Morgan McDermott

I ask my creative writing students to write to the verb and not the adjective and to make the strong choice. My students are pleasant, polite, well-reared. They have been brought up -and rightly so- to avoid conflict and hurt feelings. One half of my instruction time is spent helping them picture unpleasant, fearful, uncomfortable moments in which characters are forced to take action; the other half is spent urging them to commit those actions to the page. I ask my young writers to please break the dishes, tell them they must kick over the furniture. I write many passes at the end of each class. Some students hesitate to leave, they are having so much fun. - Morgan McDermott

Crouch will miss his mother-in-law. She has always been grateful for Crouch putting her daughter on the straight and narrow. Only a few years his senior, tenaciously protective, she has been more like an older sister. His mother-in-law is the one he would have called had he been taken hostage. Crouch will also miss the ring. A thick, sleek band of platinum, he never considered it jewelry. He liked the weight it added to his fist. Wearing it was like walking around with one brass knuckle.

But he will miss his car most of all. It will be in the custody of his estranged wife now, and Crouch will be without wheels for the first time since he was sixteen. It is a kind of young he was hoping never to feel again.

"Battery," Crouch says, when his wife asks why his silence, asks what is the problem. The phone echoes on his end, throws the word back in his face. Of this he has complained repeatedly to Maintenance, to no result. Crouch chairs the English department at a famous, revered high school that serves a line of famous, revered suburbs; elegant coastal towns winding along the north shore of Chicago like a string of antique pearls. There is nothing his school can do to become more revered, or less, so it does nothing. The phone on Crouch's desk has survived two chairmen before him. It will likely live to see him to retirement.

"Replace the battery this summer, when they're cheap," Crouch says.

She tells him not to worry.

"Change the oil every three months," he says.

His wife tells him he needs to move on, to put the car in the past.

"Mark the time," Crouch says. "Don't even pay attention to the miles."

His wife says she has only recently started paying attention to the miles. He has to strain through the static to hear her, for she whispers. She is a special-education teacher at a school in a freshly paved community, prairie now subdivided. Hers is an unknown school, so it works overtime, hires the best people, dismisses the notion that there are children unfit for college. Teachers in her department whisper when on the telephone with parents, delivering news of failed expectations. She began whispering to Crouch the year previous, around the time she asked for a divorce.

"I don't know how I'll get home," Crouch says.
His wife suggests a cab. Crouch laughs. She suggests a friend. Crouch cannot tell her that he has no one to ask. Crouch does not open himself up to people. Lately, dating for the first time in thirty years, he has removed the garments of past achievements from storage to dress his life presentably, and has found revelation is painful for a man his age. Even when he was young, talking about himself felt foolhardy, like handing out dollars to strangers. Now it feels as though he's parting with twenties.

"You're going to sell it," Crouch says.

He needs to let the car go, his wife says.

"Don't," Crouch says.

His wife says this is a good thing for him. He can think only about the future now, she says. He can think about getting close to people again.

"My job is all about people," Crouch says.

His wife says nothing.

"I go on dates," Crouch says finally, grasping.

Crouch is cautious on his dates. He likes to reveal that he played varsity for a famous football university. He holds back that he compares every subsequent moment in his life to that time, and that every moment comes up short. On dates, Crouch maintains that he is content with his life, that his job brings him respect, that the disintegration of his marriage is simple physics. He proposes that every marriage has a half-life, like elements, or guilt. What Crouch does not discuss with his dates is his view on contentment in general, for he has found there is a tenuous line between satisfaction and dissatisfaction. He has found that

the only thing worse than having a job is not having a job. The only thing worse than having a wife is not having a wife. The only thing worse than having a family is not having a family.

"You could drive me back," Crouch says. "See my new place."

His wife suggests a bicycle. Crouch holds his reply. Crouch's quiet nature leads many to believe him intelligent. To that quiet he has added an avoidance of opinion, cementing a reputation as a leader. Now, when a dating conversation turns earnest, when it assumes the tone of a loan application, Crouch uses silence and omission when disclosing his assets. He reveals that he was first married at twenty-one, at the famous football university, to his high-school sweetheart. He does not admit that the marriage was little more than a gesture to save the relationship. Crouch omits that when that union dissolved, he relocated to the emotional southern California of the divorced man's Id. He wore a gold chain. He bought cowboy boots. He combined his parenting skills with his dating skills, courting an eighteen-year-old he met when he crossed her picket line, a girl who explained over an alfalfa salad exactly why her hair was down to her waist, who along with Nixon should be jailed, and how she would bring peace to Vietnam given an hour in the right room with the right people.

"You're angry," Crouch says.

