Love Stories in This Town

So, Pearl’s organizing the magazines, maybe reading a bit as she usually does, which is why it takes her forever and a day, and she hears sounds from the man. What sounds? Grunting sounds and breaths, little short ones. (Pearl kept saying, “Like a bear, like a bear,” but nobody wanted to explore that statement.) So finally she looks up and his back’s to her. He’s hunched a bit.

You have to understand about Pearl. She’s sixty-five, and her husband was brought over straight from County Galway. He was killed in a mine explosion, but not before he left Pearl for a stripper. She never remarried, or went on a date, or even talked a whole lot to a man after that. In short, the masturbator had to turn around, raise an eyebrow, and give Pearl an eyeful before she realized he was no regular library patron. She was paralyzed for a minute. According to Rosie, who appointed herself official psychoanalyst, he finished the job right there and then, and that is why Pearl doesn’t use the water fountain anymore. Pearl finally screamed and came galloping down the stairs, and the masturbator escaped.

James drove past Pork Chop John’s. He had showered, and didn’t smell like his lunch-break Winstons but like Paco Rabanne. “What, did you leave work early?” I said.

He looked at me, and put his hand on my knee. “Annie,” he said, “I did. I left work early today.” He was talking like a movie, which pissed me off. There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Usually, we couldn’t find enough to say to each other—what food must be like in foreign countries, why our parents failed, MTV. In summer, we lay in the bed of James’s truck and made up stories of our bright future, our heads cradled by James’s winter parka and snow pants.

While James was busy squeezing my knee, he missed the light on Mercury and almost ran into a hippie Volkswagen van. “Van!” I cried, and he hit the brakes in time. “I’m hungry,” I said.

“Darling, you shall be fed,” said James.

“I’m in an onion ring mood.”

James shook his head. “So, James,” I said, “a masturbator is loose in the library.” James sighed.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” he said. He licked his lips. “Annie, if you could go anywhere, anywhere for dinner this evening, where would it be?”

I thought for a minute. “Tower Pizza,” I said.

“No.”

“Yes! You said I could choose, James. What’s your problem?”

James was breathing hard and talking strangely. He was making me nervous. “Skip it,” I said. “Mom’s making meat loaf anyway.”

“Fine!” yelled James, jerking the steering wheel and pulling into the parking lot. James didn’t even touch his salad or the double pepperoni with mushrooms. He listened glumly as I told him about the masturbator.

Then, the moment. The moment went like this:

Curtain opens on a young couple in Tower Pizza, an orange-walled restaurant with waxed yellow floors. The couple is smoking cigarettes and eating pizza from small plastic plates. The woman uses a knife and fork and the man uses his hands.

ME: Should we have gotten extra cheese?

JAMES: No. This is fine.

ME: I sort of wish I had caught the masturbator.

JAMES: Why?

ME: At least it would be exciting, you know?

JAMES: Annie, I got a promotion today. I’m leaving produce.

ME: Awesome! I wish we had extra cheese.

JAMES: I’m going to be manager of the meat counter. I almost have enough money to get us out of this place. This fucking place! I’m taking you to New York. We can stay with my cousin in Armonk, and then we’ll move to the city.

ME: Can we get cheesy garlic sticks, babe?

JAMES: Annie, will you marry me?

So I said yes, and we went up to Our Lady of the Rockies and had sex. James fell asleep, but I lay awake and gazed at Our Lady. At night she’s lit up like a Christmas tree, her arms open to us all.

The next day, there are posters all around the library. They say: CAUTION, PLEASE, THIS MAN MAY BE MASTURBATING IN THE PERIODICALS ROOM and then there’s a picture that Pearl drew of a man’s face. It looks like a cartoon pig. I tell Pearl and Rosie the signs might lead people to believe the man should be left alone, but they look at me with their brows furrowed and I zip it. Everyone is very upset about masturbation going on in the library.

Jan and the Morning Crew keep making jokes about us on the radio and repeating the description of the masturbator, down to the penny loafers. All of a sudden everybody wants to hang out at the library, and the books are in disarray. I can’t bear it.

After an hour, Rosie tells me I need a break. I tell her somebody’s got to shelve the damn books. She puts her hand on my shoulder and says, “Honey, the books aren’t going anywhere.”

