First Light by Charles Baxter
Hugh likes to eat in the dark. He pours himself a glass of low-fat milk, claws a fistful of cookies from the jar, and walks into the back den. He stands in front of the picture window and gazes out at the night. Heat lightning breaks behind the clouds. Clouds! He hasn’t seen any clouds for a month; we’re saved, he thinks. He dips a cookie into his glass of milk long enough to soak it but not so long that it disintegrates, then pops it into his mouth. The heat lightning behind one cloud flickers three times: a code, a private telegraph.
“Nice, isn’t it?”
He spins around, almost losing his grip on the glass of milk. Dorsey sits in the room’s dark, curled on the edge of the sofa, her legs drawn up close to her chest underneath her summer nightshirt.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“What are you doing here?” she answers.
“Want a cookie?” He holds one out.
“I don’t like them. What’s that you’re drinking?”
“Milk.”
“That’s showing ’em. Yeah, I’ll have a sip.”
He walks over to where she is sitting. Instead of handing the glass to her, he positions it at her mouth and tilts it. When she lowers her head, he takes the glass away.
“Always the frustrated priest,” she says. When he turns his back to her, she says, “Your life is such a secret. Sometimes I think I don’t know you at all. I don’t know how you go on living this way. Oh: how’s Laurie?”
“That bruise on her face? I asked her. She said she just slipped on the lawn. She’s all right.” The lightning behind one cloud makes the cloud look like an advertisement. “It didn’t hurt.”
She inhales audibly, as if she were smoking a cigarette. “Being in this house, I keep thinking of Mom and Dad. All day today I’ve been seeing Mom standing in front of the stove with a mixing bowl in one hand and one of those wire egg-whips she always carried around in the other, and I’ve been hearing that Statue-of-Liberty voice of hers, telling me how much I—”
“—She didn’t have a Statue-of-Liberty voice.”
“Time has magnified it. She believed in me, you know, and in all the wonders I would do with my life.” She shifts position on the sofa. “She always spoke softly, but now, in my memory, she’s loud. She’s quite loud. Like a statue.”
“Statues don’t speak.”
“Oh, yes, they do,” she says, and the lightning flashes closer and brighter behind her. “Hugh, we haven’t talked this time. How are you, really?”
He faces her in the dark. “I’m all right.” She doesn’t believe this, he realizes, and gives him a silence to prove it. “What’s wrong between you and Laurie?”
“Nothing.”
“Why doesn’t she enjoy touching you? I get the feeling she doesn’t like it at all anymore.”
“Stop it. Don’t you say another word. There are some questions you can’t ask me.”
“You’re too damn decent, Hugh. How’d you get to be so decent? You didn’t use to be. You were randy and lowdown and foul. You’ve become a slave to your decency, sugar pie.”
“It’s a marriage, like any other,” he says. He tries to see her more clearly. “What else did you dig out of my life today?”
“Everything,” she says, “which was there.” She smiles at him, her imp’s smile, only the right-hand side of her mouth raised up. She lifts herself and walks over to where he is standing by the window. For a few seconds she stares at the heat lightning, but she seems bored by it. She begins to hum. Hugh doesn’t recognize the tune. The volume of her humming increases, and Dorsey does a step in time to her own music. “Fox trot,” she says quickly, careful not to break the rhythm. She raises her arms and curls her fingers at her waist as if to make small fists. Her bare feet whisper and brush the wood floor. A triple burst of lightning miles away illuminates her in three distinct positions. “Simon likes to dance,” she says, “but I taught myself this step.” She stops. “You don’t dance anymore, do you?” He shakes his head. “You’re so serious,” she says, starting up again. “Such an adult adult.” Now she is humming “The Blue Danube” and doing a small box waltz by herself near an endiable. She interrupts herself again. “Want to try it?”
“No.”
