by
Andre Dubus
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Her mind was eluding her: it was living the day ahead of her; it was in the aisle of the supermarket, it was bringing the groceries into the house and putting them away; it was driving to the gym for aerobics and weight training; it was home eating lunch, then taking clothes to the dry cleaners and getting the clothes that were there, and driving home before three-forty when the school bus brought the children to the driveway; it was lighting charcoal in the grill on the sundeck. Maybe snow would be falling then; she loved cooking in the snow. She had a housekeeper three days a week and she liked running the household. None of it absorbed her fully enough to imprison her mind, as some work in school and some at the publishing house had. So freedom was both her challenge and her vocation: she was free on most days and nights to concentrate fully on the moment at hand, and this was far more difficult than performing work she had been assigned as a student for sixteen years, and a worker for eleven. She had told Ted she must learn to be five again, before time began to mean what one could produce in its passing; or to be like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who knew so young that the essence of life was in the simplest of tasks, and in kindness to the people in your life.
neil losing interest inspo
As she filled the cart, she looked with compassion at women, the harried ones, some with a child or two, the women who did not have housekeepers and someone to care for their children, perhaps did not have husbands or did not have good ones, who were not going to the gym for a long workout to fulfill and relax them, who had to count the dollars they were spending, whose minds had not received the gifts that she had simply been born with, as she had been born with black hair and French blood; women who as teenagers had gone into the world as bodies and faces with personalities, and so acquired boyfriends, then men, then husbands, and children; they were the women whose work was never done because they could not pay someone else to do at least part of it. No wonder one’s voice rose angrily at her small girl riding in the cart, and another grabbed her son’s wrist as he reached for a cereal box, and jerked him away from the shelf. The boy’s face looked immune. It was not as simple as money, LuAnn knew; it was as complex as the soul. But so often the body ruled, and when it was tired, when it was overwhelmed, venom could spread through the soul. And with money, one could soothe the body, give it rest.
Marsha called her husband and told him, and said to come to LuAnn’s after work; then she gave LuAnn her cigarettes and left to get her children at school and buy more steaks. At three-thirty LuAnn went outside and looked at snow on the earth and gathered on wide branches of pines. She said: “Thank You.” Then she looked up at the gray sky. “That I didn’t get killed. That I didn’t get raped. That I didn’t miss his balls. That I didn’t miss with the skillet. That I didn’t beg for their mercy. That I didn’t kill anyone.”
“I’ve never told you this,” she said. “But there’s something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot. I don’t know when this came to me; it was a few years ago. There’s a difference between leaving it where you empty it and taking it back to the front of the store. It’s significant.”
“Because somebody has to take them in.”
“Yes. And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world. With your body. And for those few moments, you join it with your soul. You move out of your isolation and become universal. But they were standing there watching me. Then I was afraid: a woman so far removed from nature that the checkout clerk had to tell me which way the wind was blowing. And she heard it from someone in the coffee room. Then the men left, and I pushed the cart back. I live by trying to be what I’m doing. I could do nearly everything I do without thinking about it. But I’d be different.”
His face was tender in the light of the fire; he said: “Yes.”
Emily wore a dark blue shirt with short sleeves and a pale yellow skirt; she had brown hair, and for over thirty years she had wanted a pretty face. For too long, as a girl and adolescent, then a young woman, she had believed her face was homely. Now she knew it was simply not pretty. Its parts were: her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her cheeks and jaw, and chin and brow; but, combined, they lacked the mysterious proportion of a pretty face during Emily’s womanhood in America. Often, looking at photographs of models and actresses, she thought how disfiguring an eighth of an inch could be, if a beautiful woman’s nose were moved laterally that distance, or an eye moved vertically. Her body had vigor, and beneath its skin were firm muscles, and for decades her female friends had told Emily they envied it. They admired her hair, too: it was thick and soft and fell in waves to her shoulders.
Believing she was homely as a girl and a young woman had deeply wounded her. She knew this affected her when she was with people, and she knew she could do nothing but feel it. She could not change. She also liked her face, even loved it; she had to: it held her eyes and nose and mouth and ears; they let her see and hear and smell and taste the world; and behind her face was her brain. Alone in her apartment, looking in the mirror above her dressing table, she saw her entire life, perhaps her entire self, in her face, and she could see it as it was when she was a child, a girl, a young woman. She knew now that most people’s faces were plain, that most women of forty, even if they had been lovely once, were plain. But she felt that her face was an injustice she had suffered, and no matter how hard she tried, she could not achieve some new clarity, could not see herself as an ordinary and attractive woman walking the earth within meeting radius of hundreds of men whose eyes she could draw, whose hearts she could inspire.
