Atwood Margaret - The Heart Goes Last

Sleeping in the car is cramped. Being a third-hand Honda, its no palace to begin with. If it was a van theyd have more room, but fat chance of affording one of those, even back when they thought they had money. Stan says theyre lucky to have any kind of a car at all, which is true, but their luckiness doesnt make the car any bigger.

Charmaine feels that Stan ought to sleep in the back because he needs more space it would only be fair, hes larger but he has to be in the front in order to drive them away fast in an emergency. He doesnt trust Charmaines ability to function under those circumstances: he says shed be too busy screaming to drive. So Charmaine can have the more spacious back, though even so she has to curl up like a snail because she cant exactly stretch out.

They keep the windows mostly closed because of the mosquitoes and the gangs and the solitary vandals. The solitaries dont usually have guns or knives if there are those kinds of weapons you have to get out of there triple fast but theyre more likely to be bat-shit crazy, and a crazy person with a piece of metal or a rock or even a high-heeled shoe can do a lot of damage. Theyll think youre a demon or the undead or a vampire whore, and no kind of reasonable thing you might do to calm them down will cancel out that opinion. The best thing with crazy people, Grandma Win used to say the only thing, really is to be somewhere else.

With the windows shut except for a crack at the top, the air gets dead and supersaturated with their own smells. There arent many places where they can grab a shower or wash their clothes, and that makes Stan irritable. It makes Charmaine irritable too, but she tries her best to stamp on that feeling and look on the bright side, because whats the use of complaining?

Whats the use of anything? she often thinks. But whats the use of even thinking Whats the use? So instead she says, Honey, lets just cheer up!

Why? Stan might say. Give me one good fucking reason to cheer the fuck up. Or he might say, Honey, just shut it! mimicking her light, positive tone, which is mean of him. He can lean to the mean when hes irritated, but hes a good man underneath. Most people are good underneath if they have a chance to show their goodness: Charmaine is determined to keep on believing that. A shower is a help for the showing of the goodness in a person, because, as Grandma Win was in the habit of saying, Cleanliness is next to godliness and godliness means goodliness.

That was among the other things she might say, such as Your mother didnt kill herself, that was just talk. Your daddy did the best he could but he had a lot to put up with and it got too much. You should try hard to forget those other things, because a mans not accountable when hes had too much to drink. And then she would say, Lets make popcorn!

And they would make the popcorn, and Grandma Win would say, Dont look out the window, sugar pie, you dont want to see what theyre doing out there. It isnt nice. They yell because they want to. Its self-expression. Sit here by me. It all worked out for the best, because look, here you are and were happy and safe now!

That didnt last, though. The happiness. The safeness. The now.

Where?

Stan twists in the front seat, trying to get comfortable. Not much fucking chance of that. So what can he do? Where can they turn? Theres no safe place, there are no instructions. Its like hes being blown by a vicious but mindless wind, aimlessly round and around in circles. No way out.

He feels so lonely, and sometimes having Charmaine with him makes him feel lonelier. Hes let her down.

He has a brother, true, but that would be a last resort. He and Conor had followed different paths was the polite way of saying it. A drunken midnight fight, with dickheads and douchebags and shit-for-brains freely exchanged, would be the impolite way of saying it, and it was in fact the way Conor had chosen during their last encounter. To be accurate, Stan had chosen that way too, though hed never had as foul a mouth as Con.

In Stans view his view at that time Conor was next door to a criminal. But in Cons view Stan was a dupe of the system, an ass-kisser, a farce, and a coward. Balls of a tadpole.

Wheres slippery Conor now, whats he doing? At least he wont have lost his job in the big financial-crash business-wrecking meltdown that turned this part of the country into a rust bucket: you cant lose your job if you dont have one. Unlike Stan, he hasnt been expelled, cast out, condemned to a life of frantic, grit-in-the-eyes, rancid-armpit wandering. He always lived off what he could mooch or filch from others, ever since he was a kid. Stan hasnt forgotten his Swiss Army knife that hed saved up for, his Transformer, his Nerf gun with the foam bullets: magical disappearances all, with Cons younger-brother head going shake shake shake from side to side, no way, who, me?

Stan wakes at night thinking for a moment that hes home in bed, or at least in a bed of some sort. He reaches for Charmaine, but she isnt there beside him and he finds himself inside the stinking car, needing a piss but afraid to unlock the door because of the voices yammering toward him and the footsteps crunching on gravel or thudding on asphalt, and maybe a fist thumping on the roof and a scarred, partly toothed face leering in the window: Lookit what we got! Cockfodder! Lets open er up! Gimme the crowbar!

And then Charmaines terrified little whisper: Stan! Stan! We need to go! We need to go right now! As if he couldnt figure that out for himself. He keeps the key in the ignition, always. Rev of motor, screech of tires, yelling and jeering, pounding of heart, and then what? More of the same in some other parking lot or sidestreet, somewhere else. It would be nice if he had a machine gun: nothing any smaller would even come close. As it is, his only weapon is flight.

He feels pursued by bad luck, as if bad luck is a feral dog, lurking along behind him, following his scent, lying in wait around corners. Peering out from under bushes to fix him with its evil yellow eye. Maybe what he needs is a witch doctor, some serious voodoo. Plus a couple of hundred bucks so they could spend a night in a motel, with Charmaine beside him instead of out of reach in the back seat. That would be the bare minimum: to wish for any more would be pushing it.

Charmaines commiseration makes it worse. She tries so hard. You are not a failure, she says. Just because we lost the house and were sleeping in the car, and you got She doesnt want to say fired. And you havent given up, at least youre looking for a job. Those things like losing the house, and, and those things have happened to a lot of people. To most people.