them

  Betty called him that guy behind his back.

  When Maureen went out he was still sitting at the kitchen table, which was pushed into a corner. His shirt was off. His chest, broad and yet a little sunken, covered with thick curly gray hair, rose and fell as he breathed; he was drinking coffee noisily. He held the cup in both hands. Loretta stood behind him idly massaging his back.

  “Don’t you go lifting anything, somebody wants a hand,” Loretta said. “You got to get over this trouble. A slipped disk would be terrible.”

  “A what?” said Furlong.

  “A slipped disk, something in the spine. Men get it from lifting heavy things.” She glanced at Maureen. Her face was pursed into a pretty, worried look.

  “Yeah, well, the goddam cold weather don’t do it any good,” Furlong said.

  His back was “acting up.” When it had been better—a few months before, Maureen gathered—he had driven a truck. He belonged to the Teamsters Union. But now he just messed around at a garage where some friends of his worked, though that kind of work wasn’t good enough for him. He had a lot of time on his hands. He seemed to examine his hands often, seeing them empty, puzzled and a little angry, a big man getting fat. As soon as his back got well, he was always saying, he’d be on the road again and making good money.

  Betty, who said she hated him, was crowding around him this morning. She was asking him about trucks. About fights. What did he think of Rocky Marciano? (Rocky Marciano was one of Betty’s heroes; she had a picture of him taped up in her room.) Did he ever fight himself? Did he ever handle a gun? Weren’t there shootings sometimes? Wasn’t a truck driver killed just the other day? He knew all about it, didn’t he, the inside story? A truck driver who hadn’t belonged to a union had been killed driving to East Lansing; a large piece of scrap metal had been knocked off an overpass and through his windshield. The News had a big picture story about it. Didn’t Furlong know all about it, know who had done the job?

  He rubbed his hand hard over Betty’s head, as if she were a boy, a kid who bothered him and yet pleased him. Betty tried not to wince with pain. “Sorry, kid,” Furlong said, “that’s secret stuff.”

  He turned to Maureen, smiling. “Well,” he said awkwardly and yet with the same bossy smile he used on Betty, “well, where are you going? Out to Hollywood to get in the movies?”

  “This is what we wear at school, this thing,” Maureen said. She tried not to look at him; his foolish teasing made her miserable.

  “That old jumper’s been around for years. Reeny’s worn it to school for years,” Loretta said, her voice high-pitched and surprised. She let her arms slide across Furlong’s chest and she looked at Maureen over his head with a certain tenderness. “The nuns make them wear it. You know.”

  “I wasn’t kidding or anything, I think it looks nice. You had breakfast yet, Maureen?”

  He was trying to be friends.

  “Yes. I’m going.”

  He had a thick, muscular body, and because he was so often without his shirt—either in his undershirt or with his chest bare—Maureen mixed up the graying, matted hair on his chest with his face. She had a confused idea of him as hairy, with curly hair like shavings, very stiff, gray, unreal. But his face was always shaven. It was clean and frank. His head, like his body, looked hard and muscular; his curly hair was clipped short up the back of his head, very neat; his nose was small but clearly defined, because the nostrils were so large and dark. Tiny hairs emerged from them, just visible. Maureen supposed he was a man women would call handsome. But when she had to pass near him she could smell the smell that was always with him—not just dirt and grime and grease but the personal, private smell of his body. She did not remember her father smelling like that—he had had an odor of tobacco mostly. She did not think this man was handsome. She hated him. In her daydreams she imagined him dying as her father had died, crushed by metal. Hot metal. Deaths of men had to be brutal, the death of tons of metal cracking through ribs, through skulls, because the men themselves were so brutal. Even their breathing was brutal. Their snoring was brutal. Hard, rhythmic, deliberate, their breathing at night or during the day, their eating and their talking, the way they sat at the table, were brutal. Furlong was always teasing her, half teasing her. Trying to be friends, with those blunt thick fingers and those dirty nails. Sometimes, at Mass, Maureen found herself thinking about him. She thought of a flashing movement she could not quite explain to herself, the falling of metal, something sharp. An artery severed. One arm crushed and mangled. An accident, an accident—once happened it can never be undone! And with his chest bare, this man could withstand nothing, he was open, vulnerable, waiting—he would cry out in pain, calling for help, but no one could help him. A man on his way to death cannot be helped.

