OUT OF THE BLUE SHE CALLED. He had learned to dread news from his mother. There was always a crisis, a change, a sorrow, a complaint, a plea. The sound of her voice could bring an ache to his insides. He held the phone and watched the frame of the window, light and moody clouds, a few people hanging out on the long balconies of each floor of the dorm. They were watching the baseball game, the white-uniformed players on the green turf of the stadium just beyond the parking lot. He heard the snap of a bat as if it were next to his ear, a collective sound of consternation from the stands at commotion in the outfield. Caught. Out. He took a deep breath.
His mother’s voice had that edge of brightness that he knew to be brittle and feigned. She was as happy as a woman could be, she said. He could picture her sitting on the edge of the colonial rocking chair that she had bought from Furniture Fair in Goldsboro, where she lived now. The cushions were covered in a beige cloth printed with butter churns, milking stools, and washtubs. The chair made a creaking sound, its springs expanding and contracting as she moved restlessly back and forth; he could hear it, a sort of undertone to her words. She told him, in a rush, she was moving to Nevada next week and marrying a new husband.
“Oh, lord, it was like a miracle. I met him at the One Stop, you know, when I was working at the cash register—he was buying a pack of Pall Malls, my favorite cigarette. And I tell you what, a thrill ran through me like a bolt from heaven, it had to be a sign of true love. A person knows what true love feels like.” The wedding would be at a casino in Las Vegas in one of those fast-turnaround chapels, Ronny didn’t need to worry about being there.
All this spoken in a raspy monotone with pause for breath. This would be her fourth husband, not counting the fact that she had married one of them twice.
At first Ronny felt only the sinking sensation with which his body greeted all of her life changes. He kicked at a pizza box on the floor. “This is kind of sudden,” he said.
She made a sound of irritation, a cough; she was probably smoking a Pall Mall herself. “Don’t be like that, honey, just be happy for me, can’t you?”
“I just mean you haven’t known him that long, Mama, that’s all. And you’re going to move with him to Las Vegas.”
“That’s not where we’re going to live, it’s too trashy. We’re going to live in Reno.”
“Well,” Ronny said, and a deep sadness swept through.
“I can’t help it,” she said. “He blows my mind. Isn’t that what you say these days?”
“That sounds right. That’s great, Mom, I guess. Who is he?”
“I thought I already told you about him. Maybe not. After I met him at the One Stop he took me to the fair where I was showing my flowers. You know how I do with putting up my plants at the fair. The judges give me three red ribbons and a white one and he come up to me and said, don’t be blue. Because of I didn’t get a blue ribbon. Don’t you think that’s cute?”
“How long have you known him?”
“Four and a half weeks. His name is Rayford Placid. My new name is going to be Thelma Placid. I think that’s nice. Can’t you be happy for your mom?”
Her new name was going to be Thelma Eurene Johnson Mallory Verner Hansome Placid. She had as many surnames as a soap opera heroine. Ronny, who had only one, Mallory, said, “Sure. I guess.”
“I really think this is the one, Ronny.”
“That’s great.” He was being very quiet, not that she would notice.
“Hell, I’m going to be forty next year, I deserve to be happy.” She paused to take a sip from her cup of coffee; the swallow was audible, and Ronny pictured her standing there with her cup in one hand and her makeup mirror in the other, the phone somehow juggled between, cigarette burning in the ashtray on the table beside her. In the tiny trailer kitchenette with her pots of snake plant and lamb’s ears on the windowsill. “Is everything okay, son? Is school going okay?”
He laughed quietly. “Well, no, Mom.” He was feeling a kind of choking in his midsection and had a hard time getting his breath. “I mean, school is fine. Classes are almost over. But now all of a sudden I have to find a place to live and get a job for the summer. This is kind of sudden, that’s all. I was expecting to come home.”
“Honey, you don’t want to live in this trailer one more summer, do you? I already filled up your bedroom with my shoe boxes anyway.”
“Well, I knew you put a lot of shoes in there but I figured I could make enough room to sleep.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m sorry, son. But it’s 1977 and I’ve wasted too much time. I have to move on.”
Her life, as far as Ronny could remember, had consisted of little beyond her need to move on, which she announced every so often in much these terms, usually including the
year, as if he did not know it. He felt an echo inside himself, as if he were hollow. But he spoke calmly. “I know you do, Mom. It’s fine. I’ll be all right.”
