them

  He embraced her. Everything was all right with him. Sitting in the car, she let the strength flow out of her body, as if it were Maureen herself flowing out, escaping, disappearing into the air, and clumsily the man leaned over her, trying to define some need of his with his own body, his hands. There was something gay and extravagant in his passion—sparks that seemed to flirt with her, leaping about her, sparks of excitement she could not quite grasp and had a little curiosity about sometimes but could not get hold of herself.

  Shaken, he drove out Woodward Avenue, driving fast as if to exhibit his power. She let her eyes trail along the string of familiar buildings. On the radio a popular song was playing. The air was good, as this man had said, touched with spring. Maureen wondered why it didn’t mean more to her. She couldn’t quite remember the spring before, the year before. She thought she’d always liked spring, relieved at having lived through another winter, but now this feeling belonged to her friend, who was steering the car with one hand and squeezing her hand with the other. He had taken up all the strength of spring and was giddy with it, while Maureen sat calmly and looked out at the stores and the people, all those people with money in their pockets going in stores to buy things, to lay out money on counters, to give money to other people, a cycle that never stopped.

  He was talking to her and she had to listen. “Are you still a homeroom secretary?” he said. “Tell me about that.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “I remember being in school—my homeroom—we had a president and a secretary too. Tell me about it.”

  “Really, there’s nothing to tell.”

  After a while he said, “Tell me more about your mother. Do the two of you fight all the time? She doesn’t really believe it, does she?—that you’re running around. What about your father, what does he think?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about them.”

  “Did somebody try to pick you up once and she found out? Tell me about it.”

  He drove out past Palmer Park, where small crowds of people drifted in the spring sunshine, looking dazzled by it. An unruly mob of ducks and geese were scrambling for food around the pond, fighting with one another. Out in the water benches had been thrown, one of them on end, and a pigeon was perched on it, watching the spectacle. The sunlight glinted beautifully on everything. There should have been music. People were on the tennis courts, playing tennis or hanging around. Maureen put her hand over the man’s hand and stroked his fingers. This might keep him silent. She wondered what it was like to be a tennis player; not to play tennis, she had no interest in that, but to be a tennis player, one of those girls in a white outfit with a sweater slung over her back and its sleeves tied in front of her…

  He drove past the State Fair Ground. Negroes were waiting for buses in a large shelter; a few of them, women, stood out in the sunlight.

  The man took her to a motel outside Detroit, a place painted white, with pink neon lights. There were several cars in the parking lot with out-of-state license plates. Maureen got out of the car and waited for him to come back from registering, then went with him to the room. The Venetian blinds were already drawn.

  The man helped her take off her jumper and, with a gentle, kindly pretense of authority, drew the skin taut at the tips of her eyes. “You should get more sleep. Is your family still so crazy?” he said.

  Maureen said nothing. Standing in her white slip, she drew the covers back from the pillows, thinking that this scene, the pillows and the sallow light, were so familiar that she no longer had to place herself among them. She was here and yet not here. But an accident disturbed her—she happened to catch sight of the man’s face in the mirror. She hadn’t meant to see it. He was unbuttoning his shirt, looking down, and she noticed that he wore a platinum stretch-band watch and that there were tiny buttons on the points of his collar, holding them down neatly; his face looked a little coarse with hurrying.

  He came to her and they passed into another part of the cycle, now that they had stopped talking, and Maureen felt the flesh of his back dutifully as if only now was she beginning to recognize him. But this too was familiar. She had memorized all the parts of the cycle, the route the machinery took to its inevitable end; she wanted to hurry it along. His skin was a man’s skin, a little rough. It felt almost sandy beneath her fingers. He himself was a little rough, and so she seemed to be guiding him with her hands on his back and her mouth near his. A man was like a machine: one of those machines at the laundromat where she dragged the laundry. There were certain cycles to go through. The cycle had begun when he had opened the door of his car for her, and in a minute or two it would end with his sudden paralyzed tension, his broken breath against her face, the familiar urgent signs of a man’s love. For he spoke of love, groaning against her, “Jesus Christ, but I love you…I’m crazy about you…”

  Afterward they lay together under the cheap cotton cover and he talked in another voice. He was cheerful and energetic, a little loud. “Your mother doesn’t really believe it, the crap she says, does she? Why would she let you go out then?” He was setting a certain argument before her, certain blocks of logic. It did not matter what they meant.

  “I don’t know,” Maureen said.

  “You should get more sleep. Get to bed early.”

  “All right.”

  “Do you need much money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why, to buy things?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What kind of things? Skirts and dresses?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want to buy pretty things for yourself, huh?”

  Maureen closed her eyes.

  “I could buy them for you. Let me buy you something.”

  “No,” she said simply, “I would rather have the money.”

  “But I could buy you something nice myself. You could pick it out.”

  “I would rather have the money.”

  “If I didn’t give you money, you wouldn’t come with me?” Maureen didn’t answer. She felt too weary to answer.

  “Then you don’t like me, huh?”

  “I like you.”

  He laughed. He was in a very good mood. “Do you love me?” he said.

