A Good Divorce (19 page)

After the second hyperbaric treatment, they transported her in a gurney with a lumpy wheel that bumped as we followed her through the hallways to her room. Once in her bed, she crept out of unconsciousness long enough to see us standing over her. She didn't say anything but her eyes moved from me to Jude and back again. Her eyelids opened and closed slowly, like she was pulling a weighted theater curtain up and down. Her eyes locked on mine with an openness I'd never felt between us before. If there was any shame for what she'd done, the purity of the oxygen had diluted it. Then she dropped off again.

Jude's mother, Martha, came by later in a red evening gown with a fox pelt over the shoulders and her face tanned from a Caribbean cruise. Her gentleman friend in a white tux carried his hat in his hand. They looked like they were on the way to a charity auction, where everyone got boozed up and bid for weekend trips to San Francisco and Acapulco. Her hibiscus perfume dueled with his lemon after-shave bracer. Martha broke into tears when she saw Justine, and her friend helped her into the chair next to the bed.

“I'm sorry, Pudding. You don't need your grandmother doing this on you.” Justine hated to be called pudding.

Jude disappeared for her dinner break in the hospital cafeteria as soon as her mom showed up, so I had to make my own conversation with her. I hadn't seen Martha since the separation, an event that was already a defining milestone in my life. Justine's attempt on her life in the driver's seat of Jude's car would be another.

“You're looking pretty chipper, kid,” Martha's beau said, as he stepped up to the bed and rested his hat on the bedding somewhere over Justine's left knee. I didn't even know if he'd met her before.

Martha stopped sniveling and escorted me by the elbow over to the doorway and into the bright hollowness of the hallway. Her fingers dug into the flesh on the inside of my elbow joint. “This is Jude's fault, you know.”

“I don't think …”

“I'm against the whole divorce idea.” She snapped her head as she said it. “Leaving someone with a good job for a woman?” The implication was that if it had been a man it might have made sense. “Now she's neglecting the kids.”

“They aren't neglected, Martha.”

She looked mystified.

I nodded toward Justine. “She's a complex kid. There's millions of pent-up fears in someone her age. Any one of them could have set this off.”

“You're being soft on Jude,” she said. “You were always too soft on her.”

“The world's changing, Martha. We can't bully and bark our way to the top anymore.” I remembered all the times Jude had complained of her mom's bitching about her weight, and Jude telling her she didn't want to look like a model, and she wasn't going to starve herself for someone else's stereotype. Of course, Jude burned more calories worrying about her mom than she ever could have lost with a diet.

“Bosh!” Martha almost spit on me. “Women's lib is bunk. Don't you see that?” She looked past me to Justine and her friend at the bedside. “It's just bunk.”

Jude and I stayed with Justine at the hospital that night, and Lill stayed with Derek. I called Derek to tell him what was going on.

“Justine's going to make it, pal, but the doctor wants to keep her under observation and take some more tests to make sure her levels stay down. How are you doing?”

“Magpie and I want to sleep in her bedroom.”

“That's a good idea.”

Jude and I took turns sleeping in the second bed in Justine's room, which had a thin mattress and a button to raise and lower the pillow end. Justine woke up in the middle of my shift and seemed to be free of the weariness that had possessed her earlier. The last time I'd tended to her at bedside she was seven and they'd taken out her tonsils.

“I'm sorry, Dad,” she whispered, her lips too dry to stretch. She gripped my hand. Then she looked over to see if her mom was listening, but Jude's breathing was slow and rhythmic. She clamped her eyes shut. “I've been feeling so ugly.” Her lips quivered and her chin tightened into a knuckle. “Someone at school said I was sexless.”

“Jesus, Justine.” Her accuser's words resonated with my own guilt; I'd periodically thought the same thing of Jude.

“I couldn't go back to class, so I just left school and wandered around. I knew he was right. Because of Mom.”

I knelt down next to the bed so that my head was near hers and wrapped both hands over her fists like they were a warm stone. “Justine, daughters don't always turn out like their mothers. Look at your mom and Martha.”

