All My Relations (11 page)

Leah spent the night on my couch. In the morning I served us breakfast.

“This is like the tundra.” Leah gestured around my barren apartment. Six weeks after leaving my lover I'd acquired only a Finnish dining set and a matching overstuffed rattan chair and couch.

Leah was fidgety, anxious to go. When I dropped her at home, the white pickup was in the drive, and she relaxed. Thanking me, she invited me back for dinner. Soothed by the role of spectator at someone else's drama, I said yes.

The man I'd left, large, balding, mat of hair on his chest, had reminded me of Gerald Ford. Star athlete, a handsome, friendly guy—I've never understood the derision heaped on President Ford. Instead of guiding the nation, though, my Jim took long walks and occasional carpentry jobs. As his money ran out, he drank hard liquor, aggravating his ulcer. Our last weeks, he was vomiting nightly. I would wake just before the sound began. After twice finding the toilet filled with blood, I would close my eyes and flush when I entered the bathroom.

My first impression at Leah's was that I'd entered a sunken living room. But, outside of two standing brass lamps, it was the furniture itself that was low, the long couches and tables. Cushions were strewn everywhere, collecting in mounds along the walls. Leah took a place among them, I beside her. Sitting, we were nearly reclining.

The pillows were boldly quilted, some resembling vegetables, clouds, mustaches. She made them to sell at street fairs, she said, and for steady income taught math at the JC. “Lies,” she laughed. “All I do now is fuck.”

“I take it such an event has occurred since this morning?”

“Why ye-es.” Last night was a farce, she whispered. Eskison, the boyfriend, had taken the pretzel woman for cigarettes, and they were back ten minutes after we left. When Leah wasn't
home, he'd called the party, but no one knew my address. “Idiot,” Leah said, her forefinger making the “crazy” circle at her own head. “Sorry.”

Yeah, but what about the pretzels in the décolletage?

“‘I couldn't let her get away with dressing like that,'” Leah quoted him sarcastically. She spread her hands. “He sucks.”

Both she and Eskison, who now appeared from the kitchen, seemed light-headed with the reconciliation.

“The rescuer,” he said, shaking my hand. “I should sue you for mental agony. I didn't sleep a second all night.”

“I countersue you, on the same grounds,” Leah said. They laughed uproariously. Eskison stiffened his body, arms rigid at his sides, eyes bulging—“'What's she doing?' ‘What's he doing?'”

Small and dark, curly hair and beard encircling his face, he was in his mid-twenties, I guessed, Leah approaching forty. I was twenty-five, and subtracting the glamor of youth, he wasn't so great.

After dinner, while Eskison smoked outside, Leah and I told stories about our neighbors, mine young singles, hers Mexican families established for generations. “You glazed over,” she said. “Am I talking too much? Do you want coffee?”

Teaching myself moment to moment to live with my lover's absence occupied me so completely, only then had it occurred to me I was going home, to Delaware, the next week.

“Trouble?” Leah asked.

When I was ten, I explained, Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS, was diagnosed in my father, and he was given five years to live. Continuing to work a decade, he'd then sold his housepainting business. Fifteen years after the first symptoms, doctors were confounded by his protracted dying.

“That's awful,” Leah said. Embarrassingly, I couldn't speak. My mind was blank. After a respectful silence, she added, “Stop by when you're back, if you need fixing up.”

Then Eskison's truck started, and Leah's face sagged.

“Probably going for more beer,” I said.

“Es
posible.
” Leah waved her hand dismissively. She sat on the couch, crossed her legs, fluffed her hair. Seeing that she was postponing a fit until I left, shortly I did.

The next morning she called to apologize for her “edginess.” I was right about the beer. She wished me luck.

My brother Rick picked me up at Greater Wilmington Airport, in a ‘56 Thunderbird. Top down, we zoomed past slushy ice, Rick's hair blown back in a crest. Dark birthmark beneath his right eye, cigarette tip pale orange in the wind—dashing Rick.

Home, my mother scurried about the kitchen, her red face puckered and shiny as a baked apple. As usual, during our hug she looked away, as if worried that somewhere something was boiling over.

From the wrinkles across his shirt I knew that Dad had been lying down. He was so emaciated the skin and white mustache drooped from his face like the shirt from his frame. Wrapping my arms around him, I pressed his back.