His wife insists she is not. She says it is in everyone's interest that they follow the court order, and that yes, she is going to sell the car, yes. She says it will do them both good to be rid of the past.

Crouch hangs up on her.

Through the window of his office, Crouch watches the new teacher he has just hired. She went to a famous high school up the shore, in a town where the money is even older and quieter. She is new out of college and ready to stare down the world. Her blue eyes shimmer like pools lit for an evening swim. During their interview, Crouch had been gripped by the urge to throw something in, to pitch a pebble and watch the ripples. He had hired the girl partly because he lost track of their conversation at that point, lost his place in her monologue about books and ideas. He offered her the post so they could move on to pension plans and salaries; firmer, safer ground. Crouch is not a book person. He does not trust his judgment of words or of people. He majored in English at the famous football university because he assumed he knew the language.

He picks up the phone and dials.

"I can tell you're angry," Crouch says to his wife. She reminds him he is the one who disconnected.

"You're selling the car to spite me," he says. She reminds him that he gave her the car ten years ago. She says she is taking it off his hands now.

"Out of my hands," he says.

She tells him to phrase it however he likes.

"Spite," he says.

She insists that is not the point. She says she is taking protective measures, that caution is the burden of women. She insists the point is that he bought the car under circumstances that will never allow him to feel good. He needs a car he can call his own, a car with which he might feel empowered. Or a truck.

"I live in an apartment now," he says. "Guys who live in apartments don't need trucks."

Crouch watches the new hire work the photocopier. She, too, is taking protective measures. The next school year is three months away, yet she is here preparing, aware that she may not be taken seriously because she is removed from the student body only by the thickness of a few sheets of paper. Crouch assumed many in his department would bristle at her display of ambition, but already the young married male teachers are orbiting, offering help. The girl's hair is mottled from rain, slick and brassy. Crouch would like to wrap her hair in a thick towel. He would like to rub her shoulders and reassure her that being mistaken for five years younger does not last forever, that it is a sweet pause on the way to bad knees. He would like to tell her that the only thing worse than being young is not being young.

His wife suggests that his time with the car has not really been ownership. She says he needs to take ownership.

"I could go for a motorcycle," Crouch says. "I could buy a Harley."

In the background on her end, Crouch hears the murmur of edgy telephone conversations, sentences snapping like pretzels. Her school is ten more days in session before final exams, unlike his famous and revered school, where today is the last day and grades are posted and papers scatter across the halls and four thousand people celebrate for four thousand different reasons. Crouch has been at his school for thirty-two years, and the conclusion of each one is like Cuba at the end of Battista. His wife's school is more organized. Students there are dismissed after exams, grades are mailed home, and she spends her summer fielding calls from irate parents. The only thing worse than working in a disorganized school, Crouch has learned, is working in an organized one.

His wife laughs. She points out that it is difficult to run someone over with a motorcycle.

"I wasn't trying to run her over," Crouch says. "I was just looking."

He had been looking closely. It had been night, and raining, and he had not been able to see well in the poor light of the parking lot. He had not been able to see the woman's face clearly, so he had been straining. He had missed striking the woman by inches. The corner of the store's brick facade had clipped the car while he was looking at her.

"Sometimes people step on the gas when they mean to step on the brake," he says.

Crouch watches the new hire sweep her fingers through her hair. The copy machine flickers, a strobe light, and Crouch pictures the girl dancing in a room crowded with loud music and bare skin. His imagination flows so smoothly that the image becomes a memory already fading, washing away with the attempt to recollect.

His wife tells Crouch that she still thinks him a good man, and as she speaks, her whisper grows forced, as though she were blowing on something hot, something sweet of her own making yet presently too painful to touch.

"I was looking to see how she's changed," Crouch says.

His wife tells him she wants him to be as happy as she is now. By this, his wife means as happy as she is now that she is leaving him.

His wife is leaving Crouch for a woman. A young woman. The fact that this young woman was at one time the girlfriend of their late son is a land mine buried just beneath the surface of their relationship, forcing them to tread lightly. Crouch regards his recent attempt to run down this woman in the parking lot of the Discount Shoe Warehouse as his only real misstep.

"I could just give you money for the car," Crouch says. "I have cash."

She says she is not poor.

"I could buy you something for the house," he says. "That new refrigerator."

She says that the locksmith will be coming on Saturday.

The house, now her house, is old, but not charming. It is a small, cheap house in a small, expensive community, one of the glittering lakefront towns surrounding the school. It is the kind of house purchased exclusively with a child's upward mobility in mind.

"There are all kinds of ways to pay for a mistake," Crouch says.