She smiled and squeezed my hand. “Don't tell Derek about this. He'll be freaked out.”

“Don't worry about him. Just you get better.”

I knelt next to the bed until she dropped off and her breathing became audible. Then I sat in the chair, rested the back of my head against the wall, and closed my eyes.

When Justine was five, we dressed her in a bunny costume and took her to Volunteer Park for the public egg hunt. It was a madhouse with all of the kids crowding around the man in the microphone who was dressed in a padded rabbit suit. His little helpers in fairy suits with transparent wings stood inside the rope barrier to keep kids from hunting until the gun went off. It was a children's version of the street demonstrations at the '68 Democratic Convention. Justine wanted to go home, but we made her stay and helped work her closer to the rope. Most of the kids were uncostumed, including a gang of boys next to Justine with pillowcases and plastic bags tucked into their belts who whistled and shouted at the bunny to shoot his gun. Besides marshmallow eggs and chocolate bunnies, the fairies had hidden plastic eggs with quarters in them and golden eggs with tickets to the Poncho Theater.

When the gun fired, someone knocked Justine over and her headpiece twisted down over one of her eyes. We lifted her up and urged her on, watching as she shuffled across the grass with her bamboo-weave Easter basket. Every bush and tree she looked behind had already been picked clean. Older kids flashed by her like skyrockets, showing off eggs and candies to their parents behind the rope. When the whistle blew to stop the hunt, Justine had an empty basket that she dropped at our feet. She was crying. I scurried around until I found one of the boys with a pillowcase and paid him a dollar for a handful of candy that I put into her basket.

I could hear the sound of voices at the nursing station and the pad of tennis shoes passing the open door to Justine's room. Jude and Justine were both snoring and, I thought, they did sound a lot alike. Justine had inherited so many traits from her mother that I wondered if sexual perplexity was one of them.

The first night Justine was out of the hospital and the kids stayed with me I found a half-smoked joint in the cigar box from my dresser amid the campaign pins, contact lens case, mood ring, Canadian coins, spare keys, football needles, and other miniature paraphernalia. It was dry and hard and the paper was bumpy where it molded around the crumpled grass. One end of it tapered to a smoking hole the size of pencil lead and the other end was blunt and ashen where it had been tamped out, the leftovers from one of our nights with the Baldwins, when they'd bring their kid over for a potluck dinner and a jug of Gallo Burgundy. Their girl was the same age as Derek and we'd have Justine play out in the yard or the basement with them while we passed a joint in the kitchen for an appetizer. After dinner, we'd put the kids to bed, pass another joint, and turn on the Moody Blues. Then we'd get ravenous and vandalize the kitchen for strawberry shortcake makings. We figured Justine was too young to know the difference between cigarettes and pot.

Jerry Baldwin worked on the UW campus and had access to all the dope he wanted. I was scared of getting caught and losing my bar membership so I never kept a lid in the house. We bartered sandwich baggies with a little dope in the bottom in exchange for our babysitting their girl. I only smoked when we had company. For me, the laughter was the turn-on; for Jude, it was the idea of my breaking the law. I used to worry when we made love after smoking pot that she was fantasizing I was one of her ACLU buddies. The first time Jude let me come down on her we'd had some of the Baldwins' grass. Maybe that was the start of her transformation.

I rolled the little butt from my cigar box between my fingers, closed the lid, and put the box back into the sock drawer. When Justine turned twelve, we stopped doing the grass. I hadn't even thought of the stuff for years. But with the kids in bed, I thought, why not close the door, open the window, and finish this one off? It was better than having them find it. Besides, I needed an escape from the stories of adolescent suicide that had begun to jump out at me from the newspapers and I also needed relief from watching Justine for the least hint of depression.

I lit a candle and dripped wax onto a saucer to create a base. Then I turned off the light, climbed into the center of the bed, and put the saucer on the bedspread. The joint crackled when I lit it off the candle flame. Seeds. I was surprised at how easily I was able to open my throat and draw down the first drag. I held my breath and let the dope find its way into the bloodstream where it created a rush of parental euphoria. It felt so reassuring to be under the same roof with the kids, even if it was only for the weekend. Justine's incident had made me treasure our limited time together even more. We were surviving the pandemonium.

