A Stillness in Bethlehem(83)

“Do you want a beer beer,” she asked him, “or do you want some of that stuff you brought home? That Molson’s Ale.”

“Molson’s Ale.”

“All right,” Candy said.

She walked past him and out into the kitchen, breathing carefully, telling herself to slow down. If all he’d wanted was one of his ordinary Budweisers, she wouldn’t have been able to bring it off. The Budweisers were in the refrigerator. The six-pack of Molson’s Ale was on the back porch, just off the landing that led to the cellar, two steps down from the kitchen through a narrow door. There was a lightbulb screwed into a socket on the ceiling of that landing, and they had a ritual about it. Since Candy was short and small, she wasn’t supposed to be able to reach the bulb to change it. Since Reggie was tall and big, he was supposed to do it for her. This was one of the many ways in which he brought home his point, which was that men and women were very different, and that men were stronger and taller and better than women, and that all the problems in the world would be solved if women just learned to accept the fact. There had been times when Candy thought the entire Women’s Liberation Movement had been invented to give Reggie something to argue about. Reggie and her stepfather.

Candy went down the two steps to the landing and pulled the knob on the outside door. It held, meaning the door was really shut, not half-open the way Reggie sometimes left it. She reached up and turned the switch lock to locked, then threw the bolt. Then she got the old-fashioned key that worked the center lock from its place on the ledge and locked that lock, too, putting the key in her pocket. Out in the living room, Reggie was getting restless.

“What the hell are you doing out there?” he bellowed at her.

Candy came up the two steps into the kitchen again and called back. “There’s a ton of crap on the landing. I’m just getting out the door.”

There was not, as a matter of fact, a ton of crap on the landing. There was not much of anything at all. Candy waited, but there were no further sounds from Reggie, and she assumed her explanation had held water for the moment. The moment was all she really needed. She went back down to the landing and reached into the stairwell for the broom. When she got it out, she held its handle in the air and aimed for the bulb. The first time, shockingly enough, she missed. She almost panicked. It was such an easy target, such a close thing to hit. If she couldn’t do that much, what could she do? Then she tried it again and it worked. The glass shattered. The shards fell onto her hands and her blouse and glittered even in this place where there was almost no light.

Candy took a deep breath and made herself as loud as she could. “Damn,” she said. “Damn, damn, damn.”

“Candy?”

Candy dropped the broom and came up into the kitchen again. It was very important that she not be on the landing. It was very important that she not be anywhere near the cellar door. She stepped into the middle of the kitchen and called, “Reggie?”

“What is it?”

“I need some help. I was moving some things around on the landing, trying to get to the back porch, where your Molson’s is. I picked up the broom and the handle broke the bulb.”

“Broke the bulb?”

“It’s just a lightbulb, Reggie.”

“Nothing’s just a lightbulb,” Reggie said. “It all costs money. It all costs a lot of money.”

They kept the spare lightbulbs in the cabinet next to the kitchen sink. Candy got one out—careful to make sure it was a sixty-watt bulb; she didn’t want to set him off with the wrong kind of bulb—and stood back a little farther with the bulb held in her hand, held out, like an offering. Reggie came lumbering in to the kitchen with a scowl on his face, and Candy saw it. Always before, she had thought of their fights as inevitable, as stimulus-response, as her fault. She said something or did something to set him off, and then he was out of control. Now she realized there was nothing she could have done or failed to do, because he looked for excuses to start his fights, he began wanting to hit her and then he found a reason he could pin it on. That was what he was doing now. He didn’t care about the bulb. He didn’t care all that much about the Molson’s Ale, either. He just wanted to punch her into a mass of pulp and blood.

“Broke the bulb,” he muttered, taking the new one she was offering him. “Stupid bitch. Stupid goddamned bitch.”

“It was just an accident, Reggie. I picked up the broom and the top of the handle hit the light. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I don’t know what you do on purpose,” Reggie said. “You have so many goddamned accidents.”