An Actual Life, page 2
“Are you going to start this all over again is more like it,” I say.
He just keeps his back to me.
This is what worries me. It must be true love if he loves her and she is not even pretty.
It is bad luck to stir with a knife and a minute later Buddy uses one to mix the sugar in his coffee and I let him. I don’t remind him. I knock on wood while he’s doing it though, just to keep the bad luck down to a minimum. It feels too funny just to let him expose himself that way to the forces of nature. At least, I have told him time and time again, at least use the handle not the blade. But Buddy pays no attention to any of this. He thinks I am ridiculous. Well, I hope I do not have the last laugh is all I can say.
I love you,” I said to Buddy over and over the spring before last. We were in his dorm room with the door closed and we’d hooked a chair under the knob so nobody could come in. It was just a little bedroom with a really high ceiling but otherwise it was like a cell, really. Buddy rolled off me and he snapped on the light.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “What’s the matter?” I was so nervous. I was afraid he would see my bra with all the safety pins and gray elastic. I usually took my own bra off first and stuffed it into my bag. My underwear isn’t always in the best of shape. But tonight had just happened so fast I didn’t get the chance and now Buddy was staring at the sheets. “Move over,” he said. I wrapped the blanket around me since I am actually very modest and leaned against the wall. “What are you doing?” I asked him. “What are you looking for?” I hoped he would never see my underpants which were in a corner of the room. God.
“Blood,” he said. “There’s supposed to be blood.” He was whipping back the top sheet all the way to the foot of the bed.
“Oh, that’s right,” I said. “I know. Do you see any?”
Buddy shook his head. Finally I found a speck of red underneath where I had been lying. “Here it is,” I said, but I could tell Buddy was disappointed. Maybe he didn’t even believe it was my first time. But it was. Swear to God, it was. I can’t help it if I didn’t bleed. It didn’t even hurt. But there I was, with a bun in the oven that very night for God sakes. It was so easy.
Last night there was a cricket in the living room and I couldn’t sleep. I had to wake Buddy because I was scared to go to the bathroom. The crickets here are as big as little mice. I woke him as nicely as I could.
“Buddy?”
“Mmmmm.”
“Buddy, wake up.” I shook him. “Buddy, there’s a cricket.” I whispered it loudly in his ear.
“What?” But he wasn’t really paying attention. I pinched his arm just a little.
“Buddy, there’s a cricket in the living room I think and another one in the bathroom over by the toilet. I can hear them.”
“Why are you telling me this, Virginia? It’s two a.m.” He held his arm over his eyes.
“Because I have to get up.”
“So get up.” He turned back to sleep again.
“I can’t, Buddy. There’s a cricket. I told you.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” He propped himself up on one elbow and his breath smelled sour but I suddenly really wished he’d kiss me. But of course he didn’t.
“I want you to wrap it up in tissue paper and drop it out the back door. Both of them.”
“You do?”
“I don’t want you to kill it. Them.”
“You don’t?”
“No. It’s very bad luck to kill a cricket especially when it’s in your house.” I said this even though I was afraid he’d get up and smash the poor cricket with his shoe but he surprised me. He caught them both and put them both out back. I heard the screen door bang and then he came back to bed.
“Are you happy now, Virginia?” he asked. I got up to pee. “Thank you very much,” I said, the bed creaking. “Don’t mention it,” said Buddy. I tiptoed down the hall and stood there quietly listening but all the crickets were outside the house. It sounded like all the crickets in the world. When I got back in bed Buddy was snoring away and I very lightly put my arm around his shoulders and fell asleep myself. In the morning I woke up the way I always wake up, way over on my own little bed with the pillow over my head and Buddy already in the shower.
My mother calls and Buddy answers the phone. He has not always got the most perfect manners. “Hi, I’ll get Virginia,” is all he says to her. He puts the phone down on the table and bawls out my name. “Virginia! Telephone!” He doesn’t even say, “Virginia!Your mother is on the phone!” I know my mother will be galled by this because it is like ignoring her. But Buddy doesn’t know what to say to her. He knows what to say to Dot. “Hey, Dottie,” he says, “howzit goin’?” If he said “howzit goin’” to my mother she wouldn’t know what to say.
