The End of the Pier Read online

  “Adults—I mean older adults—” and she smiled slowly again to indicate she didn’t mean to suggest Maud’s son wasn’t “adult”—“usually haven’t much respect for younger ones. For young people. And I imagine”—again, she smiled slowly, as her glance strayed toward the end of the counter and Joey, drinking a Coke—“that she’d be hard to impress. She seems rather disappointed in her own son.”

  Maud blinked, looking from Shirl, who was complaining to some customer about his handing her a twenty when (“the damned fool must have known”) it was Labor Day weekend and all change disappeared on holidays (to hear Shirl tell it)—looking down to Joey, then back to Dr. Hooper, sipping her coffee, and wondered if Shirl was right after all, if there was some sort of mind reading going on. Not soul sucking, of course, just mind reading. How stupid, she thought. Anyone with a grain of intelligence and any powers of observation wouldn’t have to hang around the Rainbow for long to know Shirl was “disappointed” with Joey. And this woman was a psychiatrist.

  “People . . . parents . . . I seldom hear them paying compliments to young people.” Frowning over her coffee cup, seeming to give this point her gravest consideration, Dr. Hooper added, “Indeed, I never do.”

  As Charlene flounced by behind her and grabbed up the coffee pot (it was Maud’s turn at the counter, after all), Maud stood her ground and asked with deadly seriousness, “Why do you think that is?”

  “Well . . . there doesn’t seem to be much respect for young people. Their parents certainly don’t have much for them, in the sense they seem to be more problems than people. I expect it might be because everyone feels so guilty—the parents, the children. It goes back and forth, gets passed around the table and back again.” She replaced her cup and folded her hands before her, her expression, her position a little like someone kneeling in a pew. “So your son must be quite unusual.”

  He was unusual; but Maud didn’t think she should blatantly agree. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Shirl, who was banging open the display case to get at the pies, staring at her. But Shirl would turn to stone before she’d interrupt a conversation with Dr. Hooper, since Shirl herself was dying of curiosity to know about her.

  “I guess people seem to like him,” Maud said. “I guess he’s able to talk to adults more than most kids his age. He seems, well, comfortable with them, I think. I remember when he was, oh, six or seven . . .” This was ridiculous, she thought, busying herself with polishing up the milk-shake container; she couldn’t stand here and reminisce. And there was that familiar tightening in her throat; that would be just fine, wouldn’t it—in answer to a polite question on this woman’s part, suddenly to start crying? Yes, that would be fine.

  Dr. Hooper was finished but not leaving, turning slightly back and forth on the wooden counter stool. She slid the conversation effortlessly into something more general. “I don’t mean to say that it’s just children that have a hard time of it.” Her tone was slightly apologetic, as if it were she and not Maud who was making things difficult, conversationally. “So do parents. Parents are so often forced to desperate remedies.” She grew silent, her eyes down-turned. “What do you think?”

  That Dr. Hooper thought her opinion truly mattered astonished Maud and drew her eyes from her fun-house reflection in the aluminum container up to Dr. Hooper’s mild brown gaze. Maud rocked a little on her heels, as if her body were being pushed by the sudden force of all of the unanswered questions she had about herself and Chad, about her depression over the sense of loss, about the . . . betrayal. The word simply clicked into place in her mind and shocked her. “Betrayal.” Her face grew stiff with the exertion of trying to keep this disloyal, irrational thought from showing there. But the word dragged a rush of other irrational notions with it—the notion that she’d been tricked, tricked into believing childhood would last forever. Believing it in her crazy, mixed-up way. Face it: what she felt this very minute was that he had tricked her, his six-year-old-ness, his child-ness had tricked her; and she felt, even as Dr. Hooper was taking the three one-dollar bills from her purse and still looking at Maud with those luminous eyes—Maud felt the rage beginning. It would spread as it always did, burning in her constricted stomach muscles, raying out through her limbs, upward to her face like a hot, angry blush, and then settling in a tight sore lump that she feared would fester and burst.

