That Feeling You Can Only Say What It Is In French.pdf

That Feeling, You Can Only Say

What It Is in French

Floyd, what’s that over there? Oh shit.

The man’s voice speaking these words was vaguely familiar, but

the words themselves were just a disconnected snip of dialogue, the

kind of thing you heard when you were channel-surﬁng with the

remote. There was no one named Floyd in her life. Still, that was the

start. Even before she saw the little girl in the red pinafore, there

were those disconnected words.

But it was the little girl who brought it on strong. “Oh-oh, I’m

getting that feeling,” Carol said.

The girl in the pinafore was in front of a country market called

Carson’s— BEER , WINE , GROC , FRESH BAIT , LOTTERY —crouched down

with her butt between her ankles and the bright-red apron-dress

tucked between her thighs, playing with a doll. The doll was yellow-

haired and dirty, the kind that’s round and stuffed and boneless in the

body.

“What feeling?” Bill asked.

“You know. The one you can only say what it is in French. Help

me here.”

“Déjà vu,” he said.

“That’s it,” she said, and turned to look at the little girl one more

time. She’ll have the doll by one leg, Carol thought. Holding it upside down

by one leg with its grimy yellow hair hanging down.

But the little girl had abandoned the doll on the store’s splintery

gray steps and had gone over to look at a dog caged up in the back

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STEPHEN KING

of a station wagon. Then Bill and Carol Shelton went around a

curve in the road and the store was out of sight.

“How much farther?” Carol asked.

Bill looked at her with one eyebrow raised and his mouth dim-

pled at one corner—left eyebrow, right dimple, always the same.

The look that said, You think I’m amused, but I’m really irritated. For the

ninety trillionth or so time in the marriage, I’m really irritated. You don’t

know that, though, because you can only see about two inches into me and

then your vision fails.

But she had better vision than he realized; it was one of the

secrets of the marriage. Probably he had a few secrets of his own.

And there were, of course, the ones they kept together.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been here.”

“But you’re sure we’re on the right road.”

“Once you get over the causeway and onto Sanibel Island, there’s

only one,” he said. “It goes across to Captiva, and there it ends. But

before it does we’ll come to Palm House. That I promise you.”

The arch in his eyebrow began to ﬂatten. The dimple began to ﬁll

in. He was returning to what she thought of as the Great Level. She

had come to dislike the Great Level, too, but not as much as the eye-

brow and the dimple, or his sarcastic way of saying “Excuse me?”

when you said something he considered stupid, or his habit of

pooching out his lower lip when he wanted to appear thoughtful and

deliberative.

“Bill?”

“Mmm?”

“Do you know anyone named Floyd?”

“There was Floyd Denning. He and I ran the downstairs snack

bar at Christ the Redeemer in our senior year. I told you about him,

didn’t I? He stole the Coke money one Friday and spent the week-

end in New York with his girlfriend. They suspended him and

expelled her. What made you think of him?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Easier than telling him that the Floyd with

whom Bill had gone to high school wasn’t the Floyd the voice in her

head was speaking to. At least, she didn’t think it was.

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EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

Second honeymoon, that’s what you call this, she thought, looking at

the palms that lined Highway 867, a white bird that stalked along

the shoulder like an angry preacher, and a sign that read SEMINOLE

WILDLIFE PARK , BRING A CARFUL FOR $10. Florida the Sunshine State.

Florida the Hospitality State. Not to mention Florida the Second-Honeymoon

State. Florida, where Bill Shelton and Carol Shelton, the former Carol

O’Neill, of Lynn, Massachusetts, came on their ﬁrst honeymoon twenty-ﬁve

years before. Only that was on the other side, the Atlantic side, at a little

cabin colony, and there were cockroaches in the bureau drawers. He couldn’t

stop touching me. That was all right, though, in those days I wanted to be

touched. Hell, I wanted to be torched like Atlanta in Gone With the

Wind , and he torched me, rebuilt me, torched me again. Now it’s silver.

Tw enty-ﬁve is silver. And sometimes I get that feeling.

They were approaching a curve, and she thought, Three crosses on the

right side of the road. Two small ones ﬂanking a bigger one. The small ones are

clapped-together wood. The one in the middle is white birch with a picture on

it, a tiny photograph of the seventeen-year-old boy who lost control of his car

on this curve one drunk night that was his last drunk night, and this is where

his girlfriend and her girlfriends marked the spot—

Bill drove around the curve. A pair of black crows, plump and

shiny, lifted off from something pasted to the macadam in a splat of

blood. The birds had eaten so well that Carol wasn’t sure they were

going to get out of the way until they did. There were no crosses, not

on the left, not on the right. Just roadkill in the middle, a woodchuck

or something, now passing beneath a luxury car that had never been

north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Floyd, what’s that over there?