“Mother,” I say to her now, “how are you and Daddy?”
“Your father is fine, Virginia.” She has an icy tone in her voice.
“How about you? How are you?” Sometimes you have to coax her to talk about herself even when you know that’s why she called.
“Oh, I’m fine, Virginia,” she says, but I can tell she is furious about something. It always makes me nervous until I find out what it is. Like anything I say might be the trap door that I’ll fall through. You never can tell what will tick my mother off.
“Well, that’s good,” I say. I don’t know what else to say. There is a horrible pause.
“Mrs. Mercher says Elinor had a letter from you.” She says the word “letter” as if it were a spider.
“I sent Elinor a letter,” I say as brightly as possible considering the froggy guilt I can feel in my throat. I don’t even know what I’ve done yet. What did I say in the letter that could make my mother so mad?
“I understand you sent several photographs.” My mother’s voice has that sound you make by rubbing a balloon with your hands. I don’t know how she does it. I have tried but I can’t make my voice do that. Nobody pays any attention. Buddy just looks at me and laughs.
“Yes, I did,” I say, trying to sound cheerful. I sent Elinor a couple of pictures of me in my wedding dress after I spilled grape juice down the front. I forget what I wrote. It was after Buddy and I had gone back to our new apartment at school. Ages ago.
“I understand something spilled on your new dress.” She means wedding dress but she won’t call it that. Nothing about the wedding made my mother happy but she got through it anyway.
“Oh,” I say, “it was terrible. But I didn’t ruin it, Mother,” I say. “I soaked it after.” A big fat lie. I threw it out.
“It looked ruined to me. I gather you found it all rather funny, too. I’m just surprised at you, that’s all, Virginia. I thought you quite liked that dress.”
That’s how she gets sometimes. “Oh, Mother, I loved the dress! Really!” You can go on and on like that but she gets it in her head a different way and it hurts her feelings. When you hurt her feelings she gets pretty mad. The thing is, I hated the dress. It had ruffles on the front and it was puffy-sleeved and it made me look like I had stuffed some mashed potatoes down my front instead of having a nice figure. I didn’t like it at all, and I was glad that I stained it so bad. It was kind of a gray color. “You certainly cannot wear white,” my mother had said.
I don’t know why this made her so mad. Probably she thought Mrs. Mercher was talking behind her back. My mother does not like to think people might talk about her or know something she doesn’t know, or anything like that. She does not like that I might not have appeared proper in that picture or whatever I wrote to Elinor which now I can’t remember. It’s Mrs. Mercher’s fault partly too, to go snooping around in Elinor’s things. I’m sure Elinor wouldn’t have told.
“Elinor Mercher is getting married,” my mother tells me now. “He is some sort of royalty. I believe they will settle in Bologna.” She pronounces it the Italian way.
“Oh, that’s great,” I say, imagining my voice like this flat tire I need to jack up. This is one of her ways of being mad at me for what happened, for having to get married. She is saying look what you threw away. A proper marriage. “Kings adored you, Virginia,” she said to me once, after she had been crying a long time. That is because once in Switzerland a tiny little midget asked me out and he happened also to be heir to the throne of the smallest kingdom in the world. This is actual fact. Except he asked everybody out. I have told my mother this. She refuses to pay any attention. In her mind if a king asked you out that’s all that mattered. You had a shot at something really big. It is very embarrassing to hear her talk about this. He didn’t love me and he wasn’t a king. He was some sort of tiny prince. But even if he had been I wouldn’t have gone out with him. Once I saw him picking his nose. I didn’t wait to see what he did with it after he looked at it on the end of his finger. I was afraid he was going to eat it. I just went back to my game of checkers and pulled my hat over my face.
To cheer Mother up I tell her that Maddie is not too happy here. “She keeps saying your name,” I tell her. This is actually a lie but it makes my mother sound happier. “Well, that’s very nice, Virginia,” she says. Actually, Maddie loves Dot and the only name she really says is Pop-Pop.
