Bygones by LaVyrle Spencer
“More than satisfied. It looks perfect.”
“Ah, good.”
“Smells like squaw piss, though.”
Bess burst out laughing and even across the telephone wire felt a thrill of attraction that she'd been staving off ever since her last meeting with him. She had forgotten how genuinely funny Michael could be and how effortlessly he'd always been able to make her laugh.
“But you like it?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Good. Listen, the invoices are starting to come in now on your furniture. So far it looks as though most things will be arriving in mid-May. No word yet on the Natuzzi from Italy but I'm sure that'll take longer. I'll let you know as soon as I hear.”
“All right.”
Bess paused before changing the subject. “Michael, I need to talk to you about the bills for Lisa's wedding. Some of them have already been paid and others are coming in, so how do you want to handle it? I've paid out eight hundred dollars already, so why don't you match it and add two thousand, and I'll add the same and Lisa can put it into her savings account and draw on it as she needs it? Then what's left over—if any is—we can split.”
“Fine.”
“I have the receipts for everything, and I'll be more than happy to send them to you if—”
“Heaven's sake, Bess, I trust you.”
“Oh . . . well . . . thanks, Michael. Just send the check to Lisa, then.”
“You really think we'll see any leftover money?”
Bess chuckled. “Probably not.”
“Now you're thinking like a realist.”
“But I don't mind spending it, do you?”
“Not at all. She's our only daughter.”
The chance remark left the phone line silent while they reached back to their beginnings, wishing they could undo the negative part of their past and recapture what they'd once had. Bess felt an undeniable stirring, the urge to ask him what he'd been doing, where he was, what he was wearing, the kind of questions that signal infatuation. She quelled her foolhardiness and said instead, “I guess I'll see you at the rehearsal, then.”
Michael cleared his throat and said in a curiously flat voice, “Yeah . . . sure.”
When Bess hung up she tipped her desk chair back to its limit, drove both hands into her hair and blew an enormous breath at her loft ceiling.
* * *
Randy kept his car like the bottom of a bird cage. Whatever fell, stayed. The day of the groom's dinner and rehearsal he took the battered '84 Chevy Nova to the car wash and mucked 'er out. Fast-food containers, dirty sweat socks, empty condom packages, crumpled Twin Cities' Readers, unopened mail, unmailed mail, parking-lot receipts, a dried-up doughnut, empty pop cans, a curled-up Adidas, unpaid parking tickets—all got relegated to the bottom of a fifty-gallon garbage drum.
He vacuumed the floor, ran the mats through the washer, Armor Alled the vinyl, emptied the ashtrays, washed the windows, washed and dried the outside and bought a blue Christmas tree to hang from the dash and make the inside smell like a girl's neck.
Then he drove to Maplewood Mall and bought a new pair of trousers at Hal's, and a sweater at The Gap, and went home to put on his headset and play Foreigner's “I Want to Know What Love Is” and beat his drums and dream about Maryann Padgett.
The rehearsal was scheduled for six o'clock. At quarter to, when his mother asked if he wanted to ride to the church with her, he answered, “Sorry, Mom, but I've got plans for afterwards.” His plan was to ask Maryann Padgett if he could drive her home.
When he walked into St. Mary's and saw Maryann, the oxygen supply in the vestibule seemed to disappear. He felt the way he had when he was nine years old and used to hang upside down on the monkey bars for five minutes, then try to walk straight. She was wearing a prim little navy-blue coat, and prim little navy-blue shoes with short, prim heels, and probably a prim little Sunday dress with a prim little collar, and talking to Lisa in prim, proper terms. She probably went to Bible camp in the summer and edited the school newspaper in the winter.
He'd never wanted to impress anyone so badly in his life.
Lisa saw him and said, “Oh, hi, Randy.”
“Hi, Lisa.” He nodded to Maryann, hoping his eyes wouldn't pop out of their sockets and bounce on the vestibule floor.
“Where's Mom?” Lisa asked.
“She's coming. We drove in separate cars.”
“You and Maryann are going to be first up the aisle.”
“Yeah? Oh, well, hey . . . how about that.” Bravo, Curran, you glib rascal, you. Really knocked her prim little socks off with that one.
Maryann said, “I was just telling Lisa that I've never been in a wedding before.”
“Me either.”
“It's exciting, isn't it?”
“Yes, it is.”
Inside his new acrylic sweater he was warm and quivering. She had this little pixie face with blue eyes about the size of Lake Superior; and pretty puffed lips and the teeniest, tiniest mole above the upper one but close enough that if you kissed her properly you'd kiss it, too; and not a fleck of makeup ruining any of it.
“Dressing up for first Communion is about as close as I've come to this,” she remarked. The vestibule was crowded, and Lisa spied someone else she needed to talk to.
Left in a lull, Randy searched for something to talk about. “Have you always lived in White Bear Lake?”
“Born and raised there.”
“I used to go to the street dances there in the summer during Manitou Days. They'd get some good bands.”
“You like music?”
“Music is what drives me. I want to play in a band.”
