when she fell in love with Jace Burke at the university and he broke up with her. Jace was a piano player, and one time when her father went to a conference, she brought Jace back to Crosby for the night. Jace looked around the rectory and said, “Baby, this is one strange place.” He looked at her with a tenderness that was like a sweet erasure of all the darkness in her past. Later, they went to the Warehouse Bar and Grill, where the kind-of-crazy Angela O’Meara still played the piano in the bar. “Oh, man, she’s great,” Jace said.
“My father always lets her come to the church to play whenever she feels like it. She doesn’t have a piano,” Rebecca explained. “She never did.”
“She’s great,” Jace repeated softly, and Rebecca felt a delicious warmth toward her father then, as though her father had seen some greatness in poor half-soused Angie, too, that Rebecca had never known. When they left, Jace slipped a twenty-dollar bill into Angela’s tip jar. Angela made a kiss in their direction and played “Hello, Young Lovers” as they left the bar.
When Jace left the university, he played in bars all over Boston. Sometimes the bars were fancy places with thick carpets and leather chairs, and sometimes there’d be a poster out front with Jace’s picture on it. But a lot of times his luck was bad and he’d have to play the electric organ in strip joints just to earn some money.
Every weekend, Rebecca took a Greyhound bus and stayed with him in his dirty apartment, where there were cockroaches in the silverware drawer. On Sunday evenings when she got back, she’d call her father and tell him how hard she was studying. Later on, when she was living with David, she’d sometimes let herself remember those weekends with Jace. The dirty sheets against her skin, the way Jace’s metal chairs felt, sitting on them naked while they ate English muffins by the open window, grime all around the window casing. She’d remember standing at the dirty sink in the bathroom, naked, Jace standing behind her, naked too, seeing themselves in the mirror. There was no voice of her father’s in her head, no thoughts of men behaving like dogs. All of it was easy as pie.
One night in the bathtub, Jace told her about a blond woman he’d met. Rebecca sat with the facecloth in her hand, staring at the cracked caulking around the edge of the tub, at the dirt wedged into the cracks. These things happen, is what Jace said.
Later that week, her father called. Even now, Rebecca didn’t understand exactly what had been wrong with her father’s heart; he hadn’t said, exactly. Only that there was nothing the doctors could do. “But they can do all sorts of things, Daddy,” she said. “I mean, I hear about all kinds of heart procedures and stuff.”
“Not my heart,” he answered, and there was fear in his voice. The fear made Rebecca wonder if perhaps her father hadn’t believed all those things he’d preached for years. But even when she heard the fear in his voice, and felt the fear herself, she knew what she felt most badly about was Jace and the blonde.
“Tell me,” David said. “What’s a facecloth doing in the freezer?”
“I didn’t get the job,” Rebecca said.
“No?” David closed the freezer door. “I’m kind of surprised. I thought you would. What do they want, a Ph.D.?” He tore the end off a loaf of bread that was on the counter and stuck it into a jar of spaghetti sauce. “Poor Bicka-Beck,” he said, and shook his head.
“Maybe it’s because I talked about the barium enema I had,” Rebecca said, with a shrug. She turned the heat down so the spaghetti wouldn’t boil over. “I talked a lot,” she admitted. “I probably talked too much.”
David sat down at the table and looked at her. “See, that might not be a good idea. See, Bicka, maybe nobody ever told you this, but people don’t really want to hear about other people’s barium enemas.”
Rebecca took the facecloth out of the freezer. She folded it into a strip and sat down across from David, holding the facecloth over her eyes. “If a person’s had one,” she said, “I don’t think they would mind.”
David didn’t answer.
“Evidently the dentist never had one,” Rebecca added.
“Man,” said David. “Where in the world did you come from? Can I just ask how the subject came up? Wouldn’t it make more sense to be talking about teeth?”
“We’d already talked about teeth by then.” Rebecca pressed on the facecloth. “I was telling him why I wanted the job. How important it is for all these helpers dressed in white to be nice to scared people.”
“Okay, okay,” David said. Rebecca peeled back the facecloth and looked at him with one eye. “Tomorrow you’ll get a job,” he said.
And she did. She got a job in Augusta, typing traffic reports for a fat man who scowled and never said please. The man was the head of an agency that studied the flow of traffic in and around different cities in the state, so the cities would know where to build ramps and put up lights. Rebecca hadn’t thought of anyone doing that before, studying traffic, and it was interesting the first morning, but by afternoon it was not so interesting anymore, and after a few weeks, she knew she would probably quit. One afternoon as she was typing, her hand began to shake. When she held up her other hand, it was shaking, too. She felt the way she had on the Greyhound bus that weekend Jace had told her about the blonde, when she kept thinking: This can’t be my life. And then she thought that most of her life she had been thinking: This can’t be my life.
In the lobby near the mailboxes was a brown padded envelope addressed to Rebecca. The shirt had made its way from Kentucky to Maine. Rebecca carried it upstairs to the apartment, and pulled the tab across the top of the envelope, while pieces of gray stuffing sprayed across the table. The woman was right, it was a beautiful shirt. Rebecca spread it out over the couch, arranging the full sleeves over the cushions, and then stepped back to look. This was not a shirt David would wear. Never in the world would David wear this shirt. This was a shirt for Jace.
“It happens,” the woman said cheerfully. “Just send it on back.”
“All right,” Rebecca said.
“You sound discouraged,” the woman said. “But you’ll get your money back, honey. It’ll take a few weeks, but you’ll get it back.”
“All right,” Rebecca said again.
“No problem, honey. It’s no problem at all.”
The next day, Rebecca looked around the doctor’s office for something to steal. Other than magazines, there wasn’t much. It was like they’d planned it that way, even the coat hangers were the kind that couldn’t come off the rack. But there was a small glass vase on the windowsill, plain and ordinary, with the pale remnants of a brown stain around the bottom.
“The doctor will see you now,” said the nurse. Rebecca followed her down the hallway into the examining room. She rolled up her sl
eeve for the blood pressure check. “How’s the stomach feel?” the nurse asked, and glanced at the chart.
“Good,” Rebecca said. “Well, not good. The Maalox doesn’t really work.”
The nurse unpeeled the Velcro strip from Rebecca’s arm. “Tell the doctor,” she said.
But the doctor, Rebecca could see right away, was irritated with her. He folded his arms across his white-coated chest and pressed his lips together, gazing at her without blinking.
“It still hurts,” Rebecca said. “And—”
“And what?”
She had been planning on telling him how her hands were shaking, how she felt that something was deeply wrong. “And I just wondered why it still hurt.” She looked down at her feet.
“Rebecca, we’ve run upper and lower GI’s on you, done the blood work. And what you have to accept is that you’re fine. You have a sensitive stomach. A lot of people do.”
Back in the waiting room, Rebecca put her coat on, standing near the window and gazing out, as if she were interested in the parking lot below. For a moment, her head didn’t ache, her stomach didn’t ache, there was nothing in her except a thrill as clean as fresh water. Like she was the pure flame her lighter became. Nearby, a man read a magazine. A woman filed her nails. Rebecca put the vase into her knapsack and left.
That night they sat on the floor watching an old movie on television. Anyone looking through the window would have seen Rebecca sitting, leaning against the couch, David next to her, holding a bottle of seltzer water, as ordinary-looking as a couple could be.
“I never shoplifted when I was a kid,” Rebecca said.
“I did,” said David, still watching the movie. “I stole a watch from the drugstore I worked in. I stole a lot of things.”
“I never did it, because I was scared I’d get caught,” Rebecca said. “Not because it was wrong. I mean, I knew it was wrong, but that’s not why I didn’t do it.”