Continental Drift

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Bob looks forward to seeing Marguerite twice, in the morning when she brings her father to work and again in the late afternoon when she picks him up. She could more easily drop the old man off in the morning, and later, sitting in her car outside, signal with the horn for him to come out, but she doesn’t. She gets out of the car and comes into the store and talks with Bob. Bob believes she does this because she is falling in love with him. He believes this because he thinks he is falling in love with her, and just as his days have now taken on an unexpected yet longed-for significance, at least his Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays have, so, too, he believes, have her days, once tedious and bland as boiled potatoes, now come to seem intense, shapely, piquant.

At home, Bob merely waits for time to pass. He withdraws from his nightly conversations with Elaine, leaves off, or treats as a chore, reading stories to the girls before they go to bed, and usually ends up falling asleep on the couch before the eleven o’clock news comes on. Naturally, Elaine resents and then quickly fears the change in him, for she does not attribute it to anything other than to the change in her, that is, to her pregnancy, which, she thinks, has made her more sensitive than usual, more demanding and more easily hurt.

So she tries to avoid criticizing Bob for depriving her and the girls of his attention, and really, that is all he’s guilty of so far, so why should he be criticized? He’s working sixty and seventy hours a week at a demeaning, boring job that he was led to expect would be something quite different from what it’s turned out to be, he’s cut himself off from everything that’s familiar to him — landscape, manners, friends — and except for Eddie, around whom he’s never able to rest, he has no one he can simply enjoy himself with, no one to go out for pizza and beers with, no one to go fishing with, no one to go with him on a Sunday morning to Chain-O’-Lakes Park in Winter Haven, where the Red Sox hold their spring training rites and play their exhibition games, where, if he got out there before they went north in late April, he could get, he told her, Carl Yastrzemski’s, Jim Rice’s and Freddie Lynn’s autographs for their son, because someday, he said to her, those guys will be dead and buried and Bob junior won’t believe that his dad saw them in the flesh and actually had a conversation with them.

Elaine feels sorry for her husband. She suggests hiring a babysitter and going out together to the Okie Doke, a dance club she’s heard about from one of the wives she’s befriended at the park, a woman named Ellen Skeeter, but Bob says, “Naw, that’s just one of those cracker joints where the music’s too loud and everybody gets drunk and ends up stomping on your feet if you try to dance or picking a fight with you on the way to the men’s room.”

So she urges him to take a Sunday and pack a lunch and drive with her and the girls to New Smyrna Beach on the coast, but he sighs and says, “Just what I need after a hard week, a day spent in the car fighting the traffic, with the kids fussing in back, a bunch of sandy sandwiches in the sun, and a sunburn to boot. Besides, this time of year the beaches are jammed with all those noisy Canucks who couldn’t afford to come down in January and February. God save me from the Frenchmen. It’s the same kind as used to drive us nuts in July at Old Orchard Beach in Maine.”

Well, maybe he could go fishing with Eddie one Sunday, take a ride in the boat he’s always bragging about, learn how to water ski, since Eddie’s so eager to teach him.

“Fuck Eddie,” Bob grunts, leaning forward on the couch to switch channels on the Sony.

Naturally, then, though neither of them intends or desires it, Bob and Elaine fall to quarreling. At first it’s a snarl and countersnarl, followed by a sullen silence that fades in an hour or two. But then her insecurity and attempts to please him, colliding almost nightly with his desire to be left alone with his fantasies and depression, make him feel entrapped as well, a feeling that makes him act like a man who thinks his guilt is being exploited, even though he believes that he has done nothing to feel guilty for, which only increases his resentment. Confused and angry, he lashes out at her, until she, too, is confused and angry. Weeks go by marked only by their quarrels and the silent, solitary periods in between, a sad time for them, since neither of them knows what is happening to them or how to stop it.