Continental Drift

“And every time I drive that car I still owe money on I realize I’ll be lucky to get another month off the damned thing before the fucking transmission goes, which I can’t afford to have fixed if it does go. And that’s being dead, Elaine. Day and night, week after week, year in and year out, it’s the same, until finally my body catches up with the rest of me, and it dies too.”

He removes his hand from hers and lights a cigarette. She remains kneeling at his side, and the television goes on yakking in the background. “I listen to my brother Eddie on the fucking phone telling me about his new house on the lake in Florida and his new boat and how he sends his kid to horseback lessons, you know? And at first I want to kill him. But then I think, Hey, Eddie’s my brother and he’s only a couple years older than me, and he’s not really any smarter than me or better educated, so I must be alive too, like Eddie, ’cause he sure as shit seems alive to me. So it’s you and me and our girls, just like Eddie and Sarah and Jessica. Only it’s Eddie and Sarah and Jessica in Oleander Park, and it’s his liquor store that’s doing so great he’s going to open up a second store and trade in his boat on a bigger one — that’s what he told me last time he called. And it’s me in Catamount, New Hampshire, and it’s Abenaki Oil Company, and me on night call because I can’t meet my bank payments without the overtime. No … if Eddie’s alive, I’m dead, Elaine.”

“Honey, honey, honey,” she says. “It’s just because it’s Christmas and all. You’re worried. That’s all. And you’ve been working too hard, all these nights and Saturdays and Sundays being on call. It’s worse than being a doctor. You’ve just been working too hard. And we’re not like Eddie and Sarah, you know that. We don’t want to be, either. We love each other, Bob. We don’t need all those material things they’ve got, to be happy. We’ve always said that.”

He snorts and looks above the TV set at a spot on the wall, and though he is thinking of Doris Cleeve, he says to his wife, “Sure, we love each other. But if we had some of those material things Eddie’s got, if I had a fucking future, then maybe there’d be some kind of chance for romance. Hah! A chance for romance! Maybe we could go on a little vacation in the Caribbean, you know? Make love in the moonlight, drink rum punches from a coconut. Actually do the things we just get to think about. I wish you could understand what I’m trying to say to you.” He thinks of Doris Cleeve in her shabby apartment above Irwin’s, her thick legs and belly, her weary melancholy, her alcoholism, and he says, “It all started with those skates….” His shoulders sag, his eyes fill, and he shakes his head from side to side as if saying no.

Above and to the right of the television set, a small plaster crucified Jesus gazes sadly down. Bob studies the object, and as he does every time his gaze happens to fall on it, he wonders how he can improve the way it looks. By itself and because of its smallness, the crucifix looks isolated and pathetic. The way it looks now, has looked from the day years ago when Elaine first hung it on the wall, the thing bothers Bob. He’d change it somehow, but if he surrounded it with pictures or wall hangings, framed mottoes or bric-a-brac, he wouldn’t really be able to respect it. It would be a decoration, like everything else. On the other hand, if he swapped it for a larger crucifix, one of those massive and detailed crosses with a Jesus so large you can see the awful expression on His face, it would be scary. He’d think he was in a church or a priest’s house or a monastery. Better to leave the thing the way it is.

“Bob,” Elaine says quietly. “Bob, let’s move.”

“What?”

“I mean it. Let’s move, Bob. Let’s start over. Let’s move and start over.” She’s smiling up into his large, sad face. “Let’s just sell the house, sell the car and the boat, and even sell the furniture, and start over someplace else. Lots of people do it.”

Bob screws his face into a question mark. “Move?” He’s never really put the possibility to himself, never truly thought about it. Moving was what other people did, people who were just starting out in life, like Eddie back when he left for Oleander Park, or people without family responsibilities, like Ave Boone, or people who had no choice. “Now? Sell everything?” Would it be giving up, admitting defeat to everyone? “Not the boat,” he says. “I’ve only got three more payments on the boat.”

“Okay, fine, honey. Not the boat. And not the car, if you want. Things we need. But everything else. Then we can take the money and go to California, or go down to Arizona, if you want. Anywhere. I don’t care. Anywhere, so long as it’s somewhere else, where there’s a future for us. We’re not dead,” she says. “We’re not. It’s this place that’s dead.”