Songs in Ordinary Time Read online

  “Faster,” Lester groaned.

  Her eyes shot open. She thought she’d heard a noise upstairs. Maybe it was Lester’s mother. She was too weak to get out of bed by herself, but she might be calling Lester to help her. Maybe the pain was getting bad again.

  “Faster! Faster!” Lester panted. He had taken his hand away from Alice and was covering his face with both hands.

  “Sh!” she said, listening. She stopped.

  “Please!” he moaned behind his hands.

  It was a creaking sound. “Did you hear that? I heard it again!” she said. She pulled her hand away and switched on the table lamp.

  “It’s the cat,” he said, wincing, turning his head from the light. His eyes were thick and inflamed.

  “What if it’s your mother?” She leaned forward, listening.

  “My mother hasn’t been out of bed in two weeks!” he said.

  “Then maybe it’s your father.”

  “He’s on duty,” Lester said.

  “Maybe he stopped by.”

  “He’d never do that,” Lester said. “Not when he’s on duty.”

  She listened, her eyes moving along the ceiling and up the stairs to the door.

  “It’s Precious,” he hissed. “That’s all.”

  “Are you sure?” She leaned toward the lamp. He closed his eyes. “Please,” he said in a small pained voice as he guided her hand under the blanket.

  She turned out the light and moved close to be kissed, but he had covered his face again. With her touch he arched his back and made a whimpering sound. Her hand froze. “I’m sorry!” she gasped, thinking she’d hurt him.

  “Please,” he groaned and she started again. All she knew of sex were the basics she’d read about in the encyclopedia. Certain couples she knew were said to have been going all the way for a long time. Supposedly Marilyn St. Marie and Jimmy Sloane had been doing it ever since eighth grade. Chrissie Barrett had told her that you could tell which girls had done it a lot by the size of their hips. Wide-hipped girls were the most experienced and skinny-hipped girls were usually virgins. Alice had believed her until she finally realized that Bernadette Mansaw, the town slut, had hips as slim as her own.

  “Don’t stop,” Lester grunted. He stretched back, trying to pull down his pants. “Take off yours!” he groaned in that hard thick voice.

  “What?” Again she was afraid she had hurt him. Her hand fell away, and she was shocked by the stiffness she felt.

  “Take off your underpants,” he said.

  She sat very still. She could smell her own sweat mingling with the damp sourness of the rug and this musty divan, an odor she’d never noticed before.

  “Please,” he begged, the desire in his voice more exciting to her than any of his kisses or caresses.

  “We love each other,” he groaned as she removed her panties. “You know we do. We can’t stop now…we can’t,” he groaned, lying on top of her. “We have to…oh, my God, we have to. There’s nothing we can do…spread wide. Oh God,” his voice boomed and he drooled in her ear. “Help me,” he cried. “Help me, help me, help me,” he gasped over and over, his voice growing shrill.

  Her eyes were so deeply closed they’d never open again. It was supposed to hurt the first time. But it didn’t. She heard a deep animal-like growl, and it was a moment before she realized it had been her own voice. Of all the things she’d ever felt in her whole life, this was the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the deep, deepest…God…Oh, God…It didn’t hurt at all….

  Lester gasped and his back arched, then suddenly he pulled away.

  Blindly, she reached out, grabbing his arm. “Lester!” she cried, trying to pull him back to her.

  “I’m sorry!” he cried as he struggled into his pants. “I’m so sorry!”

  “Oh Les,” she sighed, then, realizing he was crying, she sat up and tried to put her arms around him, but he pulled away, sobbing softly as he tied his shoes. She tried to tell him it was all right. It wasn’t his fault. She’d been just as willing. “What’s important is that we love each other,” she said, swamped with tenderness. In fact, until this moment, she realized, she’d always felt uneasy with Lester. His voice was too high, his hair too thin, his pants too short, his hands too clammy, his eyes too ready to glisten with tears. It amazed her now how completely love could abrade those sharp edges. She felt as if she could take on any burden. Life was changed; she was changed. She felt whole and good and calm. Nothing mattered, not her father, not that weird Omar Duvall her mother had invited to supper two nights in a row. All that mattered was Les. No, she thought. Even Lester didn’t matter. All that really mattered was this wonderful peace inside.

