“I can’t move away with Lynnie, we don’t have any money. My parents won’t give me a cent, and I won’t move back in with them. It was awful staying with them this summer.”
“Maybe they’ll give you some money so Lynnie can get some help.”
“They didn’t give us money when Ed was being good, Marie. Now he’s knocked up your best friend and they’re going to help us out? Honest to Pete! They voted for Nixon!”
No one said anything for a while. The kitty bolted past as if being chased by a dog. Casey munched his cereal. We had a swimming lesson at one. I wondered if my mother and Peg would be done by then so that our mother could give us a ride.
“Maybe Natalie will die.”
“Peg!”
“Or maybe the baby will die, who knows?”
“Darling. Something is going to happen, something is going to shift, before this is through, I promise. I don’t know what it will be, but I swear, it is all going to be okay. I promise.”
Casey yawned but didn’t look up. He hated swimming lessons, the way most children hated piano lessons. He still couldn’t swim. At the rec center they gave you a small flannel fish when you could swim well enough to go the width of the pool and do the dead man’s float for sixty seconds—and the fish meant you could play in the deep end. I got mine when I was six, but Casey didn’t get his until he was nine. This caused both of us to feel deeply ashamed. I couldn’t bear for him to feel humiliation. He did routines to keep his friends from knowing how badly he swam. He made up characters who belly flopped and dog paddled and bobbed about. He jumped off the diving board holding his nose, and when he reached the bottom he pushed off so hard that he shot back out of the water like a killer whale, ending up near the side of the pool to which he could cling. Or he hung around in the shallower parts and pogoed from side to side while saying funny things. My father was not a good swimmer either. At the beach he walked gallantly to the shore with his shoulders thrown back and his puny washboard chest puffed out, his stick-figure body as white as the moon, and after a couple of deep breaths he would walk into the frigid surf and freeze, gasping when the water rolled over his feet. Then he would make banshee screams as the water went up past his ankles, and after a minute he would tear out of the water and back across the sand to his towel, where my mother in her bermuda shorts and the top part of a calico two-piece suit would say to him, “There, there, darling.”
“Don’t look at me,” Casey said on the porch that day.
“I swear on the souls of my grandchildren, Peg. Everything is going to fall into place. Something will happen.”
“I don’t know how you can say that. What if Robbie had a girlfriend in this town?”
“Natalie isn’t Ed’s girlfriend. Ed doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
“Let me finish! What if Robbie had a girlfriend in town and got her pregnant, and she wouldn’t have an abortion, and no one involved had any money, and no one could move away. And you knew that every time you left the house, you might run into her and the kid, plus you knew that everyone was talking about you. . .”
“How will they know it’s Ed’s baby?”
“They just will. You know they’ll know. They’re like bats.”
“I know what it feels like in your heart. I know what the knife feels like. You know Robbie’s had those affairs.” I plugged my ears and sang a tune I made up on the spot, and when I turned around to look at Casey he was gone.
“Darling, I’ll make us some coffee,” my mother said to Peg.
“Can I stay here and rest?”
“Yes, of course you can. Are you warm enough? Let me close the window.”
I looked up and saw my mother at the window, peering out at all the trees, the redwoods, the ivy, the pine, and then she looked down at me and waved. I waved back. Then I went and leaned forward so my stomach was on the banister and my feet were off the ground. There were spiderwebs suspended between the stalks of ivy like fire nets, catching tiny leaves and wind-blown pebbles, flecked with them like the beaded hairnets my Grandmother Bette sent away for to wear in her airy fog-white hair.
Peg had always been vaguely suspicious that Natalie and Ed were interested in each other, although as far as either of my parents knew, they had never been to bed before that summer. But everyone’s favorite Uncle Ed story involved Natalie, and I suppose Peg had heard it more times than she cared to. It took place the month Casey was born, when Natalie was still pregnant with her twins. Ed and Peg had had an enormous fight about the Sears bill, and Ed went out to hit the bars on Main Street. Several hours later and blind drunk, he appeared on the doorstep of one of Natalie’s best friends, a woman named Pat. Ed begged Pat not to call Peg and divulge his whereabouts, and then he went into her bedroom and passed out on her bed. She panicked, thinking that somehow against all odds Peg would find Ed there in her bed, so she went downstairs to the bar where all the liberal-commie-artist types hung out, found Natalie and her husband Gabe and explained the situation. She pleaded with them to come home with her, and they did.
