The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

I wrote ‘Premium Harmony’ shortly after reading more than two dozen Carver stories, and it should come as no surprise that it has the feel of a Carver story. If I had written it at twenty, I think it would have been no more than a blurred copy of a much better writer. Because it was written at sixty-two, my own style bleeds through, for better or worse. Like many great American writers (Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen come to mind), Carver seemed to have little sense of humor. I, on the other hand, see the humor in almost everything. The humor here is black, but in my opinion, that’s often the best kind. Because – dig it – when it comes to death, what can you do but laugh?

Premium Harmony

They’ve been married for ten years and for a long time everything was okay – swell – but now they argue. Now they argue quite a lot. It’s really all the same argument. It has circularity. It is, Ray sometimes thinks, like a dog track. When they argue they’re like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. You go past the same scenery time after time, but you don’t see the landscape. You see the rabbit.

He thinks it might be different if they’d had kids, but she couldn’t have kids. They finally got tested, and that’s what the doctor said. It was her problem. Something in her. A year or so after that, he bought her a dog, a Jack Russell she named Biznezz. Mary would spell it for people who asked. She wants everyone to get the joke. She loves that dog, but now they argue anyway.

They’re going to Walmart for grass seed. They’ve decided to sell the house – they can’t afford to keep it – but Mary says they won’t get far until they do something about the plumbing and make the lawn nice. She says those bald patches make it look shanty Irish. It’s been a hot summer with no rain to speak of. Ray tells her grass seed won’t grow the lawn without rain no matter how good the grass seed is. He says they should wait.

‘Then another year goes by and we’re still there,’ she says. ‘We can’t wait another year, Ray. We’ll be bankrupts.’

When she talks, Biz looks at her from his place in the backseat. Sometimes he looks at Ray when Ray talks, but not always. Mostly he looks at Mary.

‘What do you think?’ he says. ‘It’s going to rain so you don’t have to worry about going bankrupt?’

‘We’re in it together, unless you forgot,’ she says. They’re driving through Castle Rock now. It’s pretty dead. What Ray calls ‘the economy’ has disappeared from this part of Maine. The Walmart is on the other side of town, near the high school where Ray is a janitor. The Walmart has its own stoplight. People joke about it.

‘Penny wise and pound foolish,’ he says. ‘You ever hear that one?’

‘A million times, from you.’

He grunts. He can see the dog in the rearview mirror, watching her. Sometimes he hates the way Biz does that. It comes to him that neither of them knows what they are talking about. It is a depressing thought.

‘And pull in at the Quik-Pik,’ she says. ‘I want to get a kickball for Tallie’s birthday.’ Tallie is her brother’s little girl. Ray supposes that makes her his niece, although he’s not sure that’s right, since all the blood is on Mary’s side.

‘They have balls at Walmart,’ Ray says, ‘and everything’s cheaper at Wally World.’

‘The ones at Quik-Pik are purple. Purple is her favorite color. I can’t be sure there’ll be purple at Walmart.’

‘If there aren’t, we’ll stop at the Quik-Pik on the way back.’ He feels like a great weight is pressing down on his head. She’ll get her way. She always does on things like this. Marriage is like a football game and he’s quarterbacking the underdog team. He has to pick his spots. Make short passes.

‘It’ll be on the wrong side coming back,’ she says – as if they are caught in a torrent of city traffic instead of rolling through an almost deserted little town where most of the stores are for sale. ‘I’ll just dash in and get the ball and dash right back out.’

At two hundred pounds, Ray thinks, your dashing days are over, honey.

‘They’re only ninety-nine cents,’ she says. ‘Don’t be such a pinchpenny.’

Don’t be so pound foolish, he thinks, but what he says is, ‘Buy me a pack of smokes while you’re in there. I’m out.’

‘If you quit, we’d have an extra forty dollars a week.’

He saves up and pays a friend in South Carolina to ship him a dozen cartons at a time. They’re twenty dollars a carton cheaper in South Carolina. That’s a lot of money, even in this day and age. It’s not like he doesn’t try to economize. He has told her this before and will again, but what’s the point? In one ear, out the other. Nothing to slow down what he says in the middle.