  All of this went through her mind in a moment, less than a moment, and she saw herself, as if she were standing away from herself, writing up Dr. Hooper’s check with a little frown of concentration that was supposed to suggest she was merely considering her answer. Wetting her lips, she wrote down the pie and coffee, a dollar eighty-five, afraid this woman had seen this inexplicable, murderous rage which was subsiding as quickly as it had come. She added the tax slowly, afraid to look into Dr. Hooper’s eyes for fear that Dr. Hooper had seen clear through her, through her carefully ironed apron and sprigged cotton dress, her freckles, pale skin, and light eyes, to a woman with all of the characteristics of a psychopath. The question still hung in the air, What do you think?, and what Maud wanted to say was, “I think I could kill someone, I could be one of those parents who could kill their own children, and it terrifies me that I could, even for one-tenth of a second, actually stand in that person’s shoes, feel that person’s arm raising the knife or the gun” . . . but to turn, Maud wondered confusedly, on whom? The knife seemed to twist backward into her own heart, the gun rise to her own temple. And the murderous anger returned while she drew a line on the check to tote up the pie, coffee, tax—returned, receded in waves, and left behind it the stuff of depression like detritus for the birds on the beach.

  As she slowly tore Dr. Hooper’s check from the pad and repositioned the oblong of carbon paper, she wondered, how in God’s name could all of this go through a person’s mind while she was writing on a dirty-white check with “Thank You” scrolled at the top in faded blue ink?

  She placed the check by Dr. Hooper’s cup, fixed the small, tilted-up smile on her face as she slid the book of checks back into her apron pocket and answered the question. “Well, I think most parents don’t know how they feel or what to do, and maybe it’s because of all the decisions they have to make—not the big ones, the little ones, the ones that seem to come up every minute, and you have to make up your mind in a split second without being able to get anyone’s advice, and where the odds are always against any decision being right because what you think is in everybody’s best interests isn’t at all, since a lot of the time you don’t even want everybody’s best interests, don’t even know what they are, not even your own. . . . Maybe that’s why I don’t blame Shirl. Or anyone.” Maud stopped suddenly, closed her mouth as if slamming a tiny door, feeling that what was behind it, a rush of thoughtless words bursting out, unbidden and unchecked like some horror-film poltergeist, so alarmed her that she just had to clamp her lips together, try to paste on again that little hooked smile to let Dr. Hooper know she wasn’t irrevocably crazy.

  But Dr. Hooper merely nodded in her thoughtful way. Her long, elegant fingers placed the three one-dollar bills with the check (it was always the same amount) as she said, “I’ve never heard a parent say that.” Her own smile was a little like Maud’s, closed-mouthed, tilting up.

  Is that good or is that bad? Maud wanted to ask.

  • • •

  But Maud had been surprised that Dr. Hooper had come in just this morning, apparently on her way “up north,” for tomorrow was Labor Day.

  “Well, he sometimes goes back to school early. Before he has to.”

  Immediately, Maud felt an even closer bond. She hung on to the silver milk-shake container, her hands jittering up and down, and told Elizabeth Hooper that Chad himself had left early to visit a friend of his. Probably, she couldn’t keep the irritation—or was it sadness? they seemed to overlap—out of her voice, and she cut up Dr. Hooper’s lemon chiffon pie pretty ruthlessly. Then it occurred to her that if Dr. Hooper’s son had gone back to school already,
he obviously wasn’t riding with his mother.

  “He doesn’t spend summers with me.” Dr. Hooper’s dark eyes were on the piece of pie.

  Maud could sense that something here was wrong, so she merely said “Oh” and wiped her hands down her apron sides. Yes, there was really something wrong, for Dr. Hooper’s hand shook as she raised her coffee cup. Then she said, not to Maud but very quietly to her piece of pie, “He doesn’t live with me; he lives with his father. His father has custody.”

  Maud returned the pie to the display case, looking at, and then away from, Elizabeth Hooper, who was clearly upset. Maud licked her lips and tried to say that she couldn’t imagine that someone like her, who went to so much trouble to see her son, could not get custody. God, look at Shirl. Well, that wasn’t fair, she guessed; Shirl actually did put up with a lot from Joey and had raised him all by herself. . . .

