Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger

Bob hung his head and scuttled sideways toward the sofa, panting.

  “Well,” Netta said. “Just do what you want to, then, you always do anyway, both you and your sister Lisa.”

  “Mama,” Cheryl said. It wasn’t fair. They were driving her crazy. All of them, her mother and Lisa and Bob and the kids too, oh especially the kids, summer was awful with them out of school. Except for Louis, who had flunked ninth-grade math and Spanish — he’d almost flunked everything — and now had to take summer school. Meanwhile David just sat by the pool at the Swiss Chalet Apartments getting browner and younger looking, with Margaret Fine-Manning. Cheryl didn’t see how Margaret could get any sun at all on her legs, she had so much hair on them. It wasn’t fair. Joan Collins got out of a car on TV, Bob thumped his tail on the floor. “Good night, Mother,” Cheryl said.

  JULY WAS A BUSY month with a lot of things happening. The first one was that Louis passed math but flunked Spanish and had to take it again in the second semester of summer school. The second thing was that Cheryl took Bob to obedience training at Triangle Vet, where he pitched a fit and tried to chew up his leash instead of walking around in a circle with the others. “Now, now, now!” said the instructor, a Mrs. Livers, pulling the leash out of Bob’s mouth and squeezing his muzzle shut with both hands. “We don’t love with our teeth!” she exclaimed. After the second class, she kicked Bob out. Then Mr. and Mrs. Wright across the street, who had always acted so nice, showed their true colors at last. They started calling up on the telephone every time Bob howled and then they started calling the police. They swore out a warrant calling Bob a pernicious nuisance, which wasn’t true at all, and enjoined him from howling. But Bob refused to be enjoined. If he stayed inside too long, he messed on the floor, but if he stayed outside on the chain too long, he howled. Cheryl was at her wits’ end. So she called Gary Majors and asked him to build her a dog pen, and Gary Majors said okay, but she’d have to go to Jarvis Supply and sign for the materials.

  As soon as Cheryl walked in the door she saw him, Jerry Jarvis, behind a big computer. He stood up right away and stared at Cheryl, hard, across the store. Their eyes locked. Then he came hurrying over and asked her what he could do for her today. Somehow what he said sounded dirty, and Cheryl blushed. “Oh, I didn’t mean anything like that, honest, swear to God,” Jerry said. Jerry had thinning red hair and beautiful big brown eyes.

  Cheryl believed him. She believed that the reason he was still so crazy about her was that in all their years of dating they’d never actually done it. Cheryl had been so religious in high school, plus they all wore panty girdles in those days.

  Now, Jerry was trying hard to make conversation. He asked her about playing tennis and Cheryl told him that no, she did not play tennis, and she needed to sign a note for whatever Gary Majors might require to build a pen for Bob.

  “Gary Majors?” Jerry Jarvis acted amazed. He said he’d come over and build the pen himself, how about that?

  Cheryl looked at his seersucker suit, his nice white shirt, his bright red tie. “No, Jerry, I don’t think so,” was all she said.

  But later that same week, when the stuff from Jarvis Supply arrived, there was a new ornamental gate with wrought-iron flowers on it, and his business card saying, “Pastrami on rye? Chicken on white? Your friend, Jerry Jarvis.”

  Then Gary Majors, a high school dropout about Cheryl’s age, came by and started Bob’s pen. Luckily this kept Mary Duke and Bob both happy, someone in the backyard to talk to them. Cheryl was having trouble getting Angela to stay at home and babysit with Mary Duke — Angela kept hanging out at the mall where her boyfriend worked. Sandy was at day camp at the Y, thank God, but Louis was flunking Spanish in summer school.