[...] When Jeff had taught her the work, he had said: When you’re behind the bar, you’re the ship’s captain; never leave the bar, and never let a customer behind it; keep their respect. She did. She was friendly with her customers; she wanted them to feel they were welcome here, and were missed if they did not come in often. She remembered the names of the regulars, their jobs and something about their families, and what they liked to drink. She talked with them when they wanted her to, and this was the hardest work of all; and standing for hours was hard, and she wore runner’s shoes, and still her soles ached. She did not allow discourtesy or drunkenness.
Dark-skinned, black-haired Kay Younger had gray-blue eyes, and she flirted subtly and seriously with Rita, evening after evening when Rita sat at the bar for two drinks after work. Rita smiled at Kay’s flirting, and Emily did not believe she saw what Emily did: that Kay was falling in love. Emily hoped Kay would stop the fall, or direct its arc toward a woman who did not work at the bar. Emily wished she were not so cautious, or disillusioned; she longed for love but was able to keep her longing muted till late at night when she lay reading in bed, and it was trumpets, drums, French horns; and when she woke at noon, its sound in her soul was a distant fast train. Love did not bring happiness, it did not last, and it ended in pain. She did not want to believe this, and she was not certain that she did; perhaps she feared it was true in her own life, and her fear had become a feeling that tasted like disbelief. She did not want to see Rita and Kay in pain, and she did not want to walk into their pain when five nights a week she came to work. Love also pulled you downhill; then you had to climb again to the top, where you felt solidly alone with your integrity and were able to enjoy work again, and food and exercise and friends. Kay lit a cigarette and rested it on an ashtray, and Emily picked it up and drew on it and put it back; she blew smoke into the ice chest and reached for the tequila in the speed rack.
Emily had discipline: every night she read two or three poems twice, then a novel or stories till she slept. Eight hours later she woke and ate grapefruit or a melon, and cereal with a banana or berries and skimmed milk, and wheat toast with nothing on it. An hour after eating, she left her apartment and walked five miles in fifty-three minutes; the first half mile was in her neighborhood, and the next two were on a road through woods and past a farm with a meadow where cows stood. In late afternoon she cooked fish or chicken, and rice, a yellow vegetable and a green one. On the days when she did not have to work, she washed her clothes and cleaned her apartment, bought food, and went to a video store to rent a movie, or in a theater that night watched one with women friends. All of this sustained her body and soul, but they also isolated her: she became what she could see and hear, smell and taste and touch; like and dislike; think about and talk about; and they became the world. Then, in her long nights, when it seemed everyone on earth was asleep while she lay reading in bed, sorrow was tangible in the dark hall to her bedroom door, and in the dark rooms she could not see from her bed. It was there, in the lamplight, that she knew she would never bear and love children; that tomorrow would require of her the same strength and rituals of today; that if she did not nourish herself with food, gain a balancing peace of soul with a long walk, and immerse herself in work, she could not keep sorrow at bay, and it would consume her. In the lamplight she read, and she was opened to the world by imagined women and men and children, on pages she held in her hands, and the sorrow in the darkness remained, but she was consoled, as she became one with the earth and its creatures: its dead, its living, its living after her own death; one with the sky and water, and with a single leaf falling from a tree.
ack. a warning?
[...] In her last three years she realized she was becoming scornful and bitter, and she worked to control the tone of her voice, and what she said to students, and what she wrote on their papers. She taught without confidence or hope, and felt like a woman standing at a roadside, reading poems aloud into the wind as cars filled with teenagers went speeding by. She was tending bar in summer and finally she asked Jeff if she could work all year. She liked the work, she stopped taking sleeping pills because when she slept no longer mattered, and, with her tips, she earned more money. She did not want to teach again, or work with teenagers, or have to talk to anyone about the books she read. But she knew that pain had defeated her, while other teachers had endured it, or had not felt it as sharply.
Because of pain, she had turned away from Jeff, a man whom she looked forward to seeing at work. She was not afraid of pain; she was tired of it; and sometimes she thought being tired of it was worse than fear, that losing fear meant she had lost hope as well. If this were true, she would not be able to love with her whole heart, for she would not have a whole heart; and only a man who had also lost hope, and who would settle for the crumbs of the feast, would return her love with the crumbs of his soul. For a long time she had not trusted what she felt for a man, and for an even longer time, beginning in high school, she had deeply mistrusted what men felt for her, or believed they felt, or told her they felt. [...]