The phone line crackles. An instant later the window in his office door rattles to the clap of thunder. The keys to the house, the new apartment, the office, the Lexus, they shiver on his desk. The new hire looks up from the copier, startled by the shake of the building. The school is old and charming and very brittle. Its floors are wood. In the Fifties, the desks had been bolted down to help children take their mark for the race against the Soviet Union. The new hire's eyes meet Crouch's, and then, without pause, move on.

His wife asks that he drive carefully when he drops off the car. She asks that he deliver it in one piece, and that he deliver it clean.

She asks him not to drive angry.

On dates, Crouch will mention that he once bought a Lexus for his wife. What he will not say is that he bought it both too late, and too early. He will not detail how he was purchasing the car while his wife was attending to the burial of their son. He is a hard person to forgive, the man Crouch had been that day. Crouch had soldiered through the wake, sat numbly as the funeral marched over him, but could not face the internment. He could not face the sight of his child in a box being placed in the ground, exposed to the rain and to the snow. His wife, distraught at his disappearance, exploded in tears when he drove up to the house. When he tried to hand her the car key, she flung it into the street, into the dark. Crouch remembers listening for the tinkle of the key on the pavement, so he might more easily retrieve it. That is not a good date story.

Crouch had no choice but to become the car's guardian. He liked to think he had been awarded the chairmanship because people recognized in the car his decision-making potential. People on the North Shore put stock in the character of a man's automobile. He did not want to think that his appointment had anything to do with sympathy.

His wife reminds him, gently but firmly, that she is leaving for Egypt on Sunday. She is accustomed to repeating herself. Working with young people whose brains have arrived with some assembly required, she has become her work: she is gentle, firm, and counsels out of instinct. She has been teaching half as long as Crouch, but has much more to show for it. Her auto mechanic is a former student. He opens the garage for her on Sundays, brews coffee so they can talk while he works on her Honda. Crouch's students became chief financial officers and risk managers and Secretaries of Transportation, existing on another planet once they left him. His wife also has a dentist whom she championed when he was young, and now he does all her work for free. It is his pleasure to crown her. She is that kind of teacher.

His wife reminds Crouch that she and the young woman will be in Egypt, then Greece, then Italy.

"What about her kid?" Crouch says.

Crouch's son and the woman had dated in high school. Crouch's wife was ecstatic. She and the woman were the same height, possessed the same cool Scandinavian comportment. The woman was everything his wife had been, and at the same time was everything his wife could have been had she not married Crouch, or cut her hair, or lost her son. The woman, a girl then, was present at the time of the accident, was the last person to speak with Crouch's son. This was the other reason she and Crouch's wife kept in touch.

His wife tells Crouch that the little boy will spend time with his father, a drummer in a Phoenix bar band. The boy will spend a summer in the desert learning to appreciate his mother.

"She doesn't worry?" Crouch says.

His wife says she and the woman are both learning how to be free again, that it is a process. Crouch imagines the ease with which they will work through the process, traveling the world. They will share hotel suites and no one, not even a Swiss, will look twice. Nothing appears more natural than a mother touring the ruins of the past hand-in-hand with her daughter.

She reminds Crouch that he still has many of his belongings in the house, that his window of access is limited, unless he wants to wait until September.

"Locks only keep out the honest people," Crouch says.

His wife says that she doesn't have much time, that she has a situation. Crouch looks at his wristwatch, the reflex instinctive. He has been an administrator for so long that his wristwatch has become the single instrument with which he gauges the only two things important in administrating his life: that he is not too early, and that he is not too late.

"Forget it," he says. "I'll be there before you leave. You won't recognize me. I've lost fifteen pounds. I'm doing sit-ups."

She says she is glad to hear it.

"I'm going to lose ten years," Crouch says. "Sit-ups and push-ups."

His wife does both. Hundreds, first thing in the morning. After the funeral she would wake, put on classical music, and carve herself out of wood on the living room floor. She never asked him to join her. He would lie in bed listening to the strains and smoke two cigarettes down to the filter. Then he would rise, and while his wife showered he would fix coffee and eat a Moon Pie. By the time he was out the front door, he was dazed enough to get through another day. It is a ritual he misses.

She is enthusiastic about his new commitment, and suggests it is a good time to work on his tone. Tone is so important for an older man, she says.

Crouch looks to the copy room, to the new girl. He has always had trouble with tone.

#

You look so serious, the new hire said, having appeared suddenly at his car window, startling him. She had pulled into the spot next to his as he sat in his car, waiting. It was Crouch's habit to wrest from the day a few minutes between his arrival and his first meeting, to roll the window down and sit and appreciate the day. She was young enough to still mistake being alone for loneliness.