“It’s easy,” she says. Standing at a dancing-class distance from him, she takes his hand. “Watch. One-two-three, one-two-three, turn-two-three, turn-two-three.” He tries to follow but cannot. “It’s so simple,” she says, “there’s nothing to it. Time and space. Move your left foot out like this. One-two-three. See? Come on, Hughie.” She counts out the beat twice more, then gives up. She takes her hands away from him, and her humming fades out. “A person has to dance sometimes,” she says. “Alone or with strangers, it doesn’t matter, it has to be done. Even when there’s no music. Especially then.” She breathes softly. “You think this is very Dorsey-like, don’t you?”
He shrugs.
“Trust me on this one. A person has to be grateful to Simon sometimes for the pastimes Simon suggests.”
“A person has to be grateful?”
She stands in front of the window, looking out. “It’s Simon’s business who he loves,” Dorsey says, aiming her words at her brother. “Sorry: whom he loves. I know who it is because he tells me. I don’t mind anymore that Simon loves so many different people. I know you didn’t ask this time, but you asked before and so I’m telling you now. Simon gets infatuated. That’s how he got me. The world’s a garden for him. He goes around like this, pick, pick, pick.” Her hands pluck imaginary blossoms. “I say to him, ‘Simon, don’t get any diseases.’ He says he’s careful. I believe him. That’s all I’m telling you.”
“If everything is so wonderful,” he asks, “what are you doing up in the middle of the night?”
“I’m not sleeping because I never sleep.”
Hugh nods. “I see.”
“And I’m not used to being in this house,” she tells him. “Too many ghosts. I don’t care how kind and loving they are.”
He stares out through the window. All over the county, he thinks, farmers are standing at their bedroom windows, breathing lightly, watching the sky in hopes of the sudden downpour, the odd cloudburst. “All I ever wanted,” he says, suddenly afraid of his own generalization, “was to make sure … that you were all right. You know: safe.”
“That’s sweet,” she says. “But it won’t ever work. Not for me. It hasn’t ever worked. Besides, there’s no safety in safety. So I might as well live with Simon. You and I, Hugh—we’ve been divorced, haven’t we? Can brothers and sisters get divorces from each other? I think they can, and I think we got one.” She gives her brother a kiss on the cheek, then goes upstairs.
He puts down the glass of milk. Why is it, he thinks, every time I talk to her, I get blindsided? It’s happened so often that no one’s even keeping count. All the scores are settled.
He looks out onto the grass and thinks he sees some silver forks lying on the lawn, lit by the high-altitude cloud lightning, which makes the backyard appear to be black and white, a landscape of tarnished metal. The keys. Hugh’s keys are still out there somewhere on the grass, at the end of an arc that began at the roof. He gazes at the ceiling with impatience at himself—I love my parachute—then opens the back door quietly and stands on the lawn. The hot summer night air presses against his skin like a heavy paw. Up above him, at the second-floor window, his sister gazes down at him, and he sees her there, a small familiar figure in white, standing in the room where she once, long ago, grew up. He waves, but she moves back as if she hasn’t seen him. When he hears thunder, Hugh bends down and begins to search in the burned grass for his keys, the ones to the car and the house and the garage and his office door, and the one that opens a lock he’s forgotten about, and the one that he forgot to give back at the motel’s check-out desk twenty miles out of town, and in the next flash of lightning, he sees a frog, and what he thinks may be a garter snake, but when the first drop of rain falls on his back, he hasn’t found what he’s
2
“Ordinary white wine,” Dorsey says, when Simon asks her to name her favorite alcoholic drink. They drive for another half mile before Simon asks her for the brand of her favorite candy bar. She looks at a silo, and at the rotting wooden frame of a billboard, vacant, framing only the scrub pine trees behind it, before she says, “Almond Joy.”
Driving the back roads of Ohio, on their way to Hugh and Laurie’s for the Fourth of July, Dorsey and Simon play Simon’s preference game for as long as Simon can think of categories. After an hour of this, Simon sinks into a traveler’s stupor, and his hands hang limply on the steering wheel. He and Dorsey both look out in silence at what there is of Ohio to see. They have been wandering on county highways, service drives, and township line roads, heading in a northwesterly direction. Simon does not, on principle, drive on freeways or use road maps. Maps, he says, take all the creativity out of getting somewhere. Why travel if you already know how to get where you’re going? For direction they use the angle of the sun and a water-ball compass stuck to the front windshield with a black suction cup.
