The Life and Adventures of Gillian McKenna
“Not to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.” -Spinoza
Part Three:
20
When she had gotten halfway down the stairs, then again when she reached the bottom, Gillian’s back seized up on her. Both times she had to wait until the pain subsided before she could breathe, let alone move. She then took a few moments to curse quietly. Emily came into the living room and saw her stepping gingerly away from the staircase.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“No, something is obviously wrong.”
“Ok, my back hurts. It hurts like a son of a bitch.”
“Watch your mouth, please. All right, come lie down.”
Emily helped her into the living room where Gillian lowered herself slowly to the couch. Schulz wandered in and watched the proceedings.
Emily arranged the throw pillows. “Lay on your stomach,” she said.
Gillian winced, shook her head. “I don’t think so. That’ll hurt.”
“If it’s going to cause so much pain,” said Emily, “maybe you shouldn’t go to any more dances.”
Schulz stretched out an ugly grin. “What does the duchess have to say to that?”
“The duchess says, fuck off.”
Schulz’s smile vanished. He waited for Emily’s reproach, then stomped out when, inexplicably, it didn’t come.
“And stay out!” Gillian shouted after Schulz, whom she now considered just one more rapist.
“That’s enough,” said Emily. She gently rubbed her daughter’s back. “Here, let me have a look.”
Carefully, she lifted the back of Gillian’s shirt.
“Oh my god,” said Emily. She pulled the material up and exposed the deep purple bruise covering the lower half of Gillian’s back and extending below her waistband. “What in the hell did you do to yourself?”
“I don’t know, Mom. I must’ve twisted it dancing.”
“No, dancing didn’t cause this. You’re black and blue!”
“Well, maybe when the girl pushed me. I fell.”
“Maybe you should go to the doctor.”
“I’m not going to the doctor and I’m done talking about it.”
Emily got up abruptly without another word. Gillian heard her rattling around in the kitchen, and soon she returned with an ice pack. “Lie down and put this on your back.”
Gillian waited a few beats before she took the ice. She arranged herself as comfortably as possible with pillows under her stomach and positioned the cold pack. Emily stood by for a minute before leaving the room, probably waiting for Gillian to say “thank you.”
The ice helped. Gillian later called Erin to see if they could get together, and Mrs. Baxter drove them to Oakwood Mall. Gillian was happy to treat her friend to lunch for a change; after Benny’s funeral, her Grandma Lou had sent her a sympathy card with fifty dollars in it. In the middle of burgers and cold drinks at the Katz and Besthoff soda fountain, Erin asked if anything was wrong. “You’re not acting like yourself,” she said.
Gillian held it together for almost a full minute before she broke down. Erin squeezed her hand and listened with wide eyes as Gillian told the story, haltingly through quiet sobs, what had happened at the Star Palace. Before she had finished Erin was also in tears.
“Why didn’t you ask me to go with you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does your mom know?”
Gillian looked at her impatiently.
Erin nodded.
After they both had a good cry, Gillian hung her head and mumbled something before loudly slurping the last of her soda.
Erin gave her hand another squeeze. “What did you say?”
Gillian was quiet.
“Tell me!”
“I said, so now I’m damaged goods.”
“I don’t believe you’re even saying that. You know better.”
“Do I?” She snatched a napkin and angrily wiped her tears away. “That’s how it works, isn’t it?”
Erin said nothing.
“I’m through with the good girl routine. Look where it’s got me.”
“So…because this happened, now you’re going to be a slut.”
Gillian shrugged. “Maybe. A queen bitch at the very least.”
“Come on, that makes absolutely no sense.”
“If I have to pay the piper anyway, why not dance?” Her jaw was set.
Erin leaned back in the booth and studied her friend. “Ok. That’s anger talking. I don’t blame you a bit.”
They went shopping. The note in Grandma Lou’s condolence card said Gillian should use the fifty dollars to “buy something nice.” In those days that was a healthy sum in a clothing store, especially if you hit the sales. Before long Gillian carried bags of low cut peasant blouses, tank tops, tube tops, hot pants, the mini-est of mini skirts, grecian sandals, and paint-on jeans.
“I’m sensing a theme here,” said Erin. “Whatever your mother would disapprove of.”
They were standing at a rack of skirts the sign designated as “midi.”
“These will never last,” said Gillian.
As they moved on, Erin seized her arm. “Oh, shit!”
“What?”
“I hope you don’t get pregnant…or get a disease!”
Gillian looked at her in terror. The thought had never crossed her mind.
“When did you get your period?”
“Just last week,” she said miserably.
“All right… that’s not too bad,” Erin said. “Just make sure you’re on time next month. And don’t ignore it if you feel itchy.”
“Right… right,” said Gillian.
Erin hugged her. “Are you ok? Do you want to go home?”
Gillian looked around as if bewildered by her surroundings. She was sick to her stomach and more furious than ever.
“I don’t know where I want to go,” she said.
One place she knew she didn’t want to go was to school. Her attendance there since the funeral had waxed and waned, primarily the latter. School had become just so much regimented tedium, and both of Gillian’s parents were too distracted by their own lives to see that she did go. After realizing this, she came home from school one day and declared she wasn’t going back.
Schulz was about to take her mother to work, and they were having their usual pre-drive fight. Schulz wanted the top down on his convertible, but Emily wouldn’t allow it because the wind messed up her hair. When Gillian interrupted them with her announcement, they stopped arguing and looked at her in great consternation, Emily because she knew it was her duty to make sure her child was educated, Schulz because he hated her more than ever and just didn’t want her around.
Gillian, smacking on gum, walked past them on her way to the stairway. “Don’t worry, I’ll go to night school and get my GED.” She blew a bubble and popped it to indicate finality, flipped her hair in Schulz’s direction for emphasis, and sashayed up the stairs.
Gillian’s quitting school during the convertible argument gave Schulz an idea. When he pitched it to Emily, she was immediately on board.
“Sweetie,” Emily said to Gillian the next day, “I think you should have your own automobile.”
“Really?”
“Yes. You’re old enough to get your driver’s license, and I think you’re ready to handle the responsibility.”
“Really?”
“Do you think you can handle the responsibility?”
“Yes! But where will I get a car?”
“I’ve already talked to Mr. Harold about it, and he’s agreed to buy one for you. You can pick one out this weekend if you like.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Schulz bought her a brand new Dodge Dart. She picked out a yellow one in honor of Benny’s Yellow Submarine, but unlike that car, the Dodge had automatic transmission. Schulz actually rode with her several times while she practiced for the test, and they managed a temporary truce in which he put a lid on his disdain and she kept her snide remarks to a minimum.
On the day of the driving exam, Gillian’s hands shook and her stomach was upset, but she relaxed considerably once she started the written part. The whole process took less than an hour. Gillian’s driver’s license photo showed the girl beaming with pride. She continued beaming as they typed in her information, processed the photograph, laminated the document, and presented it to her. She was beaming still when she drove to Erin’s that very afternoon to show off her new car and her new operator’s license.
The trip to Erin’s that day was the first, last, and only time she was allowed to drive the car without her mother in the passenger seat or to a destination of her own choosing. During the next several weeks, nauseous with anxiety over whether or not she’d been knocked up (which she naturally interpreted as round the clock morning sickness), she learned she could use the car to chauffeur her mother to work, to the beauty parlor, to the grocery store, to the doctor, or anywhere else her mother wanted to go, and that was all. Relieved and energized when she finally got her period, Gillian told Emily and Schulz they could shove the Dodge Dart up their combined asses because she didn’t want it any more. Emily still refused to learn to drive. Schulz ended up selling the car.