So the three of them sat up drinking red wine and listening to jazz on the hi-fi until no one could stay up any longer, and Pat persuaded them to sleep over rather than to risk driving home. Pat made Gabe sleep with Uncle Ed in case Peg barged in on the whole scene, and she and Natalie slept on the sofa bed in the living room.
Ed woke up at dawn still somewhat drunk. “I lay there,” he would say whenever he told the story, “very very sick. I had one of those hangovers where you feel like you’ve washed up on shore somewhere hot, and you lie there in the sand half-dead. I was lying on my side, facing the wall, when suddenly I heard a man beside me breathing; and I thought, ‘If I lie here really really quietly, maybe he won’t fuck me again.’”
Peg gained more weight when Natalie got pregnant than Natalie did. The whole thing was a mess. Ed was on the wagon, professing his love to Peg whenever she could hear, but she was wild in her betrayal and fear.
One day my mother made me go shopping for school clothes with Peg and Lynnie. We went to the Sears store on Geary, and Peg seemed sort of more or less okay, although mostly all we did was eat. We hardly found any clothes to buy at all. When we were leaving, we got to buy both popcorn and chocolates; usually we had to pick one or the other. We bought a little bag of chocolate stars for Lynnie and me, and a big bag of bridge mix for Peg.
She sat alone in the front seat with her candy, staring forlornly at the road as she drove, while Lynnie and I sat in the back letting stars melt one by one in our mouths, watching Peg eat. She was scooping out a small handful every few minutes and lowering her mouth into her cupped palm like an old horse nibbling a handful of oats.
When we pulled up in front of my house, Peg turned off the engine and sat there crying. Lynnie stared out the window at a bank of ivy, with her head cocked as though we were still driving along and there were many sights to see. I could see the steps of our house out the window. They were made of stone, so big and so steep and they stretched so high, all the way up to the huge blue sky, and amidst all that green, all those redwoods, all that ivy, all those pines and eucalyptus flanking and partially shading the stairs, that they looked like they might be the stairs of a massive Mayan temple.
My mother made a pot of tea for Peg and herself, cocoa for Lynnie and me, and sent us outside to play. We did not talk about her parents or Natalie, we didn’t talk much at all, and when we did it was about my cat and her dog, Jeffey and Sarah-Jane. We finished our cocoa and then sat on the lowest branch of a cypress and kept an eye on the tiny figures of our mothers sitting together huddled on the couch inside.
That night at dinner my father asked my mother what they had been talking about all that time, and my mother told us about a sermon our pastor James had given recently. “What he said was that when all is lost and the center will not hold, that you do die an existential death. Like when someone dies or leaves you or in some other way the whole bottom just drops out. It’s like when Mary went to the tomb a
nd the body of Christ was missing and suddenly her center wouldn’t hold. All of a sudden she didn’t know for sure if any of it had happened. She didn’t know what end was up. And James said that when you’re hurt that badly, you do die, sort of, as a means of survival. And you lie there and you lie there in your grief for as long as it takes, until finally, finally life can pull you back into itself; as if it could give you its hands and pull you to your feet, so that you can totter along again.”
“What did Peg say?”
“Nothing. She just cries.”
“Ed is a mess.”
“Is he drinking yet?”
“He can’t. He’s on Antabuse. He’s going to A.A. meetings. But his head is filled with guilt and self-loathing and fear, and what is he supposed to do, promise he’ll never want to see the kid, the baby? His head is really troubled. It’s like when Jeffey had that awful case of earmites.”
“We just really have to live in the solution.”
“Lambie, I think that maybe everyone is beginning to tire of hearing you say that. You’ve said it maybe fifty times since all this broke, and I know you mean well...”