  And she would come to herself, shaken and ashamed, and remember that she was in church and that she was happy for her mother: why shouldn’t Loretta get married again and be happy?

  “Hey, Reeny,” Loretta said as Maureen went to the door, “be sure you come right home today.”

  “I will.”

  “Don’t you go fooling around or anything, I need you back home.”

  “Betty’s the one that fools around,” Maureen said with dignity.

  “Go to hell,” said Betty.

  “Just you come right home, Maureen,” said Loretta. “There’s all that ironing laying in the basket—”

  “I said I’d come right home.”

  Maureen wanted to get out, but Loretta seemed to be hanging onto her. Loretta said in a high-pitched, critical, and yet not unpleasant voice, “There’s a lot going on, so I hear. I hear lots of things. I don’t want you hanging around the five-and-ten or with that Carol what’s-her-name, her mother is absolutely nuts. They found her in her slip running around outside in a storm, what d’ya think of that? She said somebody was in the house, somebody was trying to get her. I don’t want you walking home the long way either, there’s too many smart-alecks on the lookout for kids like you.”

  Her name was now Mrs. Furlong. She was no longer Mrs. Wendall. Maureen and Betty and Jules, though, were still Wendalls; Maureen was glad of that. She thought it over and over, the meaning of her name. She thought about her mother’s new name, Mrs. Furlong, and she kept waiting for things to change, to straighten out and get quieter, but nothing happened. Nothing changed. Mrs. Furlong stayed with her job at the Checker Grill and Furlong went out most of the day, hanging around somewhere, making connections, catching up on news, telephoning people, doing who knows what, keeping himself busy, secretive. Then he came back home.

  “Carol’s mother isn’t so bad,” Maureen said sullenly. “It’s somebody to live with.”

  “Yes, well, I didn’t mean anything bad,” Loretta said, fluttery and feminine. “In fact the nut-house would only make her worse. But you better stay away from them or people will think you’re nuts too.”

  “People think she’s nuts now,” Betty said loudly.

  “They do not,” said Loretta.

  “They think she’s stuck-up, she’s always got her nose in the air. She’s a real big deal.” Betty, trying to get Furlong to look at her, spoke brazenly. To show that she knew something none of them knew she ducked her head as if the impact of her knowledge was too much for her, a joke that was also terrible.

  “You, what do you know,” Maureen said contemptuously. She opened the door.

  Loretta said, “Remember what I said about coming home early, kid? Okay?”

  “Yes, Ma. Yes.”

  “I don’t like to see girls hanging around places like the five-and-ten,” Loretta said seriously, more to Furlong than to Maureen. “They’re just in there to pick up stuff and it shows all over. They can’t hide it. If I ever caught Maureen stealing junk, like that…”

  Maureen sighed in exasperation. Maureen, always Maureen! Why didn’t her mother let her go?

  “But she probably meets boys instea
d,” Loretta said.

  She was maybe trying to tease, affectionately; maybe not. There was something bright and nervous about her this morning. The mention of Carol’s mother had done it, Maureen guessed. She knew that Loretta’s father had died in the state hospital, that he’d been crazy at the end, very bad, and that Loretta kept bringing it up somehow—when Maureen’s father had been alive he was sure to bring it up himself. “They’re all nuts in your family,” he had said.

  “I don’t meet boys,” Maureen said.

  She left. She didn’t know whether to be hurt or angry or to forget about it. Her mother was always picking on her, and yet it wasn’t in the way she picked at Betty, it was something different. It made her nervous, not exactly resentful. She couldn’t understand it. These days Loretta was not herself. She and Furlong had been married on the first of October and had gone away for four days, to Chicago they said, and now it was October 25 and there was still a dizzying excitement to the air, something strange. What did marriage mean? What was going on? Was the marriage legal and permanent, or was he going to walk out one of these days?