Now her voice took on an anxious edge, and he would have to console her. “So you can find a place to stay for the summer, can’t you?”
“I’m sure I can. Kids stay here all the time. I’ll get a job, everything will be great.”
“You can come out and see me when I get settled.”
“But I’ll have to pay for the plane ticket.”
She chortled, as if this was a foregone conclusion. “Well, you know you will. I don’t have any money.”
“Neither do I, Mom. Scholarships don’t cover plane tickets to Nevada.”
Another crack of the bat from the baseball stadium, sharp as a bullet. A wave of crowd noise, drunken. He was looking at the pile of dirty laundry in his roommate’s closet. He could smell sour beer and twice-worn socks. Opening a window, he studied the parking lot, the baseball stadium, and the diminutive players on the field, the regular bricks of Teague dorm behind a row of oaks and elms in the distance.
Mom was losing patience with the conversation—he could hear the change. She said she loved him, she said goodbye, and he sat on the bed with the spring breeze blowing through the window, the bright day mocking him. Perfectly motionless, hating the clutter of the room suddenly, he stood and gathered the pizza boxes in a stack.
So now he had no home left. Up until today he had still possessed the tiniest scrap of one, as long as he could keep up with his mother’s latest address. But now she would be in Nevada and that would be that. He dreaded the thought of finding some place to stay, given that he had almost no money, this being the end of the semester.
He cleaned the dorm room to give himself something to do, but after a while he realized that what he was really doing was waiting for Ben to call, and the thought peeved him and so he decided to walk to North Campus. Outside there was still the crowd watching the baseball game along the iron railing of the balconies; the dorm was shaped like a cross, and two of the sides faced each other, with the balconies running along the sides, giving access to the lines of suite doors, plain and geometric. Balmy in the afternoon sun. He took the elevator to the ground floor, then headed out of the lobby into the spring warmth, past people sunbathing on the lawn in front of the dorm, waving at Sheria with someone he didn’t recognize. Sheria was seated on a blanket holding a book in her lap, eating something in a plastic wrapper, frizzy hair blowing this way and that in the breeze. He had met her at Governor’s School, a summer program for gifted high school students. She hollered something at him and he cupped his hand to his ear; she shook her head and said, “Come see me later,” and he heard that, and signaled that he would. Scanning the bare bodies on their towels, the girls in their bathing suits, the boys in their jeans, he refused to search for Ben, who was too cool for suntan lotion and too restless for sun worship. Ronny took the path that led past the regular
row of brick dormitories, counting the fans in the open windows, more sunbathers on the narrow patches of grass, a plump girl in a purple romper riding a blue bicycle slowly. The scent of pot from someone’s room wafted past, and a bedraggled cat hid behind the struggling shrubbery along the front of Teague. Threads of Heart and Springsteen mingled with the fading cheers from the baseball game. The campus was all trees and brick, pine needles and shade. Near the end of semester, everybody was wearing shorts, open shirts, midriff-baring blouses, ambling with books in their arms, hoping to find a pretty spot to study for exams but distracted by the beautiful day.
He found the usual collection of creative writing students on the steps in front of Pine Hall, including Lily, her long, thick hair wrapped over one shoulder. “So it’s Mr. Mallory, how lovely.”
“Not feeling very lovely at the moment,” he said, and sat next to her, irritating her friend, a poet, who was bending toward her with the earnest look of someone about to burst into free verse.
So he told her what had happened and she commiserated. “Well, there ought to be lots of apartments open for the summer, I guess. Your poor mom.”
“Why is she the one who gets the sympathy?”
“Nevada,” she said.
After a moment he laughed. “I suppose. And at least I don’t have to go back to Goldsboro this year. If I can figure out what to do.”
Her friend the poet had drawn away, and Lily and Ronny sat in comfortable silence for a moment. The others on the steps were beginning a conversation about their grades for the semester, what Max Steele, the creative writing director, had told them during office hours, and snipes about other students in the workshops. Ronny had taken one class in fiction writing before he realized it was not for him; now he was studying English literature and journalism.
Lily took a pen and notepad out of her purse, tapped it on her thigh. “So, seriously, what will you do?”
“I don’t know. I’m almost broke, it’s the end of the semester.”