Noah sleeps in the back, the visor of his Boston Red Sox cap down over his eyes.
“Hugh,” Simon says, suddenly alert again, pronouncing his brother-in-law’s name as if the name itself were in doubtful taste. He peers at the highway, then says Hugh’s name three times, trying out different intonations, projecting the sounds as a groan, a sigh, a quiet bird call.
“Come on. We’re only staying with them for a day or two,” Dorsey says. “You can tolerate my brother for that long.”
“It’s not your brother I mind,” Simon tells her, gripping the steering wheel tightly again. “It’s his behavior I don’t like. And his looks. That furrowed brow of his. He’s so earnest. And then there’s his decency. You know I can’t handle decency. It gives me the shivers.”
They are cruising past someone’s farm, where the corn is waist high, pale green, and dried out. A DEKALB sign, with the brand name blazoned over a winged corn cob, stands at the edge of the field. Dorsey looks at her fingernails and says, “Sweetie, you don’t like it when people are predictable. You have a fetish for surprise.”
“It’s not a fetish. It’s a craving. That’s different. It’s not that he’s dull, I don’t mind dull, I even like dull sometimes. Dull can be pretty. Remember Sandra?”
“Sandra in Sausalito?” Dorsey asks.
Simon nods. “She was soulfully dull,” he sighs.
“No, she wasn’t,” Dorsey tells him. “She was languid. There’s a difference. Don’t you remember? I met her. I caught you with her once. She had herself draped over the sofa and she was drinking that alcoholic Kool-Aid you had made and were calling sangria, and she was wearing a purple silk skirt and a blouse with no bra. Yeah, I remember her. But listen: you don’t have to make a social effort. You can stay in your room and study your script. We’ll occupy ourselves. You don’t have to mingle, honey. You can stay in your room.”
Simon nods, pleased by the idea, and begins to hum the Beach Boys’ “In My Room.” His face has cleared. It’s an unusually broad face, suited for the stage, with a high forehead curtained by a mop of nondescript hair. Everyone who sees him says that Simon looks like … someone they’re sure they’ve seen before. Some say Alan Arkin. Others say Anthony Perkins or Glenda Jackson. Always they recognize him but then are unsure by what means they have done so. Simon has this characteristic: he usually looks like someone else. Like a plastic manufactured doll, he has no face of his own. He leaves nothing in the visual memory.
“All the dull, decent people should have a convention,” Simon says, turning the steering wheel for a slow S-curve around a greenish muddy lake, only two boat docks visible in a tiny bay of lily pads. “They could elect your brother the supreme King of Dullness. No,” he says, suddenly looking animated, “not the supreme king. The Pope. The terrible Pope of Torpor.”
Dorsey looks over at him. “I hate it when you struggle for bitchy adjectives,” she says. “It’s not a winning characteristic.”
Simon laughs with his mouth gripped shut, silently. He pretends to hunch over the wheel like a little troll pleased by his own vileness. Suddenly both he and Dorsey are being hit on the shoulders by back-seat hands. Dorsey turns around, where Noah is excitedly pointing to a roadside billboard, three lines of copy on three red slats.
SEASHELL CITY
WONDERS OF THE DEEP
TWO MILES
Noah holds his hands in the air. Stop there! his hands say. Tell Daddy to stop there.
Dorsey turns around to face him. Do you have to go to the bathroom? she asks.
No. I want to stop. I want to see the shells.
“What’s he want?” Simon asks. “I can’t read his hands in the rearview mirror.”
“He wants to stop at the seashell place up here.”
“Oh.” Simon’s face moves out of its troll mode and takes on an air of pleased parental concern. He puts his left hand on the wheel and lifts his right hand.
We’ll stop, the hand spells out.
