Adios, Scheherazade

Finally I swallowed the potatoes. I said, “Remember Betsy?”

Mom nodded. “A nice girl,” she said, noncommittally.

Hannah looked at me. “Did something happen to her?”

“She’s pregnant,” I said.

Hannah recoiled, and Hester said, “Hah!” She laughed, Hester did, and said, “You better pack, Ed.”

I grinned weakly at her, as though I thought she was joking, but I knew she was absolutely serious and absolutely right and I was absolutely not going to do anything about it.

Mom, with something grim in her voice, said, “You are going to marry the girl, aren’t you?” I suppose she was remembering my father, who’d maybe had second thoughts in his time, too.

“Oh, sure,” I said, as though nothing else had even for a second occurred to me. “I’m going up there,” I said, and looked at Hester, hoping to see understanding on her face, but she was drinking beer and it was several weeks before I could catch her eye again and then there was nothing in it.

Would it be ridiculous to say Hester is my father figure?

That evening I took the eight-ten bus out of Albany, and Betsy met me at the bus stop diner in Monequois at eleven-forty. She had her brothers’ truck, which I had never learned to drive. We didn’t kiss, and we looked at each other very solemnly, and I thought vaguely about murdering her. But then I thought. Could I get away with it? And then I thought, I know damn well I couldn’t. If I can’t even get away with fucking her, I’m certainly not going to get away with killing her.

She drove me to the Northway Motel, where Mom and Hannah had stayed in June, and I got a room, and she came in with me, and we talked. We discussed things, different people’s attitudes, where and when we would get married, that we were going to live for a while with my mother in Albany, and all the time we sat side by side on the single bed without touching, without very often looking at each other, and we didn’t kiss. I had no more desire for her than for a goat. Finally she asked me if I was hungry and I said no and she said she’d see me tomorrow and she left. She paused in the doorway, and I understood she wanted me to kiss her then, not because she wanted to be kissed exactly, but because at that moment that was the required gesture, and I couldn’t do it. I had come up here, I would take the blood test and get the license and marry her, but I couldn’t kiss her. I just couldn’t do it. And I didn’t.

The marriage took five days. The day before the wedding, in the early afternoon, I was over at Betsy’s house and her father said his first complete sentence to me. He said, “Can you spare a few minutes?”

“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t doing anything, I was just standing around waiting for the cement to harden.

“Good,” he said. “Come on.”

I followed him out of the house, and his dark blue Edsel station wagon with the greasy metal things lying in the back was parked out by the curb. You understand that that Edsel was at least fifty per cent of his character, or anyway I hope you understand that. An Edsel, for God’s sake. What was it then, eight years old? I understand he has a Pontiac now, so if you have any GM stock maybe you ought to sell.

In the meantime we got into the car. It was very huge inside, the seat seemed to be impossibly far back, and of course everything in the car was grimy and greasy and looked as though it was carefully rubbed down every day with used crankcase oil.

Betsy’s father started the engine and pulled away from the curb and looked out the gray windshield as he said, “I told them we were going. I told them we’ll get back soon.”

“Good,” I said.

He’s a lousy driver, of the sort who is somehow too far removed from the actions of the car. The car seemed to lumber through Monequois on its own momentum, sagging around the curves a little too fast, drooping along the straightaways a little too slow. After a while I stopped looking through the gray windshield and spent my time studying instead his right thumb.

Betsy’s father has a habit of chewing the nail of his right thumb, gnawing on it while the complexities of life wash sluggishly over him, and as a result that right thumb is clean. He is five feet four and a half inches of unrelieved grime in baggy engineer’s overalls, with right in the middle of it this pink thumb tip. It’s like a beacon, like Rudolph’s nose. If he were ever totally demolished in an automobile accident, which seems to me only inevitable, and I was asked to identify him, I’d say, “Let’s see his right thumb.” It wouldn’t even have to be on his hand, it could be torn off in the collision and I’d know it. They’d open this little box like you get a pen and pencil set in, and there would be this jointed penis sort of thing, all greasy and grimy with a gleaming pink tip, and I’d turn to Betsy and say, “I’m sorry, Betsy, but I’m afraid there’s no hope. It is Dad.”

So that was what I looked at, his right thumb, and after we’d driven three or four minutes he abruptly said, “You took a lot off my mind, you know.”