A Regular Guy

  Mary and Jane decided over and over all day that they’d ask Owens to lend them a car. He owned three. Mary wanted him to take theirs back and get the truck again or a new new car, the one that was blue.

  He was late, but that didn’t mean anything. When he finally came, Jane shuffle-tapped across the floor. “Now that you’re together, will you guys please decide like you said you would how old I have to be to be allowed to wear a dress?”

  Owens considered this. “I guess we did say we’d get back to you on that, huh?”

  “And also how old for dangly earrings.”

  “See,” Mary said, “I don’t think she should be thinking about these things.”

  Owens held a finger to his lips, pondering. “Well, I’d have to say eighteen.”

  “Yes,” Mary said, solemnly, her long neck bent.

  Jane moaned in a way that was mostly pleasure. It was nice like this, when they agreed. They were her parents and they were making rules. Impossible rules.

  Mary’s face filled with what only Owens could recognize as guilt. “The car isn’t working again, and I have to go into the city.”

  “Bixter’s having an operation,” Jane said.

  “Did you take it in?” he said absently. He knew no Bixter.

  “I wonder if it’s just a lemon, so much has gone wrong already.” Mary was repeating what Eli had said, but they didn’t mention his name around Owens.

  “The last time was a cable, Mary. Cables are little things.” He’d bought it. That was the end.

  “But I have to get there tomorrow, and so …” She lapsed into a fragile smile, which she expected would delight no one, like a poor tap dance.

  “We wanted to know could we borrow a car from you,” Jane finished.

  “Just for tomorrow,” Mary added.

  He shook his head slowly. “No.”

  “Why not?” Jane snapped.

  His jaw made a hard angle. “I don’t have a car to give you.”

  Jane sprang up. “Come on, Mom. If we’re going to ask Julie, let’s do it now. It’s late already. I’ll go with you.” She stood under the porch light, waiting with her hand out to take her mother and cross the yard to ask of neighbors again.

  After they asked to borrow his car, Owens didn’t call for three months. The first weeks, they didn’t say anything, even to each other. On the sixth Sunday, they woke up feeling bad, so they decided to treat themselves. Eliot Hanson had come with the check on the first, like every other month. At the mall, they bought a black velvet headband for Jane and found a hooded sweatshirt for Mary on sale. They both needed socks and underwear. And they bought themselves a fondue pot and had it gift-wrapped, then ate lunch in a restaurant that made crepes. It was easy for Mary to make Jane laugh. Her aunt Alma never cut her hair in her whole life, she said. She could sit on it, but she wasn’t vain at all. “She hardly knew it was there,” Mary said.

  “Mom, no one has hair that long by accident. Not nowadays anyway.” Mary was more like a grandmother when it came to hair.

  Jane added up the purchases and announced that they’d spent one hundred and six dollars. “Everything’s so expensive,” Mary said.

  In the late afternoon, when they parked in their driveway, Julie was hauling a long table in over the lawn. They helped her manuever it through the door and then let it down gently by the front window. Julie arranged the chairs she already had around it, then took out candles and placed a pitcher of flowers in the center. Now she had a dining room, and Jane thought you could just see that every night, dinner would be different.

  “A hundred bucks,” Julie said.

  And all they’d had was their day. Julie bought big things, Jane thought, and we buy little ones that clutter up or else don’t last.

  “It’s confidence,” Mary said. “I’d be afraid it wouldn’t be right when I got it home.”

  That was true, Jane understood. Her mother didn’t know how to do anything with her hair, and when she had to dress up it took her a whole day. Jane had started caring how she looked even before she came to Alta. In the mountain town, she’d studied herself in store windows. “Why don’t you have any?”

  Mary’s lip lifted on the left. Her jaw was slightly uneven and her teeth didn’t line up. She was considering, braces to correct them. “I don’t know. I guess I was born that way. Because my mother always asked me the same thing. But honest, Jane, I was popular in high school. People liked me.” She said this shyly, as though Jane wouldn’t believe her. She shrugged. “I was just nice to everybody. And now I’d like to try and do something in art again. It’s hard, though. I love having the chance to learn, but it’s not easy on your confidence.” In Seattle, the man who’d taught Jane to read suggested that Mary collect in one place all the things she’d learned in her vagrant life; he told her the book would be a best-seller. Back then, she’d played guitar and memorized popular songs for children’s parties, songs Jane found herself still humming. And now Mary was trying to paint again, because that was what she was best at in high school.

  “If it’s so hard, though, why don’t you be something else? Like a teacher? Or a lawyer?” For these things she’d have to go to school, and she wasn’t a school person, but at least she could get a job and wouldn’t have to cry every time she didn’t think she was good enough.

  “Why, honey? This is my own chance to have a life and feel it, and that’s the most important thing.”

  “More important than me?”

  “As important. Everybody loves more than one person in their life.”

  Jane sighed. An hour before, she’d been entirely happy.

  Then the phone rang, and Julie invited them over to supper on her new table.

  “See?” Mary said. “Even if we spent a lot today, dinner’s free!”

