As it turned out, he and Aunt Peg had had a small fight. He happened to mention that he’d had a chest X-ray, because the doctor was worried about his cough. He had smoked Pall Malls for twenty years, and even though he’d quit a couple of years ago, he still coughed too much. But the X-ray looked fine, the doctor said, there was nothing to worry about. At which point in my father’s story, Peg began pooh-poohing the reliability of X-rays.
My father had jumped on her, and Peg had begun to cry, and Ed had gotten mad at my father for making her cry, and as usual my mother had managed to soothe everyone and turn the talk back to something else. But we left the second the movie ended.
My father began to rant in the car; he was having a postmortem ethical consultation.
“Darling, why would someone do that?” he demanded.
“Peg just doesn’t think sometimes.”
“Doesn’t think? Dear God. Sometimes she’s got all the tact of a cow flop—by the time she was done, she had implied that for all the information an X-ray showed, the doctor might just as well stare at your chest, with you just not wearing your T-shirt.”
My mother burst out laughing.
“Well, darling, didn’t she? Didn’t she imply that? People are grave dancers, doll. I notice this whenever I have a book come out. If I get a bad review, friends and acquaintances groan for me, commiserating, but on the inside, they feel a tickle of pleasure—a tickle of relief, that it’s you, and not them.”
“Robbie, you’re ranting.”
“I am not ranting, Marie. I know that this makes them feel very bad, this grave-dancing business. And I know that it isn’t their fault. I know they were raised by screwed-up, frightened parents, and that they in effect got shitty owner’s manuals. But still. That goddamn Peg.”
I knew my mother was thinking religious thoughts, about not judging, or about trying to remember what Peg had been through.
“What do you mean?” I said, “Shitty owner’s manuals?” But we were pulling up outside our house, and all the lights were off.
“That goddamn kid had better not have left—he’s grounded another month if he has,” and the moment we stepped inside, my father called out, “Casey, Casey?” and from his darkened bedroom, Casey called back, “Yeah?”
My parents looked at each other, and then my mother walked down the hallway toward Casey’s room. My father stood there, kneading his face, and then went downstairs. I just stayed where I was. I could hardly hear what my mother was saying, but then Casey said something sharp to her. I heard her slap him. Then I heard my father downstairs dropping ice into a glass. My hearing felt muffled, as if I had just gotten off a plane. I opened my mouth and pulled my earlobes down, until my ears popped.
I kept trying to cheer up my father. I had seen him cry over Casey, after one dinner where Casey had been unable to respond to much of anything. My father had gone to his study and closed the door and when I walked past with our dinner dishes, I peeped in and saw him at his desk, hunched over, eyes closed, like in the Gospel of John when Jesus cried.
So I took him for walks on the weekends, along the shore or the salt marsh, or up on the mountain. We ambled along with our hands in our pockets; he wore a porkpie hat.
“Can you keep a secret?” he asked one morning late that spring. Of course I could keep a secret. I was the keeper of the family secrets. My mother told me everything and then made me promise not to tell anyone. My brother bragged about some of his exploits to me and swore me to secrecy. If he and I were alone at the house, I would look up from the deck to find him hanging from his bedroom window, smoking a joint, and I would say hi, and after a pause he would say hello back, and I never once told my parents. I had been raised not to tattle. Uncle Ed asked me once if Natalie ever called, and I told him the truth, that yes, she did, that her little girl wore glasses and Natalie had a beau, and I didn’t tell my mother that Ed had asked.
“Yes, I can,” I told my father.
“Your mother wants to send Casey to a psychiatrist.”
“Huh.”
We walked along. We were between the two bridges on the salt marsh and the tide was pouring in. It rushed and flowed around the small dunes covered with bright green moss, these dunes in a huge ring framed by thick bullrushes. The top of every dune was flattened and bright green, and as we stood on the one bridge watching, it came to resemble a massive turtle’s back.