We haven’t been here three days and suddenly Buddy decides he wants a tattoo. What’s going on? Why would you want to do that when you’re already married to someone? He gets all offended when I ask him. “Can’t I do anything around here without getting the third degree?” says Buddy. Well, if he asks me why I’m wearing my red sweater when I’m already married to him I don’t see why I can’t ask why he wants a tattoo for God sakes. “Who do you expect to impress, Buddy Wilcox?” I ask with my hands on my hips. It just does not seem right that he should be able to go sauntering all over town like a damn sailor when I’m stuck at home with the baby. Fortunately Maddie is already asleep. I don’t believe in arguing in front of a child. And Dot has gone to bed early too.
Buddy doesn’t pay any attention. He is too busy marking a place on his arm where he wants to put it. He has a blue pen and he wants me to draw his initials right on the side of his muscle. Then I am sure he will want me to poke holes in his skin. How can he think I would do such a thing? “If you don’t want to do it I’ll find somebody else,” he says, and I hate him in this instant. I know who he is talking about. Irene. I know for a fact that Buddy and Irene went out all through high school. I happen to have his yearbook. There are a million pictures of Irene sitting on Buddy’s lap for instance, with her skirts hiked up, which I can’t imagine how they printed it in a school publication. She is always in the picture with Buddy except when they were photographed on their horrible sports teams. It makes me sick to look at these pictures because I get so upset and jealous. And this is what is written under Irene’s picture in Buddy’s yearbook. “Hey, Buddy-boy, hang on to it for me next year, willya?” and then a heart with her initials and his inside, and then “Your Irene.” It makes me sick to read that. First, it is disgusting. Hang on to it for me, willya? I hate that. I hate the “willya” and I despise what she is probably talking about. Every time I think about it I just want to faint or die. And I can’t stop looking at it, either. Even though it makes me sick.
Buddy is staring into the mirror in the bathroom with his hair brushed back like a damn movie star and the ball-point in his hand. He has just woken up from a nap, too, and his cheek is all indented with the pattern of the bedspread. I used to feel so funny when he had just woken up like that, like a child, it made me want to hug him. But you can’t do that with Buddy. It is like hugging this dangerous tuning fork. You can feel him thrumming and he doesn’t put his arms around you back. It can be very embarrassing so I never do it anymore.
“How are you going to find a job with a tattoo?” I say, which is ridiculous, since Buddy already has a job and he has already started work painting houses. He ignores me, of course. “And exactly what is this tattoo going to be?” I ask.
“My initials,” says Buddy. “B.W.”
Well, that’s better than a skull and crossbones. “Don’t you want to put a heart around them?” I ask, hoping he will decide to put my initials next to his initials inside the heart. I could never suggest such a thing outright. It would be too embarrassing. But he doesn’t even seem to have heard that.
“Get a needle, will you, Virginia?” he says. Well, I pretend we don’t have any needles.
“All we have is a pin,” I say sweetly. “Will that do?”
Buddy nods. “Anything to make the holes so you can put the ink in.” He holds up a bottle of Quink.
“We’ll need ice to freeze up your arm so it won’t hurt too much.” I can’t believe I’m saying this. The last thing I imagined was that I’d ever be sticking pins in Buddy’s skin.
“Ice it is, then.” And he actually smiles at me. “Thanks, Virginia,” he says. God. The vision speaks. He goes into the kitchen and I can hear him breaking out the ice tray and several cubes hit the floor and skitter. Buddy swears but he sounds happy. He is probably excited to think how sexy he is going to look swaggering around Hadley.
I quickly put a couple of Chiclets in my mouth since my face is going to be right next to his face in order to draw on his arm. This is the closest we have been in months without having a baby to pass back and forth. His breath is somewhat garlicky from the take-out Chinese food last night but I don’t really mind it when Buddy’s breath smells bad. I don’t know why, it just doesn’t bother me. We get ready, I turn on the big lamp and tell him to sit right underneath and he does. I start to write his initials. “Did you ever hear about lockjaw from an infected tattoo?” I ask him in a sweet tone of voice. “Or hepatitis?”
Buddy shakes his head. “Nope.”
“Well, there’s this terrible disease where they have to break your jaw in order to get it open again. It comes from skin infections from getting a tattoo.” I keep tracing away. “Did you ever think of maybe just growing a mustache instead?”
“Stop trying to talk me out of it.”
