CHAPTER TWO
It was that lost, oblivious minute that haunted Eve Loving most. What had she been doing at precisely 9:13 on the night of November fifteenth? Eve wouldn’t ever be able to remember, not exactly, of course. Just laundry, most likely. Reaching into the creaking, complaining machine, hefting the clumped, sodden wreckage of a week of dirtied clothes, pitching it into the open mouth of the dryer. She would later retain a faint memory of seeing a pair of her husband’s fraying BVDs dropped to the dusty crevice between the machines, of stooping to chuck it into the dryer. Rotating was her family’s name for this chore.
Eve would remember doing a lot of rotating that night, the last night her universe was still intact. As the old dryer made its monstrous noises, Eve rotated from living room to kitchen, kitchen to porch, porch to bedroom, needing to busy herself. Her father-in-law had died decades before Eve met Jed; her mother-in-law, Nelly “Nunu” Loving, had passed away years ago, but this was still Nunu’s house, a granny house, porcelain figurines in the china cabinets, sunny desertscapes in gilt frames, a leering grandfather clock grunting off the seconds. She was alone in the house at Zion’s Pastures. Charlie was off at the Alpine Cinemas (Death Machine Robot 7, or some ridiculous thing), Jed chaperoning the Bliss Township Homecoming Dance, Oliver a poor, dateless attendee, who had inexplicably decided, at the last possible minute, to don one of his father’s seldom-worn suits and set off to the dance on his own. A fact to haunt Eve for the rest of her life: she had driven Oliver to the school herself.
The night before, Jed had done a highly uncommon thing (was this significant? she would later wonder); when he had come back from his work in the shed, he had slid up next to Eve in the sheets. Over the years, Eve had learned the variety of moods Jed’s drinking brought forth. There was the Mope, the Discontent, the Manic, but last night he had scooted up to Eve as that rarest of his species, the Affectionate.
“It’s too hot to sleep like that,” Eve had told him, shimmying away.
“Who said anything about sleep?”
“Are you serious?”
“Why not? Don’t you think it’s time the prisoner deserves a conjugal visit?”
“Prisoner? And so in this metaphor I’m the jailer?”
“Eve.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
For whole minutes, they had both just lain there, in the humid silence of the bedroom.
“The dance is tomorrow,” Jed said at last.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. And I don’t think our poor son has managed to wrangle a date.”
“I know. But I don’t think it’s such a tragedy. I never went to any dances myself, when I was his age.”
“I think you should come with me to chaperone,” Jed said. “Maybe we could convince Oliver to come, Charlie, too. I think we’d all have a good time.”
“You are asking me to homecoming.”
“Would you do me the honor?”
“Jed,” she said, “I’m sorry, but those school parties give me the creeps. Bad memories, I guess.”
In her peripatetic youth, Eve had spent her childhood as the New Girl, the perpetual out-of-towner, the vaguely ethnic-looking intruder in classes filled with plain, pale faces. The story of Eve’s childhood had been the tragedy of chronic self-reinvention. Each time she had taken her new seat in the front row of a classroom, she faced new eyes tracking her, waiting for her to reveal herself. And even after twenty years in West Texas, Eve still felt the outcast among its white, Christian-cheery people, the wives and husbands of Jed’s fellow Bliss Township faculty making her feel like some foreign interloper, some suspect Jewess, some Other slotted in the nebulous racial space between white and Latina. It wasn’t a persona she had at last developed so much as a defense strategy. She had learned to behave like a wallflower until approached, at which point she behaved like a Venus flytrap.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jed said, his body going rigid.
(Might her whole future have pivoted on that late-night rejection? If she had only let his whiskey-loosened body overtake her, for the first time in nearly a year, might she actually have let him persuade her to go to the dance? Might her presence there have somehow changed everything?)
“Jed, listen,” she said after a time, but he had already fallen asleep.
The next night, 9:15 passed to 9:16. Did she feel her own Big Bang gathering its hot charge, time and space beginning to warp? Hideously, no. Eve was only puttering about the reliquary of a family that seemed, in her solitary night, already vanished. Oliver’s adventure and sci-fi books on the bedroom shelf, her boys’ shirts hanging neatly in the tight little closet, the shellacked longhorn bones shining on the walls. Oliver would be off to college in less than two years, Charlie in four, and she was already indulging the empty nester’s trick, clicking on the television for the sake of noise.
9:30, 9:45, 10:00. Charlie’s curfew, why hadn’t he come home from the movies yet? She would remember pushing through the screen door, throwing her weight into a rusted aluminum chair on the wonky fieldstone porch. A November night, summery crickets still chirping. A sound of heavy paws crunching through the scrubby mesquite and bunch grass that lined the creek downhill. Eve was just forty. Maybe, before her boys even left home, she could go back to school, become some sort of a scholar? Maybe she could leave West Texas altogether, leave her sad-sack whiskey-swilling husband, and get a Ph.D. at a school not so far from the one—maybe even the same school?—that Oliver would attend. The truth was, Eve couldn’t imagine any future whose every day was not involved with Oliver—well, with both her boys, but (no denying it) with Oliver in particular. She knew it would be a kind of death for her, Oliver’s graduation.