Read Online Finding a Girl in America by Andre Dubus - Free Book Online Page B

the engine, then he thought of the street and the building where he lived, and by the time she turned on the heater he was trying to think of a way to keep her from taking him home.
    All the time she was talking. It was the first time she had stolen anything. Or anything worth a lot of money. He made himself smile by thinking of selling her to the men in the house; he thought of her sitting amid the stereos and television sets and bicycles. Then he heard her say something. She had asked if he was going to sell his old set so he could get some bucks out of the night too. He said he’d give the old one to a friend, and when she asked for directions he pointed ahead in despair. He meant to get out at the corner but when she said Here? and slowed for the turn he was awash in the loss of control which he fought so often and overcame so little, though he knew most people couldn’t tell by looking at him or even talking to him. She turned and climbed up the street, talking all the time, not about the street, the buildings, but about the stereo: or the stealing of it, and he knew from her voice she was repeating herself so she would not have to talk about what she saw. Or he felt she was. But that was not the worst. The worst was that he was so humiliated he could not trust what he felt, could not know if this dumb rich drunk girl was even aware of the street, and he knew there was no way out of this except to sleep and wake tomorrow in the bed that held his scent. He had been too long in that room (this was his third year), too long in the building: there were six apartments; families lived in the five larger ones; one family had a man: a pumper of gasoline, checker of oil and water, wiper of windshields. Mike thought of his apartment as a room, although there was a kitchen he rarely used, a bathroom, and a second room that for weeks at a time he did not enter. Some mornings when he woke he felt he had lived too long in his body. He smoked a joint in bed and showered and shaved and left the room, the building, the street of these buildings. Once free of the street he felt better: he liked feeling and smelling clean; he walked into town. The girl stopped the Volvo at another of his sighed directions and touched his thigh and said she would help him bring the stuff in. He said no and loaded everything in his arms and left her.
    Robin had wanted to go to his room too and he had never let her and now for the first time grieving for her lost flesh, he wished he had taken her there. Saw her there at nights and on the weekends, the room—rooms: he saw even the second room—smelling of paint; saw buckets and brushes on newspaper awaiting her night and weekend hand, his hand too: the two of them painting while music played not from his tinny-sounding transistor but a stereo that was simply there in his apartment with the certainty of something casually purchased with cash neither from the employment office nor his occasional and tense forays into the world of jobs: dishwashing at Timmy’s, the quick and harried waitresses bringing the trays of plates which he scraped and racked and hosed and slid into the washer, hot water in the hot kitchen wetting his clothes; he scrubbed the pots by hand and at the night’s end he mopped the floor and the bartender sent him a bottle of beer; but he only worked there in summers, when the students were gone. He saw Robin painting the walls beside him, their brushstrokes as uniform as the beating of their hearts. He was approaching the bar next to the bus station. He did not like it because the band was too loud, and the people were losers, but he often went there anyway, because he could sit and drink and watch the losers dancing without having to make one gesture he had to think about, the way he did at Timmy’s when he sat with the girls and was conscious of his shoulders and arms and hands, of his eyes and mouth as if he could see them, so that he smiled—and coolly, he