  So many times, Jane noticed, her mother’s most positive emotion was consolation. But her mother’s relief in the free meal—that was Jane’s destitution. Years later, when she was trying to determine if their poverty had been necessary, she thought Mary hadn’t fought against it very hard, taking too much pleasure in saving the cost of a dinner, as if that meant they were getting ahead a little.

  Julie used mixes and cans to cook with, but soup arrived in a special tureen and you ate on a different dish for every course. Jane felt, I am definitely having a meal. At home, they often ate parts of things, standing up.

  Julie said she was dating, and what she described sounded as pretty as the noises of the silver and the glass. Jane decided that she would date when she was older.

  Peter Bigelow owned pumpkin fields and an orchard in Half Moon Bay. He was a kind person, Julie could tell, but she didn’t know if they could really talk. He’d given her an article he’d written about the economics of organic harvesting, and she was trying to make her way through it. “But I don’t know. I’m thinking, a lifetime of talking mulch and phytopathology?”

  “What’s that?” Jane asked.

  “Tree disease.”

  “He gave me this,” she said, holding out her arm to show a watch.

  Neither Mary nor Jane had ever received a present like that from anyone but each other. And Julie said he sent her three dozen white roses after the first night. But she wasn’t sure. She had to just wait and see. Maybe by fall she’d know, by Halloween. If she was still with him, they were going to have a huge party in the pumpkin fields, with hayrides and hot apple cider and ginger cookies.

  “Even with the roses,” Jane said, “you’re still not sure?”

  After dinner, Julie served iced mint tea and sherbet on the cottage porch, sewing while they talked. She was making a slipcover for her sofa. Sipping the sweet cool drink, two steps below the women, Jane wished they had the ginger cookies and hot apple cider Julie was planning for Halloween. June was cold here, as Jane had known her whole life.

  Though she was a lawyer, Julie thought like an elementary school teacher. She always knew which holiday came next, and liked having something to look forward to. Jane and Mary a
ssumed it was because her family came, three generations before, from the East. Most of the books Jane got from Amber had autumn foliage and winter snow.

  Mary told Julie about Eli, how he lived in a garage apartment with a huge outside cage of birds.

  “The main thing is,” Julie said, “where do you want your life to be in three years?”

  “I guess I’d like to feel settled with somebody and maybe even have another child.”

  “You do?” Jane said. “You want another child?”

  Mary blushed. They spent so much time together, sometimes she almost forgot Jane was there. “I think I would. If everything was right. Don’t forget you’ll be getting older. You’ll be in high school in a few years.”

  “If you guys ever let me go.”

  At that moment, Julie turned back into a lawyer. “And do you think Eli could give you that life?”

  Mary shook her head, smiling, a meaningless smile like a caught fish. “No, I don’t think so. No.”

  “See, that’s what I learned about the man I was seeing before. And we don’t have two years to figure things out.”

  “But Eli helps me. He really helps me see things.”

  That was true. Eli tried to give Mary confidence. Every time she had a new idea for a career, they stayed up late considering all the details. “I think this is going to be a really big deal,” he’d say.

  “Wait,” Jane said. “Why don’t you both have two years?”

  “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been in love.” Julie looked from one to the other, her face shining with an expression that was hard to decipher: bafflement, a little shame, the gift of a secret.

  Mary held her knees and rocked a little.

  “Is that so bad, though?” Jane said, from the steps below.

  “I don’t know,” Julie whispered.

  Then they both looked to Mary. For once, she was the one who had knowledge. “Oh, I don’t know either,” she said.

  When they walked in the back door of the bungalow, Eli was sitting at the kitchen table eating ramen, rolling drumsticks on an overturned pan.

  Then he started drumming on Jane’s head.

  “Eli, stop it—that hurts!” she screamed. It didn’t hurt.

  Julie planned a dinner party and invited someone named Bill for Mary to meet.

  “Stop it with the lip, Mom. You’re doing it again.”

  Children are like little police, Mary thought, sighing, used to it. They see everything wrong. All afternoon, she’d torn apart her closet. She took out one thing after another, tried it on, decided it looked terrible, and soon her wardrobe was heaped like a haystack on the bed. She was pacing the room when Jane returned from her lessons. “I’m just going to call and say I’m sick,” her mother said.

  Jane sat on the small corner where there weren’t any clothes. “What about your gray?”

  “That’s not dressy enough.”

  Jane pushed herself up and ran to Julie’s kitchen. Julie’s theory about dressing was to wear one good thing, top or bottom, mixed with a tee shirt or jeans.

  So Mary wore the long denim skirt and a white blouse, and brought chocolate fondue for dessert. Noah came to take Jane to the movies. She rode on his lap on the chair. That first year, when Owens was scarce, Noah often gave Jane rides on his chair. Once, in the rain, she’d held his umbrella up over both of them.

  Later, Jane waited in the dark for her mother to come home. A bird had built its nest in the back of the kitchen, in the corner above the dryer, and Jane listened to its tiny ticking sounds.

  “Well, what did you think?” she asked, when her mother came in.