“Your mother can’t accept that Casey is just growing up. You know her, she likes to fix us all. Like her blood is epoxy. That’s why she married me, doll! Boy, was I a real fixer-upper. And most of the people who come to your mother want to be fixed, and so we let her fix us. But Casey doesn’t even think he’s broken. And maybe he isn’t, and anyway Nanny, don’t you think to be human is to be broken?”
I nodded knowingly.
“It even has its own beauty, to be broken,” he said.
“There’s an avocet,” I said.
“That a girl. . . It’s very hard for your mother right now. I try to remember what Joyce said—that God keeps a gentle eye on the world, while He pares His nails. And I’m trying to sit back a bit, keep a gentle eye on Casey, while I pare my nails. But sometimes he pushes us too hard, and it’s very hard on your mother. There’s a story machine in her head, cranking out scenes of disaster. I guess we all have it, to some degree, but she worries too much—well, so do I. I don’t know what the difference is.” Now we were facing the crystalline mirror-flat bay, green as jade today. The eucalyptus groves on the hills to the left were perfectly reflected, the leaves a flatter gray-green than the water. Most of the surface of the bay was taken up by three hills across the way, and near the shore an egret stood in its own reflection, snowy white feathers on black pencil legs on the snowy white image of itself, in all that green, green water.
“I said to her, ‘Darling? Ed and I were talking at the beach the other day. About how Natalie had to move away, how Peg cried all the time for a while, sure that Ed would leave her—’ And how probably Ed won’t see that daughter much until she’s all the way grown—and how terrible, how utterly unreal it feels to him. How huge the ramifications were, of two lonely friends going to bed—your mother and brother both lost their best friends, Peg nearly lost her mind—but Natalie sure loves that baby of hers . . . And anyway, sweetheart, the point I was making . . .”
“You were saying something to Mom.”
“That’s right, I said to her what Ed said to me, which was why do we make it all seem like a crisis, over and over again? Why do we worry it all to death, like dogs with socks or chew-toys? ‘Look at it this way,’ he said to me. ‘In a hundred years?—All new people.’”
Sometimes the three of us would be watching television after dinner, not very often, and Casey would come in and stand in the doorway watching us watch television, as though he had found us playing with our coloring books. He’d then get caught up in whatever we were watching, and sit down next to one of us. When he sat down next to my mother or me, we would be so happy we could hardly concentrate on the show. When he sat down next to my father, Dad would reach over and begin to scratch Casey’s jutting shoulder blades, without taking his eyes off the set, then every so often glance over surreptitiously, see the long hair, the red eyes, and sigh.
I remember us watching a show on wildebeests one Sunday night. Casey was sitting next to my mother in the loveseat. He was watching the set, and she was watching his hair grow, really studying his head, as if there were a map on it and she was trying to track a route cross-country. Finally he turned to her, and said, “Do you mind?” The narrator was saying that some wildebeests got a fatal illness called Turning Disease. They caught it from bugs. It affected their equilibrium in such a way that all they could do was to turn and turn and turn, walking in small circles, some of them faster than others, but mostly quite slowly, for days or weeks, alone. The lucky ones got killed by hyenas, instead of turning themselves to death.
“Dear God,” said my father.
“Win
o John had it today in church. The whole time James was preaching. He actually had it, didn’t he, Nan? Turning and turning, with the weight of the world on his shoulders. I kept thinking that at least it was keeping him quiet.”
“I’ll tell you what I see in this,” said Casey. “Mr. Allen has been reading us Thoreau. I see this as about men leading lives of quiet desperation, just turning and turning, sick till they die.”
My father nodded sagely.
“There’s hope for him yet,” he said to my mother after Casey had left the room.
Things were sort of peaceful for a few days, until Saturday when my father and I were walking through the railroad yard on our way into town. There were hardly any trains left. There were new houses on the hills above the railroad yard and everywhere you looked. Suddenly my father put his right arm out to stop me—as if we were in the car and he was braking out of the blue—and then he jammed his hands in his pockets and stalked over to where wino John and three of my brother’s friends stood, on the ground in the shade of a locomotive, each with a bottle of stout malt liquor. Wino John raised his bottle in salute. Mighty Owen Turner’s mouth fell open, and he put his bottle of stout behind his back, while Allan and Greg Schneider both looked extremely hopeful—as if my father had brought them some nice snacks to go with their beer.