You look so bummed, the new hire said. Are you bummed?

Rain was hanging ominously in the air, but she had the top down anyway. He looked at the twinkling little convertible and could tell without doubt that she had been born on the North Shore, that she had grown up relying on the cool, composed air along the lakefront, on beaches unthreatened by hurricanes and water without sharks. Crouch was from the Great Plains, where the weather stalked residents as stealthily and as deadly as an Indian raiding party. On the Plains, the weather arrived in thunderheads the size of mountain ranges, the rain accompanied by whiplash twisters and quarry-stone hail. Crouch had been awakened by thunder that morning, and the knot that tornadoes had cinched in his stomach during childhood tightened immediately. Where he was from, the only thing worse than no rain was often the rain itself.

Not at all, Crouch said. Good to see you.

Yes, the new hire said. She had straight, blond hair that bounced as she nodded.

Are you here to see me? Crouch said, afraid for an instant that they had a meeting and he had forgotten.

No, she said. I'm just getting things started. You know.

I remember the feeling, Crouch said.

The girl wore sunglasses, thin rectangles of cherry glass, despite the clouds. Is that a Lexus? she said, smiling. Crouch saw she had straight, white teeth not yet ground down by the act of chewing on what the world had to offer.

That's what they looked like back in the day? she said.

It was still deciding what it wanted to be when it grew up, Crouch said. But it is an excellent ride.

To his dates, Crouch will never, ever admit that he was in the clutches of advertising when he bought the car, in the grip of promises that the car would not break down on the expressway at night, would never force its driver to the shoulder of the road, never offer a reason for its driver to exit and, flustered, step too far into traffic. Crouch bought the car for his wife the day his son was being buried because its advertising promised he would never again have to stand in a receiving line and hug five hundred weeping high school students. He wrote a check for the price of the car, drained their joint account. He wrote the check without hesitation, paying full price for its bulletproof reputation.

It was more attractive when it was young, Crouch said to the new hire.

#

His wife tells him to use protection with women. Crouch feels his face grow hot. She means she wants him to be careful when he sleeps with women.

"Thanks, Mom," Crouch says.

After a long moment, she reminds him that he never gave their son that special talk about girls.

"I did so," Crouch says weakly, remembering the awkward exchange as he drove the boy to a junior-high dance. Crouch had used the example of a recent Washington scandal to illustrate the danger of letting oneself get carried away with girls. The boy had looked at Crouch with an equal measure of puzzlement and horror; his mother had raised him on National Public Radio, and there was nothing Crouch could teach him about the dangers posed by sex or religion or the Republican Party.

To gain favor on dates, Crouch speaks of his son. Crouch, in a prepared speech, recounts how the boy was politician-handsome, clean-cut and square, how he could breathe life into a joke and how girls counted him among their best friends. Crouch recounts how he watched the bolder girls begin circling the boy in elementary school. Crouch recounts how he and his wife joked fearfully about the wonderful, terrible things that would happen when the boy could drive, how they would lose him to the French Foreign Legion of the teenage years. What Crouch does not reveal on his dates is that he bought his son the cheapest car in the world to keep him a little closer to home, to bring him down a peg.

#

Standing alongside his car, she swished inside her short skirt. She caught him looking.

It's just so Eighties, the girl said. It looks like the Nineteen Eighties.

Crouch emerged from his car to join her, to stand by her side, stunned at the difference between the old and the new. Her Lexus was soft, all curves, without a blemish.

It hasn't given me a day of trouble, he said.

It's so cute, she said, leaning to peer at the side of his car. Did you have an accident?

She had slung a large book bag over her shoulder, and to adjust to the lean, she reached for his arm. Together they peered at the scarred fender, the bite taken by the shoe store.

Yes, Crouch said. It was an accident.

Were you hurt? she said.

He thought for a moment.

Yes, he said.

I worry sometimes about things, the girl said, looking at him carefully, at his limbs. She was looking for proof of his pain.

Don't, he said.

I can't even think of what I'd do if I got in a bad accident, she said.

You're very capable, he said. I'm sure you'll never hurt anyone.

Yes? she said.

Of course not, he said, looking at her breasts.

Still, she said.

You're here, he said. Look how capable you are.

I'm so excited to get started, she said.

He looked at her hips, the sway of them towards him, then away, then back, laps against the beach. Everything about the girl seemed set in motion, twisting and rolling before his eyes.

That's a nice car, Crouch said finally. Kids will tease you for having a nice car.

It's a present from my father, she said, still holding Crouch's arm. He's so excited for me.

#

His wife says that she does not blame him for not having the talk. She says it is hard to look out for others, even when it is a paying job.