  Everything was busy, noisy. Maureen thought that life should be quiet and sensible, but there was always too much happening at their place. The apartment was too small. Wash and ironing and dishes lay about until Maureen put them away. Clothes lay about. Towels, sheets, boxes of cereal carelessly closed, knives with food stuck to them, Furlong’s shoes, Betty’s junk—everything lay around, waiting to be taken care of by Maureen. Sometimes Furlong had friends of his over, men who played cards and drank in the kitchen until early in the morning. Betty stayed out until late. Jules was always gone, never came to visit. Maureen would sit in her room, trying to do schoolwork. She shut her ears against the noise from the kitchen or from the television set or from Loretta and Furlong arguing or fooling around or laughing together, two big kids, two fools. It was harder and harder for her to do her homework. Since moving to this apartment she hadn’t been able to sleep right—she slept part of the night, but not well. She kept waking. Her heart seemed to flutter, as if it had heard something she hadn’t. It took her an hour to do a page of math homework, sometimes more than an hour, sitting with her hands pressed over her ears, staring at the book, trying to make sense of what she was reading.

  She was in the ninth grade now. Assignments seemed harder to her. Her mind seemed to work backward, strain backward, resisting what it should do. A crease or speck of dirt on the page distracted her, caught her eye again and again until in exasperation she would have to cover it up with her hand. She wanted to please her teacher—there seemed nothing more important to her now. But her mind seemed to resist. It wanted to break loose. Furlong’s friends stayed for hours, and at about two in the morning, when Loretta came home from work, no one bothered even to go and unlock the door for her, she had to unlock it herself. Maureen, lying sleepless and exhausted in her room, could hear all this but could not figure out exactly what it meant.

  Why was there always so much going on?

  Maureen hurried outside. It was always good to leave the apartment. She walked to school alone now, walking fast. She could not think whether to be hurt or angry over Loretta’s teasing. “I suppose you got a secret boy friend,” Loretta was always saying. Loretta had grown slightly thinner since her marriage. You could see the outline of her shoulderblades when she leaned forward in her green kimono. Her face had a pale, bluish look when there was no makeup on it, and sometimes she dropped things. The evening before she had dropped the scissors and Maureen had had to pick them up for her. “It makes me dizzy, bending over,” she had said.

  Maureen felt a peculiar tenderness toward her, partly resentful, partly protective. But she was measuring everything against the time when she would leave home, like Jules.

  * * *

  —

  She drifted down to the library whenever she was free. Growing up and moving away from home was somehow linked in her mind with the library—the library at night, its silence and openness. Anything might happen. Nothing happened but anything might. She sat at the long, shiny, empty tables, reading, leafing nervously through books, glancing up when someone came into the big reading-room, waiting. She liked to go to the library in the evenings, when her mother was out working. Furlong didn’t care where she went. If Loretta were home she’d never let Maureen out, so Maureen began to think that it was good her mother worked, it was good to be left alone.

  She leafed through magazines, curious and alert for what the rest of the world was doing. In a glossy magazine she came upon an advertisement for a paperweight, a small cat made of glass; it sold for $500 and was “to hold down your important papers.” She sat staring at this advertisement for some time. She looked at what women were wearing, long-legged and sullen, their faces more beautiful than hers and remote, as if they were women from another planet, speaking another language. She stared at these pictures, aware of having failed though she was still young; her failure was tied up somehow with her being unable to sleep. She would not grow up into a normal woman: something would catch her and hold her back, some snag, some failure to have dreamed her way out of childhood.

  Most of all she liked novels. She liked novels set in England. As soon as she read the first page of a novel by Jane Austen she was pleased, startled, excited to know that this was real: the world of this novel was real. Her own life, up over Elson’s Drugs or back on Labrosse, could not be real. The birdlike chatter of her mother, Betty’s grunts and bad temper, the glimpse Maureen had to content herself with of Jules out on the street were not so real as novels, not so convincing. There was nothing permanent about them, as there was about people in novels. And when her mother made those ugly accusations about Maureen meeting boys when she should be in school, how could that be real? How could such words be real?