  “Yes, I love you.” She spoke in a dull, vacuous manner, perfectly obedient.

  She could hear traffic getting louder outside on Woodward; it was getting late. People were heading out of the city, heading north. She felt a shiver pass over her, thinking of men in cars heading out of the city, north to the suburbs where they lived, a steady, noisy stream of cars. So many people, so much urgency. It was strange that she had to lie still on this strange bed, in a room this man had rented, while everyone else was escaping, driving away from the city. She eased away from him a little. Her heart had begun to beat quickly.

  When she got home, around seven, she went right to the bathroom and got her mother’s jar of cold cream out of the medicine cabinet. Loretta followed Maureen into the bathroom. “Help yourself, don’t bother asking. Feel free,” she said. Rita was gone now but her chattiness was in the air and had infected Loretta.

  “Well, can I have it?” Maureen said patiently.

  “Why not? We got to live together.”

  She slid past her mother and went to her room, where she sat on the edge of her bed. Loretta followed. Maureen could see Poets of the New World from where she sat. She had more money to be put in the book—that night she could count it all up. She could lock herself in the bathroom and count it.

  She put cold cream on her face while her mother slouched in the doorway, smoking. Maureen did not listen to her mother’s chatter but thought about her own face. Maybe it was getting older, changed, by the friction of those rough faces against hers. Something would change in her face. She wondered if all women who gave themselves to men felt the imprint of faces on theirs—how did you get them rubbed off? They were like shells en
closing her face, hard and ugly. Her own skin would get rough.

  Loretta was saying a little drunkenly, “That Rita is a real sweet kid, she’s my heart, that one. Two times she helped me out, two times, when I was in bad trouble…”

  Maureen wiped the cold cream off her face with a tissue. On the tissue there were no particular signs—just cold cream, a little dirt. Specks of dirt. No sign. She did not dare to be relieved, however. It was bad luck to be relieved when danger was past; danger was never really past. What about the money in her purse? What if Loretta snatched up her purse, in fun, and looked inside? She was nosy enough to do this. A shudder began low in Maureen’s spine. She wiped her face and crumpled up the tissue, wondering if her mother could guess. Yes, her mother would guess if she opened the purse. No, she wouldn’t guess anything. Did she know already? Or was it all a joke? Maureen’s spine felt cold and brittle as if it were turning to ice. It felt as if it might break suddenly. And then all the spinal fluid would gush out. She thought of that man hanging over her, his weight on her, all that love pushed into her and released as if it had been just too much for him and he had to get rid of it, the sooner the better. She thought of her mother and Furlong. She thought of her mother and her father, her dead father. Very slowly she wiped cold cream off her throat, thinking of these things. It was good to feel clean, yet there was a greasy, clammy feel to her skin from the cream. It was not really clean. Her back was very cold, brittle. If a man fell upon her now he would break her in two, her spine would snap. She could not understand these things. She could not understand the weight, the force that drew men and women together, of their own free will. What she could understand was the money in her purse, and the money in that book. It was something that could be counted again and again; it was as real as a novel by Jane Austen.

  Loretta, lounging in the doorway, chatting, smoking, gave no sign of going away. “So how was the library, kid? Learn a lot?”

  “Ma, you should turn off that stupid television and read something yourself. There’re all kinds of books in the library,” Maureen said suddenly. “You’d learn something.”

  “Oh, the hell I would! What?”

  “There’re books on all kinds of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “I took out a book of poems, it’s right there on the floor. Poems.”

  Loretta looked down at the row of books.

  “Poems, hell. Shit,” she said, and left the doorway.

  Is she real? Maureen wondered suddenly. Is any of this real? She remembered hearing her mother talk once about being a mother, about having children. Loretta had said that it was strange to be a mother because if the kids weren’t in the room with you—were they really around? Did you really have them? And maybe the main kid you were supposed to have, the important one, was someone you never got around to having—what then? Loretta had spoken slowly and seriously. She’d been talking to Connie, across Grandma Wendall’s body. And Maureen, half listening, had been struck by something pathetic and frightening in her mother’s voice. If the kids weren’t in the room with you, did you reallyhave them? And she herself, Loretta’s daughter, could not have said what the answer was.

  Maybe the book with her money in it, and the money so greedily saved, and the idea of the money, maybe these things weren’t real either. What would happen if everything broke into pieces? It was queer how you felt, instinctively, that a certain space of time was real and not a dream, and you gave your life to it, all your energy and faith, believing it to be real. But how could you tell what would last and what wouldn’t? How could you get hold of something that wouldn’t end? Marriages ended. Love ended. Money could be stolen, found out and taken, Furlong himself might find it or it might disappear by itself, like that secretary’s notebook. Such things happened. Objects disappeared, slipped through cracks, devoured, kicked aside, knocked under the bed or into the trash, lost. Nothing lasted for long. Maureen thought of earthquakes opening the earth in violent rifts, swallowing city blocks, churches, railroad tracks. She thought of fires, of bulldozers leveling trees and buildings. Why not? While she had lain with that man, only a short time before, it had come to her helplessly that she was there, not out on the avenue, she was in bed with a man and not in a car traveling somewhere. It was her fate to be Maureen; that was that. But the Maureen she was in the presence of that man she’d been with—he said he was crazy about her and he needed her violently—did not last. It came to an end. As eagerly as he switched himself onto the cycle of loving her, still he was sober and eager to switch himself off and drive her home and get rid of her. That was a fact. He was very real to her for about five minutes, that was all. Her clearest memory of the men she’d been with was their moving away from her. They were all body then, completed.

