Wild Child and Other Stories Read online

  High comedy—Dave and I would have a real laugh over this one. My feet sailed on down the walk, across the lot and through the drizzle of the world, and I was thinking cold beer, medium-rare burger with extra cheese and two slices of Bermuda onion, until I reached my car and saw that I wasn’t going anywhere. The rear tires had sunk maybe half an inch into the grass-turned-to-mud, but that wasn’t the problem, or not the immediate problem. The immediate problem was the Mini Cooper (two-tone, red and black) backed up against my bumper and blocking me as effectively as if a wall had been erected round my car while the meeting was going down.

  I was wearing a tan leather three-quarter-length overcoat that had caught my eye in the window of a shop on Fifth Avenue a month back and for which I’d paid too much, and it was on its way to being ruined. I didn’t have an umbrella. And I’d ignored the salesgirl, who’d given me a four-ounce plastic bottle of some waterproofing agent and made me swear to spray the coat with it the minute I got home. I could feel the coat drinking up the wet. A thin trickle, smelling of mango-pineapple, began to drip from the tip of my nose. I looked round me, thinking of the blond woman—this was her car, I was sure of it, and where in hell was she and how could she just block me in like that?—and then I opened the door of my car and slid in to wait.

  Twenty of the longest minutes of my life crumbled round me as I sat there in the dark, smoking one of the cigarettes I’d promised myself to give up while the radio whispered and the windshield fogged over. Headlights illuminated me as one car after another backed out, swung round and rolled on out of the lot to freedom. I reminded myself, not for the first time, that patience, far from being a virtue, was just weakness in disguise. A mosquito beat itself up out of nowhere to settle on the back of my neck so I could put an end to its existence before it had its opportunity to produce more mosquitoes to send out into a world of exposed necks, arms and midriffs. Midriffs. I began to think about midriffs and then the blond woman and what hers might look like if she were wearing something less formal than a flocked blue dress that buttoned all the way up to the collar and I pulled on my cigarette and drummed my fingers on the dash and felt my lids grow heavy.

  Finally—and it was my bad luck that the last two cars left in the whole place were the ones blocking me in—I heard voices and glanced in the rearview mirror to see three figures emerging from the gloom. Women. “All right, then,” one of them called out, and here she was—the chairwoman, her big white block of a face looming up on the passenger side of my car like a calving glacier as the Suburban flashed its lights and gurgled in appreciation of her—“you have a good night. And feel good. You did real well tonight, honey.”

  The door slammed. The Suburban roared. Red brake lights, a great powerful churning of tires and the song of the steering mechanism, and then she was gone. I shifted my eyes to the other side, and there she was, the blonde, framed in the driver’s side mirror. Right next to her daughter, in the plaid skirt and damp white sweater.

  I froze. Absolutely. I was motionless. I didn’t draw breath. The girl and her mother climbed into the Mini Cooper and I wanted to shrink down in my seat, crawl into the well under the steering wheel, vanish altogether, but I couldn’t do a thing. I heard the engine start up—they were on their way; in a second they’d be gone—and for all I’d been through, for all the rumbling of my stomach and the craving for alcohol that was almost like a need and the strangeness of that overstuffed auditorium and the testimony I’d witnessed, I felt a yearning so powerful it took me out of myself till I didn’t know where I was. And then I heard the harsh message of the wheels slipping and then an accelerating whine as they fought for purchase in the mud. She had no idea, this woman—not the faintest notion—of how to rock a car out of a hole in a yielding surface. She accelerated. The wheels spun. Then she did it again. And again.

  I watched the door swing open, watched her legs emerge from the car as she reached down to remove her shoes and step out onto the grass to assess the situation while her daughter’s torso faded in soft focus behind the fogged-over windshield. And because I was weak, because I hadn’t dated anybody in a month and more and couldn’t stand to see those shining bare legs and glistening feet stained with mud and didn’t care whether Jesus and all the saints in heaven were involved in the equation or not, I got out of my car, looked her full in the face over the glare of the headlights and said, “Can I help?”

