When Patty was younger, an uncle who could not understand what the hell she was doing with herself kept reminding her to get married soon. She was cute as a button but she wasn’t going to live forever. (He didn’t know then that Patty was gay, although he knows now and is fine about it.) “I have to say, what are you waiting for?” he said. “You like honesty, right?”
I do? Patty remembers thinking. Where had he gotten this idea? She didn’t think of herself as an unusually honest person, and she wasn’t that eager for other people’s candor either. Given a choice, she’d rather let things slide.
She is probably franker now than she was then. As she gets older–Patty is forty-two–she gets more used to explaining herself and readier with terms at hand. AlI the same, Patty is perfectly comfortable with phony small talk and polite circumlocutions, with things left unsaid.
In the town where Patty lives now in upstate New York, people probably also think of her as a blunt and open sort of person. Anyone can see that she and Charlotte are a couple, no big secret there. Patty feels this so-called bluntness is a false impression, but it does cause people to tell her things. The guy at the gas station is in A.A., the woman who owns Ferdie’s Lounge has a son who steals cars; within five months Patty knows this.
Patty does like to be trustworthy, and the only person she tells is Charlotte. The two of them need things to talk about; they’ve never lived out of Manhattan before and aren’t used to being alone together this much. When Wyona, their sixteen-month-old daughter, is around, they have plenty to occupy them jointly, but at night a certain stillness falls over the living room. The stillness is welcome when it first starts–Wyona wears them out and they’ve been working on the house and Patty has a new office job in Albany–so they like sitting around in a nicely companionable fatigue, hearing the summer night outside, the insects’ thick texture of sound and in certain hours a very persistent, monotonous whipoorwill. Sometimes the raccoons fight, arguing in shrill blurts, like electronic noise. All this interests them both, but as the evening goes on, their attention starts rooting around for more material; it starts drifting back to the human realm.
“Kevin says they’re having trouble at this church where they hold the A.A. meetings,” Patty says. Kevin is the guy at the Sunoco station. “The church gets mad because people leave the place so messy.”
“Don’t they have a clean-up committee?” Charlotte says. Patty says maybe Kevin is on it, maybe that’s the problem. The station is pretty funky.
“Kevin could send in a maid every night for the amount of money they charge people at that station,” Charlotte says.
“Believe it.”
“When did he drink? Was he living here then?”
“I think it was when he was married. The wife still lives around here. She has a house down the road from Fred.” Fred is the other mechanic. Patty and Charlotte’s car, a very old Toyota, has had so many troubles already that Patty has spent a lot of time at the station. Charlotte says Sunoco is going to give Patty a shirt with her name embroidered on it, she is there so much.
“Kevin told me the meetings get a lot of people. I think that’s his social life.” For a moment she and Charlotte both enjoy a secret smugness about being better off than Kevin; they have each other and their cozy house and are drinking cold beers right now. All the same they wouldn’t mind being out with the crowd at these meetings. Also Patty has lied to Charlotte about how much the new valve job cost; she has underquoted the amount by a lot. She thinks she did this to avoid hearing Charlotte rail against Kevin.
Kevin chats a lot–he is always taking a break and drinking a coke and asking Patty if she likes it around here. Does she swim in the lake? Does she like the food at Mario’s? You could not call this flirting, but it makes them both lively. They tee-hee about who in hell would order pineapple on his pizza. Probably this gets added into the hourly labor charge. Patty was with men when she was much younger and at certain moments she has entertained the thought that if she and Charlotte ever split up, she would go back to being with men. She still has a bit of an appetite for them. On the other hand, it’s okay with her if this appetite remains forever unfed. She is old enough to know that not everything has to happen. Many things are fine the way they are.
Kevin likes to hold forth about people who abuse their cars. Patty is trying not to be one of them. They think everything is fixable and then they’re sorry; they get what they deserve. “Anything but that,” Patty says. People do not think. His own kids act like they can trash everything they own.
“That’s youth for you,” Patty says.
Charlotte has been stuck at home a lot because of their troubles with the car. She has taught the dog not to run in the road and gotten very busy with the garden. Rarely has Patty seen an individual more in love with her own produce. Charlotte went in right away for exotics–lemon basil, sorrel, white eggplant. Bugs got to some things, and there was a terrible morning in May when Charlotte woke to find the deer had gotten through the fence and eaten all the young shoots. Patty has mostly found the garden a big bore and was secretly glad to see it trashed. But out loud she spoke bitterly against the deer and helped Charlotte fix the fence; otherwise they couldn’t live together, simple as that.
