Works and Days

Five

Second Chance

The battered and faded red hatchback had already rolled up and down Curtain Street two or three times that Sunday morning when it came back down, stopped in front of  1421 Curtain Street, and parked behind the hearse with a sputtering near-death rattle accompanied by a cloud of white exhaust. A tall woman with long, penny colored hair stepped out in sunshades, looked at the hearse, muttered, “He better not be dead,” then walked unsteadily up the brick path, tested the door, looked around the nearly empty house, shouting, “Chayne! Chayne!” before walking to the sofa on the other side of the living room, shrugging and passing out.

 

“In some churches they’ve started putting the choir in the front where everyone can see them,” Chayne told Jackie Lewis. The two of them were looking over the railing of the choir loft down at the ten a.m. congregation of Saint Adjeanet’s.

“I’m so glad we don’t do that. I’m not sure I’d want the people to see us.”

“Are we that bad?” Jackie asked Chayne.

From below, Bill Dwyer, at the pulpit, informed the congregation, “Our offertory hymn is Number Forty-Nine. ‘Come Down, O Love, Divine’. Number Forty-Nine.”

Hannah Decker began to play the organ, and Chayne waited a few seconds for Russell to get up, but saw the boy was sitting around in jeans and a tee shirt, staring out of the large round window over the choir loft.

“Russell!” Chayne hissed as Hannah looked to Chayne, and finished with her intro, improvised a new one.

Russell turned to him.

“It’s your solo,” his aunt hissed.

“Oh.” Russell’s eyes widened in delayed reaction, and he came to stand over the balcony, where  Chayne and Jackie were.

“Just because your mind is full of sex, this is not the time to fuck up your solo.”

Russell looked at Chayne, nodded his head, and then opened his mouth:

“Come down, O Love, Divine, seek Thou this soul of mine....”

 

“Chayne. He’s still married to my mom. Even if she did throw him out.”

Suddenly Russell stopped talking. Before the house, behind the hearse, was an old red hatchback.

“What the?” Chayne began, taking his hand from Russell’s back, and followed by the boy he went up the stairs and into the house to see the woman passed out on his couch.

Russell looked up at Chayne.

The woman, coming to consciousness, looked up at Chayne too, and with a crooked smile drawled, “Wazabi!” and then gave them a thumbs up and passed out again.

  

“Faye?” Russell moved to shake the woman.

“Shaken not stirred,” she mumbled, and then shook her head and sat up.

“Faye Mathisson?” Russell tried the name again. The woman pushed a hand through her disheveled hair and took the glass of water Russell offered her.

“Chayne made this for you,” he said. “He’s in the kitchen. I’m Russell.”

“I’ve heard so much about you,” said Faye, sipping the water, frowning, then declaring, “Shit, I thought it was vodka.”

She began rummaging through her purse.

“I need a smoke. Sit by me, Russell,” she patted the couch to indicate where he should sit, and continued rummaging through her purse. “Chayne! Get your black ass out here! Um,” she said the last reflectively, to herself, “Found em,” and she took out her Newports.

When Chayne came out from the kitchen, he heard Faye saying, “So you found your dad fucking some slut on a table! Awful, honey, awful way to see your folks. The first time I saw my Father was on television. He was in handcuffs, wearing a tutu, ballet slippers and push up bra. He’d been arrested for offering fellatio to a cop. That’s when I knew why Ma had never told me much about him. Chayne, Chayne, Chayne, Chayne of fools! What are you doing in that kitchen?”

“Trying to put together something decent for dinner.”

“Oh,” said Faye, “I guess I should get up and help you.”

“I guess you should.”

“Shit,” she blew out smoke and told Russell, “I didn’t know he’d call my bluff.”

“Well,” said Faye, as she stood up, stretching and cussing at her sore muscles, “we can stay here tonight, but we gotta be on the road in the morning.”

“On the Road?” started both Russell and Chayne.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Chayne, you called and said you needed to get your stuff out of the apartment, so I figured I’d come and get you now.”

“You’re going to Chicago?” started Russell.

“I am?” Chayne looked from Russell to Faye. “Faye what inspired you to do this on this particular weekend?”

