The Shipping News   ::   Proulx E. Annie

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As a hot mouth warms a cold spoon, Petal warmed Quoyle. He stumbled away from his rented trailer, his mess of dirty laundry and empty ravioli cans, to painful love, his heart scarred forever by tattoo needles pricking the name of Petal Bear.

There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering.

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Petal Bear was crosshatched with longings, but not, after they were married, for Quoyle. Desire reversed to detestation like a rubber glove turned inside out. In another time, another sex, she would have been a Genghis Khan. When she needed burning cities, the stumbling babble of captives, horses exhausted from tracing the reeling borders of her territories, she had only petty triumphs of sexual encounter. Way it goes, she said to herself. In your face, she said.

By day she sold burglar alarms at Northern Security, at night, became a woman who could not be held back from strangers’ rooms, who would have sexual conjunction whether in stinking rest rooms or mop cupboards. She went anywhere with unknown men. Flew to nightclubs in distant cities. Made a pornographic video while wearing a mask cut from a potato chip bag. Sharpened her eyeliner pencil with the paring knife, let Quoyle wonder why his sandwich cheese was streaked with green.

It was not Quoyle’s chin she hated, but his cringing hesitancy, as though he waited for her anger, expected her to make him suffer. She could not bear his hot back, the bulk of him in the bed. The part of Quoyle that was wonderful was, unfortunately, attached to the rest of him. A walrus panting on the near pillow. While she remained a curious equation that attracted many mathematicians.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, his hairy leg grazing her thigh. In the darkness his pleading fingers crept up her arm. She shuddered, shook his hand away.

“Don’t do that!”

She did not say “Lardass,” but he heard it. There was nothing about him she could stand. She wished him in the pit. Could not help it any more than he could help his witless love.

Quoyle stiff-mouthed, feeling cables tighten around him as though drawn up by a ratchet. What had he expected when he married? Not his parents’ discount-store life, but something like Partridge’s backyard-friends, grill smoke, affection and its unspoken language. But this didn’t happen. It was as though he were a tree and she a thorny branch grafted onto his side that flexed in every wind, flailing the wounded bark.

What he had was what he pretended.

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Four days after Bunny was born the baby-sitter came to loll in front of the television set-Mrs. Moosup with arms too fat for sleeves-and Petal hauled a dress that wouldn’t easily show stains over her slack belly and leaking breasts and went out to see what she could find. Setting a certain tone. And through her pregnancy with Sunshine the next year, fumed until the alien left her body.

Turmoil bubbled Quoyle’s dull waters. For it was he who drove the babies around, sometimes brought them to meetings, Sunshine in a pouch that strapped on his back, Bunny sucking her thumb and hanging on his trouser leg. The car littered with newspapers, tiny mittens, torn envelopes, teething rings. On the backseat a crust of toothpaste from a trodden tube. Soft-drink cans rolled and rolled.

Quoyle came into his rented house in the evenings. Some few times Petal was there; most often it was Mrs. Moosup doing overtime in a trance of electronic color and simulated life, smoking cigarettes and not wondering. The floor around her strewn with hairless dolls. Dishes tilted in the sink, for Mrs. Moosup said she was not a housemaid, nor ever would be.

Into the bathroom through a tangle of towels and electric cords, into the children’s room where he pulled down shades against the streetlight, pulled up covers against the night. Two cribs jammed close like bird cages. Yawning, Quoyle would swipe through some of the dishes to fall, finally, into the grey sheets and sleep. But did housework secretly, because Petal flared up if she caught him mopping and wiping as if he had accused her of something. Or other.

Once she telephoned Quoyle from Montgomery, Alabama.

“I’m down here in Alabama and nobody, including the bartender, knows how to make an Alabama Slammer.” Quoyle heard the babble and laughter of a barroom. “So listen, go in the kitchen and look on top of the fridge where I keep the Mr. Boston . They only got an old copy down here. Look up Alabama Slammer for me. I’ll wait.”

“Why don’t you come home?” he pleaded in the wretched voice. “I’ll make one for you.” She said nothing. The silence stretched out until he got the book and read the recipe, the memory of the brief month of love when she had leaned in his arms, the hot silk of her slip, flying through his mind like a harried bird.

“Thanks,” she said and hung up the phone.

There were bloody little episodes. Sometimes she pretended not to recognize the children.

“What’s that kid doing in the bathroom? I just went in to take a shower and some kid is sitting on the pot! Who the hell is she, anyway?” The television rattled with laughter.

“That’s Bunny,” said Quoyle. “That’s our daughter Bunny.” He wrenched out a smile to show he knew it was a joke. He could smile at a joke. He could.

“My God, I didn’t recognize her.” She yelled in the direction of the bathroom. “Bunny, is that really you?”

“Yes.” A belligerent voice.

“There’s another one, too, isn’t there? Well, I’m out of here. Don’t look for me until Monday or whatever.”

She was sorry he loved her so desperately, but there it was.

“Look, it’s no good,” she said. “Find yourself a girlfriend-there’s plenty of women around.”

“I only want you,” said Quoyle. Miserably. Pleading. Licking his cuff.

“Only thing that’s going to work here is a divorce,” said Petal. He was pulling her under. She was pushing him over.

“No,” groaned Quoyle. “No divorce.”

“It’s your funeral,” said Petal. Irises silvery in Sunday light. The green cloth of her coat like ivy.

One night he worked a crossword puzzle in bed, heard Petal come in, heard the gutter of voices. Freezer door opened and closed, clink of the vodka bottle, sound of the television and, after a while, squeaking, squeaking, squeaking of the hide-a-bed in the living room and a stranger’s shout. The armor of indifference in which he protected his marriage was frail. Even after he heard the door close behind the man and a car drive away he did not get up but lay on his back, the newspaper rustling with each heave of his chest, tears running down into his ears.