  And Dr. Hooper once again seemed to be reading Maud’s mind, for she said, “I could have had custody; I didn’t want it.” She had affixed a stamp to a postcard and now brought her balled-up fist down on it. Then she looked at Maud with a thin smile. “I’m a child psychiatrist, and that’s how smart I was.”

  Dr. Hooper hitched her bag over her shoulder and collected her check.

  TWO

  He looked down at the drawer of knives he held on his lap and thought of the loneliness and emptiness and the ones who had caused it, and were still causing it, and that it was only right they should have to pay.

  It was an ordinary kitchen drawer with a white enamel front. He had pulled it out by its ridged aluminum handle so that he could sit with it and hold it like a baby or a pet. He was sitting on the green slat-backed kitchen chair, his long hands resting either side of the drawer, looking down at the knives, different sizes, different shapes, and the cylindrical, tempered-steel sharpener he used to keep them carefully honed.

  Now, he picked up the butcher knife, ran his thumb lightly along its edge, and had to suck the droplet of blood that made a tiny bubble even with so light a stroke. He remembered he had been in a bit of temper when he’d drawn that one swiftly from side to side down the sharpener. He tried the paring knife, the cleaver, the cook’s knife, the hook-bill of the knife for dismembering chicken, the two utility knives. The serrated bread knife he didn’t bother with. It was no good to him.

  His mind was a black well you could drop a body in, and because it was so deep in this blackness, the sound at the bottom would be no more than the splash of a small rock. A well, a vault, cellar, cavern—empty of light.

  Not even as much light as he had been able to see when he was very small under his shut bedroom door after his mother had gone. Just a strand of light. He would crawl out of bed and lie facing the door, his eyes seeing nothing under it but that strand of light, could not see his mother, had thought she was gone forever. He would lie there willing her to come back, thinking the sheer force of his will, his concentration, would make her return to his room, that he would hear what had been the indistinct and distant clap of her slippers down the hall growing more distinct, coming back and stopping at his door again. But he figured his mind must not be strong enough, that there was some weakness there, for she didn’t come back.

  He would lie there on his side, then, looking at the band of light under the door. If he didn’t do this, the dark would swallow him, for even if his eyes adjusted to it the things in his room—lumpy chair, bureau, hump between bedposts, posts themselves—would be barely distinguishable, without definition, and melt back into darkness from mere staring to bring them out of it. His best friend back then had been terrified of the Thing in his closet at night, a Thing he’d described as a monster with teeth like panes of glass that he could feel shatter when the monster bit into his throat.

  But he, he had never been afraid of a Thing in the closet; he had been afraid of the closet itself, of the darkness and the loneliness. For they always came together. The loneliness was not quite as bad in the daylight hours, because he was out of the house doing something. He could feel it, though, always, even then, as a dull ache; for although he was around others, he never felt, being around them, what he needed. What he needed was intimacy.

  Everyone needed it, of course; he was no different from anyone else, except that his need was consuming. Loneliness drove him to desperation. He wondered why the doctors left it out of the list: sex, hunger, thirst. Would he kill someone for a glass of water, for a can of beans, for a good fuck? Sex? Why, sex had hardly anything to do with it.

  His hands once again returned to the sides of the drawer; he looked through to the larder, looked at the spigot slowly dripping water (he’d have to fix that washer), and thought, reasonably, as he’d never been dying of hunger or thirst, he couldn’t say what that would make a man do. And, of course, when it came to sex, he supposed they weren’t actually talking about killing for it. He frowned. But, then, didn’t animals . . . ?

  Looking down at the knives that speared back the reflected light of the bright bulb above, he shook his head, trying to clear it. In his childhood room there had been such a light; it would sway slightly above his bed until his mother pulled the metal cord. Sometimes she would lie down with him and he wouldn’t even care about her breath, heavy with whisky and cigarettes. No, he wouldn’t care.