Gillian settled into her new routine, that of piddling languorously on the second floor and the occasional outing with Erin. This infuriated Schulz, and it didn’t sit well with her mother, either. Finally, Emily climbed the stairs and laid down the law.
“You’re not lounging around here all day. If you’re not going to school, you have to get a job.”
It was at that precise moment that Gillian realized she was bored out of her skull. The next morning she put on a pair of bell bottom jeans, a peasant blouse, sandals, and hoop earrings, caught the bus to the Oakwood Mall, and went from store to store filling out job applications.
21
As he stood in the DH Holmes cafeteria line, Private Second Class Wilmer Thibodeaux was thankful to be wearing his dress uniform, since his army green coat was long enough to hide the fact that he had an erection.
Moments after he’d placed his tray on the slide rail and his napkin and utensils on the tray, he spotted her, perched at the register at the far end of the lunch line as she totaled up the meat-and-threes plus whatever you had to drink. She was the last item on the menu, as ripe and fresh and abundant as a basket filled with Red Delicious apples glistening with the morning dew. She was young, petite, and exquisitely delicate, with pink, tumescent lips, an unfairly full bosom, long auburn hair that flowed in soft waves around a cherubic face, and big, soft, sleepy, topaz eyes. He knew exactly what he was going to say to her. His mind raced, formulating the perfect phraseology. He had plenty of time because the line was moving very slowly; when the customers reached the register, they drifted into a kind of trance, staring at her in stupefied lust or envy or just plain awe, as the case may be. Private Second Class Thibodeaux’s mouth went dry and his knees trembled and his pulse quickened because, as he drew closer, it seemed that she was looking back at him with interest, her heavy eyelids fluttering, her lush lips parted in an inviting smile.
As it happened, he was right. The girl at the register zeroed in on the young man in uniform the moment he set foot in the door, and her own pulse throbbed with excitement. It wasn’t the uniform that enthralled her, although his tall, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped physique filled it out very nicely indeed. Nor was it his smile, the sweetest and most disarming she had ever seen. No, what took her breath away was his slammin’ gold eyes. They caught the light, glinted off the sunbeams streaming through the windows, and ignited in her heart. Something about those eyes, though, echoed in her memory. She’d seen them somewhere before.
“That’ll be four dollars and eighty cents, please. Out of five. Twenty cents change, here you are… thank you.” She handed him two dimes and his receipt.
“Thanks. Um… you’re Gillian, aren’t you?”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “Yes. I am.”
“I’m Chip Thibodeaux. You might not remember me. I used to work at the Winn Dixie over there. I’d see you and your mom and your little brother in the store all the time. Y’all would eat lunch at Stumpf’s.”
“Chip! I thought I recognized you! How are you?”
He shrugged. “Good, I guess. Nice to see you again.”
“Yes, it’s great seeing you, too!”
“Look, um… I’ll probably be shipping out soon. Maybe we could get together for lunch over at Stumpf’s before I go. Talk about old times.”
“That would be great. Wait a sec… let me give you my number.” She grabbed a pen off the register, then glanced around for something to write on.
“Use this,” he said, and handed her his receipt.
She wrote her name and phone number. The lunch line was backing up, but the customers stood quietly looking on, mesmerized, as if watching a reunion scene with Troy Donahue and Bridgette Bardot.
“Thanks,” he said as she returned the slip of paper. “I’ll give you a call.”
“Do that,” she beamed.
An hour later, as Gillian still manned the register, one of the busboys came up and told her she had a call. Fortunately the lunch rush was over and she was able to take it. “Hello?”
“Gillian, hi, it’s Chip.”
“Chip. Oh my goodness, I thought I wrote down my home number!”
“You did. Listen, I won’t keep you. I was just thinking, I don’t know how long I’ll be in town, so, I thought I’d try to get together with you sooner rather than later.”
She called her mother and told her she was going out straight from work. Emily wanted to know where she was going and with whom, and Gillian didn’t mind telling her, since she remembered well how her mother adored Chip from the days of Winn Dixie and Stumpf’s. Emily wasn’t delighted but didn’t try to stop her. Chip picked her up at the cafeteria as soon as she got off work. They stopped by a burger stand, ordered a couple of shakes, and drove out to Lakeshore Park. They found a bench near the concrete steps of the sea wall on Ponchartrain’s south shore. It was a warm evening. People fished or crabbed or sat on the steps and watched the sunset. Chip and Gillian sipped their shakes and pointed out to one another when someone reeled one in or pulled up a netful of Blue Lake Crabs, but every time she glanced up at him, he was looking at her.
“What is it?” she laughed.
He reddened a little. “I just— I can’t get over how much you’ve grown up. You’re a woman now.”
“Well, thank you.”
“No, I’m not trying to be, um… I mean it as a compliment.”
“I know. Thanks.”
“At the cafeteria today, even before I recognized you, I couldn’t take my eyes off you. Nobody could.”
She became a little uncomfortable despite being pleased by the compliments. “Well you know, you’re not so bad yourself.”
“Oh…Thanks. Yeah they really whip you into shape at Fort Polk.”
“You didn’t get those pretty gold eyes at Fork Polk.”
He reddened again and awkwardly changed the subject. “So what are you now, a sophomore… junior?
“Neither one. Actually, none of the above. I quit school almost a year ago now.”
The instant the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. His learning she was no longer in school was inevitable, but he must never, ever find out about what happened at the Star Palace.
“You quit school?” He laughed. “You can’t just quit school.”
Her mind raced, desperately trying to plan three moves ahead. “I did.”
“When are you going back?”
“I’m not.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand. How did you get away with it? Why did your parents let you quit?”
“My parents split up a long time ago. My dad’s married to somebody else. I don’t see him much. I live with my Mom.”
He looked at her, taken aback. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
Gillian shrugged. “They fought all the time.” She saw an opportunity and quickly took it. “Anyway I told my Mom I’d go to work. And that’s exactly what I did.”
“At the cafeteria.”
“No, not right off. I must’ve filled out twenty applications one day, and I found a job at a store called The Shutterbug. They sell cameras and film and stuff like that. I got a five per cent commission on cameras. I worked there a pretty good while.”
“The Shutterbug. Yeah I’ve seen that place.”
“Right, it’s in Oakwood Mall. Which, I’m embarrassed to say, proved to be a bit of a problem for me.”
“How come?”
“On my lunch breaks I’d go around to the clothes stores in the mall and sign up for their charge cards. I bought some really nice stuff. Too much really nice stuff.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I went a little crazy. I’m not gonna say how much I ran up, but my mother had a cow about it. She finally paid off what I owed, saying that was my allowance for the rest of my life.”
“But if you had a full-time job, why didn’t you pay it off?”
“I’m about to tell you. My boss at Shutterbug was a guy named Carl. He was this big, fat, nasty, greasy, gross disgusting pig with a beard.”
“Gotcha,” laughed Chip.
“He was always ragging me about boys stopping by the counter to talk to me. Like I could control what they do. I guess he was jealous. So one day he calls me into his office and he starts reprimanding me about the boys in the mall, saying we can’t have that, it’s inappropriate and unprofessional, blah blah blah. Then he says I need to take modeling shots.”
“Modeling shots?”
“Yeah. He said I might get into this fashion contest he wanted to enter me in. I’d done a little of that before and liked it, so I said ok. A few days later we started. He took a bunch of head shots, with the fan blowing my hair, then we started with full length shots. He took a lot of pictures. So one day I’m posing on a stool, and he goes, lift the skirt up a little bit to show your legs. So I lift the skirt up a little bit. He snaps a couple and says, lift it up a little more. So I lift it up a little more.”
