Continental Drift

He caught glimpses of himself as someone else, as perhaps his own father might have seen him. He saw his hair, at first wavy and blond and then, by the time he started school, straight and chestnut brown, like Ruthie’s. He saw the fear and sheer envy in his blue eyes of his father’s great, iron-hard size, the wonder of it, his awestruck gaze when, at his father’s urging, he punched the man in the tightened belly with all his force, and the man went on laughing until the boy hurt his hand and had to stop, which only made the man laugh all the harder. And he saw the terrible tremble of his lips when his father told him that to teach him to swim he and Uncle Richard were going to toss him from the dock into the lake, which they did, and indeed he did learn to swim that day, gasping and spitting water, slashing at it as if it were a beast, until he got his body close enough to the shore to feel the pebbly bottom against his feet. And then he saw his bizarre grin as he scrambled back to the dock and full speed ran its length, his skinny arms pinwheeling, and threw his body into the water himself, over and over again, slashing his way back to shore, rushing to the dock and racing to the end of it and tossing himself into the water, until finally the men stopped laughing at him and walked back to the women at the picnic table in the pine grove. And gradually Bob began to see his unborn son as he had never seen himself, for he saw the boy as pretty and frightened and sad. This confused him somewhat, muddled his fantasies, because he did not know what he should do to keep his son from being like that, from being like him, pretty and frightened and sad. Bob knew his own father had loved him and that he had been a kind, gentle, good-humored man, and with his son, Bob would have no choice but to try to be the same man his father had been with him. Any other kind of man, any other kind of father, was unimaginable to him.

The morning George Dill returns to work, he comes accompanied by his daughter. Bob has already opened the store and is sweeping the floor with a push broom, when he looks up and sees the tomato red Plymouth drive into the lot, Marguerite at the wheel. Her father, wearing his usual blue cap, white short-sleeved shirt and khaki trousers, looks small and fragile next to the woman, as if he were her child and she were driving him to school. Bob quickly puts the broom behind the stockroom door and walks to the cash register, pulls out his pen and order book and bends over the book, dropping deeply into the intricacies of the retail liquor business.

The woman enters first, wearing a nurse’s uniform with a light, pale blue cardigan sweater over it. “Well,” Bob says, “you’re safely back. That’s good.”

“We are.” She smiles lightly. Her dark brown face shows her fatigue. She has ashen circles under her eyes, and when she smiles, the skin over her high cheekbones tightens.

“I’ve missed you, George,” Bob says heartily. “You never realize how much you need someone until they take a vacation. ’Course, I know this wasn’t a vacation.”

“No, Mistah Bob, it weren’t no vacation. Dead and buried and resurrected and up in the Kingdom of Heaven now …” George says, his voice trailing off, his gaze starting to wander across the store.

“Daddy wants to come back to work right off, Mister Dubois. He’s not really … right yet, you know, but I thought, if it was fine with you, that it would be good for him to come back to work, maybe get his mind off his brother that way.” She ends her sentences with a lilt, a slight upturning of tone, so that she seems to be asking a question, a question that Bob feels compelled to hasten to answer.

“Oh, yes, sure, of course. I understand. Beautiful. Let him get right back to work. Be good for him. George,” he says, “the broom’s back by the stockroom door. You might’s well take over where you left off.”

The woman watches her father hurry off, her expression an odd mixture, odd to Bob, of relief and irritation. Bob has never seen an attractive black woman up close before. That is, he’s never really looked into her eyes, never studied the curve of her lips and let his gaze fall along her long, tense throat. He’s never allowed himself the pleasure, never subjected himself to the threat, of her beauty. In the past, whenever he’s happened to find himself standing next to an attractive young black woman in line at the supermarket, for instance, or facing one of the two black women tellers at the bank in town or a customer, a housewife from the project asking for a six-pack of Colt 45, he’s either dimmed his gaze or else has turned away altogether, embarrassed and frightened.