  That night Furlong came home early, around ten. Maureen heard him. Then she heard Loretta calling her—“Hey, kid, come out here. Got a job for you.” Maureen got up at once and went out, not even making a face to herself. She was in her bathrobe. Furlong was standing by the kitchen table with one hand on the small of his back—a gesture of defeat that looked strangely tender. Maureen had never thought much about men feeling pain but she could see that this man felt pain.

  “Honey, can you rub his back for him?” Loretta said. “It’s acting up again and I’m real tired myself. I been feeling dizzy all day.”

  Maureen looked levelly at her mother and nodded.

  “I’ll get the stuff for you,” Loretta said. “It’s a real nice favor, Reeny. He won’t be able to sleep otherwise.”

  Furlong sat. Maureen waited. The two of them did not speak or look at each other. Loretta came back from the bathroom with the rubbing alcohol and unbuttoned Furlong’s shirt for him, breezy and bullying. “Reeny might as well make herself useful,” she said. “The baby was sick twice today, the poor kid. It’s about all I can take. Now, Reeny, come here. Here’s how you do it. Watch me.”

  Her mother showed Maureen how to massage Furlong’s back. “Use your fingers hard, you have to do it hard. Around in a circle,” she said. She gave off an odor of something cheap and powdery and pleasant. Furlong smelled different. Just as his body was solid and heavy and fixed, so the odor of his being, the mysterious odor of his soul, was heavy, dark, opaque. There was nothing light about it, nothing powdery.

  Maureen felt a little dizzy, as if her mother’s dizziness had become her own. It was strange: she did not mind her mother’s hands over hers, guiding her own narrow hands on Furlong’s back, the fingertips moving slowly and with a kind of wonder over those strange little bones that make up the spine. Though she was very tired she did not mind any of this, not even her mother’s leaning against her.

  “Like this, like this,” Loretta said, pleased. To Furlong she said, “How does it feel?”

  He nodded gratefully. His face was sweaty with pain. Maureen stared at his thick, smooth flesh beneath her fingers and understood why he was silent. Her father too had been silent. There was too much flesh to men, too much weight to force words through.

  “Okay, Reeny, you know how to do it? I’m going to bed,” Loretta said and left.

  Maureen heard her in the bedroom, talking to the baby. The baby whimpered. These sounds, coming from another room, were like a wall: Loretta was on the other side of it. Maureen watched the back of Furlong’s head. She stared down at his neck, which was very still, and his solid back, the pale flesh marred with tiny blemishes and moles that were like secrets of his weakness, something you would never know unless you stood this close. She felt an overwhelming, sharp sense of dizziness.

  Massaging him became hypnotic. Yet her weariness slowed her hands; the muscles high on her forearms ached. She paused. She leaned down toward him, as if to whisper in his ear, but instead she laid her cheek against the warmth of his back, near his shoulder. She remained that way for a moment.

  Then she said, backing off, “Good night, I’m going to bed.”

  17
r />   The next week, at about five o’clock one afternoon, Maureen happened to glance out of her friend’s car window as they waited for a light to change on Livernois. On the sidewalk, standing with a group of men who looked as if they’d been standing there all day, was her mother’s husband, and he was staring at her. Maureen shielded her face with her hand and turned away.

  “What’s wrong?” said the man.

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  He drove on. He was in a different mood today, quieter. She did not bother with his moods and kept herself still, waiting for everything to be got over with, for the routine to run itself through, exhaust itself. But suddenly she was very afraid. She began to tremble. That curious sensation in her spine began again, as if it were the start of paralysis; the coldness spread through her body. She wondered what was going to happen. He had seen her, yes. She had shielded her face with her hand. It had happened in an instant and was over with and yet none of it was over with. She gripped her head with her hands, feeling the actual skull, wondering if she was going to faint in this stranger’s car.

  He was talking about something. She sat very still and stared out at the running landscape of sidewalks and stores. Everything was too bright. Her eyes hurt. She did not think about the man beside her, or about Furlong, or about what would happen when she got home. Instead she fixed her mind upon that book, and the money in it, saved up week after week. It couldn’t be taken from her, not so easily. It was not possible that she might lose it. She began to breathe quickly, thinking of her money. It was her money. A stream of air from the car window stirred her hair and made her eyes ache. Why was it so cold? She could not quite remember where they were going. Had they already gone to bed together this afternoon or were they on their way? She’d been with this man two days before, or three days. She could not remember. Cautiously she shifted her body and tried to think, testing herself—was she sore from him or hadn’t anything happened yet? One way or another, she really did not care. Everything was so empty in her that she felt nothing; her body forgot faster than she herself did.