Women with Men

  “You only get so many of these invitations, then people quit asking,” Doris said. She was smiling, too, but I knew she wanted him to come with us. She patted me on the knee. “How're you, honey bunch?” she said. “Did you take a little happy pill today? I hope so.”

  “I just took one,” I said. I could smell her perfume. She had on bright-red earrings and a brown wool coat, under which I could see the hem of a red wool dress. She always wore a lot of red. My father took a few steps farther back from the car.

  “You ought to put a sign on your mailbox, Donny,” Doris said out her window. “‘N.H.Y.’—Nothing's Happened Yet. That'd be the truth.”

  “We're moving cautiously,” my father said. He leaned down without touching the car and looked in at me. “Explain to your aunt about the atmosphere of mystery out here on the Great Plains.” He was smiling. “She'll get a kick out of that.” Doris pulled the car down into gear. “Say Happy Thanksgiving to my old friends in Seattle,” my father said, looking in at me then, and he had an odd expression, standing in the snow by himself, as if he thought what he'd just said was silly but he hadn't meant it to be.

  Doris started the window up as she turned the wheel. “You think you can't make life better, Donny, but you can,” she said. “You two've been out here too many nights alone. It's making you squirrelly.”

  “We're working on that, too,” my father said, and he shouted it for some reason. I didn't know what he meant, but what I wished then was that we could get the hell out of there and get on the road to where we were going.

  DORIS DECIDED to have a drink before we got to the interstate. She had a little bottle of schnapps under the windshield visor and told me to pour some into a Styrofoam cup from a stack on the backseat floor. On the wet floor with the cups was a cardboard for sale sign, a drinking glass, a padded snow glove, a hairbrush, a bunch of postcards—one showing a bear dancing on a beach ball—and some snapshots of Doris sitting at a desk in an office, wearing a short skirt and smiling up at the camera. They'd been taken at the police department in Great Falls, where Doris worked. Part of a man's sleeve with sergeant's stripes on it was visible in the corner of one of the pictures.

  “Those are my glamorous mug shots,” Doris said, holding her schnapps bottle in the hand she held the steering wheel with, “in case I forget who I am—or was—or in case somebody ever found me dead and wondered. I wrote my name on the backs.”

  I turned over one of the photographs, and Doris's name was written in ink that had faded. There were other things on the floor—a copy of a magazine called World Conflict, and two or three paperback books with their covers torn off. I took a cup from the stack and gave it to her. “Who do you think'll find you?” I said.

  We were going up onto the interstate, and I was pouring schnapps in her cup. The little town of Dutton, where I had been in school since September, sat just on the other side of the highway. Ten streets of houses, two bars, a Sons of Norway, three churches, a grocery, a library, three elevators, and a VFW with an old Sabre jet from Korea mounted as if it were taking off into the snowy sky. All around everywhere else was plow ground being covered in snow.

  “Never can tell who'll find you,” Doris said, watching her rearview mirror as we got out onto the highway. “I don't really like Montana,” she said, “and I particularly hate the roads. There's only one way to get anywhere. It's better seen from an airplane.” She straightened her arms toward the steering wheel as if she were taking off in a jet herself. We picked up speed and shot slush behind us. A bead of water entered the windshield through a crack at the top, then froze before it could drip in. “So. What's it about this atmosphere of mystery?”

  “He was just reading to me out of a magazine,” I said. “He made it up.”

  “I see.” She had a sip of schnapps. “And do you think you understand what the trouble is between your mom and your dad?”

  “They don't get along enough right now,” I said. “My mother decided to go to school.” That had been what my mother told me when she left. She was in school in Seattle, learning how to make out income tax forms. She'd be finished by Christmas.

  “They know too much about each other,” Doris said. “They have to figure out what the hell difference that makes. Sometimes it's good, but not always.”

  “Isn't that supposed to happen?” I said.