“I’m not trying to talk you out of it. I’m just asking you if you know what can happen. And I think you would look extremely good in a mustache. At least you wouldn’t have to turn yellow and have your jaw broken open with a little hammer.” I’m done writing his initials and I hold the ice on his arm now. “This should freeze up in just a minute,” I say, as if I know what I’m talking about. “Have you had a tetanus shot in the last four years?”
“You don’t get tetanus from a straight pin, Virginia.”
So then I give his arm a pinch. “You better have something to bite down on,” I say, and give him the July Ladies’ Home Journal.
“Have you done this before?” Buddy sounds nervous now, but it’s too late. He asked for it. He closes his eyes. You’d think I was using a damn sword.
It’s amazing how difficult it is to stick a pin through somebody’s skin even if you think you don’t care how much it hurts them. I feel sort of sorry for him, and I can’t stick the pin in as hard as I should the first time and it doesn’t puncture his skin. On top of that my fingers are slippery and the pin is painful to push down on. “Is it in yet?” he asks, taking the magazine out of his mouth. “Not quite, just hold still, Buddy.” He holds still. I try again. “Is the ice wearing off?” I ask him. “Jesus Christ, Virginia,” he says, with his eyes squeezed shut, “how hard can this be?” which of course makes me mad. “I can’t help it if you have really thick skin, Buddy,” I say, “and on top of that I don’t think you realize how slippery this pin is. I really need a thimble, if you want to know.” My fingers are brushing his arm the whole time and I know my hair is tickling his face. He has to keep blinking. He probably can’t stand being this close to me for so many minutes. “Just stick it through, Virginia,” says Buddy. “Come on. How hard can this be? Jesus.” So I stick it in as hard as I can, and he yelps and hops off the chair. “Forget it,” he says. “Just forget it.”
Old Dog wanted the ice so bad but I gave him a piece of melon instead. It turns out Old Dog is a sucker for melon of any kind. I just scooped out a nice ball of it and rolled it across the porch to him. He was so pathetically happy he didn’t even realize I should have brought it to him, not rolled it. Thump goes his tail on the floor. Thump thump.
Then we went to bed, or rather Buddy went to bed. I sat up on the living room couch for a while because I wasn’t sleepy and if there’s one thing I hate it’s lying next to Buddy in bed wide awake while he’s snoring away to beat the band, probably having one good dream after another, and I’m wondering, What am I doing here?
Old Dog comes and scratches on the screen. I feel sorry for the horrible old thing so I let him come in and his toe-nails click across the floor and first he sniffs around and then he comes over and clumps down next to me and I have to pet him even though he is horrible to look at and also I am sorry to say he is horrible to smell. Old Dog has digestive difficulties and my eyes water from the terrible smell he makes right next to the sofa. “That’s quite enough, Old Dog,” I say, standing up, and the magazine falls right off my lap. But he looks up at me with those sad old eyes and his tail thumps on the floor and I can’t put him out. Instead I get my trusty can of Pledge and spray the air a little and that makes it some better. I don’t know why Old Dog likes me. I thought dogs could read your mind. But this one seems not to know that I find him revolting. Although there is something very nice about an old animal who you don’t know from Adam who comes and sits next to you for no reason just to keep you company and lays his chin across your foot.
Maddie and I go down to watch Buddy play ball. It’s Saturday, his only day off practically. I walk the back way so I won’t run into anyone on the street. Maddie hates her stroller so I’m pushing the stroller and carrying her, which is no doubt a ridiculous sight but I can’t help that. The ball-field is behind the school. I can see Buddy out in the field; it is easy to make him out because his T-shirt is bright orange and his hair is so black. I wish it didn’t give my heart always a lurch when I see him like that from a distance. I wish I didn’t care how handsome he is, because I don’t, actually, when you get right down to it. So what if he is handsome. He has never once said, “Virginia, you are my one true love. I love you and only you.” This is because I am not. Irene is, I’m sure. I have seen him look at her with that frozen electrical look on his face. There is nothing wrong with Irene. It doesn’t matter that she is covered with makeup and wears an ankle bracelet. I just don’t know what he sees in her and it scares me. “Look, Maddie! There’s your daddy!” and I start shouting Buddy’s name.