“Then he wants you to lift it up still more.”
“Yes. And I go, ‘just how high am I supposed to lift it?’ He can tell I’m mad, so he stops, but I walk out and call my mom. She came right over in a taxi to pick me up, and she told him off. She later went to the main office and told them off. I’m pretty sure she got Carl fired.”
“Serves him right.”
“Yeah. But I was out of job for a while. I wasn’t in a giant rush to find another one after that.”
“I’m surprised your mother didn’t try to make you go back to school.”
“She didn’t. I promised her I’d go to night school and get my GED.”
“Yeah, that’s a great idea!” he said enthusiastically. “You should definitely do that!”
“I will.”
“No, I mean like, soon. Now. The longer you wait, the harder it will be.”
“I know. I’ll do it.”
“Ok. I’m going to hold you to that, Gillian.”
“You do that, Wilmer.”
He laughed in surprise. “Excuse me? What did you call me?”
She tapped his chest. “That’s what it says on your name tag. ‘PSC Wilmer Thibodeaux.’”
“You must never, ever, ever call me that, ever again, for as long as you live.”
“Do you not like that name?”
“It’s some kind of stupid traditional family name. Even my parents hate it.”
“Hence, ‘Chip.’”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
When it got dark they sat in Chip’s car, where they still had a view of the lake. They held hands and kissed a couple of times, and then Chip said, “You never told me why you quit school in the first place.”
“What?”
“You just said you went to work instead. You never explained why you quit school.”
“Oh. I guess I didn’t.”
They sat quietly in the dark until he said, “I don’t really see you flunking out.”
“No, I just started going less and less. I went through some stuff. I was a total mess there for a while.” It then occurred to her that she could tell him only as much of the truth as was necessary, and it would suffice. “I was going with a guy. We hadn’t known each other that long, but we were very close.” It was a minute before she could continue. “He was killed in Viet Nam. I’m sorry. I still can’t talk about it without crying.”
“No, of course you can’t.” He pressed her hand tightly.
Seized by a subtle panic, Gillian braced herself against some hazy, amorphous threat pervading the darkness. Long excruciating moments passed until reflexively she gulped for air, surprised at how long she’d been holding her breath. In increments, she let herself lean against Chip’s side. His hand still enclosed hers, a good sign. She had successfully kept from him the events at the Star Palace, but did she put him off by grieving over another? Could she have erred by telling of her boyfriend’s military death to this boy in uniform who was holding her hand? She was afraid he would find her to be too much trouble, change his mind about her, and go away.
She needn’t have been. He spent every possible moment of his remaining weeks stateside with her. Evenings they would get something to eat, sometimes take in a movie, and then they would drive to a secluded spot and park. Chip assured her that he was not going to die in Viet Nam, and she believed it, or rather, believed he believed it, because he never pushed, never pressed, was infinitely patient and respectful, not at all what one would expect from a hunky eighteen-year-old who thought his days on earth were numbered. With surprising ease and at a comfortable pace Gillian progressed from kissing to necking to groping to something she didn’t know the name for. Chip’s Buick had a big window in its gradually sloping hatch back, and the rear seat folded down. They climbed back there and made out horizontally in full view of the stars, whispering sweet nothings and grinding pelvises until Chip reached the end of his endurance; he found surcease in Gillian’s arms and Gillian kept her pants on: win win.
He proudly introduced her to his family. His parents welcomed her without reservation, but she struggled to get past their heavy Cajun accents which, for her, had Cro-Magnon overtones. Nevertheless, she was at ease around them. She swapped recipes with Chip’s brother’s wife, and she and Mrs. Thibodeaux gossiped like housewives over a back yard fence.
On the day Chip had to ship out, he and Gillian sat in his kitchen, knees touching, holding hands. She was crying, but not as energetically as she thought she should be, and this bothered her.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all,” she said through intermittent sobs.
“What wasn’t a good idea?”
“You and me. Us.”
“What? What on earth are you talking about? I love you!”
“And I love you, but maybe I’m not someone you want to be involved with-” she put her face in her hands.
“You mean, like a jinx?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s ridiculous. What happened to Benny was a freak accident.”
She shrugged. “You’re right.”
He was quiet until she finished crying. “Will you wait for me?” he asked.
“I’ll wait forever.”
Chip kissed her on the eyelids and told her again not to worry, he was coming back.
“Well see each other again before you know it. You’ll be looking just as beautiful as you do now.”
She looked into his eyes and smiled. She honestly didn’t know if she was being so brave because she believed he was coming back, or because she didn’t.
22
Gillian entered the classroom at three minutes of six and sat in the first empty seat nearest the door. With her peripheral vision she could see the boy in the next row’s pale, orbicular face turned in her direction her like a sign flashing, “Dork at three o’clock.” She rolled her eyes and without waiting for him to bother her got up impatiently, walked around to a desk in the back of the room, and flopped into it.
She was in no mood. She’d taken a taxi to this, her first class, after Schulz told her at the last minute that she would have to find her own way to night school. It was his petty maneuver, executed with a sneer on his smug intolerable face, that had irritated her, not the taxi fare. She was in fact happy about avoiding twenty minutes trapped in a car with him.
The weeks following Chip’s departure had been bumpy. Because it had been a while since talking to her father, Gillian made new attempts to establish a connection with him, and each time she was smacked down. If she visited him at home, Ritza sabotaged the occasion one way or another. Sometimes she locked herself in the bedroom when Gillian arrived and sobbed loudly. Arnold became sullen and distracted until Gillian threw up her hands and left in frustration. Ritza was even more unbearable when she remained present, bitching and whining about any triviality, the more insignificant the better, until Gillian threw up her hands and left in disgust. “I don’t know why you keep chasing after him,” her mother admonished. “You always have and you were always disappointed. Just give it up.” Gillian stubbornly answered, “Never.” She tried calling ahead to ask if it were a good time to come over. Maybe if he had warning, he could placate Ritza. His answer was always “no” with some lame excuse: “Ritza isn’t feeling well,” or “it’s not a good time.” On the rare occasion he relented, it was a disaster, with Ritza bouncing off the walls and spitting fire for the duration of the visit. Gillian suggested meeting for coffee, away from home and away from Ritza. “Just act like you have somewhere to go,” she urged. But he didn’t want to do that, either. “We really have a lot going on right now,” he’d say.
Gillian never stopped making good on the promise- or the threat- that she made to Erin over lunch that day at the Katz and Besthoff soda fountain. She took great care with her hair, makeup, and clothes to achieve a certain effect: enticing but remote. Her goal was to issue a challenge to every person, male and female, who looked at her. How they took it— as a dare, an invitation, or a gauntlet flung at their feet, she didn’t care which, since any interaction she didn’t initiate was stillborn anyway. The other objective was to piss off her mother, which proved spectacularly successful. They faced off daily at the bottom of the stairs on Gillian’s way out the door. Emily threw the usual punches. “That top is too low! That skirt is too high! You’re wearing too much makeup! You’re not leaving this house looking like that!” Gillian bit and scratched and kicked and spit. Emily had the experience, Gillian had the legs; the combatants were pretty evenly matched, but in the end, The Kid wanted it more and won every round.
Her undefeated status had an unanticipated, negative consequence, however. Gillian considered her job at the cafeteria, in and of itself, not a bad gig, but she soon found it necessary to quit. Working there with her mother became intolerable. Emily accused her of seductively accosting every male, young or old, that lingered to talk to the pretty girl at the cash register. Her go-to indictment was, of course, Gillian’s clothes.