My father glared at John, who smirked, and Owen studied the ground at his feet, and the Schneider boys beamed like idiots. “If you’re buying these boys beer, I’m going to knock you into tomorrow,” said my father.
“Not me,” said John. “I’m eighty-sixed anyway. I can’t even buy these days for me. They brought me this stout.”
“We just had an extra,” said Owen.
“Wasn’t that thoughtful of you,” said my father.
I don’t recall what happened next, except that we made it home in record time, my father muttering the entire way, and me seemingly forgotten behind him. Casey was actually home doing homework, and my father tried to pick a fight with my mother at the entrance to Casey’s room, and then lit into Casey for having friends who drank stout malt liquor with the winos.
“You go away somewhere,” he said to me, and I threw up my hands and stalked into my room. He followed me. “Go to the rec center, go into town—I really don’t care where you go, but go.”
“Darling,” my mother said from the distance. “Leave her alone.” My father and I glared at each other, and after a minute he left the room. I went and sat in a corner with my knees pulled up to my chest, crying. My heart was full of sympathy for Casey. Right then I hated my father too. I saw myself standing up to him, hands on my hips, sneering. You can’t tell us who our friends can be—I would say—I have two friends who none of the parents and none of the teachers like, and they’re totally cool, and they are the only people these days who have been totally nice to me.
I wasn’t terribly close to the two girls, whom none of the parents liked, but I wanted to be close to them, wanted to be like them. Not so long before, just before the trees went into bloom, I got to spend the night in the harbor aboard a Columbia 29 with them. Their names were Gigi and Pru. Gigi’s father owned the sailboat. They were twelve, and defiant enough for Casey and his friends to hang out with them a little bit at school. Gigi had three older sisters and got away with murder, got to wear eyeliner to school in seventh grade. She wrote with her oldest sister’s beautiful neat script, none of the letters slanting at all. When we became friends, in sixth grade, I tried to emulate this, having always gotten C’s in handwriting before, and now I wrote half in my sloppy boyish way and half in Gigi’s style. Actually, I didn’t know what my own handwriting looked like anymore, but I started getting B’s.
Pru’s mother was thin and dark and slutty and mean and single, and Pru’s older sister was thin and dark and gorgeous and slutty and mean, and had taught chubby Pru all the fast-girl ways of style and fashion. How to wear eyeliner, shave her legs, how to bleach her hair with peroxide, how to wear underpants over her pantyhose to keep them from bagging. She and Gigi both wore pantyhose to school, with Keds. They both wore bras and had already had boyfriends. They were allies with the truly bad girls, the really cheap slutty ones, the ones whose fathers were gone or were western white-trash drunks. They went with older boys, high school boys, sometimes—even at twelve with college boys. They shoplifted clothes, smoked cigarettes, drank rum and Cokes. They were everything I wanted to be. A few times they had let me hang out with them, and we went to Pru’s and listened to 45’s and smoked. Her mother was never home. We had to bring in our own food because Pru’s mother kept a padlock on the refrigerator.