  The Fit

  I never did get to the Granite that night. I called Dave on my cell and he sounded annoyed—wound up from the meeting and eager to take it out on somebody—but the Mini Cooper was in deeper than it looked and by the time we were able to free it I was in no shape for anything but bed. My coat was ruined. Ditto my shoes. Both pantlegs were greased with mud, my hands dense with it, my fingernails blackened. I should have given up, the term lost cause hammered like a spike into the back of my brain, but I was feeling demonstrative—and maybe just a little bit ashamed of myself over the Jesus freak comment. We were ten minutes into it, the drizzle thickening to rain, the miniature wheels digging deeper and the daughter and I straining against the rear bumper, when the woman behind the wheel—the blonde, the mother—stuck her head out the window and gave me my out. “You know,” she called over the ticking of the engine and the soft beat of the rain, “maybe I should just call Triple A?”

  I came up alongside the car so I could see the pale node of her face wrapped in her shining hair and her eyes like liquid fire. The interior of the car sank away into the shadows beyond her. I couldn’t see her shoulders or her torso or her legs. Just her face, like a picture in a frame. “No,” I said, “no need. We can get it out.”

  The daughter chimed in then—Mary-Louise. She was standing on the far side of the car, hands on hips. There was a spatter of mud on her sweater. “Come on, Mom,” she said with an edge of exasperation. “Try it again.” She looked to me, then bent to brace herself against the bumper. “Come on,” she said, “one more time.”

  I watched the mother’s face. She squeezed her eyes shut a moment so that a little hieroglyph of flesh appeared over the bridge of her nose, then she gave me the full benefit of her gaze and it came to me that she hadn’t heard what I’d said back in the auditorium, that there was no animosity, none at all. I wasn’t on trial. I was just a helpful stranger, the Good Samaritan himself. “I’m Lynnese Mohler,” she said, and here was her hand, the nails done in a metallic shade of blue or lavender, slipping free of the darkness to take hold of my own. “And this is my daughter, Mary-Louise.”

  “Calvin Jessup.” I leaned toward her, toward the smell of her, her perfume and what lay beneath it. “But people call me Cal. My friends, anyway.” I was smiling. Broadly. Stupidly. The rain quickened.

  “Come on, Mom.”

  “I want to thank you for your help—you’re really sweet. I mean it. But are you sure I shouldn’t call Triple A? It’s nothing. I mean, they don’t even charge—”

  I straightened up and gave her an elaborate shrug, feeling the accumulated weight of every cell and fiber of my one hundred and eighty-seven pounds. I didn’t need alcohol. Didn’t need a burger. All I needed was to push this car out of the ditch. “If you want to wait here in the dark,” I said. “But I really think we can get you out if you just—”

  “You have to rock the car, Mom.” The girl—what was she, fourteen, fifteen? Was that ninth grade? I couldn’t remember—slapped the side of the car with her open palm. “We almost had it there that last time, so just, come on, start it up and then you go back and forth—you know, the way Dad showed us.”

  Lynnese glanced up at me, then ducked her head and shook it side to side so that her hair, dense with moisture, fell loose to screen her face. “I’m divorced,” she said.

  Behind us, across the lot, the lights of the auditorium faded briefly and then blinked out. “Yeah,” I said. “So am I.”

  The Fittest

  A week later I was sitting with Dave at the Granite, enjoying my second Sidecar of the evening
and watching the first round of the playoffs that wouldn’t feature the Mets (this year, anyway), thinking about Lynnese while Dave went on about the lawsuit he and twelve of the other parents were filing against the school district. I liked Dave. He was one of my oldest friends. And I agreed with him both in principle and fact, but when he got on his high horse, when he got Serious with a capital S, he tended to repeat himself to the point of stupefaction. I was listening to him, feeding him the appropriate responses (“Uh-huh, uh-huh—really?”) at the appropriate junctures, yet I was tuning him out too.