“Can’t your mom help you?”
“Not really. I have to figure this out myself.”
“At least you’ll be here this summer. We can hang out.”
“That will be nice.” He picked oak tassels out of his hair, finding them by touch. The world felt wild with pollen and other forms of plant copulation. “You can show me more of your poems.”
She appeared inordinately pleased to be asked and handed him a new poem out of her folder of work, something called “Seven Long Phrases,” with a nice line at the end, “and has the
last word under water.” He told her he liked the syntax, not sure whether he was using the word in the right context, but he must have gotten it right because she just blushed a bit. He did like the poem, too. She said, “I just went by the newspaper office, nobody is there.” They both worked for The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper. “Strange to see all those desks empty, nobody typing.”
“I guess it’s just the business people in there now.”
Pleasant to sit there watching the traffic in and out of the bookstore and the student union. Flyers flapped on the Cube when a wind came up. The folks on the steps spent the sunset talking about the books of Virginia Woolf, the shape of the moral universe, and why a cow in a field might have an independent reality even if no human ever saw the cow; he figured they had all read Jacob’s Room. They talked about what kind of art was the best art and why a student who majored in business administration was missing out on the roots of things. Lily’s poet friend said, “I think it would kill my soul to do anything but art.”
“What will kill your soul is starvation for not getting paid for doing art,” said Charlotte, a Durham housewife who was taking poetry workshops; she’d made a lot of friends among the students. “Take it from an old lady.”
“Then I die for art,” the poet said, and everyone agreed he was brave and noble.
“What a way to go,” said Charlotte, and puffed her French cigarette.
After sunset, he said goodbye to Lily, watching her walk away with her manuscripts and books in her arms, long hair swinging side to side. He walked back to his dorm, finding his roommate, Kelly, already passed out, another stack of pizza boxes in the middle of the room—really, it was as if they bred and reproduced; one person could not eat that much pizza, could he?
Ronny was sober; he was almost always sober, though sometimes he felt like the only person who did not like liquor in the whole world. He listened to the heavy breathing, almost snoring, of Kelly in the other bed. The dorm lay mostly quiet and dark and he stared out the window. The lighted rectangles of other windows glowed a dull yellow, and low lights set into the bricks spilled illumination onto the bare concrete of the balconies. The night softened the sharp lines of the building and gave it a milder contour as it looked over the dark gulf of the parking lot, the roofs of the parked cars, and the patches of trees. On the side of the dorm where the football players lived, shadows were passing back and forth in front of the suites. Seated on his bed in the dark, Ronny watched Ben’s window across the way, one floor down, the light still burning. The sight of the blank doorway, the fact that he was obsessed with watching it, made him ache. Something was going wrong now and he didn’t know how to stop it.
Near midnight, though, there was a quiet knock on the door. Ronny was still sitting in the dark, fully dressed. When he answered the knock there was Ben slumped against the
opposite wall, tugging at his ear, smelling of beer and smoke. Ronny closed the door softly and they walked onto the balcony. Ben was steady on his feet, blinking slowly, wearing an old flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. “What you up to?” he asked, awkward, leaning on the iron railing, looking down into the gulf of night.
“Nothing, hanging out here all right,” Ronny said.
“Went down to He’s Not Here,” Ben said. That was the name of a bar. “Just wanted to say good night. You hadn’t called me lately.”
“You haven’t called me either.”
They were quiet. Ben raised his head a bit, jaw set, expression hardening. “You’re jealous again. You think I don’t know it?”
Ronny tried to turn away, and Ben laid hands on him and pulled him back. But they were in public, they had to be careful. They stood awkward and stiff, Ronny wrapping his arms around himself as if it were cold, though the night was all balm and sweetness. Lights like stars stretched over the campus, along the paths, in the stadium and across the athletic fields, tracing the roads. Ben said, “You act like a dope sometimes.”
“Say good night to Jennifer,” Ronny said.
“What the fuck?”
“She’s over there, right?”
“Okay,” Ben said, angry now, looming. “I think I better go before I get pissed.”
“That’s fine. Good night.”
He shuffled away. Shoulders broad as anything. Ronny shivered. He watched until Ben made it to his suite door, head bowed, shoulders hunched, studying his feet as if he had to be careful about every step he took.
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