  Finally Cheryl, who didn’t know any Spanish at all, went to see Louis’s teacher in late July, to ask him if there was any way she could help Louis, anything they could do at home to improve his grade. His teacher turned out to be a short, stocky man with big liquid eyes and so much hair on his body that it curled out over his shirt collar. His name was Amerigo Ramirez, which sounded like a country. Cheryl met him in his office at 5 p.m. on July 21, before a whirring fan. For a while they talked about Louis and Louis’s attitude, which was a problem, Cheryl had to admit. Cheryl felt so hot she felt like she was bursting through her clothes. The fan went on and on. Mr. Ramirez gave her a list of verbs for Louis to learn. He gave her a record for Louis to listen to. Cheryl was hot, hot. It was hard to pay attention at all in this heat, surprising that the school had no air-conditioning. “Are there any problems at home?” asked Mr. Ramirez. Cheryl started crying. “Mrs. Stone, you are a very attractive woman in my view,” said Mr. Ramirez. His eyes were large and moist; he took off his shirt, Cheryl had never seen so much hair. Mr. Ramirez locked the door and re directed the fan to blow toward the green chenille-covered cot in his office. Cheryl went to bed with him there, that afternoon, while the football team drilled out on the field in that terrible heat. Cheryl could hear them grunting — “Ooh! Oof! Aah!” — like figures in a cartoon. She could hear the coach shout numbers at them through the hot, still air.

  The following day, Mr. Ramirez sent her some roses from Jo’s Florist, but she wouldn’t go out to dinner with him. She didn’t think she’d see him again, because, as she told Marie, she just didn’t feel a thing. Nothing. Zero. Nothing like it had always been with David, from the word go.

  David meanwhile had bought a Nissan station wagon and announced to them all that he and Margaret Fine-Manning were going to Colorado, for their vacation. He gave Cheryl his itinerary, typed out. Bed-and-breakfasts, country inns.

  “La di dah,” Netta said. “I’d sue his pants off if I was you.”

  BUT CHERYL AND THE KIDS went with Netta to the beach for a week, which is what they had always done every summer that Cheryl could remember, renting the very same house that they had rented for so many years. Before Cheryl’s father died, before the children were born, before David left.

  This year, the people who owned the house had installed a new outside shower and bought new redwood furniture for the porch. And even though the boys had a great time and Angela fell in love with a freshman from UNC, even though Purcell joined them for four days, the house seemed twice as large as it used to, way too big. The seashell wind chimes sounded so sad that Cheryl took them down. Netta ate shrimp every night. When Purcell was there, he caught crabs every day by dangling chicken necks on string from the end of the pier. While Louis and Sandy played endlessly in the endless surf, Cheryl lay on the beach and wept with her face hidden under a People magazine.

  But she tanned easily, and the weather was perfect, and she looked terrific in her new bathing suit, cut up high on the sides of her legs. She had lost seventeen pounds. Netta had started to say something about the bathing suit, but didn’t. You could tell. Netta was being nice to Cheryl now since she wasn’t speaking to Lisa, who had fired her from La Coiffure. Lisa said that Netta’s crying and sweeping was ruining her business, her mother just had to go. Then when Netta refused to quit, Lisa fired her. So Lisa and Netta were mad, and Lisa didn’t come to the beach with them this year, but Marie did. Marie came down for a weekend while Lenny went to the National Guard camp.

  Marie said everybody back home was talking about Netta and Lisa’s big fight, some of them holding that Lisa had been wrong to fire her mother, and others that Lisa had been wronged by a mother who wouldn’t act right. Everybody in town had an opinion. Cheryl and Marie rubbed coconut suntan lotion on their legs and talked about it. Cheryl couldn’t decide what she thought. It seemed to her that Lisa had a point, but Netta had a point too. People must have stopped talking about her own separation by now, her separation must be old hat. This gave Cheryl a pang. She missed David. She did not miss Lisa, or Bob. With Bob in the kennel, Cheryl was getting a lot of rest.

  Then Marie said that Angela had asked her to get her some birth control pills and she had said she’d do it, but she just thought Cheryl ought to know. So Cheryl had that to t
hink about too. She and Marie lay back on the sand, smelling like big sweet tropical drinks.

  Netta came out of the house then, wearing a flowered robe and a big-brimmed hat, smoking a cigarette, picking her way toward them through the sand. It took her a while to get there. For the first time it struck Cheryl how old her mother looked, and how crazy. Netta was starting to look like Mamaw, who had been dead for years and years. Netta said she was going to take Mary Duke over to the water slide, which she had been doing every day. For some reason Mary Duke had decided on this trip that she didn’t like the ocean, and she wouldn’t go near it with a ten-foot pole. So Mary Duke was staying mostly in the house watching TV and driving everybody crazy.

  “I don’t see how she can be afraid of the ocean and not afraid of the water slide,” Marie said.

  “She thinks there’s things in the ocean,” Cheryl said. “You know — jaws.”