“What’s wrong?”

“Huh?” She looked at him, bewildered, feeling a little wild.

“You’re sitting bolt-upright. Got a cramp in your back?”

“Just a slight one.” She settled back by degrees. “I had that feel-

ing again. The déjà vu.”

“Is it gone?”

“Yes,” she said, but she was lying. It had retreated a little, but that

was all. She’d had this before, but never so continuously. It came up and

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STEPHEN KING

went down, but it didn’t go away. She’d been aware of it ever since

that thing about Floyd started knocking around in her head—and

then the little girl in the red pinafore.

But, really, hadn’t she felt something before either of those things?

Hadn’t it actually started when they came down the steps of the Lear

35 into the hammering heat of the Fort Myers sunshine? Or even

before? En route from Boston?

They were coming to an intersection. Overhead was a ﬂashing

yellow light, and she thought, To the right is a used-car lot and a sign

for the Sanibel Community Theater.

Then she thought, No, it’ll be like the crosses that weren’t there. It’s a

strong feeling but a false feeling.

Here was the intersection. On the right there was a used-car lot—

Palmdale Motors. Carol felt a real jump at that, a stab of something

sharper than disquiet. She told herself to quit being stupid. There had

to be car lots all over Florida and if you predicted one at every inter-

section sooner or later the law of averages made you a prophet. It was

a trick mediums had been using for hundreds of years.

Besides, there’s no theater sign.

But there was another sign. It was Mary the Mother of God, the

ghost of all her childhood days, holding out her hands the way she

did on the medallion Carol’s grandmother had given her for her tenth

birthday. Her grandmother had pressed it into her hand and looped

the chain around her ﬁngers, saying, “Wear her always as you grow,

because all the hard days are coming.” She had worn it, all right. At

Our Lady of Angels grammar and middle school she had worn it,

then at St. Vincent de Paul high. She wore the medal until breasts

grew around it like ordinary miracles, and then someplace, probably

on the class trip to Hampton Beach, she had lost it. Coming home on

the bus she had tongue-kissed for the ﬁrst time. Butch Soucy had

been the boy, and she had been able to taste the cotton candy he’d

eaten.

Mary on that long-gone medallion and Mary on this billboard had

exactly the same look, the one that made you feel guilty of thinking

impure thoughts even when all you were thinking about was a

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EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL

peanut-butter sandwich. Beneath Mary, the sign said MOTHER OF

MERCY CHARITIES HELP THE FLORIDA HOMELESS — WON ’ T YOU HELP US ?

Hey there, Mary, what’s the story—

More than one voice this time; many voices, girls’ voices, chant-

ing ghost voices. These were ordinary miracles; there were also ordi-

nary ghosts. You found these things out as you got older.

“What’s wrong with you?” She knew that voice as well as she did

the eyebrow-and-dimple look. Bill’s I’m-only-pretending-to-be-

pissed tone of voice, the one that meant he really was pissed, at least

a little.

“Nothing.” She gave him the best smile she could manage.

“You really don’t seem like yourself. Maybe you shouldn’t have

slept on the plane.”

“You’re probably right,” she said, and not just to be agreeable,

either. After all, how many women got a second honeymoon on

Captiva Island for their twenty-ﬁfth anniversary? Round trip on a

chartered Learjet? Ten days at one of those places where your money

was no good (at least until MasterCard coughed up the bill at the

end of the month) and if you wanted a massage a big Swedish babe

would come and pummel you in your six-room beach house?

Things had been different at the start. Bill, whom she’d ﬁrst met at

a crosstown high-school dance and then met again at college three

years later (another ordinary miracle), had begun their married life

working as a janitor, because there were no openings in the computer

industry. It was 1973, and computers were essentially going nowhere

and they were living in a grotty place in Revere, not on the beach but

close to it, and all night people kept going up the stairs to buy

drugs from the two sallow creatures who lived in the apartment

above them and listened endlessly to dopey records from the sixties.

Carol used to lie awake waiting for the shouting to start, thinking, We

won’t ever get out of here, we’ll grow old and die within earshot of Cream and

Blue Cheer and the Dodgem cars down on the beach.

Bill, exhausted at the end of his shift, would sleep through the

noise, lying on his side, sometimes with one hand on her hip. And

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