“I was sitting around my house,” said Faye, “and thought, shit, nothing else to do. Guess I’ll drive to Michigan. So here I am and here we go. In the morning.”

“I’m not just leaving Russell here,” Chayne said, forgetting or discounting that Russell had two parents and an aunt in town.

Faye looked at the red headed boy and said, “Bring him with us.”

“He’ll miss school,” Chayne protested weakly.

“Oh, com’on,” Faye said, smiling at Chayne. “You and I both know school is overrated.”

 

“And don’t forget, we’re going to Chicago Friday night,” Felice reminded her friend.

After Felice and Jackie left the house, Patti realized she had the day to herself. Then she realized that since the junior college had been closed, she’d had the days to herself. She hadn’t looked on it that way before. Before she had been the professor turned housewife. She had never mind making dinner for Russell or seeing after his needs. Being a mother had never made her feel less of a woman, and Russell had never really demanded much. She resented the frequent dinners for Thom, the elaborate spur of the moment affairs that she no longer had to worry about. There would be no Thom. She did not have until six o’clock to herself. Patti had the whole day and the next and the next to herself.

And Russell’s leaving had done a strange thing to her. She had not tried to stop him from leaving, had thought it best for him to be away from her craziness and with Chayne. She had missed her son, but not as much as she thought she would, and she realized that right now not only was she not a wife, she wasn’t even acting like a mother.

Acting.

Patti stood in the kitchen on the precipice of anxiety. She wasn’t a professional. She wasn’t a wife, and didn’t especially want to be. She wasn’t even a mother anymore.

I’m just myself.

What did that even mean? Suddenly, by surprise, she had been stripped of what she knew herself to be, and the stripping was too much.

“Get it together,” Patti said, and went to get her cigarettes and an ashtray before going upstairs. She went into the bathroom. It was large and white tiled with a clawfoot slipper shaped bathtub under a fanned window filled with sunlight. The place was clean, none of Thom’s underwear lying about or his shaving cream and facial hair all in the sink. None of his wet footprints on the tile or soaking the rugs. Patti prepared to draw a bath. She poured the bath foam in, and then the salts. It couldn’t be ready too soon.

She wondered if the womb felt like these warm soft waters. As she lit a cigarette she thought, “If this were really a womb, then I’d have to be completely submerged.” She pictured herself slipping all the way under the water, her gold brown curls bobbing on the surface, the last of the cigarette going beneath the bubbles with her. Then she imagined never coming up again, and she was shocked by how wonderful the idea seemed.

Patricia Lewis sat up, realizing the waters were to her chin. The reality was too close to the fantasy. Suddenly, as bright as the sun through the window came the truth. She had been unemployed for so long now because she had limited her search to the area. Wouldn’t any school take her? She had resented Thom because he was an anchor, or a chain. But if she was divorcing him, she could go to Ann Arbor, to the University. She could do anything. What about Russell? Russell, having an adolescence neither she or Thom had known, hated his life, hated Geschichte Falls. He could get up and go anywhere with her. That seemed insensitive as soon as she’d said it, dragging her only child behind her the way Thom had done with her. But if Russell really didn’t want to go, he could always stay with Chayne.

No he couldn’t!

Why couldn’t he?

Because he’s not Chayne’s child! A child should be with his mother.

Why?

Because.

If I left town, Russell would go on just fine. He doesn’t really need me or Thom. Does he?

No answer.

I could do anything!

Patti was aware that she had added the exclamation point. Suddenly the full horror of the truth was falling on her. She didn’t have to move away to work at Notre Dame. It was only a little more than an hour away. She could teach a few days a week and commute. But this hardly mattered. Even in graduate school she understood that the university didn’t hire its graduate students to go on teaching. They wanted their professors to come from elsewhere, and Geschichte Falls was not elsewhere.

She could work in Grand Rapids. She could even work at one of the little colleges around East Sequoya or Saint Gregory. But Patti suddenly knew why she hadn’t tried to get another job.

I’m afraid I won’t get it.

No.

I’m afraid I will get a new teaching job...

And I don’t want to teach anymore.

Well, ah, yes, there it was.

I do not want to teach anymore.    

In the bathtub, in the large bathroom, Patti’s shoulders began shaking and she threw her head back and howled as her shoulders shook and tears ran into the bath water.