  Mary walked over to the drawer, took out two of her childhood birthday spoons and opened the fondue pot. “Want some? It was fun. A nice party. She had all different soups.”

  “Of Bill, I mean.”

  “He was an interesting person, but I didn’t feel any sparks. Mmm, this is good. Should we sit on the porch? It’s warm out still.”

  Jane hated sparks. She couldn’t fight them. Invisible, they only kept her and her mother from what should’ve been their happiness. From the porch in the dark, they could see and hear people leaving the party.

  Then the phone rang inside and Mary lunged, thinking it was Owens. But it was Thomas for Jane. Jane had started going steady with neighborhood boys. She waited, one leg bent up against a tree, outside the pink school at four o’clock. So far, she’d gone through three; one broke up with her and she’d broken up with the other two. They were all nice. She wasn’t going to put up with much.

  While she talked to Thomas, she made out the shapes of washed-out tin cans towering on the floor. Mary cut and punctured them to make mobiles. She had got the idea from children’s snowflake decorations at the mountain camp, and thought she could sell them.

  For weeks, they had been trying to reach Owens. Mary needed to ask him for more money. Jane wanted to talk to him too, about maybe going to school.

  “What about Eli, Mom?” Jane asked when she went back to the porch. “Can Eli give us some?” Thomas couldn’t. His allowance was only four dollars a week. They didn’t say so out loud, but they each believed they might never see Owens again.

  Mary flicked her wrist, as if to say, Oh, forget it. “He would if he could.”

  All her life before Alta, Jane had lived among the infirm. She’d stepped over drunks, shrugged at beggars, turning her pockets inside out in a shuffle-twirl of hapless apology. She knew the signs of drugs, in the walk, the eyes, the skin, as early as she recognized spiders and poison berries. And it was as if now, all of a sudden, she’d looked up and seen it was not like that here.

  They sat in the dark, among the nutmeg smell of jasmine, eating the rich, still-warm chocolate from silver spoons. But now they didn’t know if they could stay.

  They waited on the steps a long time. Lawns unfurled, plush and even, in front of the small cottages and bungalows. But every fifth or sixth was a mansion built to the edge of the lot line. The neighborhood had gone up and the land was worth something, so even people with the small original houses felt pride of possession and planted flowering sages, begonias and roses in pots. The cars were washed and new, and the families tended to be young. In the morning, the sound of hammers rang up and down the street.

  Fixing the car had cost four hundred dollars. Mary looked at the spoon. She imagined she could sell the silver in the wooden box, one fork at a time. She’d save the spoons for last. They agreed on that.

  During the months he didn’t call, Owens was not angry.

  He was simply preoccupied at work. The new team was late and burning money every minute the clock ticked. When the idea of Jane and Mary rose to the surface of his attention at all, he felt a slight echo of their request, like a wince, caused less by them personally than by the notion that people saw him as someone illimitable in his resources and thus guilty. During this urgency at work, friendship fell away and Owens spoke only to the guys on the team and Olivia. He taped a message from his old friend Shep, regarding his daughter’s confirmation at Saint Anselm’s, to his computer screen until it was weeks past the event, and then he threw it away. It was easy simply to turn his concentration to the problems at hand and leave Jane and Mary on the bottom of the To Do list Kathleen supplied him with, fresh, every morning. Most days, directly above or below Jane, was Call Mom and Dad.

  Along with his To Do list, Kathleen gave him a new stack of envelopes containing money. They kept coming in, and he figured he’d received more than three hundred envelopes so far. He now understood that the San Francisco hostess who’d introduced him to Albertine was the cause of this ludicrous bounty; it was her chain letter his address had been inadvertently linked to. A temporary secretary had mistakenly sent it when she found the letter in his out box under a party list. Now there was nothing to do to stop it. He made a point of keeping the five-dollar bills in his pockets and regularly handing them out to beggars. Eventually, though, he considered the money his own.

 
Finally, Owens left a message saying he would pick Jane up from her lessons.

  She waited under a peach tree, knee bent, foot against the trunk. The late ripe peaches gave off a warm scent.

  Across the street, a boy stood sweeping the sidewalk. “You go to Lindsey?” he called.

  “No,” she mumbled down to her shoes. She made herself not look up because she didn’t want more questions about school. She heard his whinnying laugh, picked up a soft peach from the grass and tossed it. It fell wetly apart on the street before him.

  Then Olivia was coming, smoking as she walked.

  The boy whistled. “That your mom?”

  “Hi, Jane,” Olivia said. “Owens asked me to pick you up.” She and Olivia both acted as if time started now and they weren’t late. They never made excuses, never apologized. “I told him to meet us at Waves.”

  Waves was a converted cannery that rented hot tubs by the hour and served sushi in a square room; it was where Owens had taken Jane and Mary that first night. Olivia’s school friend Karen worked there as a masseuse. It was midafternoon, between lunch and dinner, and the three of them sat at one of the wooden tables, drinking juice in the humid air. Karen’s teeth were gray and overlapping, and she had a redhead’s freckled skin that aged before it was old.

  “No, it’s terrible,” Karen said. “No one would do that to a married couple.”