Freedom [82]
She stood in front of the Fen City Co-op’s meager selection of domestic beers, the Millers and the Coorses and the Budweisers, and tried to make a decision. Held a sixpack in her hand as if she might be able to judge in advance, through the aluminum of the cans, how she would feel if she drank it. Richard had told her to cool it with the drinking; she’d been ugly to him drunk. She reshelved the sixpack and wrenched herself away to less compelling parts of the store, but it was hard to plan dinner when you felt like throwing up. She returned to the beer shelves like a bird repeating its song. The various beer cans had different decorations but all contained the identical weak low-end brew. It occurred to her to drive to Grand Rapids and buy some actual wine. It occurred to her to drive back to the house without buying anything at all. But then where would she be? A weariness set in as she stood and vacillated: a premonition that none of the possible impending outcomes would bring enough relief or pleasure to justify her current heart-racing wretchedness. She saw, in other words, what it meant to have become a deeply unhappy person. And yet the autobiographer now envies and pities the younger Patty standing there in the Fen City Co-op and innocently believing that she’d reached the bottom: that, one way or another, the crisis would be resolved in the next five days.
A chubby teenage girl at the cash register had taken an interest in her paralysis. Patty gave her a lunatic smile and went and got a plastic-wrapped chicken and five ugly potatoes and some humble, limp leeks. The only thing worse than inhabiting her anxiety undrunk, she decided, would be to be drunk and still inhabiting it.
“I’m going to roast a chicken for us,” she told Richard when she got home.
Flecks of sawdust were resting in his hair and eyebrows and sticking to his sweaty, broad forehead. “That’s very nice of you,” he said.
“Deck’s looking really great,” she said. “It’s a wonderful improvement. How much longer do you think it’s going to take?”
“Couple of days, maybe.”
“You know, Walter and I can finish it up ourselves if you want to get back to New York. I know you meant to be back there by now.”
“It’s good to see a job finished,” he said. “It won’t be more than a couple of days. Unless you’re wanting to be alone here?”
“Do I want to be alone here?”
“I mean, it’s a lot of noise.”
“Oh, no, I like construction noise. It’s very comforting somehow.”
“Unless it’s your neighbors.”
“Well, I hate those neighbors, so that’s different.”
“Right.”
“So maybe I’ll get working on that chicken.”
She must have betrayed something in the way she said that, because Richard gave her a little frown. “You OK?”
“No no no,” she said, “I love being up here. I love it. This is my favorite place in the world. It doesn’t solve anything, if you know what I mean. But I love getting up in the morning. I love smelling the air.”
“I meant are you OK with my being here.”
“Oh, totally. God. Yes. Totally. Yah! I mean, you know how Walter loves you. I feel like we’ve been friends with you for so long, but I’ve hardly ever really talked to you. It’s a nice opportunity. But you truly shouldn’t feel you have to stay, if you want to get back to New York. I’m so used to being alone up here. It’s fine.”
This speech seemed to have taken her a very long time to get to the end of. It was followed by a brief silence between them.
“I’m just trying to hear what you’re actually saying,” Richard said. “Whether you actually want me here or not.”
“God,” she said, “I keep saying it, don’t I? Didn’t I just say