“Play what?”
“Drums.”
“Oh.” She thought awhile and said, “It's kind of a tough life-style, isn't it?”
“I don't know. I never had the chance to find out.”
Father Moore came in and started getting things organized, and they all went inside the church and laid their coats in the rear pews, and sure enough, Maryann Padgett was wearing her Marion-the-librarian dress, some little dark-colored thing with a dinky white collar made of lace. Without mousse or squiggly waves in her hair, she was a throwback, and he was captivated.
Randy was standing in the aisle continuing to be dumbstruck by her when someone rested a hand on his shoulder blade.
“Hi, Randy, how's it going?”
Randy turned to encounter his father. He removed all expression from his face and said, “Okay.”
Michael dropped his hand and nodded to the girl. “Hello, Maryann.”
She smiled. “Hi. I was just saying, this is the first wedding I've ever been in, and Randy said it is for him, too.”
“I guess it is for me, too, other than my own.” Michael waited, letting his eyes shift to Randy but when no response came, he drifted away, saying, “Well . . . I'll be seeing you.”
As Randy's expressionless gaze followed Michael, he repeated sarcastically, “Except for his own . . . both of them.”
Maryann whispered, “Randy, that was your father!”
“Don't remind me.”
“How could you treat him that way?”
“The old man and I don't talk.”
“Don't talk! Why, that's awful! How can you not talk to your father?”
“I haven't talked to him since I was thirteen.”
She stared at Randy as if he'd just tripped an old lady.
Father Moore asked for silence and the practice began. Randy remained put out with Michael for intruding on what had begun as a conversation with some possibilities. After the whole day of thinking about Maryann Padgett, cleaning up his car for her, dressing in new clothes for her, wanting to impress her, the whole thing had been shot by the old man's appearance.
Why can't he just lay off me? Why does he have to touch me, talk to me, make me look like a jerk in front of this girl when he's the one who's a jerk? I walked in here, I was ready to show Maryann I could be a gentleman, make small t
During the practice Randy was forced to observe his mother and father walking down the aisle on either side of Lisa, then sitting together in the front pew. There were times when he himself had to stand up front and face the congregation and could hardly avoid seeing them, side-by-side, as if everything was just peachy. Well, that was bullshit! How could she sit there beside him as if they'd never split up, as if it wasn't his fault the family broke up? She might say she had faults, too, but they were minor compared to his, and nobody was going to convince Randy differently.
When the business at the church ended they all went to a restaurant called Finnegan's, where the Padgetts had reserved a private room for the groom's dinner. Randy drove alone, arrived before Maryann and waited for her in the lobby. The door opened and she stepped inside, speaking with her father and mother, a smile on her face.
She saw him and the smile thinned, her speech faltered.
“Hello again,” he said, feeling self-conscious waiting there with such obvious intent.
“Hello.”
“Do you mind if I sit with you?”
She looked straight at him and said, “You'd do better to sit with your father but I don't mind.”
He felt himself blushing—blushing, for Christ's sake—and said, “Here, I'll help you with that,” as she began removing her coat.
He hung it up along with his own and they followed her parents into the reserved room, where a long table waited to accommodate the entire wedding party. Walking behind her, he studied her round white collar, which reminded him of something a Mennonite would wear, and her hair, dark as ink and falling in tiers to her shoulders, the tips upturned like dry oak leaves. He thought about writing a song about her hair, something slow and evocative, with the drums quiet at the beginning and building toward a climax, then ending with sheepskin mallets doing a cymbal roll that faded into silence.
He pulled out her chair and sat down beside her, at the opposite end of the table from his parents.
While they ate, Maryann sometimes talked and laughed with her father, on her right. Sometimes she did the same with Lisa or Mark, across the table, or bent forward to say something to her mother or one of her sisters, down the line. She said nothing to Randy.
Finally he asked, “Would you please pass the salt?”
She did, and flashed him a polite smile that was worse than none at all.
“Good food, huh?” he said.
“Mm-hmm.” She had a mouthful of chicken and her lips were shiny. She wiped them with her napkin and said, “My folks wanted something fancier for the groom's dinner but this was all they could afford, and Mark said it was fine, as long as Mom didn't have to do all the cooking herself.”
“You all get along really well, I guess . . . your family, I mean.”
“Yes, we do.”
He tried to think of something more to say but nothing came to mind. He grinned and glanced at her plate.
“You like chicken, huh?” She had eaten all of it and little else.
She laughed and nodded while their eyes met again.
“Listen,” he said, his stomach in knots. “I was wondering if I could drive you home.”
“I'll have to ask my dad.”
He hadn't heard that answer since he was in the tenth grade and had just gotten his driver's license.
“You mean you want to?” he asked, amazed.
“I kind of suspected you'd ask me.” She turned to her father, sitting back in her chair so Randy could hear their exchange. “Daddy, Randy wants to drive me home, okay?”
Jake touched his hearing aid and asked, “What?”
“Randy wants to drive me home.”