The air in the harbor that night on the boat smelled of sea and algae, smelled of sex, and we smoked a few cigarettes we had bought from the machine at the rec center. We went inside and, the next thing I knew, Gigi and I were trying to pull off Pru’s skin-tight pegged light-blue jeans. We were pantsing Pru. She was lying on the bunk in the back and we were all thrilled and aroused, pulling at her jeans; she was writhing, pretending to resist, and we were giggling, hot and red. She was wearing red lace bikini underpants, and I could see pubic hairs poking out on the sides, and I could hardly stand it, pulling and pulling at her tight pants, feeling her soft warm skin against my hands. This was so much better than sitting around Donna’s house, reading her cousin Punkin’s magazines. I was half out of my mind. When we had wrestled her jeans down to her ankles, we stopped, and we let her pull them back on, sheepish now, all three of us. The sailboats rubbing against the sides of the berths groaned, and harbor seals barked, and even from inside we could smell the sea, the algae, the fish, and then we were pantsing Gigi. We rolled around on her, tugging at her pants, laughing, squirming girl bodies, me gaping bug-eyed and delirious at her white lacy bikini panties, dark hair showing underneath. I felt such tightening in me, down there, a tightening in my crotch, like someone was turning the crank on a winch. And in my head I felt like a wide-eyed gasping puppy who is being tossed its first few balls. But then we were done with Gigi, and no one thought to pants me. I felt a little bit like crying, rejected, but then we all went outside and sat in the cockpit, and flushed, underneath the starry diamond sky, we smoked.
We slept in separate sleeping bags that night. They slept in the bunks, I slept on the floor between them, like a dog. We talked all night. I was in my brother’s sleeping bag, which was lined in red felt, printed with hunters and deer, pointers and ducks. When we finally stopped talking, I lay in the dark, silently kissing the back of my hand. I practiced kissing a lot in those days. I kissed the mirror in my bedroom, behind closed doors, and watched myself to see what I would look like being kissed. I didn’t think I would ever be kissed. My mother said she hadn’t thought she would ever be, either. She said she had been the tallest girl in the state. I was the shortest, skinniest, ugliest. When I kissed the mirror, I tilted my head to one side, like I had seen in the movies, and moved my head toward the mirror, fluttering my eyelashes. My parents did not know that I kissed mirrors, as I wiped the mirror clean of my lip prints. The tip of my nose always hit the glass first. It was warm against the glass, and my lips were cool.
My mother did, though, notice how often I studied myself in other mirrors. I heard her talking to my father about it, asking him if he and she had been so narcissistic in their youth.
“I suppose so,” he said. “She’s right on schedule, baby. You must have studied the mirror, too. And remember what Camus said, it was Camus, I think—that Narcissus was transfixed by his own reflection, because he was searching for something lovable in it.”
Finally on that Saturday morning, when we had found Casey’s friends drinking with Wino John in the railroad yard, I couldn’t stand being inside any longer, and without saying anything to anyone, left the house and walked into town. I hated being seen alone. I felt so forsaken that it was as if I had grown a huge tail, a dinosaur’s tail that dragged along behind me, for everyone in the streets and the stores to see. Every time I saw someone I knew, my stoma
ch buckled and shame flooded me. Help me, help me, I prayed as I walked along the boardwalk, clutching my stomach as though I had a bellyache, and the next thing I knew, a girl was calling my name.
It was Pru. She was coming out of the record store with a new 45, looking like a Campbell’s soup girl playing the town slut in the school play: white lipstick, black eyeliner, stockings with her Keds, a little white skirt, and a black poorboy shirt. She needed to peroxide her hair again. The roots were growing out black.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing much. What are you doing?”
“Nothing much.”
Somehow—and it felt like a miracle at the time—I ended up at her house, sitting on the deck smoking Kents. I told her about wino John and Casey’s friends, and how the winos bought the kids all the beer they wanted: the boys had to give the winos enough money for two of whatever they wanted, and the winos would take one out of the bag and leave the bag in a nearby trash can for the boys to collect when the winos were out of sight.
“How do you know that?”
“My brother told me. But I promised not to tell anyone.”
“We better go into town. We’re almost out of cigarettes; plus we better get some setting gel. Don’t you ever wear lipstick?”
“Yeah, I wear white—but I just ran out.”
“We’ll get you some more at the dime store.” So we walked along into town, bumping lightly into one another, and Pru told me her secret: that Gigi had ditched her a week ago.
“Gigi’s a bitch,” I said, my heart suddenly wild and warm.
Pru asked me if I could spend the night; we could set my hair. If you set kinky hair on rollers, it comes out soft and straight; oh, to have good hair. Oh, God. We made plans for the night, for the week.