TREASURES OF THE DEEP
GIANT MAN EATING CLAM
SEASHELL CITY—ONE MILE
“Sounds like my kind of place,” Simon tells Dorsey. “I can’t wait to see that man eating that clam. You don’t see giant men—”
“—We need a rest anyway,” Dorsey says, interrupting Simon, shutting him off. “Maybe we can find out where we are.”
“That’s cheating,” Simon tells her, running his hand through his hair in a petulant gesture. “That would be telling. Honey, you know the rules. We don’t ever ask strangers for directions. I mean, we know we’re in Ohio, so who cares where we are? Don’t you dare ask them how to get where we’re going. They wouldn’t know anyway.”
40,000 SHELLS!
FREE ICE WATER
SEASHELL CITY–½ MILE
They pull off into a dusty parking lot enclosed on two sides by a flaking picket fence. There is one other car in the lot, a battered and rusting peach-colored Hornet, its back bumper attached to the frame with wire and twine. Seashell City has an open front entryway, like a fruit stand, with a glass case filled with smooth polished stones, next to a circular postcard rack, a carousel of scenes of rural and urban Ohio. Behind the register is a large, balding man smoking the stump of a cigar. The man’s red face is mottled and blotched so that it looks like an enlarged, angry apple. Leaning on the counter, he fabricates a smile when Simon, Dorsey, and Noah come in. His huge meaty forearms are splayed over his newspaper. Above him, on a shelf, a radio is playing country-western: Hank Williams, Jr.
Seashell City is all one large room with long divided tables on both sides of the aisles; the large shells are arranged in parallel rows, and the small shells and the polished stones are separated on the tables so that the least expensive are closest to the door. Tourist ashtrays in the shape of upturned hands, novelty clocks that run backwards, placemats, and cedar outhouse salt-and-pepper shakers are grouped together along the north wall.
Dorsey solemnly thumbs through a stack of plastic-covered scenic placemats in Kodachrome colors: western Colorado, San Francisco Bay, Mount Rainier. She puts them back, then glances at the cast-iron dog thermometer hanging on the wall near the front—eighty-two degrees here inside Seashell City—and walks over to where Noah stands with his fingers in a small bin of seashells. The air smells of fertilized farm soil and varnished wood souvenirs. The country-western station, now playing Tammy Wynette, seems much louder than before, much louder than a radio in a public place has any right to be. Feeling a shiver of displacement, Dorsey begins to hear all the objects in Seashell City. What she hears is not a sound but instead an inaudible sensation of the ocean’s and the earth’s artifacts. Gastropods from the Atlantic, oyster shells from the Pacific, polished agates from Lake Superior, flea-sized pieces of gold from Nevada, glittering iron pyrite from California, yellow quartz crystals from closed subterranean caves all
She is about to call over to Simon when Noah, who is still standing beside her, holds up a smooth brown-spotted shell.
Mom, what’s this?
She looks down at the label. The vibrations of longing fade. It’s called a Juno’s Volute, she tells him, spelling it out.
What’s a volute?
A spiral. Anything that turns, she says. Like this. She holds her index finger in the air, turning it and raising it at the same time, a party gesture.
And this? He points to a brown shell with knobby shoulders.
A fighting conch, she says.
It fights? How does it fight? I don’t understand.
I don’t know, she tells him. Probably the males fight.
And this?
It’s an alphabet cone.
Where are the letters?
They’re not real letters. They only look like letters, she says.
I want it.
Why?
Because I want to give it to Uncle Hugh.
Why do you want to do that?
Because I love him, Noah says with his hands: thumb at heart, index finger across forehead, arms crossed, then index finger pointed out.
Dorsey looks down at her son’s face. Noah is an ordinary, wild-haired kid with scabs on his elbows and gaps in his mouth where his big teeth have been emerging in irregular juts. The left side of his shirt isn’t tucked in. Like a horse, he needs a groom. And of course he is deaf, a fact that Dorsey never forgets but on which she has managed not to fixate. She insists on thinking of Noah as a normal kid of above-average intelligence and is astonished only at times like this, when he is pointlessly affectionate and generous.