The Times Are Never So Bad by Andre Dubus Read Free Book Online Page A

certainly she felt passion, so maybe her sacramental life was not at all easy. Maybe waking up and jogging weren’t either; and she would remember her own high school years when, if you wanted friends and did not want to do what the friends did, you had to be very strong. So those times when she envied, then scorned Margaret ended with her wondering if perhaps all of Margaret’s life was good because she willed it.
    Polly went to Mass every Sunday, but did not receive communion because she had not been in the state of grace for a long time, and she did not confess because she knew that she could not be absolved of fornication and adultery while wearing an intrauterine device whose presence belied her firm intention of not sinning again. She was not certain that her lovemaking since the end of her marriage was a sin, or one serious enough to forbid her receiving, for she did not feel bad about it, except when she wished during and afterward that she had not gone to bed with someone, and that had to do with making a bad choice. She had never confessed her adultery while she was married to Raymond Yarborough, though she knew she had been wrong, had felt wicked as well as frightened; but, remembering now (she had filed for divorce and changed her name back to Comeau), her short affair with Vinnie when the marriage was in its final months was diminished by her sharper memory of Raymond yelling at her that she was a spoiled, fucked-up cunt not worth a shit to anybody, Raymond slapping her, and, on the last night, hitting her with his fist and leaving her unconscious on the bedroom floor, where she woke hearing Jerry Jeff Walker on the record player in the living room and a beer bottle landing on others in the wastebasket. Her car key was in there with him, so she climbed out the window and ran until she was nauseated and her legs were weak and trembling; then she walked, and in two hours she was home. She had to wake them to get in, and her mother put ice on her jaw, Margaret held her hand and stroked her hair, and her father took his gun and nightstick and drove to the apartment, but Raymond was gone in his jeep, taking with him his weights and bench and power stands, fishing rods and tackle box, two shotguns and a .22 rifle, the hunting knife he bought in memory of his brother, his knapsack and toilet articles and some clothes. When she moved from that apartment two weeks later, she filled a garbage bag with his clothes and Vietnam books, most of them hardcover, and left it on the curb; as she drove away, she looked in the rear view mirror at the green bulk and said aloud: ‘Adiós, motherfucker.’
    She also did not go to confession because, as well as not feeling bad about her sexual adventures, and knowing that she would not give them up anyway, she did believe that in some way her life was not a good one, but in a way the Church had not defined. Neither could she: even on those rare and mysterious nights when drinking saddened her and she went to bed drunk and disliking herself and woke hung over and regretful, she did not and could not know what about herself she disliked and regretted. So she could not confess, but she went to Mass with her family every Sunday and had gone when she lived alone, because it was one religious act she could perform, and she was afraid that neglecting it would finally lead her to a fearful loneliness she could not bear.
    Dressing for Mass was different from dressing for any other place, and she liked having her morning coffee and cigarette while, without anticipating drinks or dinner or a man or work or anything at all, she put on makeup and a dress and heels; and she liked entering the church where the large doors closed behind her and she walked down the aisle under the high, curved white ceiling, and between stained-glass windows in the white walls whose lower halves were dark brown wood, as the altar was and the large cross with a bronze Christ hanging from the wall behind