“You look like a hooker,” said Emily, examining her daughter up and down pointedly.
“I don’t look like a hooker,” said Gillian. “I just look good.”
It mattered little if Gillian came to work in a long loose dress and peasant blouse.
“You look at them with bedroom eyes,” Emily charged.
“Not my problem, Mother.” Thank goodness Emily wasn’t around the day Chip showed up, since he was the one guy she had looked at with bedroom eyes.
Gillian found a job at a Roy Roger’s restaurant, also on the bus route. That fiasco lasted two weeks. She hated the collared western shirts and the goofy bolo ties, she would not wear the ridiculous ten gallon cowboy hat that wreaked havoc on her bangs, and she refused to bellow, like some weird amalgam of Leslie Gore and Calamity Jane, “howdy pardner!” at every patron who walked through the door. The manager unsuccessfully tried to force her to behave in this ignominious manner for the two weeks before he fired her, then made the mistake of withholding her pay check on the grounds that she had never followed his instructions.
Gillian promptly reported him to her mother, who, it will be remembered, could transform from Gillian’s demeaning critic into her formidable defender with the flip of a switch. One hour later Emily showed up in the restaurant lobby and engaged the manager toe-to-toe in a screaming match. When this did not compel him to fork over Gillian’s money, Emily filed a formal complaint with the labor board, who did.
Had she been pressed, Gillian might have owned her part in losing that job. This was not true for her next brief stint, this time at Ground Pat’i. The place served drinks in large pewter mugs, and one evening all six customers at one of her tables walked out with theirs. The senior waiter spotted them leaving and hurried over to Gillian. He instructed her to retrieve the mugs.
“Go get ‘em,” he said, pointing to the front door.
“You go get ‘em.”
“Your table, your customers.”
“You want me to chase them down in the parking lot?”
“Look, those mugs aren’t cheap. They’re your responsibility.”
“Not risking my life for drink ware. Sorry.”
The manager agreed with the waiter and docked Gillian for the cost of the mugs. This time she didn’t bother sicking her mother on him. Her misadventures in food service made for amusing anecdotes when she wrote to Chip, but clearly it was time to go to school. In every one of his letters he pestered her about enrolling anyway. As soon as she made the decision, her mood improved greatly, and she in fact wondered what her resistance had been about. She made the announcement while striding buoyantly through the living room, past Schulz and her mother, on her way to the stairs.
“I’m fed up to here with eating establishments, pun intended. I’ll be starting night school next week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, six to eight.”
“That isn’t full time,” said Emily. You need to get a part time job as well.”
“I’ll babysit Gary on the nights I’m home and you’re not.” She knew Schulz wouldn’t do it and finding sitters was a giant hassle. Emily had to agree.
The instructor walked into the classroom at exactly six o’clock, as if he’d been waiting outside the door. The moment she saw him, Gillian was overcome with indifference. He was old, at least forty, and all skin and bones. His hair, thinning on top, separated in odd places and flopped at unappealing angles, and his face was riddled with acne scars. His clothes were out of style, threadbare, and wrinkled, and his shoes scuffed and dull. The upper rims of his thick black glasses sat just below his beetle brow so that he appeared to have no eyes.
“I am Mr. Lery,” he said. He carried a stack of folders which he attempted to set carefully down; instead they tumbled out of his arms and slid across his desk, some of them onto the floor. When he had finally collected them, he pushed his glasses up his nose. “I will be your instructor for this class.”
Many of the students began trading jokes and snickering at him the moment he walked in, and they continued to do so while he called the role. Gillian grew impatient and uncomfortable with this- what business did a bunch of dunces have making fun of a guy with a college degree and a job? Her protective instincts kicked in and she glared around angrily at the offenders. No one paid her any mind, but it didn’t matter, the teacher was clearly oblivious. Moments later he moved through the rows of seats passing out the folders, and one by one that began to settle them down; he’d remembered every face and name from that noisy roll call and handed them their correct folder. When he gave Gillian’s to her, she smiled her sweetest thank you; more obliviousness, which impressed her. Night school students, returning months or decades after bombing out of regular high school at various ages and grade levels, toiled at their own pace and with their own subject matter. After a while someone raised their hand and tentatively asked for help. Lery shuffled over, knelt by the person’s chair, and gave his full attention to answering the question. Soon other hands hovered in the air. Apparently the guy knew everything. He squatted next to each desk, patiently and kindly elucidated, encouraged, and cleared away academic cobwebs until, by the end of class, thirty scornful dropouts were eating out of his hand. He appeared oblivious to this as well.
When he dismissed the class his new biggest fan, Gillian, waited to the side while other stragglers hovered around Lery’s desk quenching their newfound thirst for knowledge. When they had all gone, she approached.
“Excuse me, Mr. Lery—”
“Yes Gillian, what can I do for you?” Even though he remembered everyone’s name, she couldn’t help being flattered that he remembered hers.
“Um… do you know if any of the other students live in the Gretna-Terrytown area? I need a ride. I’ll be happy to pay for gas. The closer to the Terrytown Parkway, the better.”
“I live in Gretna right off the parkway. I’ll be happy to bring you.”
“Oh— really? That wouldn’t be too much trouble?”
“Of course not. Do you need a ride home now?”
“Yes I do… thank you!” She gave him the smile she reserved for melting stainless steel, but again he failed to notice. Maybe he really doesn’t have eyes, she thought.
On the ride home he made teacherly chit-chat: learning gave him a thrill like nothing else, and if he can impart that experience to one student in thirty etc, etc. When he deposited Gillian on her doorstep, she thanked him again.
“I very much appreciate this, Mr. Lery.”
“Please, just call me Charles. We’re about the same age, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” she laughed. “We are.”
23
After adding copious amounts of cream and sugar, she sipped the sweet, tepid, pale white liquid and looked out the window at the freezing winter rain.
“You have a ways to go,” Charles said, sitting across the booth.
Gillian nodded. He was referring to geometry and algebra, not to finishing her cup of coffee. A couple of weeks earlier, on the second class meeting of the semester, Charles— “Mr. Lery” during school hours— met individually with the students to review the results of their placement exams. According to these, Gillian was a sophisticated, Ivy league co-ed when it came to English grammar and composition. Mathematically, she’d yet to reach puberty.
“History and Civics aren’t a problem,” he went on. “You’ll knock those out in a couple more weeks.”
She agreed. Those subjects were comprised of words, nothing more. Words weren’t a problem, not like numbers, which were mystifying and yet somehow staggeringly boring. She lifted the cup but again leaned forward, meeting the second sip halfway.
Charles removed his glasses to clean them with his shirt tail. Gillian caught another glimpse of his eyes with the yellowish irises and slightly oblong pupils, so odd, like everything else about him. They disappeared again when he replaced the heavy black frames. “I don’t understand what’s going on with you and the sciences,” he said. “When it comes down to it, those are just words as well. Photosynthesis. Natural selection. Quark. I would think they would interest you.”
“They do when you’re talking, but when I read about them—” she swept her hand across the table top— “it’s like skipping stones across a pond. Nothing sinks in.”