  “Certainly is,” Doris said and looked up in the mirror again. There were no other cars on the highway, only big tractor-trailers going north, running to get someplace by Thanksgiving. “When I was living with Benny as man and wife, he had many, many things I never understood inside his head. Indian things. Spirits. He believed they came to our house. He believed you had to give your valuables away—or gamble them away, in his particular case. He told me once that he wanted to be buried on a wood platform on a high hill. He believed in all that Indian medicine—which was fine, and I mean it. It was.” Doris rubbed her nose with the heel of her hand, then just stared at the highway, where white mist was collecting like fog.

  “What did you say about it?” I said, and looked at her.

  “About the wood platform?” she said. “I said, ‘Fine, a wood platform's all right with me. But don't expect me to build it or get you up there, because I'm a Seventh-Day Adventist and we don't believe in platforms.’”

  “What did Benny say?” I had only met Benny once, and remembered him as a big, quiet man with black-rimmed glasses who smelled like cigarettes.

  “He laughed. He was a Lutheran, of course. Converted by missionaries in Canada or North Dakota someplace. I forget. It might've all been a joke. But he was a tribal member. He was that. Spoke the Indian tongue.”

  “Where is he?” I said.

  “That's the sixty-four-dollar question.” Doris reached forward and turned down the heater. “Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, is my guess, where Thanksgiving comes later or earlier, one or the other. I still wear a wedding ring.” She held up her ring finger. “But I was on about Don and Jan knowing each other so well. I never had that problem with Benny, and we're still married. In a sense we are, anyway.”

  “In what sense?” I said, and I smiled at her because something in that seemed funny. I could remember her and my father talking in the living room until late, and then everything getting quiet and finally the sound of lamps being clicked off.

  “In a distant sense, Mr. Genius,” Doris said, “and in the sense that if he comes back we'd start back right where we left off. Or try to. Though if he's intending to stay gone, I wish we could get divorced so I could begin to pick up the pieces.” She laughed. “That wouldn't take a lifetime.”

  “What do you think'll happen?” I asked, referring to my father and mother. I'd never asked anybody but my father about that before, and when I'd asked him the first time, he said my mother was going to come back—this was before we left Great Falls. Though one time in the car, on the ride home from a baseball game, he'd suddenly said, “Love's just what two people decide to do, Larry. It's not a religion.” He must've been thinking about it.

  “What do I think's going to happen?” Doris said. She adjusted her glasses upwards on her nose and took a deep breath, as though this was not an easy question. “It depends on timing and the situation of third parties,” she said very seriously. “If your mom, for instance, has a young pretty boyfriend out in Seattle, or if your dad has a girlfriend back there where Jesus left his ankle shoes, then that's a problem. But if they can hold out long enough to get lonely, then they'll probably do fine—though they don't want to hold out too long. This is my opinion, of course, based on nothing.” Doris looked over at me and reached and adjusted the collar of my coat, which was turned up. “How old are you?” she said. “I should probably know that kind of thing.”

  “Seventeen,” I said, thinking about my mother's having a pretty boyfriend in Seattle. I'd thought about it some in the months she'd been gone and decided she didn't have one.

  “Then you've got your whole life in front of you for worrying,”
Doris said. “Don't start now. They ought to teach that in school instead of history. Worry management. Would you, by the way, like to know something about yourself?”

  “What?” I said.

  She didn't look at me, just kept driving. “You smell like wheat!” Doris said and laughed. “Ever since you got in this car it's smelled like a silo in here. Won't Don let you sleep in the house with him?”

  And I was shocked to hear that, because I didn't like living out on the farm or in that house and I knew already I might smell that way, because I could smell it in all the rooms and in my father's clothes. And I felt angry, angry at him, though I didn't want to let Doris know. “They stored grain in our house before we moved in,” I said, and didn't want to say anything else.

  “You're a real hick,” she said. “You better check your shoes.” She laughed again.