  I wanted to talk about Lynnese and what had happened between us in the past week, but I couldn’t. I’d never been comfortable exposing my feelings, which was why people like Dave accused me of making a joke of everything, and I couldn’t even mention her—not to Dave—without feeling like a traitor to the cause. “I’m a Christian,” she told me on the occasion of our first date, before I’d even had a chance to ice the beer or rev up the engines or ask her if she’d like to release the stern line and help cast us off (which was a simple way to involve anybody in the process of what we were about to do, because there’s no pretense in boating and the thrill of being out on the water takes you right back to your childhood, automatically—boom—just like that). The sun was high, Indian summer, a Saturday delivered from the heavens, and I was planning to take her up the river to a floating restaurant-cum-club where we could have cocktails on the deck, listen to reggae (and dance, maybe dance, if she was up for it) and get dinner too. She was wearing shorts. Her hair was its own kind of rapture. “Hi,” I said. “Hi,” she said back. “Where’s Mary-Louise?” I asked, secretly thrilled that she’d come alone and all the while dreading the intrusion of that child with Jesus in her heart, half-expecting her to pop up out of the backseat of the Mini Cooper or come strolling out of the bushes, and she told me that Mary-Louise was out in the woods hiking—“Up Breakneck Ridge? Where that trail loops behind the mountain to where those lakes are? She loves nature,” she said. “Every least thing, the way she focuses on it—it’s just a shame they won’t let her alone in school, in biology. She could be a scientist, a doctor, anything.” I didn’t have much to say to that. I held out a hand to help her into the boat. She anchored her legs, the hull rocking beneath us, and leveled her eyes on me. “I’m a Christian,” she said.

  Well, all right. I’d seen her twice since, and she was as lively, smart and well-informed as anybody I knew—and if I’d expected some sort of sackcloth-and-ashes approach to the intimate moments of an exploratory relationship, well, there went another prejudice. She was hot. And I was intrigued. Really intrigued. (Though I wouldn’t want to call it love or infatuation or anything more specific than that after what I’d gone through with my ex-wife and the three or four women who came after her.)

  “We’re going to break them,” Dave was saying. “I swear to you. There was that case in Pennsylvania and before that in Kansas, but these people just don’t learn. And they’ve got bucks behind them. Big bucks.”

  “You want to call them fanatics,” was what I said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “They’re fanatics.”

  The Petitions

  Before the trial, there were the petitions. Trials require a whole lot of steam, time to maneuver for position, war chests, thrusts and counter-thrusts, but petitions require nothing more than footwork and a filing fee. Within a week of the meeting, petitioners were everywhere. You couldn’t go into the grocery, the post office or the library without sidestepping a fold-up table with two or three clench-jawed women sitting behind it in a welter of pens, Styrofoam cups, ledgers and homemade signs. And men, men too. Men like Dave, and on the other side of the issue, men like the reverend and the pock-marked man who’d stood beside me in the auditorium distending his lips and puffing up his cheeks to express his opinion of the proceedings. I’d taken a lot of things for granted. Some of us might have lived at the end of long driveways and maybe we didn’t get involved in community issues because that sort of rah-rah business didn’t mesh with our personalities, but as far as I knew we’d always been a community in agreement—save the trees, confine the tourists, preserve the old houses on Main Street, clean up the river and educate the kids to keep them from becoming a drag on society. Now I saw how wrong I was.

  Of course, Dave came into the Granite and laid his petition right out on the bar and I was one of the first to sign it—and not just out of social pressure, Rick and half a dozen of the regulars looking over my shoulder while Elvis Costello sang “My Aim Is True” and my burger sizzled on the grill and the late sun melted across the wall, but because it was the right thing to do. “People can believe what they want,” Dave said, giving a little speech for the bar, “but that doesn’t make it the truth. And it sure as shit doesn’t make it science.” I signed. Sure, I signed. He would have killed me if I didn’t.