What really interested her was Mr. Lery— “Charles” when they were alone together. On the way to school one evening he told her it was his routine to stop at Shoney’s for coffee after class. He asked if she would like to come with him. She had never drank coffee, she said, but why not. She studied the teacher while he fixed her first cup for her, so careful and deliberate in making sure she would like it, the same way he answered questions in class, at the chalkboard or leaning over a student’s shoulder. A virtuoso instructor but in every other respect he seemed so pitiful. Reclusive, eccentric, unkempt and unloved, his rumpled, wrinkly clothes with a musty old man smell like they’d been in the closet too long, not quite to the point of repulsive. She liked him. She liked that he had interesting things to say, but she had to admit the real attraction was selfish: she liked who she was when she was with him. Who was this other person, Gillian twenty years from now? She wanted to get to know her better. Benny and recently Chip had been sweet and charming and complimentary, which was all fine, but those teenaged boys talked to a teenaged girl with whom she was becoming, frankly, a little bored.
They stayed a couple of hours at Shoney’s that first time, and when Charles dropped her off, her mother met her at the door in a predictable rage. Stationed at the window, Emily had spotted the driver’s gaunt, late thirties male countenance when they pulled up.
“Where the hell have you been and who the hell was that?”
“That’s Ch— Mr. Lery, our teacher,” Gillian replied on her way up the stairs. “He’s the one who’s giving me a ride. We stopped by Shoney’s for a cup of coffee after class. Goodnight.” She closed her door and sat on the bed. With all the caffeine on board she wasn’t near sleepy, so she pulled out her geometry book and flipped through a few incomprehensible pages while her mother ranted downstairs: “That little bastard wants to do more than just teach you school! He’s old enough to be your father!” And so on.
One day, driving in from out of town, Charles needed to collect some things from home before class. Gillian’s house was on the way, so to avoid doubling back and making them both late, he picked her up early. When they pulled in to his driveway an elderly man and presumably the elderly man’s wife were in the front yard pulling ears of corn from stalks as high as an elephant’s eye and placing them in a wicker basket. Every inch of the teacher’s yard was taken up by vegetables- corn, tomatoes, zucchini, radishes, lettuce. The couple and Charles waved casually to each other as Gillian followed him toward the house.
“Are those your parents?” she asked
“My parents? No, that’s the Newmans.”
“Oh. Do they live with you?”
“Of course not. They’re neighbors.”
The carport was mostly taken up by a rectangular above-ground swimming pool nestled in a wooden frame that Charles had converted into a fish tank. Gillian saw a number of colorful varieties gliding around in the aerated homemade pond beneath the lily pads and water hyacinths.
Once inside the front door, she had to stop and acclimate to a living room that wasn’t a living room. Her first impression was that Magnus the Marvelous had set up his mad scientist’s laboratory in a greenhouse: vines and creepers covered the walls and hung from a ceiling carpeted with flowering ivy, with clear plastic tubing of various thicknesses winding amongst the climbing plants. Tracing their origins, she found that the vines sprouted from large dirt-filled jars lining the room’s periphery. The plastic tubes drew from, or fed into, enormous clear plastic jugs. One of these Charles had labeled, in block letters, “Hoochie’s Hooch,” and another, “Pail Ale.” Peering through the foliage, Gillian could see that the walls weren’t walls at all but fully packed bookshelves.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Charles said. “I need to find a couple of things for class this evening.”
“No rush,” Gillian said, and as soon as he disappeared down the hall, she scooted into the kitchen. As suspected, he had no real food. A quick glance into the pantry revealed Spam and canned sardines, and the fridge was even more depressing. She spotted leftover corn in a pot— at least he grew himself some vegetables— but the other contents made her gag. When something spoiled in her refrigerator, she called it a “science experiment” and tossed it. In Charles’s case, this was literally true, as the shelves were taken up with rows of petri dishes filled with some algae-like life form. Whatever it was, it was thriving. It was no wonder the poor guy was emaciated. She shut the fridge and posed insouciantly in the living room as he returned with an armful of folders. On the ride to school she was thoughtful. She’d seen his house and wondered if she’d also seen into his soul. It was a place where he pursued every interest, but he had also made damn sure no one else could possibly live there with him. She had never seen him bored by people, so there had to be another reason. Preemptive loneliness was all she could come up with.
By the third week it was a standing date, Shoney’s every Tuesday and Thursday after class. Gillian had never known anyone like Charles. He talked about everything from dream interpretation to quantum mechanics, never condescendingly and in a way that she could follow. She felt like she needed to be taking notes, yet he was ridiculously easy to be with. Gillian tried to be as well, unsure of how much familiarity or formality was appropriate with her teacher, twenty years her senior, who took her to coffee twice a week. Once while resting her foot on the foot of the table leg, she realized it was actually Charles’s foot and pulled it off with “Oh, excuse me!” He chuckled, blushing slightly. She wanted to know all about him but he didn’t volunteer anything personal. He certainly never talked about his childhood, although Gillian thought she recognized a familiar grimace when he once mentioned his mother. Maybe if she went first he’d get the idea, she thought. She waited for the opportune moment- he politely asked her if she had a boyfriend— then showed him a picture of Chip in his uniform. She told him all about how they’d known each other years ago when he was a stock boy at Winn Dixie, and how they got reacquainted at the cafeteria where she worked just before he had to ship out. “He asked me to wait for him,” she said. “I told him I would.” She added, “I’d waited for someone else to come back from the war. That didn’t turn out.” She then showed him a photo of Benny, also in uniform, and with as few tears as possible told him what had happened.
Charles listened intently and with empathy, and when she was done he reached into his wallet and pulled out a few photos of his own. One showed children of various ages, four boys and a girl. They were his children and they lived here in town, but he never saw them. His ex-wife had alienated them against him, he said, and handed her a picture of the woman. She was spectacularly unattractive, toothless, homely, and obese. “I don’t blame you for leaving her,” Gillian said. Charles then showed her a photo of a short, chubby girl with blond hair and rosy cheeks. Her name was Greta, she was a Mormon, and she lived in Michigan. She was 18 years old. They were to be married next year.
Charles continued with a convoluted explanation of how he met his fiance and why she was in Michigan and he was here in New Orleans, but Gillian’s thoughts were off on a tangent. It said something about a man that he had allowed his ex-wife to sever his relationships with all five of his children, but what? He had related that information matter of factly, with no outward signs of pain, but was that because he cared little or too much? She felt drawn to him, protective; she liked being with this nice, smart man, and when he had revealed his fiance, who was her own age, she was genuinely happy for him. She was quite proud of herself for being not the least bit jealous, but it was her interest in him to which she kept returning. Yes, he was a disheveled, sartorial disaster, underneath which he was nothing at all to look at anyway, and for the first time it occurred to her that this might be at least part of the attraction. His utter lack of physical appeal was a kind of safety net; she knew he could never hurt her too badly.
Gillian congratulated Charles on his fiance. She placed her foot back on top of his, deliberately this time. Either Charles froze or he didn’t react at all, she couldn’t tell which, but since it didn’t matter, she left it there. Gillian would later have trouble remembering who reached out first, but soon they were holding hands in the car on the trip to and from school.
Word got around that Gillian McKenna was keeping company with Mr. Lery. The gossip took on the usual characteristics, but Gillian remained unfazed.
“You do know that everyone is talking about y’all,” said a concerned Erin.
Gillian shrugged. “I don’t care. He’s a nice guy, I like hanging out with him. It’s not like we’re ‘doing’ anything.”
“You’re his student. He could get into trouble.”
“I’m not going to complain.”
“No, but your mother might.”
“Legally, I’m an adult. She can complain all she wants.”
Erin didn’t know about the regular game of footsie at Shoney’s or the hand holding in the car or that Charles had recently been complimenting Gillian’s appearance. Neither did Chip, but in omitting these harmless activities in her letters, she wasn’t exactly being unfaithful or deceptive. Strategically, she kept Chip fully apprised of her friendship with Mr. Lery and her progress in night school, which Chip had been so adamant that she attend.