  “Even if I got…you know…if that ever happened…I mean, we love each other,” she said, laying her cheek on his back.

  “I pulled out,” he said, his voice thin and flat. He stood up quickly and turned on the light. Wincing, she pulled down her skirt, and he turned off the light.

  “I thought you were dressed!” he said, sounding shocked. He cleared his throat, then through the darkness said, “I read this article in the Holy Courier.”

  She felt along the floor for her panties. The Holy Courier was the diocesan Sunday paper. Aside from nuns and priests, Alice had never heard anyone say they’d actually read it.

  “I cut it out,” Lester said. “For you to read. But then I thought you’d be mad.”

  She heard him sit down in a chair on the far side of the room.

  “What did it say?” She could smell his Old Spice, though he sounded far, far away.

  “It says that girls like you…you know how your father’s…that is, girls from broken homes…well, that girls like that are confused…you know, kind of mixed up, not just emotionally, but you know—morally. That they’re, well…always trying to find love.”

  “What’re you talking about? Why’re you saying this?” Her face stung as if she’d just been slapped.

  He coughed, clearing his throat. “What just happened,” he said hoarsely. “I feel so…so lousy…like I took advantage of you…. I mean, I knew all about it, and I went ahead and did it anyway. It’s like I knew exactly what was wrong and exactly what’d happen and I went ahead and you know, did it, and now I feel so crummy…like dirt…. I feel like a piece of crud.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” And the minute she said it, she knew exactly what he meant. He meant that dark part of her, that taint she thought she could hide if she was good enough and kind enough and polite enough and quiet enough and neat enough and clean enough.

  Her face burning with shame, she stood up and felt for her schoolbag.

  Lester’s voice through the darkness was mournfully cloying, as if forgiving her for a sin she had caused them both to commit. “So I thought we should just sit together at lunch and stuff like that,” he was saying. “Go downtown and the library. Stuff like that.”

  He followed her up the stairs. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen,” he said at the front door. “I’d feel so…it’s so wrong!” he burst out. “You know what I mean, Alice!” he called as she hurried down the path. “Alice! Alice!”

  The lilacs were shriveled now, their faint dry fragrance more memory than scent as the days grew longer, hotter, fuller. There were afternoons when the air swelled in such a tumescence of heat and light that the leaves on the trees hung as limply as if they were dying. Sometimes there would be a dark ripeness, a foulness, a stench that seemed to seep out from the very bowels of the earth. No one was sure where the smell was coming from. But there were a couple of old men in town, whose hands gripped their porch rails as with narrowed eyes they sniffed, then turned away troubled, these few who knew that indescribable odor of decaying human flesh.

  Most people blamed it on the pig farm. They complained that the pigman wasn’t taking the care he once had. And they were more right than they knew. He wasn’t. Turning soil and liming swill were meaningless now to a man who thirty years ago had lost his sense of smell and then
in the last few months had lost his heart to Jozia Menka, whose big strong hands weakened him with their touch.

  His old black truck shimmied as it backed into the Fermoyles’ driveway. The brakes caught with a great sigh. Grondine Carson wiped his hands on his shirtfront. Up on the rear porch the door flew open, and Helen LaChance hollered over the racket of the engine. “It’s Thursday,” she kept yelling down at him. “Not Tuesday. It’s Thursday!”

  With a glance in the rearview mirror, he wiped away a smudge under his left eye. Only recently had he realized that he wasn’t a homely man at all. Just plain. He was long, bony, and plain as an old tree, and all his life about as unnoticed. The contrast of his short-cropped white hair against his deep clayey tan was his only distinguishing feature. He climbed down from the truck and closed the door.

  “It’s Thursday!” Helen LaChance called. “It’s not my day! I don’t need a double pickup, and I won’t pay for one!”

  He couldn’t hear what she was saying. He looked past her to the sagging door screen.

  “Jozia here?” he called, his unused icy voice cracking with the pleasure of her name. It had occurred to him as he completed the day’s route that he had never eaten a meal with Jozia. He would take her to dinner, maybe to the Palms for pizza or maybe the Kong Chow for egg rolls and spareribs. His stomach and heart churned with hunger. Heat waves dazzled off the chugging hood of the truck and fat black flies clung to its warm, splattered sides. He stepped closer and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Jozia here, Miz LaChance? I come for Jozia Menka.”