The first exhalation left me light-headed as I sat there motionless. A wisp of smoke trailed off the end of the joint, making it look like it had died. Against the cement wall of the bedroom, I could see my shadow. The torso that rose out of the mattress fluttered and swayed like a genie coming out of its bottle as the candle flame flickered next to me.

I lay back, closed my eyes, and took another toke that went straight to the groin, microdots of cannabis leaking into my scrotum. Lill floated into the room, unwrapping herself as she moved. Her clothes were translucent and fell off her pale skin like silk sliding from marble as she walked toward me, her pubic hair the color of port wine. Go ahead, Lill, I thought, unzip me. She swept the air with her free hand like a blind woman trying to find the edge of the bed, and I tried to imagine the orange blossom scent of her hair and the pad of my thumb brushing over her scar.

Then the hot cone from the joint dropped onto my bare stomach and I jumped up and brushed it to the floor. I thought I heard something from Justine's room and put my ear next to the crack. What if one of the kids walked in on me? I held the roach up to my eye and there was no sign of heat. It was dead. I thought of flushing it down the toilet but I didn't want to leave the bedroom with it so I pinched it off the hairpin, threw it to the back of my throat, and swallowed it the way Jerry had taught me. It lodged partway down like a spitwad, and I tried to make saliva but the insides of my mouth were juiceless. I opened the window and waved the smoke out with a pillow. Then I wondered if the probation officer upstairs with the pug face would smell it and call the cops. The window accidentally banged shut when I unhooked the chain and I clenched my teeth, sure that I had aroused either the kids or the pug.

With my clothes still on, I slid under the covers and pulled them up to my chin. This was the other reason I'd stopped smoking this stuff: it made me paranoid. But this time the paranoia was warranted. I felt horrible for even thinking of Lill, especially with the kids here. I kept thinking of Justine bringing home a girlfriend in overalls and a pocket protector, of Derek loitering around rest rooms in the park to pick up men, of some zealot like Dan White who gunned down Harvey Milk in the San Francisco City Hall coming after them.

In my dream that night, I took a woman to the Greyhound bus station who slipped off her ring and stuck it into my pants pocket as we stood in the breezeway next to an idling bus, the diesel fumes making me nauseous. She turned, handed her ticket to the mustached driver standing at the door, and bolted up the steps. Once she reached her seat, she whispered something to me through the tinted windows, and I answered her with voiceless words that moved my lips.

Derek was at a friend's house that Saturday, so I had to think of something to do with Justine. I asked her if she wanted to have someone over. Negative. Or go bicycling. Negative. Or take Magpie on a hike.

“You can go without me,” she said.

There was no way I was going to leave her home alone. And I couldn't imagine just the two of us sitting home without talking about it. I needed distraction. I wanted cheerful. She finally agreed to go to Longacres.

In order to save two bucks, I used general parking, which was distant from the entry way but free, and took the shuttle train, which looked like a series of coupled golf carts. I thought she'd get a kick out of the open-air ride, but she seemed glum. I wanted sunshine, but the sun was behind a cloud formation resembling a pile of poker chips. Justine dragged behind as I led us to a bench close to the finish line.

“Look at that infield,” I said. “It's landscaped like Buckingham Palace.”

“The people seem just ordinary.”

She was right on that one. They called it the sport of kings, but the stands were filled with paupers and pretenders, a melting field of races where every tongue could utter win, place, show. She hung her hooded sweatshirt over the back of the bench and I folded my Scotch-plaid sportcoat, a Christmas gift from Mom, into a square on the seat next to me. I taught her how to read the racing form—date and length of race, track condition, position at each call, jockey weight, speed rating. She seemed to be coming alive and started studying the form, circling and ranking her top three horses the same as I did, but our choices seldom matched. During the parade to the post, she'd go over to the rail and watch the jockeys canter their horses by.

“Don't just go with the prettiest silks,” I told her.