“You’ve been to his house,” he wrote back, “and coffee at Shoney’s after every class? Should I be jealous of this guy?”
“Jealous? Ha Ha. No indeed, sweetheart. He’s literally twice my age, has an ex-wife, five kids, and an eighteen-year-old fiance in Michigan that he is going to marry within the year. Not to mention he’s a complete nerd.” She only wished she had a photo of Charles to send, which she knew would, all by itself, assuage any remaining fears he might have. Gillian found a degree of satisfaction in putting Chip’s mind at ease by telling him the truth, but he never seemed fully convinced.
“Make sure he knows you have a soldier coming home to you,” he replied.
Chip used that phrase often in his letters, “a soldier coming home to you.” Whenever she read it, she thought of Benny.
“I’ve been having these nightmares,” Gillian said. “Not exactly nightmares. They barely qualify as—”
The waitress appeared carrying the coffee pot and asked if either of them would like a warmup. The icy rain was still coming down hard. “Yes, please,” Charles said. They were quiet while the waitress poured.
Gillian dumped in more cream and shoveled in more sugar. “They barely qualify as dreams at all.”
“What happens in them?” Charles asked.
“I’m in bed, looking at the door. I’m half awake and there’s something malevolent in the hallway about to come in. I can’t describe the feeling it causes. So much fear and horror it’s sickening. Then I’m sitting up, really awake, looking at the same door in the same room, and the feeling is still there.”
“That’s called a ‘night terror.’”
“That’s a good name for it. Have you ever had anything like that?”
Charles thought. “The closest I’ve come was a dream I had when I first learned the kids didn’t want to see me any more. The point of view of the dream was from a great height. I was looking down at myself crawling through a vast, complicated maze. I had this bad feeling as I dragged myself along with my elbows. Not the same feeling as you described, but still very bad. Then the point of view began to descend, lower and lower, until it was close to the ground and I could see that the walls of the maze were only two feet high. I didn’t have to solve the maze at all. I just had to stand up and step out of it.”
Gillian cocked an eyebrow. “Gee, Charles. I wonder what that dream could possibly mean.”
“Obviously it wasn’t about the do’s and don’t’s of maze construction. I’m saying your unconscious mind is telling you something. Keep listening, you’ll get it.”
“But in my nightmare— my night terror— there’s no characters, no plot. There’s nothing to interpret.”
“Maybe there is. What—or whom— do you think is lurking in the hallway?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you had a suggestion.”
After a time, Charles said. “Does that horrible feeling remind you of anything? I mean, have you ever had it before?”
Many, many times, Gillian thought, but she decided to tell him about the most recent. She pressed her foot more firmly on top of his. “A year or so ago I was gang raped by six guys at a dance.”
“Oh my goodness,” he said.
“It was pretty bad,” Gillian went on. “I’m afraid it’s going to keep affecting me. Maybe that’s what it’s about. Chip and I didn’t see each other very long before he left. We only messed around a little. We never did it. I was terrified to tell him about the rape. I didn’t know how he would take it. He might think I brought it on. Also, I’m afraid… that… it’s always going to hurt.”
She had been staring into her coffee cup while she spoke, and when she was finished she looked up at Charles. She was astonished at how easily she had told him the tale.
He reached across the table and took her hand. “No, no, no, it’s not going to be like that. You have to get over that or you won’t be able to enjoy a normal happy life. Good things will happen. It won’t hurt and you won’t be afraid. You’ll see.”
Coming from anyone else, she would have dismissed it as an encouraging pep talk. Charles knew a lot of stuff, though, and for an instant, she almost believed him.
24
Something else Gillian left out of her letters to Chip was that Charles gave her money. He began by paying for her coffee at Shoneys, then for meals there, and soon he was giving her cash to buy things- clothes, makeup, he never asked what she did with it. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with this but she wanted the things and found it easier to accept the money rather than refuse it. She did, however, tell Chip all about the job she got at Maison Blanche department store when she decided it would be good to buy her own things.
One of the things she bought was a horse. She knew little about the animals and, as she commented to Erin, “I might as well have been buying a space ship.” But the woman who lived next door, whom Gillian had gotten to know pretty well, told her about a horse named Freckles that was on sale for $75. Her mother hated the idea of Gillian’s owning a horse, which made it an offer she couldn’t refuse. The neighbor, Charlene Killian, owned a stable in Gretna. For fifteen dollars a month Gillian could rent a stall and receive informal riding lessons from Charlene into the bargain.
Gillian kept Chip apprised of her regular attendance at night school, omitting that she had long since been prepared to take the GED but kept putting it off. Chip might have a problem with her still having coffee with Charles at Shoney’s after she passed the test, and she wasn’t going to lie to him about it. She already felt two-faced enough. Her life, as portrayed in her letters to Chip, consisted mostly of her job at Maison Blanche, her friend Erin, and Freckles the horse. She had become adept at staving off bothersome questions about her friendship with Charles by providing selected details consistent with Chip’s understanding of him as a good teacher and a kind man but a disheveled and unattractive social misfit engaged to a girl in Michigan. An effective way to do this was to talk about his “Poindexter accessories,” as she called them. “He wears the standard issue masking tape in the middle of his glasses, but I’m not sure if it’s to hold them together or to keep them from chafing his nose. He uses tape the same hue as his pocket protector, so at least he’s color coordinated.”
As Gillian and Charles grew more comfortable with one another, the relationship became mutually Pygmalionesque. At her behest he bought new glasses and dispensed altogether with the tape in the middle of the frame. She gradually made other improvements until he was reasonably presentable. He bought new clothes, got a haircut. He began bathing more often, and soon his musty odor was barely discernible. He resisted ironing, so Gillian did it for him. One night each week he brought her a bag of shirts. Unsurprisingly, this made her mother angry. “You don’t even iron your own things!” To Emily it was further proof the man’s agenda was exploitation, but Gillian told her she had insisted on it. “He uses up extra gas to bring me back and forth to school twice a week, and besides, he always pays me a little something for it.”
In return, Charles expanded his role of teacher further and further beyond the classroom. He showed her Zemurray Gardens, explaining the nutritional and photosynthetic needs of every species encountered. He took her to a different ethnic restaurant every time they went out to eat and kept her entranced with vivid descriptions of European countries he’d visited. His favorite, for reasons which she never clearly understood, was Hungary, a congenial locale for Gillian, remembering her friend next door, Peter, from her grammar school days in Gentilly. One evening Charles surprised her by taking her to a dance venue. The building’s exterior was similar enough to the Star Palace that her anxiety mounted, and in desperation she tried to come up with an excuse for going home. Once inside, though, she saw it was well lit and populated with people Charles’s age. Turns out he was no mean practitioner of West Coast Swing. Twenty years her senior or not, he had her gasping for air, spinning her inside and outside and up and down the slot as if he were Arthur Murray.
Gillian would never again be in a relationship as comfortable as the one with Charles. It contained but one discomfiting element, which she encountered on a rainy day while Charles painted her portrait on black velvet.
“It’s a very old technique,” he said. “it originated in Kashmir, where they invented the fabric.”
“No kidding,” said Gillian. “I thought it originated at Crescent City Arts and Crafts, over on Carrolton.”
“No. Turn a little to the left.”
She was enjoying the experience until she spotted another, similar piece on the wall. This portrait was of a middle aged, light haired woman. “Who’s that?” she asked.
Charles glanced over. “That’s Merry.”
“Oh. Mary who?”
“It’s actually ‘Merry,’ as in ‘Merry Christmas.’
