The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [82]
“Thanks,” said Ira. “All the same, you’ll never see it. Just think. There you’ll be in the rest home. You open your mouth like a toothless old bird and they pour soup down your gullet through a funnel. You’ll be thinking to yourself, If only I’d seen her body, what she looked like under that sweater, that parka, those jeans. Maybe I could resign myself to drinking soup through a funnel. But no. You’ll always wonder.”
“I don’t need to see you that way, really,” said the man. “I can tell. Of course, to raise children right, your looks don’t matter.”
“You got that right,” said Ira, shifting in her chair, frowning at the black plastic ashtray, tipping it critically back and forth. “Kids, they don’t care. They think you’re beautiful anyway, no matter what. I should go home. That’s where my kids are. They’re sleeping anyway.”
“You hope.”
“Well, it’s cold. It’s very cold. They’re not going out of doors.”
“It is very bad, this cold.”
“This dry cold.”
“And it’s still going down.”
Now for a few moments neither did speak, as they were both caught up in their private worries and thoughts about the cold. The man knew his wife had the car and he hoped she would remember to start it in the middle of the night, otherwise the battery would go dead. In this kind of deep cold you had to run the car every four or six hours, unless you could plug it in someplace. He’d looked ahead. He had a heater for it because he really did work. Sometimes if you covered the hood up with blankets, to keep the wind off, that helped too. His wife also talked to the car, treated it like an animal and told it when it was going to be fed. Sometimes she was joking when she did that, sometimes she was serious. Sometimes she put tobacco down beside its wheels before a long, tough trip. She didn’t drink. The scar was put upon her face when she was just a little girl.
“I don’t know.” Ira was talking again. “I should have a reason. I just don’t want to go home. I don’t know how I would get there anyhow, through the bush. I got a ride into town, here, before I knew it was going to keep on getting colder and colder like this.”
“Maybe you should come home with me,” said the man in a transparently false tone of voice, “I was bullshitting you about my wife.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“Well, I am pretty sure that she is at her sister’s with the kids and with the cold going deeper like this they will not be coming home. Do you want me to make a phone call?”
“I’m just that drunk I don’t have good judgment right now. Do you have an STD?”
“What’s that?”
“Oh right, your wife and her medicine. I’m just sure she fixed it,” said Ira. “Where do you live anyway?”
It seemed to Ira that she knew where he lived, that she’d heard about him. Something more than that scar was familiar about his wife, too, but she couldn’t put the story together.
“I live just outside town here. I work at the electric plant. I got my own house through the housing board.” The man sounded dreamy now. “It’s a three bedroom and it came to us already half assembled. They drove it up to the lot in two pieces, wrapped in plastic. Then they took the plastic off and set the halves down and fit them together. When we walked inside, the rooms already had their cupboards, toilets, everything. It was a miracle.”
The man was solemn, remembering the day that the house arrived. Ira laughed. “Cheap miracle. A prefab. My father built our house by hand.”
“All they had to do was hook up the plumbing, the electric, the gas.”
“You might be contented,” said Ira. “I wouldn’t be. I’m looking for something else.”
The young man now laughed. “How long have you said that,” he asked, “how many times to a guy in a bar? I’m a little different because I can live with my habit, controlled drinking. You’re getting drunk though.”
“And you’re helping me.” Ira pointed at him and squinted along her finger. “You are an enabler. That is what I call you.”
“Why do we do this, oh why do we do this,” said the man, a false pathos in his voice at which the two of them laughed in a slightly overanimated way that made them both