Jake leaned forward, peered around Maryann to study Randy a moment and said, “I guess that would be all right but you have things to do early tomorrow, don't you?”
“Yes, Daddy, I'll get in early.” She turned to Randy and said, “Okay?”
He raised his right hand like a Boy Scout. “Straight home.”
When the meal was over there was a jumble of good-byes at the door. He held Maryann's coat, then the heavy plate-glass door, and they walked across the snowy parking lot together.
“This one's mine,” he said, reaching his Nova and walking around to open the passenger door for her, waiting until she was seated, then slamming it, feeling gallant and eager to extend every courtesy ever invented by men for women.
When he was sitting behind the wheel, putting his keys in the ignition, she remarked, “Boys don't do that much anymore . . . open car doors.”
He knew. He was one of them.
“Some girls don't want a guy to open doors for them. It's got something to do with women's lib hang-ups.” He started the engine.
“That's the silliest thing I ever heard. I love it.”
He felt all glowy inside and decided if she could be honest, so could he. “It felt good doing it, too, and you know what? Other than for my mother, I don't do it much, either, but I will from now on.”
She buckled her seat belt, something else he rarely did, but he fished around and found his buried buckle and engaged it. He adjusted the heater, stalling for time, judging he'd have her at her doorstep in less than ten minutes. The floor fan came on and twisted the blue Christmas tree around and around on its string.
“It smells good in here,” she said. “What is it?”
“This thing.” He poked the tree and put the car into reverse and headed toward White Bear Avenue. It would have been more direct to take I-95 to 61 and go around the west side of the lake but he headed around the east side instead, driving twenty miles an hour in the thirty-mile zone through the residential district.
When they were halfway to her house he said, “Could I ask you something?”
“What?”
“How old are you?”
“I'm a senior. Seventeen.”
“Are you going with anybody?”
“I don't have time. I'm in girls' basketball and track, and I work on the school paper and I spend a lot of time studying. I want to do something in either medicine or law, and I've applied to Hamline University. My folks can't afford to pay their tuition fees so I'll need a scholarship if I'm going to go there, which means I have to keep my grades up.”
If he told her how he'd skated through high school she'd ask him to stop the car and let her out right here.
“How about you?” she asked.
“Me? Nope, don't go with anybody.”
“College?”
“Nope, just high school.”
“But you want to be a drummer.”
“Yes.”
“In a rock band?”
“Yes.”
“And meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile, I work in a nut house.”
“A what!” She was already amused.
“It's a warehouse, actually. I package fresh roasted nuts—peanuts, pistachios, cashews—it's a big wholesale house. Custom orders that go out to places all over America. Christmas is our biggest season. It really gets crazy in a nut house at Christmas.”
She laughed, as people always did, but the comparison between their ambitions was pointed enough to sound ludicrous, even to him.
They rode in silence awhile before Randy said, “Jesus, I really sound like a loser, don't I?”
“Randy, I need to say something right up front.”
“Say it.”
“I'd just as soon you didn't say ‘Jesus' that way. It offends me.”
That was the last thing he'd expected. He hadn't even realized he'd said it. “Okay,” he replied, “you got it.”
“And as far as being a loser—well, that's all just a state of mind. I guess I've always thought if a person feels like a loser he ought to do something about it. Go to school, get a different job, do something to boost your self-esteem. That's the first step.”
They reached her house and he parked o
Randy hunched his shoulders toward the steering wheel, joined his hands between his knees and looked straight out the windshield at a streetlight twenty feet away.
“Listen, I know you think I'm a jerk because I don't get along with my dad but maybe you'd like to hear why.”
“Sure. I'm a good listener.”
“When I was thirteen he had an affair and divorced my mother and married somebody else. Everything just sort of fell apart after that. Home, school. Especially school. I kind of drifted through.”
“And you're still feeling sorry for yourself.”
He turned his head, studied her awhile and said, “He screwed up our whole family.”
“You think so?” He waited, eyeing her warily. “You aren't going to like what I have to say but the truth is, each of us is responsible for ourself. If you started sloughing off in school, you can't blame him for that. It's just easier if you do, that's all.”
“Jesus, aren't we smug?” he replied.
“You said ‘Jesus' again. Do it once more and I'm leaving.”
“All right, I'm sorry!”
“I said you weren't going to like what I had to say. Your sister made it through. Your mother seems to have done all right. Why didn't you?”
He threw himself back into the corner of the seat and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Christ, I don't know!”
She was out of the car like a shot, slamming the door, leaping over the snowbank onto the sidewalk and heading for the house before he realized what he'd said. He opened his door and shouted, “Maryann, I'm sorry! It just slipped out!” When the house door slammed, he slugged the car roof with both fists and railed aloud, “Jesus Christ, Curran, what are you doing chasing this uptight broad!”
He flung his body behind the wheel, gunned the engine with the ear-splitting thunder of an Indy-500 ignition, peeled down the street fishtailing for a quarter of a block, rolled down the window, yanked the smelly Christmas tree off the radio knob, cutting his finger before the string broke, and hurled the thing into the street, cursing a blue streak.