“Or Merry-go-round.”
“Exactly.”
“Who is she?”
Charles said she was a good friend of his. She occasionally brought him casserole dishes, and they gave each other plants. They had a lot in common, both interested in the sciences and arts. She was knowledgeable about drama, which was helpful, since Charles was the faculty advisor for the school’s Thespian Club. She was very bright and was good company, he said.
“Oh I see.” Gillian appraised the painting. “She’s pretty. In an older sort of way.”
Charles glanced at the portrait again but said nothing.
Gillian prided herself on her lofty lack of jealousy in regard to Greta, Charles’s eighteen-year-old fiance in Michigan; why did it utterly consume her now? Was it because Merry seemed to be his other half, an accomplished female geek, or was it because she had Charles’s admiration and attention and she didn’t even have to be young and pretty? Gillian kept it hidden from Charles, but she writhed in dark green envy every time Merry’s name came up.
Three weeks pass. In that time, Gillian wrote eight letters to Chip and received nine. She and Charles drank six pots of coffee at Shoney’s and went to two new restaurants, one Cantonese and one Indian. She washed and ironed Charles’s shirts three times. She attended six night school classes.
During that class, on a cold Thursday evening, she sat half listening to Charles go off on one of his tangents, something that often happened when a student asked a question on a subject about which he was particularly passionate.
Charles:
So, quite literally, nothing in the universe exists until it has a reason to. The stars come into being because we look up at them when they shine down on us, the Earth because we are born on its surface, walk around on it, and are buried inside it.
Charles writes a number on the blackboard, a ten with
superscript eighty-two.
That’s a one followed by eighty two zeroes. This is the number of atoms in the universe, and not a single one of them occupied a place in all of creation prior to finding its purpose.
Student 1:
But if they weren’t in the universe yet, Mr. Lery, where were they?
Charles:
They were nowhere in particular, existing only as waves of possibility extending throughout all of space and all of time.
Student 1:
What kind of waves did you say?
Charles:
Waves of possibility. The atoms that compose you, Jacob, could very possibly have been found, some eighteen years ago, on the dark side of Io, the first Galilean moon of Jupiter. It wasn’t until your parents’ wedding night that it was much more probable for them to be found in Niagara Falls, or wherever it is you were conceived on your mom and dad’s honeymoon.
Student 1:
Waves of possibility. Weird.
Student 2:
Waves of nausea, more like. This is making me dizzy.
Gillian laughed along with several others in the classroom. To her it sounded more like poetry than science, both of them equally tedious. Sometimes things can happen in weeks that can often take months but could never happen in mere days, and it was then she decided to take the GED test at the next opportunity.
When class was over, she accompanied Charles to the school’s theater, where he had to make some repairs to the sets built for the upcoming student production. Upon entering, the theater was dark. Gillian waited in the gallery until Charles made his way to the wings and turned on the stage lights, then joined him on the stage. The scenery consisted of two arched trellises covered with vines and flowers, but some of the lattice work and artificial foliage was on the floor. The trellises reminded her of her misadventure as a runway model, when she accidentally pulled the flowered lattice wall down on top of her and several other girls. Two tall wooden step ladders had been left on the stage, one on the left, one on the right.
Gillian:
Your crew forgot to put their ladders away.
Charles:
He laughs as he picks up a section of lattice work, along with a hammer, and starts to rebuild the trellis.
This shouldn’t take too long. Then we can go get some coffee.
While Charles hammers, Gillian wanders backstage, where it is still quite dark. She remembers that Charles often enlists Merry’s help with his theatrical duties, and she thinks about the two of them together for hours at a time back here in the shadows. Feeling her irritation rise in spite of herself, she spots a large wooden bin and opens it. It contains the play’s costumes, which consist of a lot of drab, old time apparel. One item is different and catches her eye. She calls out to Charles.
Gillian:
Hey! What year are these clothes supposed to be from?
Charles:
Circa 1910!
Gillian:
Mind if I try something on?
Charles:
Be my guest!
Although she is alone backstage, Gillian steps behind the bin to change and emerges a few minutes later in a wedding dress, the item that caught her attention. It fits quite well and she is pleased with how it looks on her. Probably a tad better, she smirks, than it would look on Merry. She takes one other article of clothing from the bin, then walks slowly out onto the stage humming the Bridal Chorus. Charles stops hammering and watches her.
Gillian:
Dah, dum, de dum. Dah, dum, de dum. How do I look?
Charles:
Like a beautiful bride.
Gillian:
This dress is what’s beautiful. It’s modern but it wouldn’t look out of place in 1910, either.
Charles:
A parent of one of the students lent it to us.
Gillian:
She shows Charles the other item that she took from the bin, a brown vest.
Try this on. It goes with a plaid shirt, but you’re already wearing a plaid shirt.
Charles is reluctant. He looks at his watch, then down at the work he has left to do, but nevertheless dons the vest. His attitude seems to be that since he’s making her wait while he attends to a task he should have accomplished during the day, the least he could do is indulge her in this little game.
Gillian:
Does it belong to the guy I’m marrying?
Charles:
Uh, no. This belongs to the editor of the town paper, actually.
Gillian:
Well, it looks great on you. You should think about adding a vest or two to your wardrobe.
Charles:
Hm. Maybe so.
As Charles resumes his work, Gillian walks downstage. She hikes up the dress and sits carefully on the edge with her legs hanging off. In a few minutes, Charles stops hammering and joins her, except he jumps off the stage and stands facing her.
Gillian:
All finished?
Charles:
Just about. There’s something not quite right with this lace.
Charles fiddles with the hem of the wedding dress while he tells her a little about the play, the scene where the boy proposes to the girl. He tugs this way and that on the material, then does so from the inside, gradually pushing the dress higher with his hands on her thighs. For Gillian, the important thing was to be present but not present, to realize what was happening but not realize it, thinking, I’m going to go with this but I’m not going to stare directly at it because I have to protect myself. The next thing she knew, he was there, catching her up in a relentless series of waves, crests, and troughs of remembering and forgetting, rushing up, rushing down, pleasure and fear, within reach and far away. She was afraid someone might come into the theater, afraid her mother would come in when her father was messing with her, afraid her boss would make her lift her dress higher, afraid everything her mother told her was true, afraid she was a cheat and a slut, Schulz offering money, six thugs in a dark dance, Don out for whatever he could get, every time she got close it was disgusting or violent but this time it was Charles and it had to be all right. When she felt his mouth her body bowed with a flood of sensations- a sharp pain in her low back, a whiff of sweat and cologne like boiled wine, tiny black silhouettes of ballerinas on a shroud, a stack of hundred dollar bills, and a vast and empty feeling of aloneness in her chest- that made her convulse with their intensity but seemed to belong to someone else. She would never have voluntarily agreed to this, she just allowed herself to be swept along until Charles’s waves of possibility collapsed and for the first time ever, at long last, she was engulfed by a wave of certainty.
25
It happened more than once that Gillian’s mother came home unexpectedly and Gillian had to sneak Charles out of her room, he dressing hurriedly and tiptoeing down the back stairs while Emily entered through the front door. Their closest call was the first time Gillian brought him to the house. Charles had of course told her that intercourse didn’t always hurt, and she didn’t disbelieve him, but it was still a moment of great rejoicing when they proved it didn’t. Afterward, she was jumping up and down on the bed whooping in pure glee and Charles was laughing at her, and they didn’t hear Emily come in. Luckily her mother called out to see if anyone was home and amidst a lot of stifled giggling Charles dressed and escaped.