Crouch would like to tussle, but he wonders how much he is risking, just being on the phone, just having the conversation. Beyond the thin walls of the old school, the sky rumbles continuously. On the Plains, Crouch grew up with stories about lightning seeking out telephone lines, shimmying miles of wire to kill a man through the hand-set. On the Plains, Crouch grew up understanding that often the only thing worse than being out of touch with others was being connected. She says she does not blame him, and he does not argue that she should. She is waiting for him to argue that she should.

#

Your father is quite a guy, Crouch said to the new hire. You must love him a lot.

Tears welled in her eyes. Crouch stood closer. Her perfume sparkled around him. He watched the tears spring forth at his mention of the man who blew fifteen thousand dollars on depreciation, money gone the instant her curvy car left the dealership, a tithe to love. The urge to hug her grew unbearable.

The girl was not surprised by the embrace. Like most men, Crouch had learned early that there were girls who did not know how to hug. These girls were like lighthouses: stately, rigid, on an island. It was hard not to see their signals. The new hire was the other kind of girl, the hugging kind. She was a natural. Crouch had her in one motion. His arm enveloped her, and she moved into him, her head tilted low, her gaze fixed on her automobile. Her chin sought the curve of his collarbone. He felt her ribs and her hip. Her hair was soft and smelled of cut fruit. For a moment his youth awakened as though from a liquor sleep, and he kissed the top of her head.

#

After a few moments of Crouch's silence, his wife removes the peace offering from the table. She suggests that it might be better if he not come over.

"Suit yourself," he says.

She suggests that it might be better if she just leave his things in the garage. She suggests that they might have a better conversation when he's ready to listen.

"I'm listening," Crouch says, but he is looking through the glass, at the girl, and they are just words.

#

Look, the girl said, breaking away. She put her hands up. Crouch withdrew his arm. They were both looking around the lot to see who might have seen.

Look, she said, and Crouch stepped back. The side-view mirror of his car caught him in his spine. During the rise of the searing pain, Crouch realized he had forgotten after ten years that sometimes the only thing uglier than not making a gesture to soothe a woman was making one.

Yes, Crouch said, feeling the pain to his toes, bending like an old man.

Here's the thing, she said.

Of course, Crouch said.

I'm here to make copies, she said.

Crouch held his hands up, as though he were being robbed.

I'm going to go to the office to make some copies, the girl said.

Yes, Crouch said.

In the silence, Crouch heard the school stirring in morning, the cheer of the air-conditioning compressors, the scratch of shoes on pavement like a series of matches being struck, and struck again. Crouch watched as she gathered her books and her wits and, with the press of a button on her key chain, set into motion the roof of her car. The roof elevated, opened like a silver hand, and settled over the flashy interior protectively, just ahead of the rain.

In pain, Crouch hurried for his briefcase. Droplets pelted his exposed neck as he bent to reach inside his car, and for the first time in a long while he noticed the shabbiness of the Lexus, the crumbs and cans and papers. He noticed the hairs stuck to the upholstery, gray and blond and black and red hairs fallen from heads whose faces he could not remember, people who had passed in and out of the car, ridden some short distance and concluded that they knew him. The interior of the old car smelled loamy, like freshly dug earth.

Crouch removed the case, and, closing the door, saw he was alone in the parking lot.

#

His wife is struggling to tell him that perhaps it is not him, perhaps it is just the car. She is fumbling for a way to say it so they might remain friends. Crouch is not helping.

Crouch sits on the edge of his chair so that his bruised back might not touch anything, might not send bolts of pain to his toes. "Aren't they all the wrong car?" he says. "Eventually?"

He is watching the new hire focus on the photocopier, her face grooved in concentration. What he knows that the girl does not is that the entire department has seen her come in as soaked as he, and they have already started the process of assumption. What Crouch knows that she does not is that the only thing worse than being seen with Crouch is not being seen with him. What he knows that she does not is that depreciation is merciless, that her spotless car and her good legs and her nice teeth will get her only so far, and he thinks of how very much a natural his son was at dating such a girl.

Crouch will hardly speak to his wife now. She will be in the ancient world, and then she will be back, but she will still be gone, and he will lose his son all over again as he loses the chance to speak of him. He will miss that about being married to the mother of his son. Crouch will forget little things about the boy. He will forget that his son could say just the right thing to a girl to maintain a hug. He will forget that his son could come up with the words to make a battered automobile appear adventurous, even romantic. Crouch's ear and back and heart throb as ghosts hum and hiss on the open line, and he does not catch his wife's reply, because he is searching for the words his son would use to tell the girl that the only thing worse than growing old, is not.