Adios, Scheherazade

I wish I could remember dialogue, I wish I could recall every word of that meeting, but I can’t. My mind doesn’t work that way, which most of the time is a blessing but which right now is a loss, because the build-up was what did it, the listening to his soporific talk in the too-warm office, almost going to sleep with him talking along, earnestly and incomprehensibly, and then beginning to wonder what he was leading up to, and then waking up again because he had to be leading up to something, and it was taking so long, he was talking about “sailing into the future” and “braving life together” and “solving the problems of marital stress” and “planning not only for yourselves but also for your children” and all this stuff was going on and on, every sermon he’d ever preached all shuffled together into one fifteen-minute brand X brainwash. After a while I began to think, Well, he’s building up to the fee. I had a five-dollar bill folded and tucked away in my shirt pocket where it would be easiest to get at, because I was nervous myself about that part of it, sure it would be an awkward moment, and if it was going to be awkward for Rev Plunkett too, God help us all.

But that wasn’t it. He kept talking and kept talking and kept talking, and I could see that behind the bland cheerful exterior he was very very nervous, very very embarrassed and ill at ease, and when it finally occurred to me what he was talking about I couldn’t at first believe it.

But he didn’t know about us, you see. The facts of the case, I mean.

The Reverend R. Eugene Plunkett was talking to us about planned parenthood!

I looked at Betsy and she hadn’t gotten it yet. She was sitting there looking at Rev Plunkett with glazed eyes, and I knew she wasn’t hearing a thing. Inside there she was asleep, drugged, mesmerized.

I suddenly felt close to her, I felt as though we were a team, I felt combined with her. For one of the few times in our life together, I felt as though it was us against the world.

I wanted her to share the feeling, I wanted our eyes to meet and our understandings to merge. So I put out my hand and closed it over hers.

She started. Her eyes suddenly focused, a change so great that Rev Plunkett faltered in his maundering, looking at us with bovine alarm. I gave him a reassuring smile, and I guess Betsy did the same, and he smiled back and went on.

Under cover of his fog, I turned my head and looked at Betsy again and now she was looking at me. I still held her hand. In her eyes I could see the question: Why did you wake me? I winked the off-eye, the one Rev Plunkett couldn’t see, and turned to look at him again, meaning Betsy to understand that she should listen to what was being said, there was something in there of interest.

I don’t know if she followed my meaning or not, but she did listen, because when Rev Plunkett, getting closer and closer to the heart of his topic, said “the importance of the size of the family,” her hand, still held in mine, suddenly jerked, then turned and gave my hand a squeeze of comprehension.

I looked at her again, and around the corners of her lips she was grinning. Her eyes were full of mischief, but only I would have known her well enough to recognize it.

So there we were, a team, united by the absurdity of anybody pushing planned parenthood to a girl two months pregnant and her shotgun beau. The delight this gave us cemented us just barely in time for the ceremony and the honeymoon.

Honeymoon? Yes, we had a honeymoon. Birge and Johnny owned a fallen-down shack up near the Canadian border, and Betsy’s family stocked this with booze and canned goods and blankets. Johnny drove us up there after cake and coffee at the house following the ceremony and we were left there three days. Then Johnny came up and got us again, told a lot of dirty jokes, and drove us back down to Monequois in time to get the Albany bus.

The glow of union the minister had so unwittingly given us — the marriage ceremony itself was a bore — carried through the wedding, the bitter coffee and dry cake back at the house, the drive through twilight and night up to the shack, and the first few moments of silence and solitude when we were (at last?) alone.

The shack was one large square room. There was water, but no toilet, that being a privy out back, complete with halfmoon slit in the door. Only time in my life I ever used an outhouse. There was no toilet paper, so we used some old True Detective magazines that were lying around under the bunks.

There was a sink in one corner, with ice cold water coming from the single faucet. Near the sink there was a gas stove, and beyond it a gas refrigerator, both served by the big canister of bottled gas against the outer wall. There was no electricity, so we made do with kerosene lamps and the light from the fireplace. On those rare occasions when I managed to get a fire going, that is.