  Netta leaned across Cheryl and tapped Marie on the knee. “Did you hear how my own daughter Lisa did me?” she asked, and Marie said yes, she had heard it all right. Then Netta grabbed Cheryl’s knee so hard Cheryl sat up. Netta’s face beneath the huge hat brim was pale and trembly. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, honey?” she asked.

  “Do what Mama?” Cheryl said.

  “Get rid of me like that, you know, for no reason.”

  “No,” Cheryl said. “Of course not.” It was true.

  “Grammy, Grammy,” Mary Duke called from the house. Netta straightened up and started across the sand.

  “My whole body feels different since I’ve been having this relationship with Lenny,” Marie began. “It’s hard to explain.”

  Cheryl lay flat on her back in the warm sand, smelling sweet and staring straight up at the hot white sun.

  “GREAT TAN,” JERRY JARVIS SAID. The way he said it sounded suggestive, but then when she thought about it later, Cheryl was not so sure. Maybe he didn’t mean to sound that way, maybe he was just being nice after all. Certainly it was nice of him to stop by like this after work to check out the dog pen and see how things were going. Not so well, was the truth, which she didn’t say. Bob had grown bigger and stronger at the kennel while they were away, and now he kept digging out of his pen despite the pretty ornamental gate that Jerry had sent over, despite the rocks and boards and things that Cheryl and the kids kept piling around the bottom of the fence to keep him in. The week before, Cheryl had bought a whole truckload of cinder blocks, and every time he got out, she’d put a cinder block where he did it, or a big rock she lugged up from the creek. It went on and on. Last Thursday when Bob got out, he went two streets over and stole a three-by-five Oriental rug from the Lucases, who had just moved down here from Fairfax, Virginia. Another time he knocked over Mr. Ellman’s brother, who had a pacemaker.

  Now Bob bounced against the fence, in high spirits. Cheryl sighed. She knew he could get out anytime he wanted to, until she got something along every inch of that pen. Every inch. Bob was such a hassle, but Cheryl couldn’t bring herself to consider getting rid of him, she couldn’t have told you why. And now Margaret Fine-Manning had moved in with David and they jogged together every morning. They ran from the Swiss Chalet all the way to Burger King, along the highway. Cheryl, driving to work, saw them every day. Margaret wore ankle weights.

  “Cheryl?” Jerry Jarvis was saying. “Listen to me.”

  Cheryl looked at him. His hair was red, his face was flushed, his eyes were brown and sincere. He was a big impressive man. “I can have a boy over here tomorrow to run you a little old electric wire right around the bottom of this fence and then you won’t have no more trouble. It won’t hurt him a bit. Just a little jolt is all, he won’t hardly feel it, but I guarantee you he’ll stay in this pen.”

  “Well, thanks, Jerry,” Cheryl said, “but I think that’s awful. Shocking him.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt him a bit, now,” Jerry said. He grinned at her. He had big white even teeth, and Cheryl found herself grinning back.

  “No,” she said. “I know you think it’s stupid, but I won’t do that. I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing. We’ll just put more stuff around until he can’t get out, that’s all. Sandy would have a fit if Bob got electric shock.”

  “It’s not electric shock, Cheryl.” Jerry was laughing. “It’s really nothing, just a little whammy, that’s it.”

  “No,” Cheryl said.

  She stood by the fancy gate as Jerry Jarvis walked over to his hardware truck. Sometimes he drove the truck, and sometimes he drove his BMW. It was September now, almost time for school to start. The leaves on the hickory tree looked papery against the sky, yellowing. Cheryl felt cold suddenly, although it wasn’t cold. She couldn’t think why she was being so silly about this pen.

  Jerry Jarvis reached his truck and opened the door and then suddenly slammed it. He turned and walked back to her, fast. He grabbed her and pulled her to him and crushed her up against his yellow shirt. “Cheryl, Cheryl,” he said. “I’ve got to have you, it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Let go of me this minute, Jerry Jarvis,” Cheryl said.

  “You’re driving me crazy,” said Jerry Jarvis.

  Then he kissed Cheryl slow and hard, a kiss that left her breathless, leaning against Bob’s pen. Jerry rubbed her cheek and smiled into her eyes, it was clear he didn’t even care who might be looking. “You know where to call me if you want me,” he said.