  “We're just out there for this year,” I said. And I felt even angrier about the whole subject. Out the clouded window, the first dark rows of tilled winter wheat began just beyond the road verge and the fence line—snow crusting between the new rows. What I wanted to do, I thought then, was stay in Seattle with my mother and start in at a new school after Christmas even if it meant beginning the year over. I wanted to get out of Montana, where we didn't have a TV and had to haul our water and where the coyotes woke you up howling and my father and I had nobody to talk to but each other. I was missing something, I thought, an important opportunity. And later, when I would try to explain to someone how it was, that I had not been a farm boy but had just led life like that for a while, nobody'd believe me. And after that it would always be impossible to explain how things really were.

  “I was depressed, myself, for a long time after Benny left,” Doris said. “Do you know what that means—to be depressed?”

  “No,” I said gloomily.

  She reached up and put her finger on the hole in the windshield where water had come in and frozen. She looked at the tip of her finger, then looked at me and smiled. “You're way too young for turmoil,” she said, “because I'm too young for it myself.” She licked her finger. “Tell me about your dad. Has he got a girlfriend out there in Siberia? I'll bet he has. Some little diamond in the rough.”

  “He does,” I said, and I didn't care if she told my mother. “There's a teacher down the road from us.”

  “Well, good for him,” Doris said, though she didn't smile about it. “What's her name?”

  “Joyce.”

  “That's a cute name. I guess your mother doesn't know about this.”

  “I don't know if she does.”

  “I'm sure she doesn't, not that it matters,” Doris said. I wondered if my father was down at Joyce Jensen's trailer right then. I remembered the red car sitting in front.

  Doris took her bottle of schnapps and handed it and her cup to me. “I'd have another, please.”

  I thought maybe she was going to get drunk because I'd told her my dad had a girlfriend. It was nearly dark and snow was building up and it was colder, and even though we were close to Shelby it was still three hours until the train. And I had a fear that we'd miss it, that Doris would get drunk and go to sleep someplace where I couldn't wake her up and I'd end up back at home that night, going in the front door after midnight and finding no one there.

  I poured less than I'd poured before. The schnapps was gluey on my fingers and tasted like root beer. I had been in bars with my father and seen that schnapps before, but I hadn't actually seen someone drink it.

  “You know,” Doris said, and she sounded indignant about something, “you certainly understand you don't belong to your dad, don't you? Nobody belongs to anybody. Some people think they do, but that's ridiculous.”

  “I know that,” I said. “I'll be on my own when the school year's over.”

  “You're on your own right now. School doesn't determine that,” Doris said. “And I'm not your mother. You know that, too, don't you? I'm your aunt. A technicality. It doesn't matter to me what you do. You can move right back to Great Falls tomorrow if you want to. You can live with me. That'd be an innovation.” Doris cut her eyes at me, still indignant. I thought she might invite me to have a drink of schnapps, but I didn't want it. I remembered a little tattoo she had on her shoulder, a blue-and-red butterfly I'd seen the summer before, when she was around the house and spending time with my father. “You're like a bird in a glass cage, aren't you?”

  “I won't stay there much longer,” I said.

  “We'll see about that,” Doris said, staring out into the snowflakes. “Did you buy your mother a nice present?”

  “I'm going to,” I said.

  “Did your dad give you a lot of money, now that he's collecting a big check?”

  “I had some already,” I lied, thinking that nice stores would probably be closed in Shelby. I pictured the main street, where I'd only been once, with my father, when my mother had taken the train back from the Cities, and all I could remember was a row of bar and motel signs with Route 2 running through the town toward Havre. “I worked at the elevator in the harvest,” I said.

  “Is Don still off the drink?”

  “Yes, he is,” I said.

  “And you two get along just great?”

  “Yes,” I said, “we do.”

  “Well, that's wonderful,” she said. Out in the snow and fog haze I could see faint yellow lights all in a string at the bottom of a hill. It was Shelby. “I used to think your father'd married the wrong sister, since we all met at the same time. You know? I thought he was too good for Jan. But I don't think so now. She and I have gotten a lot closer than we used to be since she's been out in Seattle. We talk on the phone about things.” Doris let her window down and poured out the schnapps she had left. It hit the back window and froze. “She's pretty wonderful, did you know that? Did you know your mother was wonderful?”