Charlotte has looked–not too hard–for a job around here. She was a chef in New York, but she quit when they adopted Wyona, and neither of them is in a hurry for her to go back to work. If Charlotte gets work, even if she just does dinners somewhere, Wyona will have to spend some time in day care. Probably they would send her to the Big Bird Infant Playschool, which is held in the same church where Kevin’s A.A. program meets. “Maybe she’ll love it, who knows?” Patty says. At night they debate whether Wyona gives a hoot about other kids yet and whether a Presbyterian church is the kind of spot she could cut loose in.
“If one more thing goes wrong with the car,” Charlotte says, “we’re in a major bind financially.”
“Let’s just sit here and worry about it,” Patty says.
“I thought we were richer,” Charlotte says. “Why did I think that?”
They do often think they’re richer than they are. Why is that? Patty asks. They eat quite stylishly, for one thing, and they used to travel, before Wyona, so they’ve always had a certain amount of savoring and idling, in their low-budget lives. Nothing wrong with this, Patty thinks–and here they are now, after all, with the sun in the morning and the moon at night–only they have Wyona to watch out for and they don’t know zip about what anything costs in the country.
On the way to work the next day, on the highway in her rattling Toyota, Patty feels optimistic again; there is an excellent rock station that comes in well for most of the ride and it reminds her of aspects of herself which have not been entirely ruined by being here. She misses New York but upstate is not altogether out of the loop.
Patty hasn’t changed her style of dress–why should she and she walks into work in snakeskin-lycra pedal pushers and jewelry made from bike chains. The office applauds. She is having quite a nice time at work, actually. Rudy the mail guy asks her if she’s going to belt the boss with those chains. Patty says, “Chains today, whips tomorrow. He’ll love it.”
The style of kidding is a little different here–yesterday Karen from the supervisor’s office brought Patty a sandwich with a fake worm in it–but everyone’s glad to have a new person who’s lively. They make a lot of jokes about the State they work for. The state of chaos, the state of New Jerk. The State’s feelings are not hurt by these or any other remarks. Patty, at her computer, gets paid to watch how the State allocates funds for substance abuse services; she is still startled by the amounts involved. Some days it really irritates her just to see the figures; she’s like someone on a diet looking at pictures of food. She would like to shake the monitor down like a piggy bank.
All around her people complain all day about how broke and strapped they are, either that or about what item they just bought. This is irritating in its own way, but it makes Patty feel like one of the most normal people in the world. Everyone in the United States is in at least as much as debt as she and Charlotte are; the two of them are ordinary and average, it turns out. For the time being Patty is very glad to hear this.
The mail on Saturday is terrible. Patty and Charlotte get a big bill from one of their credit card companies, and a notice about their property taxes. When they decided to move from the city, people warned them about all the wrong things. People thought the living would be cheap as dirt. They worried instead about Wyona, who is, as the form at the lawyer’s said, a mixed-race baby. In Patty’s experience, there are very few people who want to be openly mean to an infant. The supermarket clerk calls her my little sweetheart, the man at the drugstore makes silly faces for her. And Wyona is a perky, sociable creature, as a rule. Only the teenagers ogle; they hang out at night in front of the 7-Eleven waiting for things to ogle at. The town is at the edge of the Catskills, not that far from Woodstock, and Patty thinks they must’ve all seen far weirder sights many times over. Not to mention the MTV they get over their satellite dishes. Soon the Wyona family will be old hat to them, more evidence that nothing happens in this burg.
Among the adults in the town the most hostile thing anyone ever says is, “Who’s the mother?” Legally Charlotte is, as a matter of fact, which is what Patty or Charlotte says for an answer. Conversation can stall at this point; if Charlotte is there, she will start nattering on about how many months old Wyona is and what words she understands. Charlotte puts people at ease by boring them into the ground, Patty thinks.
Right now Charlotte is pointing out to Patty that the mail today also has some great items in it–a circular for the hardware store, a coupon for the Casa Paco Restaurant–but Patty doesn’t think this is funny. Wyona is in a crabby mood too. She is sprawled on a blanket, throwing her toys at Patty and Charlotte; she has refused to take her nap. Charlotte wants to work in the garden and Patty says she will take the baby for a ride in the car; the motion of the ride often sends Wyona into sleep. Patty needs to get some gas anyway.