I call my mother and ask her to have breakfast with me. She wasn’t awake when I left for work, and my father was coughing too hard to notice the ring on my finger. It was a thick gold ring with a diamond the size of a pencil eraser—James’s grandmother’s ring. She was a famous lounge singer who was given the ring by a movie star I can never remember the name of. It glitters and flashes around as I file the card catalog. Nobody notices when I slip out a side door.

My mom is waiting at the Squat and Gobble. She has ordered her tea and my creamy coffee, and is wearing a pillbox hat. When I come in, she looks up, and in the bright sunlight her face is lined and dry. Jesus, I think, she’s an old biddy. Then I feel guilty and give her a big hug. And don’t you know she sees that rock on my finger before I even sit down.

“Margaret Ann,” she says, “is that what I think it is?”

I say, “Yes,” and her eyes fill with tears.

“James is a good boy, he is,” she says.

“I know.”

We eat eggs and bacon, and my mother dabs at the corners of her lips between bites. She comes from a wealthy Irish family and never lets us forget it.

“James was promoted to the meat department,” I say. She smiles. “He wants to leave Butte.” Her smile widens. “How do I know if this is the right thing, Mom?”

“Do you love him?”

I think of James and his baby chick hair. “Yes.”

“I loved your papa, too,” says my mother, and she shakes her head slowly. “Thank goodness you’ll get out of this town,” she says. She looks through the window, and I look too. There are old cars glinting in the sun. A man with a beard leans against Frank’s Pawn Shoppe and draws a circle with his toe. He has only one arm. A woman comes out of Terminal Meats holding her dinner wrapped in paper. Her face is rosy and her shoes are shiny and new. Her coat is lined in fake fur and she holds it closed with the hand not holding the meat. She nods at the one-armed man, who smiles tiredly. “Maybe you and James could go to Florida,” says my mother. “Just like the Lady Griz.”

“My knee is broken!” I yell, by mistake. My mother shuts up like a clam and her face goes even paler.

“I’m sorry,” I say. My mother stares at her eggs. She looks like what she is: an old lady with a husband who has cancer in his bones. Her pillbox hat is faded and her lipstick creeps into the wrinkles around her mouth. She doesn’t dab at her eyes but lets her cheeks get all wet, so they look like they’re made of clay.

“Why aren’t you happy for me?” I say. “This ring belonged to Marlon Brando!”

My mother meets my gaze. “I am happy,” she says.

“Why don’t you come with me?” I say. “Why don’t you go instead of me? I don’t care.”

“Breakfast is my treat,” she says, and I watch her count change from her purse. On impulse, I grab her soft fingers. She looks up, startled, but does not pull away.

The masturbator has already left by the time I return to the library. This time it was Mrs. McKim who saw him in the Newspaper Nook. He was working himself into a frenzy by the stacks. Mrs. McKim didn’t get a gander at the whole package. She saw the leather jacket and the loafers and ran screaming before he even turned around. He had gotten away by the time the police arrived. “Secure all the doors!” the police say to us. Nobody shelves the whole afternoon, and the books are not in order on the cart. All the peepers who have started hanging around begin to pick up books, look at the covers, and then drop them somewhere else. I find a Young Adult novel in the Reference Room! That night, I can barely sleep. I have my mother tell James I’m too sick to go dancing. In bed, I listen to the sounds of my house: the clink of silverware going in drawers, the hum of the TV. The creakings of two old people moving around each other in the night.

The next day, I take the ring off and put it in my pocket. It’s getting in the way. I’m at the counter when they come in: three little kids brandishing pens. “We,” says the tallest one, throwing her shoulders back, “are the Future Problem Solvers of America.” I recognize her—she’s Katie, the granddaughter of one of my dad’s miner pals. She has black hair parted in the middle and combed behind her ears. She wears glasses, and through them, her eyes are wide and blue. I know Katie’s mother, June, who dropped out of Butte High and drinks too much.

Another kid chimes in. “We are working on deforestation,” he says.

“Check the card catalog under ‘forest’ or ‘woods,’ ” I say. The Future Problem Solvers of America look sheepish.

“We can’t read,” says Katie.

“No worries,” I tell her. I spend all afternoon helping the kids. We find pictures of clear-cut forests and pictures of lush, green ones. We find pictures of log homes, and rugged men with axes. The FPS of A leave satisfied. They promise to return next week, when they will begin to cure cancer. When they open the library entrance, the late-afternoon sun makes Katie’s hair shine.

