Rocky & Helen, Part 2

Seriously
by Lucia Nevai

(Page 2 of 2)

"It's what I've been telling you for thirty years," she said. There was peace between them on this point. "So who died?"

"Al."

"Al died?" She and Rocky looked each other through and through, enjoying a private joke of long standing. "See if you can help her," Helen said as if it were a challenge. "She doesn't know what she wants."

"I do, too!" I said. My ears were getting red the way they did when my sister lectured me.

"Hold on, calm down, just relax," Rocky said. He folded his hands on his paperwork and swiveled toward me in his swivel chair. I felt as if I was about to receive pastoral counseling. "What is it you need?"

"I want prices. I'm starting an art gallery in the old feed store."

"You're the new girl," Rocky informed me. Girl. I was pushing thirty. "What kind of coverage?" I read again from my page of notes. His expression grew befuddled. "Let me see that," he said, reaching for the paper in my hand. I gave it to him. "Whose writing is this?"

"Mine."

"There is no such thing as a liability floater," he said scornfully. "You get the blanket liability with the policy."

"Who told you we had a liability floater?" Helen asked with indignation.

"My sister," I answered idiotically.

"Look, miss," Rocky said. "You're going to sell what-the Mona Lisa?" He and Helen both erupted in long, phlegmy laughing fits.

Helen wiped her eyes. "Where is your husband at?" she asked to humiliate me.

"If she had one, she don't no more," Rocky told her. Single girls never settle on the crossroads, I learned from Henry Storey, who owned the antiques store next to me.

"Well, how did you intend to pay for this insurance?" Helen asked, as if only men had money.

"What do you care as long as the premium is paid?" I said.

"We screen everybody," Helen said. "To write a bad policy costs us. And the company don't like to see a lot of bad policies from one agent. Do they, Rocky?"

"No, they do not," he said without looking up. In the margin of my notepaper he had drawn the word THEFT in box capitals and was now shading each letter. Perhaps he had wanted to be a commercial artist.

"And what exactly is it you want to insure, anyhow?" Helen asked, blinking rapidly to brace herself against the poverty of my reply.

For once, I was ready with a good answer. "My Nikons are worth two thousand dollars."

"Two thousand, Helen," Rocky said. Helen stopped blinking and inched toward me between the desk and the cartons, as if to get closer to that amount of money. "How much rent do you pay Shirley?" she asked.

"Three-fifty a month."

"You should have asked us. We could have done better for you," Helen said. "We know of a few rentals, all better than that place you're in. Do you have an appraisal for the cameras?"

"Yes."

"Rocky, you've got to go down there," Helen ordered.

He reared back from his lettering, cocking his head to one side in admiration.

"Well, does she know we close for lunch?" he asked.

"We close at twelve," Helen told me. "Rocky will come down after lunch," Helen said. "He needs to write up your full replacement value."

"Fine," I said. I was free until three. Henry Storey was taking me bottle digging that afternoon. He had stumbled on a cache of antique garbage buried in a field nearby-he wouldn't say where. "There's bottle collectors in this town who'd like to get their hands on this stuff," he said. He'd showed me a pale blue-green mason jar recovered from the site, so old there were dozens of tiny bubbles trapped in the glass. "Worth money," he said, holding it up to the light for me.

Rocky and Helen locked up for lunch, climbed into their little nondescript sedan, and drove home-across the highway.

I walked back to the crossroads. I dragged my feet. I felt transparent: a girl with long legs and no history, solemn, detached, unproductive. Frothy, spermy Queen Anne's lace flowered like fireworks along the ditch.

Back in my gallery, I came to an obvious conclusion: insurance was premature. I didn't want Rocky in there estimating my full replacement value until the floors were done, the walls were painted, and the recessed lighting installed. I looked up the Shurberry residence in the phone book-no number. I called Information-they were unlisted. I made a little sign, CLOSED DUE TO HEAT, and taped it to the front door.

I went into my back room, took off the dress, and pulled on my cutoffs. I felt like myself again. I made a tomato sandwich, then flopped down on my bed, reached under the pillow for Boz's worn black T-shirt, and draped it over my face. I loved his smell. There was a foresty cosmetics element, probably aftershave; a male element, probably sweat; and something invisible and powerfully appealing, the essence of Boz. Three more days before our next motel afternoon. I tossed from side to side, arching my back. I could drive myself crazy this way, but this afternoon I didn't want to, so I sat up and shook it off. This, not art, was the real business of my life, this slow, riveting revelation of a sexual self, unfolded to me tryst by tryst by a man who felt the same thing happening to him. Boz had given me his grandfather's gold pocket watch as a token of love, but because there were people in and around Wickley who actually knew that watch by sight, I wasn't allowed to wear it where it could be seen. True, he was still married. But wasn't a token supposed to be something that could be seen? I needed a gesture from him. I needed to feel sure.

I heard Rocky drive up, knock on the front door, ring the buzzer for a full sixty seconds, pound on the display window, ring the buzzer again, call out, knock on the glass, and finally leave.

Henry came to the back door a little after three. His appearance was always eccentric, but now, with two shovels over his shoulder, a large burlap bag hanging down his back, and an old bent-up gray fedora shading his eyes, he looked mythic. "Hey, I want a hat, too," I said. He went next door and found a companion fedora that was too big for my head, so he took it and gave me his.

"Do you think you could bring us a beer?" he asked. I stuck a bottle into each of my back pockets. We tramped down the hill behind our stores. The streambed was low, down to a trickle. We followed it south a ways to the giant culvert under County Route 1, big enough to walk through. It was cool and dark inside. A shallow pool of dark water had collected. Henry edged his way over the stones.

"Know what?" he said, his voice echoing. "Don't slip."

I wasn't paying much attention to where exactly we were going. I climbed the hill behind Henry. He stopped and jabbed his spade into the field and started to dig. There we were, not a hundred feet from the State Farm Insurance office.

Helen saw us first. Her mouth was going a mile a minute as she and Rocky edged their way between the cartons for a better look. My first reflex was to hide. I tried to dig with my back to them, my face in the shadow of the fedora. I felt as if I'd been playing hooky, as if Rocky might pick up the phone right there and then to call my sister, saying, "She's goofing off. She's not getting the insurance from me you told her to get."

"What's eating them?" Henry said.

"I just stood them up," I said.

"That's rich," he said. "Oh boy, is that rich. They have even less of a notion than you about how to run a business." He went back to his digging.

Henry unearthed a beautiful cobalt blue bottle, cylindrical, with a silver cap. I found a tiny brown one with half the label still intact: Carter's Little Liver Pills.

I was brushing the dirt off the lip when I saw the red Mercury. Boz was driving slowly by the gallery, hoping for a glimpse of me, his red taillights brightening with desire with each tap of the brakes. I stood riveted to the hillside in a state of unwise exhilaration that began in the soles of my feet and ended in the tips of my hair, watching the red car disappear over the hill. I opened our beers.

Henry found twenty-eight bottles and I found twelve. Rocky and Helen stayed with us, chain-smoking shoulder to shoulder at the window. Every time I looked up, Helen's mouth was still going. They looked so flat, gray, and stale, trapped in their marriage behind the glass, that I felt a rush of tenderness. I hoped the Chuzzners weren't sitting by the phone.

Copyright © 2004 by Lucia Nevai

About the Author

Lucia Nevai's short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, the Iowa Review, New England Review, and other periodicals. She is the author of two collections of stories, Star Game, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Normal. Born in Iowa, Nevai now lives in upstate New York.