Kevin is at the gas station (Saturday is one of his days, not that she’s memorized his schedule) and he yells, “It’s the mighty blue death trap,” when he sees Patty in her Toyota. Wyona hasn’t been lulled out yet and is whining from her car seat in the back.
“How’s it going?” Patty says, but she is drowned out by Wyona, who is protesting this stop by squawking. “Hey, Crab-apple,” Patty says. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Wyona is shrieking–Patty can hardly tell Kevin to fill the tank–and Wyona begins thrashing around wildly. Patty leans around to check if there’s anything jabbing the baby–there isn’t–and she strokes her and says cooing things but she keeps Wyona strapped in; otherwise there’ll be no getting her back in that seat.
“Bet you never thought it would be like this,” Kevin says.
“No way.”
“What did you think it would be like?”
“Quieter.”
“People don’t know. They have no idea.” Patty thinks Kevin is going to talk about his own kids, but he says, “Everybody thinks it’s so easy. It’s a big fashion to go be a parent now, right? Anybody can sign up. People think they can buy human equipment for their lives and play house. They think they can be fake about who they are.”
Patty is grateful now that Wyona is squalling at the top of her lungs. She is so stunned that Kevin has insulted her this deeply, this meanly, that she keeps thinking there’s something else he might have meant by what he just said. She doesn’t say a word when he gives her change, and she drives off with the wailing Wyona.
She drives without thinking, following the road, full of hatred for every ugly sign she passes, every stupid-looking house with old appliances in the yard. Every Ferdie’s Lounge and Grill, every Adams’ Guns and Ammo. Why did she and Charlotte ever want to come here, what were they thinking? Wyona, however, has stopped crying, and when Patty glances back, she sees that Wyona is staring out the window at the lake. The lake looks bright and blazing at this time of day. Some men and boys are fishing in one spot, and further on is a spot where Patty can park the car. She is a strong swimmer and has swum across the lake, but not in this part. She takes Wyona out of the car, takes off the baby’s shoes and then her own, and she wades in, swinging Wyona across the water and dipping her feet. Wyona gives Patty a suspicious look for the first second, and then she splashes and crows, protesting only when Patty stops. This is just the sort of thing Wyona goes for in a big way.
Patty makes several resolves while this is going on. She will never never go to that gas station again. She will never again be so vain as to mistake the conversational drift of a venomous jerk. She will not blame a whole region because of one semi-recovering alcoholic lout, and she will think about this as little as she can.
In New York she would’ve handled it much better. She wouldn’t have been so caught off guard. She has lost some of her powers in coming to a new place. Who the hell do you think you are? she would’ve said. Everybody on the street would’ve gotten into it. Just a minute here. The whole ride back to the house, Patty knows in detail what she would have said.
When Patty gets back to the house, Wyona is asleep and has to be gently unbuckled and lifted out of her straps.
“A narcotized baby,” Charlotte says.
“My favorite thing.”
“I’m sick of the ridiculous prices at Sunoco,” Patty somehow has to say.
“It’s depressing. There are other places we can go to.”
Charlotte is not dumb; she has noticed Patty’s smiliness around Kevin. “They’ll rip anybody off, those guys,” Charlotte says. “In my opinion.”
Patty can’t bear to let Charlotte know what freaks and fakes Kevin thinks they are and how Patty had nothing to say to that, as if she agreed with him. Keeping this to herself, however, makes her sour and stilted for the rest of the afternoon. She and Charlotte work together on fixing the back steps, but whatever conversation they have is brief and utilitarian. Patty is as sore at Charlotte as if Charlotte had ordered her by force to shut up.
Their carpentry project is not fun–Patty hits her finger with the hammer more than once–is this their weekend? All the same, by trial and error, the job gets done. The steps end up looking more or less like real steps. Charlotte wants to celebrate by making the two of them a knock-out Italian dinner–she will use three kinds of basil, she will grill chicken on skewers of rosemary.
“It’s good to fix things like the steps,” Patty says. “For when we have to sell the house.
“You planning to put it on the market next week?” Charlotte says.
Patty says she has serious doubts about letting Wyona grow up around here. “Who will she be friends with?” Patty says.
Patty could’ve said a lot of things to Kevin she didn’t say. What about when his wife was pregnant, and he was in the backyard, drinking and listening to the radio, when she wanted him to drive her to the hospital, and he wasn’t ready and he wasn’t going until he was ready? He called a friend to join him; they drove to Buffalo to visit another friend, and he didn’t see his first son till he was a week old. It’s a terrible story. Kevin is probably very sorry that he told it to her. He probably hates her for having heard it.
