The Times Are Never So Bad by Andre Dubus Page A

alone in the kitchen, she waited, her mind like a blank movie screen, to know what she wanted to do with her day. She saw herself lying on a towel at the beach; shopping at the mall or in Boston; going to Steve’s house to swim in the lake or, if he wanted to run the boat, water-ski; wearing one of her new dresses and drinking at Timmy’s. That was it, on this hot day in July: she wanted to be the woman in a summer dress, sitting at the table by the window. She chose the salmon one with shoulder straps, cut to the top of her breasts and nearly to the small of her back. Then she took the pistol from the drawer of her bedside table and put it in her purse. By one o’clock she was at the table, sipping her first vodka and tonic, opening a pack of cigarettes, amused at herself as she tasted lime and smelled tobacco, because she still loved smoking and drinking as she had ten years ago when they were secret pleasures, still at times (and today was one) felt in the lifted glass and fondled pack a glimmer of promise from out there beyond the window and the town, as if the pack and glass were conduits between the mysterious sensuous rhythms of the world and her own.
    She looked out the window at people in cars and walking in the hot sunlight. Al was the afternoon bartender, a man in his fifties, who let her sit quietly, only talking to her when she went to the bar for another drink. Men came in out of the heat, alone or in pairs, and drank a beer and left. She drank slowly, glanced at the men as they came and went, kept her back to the bar, listened to them talking with Al. For the first two hours, while she had three drinks, her mood was the one that had come to her at the kitchen table. Had someone approached and spoken, she would have blinked at the face while she waited for the person’s name to emerge from wherever her mind had been. She sat peacefully looking out the window, and at times, when she realized that she was having precisely the afternoon she had wanted, and how rare it was now and had been for years to have the feeling you had wanted and planned for, her heart beat faster with a sense of freedom, of generosity; and in those moments she nearly bought the bar a round, but did not, knowing then someone would talk to her, and what she had now would be lost, dissipated into an afternoon of babble and laughter. But the fourth drink shifted something under her mood, as though it rested on a foundation that vodka had begun to dissolve.
    Now when she noticed her purse beside her hand, she did not think of money but of the pistol. Looking out at people passing on foot or in cars, she no longer saw each of them as someone who loved and hoped under that brilliant, hot sky; they became parts again, as the cars did, and the Chevrolet building across the street where behind the glass front girls spoke into telephones and salesmen talked to couples, and as the sky itself did: parts of this town, the boundaries of her life.
    She saw her life as, at best, a small circle: one year as a commuting student, driving her mother’s car twenty minutes to Merrimack College, a Catholic school with secular faculty, leaving home in the morning and returning after classes as she had since kindergarten, discovering in that year—or forcing her parents to discover what she had known since ninth grade—that she was not a student, simply because she was not interested. She could learn anything they taught, and do the work, and get the grades, but in college she was free to do none of this, and she chose to do only enough to accumulate eight Cs and convince her parents that she was, not unlike themselves, a person whose strengths were not meant to be educated in schools.
    She did not know why she was not interested. In June, when her first and last year of college was a month behind her, she remembered it with neither fondness nor regret, as she might have recalled movies she had seen with boys she did not love. She had