I tell James I have the flu, and watch television with my father. I wrap myself in an old blue blanket and laugh so hard that my father tells me to shut my piehole.

By Thursday, things have settled down at the library. The masturbator has not returned, and James has stopped coming by and asking what’s wrong, what’s wrong.

I’ll tell you what’s wrong. It took me all day to get that library back in order. What’s wrong? People and their ability to mess everything up. Disorder always increases. That’s the rule, according to Einstein or whoever. Well, I’m no Einstein, but I’ll tell you this: I tape my knee every day. It won’t get worse, and that’s a promise.

I like being a librarian. I like the peace and quiet, and the smell of old paper. I like listening to Old Ralph and paging through magazines. Each book is stamped with a history: who’s read it and when. Who needed a renewal. Nowadays, everybody loves mysteries, but I can prove that people used to like history books.

My kids are going to know all about history. Pocahontas to Columbus to Marcus Daly, who took all the copper out of Butte and left us with his empty mansion and a cancer pond. I’m going to teach them to be a part of history, like the Lady Griz and their championship. Like the masturbator, even.

At three or so P.M., I hear the front door open. It makes a click sound and by the time I turn around, someone is climbing the stairs. I know without seeing that it’s him. But I keep filing for a time. Really, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Finally, when nobody else goes about catching him, I climb the staircase. It’s a wooden staircase, and it makes a creaking sound with each step. Outside the door to the Periodicals area, it’s silent, and smells like chicken soup. I push on the door, and of course, there he is, the masturbator, whacking away.

“Hey!” I say, and he turns around. His face is red. His hair is neatly combed, and his shirt is white and pressed. He looks like somebody’s lawyer, or somebody’s dad. Granted, his dick is hard and he’s got his meaty hand around it. But the expression on his face is not panic. He looks relieved, or like I had walked in with a present all tied up in a bow. He says, “Oh.”

What is there for me to do? I am eighteen years old, and a grown man is standing between me and the weekly periodicals and he’s got his pants unzipped. I am a librarian, and a Montanan.

I recognize the look in his eyes.

“Go home,” I tell him. “Can’t you just go home?” And something changes in his face. His eyes fill up with tears.

Rosie comes through the door. She has been fixing her hair and she smells like Aqua Net and a new dose of perfume. Her mouth opens wide, and she grabs me. The man (dick completely soft by this time, and swinging wildly) pushes us to the ground and heads for the door. Old Ralph tackles him downstairs, and when the cops arrive, the masturbator is tied to the card catalog with packing tape.

It turns out that the masturbator has a name: Neil Davidson. He lives in Helena with his wife and two kids. He’s a mortgage broker. His picture is on the front page of the Friday paper, along with my name and the name of our library. It is an old picture: his hair is thick, and he wears a tie. His smile is full of hope.

“What a sick, sick man,” says my mother, looking at the paper over my shoulder. Her hair is still pinned in curls, and she has given me my toast with honey. She is rotting from the inside, I can smell it.

“You got that right,” calls my father from the living room. His oxygen tube almost drowns out the television. I can see my father’s face, and it is gray and resentful.

I don’t say anything, but I know they are wrong. I saw Neil Davidson in the flesh. I knew the look in his eyes. I wish my parents would just be quiet. I will call James today, and I will give him back his ring. “Please understand, James,” I will say. And then I will tell him what I should have told the masturbator: There are plenty of things worse than having a home, and doing what you have to do to stay there.

The Stars Are Bright in Texas

They told us the baby was dead, and two days later we were on a plane to Texas. We were moving, and had to buy a house. We’d always rented, and all our furniture was from Goodwill. We’d never had a realtor before. We were going to be rich.

In my carry-on bag, I had three magazines, an apple, and two bottles of prescription pills: an antibiotic and a painkiller. I swallowed one pill from each bottle as we taxied down the runway, leaving Bloomington, and my dead baby, behind.

It hadn’t even been a baby, my doctor said, despite my morning sickness, tender breasts, and anticipatory purchases from A Pea in the Pod. It was just a mass of cells, the wrong egg fertilized. Though my husband, Greg, knew more than any of us about chromosomal abnormalities, he was superstitious—he was convinced it was because he was drunk or stressed out from his pharmaceutical company interviews when we conceived. That night had been a heavenly memory: the smell of a fire, snow falling quietly outside our bedroom window. Now it was just a storm and a mistake.