  Her lips twitched as she regarded him with horror.

  “She’s mine,” he thought she answered, until he heard her say, “She’s gone. She already left.”

  He climbed back into his truck and drove off with an iridescent cloud of black crows flapping overhead and dogs chasing his slimy tires. When he came to Jozia’s street, he slowed and looked up at the small curtained windows of her apartment over the religious articles store. Because of her brother, she would not let him come here. Howard was very jealous, she’d told him. “He thinks he owns me,” she’d said. “He thinks he’s the boss.” Oh Jozia, Grondine thought as he drove around the corner. Oh how I love you.

  He wanted to pick up twice,” Helen LaChance was complaining. “He thought he could get away with it, that I wouldn’t notice. Hah!” she sniffed, stirring the pot of soup Jozia had started. Jozia stood by the back door, looking at Mrs. LaChance’s small back and rounded shoulders, her sparse hair set in finger waves. Mrs. LaChance was shrinking. Like her mother she would grow smaller and smaller. Once such a thought would have numbed Jozia with fear. But lately she felt braver and stronger, and smarter. It wasn’t that she was changing so much as that there seemed to be a whole new Jozia growing inside the old Jozia.

  From here she could see old Mrs. Fermoyle dozing in her huge crib. She was all white: hair, skin, bed jacket, sheets; nothing about her moved or seemed alive. Sometimes she had to press her ear to the old woman’s narrow chest and listen for her heartbeat. It seemed to Jozia more and more lately that the old woman actually dwelled in death, that sometimes she was dead and sometimes she was alive. For years she and Mrs. LaChance had struggled to keep the old woman alive; together they had staved off death—and Sam.

  “There’s something wrong with that old pigman. He’s getting pretty odd if you ask me; pretty strange, living all alone out there in that dirty, disgusting, godforsaken pigsty of a house. Lord knows what goes on.”

  Jozia untied her apron and hung it on the hook by the door. A faint smile eased her heavy mouth. Soon, Grondine’s house would be every bit as clean as this one. Room by room she was taking it apart, scrubbing and polishing it back into a real nice place. Every room she did felt like hers somehow. Even Grondine thought so. He wanted to pay her for all her work, but she’d refused.

  “Don’t look like the same place anymore. Looks like a real house,” he’d said last week as he watched her rehang the freshly ironed cotton curtains in the front room. Her cheeks flushed now at the thought of doing the upstairs, even though Grondine said he never went up there anymore. He slept on the couch and kept his clothes in the back hall closet.

  “They ought to shut him down,” Mrs. LaChance said, shaking salt into the soup.

  Mr. LaChance wasn’t supposed to have any salt, so Jozia never added it. The one time she’d reminded Mrs. LaChance of this, she’d almost taken her head off.

  “If he can’t run his business right, then he shouldn’t be in business.”

  “What’s that?” Jozia had lost track of the conversation. It always confused her the way Mrs. LaChance got so fired up over things and ranted and raved.

  “That awful smell. Even the people in the Flatts are complaining, if you can imagine.”

  “It’s the dump,” Jozia said. Sometimes Mrs. LaChance was a real snob, but that was her mother’s fault. In front of people old Mrs. Fermoyle had acted like nobody could hold a candle to the Fermoyles. In private she was always worried what people might think. “Grondine says it always smells like that when it’s hot.”

  “Who?” Mrs. LaChance’s head whipped around. “Who says?”

  “Mr. Carson,” Jozia said, her bulging eyes wide, her high round cheeks ablaze.

  “What did you call him?” Mrs. LaChance asked, turning.

  Jozia shrugged. “Grondine?” she said shyly, softly, as if it were a question.

  “Grondine!” Mrs. LaChance cried. “Imagine! Grondine!”

