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Come get me,
Rebecca thought—hard—to her mother.
Come get me, please.
Later on, she thought,
Fuck you.
She stopped reading about Scientology and started reading books about being
a minister’s wife. You were supposed to have a can of fruit cocktail in the pantry
in case some parishioner came to call. For a number of years Rebecca made sure
to have fruit cocktail in the cupboard, though it was very seldom that anyone
came to call.
When she graduated from high school and knew she’d be going two hours
away to the university,
living somewhere else,
Rebecca was so dazed to think
such good fortune had finally arrived that she worried she’d be hit by a car and
become paralyzed and have to live in the rectory forever. But once she was at the
university, she sometimes missed her father, and she tried not to think of him
alone in that house. When people spoke of their mothers, she would say quietly
that her own mother had “passed away,” which made people uncomfortable,
because Rebecca had a way of looking down after she said this, as though to
indicate she could not bear to say any more about it. She thought, in a very
technical way, what she said was true. She didn’t say her mother was dead,
which, as far as she knew, wasn’t true. Her mother had passed (as in an airplane
far above) away (to a different land), and Rebecca was quite used to the phases
she went through when she thought a great deal about her mother, and then when
she did not think about her at all. She did not know anyone else whose mother
had run off and never looked back, and she thought her own thoughts about it
must be natural, given the circumstances.
It was during her father’s funeral that Rebecca had the kind of thoughts she
knew couldn’t be natural. Certainly not during a funeral, anyway. A shaft of
sunlight had come through a window of the church, bouncing off the wooden
pew and slanting across the carpet, and the sun like that had made Rebecca want
someone. She was nineteen years old, and had learned some things in college
about men. The minister doing the funeral was a friend of her father’s; they had
gone to seminary together years ago, and watching him up there with his hand
raised in a blessing, Rebecca started thinking about things she could do to him
under his robe, things he’d have to pray about later. “Carleton’s spirit remains
here with us,” the minister said, and goose bumps started all over Rebecca’s
head. She thought about the psychic woman reading dead people’s thoughts, and
she got the feeling that her father was right behind her eyeballs, seeing what she
was imagining doing to his friend.
Then she thought about her mother—that maybe her mother had been taught
to read people’s thoughts, and was reading Rebecca’s thoughts right now.
Rebecca closed her eyes as though she were praying.
Fuck you,
she said to her
mother.
Sorry,
she said to her father. Then she opened her eyes, looked at the
people in the church, as dull-looking as dry sticks. She pictured lighting little
piles of papers in the woods; she had always liked the sudden small burst of a
flame.
“What’ve you got there, Bicka-Beck?” David asked. He was sitting on the floor
aiming the remote control at the television, switching channels every time a
commercial came on. Above him on the windowpane were reflections from the
television screen, jerking and dancing across the glass.
“A dental assistant,” Rebecca said, from where she sat at the table. She circled
the ad with her pen. “Experience preferred, but they’ll train if they have to.”
“Oh, sweetie,” said David, looking at the television. “People’s
mouths
?”
There was no way around it, jobs were a problem for her. The only job
Rebecca had ever enjoyed was a job she had one summer at the Dreambeam Ice
Cream Machine. The manager was drunk every day by two o’clock and he let
his help eat all the ice cream they wanted. They’d give the kids who came in
huge ice cream cones and watch their eyes get big. “ ’S okay,” the manager
would say, weaving between the ice cream freezers. “Run the place broke, I
don’t give a shit.”
Right before Rebecca had moved in with David, she’d been a secretary at a
big firm of lawyers. Some of the lawyers would buzz her on the phone and tell
her to bring them coffee. Even the women lawyers did this. She kept wondering
if she had the right to tell them no. But it didn’t matter—within a few weeks,
they’d sent a woman over to tell her that she worked too slow.
“Remember, sweetie pie,” David said, switching channels again. “Confidence
is the name of the game.”
“Okay,” said Rebecca. She kept on circling the ad for the dental assistant until
the circle took up almost half the page.
“Go in with the attitude they’re lucky to get you.”
“Okay.”
“In a nonthreatening way, of course.”
“Okay.”
“And be friendly but don’t talk too much.” David pointed the remote control
and the television switched off. The end of the living room was dark. “Poor old
sweetie pie,” said David, standing up and walking to her. He put his arm around
her neck and squeezed playfully. “We should just take you out to the pasture and
shoot you, poor old thing.”
David always fell asleep right afterward, but a lot of nights Rebecca lay
awake. That night she got up and walked into the kitchen. There was a bar across
the street that you could see from the window, a noisy place—you could hear
everything that happened in the parking lot, but Rebecca liked having the bar
there. On nights when she couldn’t sleep, she liked knowing there were other
people awake. She stood there thinking of the man in the story, the ordinary,
balding man sitting alone in his office at lunchtime. And she thought of her
father’s voice, how she had heard it in her head. She remembered how one time
he had said to her, years ago, There are some men in the world that when they lie
down beside a woman, they are no different from dogs. She remembered how
once, a few years after her mother left, Rebecca announced she was going to go
live with her. You can’t, her father said, without looking up from his reading.
She gave you up. I’ve gone to court. I have sole custody.
For a long time, Rebecca had thought it was spelled
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