  The rest of the day, the following night, were hardly enough for her thoughts. She was bewildered amidst the confusion of all that had rushed on her within the last few hours. Every moment had brought a fresh surprise; and every surprise must be a matter of humiliation to her. How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under!

  What power in these words, and in the intelligence behind them. Maureen, dreaming over them, could feel herself begin to dissolve into nothing, nobody, an eye in a head, a blankness. The suffering of such a character in such a novel was much greater than her own. How could she or her people be raised to this level of suffering? Grandma Wendall’s grunts and groans made her hated. Nobody felt sorry for her, not really. Nobody would ever cry over her as they would over the minor unhappiness of a woman in a novel.

  On Sundays, when they went to visit Grandma Wendall, Maureen took a book along for something to do. Often Aunt Connie came with them. Furlong drove them and let them off at the nursing home, then went down the street to have a few beers while they climbed the steps and ascended through layer after layer of stale, disinfectant-stinking air, peering without curiosity through opened doors that showed bed after bed, aged woman after woman, all of them sisters in their soiled white nightgowns of flannel and their anxious, jealous eyes. Sometimes an old woman would creep out into the corridor to stare after them, fascinated by Loretta’s patent-leather high heels and Maureen’s long shining hair, or angry about some fantastic wrong. “Come here and look, it’s filthy! Not fit for people! They come and do their business in the corner of my room, look at the roaches, little girl, come look!” Maureen always kept going.

  “Them poor old things,” Loretta said, shaking her head. “It’s really awful when you get old.”

  It was a world of women: sick trays, skeletal hands, wet paper napkins. Maureen stared at the smooth, innocent curve of a skull beneath thin white hair. She felt very young, remote. But she also felt threatened. The crucifixes on the walls were the same as the one her mother had on the living-room wall at home. Everything was the same in this world outside of novels.


  Connie, in her broad-shouldered cloth coat and her Sunday hat, was always calm. Or perhaps she saw nothing. She led the way up to the fifth floor and to the old woman’s room, no nonsense about her, no lingering over elderly women in the corridors who wanted to register a complaint with the bishop. Maureen was both nervous and bored by these visits. She felt very young, even threatened. She hated to be stared at. In the room they always sat in the same place—Connie and Loretta on either side of the bed, Maureen on the window sill, half sitting and half standing. She was glad to be out of the way. Grandma Wendall looked very old. She did not look like the same woman. Her body, big beneath the bedclothes, had a stationary, welded look, as if nothing could move it. Maureen tried to feel sorry for her but could not locate any sorrow. The odor of flesh and spilled food was too much; it ruled out sorrow.

  “They told you, eh, about my stroke? Whole right side paralyzed, paralyzed?” the old woman said to Maureen.

  She was alert and spiteful, not wanting Maureen to open that book and escape.

  “How is Jules? Jules is my favorite!” the old woman said.

  Connie and Loretta, who now saw each other only during these visits, faced the old woman with a certain strange enthusiasm. Climbing up the steps made them breathless, and this breathlessness turned into a kind of anticipation. They began to talk. They talked to Grandma Wendall and to each other with ironic, womanly smiles, moving gradually into the areas of their real interests, gaining enthusiasm, momentum, as the minutes passed. They talked about work. Loretta was still a waitress and Connie worked in a laundry. They talked about religion, about the priests at their churches. They talked about the price of food, about the baby Loretta was going to have (yes, a new baby—due in four months!), Loretta’s apartment and Connie’s apartment, the troubles on the street, the troubles in the city, Betty and her gang, Maureen herself (“She’s got secrets of her own, like a sneaky cat,” Loretta said in Maureen’s hearing), and finally, as if this were the target they’d been circling, men. Furlong and his job. Furlong and his back. Furlong. Men. Connie’s boy friend Stan. His job. His ex-wife. His crazy ex-wife.