  God knows he had tried other ways to get what he needed. To get rid of the loneliness and find the intimacy. Even the word seemed warm and slightly liquid. If only his speech hadn’t been tangled, stupid words hitting, bashing, mangling one another in their rush toward friendship, toward intimacy; and if that hadn’t made the women look down, look away, even step back, almost as if (now the face that turned to the drawer had to smile) . . .

  As if he was holding a knife on them.

  • • •

  He hated that he had to show them the knife, that they had to know that they were going to die, for although it didn’t completely spoil the end, it made it sad, much more difficult. But there was no other way, for they had to see what they’d done and what they were guilty of. How strange was the often held idea that just before the moment of death, in the moments of dying, the expression in a dying person’s eyes grew remote, clouded, shuttered. That a shade snapped down, or curtains suddenly pulled to.

  To him, it was just the other way around. It was the moment when the shade snapped up, the musty curtains suddenly opened to let in the light. It was the moment of profoundest and deepest intimacy. There was no holding back.

  And he had tried, always, and gently, to explain this. Although his holding them had to be rough (how else could he keep them still?), his voice had been gentle (which in itself was a small miracle), and the words had flowed from his mouth like syrup, smoothly. Naturally, they fought it. Some women had incredible strength.

  He was sorry that they couldn’t, by an act of a merciful God (but, then, there was no God, not really), simply die in his arms peacefully. Yet, if they had, would they have understood? Would their minds have been full of him and the fear of the dark? Or would they be thinking about some other person, some lost place, a long, green meadow full of sunlight? They would not be thinking of him.

  He drove the paring knife into the chair arm so hard the blade broke from the handle; and realizing he’d done this without meaning to, that the loneliness had driven him to this, he started to weep, wiped his sleeve along his eyes, placed the broken knife carefully on the table.

  Taking the drawer out, smoothing his thumb along the knife-edges, childish fits of rage—he knew the signs. That the loneliness, the need for intimacy were overwhelming him again and he would have to do something.

  But they hadn’t screamed.

  It had surprised him that they hadn’t screamed. Probably because he had been just an old, sad face for the most part, and then, after he had explained and pinioned them and brought out the knife, any scream had been locked in their throats, frozen there, choking them. Yet he had usually had to clamp his hand over their mouths because of the pleas, the whimpe
rs, the “no”s (no no no no no no) that he was loath to hear.

  Except Tony. Antoinette. When he brought the knife from under his jacket, she’d looked at him and laughed. Laughed fit to kill. (Now he bowed his head in shame for that lousy pun.) She was something, wasn’t she? Had it angered him she’d laughed? Hadn’t taken his reasons seriously? Of course not; he wasn’t childish. He had laughed with her, out there in the woods. It had been good to laugh; the idea that that last long look of understanding might be one of pleasure was infinitely preferable to the terror later in the eyes of Loreen Butts.

  But her laughter had run down like an old car sputtering to a stop when he’d held her against the oak tree. Carefully and slowly he’d explained he wasn’t going to rape her; it wasn’t sex he was after. It was closeness.

  Understand?

  Tony had looked at him wildly, her eyes wild over the top of his hand where he felt the hot breath coming.

  And then slowly she nodded.

  Is that what you want? You want me to fuck you? You want sex?

  The look in her eyes changed to something sly and knowing. Again she nodded.

  That’s what you want, you can have it, of course. Die happy.

  To his astonishment, as he stood against her still with his hand over her mouth, she took her own two away where she’d been dragging, clawing at his, and ripped the top of her cheap rayon blouse down with one hand; the other yanked at his fly. He was hard as a rock.

  With her head she was trying to nod toward the ground.

  You want it on the ground?

  Swiftly, she nodded her head, three, four times.

  He held the knife to her throat, lowered her to the ground, where she squirmed, panted, and he spread the fingers of his hand and heard her begging for it. He was enthralled; he was fascinated. He brought the knife down from her throat, held the cold steel across her nipples, which excited her even more, and he looked down at his hard cock and shoved it in . . .