Extraordinary

goodbye I’d start to go through it—the local newspaper, ads for baking sales, bills from the local hardware store, even Christmas cards that had gotten lost for six months. I’d start off full of hope, there’d be all this stuff, but then there’d be five letters left, then three, then none, and I’d go through the pile again as though maybe I’d missed it.

“But never a letter. Once, I even waved down the car as it pulled away. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing for me?’ The father said, ‘Well, let’s take another look.’ And he did. ‘Maybe tomorrow, Sally,’ he said.

“It was the longest walk back to the house—a hot day, cicadas roaring, those big pointless fields and nothing to look forward to. I let the screen door bang behind me. My grandmother said, ‘Sally, don’t let that door bang, it scares the willies out of me.’

“I went back into my bedroom and lay down on the bed, the wallpaper with little wooden rocking chairs on it, the yellow fields outside. I thought, I’ve got to do something, read a book or write in my diary or play some records, and I kept thinking my way through it: open up the record box, take out a forty- five, put it on the record player and start it up. But it just seemed like too much work. Everything did. Everything seemed exhausting. I just lay there till supper.

“I never found out what the trouble was. He just vanished.”

“And your mother? Where was your mother, our mother, while all this was going on?”

“She was around. At her convenience, of course. Sometimes she’d come by in a grey car with a big grille with flies stuck in it and take me to the Tastee Freeze in town for a hamburger—it was a ritual we had—and then she’d take me for a long drive on backcountry roads, let me light her cigarettes for her. She was a great talker. A good listener too, to be fair—as long as you said what she wanted to hear.

“On one of these drives, just as it was getting dark and we were heading back to my grandfather’s, I told her about Terry Blanchard, about that night he tumbled into my bed. It wasn’t a confession, it was just that talking about it was as close as I could get to doing it again.”

“And what did she say?”

“She asked me if I felt better now that I’d talked about it. And I said yes. And then she said something that I have never forgotten. She said, ‘You’re going to feel good about all this for a while and then later, when I’m gone and you’re alone again and the excitement of talking about it has worn off, you’re going to go back to feeling the way you did before. And that’s normal. Just remember that that’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ Then she told me about going out on a date with a Hollywood movie star when she was just nineteen.”

“Who was it?”

“I think it was Errol Flynn. She claimed to not know this from personal experience, but someone had told her his dink was so big he had to strap it to his leg. It made me laugh. A funny story to hear from your mother. But I don’t know. You could never be sure with her. She told me she wrote a short story for the New Yorker once, too. But I never saw it. Maybe she did. But I doubt it.”

“The New Yorker? That’s a pretty tall order.”

“It certainly is.”

“And was she right?” I asked.

“About what?”

“About how you were going to feel later.”

“She was. After she left, I kept looking at the clock. An hour later, I was still fine, happy even. Two hours later, same thing. But then later, after dinner, I was watching television with my grandfather, and I could feel things starting to darken again. It was as if some kind of poison was slowly creeping into my body, like some awful leak, and the whole good feeling I’d had with my mother just slipped away. I couldn’t concentrate on the TV show, it was like the screen was a sort of anchor that allowed my thoughts to go in some very gloomy directions. I was afraid it would show on my face or that my grandfather would hear it in my responses. He liked to talk during television shows, but that night it was driving me crazy, as though I had something important to figure out and he was interrupting me from it with his chatter.

“So I went to bed. But here’s something odd. Sometime near morning, it was just getting light, I found myself on the floor. I was soaked in sweat, I was menstruating, I thought I was dying. Dying of a broken heart. But then I thought about Terry Blanchard, about that night he came tumbling into my bed, and I didn’t feel anything. And then, like sticking your hand in a basin of hot water to test it, I thought about him again. Nothing. I mean, absolutely nothing. Gone. I thought, I’m free of him! This is how you do it, this is how you recover from love. And little by little, I started to notice things in the world—a snowbank, a name written on the washroom wall—without all of it leading back to him.

“It must have been the next summer—I was seventeen—when a beat-up white car pulled into the driveway and a man with small ears and an acne-scarred complexion shambled up to the house. He was lost, he said. Was there an asbestos factory near here? He was late for a pickup. Could he use the phone? It was Bruce Sanders. Eight months later, I married him.”

“Eight months?”

“The details don’t matter. Not now, not at this stage. But he was a great lover. A mind reader. You’re surprised?”

“Why, yes. Yes, I am.” A childhood memory of Bruce slouching through our living room at a Christmas party turned over in my memory like a playing card.

“So was I,” she said, her eyebrows poised on a deadpan face. In that moment, in that light, she looked Asian. “Anyway,” Sally said, “I’m through with that stuff. I have been for a while. It all seems just so messy.”

I wasn’t sure how to answer and looked into my glass. A car honked three times eighteen floors down. I heard a jet passing over. “I didn’t know we were so close to the airport,” I said.

Picking up on my discomfort, and probably sorry she’d thrown that in, Sally went on. “Bruce Sanders was certainly nothing to look at, on the surface anyway. He wore a kind of military brush cut that stuck up like a raccoon’s pelt. But he had a wiry little body with deep tan lines from working outside. He was very strong, deceptively so. There was a lot of dangerous leverage in those arms. I saw him lay his forearm across the throat of some local lacrosse hero one night and lift him up the wall, right off the ground.

“There was something about Bruce I admired, some old-fashioned, tight-lipped masculinity. They are a rare thing these days, real men. Too many sissies eager to get on the right side of women.” Pause. “What women like about men is that they’re not women. And they don’t think like women.”

“We’re simple creatures,” I said, and we both laughed. We were having a preposterous time. I caught myself thinking, Should we be doing this? Or should we be doing something else? We are talking about what we’re talking about because that’s what she wants to talk about. But is this really going to happen? Now that we’re here? Is she waiting for me to say stop, or am I waiting for her? Is this going to happen because we’re both waiting for the other to say something? And if I were to say something, what would it be? What would I mean? If I were in her place, what would I want?

“Sally…” I began, but her hand fluttered me to silence. I had not considered this part, at least not the way it now presented itself.

She went on: “That said, Bruce was not very socially able. Sulked in public gatherings. I think he felt out of his intellectual league if the conversation ever steered toward movies or even the Beatles. For some reason, he found them especially infuriating.”

“The Beatles?”

“He said the only reason they get to be the Beatles is that other people don’t get to be. Whatever the hell that means. Anyway, it annoyed him when I talked too much at parties. When I got excited. Excited because I was so hungry for talk that I’d drink too much sometimes and get very, very talkative. He’d sulk for days afterwards. That was my punishment.

“Anyway, I married him. I looked out my bedroom window one afternoon and saw all those flat fields and thought, Why not? We had a wedding in a small country church with a graveyard you could see from the pews. Afterwards, we went to a party in town. You know why? Because someone told me they’d seen Terry Blanchard outside the hardware store and that maybe he’d be there. Isn’t that pathetic? God, what was I thinking? Going to a party on my wedding night because this other guy might be there! And here I’d thought I was over him.”

“Was he there?”

“No, thank God. I couldn’t relax until I was sure. I kept peeking at the door every time someone came in. I