  “I knew that,” I said. “What do you think about Dad?”

  “He's fine,” Doris said. “That's how I feel about him. I don't particularly trust him. He's not equipped to care for things very much—he's like a cat in that way. But he's fine. You can't go back on your important decisions.”

  “Are you sorry you didn't marry him?” I said. I thought she was wrong about my father, of course. He cared about things as much as anybody did, and more than Doris did, I felt sure.

  “Put it like this,” Doris said, and she smiled at me in a sweet way, a way that could make you like her. “If I had married him, then we wouldn't have you here, would we? Everything'd be different.” She tapped me on the knee. “So there's good to everything. That's a belief Seventh-Day Adventists hold.” She scratched her fingernails on my knee and smiled at me again, and we drove on into town, where it was snowing still, and almost dark except for lights down the main street.

  CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS were already up in Shelby, strings of red and green and white lights hung across the three intersections, and little Christmas trees on top of the traffic lights. Plenty of cars and trucks were on the streets in the snow, and all the stores looked open. We drove past a big lighted Albertson's, where the parking lot was full of vehicles and people carrying packages. I saw a drugstore and a card shop and a western-wear on the main street, all with their lights on and customers moving around the aisles inside.

  “Something's physically odd about Shelby, don't you think?” Doris said, driving slowly along and looking out at the business signs and Thanksgiving cutouts in the store windows. “It has a foreignness. It just seems pointless somehow up here. Maybe it's being so close to Canada. I don't know.”

  “Maybe I can get out and go buy something now,” I said. I'd seen a Redwing store and thought about buying my mother a pair of shoes, though I didn't know her size. I remembered some green high heels I'd seen her wear, and it surprised me that I didn't remember more than that.

  “You want to eat Chinese food in town, or dine in the dining car?” Doris said.

  “I'd rather eat on the train,” I said, because I wanted to get out of t
he car.

  “I want you to enjoy yourself when you're under my protection.”

  “I'm enjoying myself,” I said. We were stopped at a light, and I turned and looked back. I wanted to get back to the card store before it got too far away.

  “Can you find the train station by yourself?” Doris glanced at the traffic in the rearview mirror.

  “I'll ask somebody,” I said, and opened the door and slid out onto the snowy pavement.

  “Don't ask an Indian,” Doris said loudly. “They lie like snakes. Ask a Swede. They don't know what a lie is. That's why they make the good husbands.”

  “I will,” I said, and closed the car door while she was talking.

  People were on the sidewalk and going in and out of stores. There were plenty of cars and noises for a small town, although the snow had softened everything. It was like a Saturday night in Great Falls, and I walked in a hurry down the block in the direction we'd just come from. For some reason, I didn't see the card shop where I thought it would be and didn't see the western-wear shop, though there was a Chinese restaurant and a bar, and then the drugstore, where I went in to look.

  The air was warm and smelled like Halloween candy inside. A lot of customers were in the store, and I walked down the three aisles, looking for something my mother might like to receive from me and trying to think of what I knew she liked. There was a section that had pink and blue boxes of candy, and a wall that had perfume, and a long row of cards with Thanksgiving messages. I went around the center section twice, then looked at the back of the store, where the pharmacist was and where there were footbaths and sickroom articles. I thought about something for her hair—shampoo or hair spray, but I knew she bought those for herself. Then I saw there was a glass display of watches with mirrored shelves you rotated by pushing a silver button at the bottom. The watches were all around thirty dollars, and what my father had given me was fifty, and I thought a watch would be better than perfume because my mother wouldn't use it up, and I liked the way the watches looked revolving behind the glass, and I was relieved to have almost decided so fast. My mother had a watch, I remembered, but it had been broken since sometime in the spring.