Continental Drift

“Oh,” she says. “I was worried. Because of the snow and all.”

An advertisement appears on the screen. A jubilant, pink-faced family in pajamas and plaid bathrobes gathered around a modestly decorated, dark green tree is being photographed by the father of the family with his new Polaroid camera. Elaine turns away from the screen and for the first time looks at her husband’s face and realizes that he’s been crying. He looks at her, and away. Then silence, and she goes on staring at him.

She says his name, as if not believing the man next to her is really Bob. Her hands move to her mouth, and she brushes her lips with her fingertips, as if trying to read unuttered words from them. In the nearly ten years she’s known him, she’s never seen him like this. She’s seen him angry, hurt, glad or sad, but she’s never seen him cry, though she has on a few occasions wished he would break down and cry. There was the time when his father finally died from the cancer, and the summer after that, when his mother died so suddenly, and the time Elaine confessed to having slept with Bob’s best friend, Avery Boone, and when they thought Ruthie would die from the spinal meningitis and she didn’t, and then they thought she’d never walk again but she did — all those times he had simply tightened up, like a man being photographed by the police, a man afraid of being identified later by witnesses as the rapist, the burgler, the driver of the getaway car.

Slowly, without looking at her, he lifts his swollen right hand, opens and extends it so she can see the swelling and discoloration along the heel of the hand. “I broke … I broke all the windows of the car.”

“You what?”

“I said I broke all the windows of the car. Don’t worry, I’ll get ’em fixed. I’ll tell the insurance company some kids vandalized it or something.”

“Broke the windows? Why?” she asks calmly. This is her way. In a crisis she is calm and patient. She saves her rage and alarm, her joy and her grief, even, for later, when she has got all the information.

“I don’t know, Elaine. I don’t know, I just got … so damned … mad. You know?”

“Are you drunk?”

“No, no. I had a couple of beers at Irwin’s, that’s all. Nothing.”

“Then why are you … why were you so mad? Did you get fired? What happened, Bob?”

“Nothing. Nothing happened.” He finally turns and faces her. He knows she’s not angry at him, she’s only confused, and now he wants her to understand. He wants her to know what he knows, to feel what he feels.

Crossing from the couch to his chair, Elaine kneels and cups his injured hand gently in both of hers, as if confining a small, delicate animal there.

“I went to Sears. I went there and looked at the skates there, you know, for Ruthie, and came back to the car … and I got so damned mad … the skates were expensive … I got mad at everything, though, mad at everything … then I just got to pounding on the car windows, and they broke. And then coming home, I felt … coming home I felt worse than I’ve ever felt in my life. I can’t even say it, how bad I felt. And then all of a sudden I just … I just started crying. Me!” he says, almost shouting, his voice breaking, his face forcing a grotesque grin over its surface. “I mean, I don’t know what’s the matter with me, what was the matter, I mean, because I’m okay now, but just like that, all of a sudden I’m crying like a baby. Me! Crying like a fucking baby!”

“Oh, Bob, don’t,” she croons. “Don’t.” She strokes his hand lovingly.

“No, no, I’m okay now. No kidding, I’m fine now. It’s just that … it’s just I was so surprised, you know? Because I was so mad and all. And I have to tell you, I have to tell …”

“No, honey, it’s okay. I understand. Don’t worry, honey.”

“No, you don’t understand. I have to tell you how I felt.”

“I know, baby.” She goes on stroking his hand, soothing and trying to heal it with her touch.

“No, Elaine, you really don’t understand,” he says, pulling his hand away. “Listen to me. It’s this place. This goddamned place. It stinks. And it’s my job at Abenaki, that fucking job. And it’s this whole fucking life. This stupid life. All of a sudden, this whole life came to me, it showed me itself. I had the feelings before I saw it, and I didn’t know what the feelings came from, until I saw it, and then I saw this life, this whole fucking life, and I knew what the feelings came from. I saw that there’s no way out of it for me. It’s like I’m my father all over again. I’m all grown up now, and all of a sudden I’m my own fucking father over again. Just like by the time he was my age he got to be his father. The both of them, dumb Frenchmen down at the goddamned mill running a lathe, the both of them, their whole livelong lives! Only difference now, the mill is turned into a fucking pea cannery where only women work, so I’m fixing broken oil burners for Fred Turner, crawling in and out of boiler rooms and basements my whole livelong life!”