When Gillian passed her GED with flying colors, Charles and Chip were both quite proud of her. She was at first worried that she would have to become increasingly deceptive in her letters to Chip, since she and Charles, in addition to their trysts at home, continued to see each other as much as ever. They even went on a weekend getaway to a beach house on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was a cozy little place with the front windows looking out onto the waves. They walked in the sand holding hands and went out for every meal. They stayed Friday and Saturday night, Gillian having told her mother she and Erin were spending the weekend with a friend of Erin’s.
But the situation never became an issue in her correspondence with Chip. He didn’t write as often, and after a brief period when she didn’t hear from him at all- worrying her greatly- his letters were shorter and almost perfunctory. She figured he must be exhausted from the war.
And then one day it was time for Charles to travel to Michigan, marry Greta, his rosy cheeked, eighteen-year-old Mormon fiance, and bring her home. Over their last cup of coffee at Shoney’s, he and Gillian bid each other a bittersweet goodbye and promised each other that they would be friends always.
They made good on that promise. It would be quite a while before they saw each other again, but they made certain to talk on the phone from time to time. Gillian learned that Greta stayed around for less than a year before leaving him. One day she just up and hightailed it back to Michigan. Charles got in touch with his kids when they got older, and he was was able to salvage a pretty good relationship with them.
Gillian crossed paths with Charles only a handful of times over the years. Most of them were happenstance meetings where they found themselves at the same place at the same time, smiled, nodded, and exchanged a few words. Three of the occasions were more substantial. On the first, Gillian, then in her thirties, had been through a period of bad luck when Charles gave her a call. After talking a while, he knew of a way to help her. She stopped by his house and Charles, never one to be strapped for cash, gave her $2000 to buy an air conditioner for her place, a life saving gesture in steamy New Orleans. Oddly, her mother had accompanied her on that visit.
On the second occasion Gillian, now in her late forties, was living in Holden, Louisiana. Charles brought her a bunch of day lillies and spent five hours planting them in her garden. They went to lunch, where Charles filled her in on some events of the intervening years. Not that long ago he got an exchange student from Hungary and put her up at his house. She was nineteen, Charles was in his sixties. While relating the details of this adventure Charles was, in his socially inept way, overly forthcoming at times, at other times guarded, but knowing him as she did, Gillian was able to read between the lines when necessary and piece together what happened. Charles had promptly fallen in love with the exchange student but naturally enough she wasn’t in the least bit interested. He bought her a car and gave her unlimited funds for whatever she wanted. He followed her everywhere, to the degree that it was clear to Gillian he had been stalking her. Charles sadly admitted he knew the girl was just using him and that she had no interest in him whatsoever. With genuine tenderness Gillian suggested that it was perhaps time for him to stop with the young girls.
Charles looked at her for a moment. “I could never be attracted to a woman your age,” he said. “And I could never marry a woman that had been married before.”
Gillian responded good naturedly, “That’s pretty double-standard of you, isn’t it?” At the time, Gillian had been married more than once, but so had Charles. She wasn’t at all offended by his comments. They were such Charles things to say, especially since there had been no such feeling between them, and not so much as a kiss, since she was his student in night school.
In 2003, Gillian showed up unexpectedly at his house and walked into a nightmare: all of of his vegetables long dead, a car up on blocks in the front yard and the grass overgrown up to its door handles, machine parts strewn all over the premises, the Koi pond stagnant, putrid, and full of algae. When Charles answered the door, it was the same inside, the vines and ivy that once flourished on the walls and ceiling were decaying and brittle, the floor strewn with grimy paper and useless junk. Charles was dirty, unkempt, and stinking. His long greasy hair hung in his eyes, which were milky, as if in the advanced stages of glaucoma. He let her in, then looked at her as if puzzled.
“Can I help you?” he said.
“Charles… it’s me, Gillian.”
“Gillian?”
“Don’t you remember me?”
He searched her face. “Oh…Gillian, the girl that…” After what seemed a moment of recognition, it was gone.
Gillian took a couple of tentative steps through the debris. A stench emanated from the kitchen. Clearly, he was alone here, with no one looking after him. She wondered where his children were. Even if they had abandoned him, he could surely afford assistance- he’d hoarded money all his life. On top of that, he had not missed one single day working for the Orleans Parish School Board, and at his retirement he received an enormous, additional sum from years of unused vacation and sick time.
“Charles, is anyone helping you?”
He shook his head.
There was nothing for her to do but leave, which she did, feeling helpless and heartsick. It was the last time they saw each other.
In 2014 Gillian ran across a name on a dating website, Kyle Lery. “Please excuse the intrusion,” she wrote, “but do you know a man named Charles Lery?”
“That’s my father,” he wrote back.
“I met him when I was seventeen. He was my teacher and we stayed friends. I loved him dearly. He was a wonderful man.” Kyle lived in New Orleans and Gillian asked if it would be ok if they met.
They got together for coffee. Kyle’s appearance, voice, and mannerisms were uncannily like his father’s. By that time, the term “Asperger’s Syndrome” had made it into the public consciousness. Talking to Kyle was just like talking to Charles, minus the Asperger’s.
She learned that Charles died of pneumonia. “We brought him to the hospital, and he never came out,” Kyle said.
Gillian told him about her meeting with Charles at his house in 2003. Kyle said he had lived out of state for several years at the time. His father wouldn’t have gotten much help from Kyle’s brother, Ken, either. That was the problem child, Charles’s deadbeat son.
“Did he ever talk about me?” Gillian asked.
“He might have. I don’t remember, though.”
They’d met on a dating site, and although Kyle was nine years younger, Gillian reflected briefly that if he asked her out, she would accept. That never materialized, but she was very happy with the meeting. Charles would have been pleased that she met one of his children.
Three months after Gillian and Charles had their last cup of coffee together and he went to Michigan to marry Greta, Chip wrote that he was coming home. He gave her the date and asked her to meet him at his house. He wanted to see her as soon as possible.
She called Chip’s mother, who was more than happy to have her at the homecoming. Gillian went all out, got her hair done, spent an hour on her makeup, wore her best outfit. She arrived at the Thibodeaux residence in plenty of time, sat on the couch- carefully, so as to remain perfect- and waited. Several hours later they got word he wasn’t coming. His flight was delayed. He’d be home tomorrow.
Gillian went through the same process the next day, but she wore a different dress for luck. It didn’t work. It wasn’t until after she went home late that evening that Chip’s mother found out her son’s return was again delayed. Mrs. Thibodeaux told Gillian there was no sense in sitting around on the couch all day, she would let her know as soon as she found out for sure when Chip was coming in.
On the third day, Gillian went out to the stable to groom Freckles and go for a ride. As she saddled him up, she saw a car coming down the long gravel drive across the dusty field. It stopped about fifty yards out. The door opened and a tall handsome soldier emerged and stood gazing in her direction. Gillian froze. “Chip,” she said under her breath, her heart pounding. She started to run, not in slow motion, but as fast as her legs could carry her.
In the opposite direction.
In Gillian’s version of their magical reunion, she, the unparalleled sight for sore eyes, rendered him, the returning hero, speechless, which was just as well, since words would only delay their long awaited passionate embrace. But now, dressed in frayed cutoffs and a t-shirt with no makeup, her hair in curlers, and probably smelling a bit like Freckles, she was terrified she would disappoint him.
“Gillian! Wait up! It’s Chip!” He raced after her, picking up fallen curlers along the way.
“Don’t look at me!” she screeched, kicking up dust as she raced across the field. She could really move when she wanted to. The reunion eventually happened, just not the way she had envisioned.