  And then I was coming up the hill from the station, the trees fired with the season and dusk coming down over the river behind me, everything so changeless and pure it was as if I’d stepped back in time, when I remembered I needed to pick up a few things at the deli. I didn’t cook much—I let Tom Scoville, the chef at the Granite, take care of that—but I ate cereal for breakfast, slipped the odd frozen dinner into the microwave or went through the elaborate ritual of slicing Swiss and folding it between two slices of rye. I was out of milk, butter, bread. And as I’d walked down the hill to the train that morning I’d reminded myself to remind myself when I came back up.

  I was deep in my post-work oblivion, thinking nothing, and the pock-marked man took me by surprise. Suddenly he was standing there, right in front of the door of Gravenites’ Deli, not exactly blocking my access, but taking up space in a way I didn’t like. Up close, I saw that the pock-marks were a remnant of an epidermal war he was fighting not only on his face but his scalp and throat as well. He smelled like roast beef. “Hello, brother,” he said, thrusting a clipboard at me.

  I was in no mood. “I’m an only child,” I said.

  Unfazed—I don’t even think he heard me—he just kept talking, “There’s a battle going on here for the souls of our children. And we all have to get involved.”

  “Not me,” I said, trying to maneuver past him. “What I have to get is a quart of milk.”

  “I saw you at the meeting,” he said, and now he was blocking my way. “You know damn well what this is all about.” Behind him, in the depths of the store, I could see people lined up waiting for cold cuts, sandwiches, a slice of pizza. Thirty seconds had gone by, thirty seconds out of my life. I moved for the door and the clipboard flew up like a bird. “What side you on?” he said. “Because there’s only one side to this—God’s side.”

  “Get the fuck out of my way.”

  His eyes jumped and steadied and something hard settled into his face. “Don’t use that language with me.”

  The whole world dissolved in that instant, as if the movie had slipped off the reel, and a long sorrow opened up inside me. What was going on here had nothing to do with Dave or school boards or Lynnese or her daughter either—it was just some stranger getting in my face, and nobody gets in my face. Some redneck. Some yahoo with a complexion like a cheese grater and bad breath on top of it. So I shoved him and he lurched back against the window and everybody in Gravenites’ Deli looked up at the concussion as the plate glass contracted and snapped back again. He came at me before I could get a second shove in, his hands at the collar of my shirt, bunching the material there, and he was the one cursing now, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!”

  It was over in a minute, the way most fights are. I grabbed both his hands and flung them away from me even as my shirt—green Tencel, in a banana-leaf pattern, eighty-seven bucks on sale—ripped down the front and I gave him a parting shove that sent him into the empty steel framework of the bicycle rack, where his legs got tangled up and he went down hard on the sidewalk. Then I was stalking up the street, the blood screaming in my ears and everything so distorted I thought I was
losing my sight.

  I felt contaminated. Angry with myself but more angry with him and everybody like him, the narrow, the bigoted, the fanatics, because that was what they were, their hope masquerading as certainty, desperation plucking at your sleeve, plucking, always plucking and pushing. In college—I think it was my sophomore year—I took a course called “Philosophy of Religion” by way of fulfilling an elective requirement, but also because I wanted ammunition against my Catholic mother and the fraud the priests and rabbis and mullahs were perpetrating on people too ignorant and scared to know better. Throughout my childhood I’d been the victim of a scam, of the panoply of God and His angels, of goodness everlasting and the answer to the mystery Mary-Louise carried in her heart and laid out for all to see, and I wanted this certified college course and this middle-aged professor with a pouf of discolored hair and a birthmark in the shape of Lake Erie on his forehead to confirm it. I knew Paley’s argument from design, knew about the watch and the watchmaker, and I knew now that these people—these Jesus freaks—were trundling out the same old argument dressed in new clothes. Intricacy requires design, that was what they said. And design requires a designer. That was as far as they could see, that was it, case closed: God exists. And the earth is ten thousand years old, just like the Bible says.