We landed at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Joe, from Lone Star Realty, picked us up in his mother-in-law’s gold minivan. He wore a Mexican wedding shirt that would be soaked through by the end of the day.

Our friends Daniel and Jane had recommended Lone Star Realty. Daniel finished his PhD in molecular biology a year before Greg, and we watched with fascination as he went through the recruiting process. When Daniel slipped his wrists into the golden handcuffs, which was what we called pharmaceutical jobs, he and Jane went to Texas for a weekend and returned with stories of giant houses, hot brisket, and a dip called queso. Daniel, too, had considered a teaching job, but PharmaLab’s glittering promises were too wonderful to resist. “Once you’re in, you never get out,” mused Daniel, who had shaved his grad-school beard for interviews, revealing a small, pale chin.

“But why would you want to?” Jane asked. “Did we tell you we’re getting four thousand square feet? And a flipping pool! We’re twenty-six.” She shook her head with wonder.

“I’m twenty-eight,” I said.

“See what I’m saying?” she replied, gesturing at our dumpy Bloomington apartment, where I had just microwaved us two mugs of Earl Grey. Daniel and Jane were away the weekend we visited Houston, but promised to throw us a pool party when we arrived for good.

I tried to ignore the way Joe’s hands shook, the fact that he took a wrong turn getting to the first house, and then said, “Hey, now this is cute!” as if he’d never visited the neighborhood before. We were looking at houses in the Woodlands, the planned community north of Houston where Pharma-Lab was located. We could live in a real city, Daniel had told us, but the commute would be a bitch.

The first house was on Pleasure Cove Drive. It was made of limestone, and had an orange roof. The “country kitchen” included a wood-paneled refrigerator, and the nursery was furnished from the same Pottery Barn Kids catalog I had on my bedside table. This mother had chosen the Lullaby Rocker and Ottoman in cranberry twill. I had wanted butter twill.

“Did you see the country kitchen?” asked Joe. “How about the master suite?” He seemed overly excited.

The master suite had pictures of Chicago sports teams all over one wall. A wedding photo featured a blonde with a dazzling smile. The husband was not such a looker, but hey. Someone was reading Who Moved My Cheese? in bed. The other one was reading Star.

Greg was in the yard, under a sign that said MARGARITAVILLE!

“I hate it,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “okay.” We moved toward the minivan.

· · ·

As we drove to another house, Joe chatted with himself. “Silly flooring choices,” he said, and “tiles from the wrong period.” He turned on Treasure Cove Drive and stopped in front of a faux Victorian. “Right,” he said, running a hand through his hair. He told us the price of the house, which was one hundred thousand more dollars than we could afford, even with the handcuffs.

I looked back at Greg, who shrugged. He was wearing a light blue shirt I had sewn for him—it was the color of his eyes. He had a fresh haircut, and looked weary but optimistic.

My brother, Adam, a devotee of HGTV, would have loved the house on Treasure Cove. It was solid brick—so unlike the house we had grown up in, which shook during Georgia thunderstorms—and had a media room with a wet bar and a giant deck for entertaining.

I was feeling woozy and dreamy. In a stranger’s bathroom, I changed my Maxi Pad. The bathroom had a Jacuzzi tub. I wrapped the old pad in toilet paper and stuck it in my pocket. My blood—which had cushioned the mass of cells—dripped into the toilet bowl. In the tub, someone had lit berry-scented candles. I began to feel ill. I took a few breaths, then composed myself and joined my husband, who was admiring the skylight above the bed. A stitched pillow proclaimed THE STARS ARE BRIGHT IN TEXAS. It was a mass-produced piece of junk. Perhaps no one had the time to hand-stitch in Houston. Perhaps no one had a motto worth hand-stitching. THE HOUSES ARE BIG IN TEXAS, I thought. THE HAIR IS BLOND IN TEXAS. WHAT AM I DOING IN TEXAS?

In the minivan, I said I was too tired to trek around anymore. “Sweetie,” said Greg, “we only have this weekend….”

“How about a Diet Dr Pepper?” suggested Joe. “Got a twelve-pack in the cooler.”

My empty womb was starting to cramp. “I just don’t feel so well,” I said. “I’m on antibiotics.”