  THEN JERRY JARVIS SENT her twelve free cinder blocks, but he didn’t come back again. School started. Cheryl was swamped with orders for slipcovers — fall was very big in the slipcover business. Angela cut off all her hair except for one long piece down the back, which she dyed pink. Lisa almost died when she saw how Angela looked. But Angela liked it. Cheryl didn’t know what to think about Angela’s hair — at least Angela’s old boyfriend, Scott Eubanks, had gotten busted for marijuana over the summer and had been sent to live with his father in Georgia, so that was something. Cheryl guessed she could stand Angela’s hair. And Louis started off better in school this year. He liked English. Of course he had passed Spanish, after all. Sandy was doing better — he’d stopped coughing, for one thing, and his Cub Scout troop had a new leader who was young and energetic. Sandy had earned merit badges in knot tying, carpentry, and letter writing. For his letter-writing badge, Sandy had to write a hundred letters. He had a Cub Scout pen pal in England who wrote to him on thin crinkly see-through paper. Sandy had also written several letters to his father, which just killed Cheryl. She couldn’t imagine what in the world he said. Also, Sandy had a new friend named Olan Barker who had moved in with his family up the street. So Sandy was doing better, all in all, and his interest in Bob had waned. Oh, Sandy still patted him and fed him sometimes, but he never took Bob walking — and in all fairness to Sandy, he almost couldn’t. For Bob had grown and grown. Sandy couldn’t control him. Bob had become Cheryl’s dog, finally, totally, after all. And sometimes he still got out of his pen: he’d move a cinder block, tunnel out, and run wild until somebody called the police, who came and got him and put him in the pound.

  THIS HAPPENED IN LATE SEPTEMBER. When Cheryl went down to the police station to get him, the officer in charge was very friendly. At first he said there’d be a forty-two-dollar fine and then when Cheryl looked stunned to hear that — it was the end of the month, she wouldn’t get paid till the first, and David had paid only half his child support for reasons he hadn’t explained — when she looked so depressed, the officer in charge said, well, nobody was there but them, and why didn’t he just tear up the ticket like this? — he tore it up before her eyes and dropped it in the basket by his desk — and he’d issue Bob a warning instead. He filled out the warning on a green card and handed it to her.

  This officer was young, blond, and plump, with a big wide smile. He said that actually he didn’t give a damn, that he didn’t think the police ought to have to deal with dogs anyway, that every other town he’d ever heard of had a dogcatcher. He said this was a one-horse town in his opi
nion, with no nightlife. He said he was from Gainesville, Florida. He wore a badge that said “M. Herron,” so Cheryl guessed this was his name. She looked around the police station, and he was right. Nobody else was there at all.

  The police station used to be the agriculture extension office. She’d had 4-H in here. The gray painted concrete floor was exactly the same. Almost the only way you could tell it was a police station was by the messiness of it — cigarette butts jabbed down in sand-filled containers, paper cups on the floor. The county extension agent, Betty Gore, would never have allowed this disorder. Cheryl remembered Miss Gore’s tight yellow curls and how particular she was about buttonholes. It was right here, all those years ago, that Cheryl had started sewing. She’d made an apron, an overblouse, a Christmas-tree skirt with felt appliqués. Now, wanted posters hung on the wall, full face and profile: one man, bearded, looked like David. Or she thought he did.

  Cheryl, daydreaming, was so confused that when M. Herron offered to pick up Bob at the dog pound and bring him home after he got off duty, she said yes. Later she realized she should have said no. But by then it was too late. And when M. Herron showed up just at dark in his police car, it was real exciting. Clearly, Bob was glad to be home. He barked and lunged at them all and rolled on the grass. It took Cheryl, M. Herron, and Louis all working together to catch him and put him back on the stakeout chain, where he’d have to stay until Cheryl could get his pen fixed.

  Then M. Herron let Mary Duke and Sandy get in the police car and showed them how everything worked. They even got to talk to headquarters on the radio, and M. Herron drove them around the block with the blue light flashing. He told Netta he loved children. When he finally left, Angela said he was cute. “Ha!” Netta said.

  M. Herron came back on Tuesday, Cheryl’s morning off, to give them some free burglar-prevention advice, which he said they needed. By coincidence, Netta was not at home, having gone to the outlet mall. M. Herron was not wearing his uniform. He walked through every inch of their house checking doors and windows and then advised Cheryl to go right out and buy dead-bolt locks. “You can’t be too careful,” he said.