“Oh go to hell,” my mother said, and I flushed with fear for her to have said this, and she got to her feet, her cheeks flushed, her nostrils flaring. I felt a stab of pain watching her one big nostril flare. It looked like something a fish would have, almost like a gill. Then she stomped off to the kitchen. My father rolled his eyes wearily and put his napkin down. “You kids finish your dinner,” he said. “And no monkey business.” We looked at each other blankly when he left. Then we wrapped our peas up in our napkins, stuck them in our pockets, and finished off the last of our meat loaf.
Ed came over the next morning at breakfast, looking well, as he always did when he was on the wagon. He sat with us at the breakfast table, refusing our offers of waffles, but getting himself a cup of coffee from the kitchen. He was wearing washed-out dark blue cords, and the chamois shirt we gave him last Christmas, faded dark green. And black zoris. He was in his early thirties at the time, although in my memory he seems much older. “Hey Case,” he said. “Hey Nanny beans. You both hear what’s going on?” Casey and I nodded and tried to look wise. Ed very slowly raised his head until he could look at the ceiling, as if maybe some sort of an answer was there. “How is Natalie? “he asked.
“She’s okay,” said my mother. “Sort of lost. But she’s quit smoking.”
“That’s good.”
“The twins won’t talk about what’s going on, except that she hears them talking to each other about maybe moving in with their father, who in fact doesn’t want them, or at any rate his second wife doesn’t want them.”
“God.”
“Plus she’s heard them plot your death.”
Ed nodded pleasantly. “I guess they probably deserve to.”
“Oh Ed,” said my father. “Give yourself a break.”
“This is not my finest hour.”
“Well what was, then? ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave. This is just very human stuff. Go easy on yourself.”
“Robbie, remember when Casey had just turned two, and there was that scene with the ink? Remember, Marie?”
“No. Was I there?”
“I remember,” said Casey.
“How could you possibly remember that far back?”
“I just do.”
“You were out of it, Marie—Nanny’d only been home a week; you were both upstairs asleep. It was in the late afternoon, and old man diGrazia came by with a bottle of his latest dago red. Me and Robbie’d been there for the grape stomp, and he brought us a bottle, or maybe a couple, I don’t remember. But anyway, the three of us were killing a bottle when all of sudden Casey came out of Robbie’s study with ink all over his hands and arms and legs, jet-black India ink. He’d been being so quiet and good, we assumed he was in there crayoning. And he said in a quiet and solemn voice, ‘There’s a mess in the study. It’s a big mess. And it’s my mess.’”
Casey tittered into his chest. He looked exactly like the early pictures of Ed, with the same cowlick, the same black brows, deep-set eyes, earnest concern, the same big ears and clever fingers.
“And that’s how I’m feeling now,” said Ed. “It’s a big mess. And it’s my mess. But at least I’m sober. Maybe that’ll help. It sure as hell won’t hurt.”
“You going to those meetings?” my father asked.
“Yeah.”
“How are they?”
Ed let his head fall forward on to his chest, and snored. Then he straightened up. “Shit, man. They talk about sobriety, and to me it’s like hearing about the sun during an ice age. Obviously my way isn’t working. I don’t know.”
He looked so healthy. His color was good and he was calm, if chagrined, and I thought that maybe this, Ed being on the wagon, was the solution my mother kept talking about. He and Casey excused themselves from the breakfast table and spent the rest of the morning in Casey’s room, working on a model airplane. My father disappeared into his study, and we heard him typing away.
“What are you going to do today, darling?” my mother asked me.
“I don’t know.”
“Will you help me with the dishes?”
“Okay. Maybe Lynnie can play today.”
“Lynnie’s got ballet all morning. Why don’t you come into town with me and do errands. It would make life easier for me.”
“How come?”
“Because I feel like everyone’s looking at me,” she said.
“But they’ll look at you anyway, even if I’m there.”
“But I wouldn’t be scared if you were there.”
“Okay.”