Joe smoothly put the car in gear. He talked about strep throat, how he always used to get strep throat as a kid, always taking antibiotics.

“Let’s hit a few more houses,” said my husband. “Kimmy, you rest in the car. I’ll let you know if anything’s amazing.” The doctor had suggested we cancel the trip, but I had already covered my shifts, and I wanted so much to fly somewhere new, somewhere else, and buy a home. Our apartment was grimy, despite the curtains I had made from vintage fabric. The previous tenants had left old pots and pans; there was even a towel in the bathroom that said RANDY.

“You’ll be completely wiped out after the procedure,” the doctor had said, as I lay on a gurney, an IV in my arm. I was given an anti-nauseal called Regulan.

“I feel a bit weird already,” I said.

“Hm,” said the doctor, leaning in. I was her first operation of the day: I could smell the hair dryer and Aqua Net. “Do you feel anxious, jittery, like you want to jump off the table?”

“I do.”

“It’s the Regulan,” said the doctor, matter-of-factly. But I was also about to go into surgery, to have what was left of my baby scraped out. We had prematurely named the baby Madeline or Greg Junior.

“You’ll be in la la land in a sec anyway,” said the doctor.

She was right. The next thing I knew, a nurse said, “It’s all over. Now don’t forget Doc’s instructions.”

She pulled back a white curtain, and there was Greg, his eyes red. “Mouse,” he said, and he tried to smile.

The nurse continued, “Dr. O’Brien told you the surgery was fine, and you asked when you could have a margarita.”

“What did she say?” Greg and I asked in unison.

“She said Sunday.”

It was Friday night when Joe dropped us at the Hilton Garden Inn, but we ordered margaritas anyway at the Great American Grill. The espadrilles I had bought for the trip were already giving me blisters. We were depressed.

“I can’t imagine myself in any of these McMansions,” I said, poking an ice cube with my straw.

“I’m not hungry, but I’m getting fried chicken,” said Greg.

“I miss it,” I said. Greg slid his chair next to mine and took me in his arms.

“I know,” he said. “Me too.”

Three nights before, I had climbed into bed and said, “I have a little blood in my underwear.”

“What?”

“But I looked on the Internet. Something about old blood, sometimes, like making room for the growing uterus or something. I don’t know.” I felt a sick excitement, speculating that I’d get some extra attention and maybe see the baby on an early sonogram, paid for by Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

“It’s probably nothing,” Greg had said, putting one hand on my stomach and the other on his fruitfly genome data.

After two rounds of margaritas, we went to our hotel room. Greg took a shower and joined me in bed, smelling of the hotel’s ginger citrus shampoo. When he fell asleep, I was alone in a humid city.

I was six when a man approached my mother near the perfume counter at Dillard’s. Once in a while, she took us shopping in Atlanta, about an hour from our hometown of Haralson, Georgia, population 143. The man asked my mother if she’d ever thought of being a model. She laughed in a way I had never heard, showing her throat. She said she was happily married with two small children. The man told my mother they had nannies in Paris, who were called au pairs.

In my memory, the man had dark hair and shiny skin. He wore a suit and tie. He handed her a card and said, “Just promise me you’ll think about it.” My mother was a rare beauty, he said.

She looked at the card, her forehead creased. She said, “I’ll think about it. Okay, I will, I’ll think about it.” She bought a shirt for my brother and a plaid jumper for me, and then she drove us home.

She was beautiful, my mother. She’d rest her long, bare arms on her knees and stare into space while I tried to capture her attention. She didn’t cook, like other mothers, or put name tags in my clothes. I can imagine her hanging my new dress in my closet, mulling her options. Did she even hesitate? Lighting a cigarette, dialing the number, packing her suitcase.

I don’t know if she made it to Paris, or became famous there. Whatever she found, I hope it brought her happiness. I hope it was better than my brother and me.

At ten the next morning, I climbed into the front seat of Joe’s mother-in-law’s minivan. Greg was in the back, next to the cooler. We drove south, heading into a neighborhood I loved immediately. There was a big park with a swimming pool, and a jungle gym surrounded by moms holding take-out coffees.

“Okeydokey,” said Joe, looking through a messy pile of papers, each a possible place for us to live. “Okay, now,” he said, “we’re a few blocks from the Ginger Man, a good little bar.”