It

sure of himself, confident of the future, unconcerned with the pitfalls their parents saw strewn all about ‘the kids.’ And in the end it was his confidence rather than their fears which had been justified. In July of 1972, with the ink barely dry on her diploma, Patty had landed a job teaching shorthand and business English in Traynor, a small town forty miles south of Atlanta. When she thought of how she had come by that job, it always struck her as a little — well, eerie. She had made a list of forty possibles from the ads in the teachers’ journals, then had written forty letters over five nights — eight each evening — requesting further information on the job, and an application for each. Twenty-two replies indicated that the positions had been filled. In other cases, a more detailed explanation of the skills needed made it clear she wasn’t in the running; applying would only be a waste of her time and theirs. She had finished with a dozen possibles. Each looked as likely as any other. Stanley had come in while she was puzzling over them and wondering if she could possibly manage to fill out a dozen teaching applications without going totally bonkers. He looked at
the strew of papers on the table and then tapped the letter from the Traynor Superintendent of Schools, a letter which to her looked no more or less encouraging than any of the others.
‘There,’ he said.
She looked up at him, startled by the simple certainty in his voice. ‘Do you know something about Georgia that I don’t?’
‘Nope. Only time I was ever there was at the movies.’
She looked at him, an eyebrow cocked.
‘Gone with the Wind. Vivien Leigh. Clark Gable. «I will think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is anothah day.» Do I sound like I come from the South, Patty?’
‘Yes. South Bronx. If you don’t know anything about Georgia and you’ve never been there, then why — ‘
‘Because it’s right.’
‘You can’t know that, Stanley.’
‘Sure I can,’ he said simply. ‘I do. ‘ Looking at him, she had seen he wasn’t joking: he really meant it. She had felt a ripple of unease go up her back.
‘How do you know?’
He had been smiling a little. Now the smile faltered, and for a moment he had seemed puzzled. His eyes had darkened, as if he looked inward, consulting some interior device which ticked and whirred correctly but which, ultimately, he understood no more than the average man understands the workings of the watch on his wrist.
‘The tur tle couldn’t help us,’ he said suddenly. He said that quite clearly. She heard it. That inward look — that look of surprised musing — was still on his face, and it was starting to scare her.
‘Stanley? What are you talking about? Stanley?
He jerked. She had been eating peaches as she went over the applications, and his hand struck the dish. It fell on the floor and broke. His eyes seemed to clear.
‘Oh, shit! I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right. Stanley — what were you talking about?’
‘I forget,’ he said. ‘But I think we ought to think Georgia, baby-love.’
‘But — ‘
‘Trust me,’ he said, so she did.
Her interview had gone smashingly. She had known she had the job when she got on the train back to New York. The head of the Business Department had taken an instant liking to Patty, and she to him; she had almost heard the click. The confirming letter had come a week later. The Traynor Consolidated School Department could offer her $9,200 and a probationary contract.
‘You are going to starve,’ Herbert Blum said when his daughter told him she intended to take the job. ‘And you will be hot while you starve.’
‘Fiddle-dee-dee, Scarlett,’ Stanley said when she told him what her father had said. She had been furious, near tears, but now she began to giggle, and Stanley swept her into his arms.
Hot they had been; starved they had not. They were married on August 19th, 1972. Patty Uris had gone to her marriage bed a virgin. She had slipped naked between cool sheets at a resort hotel in the Poconos, her mood turbulent and stormy — lightning-flares of wanting and delicious lust, dark clouds of fright. When Stanley slid into bed beside her, ropy with muscle, his penis an exclamation point rising from gingery pubic hair, she had whispered: ‘Don’t hurt me, dear.’
‘I will never hurt you,’ he said as he took her in his arms, and it was a promise he had kept faithfully until May 27th, 1985 — the night of the bath.
Her teaching had gone well. Stanley got a job driving a bakery truck for one hundred dollars a week. In November of that year, when the Traynor Flats Shopping Center opened,
he got a job with the H & R Block office out there for a hundred and fifty. Their combined income was then