Old man diGrazia was browsing at the produce bins when we arrived at the grocery store. He was glumly studying the avocados. I wondered if he knew about Ed and Natalie. My father said everyone would guess because Natalie and Ed had gone into a bar together a few times when Peg was gone, and now Peg went around town looking like she had been crying or was about to, and Natalie’s stomach was beginning to show. My mother reached for an avocado and old man diGrazia gaped at her as if she had just burped. His pants were belted nearly at the sternum and appeared to be swallowing up what was left of his trunk, like a boa constrictor. I stared. You could almost imagine the jaw hinges of the trousers opening wider, taking in more of old man diGrazia’s chest. He seemed angry.
My mother asked timidly, “Is this the exact avocado you’ve had your eye on?”
He nodded, staring at his well-shined shoes.
“Take it,” she said. “Honest. Please.”
He squinted at her and then turned away, terribly depressed.
“I’d rather be mad,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “I get it.”
Then the old man reached for the avocado, wrapped his long bird-bone fingers around it, placing it gently in his cart. He turned to go.
“I’m still mad,” he said.
“Does he know?” I asked my mother.
“God only knows.”
My friend Wendy Harper’s mother was flirting with the butcher over at the meat counter. She was large, on her way to obese, and she always wore low-cut muumuus that made her breasts look like someone’s bottom. All through my childhood she would catch me and press me into her big clammy moist bosom. God, I hated it. I tiptoed out of the store and sat on the curb outside to wait for my mother, drawing in the dirt with a Popsicle stick. I got up to see from outside the market if my mother was in line yet—she hadn’t had much to buy—and was promptly ambushed by Mrs. Harper, who set down her bag of groceries and pulled me into her monstrous yawning cleavage.
After leaving the market my mother and I went to pick up my father’s shirts at the cleaners. She had refused to starch and iron his shirts ever since we had this extra money from renting out our real home. We stood there waiting to be helped. There were people ahead of us, but no one I knew. I recognized most of the families whose last names were written in sloppy black
felt pen on the blue paper bundles of shirts. All of them were going to talk about us behind our backs—I knew that from now on people at the rec center or the library or the post office would stop in mid-conversation when anyone from our family drew near. My mother was humming a hymn softly, seeming to daydream. We were holding hands.
The McGees had two bundles of shirts to pick up here. They lived in an old stone house on the road that ran along the railroad tracks. They had a Newfoundland and a garden full of roses and tulips, daffodils in the spring. In the winter the whole family went up to Tahoe and skied. The father was very jolly and in late summer he wore lederhosen. I wanted my father to wear lederhosen, and when I asked him if he would buy some, he said, “Later, darling.” I wanted him to be a jolly lederhosen kind of guy, my skinny leftist dad with his moon-white pterodactyl legs.
On top of the McGees’ bundles were the shirts for the Nathans. They were Catholic and had six children who went off in packs with the other Catholic children on Tuesday afternoons to catechism class. They pretended to love to go, to make us feel bad. The Otters had a pool. Mr. Otter was an attorney and had three bundles of shirts here. They lived on the hillside above the little white church, and his daughter had the best slumber parties because we got to go swimming in the dark with only the pool lights on, when the air outside was cold and the aqua blue water hot when you first jumped in. Mr. Pinole only had one bundle of shirts. I knew he must have to drop them off and pick them up himself. His wife Adelaide drank so much that a couple of times she was discovered passed out on the road above their house before noon, making a break for it. On Saturdays my girlfriends and sometimes Lynnie and I would hastily paint pictures and take them around the neighborhood, asking people if they were interested in children’s art. How could you say no? They would give us a nickel or a dime, and say how lovely they were, our watercolor pictures of trains and the railroad yard, or boats on the bay, or deer and raccoon on the mountain. “Here’s one that might interest you,” we would say, and show them a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, cars of every color on it, sailboats and freighters down below, sloppy V’s for flying gulls. Adelaide Pinole would often give us a whole dollar after getting up unsteadily and lurching around the house looking for her purse. We were shameless. We called her Aunt Adelaide. Sometimes Mr. Pinole would rush in while we were there, wiping oil and grime off his hands with rags that smelled of kerosene, and shoo us out of the kitchen. Aunt Adelaide would sit there looking like we had all just been busted. “Have pity on her,” Mr. Pinole would beseech us, handing us our paintings at the door. “Have pity on her.”