  After work Jozia hurried across the street to the rectory, where Howard waited on the side steps. His eyes were bright and he couldn’t stop talking. Even seeing the pigman’s truck in the Fermoyles’ driveway earlier hadn’t been enough to quell his excitement. “Well, guess what? The new priest came. His name’s Joe, he said. ‘Just call me Joe,’ he said, so I did, but Monsignor said, ‘No, his name’s Father,’ so I call him Father, and the new priest said, ‘Call me Father Joe, then.’ So I did, and Monsignor come out, and he said, ‘No, his name’s Father Gannon,’ so I ain’t gonna call him nothin’, I guess. That way, nobody’s mad. But he’s real nice. Real nice. Hey!” Howard skipped to catch up with his sister. “Wait up!”

  She walked faster, her strong arms swinging her along. Grondine hadn’t come for a double pickup, but to see her, probably to ride her home, probably didn’t even tell Mrs. LaChance. Grondine could be awful shy. She was smiling.

  “Gonna be a busy day tomorrow. Gotta wash the car and get it all waxed. It’s graduation tomorrow. Monsignor said, the grass gotta be cut and all the bushes and the flowers gotta be weeded and the marble chips gotta be raked back….” His voice trailed off and he stood a moment, watching sadly as she hurried on without him.

  “I heard something,” he said. “But I can’t tell. Something ’bout the new priest.” He fairly ran to get beside her. “Don’t say nothin’. But he just come outta a mental place.”

  Jozia stopped and looked down at him. “You know something, Howard. I think you’re the one that’s mental. ’Magine!”

  “’Strue. I heard the whole thing. I heard Monsignor call the Bishop. ‘You can’t do this to me, your Lexcency.’ That’s what he said!”

  “Do what?”

  “He said, ‘You can’t send him to me straight outta the funny farm.’ He said, ‘I need a priest here, your Lexcency. Not a mental patient.’”

  “Is he crazy?” Jozia asked, starting to walk again.

  “Oh no,” Howard said. “He’s just like us.”

  That night while Marie Fermoyle washed the supper dishes, Omar Duvall sat at the table with one of the kitchen chairs upside down on his knees. He had just glued the joints and now was looping twine around the legs.

  “You should’ve pressed for what was due you,” he grunted as he tied a tight knot on each leg.

  She kept rinsing the same plate. As soon as they were alone after supper, he had asked about her divorce and whether or not she had gotten any support money. She glanced back. This was none of
his business. “It’s just that I can’t bear injustice, particularly when children are the victims.” He got up and laid the chair upside down on the table to dry.

  “It’s all water over the dam now,” she sighed, wringing out the dishrag.

  He picked up a dish towel and began to dry the frying pan. “Why didn’t you do anything, then?” he asked.

  Her eyes flashed angrily. “What could I do? I had no more money for a lawyer. A month after the divorce, he’d quit his job. I called the Judge and he said, ‘You can’t get blood out of a stone, Marie. Some things you just have to accept.’ Every time I called Helen she’d hang up on me, and his mother was going senile. So I just kept on working.” She took the frying pan from him and jammed it into the cupboard, then closed the door quickly on the falling clatter. Mind your own business, she thought, keeping her back to him, trying to hide her irritation. Leave me alone. Who the hell are you to judge me. I did my best, goddamn it.

  “Oh, I wish I’d known you then, lady. I wish I’d been around.” He looked at her so long and hard that she blushed and lifted the curtain over the sink, staring out with burning wet eyes. The Klubocks were playing croquet in their yard with another couple. Jessie Klubock’s pale dress swirled around her slender legs as she leaned forward to take her shot. The mallet whacked into the wooden ball, and the women laughed as the men groaned. Marie smiled, sensing herself part of this symmetry, a finely tuned meshing and turning of gears and parts, a harmony she had never known. Just then Jessie looked up and seemed to smile back at her. Marie turned suddenly. Bastards, she thought, with each whack of the ball. They have no troubles. It’s too easy for them. She tried to think back. What had been her first mistake, fear or love? Or were they one and the same for people like her?

  “All that support,” Omar was saying. “All those years he never paid—that’s probably a lot of money by now. Let’s see…fifty-two weeks times ten dollars times, what, ten years…” He looked up. “Why, that’s five thousand two hundred dollars you’re owed,” he said softly, repeating the sum, his tone holding it aloft like some fragile offering.