Mother cut his meat at the dinner table. After dessert we watched TV in the den. On the seven-foot screen a quarterback threw his pass into the stands. Rick sat hunched, neck in a U, cracking his knuckles. “Got to thrash tonight,” he said, standing.

“Rick!” Mother said. “You won't see Claire again until God knows when.”

“We'll do tomorrow.” Rick winked at me.

“Movie, hon?” Dad said.

“I like the game, Dad.” We always watched together. I would sit in his lap, beside him as I got older, sharing sips of beer, breathing the turpentine that never scrubbed out.

By halftime Dad's jaw dropped and he stared as if aghast at the colored figures piling up on Astroturf. Mother and I stretched him on the hide-a-bed, drawing a comforter to his chin.

“When we bought the couch, nobody guessed how well it fit him,” Mother said. “See? His feet go right down to the end.”

Mother had grown so inward, I didn't always know how to respond.

Without Rick in the house I was lonely. We hadn't always been close. Until Dad's illness I barely acknowledged Rick, four years younger. I was the first, he was the boy. We each had our claim. What I do recall is the garden variety ruthlessness, I “forgetting” to remove the baby gate from the stairs, Rick left wailing as I played loudly below; an older Rick parading buddies through the bathroom while I showered.

When I first learned about Dad, I pushed in loose concrete blocks and crawled under the house. In the dark I dug elbows and heels into the cool earth. Footsteps above rained dust and cobwebs on me. I stuffed dirt in my mouth, cramming it down with my fists. A strand of web stuck to my lip. I couldn't detach it with tongue or fingers. I gagged, spitting. I screamed. They had to drag me out by the feet.

Gradually, as far as Rick was concerned, I took over for Dad. I walked Rick to tee-ball and then Little League practice, and watched. Sometimes they had me get in the pickle, not often, because I was too fast. The parental stand-in at Open House, I promised to ride Rick about his homework.

To finance Dad's cure we threw a paper route. I could see Rick pedaling furiously abreast of me, newspaper cocked behind his ear. His face, still pudgy, sweated, veins swelling.

Rick and I drove around. Since he insisted on keeping the top down, we were bundled like polar explorers. The sky was raw and leaden with clouds. We shouted through traffic noise and earmuffs. Rick approved that I'd broken up with Jim, whom I'd met the first month after I moved to Tucson three years before.

Rick and I had a tradition of confiding our most intimate
romantic details while the listener dissected the lover mercilessly.

“You undersold yourself on that Jim,” he said. “After Vinnie Toglia, you go out there and take up with an old bald bum.”

“Vinnie Toglia was a sadist.”

“You handled him. That Camaro was the most loaded thing this side of NASA. He's got his own dog-grooming business now.” The other half of the tradition was that, once departed suitably long, these maligned lovers took on wonderful attributes and their loss was seen as a tragic error in judgment. Within a year or two, I assumed, Rick would have canonized Jim—“oddball, but he showed you respect, a gentleman.”

“I was in a bad space when I was seeing Vinnie,” I said. “I can't stand this. My face is frostbitten.”

“Arizona has wimped you out.”

We fought a few blocks before Rick curbed the T-Bird and attached the top.

“Rick,” I said once we were moving, “what will you do when Dad's gone?”

“Fuck knows. Jack around with cars, I guess, free-lance, a garage.”

Rick parked at a renovated corner market of graying brick, the window veined with neon. I would treat him to this video arcade on the way home from Little League.

“Ding-dongs, salted nut roll, and two cream sodas,” the proprietor said immediately. “I wouldn't have recognized you without Rick,” he told me. “You've gotten your hair very ooh-la-la.” He wiggled his head. “You're beautiful.”

“Anteater nose,” I said.

“No, your face has grown into it. Now you call it queenly.”

After Rick posted high score, slapping and jamming the controls with contemptuous grace, we ate our snacks on tall stools in the rear corner, nearly dark, surrounded by slowly shifting
color fields of idle video screens. I almost repeated my question from the car. Surely Rick's thinking had gone beyond his answer; he must have plans. But, I remembered, talk about Dad was forbidden in the arcade. Instead I said, “I just thought of Monty collecting for St. Ann's.”

“Oh, no!” Rick threw his arms and legs out, laughing. “The killer kids.”

One day Rick and I were home from school alone when the doorbell rang, followed by heavy knocking.

“Who is it?” we said. The thuds continued.

Never open a crack until the person identifies himself, we'd been commanded. “Who is it?” we yelled. Silence. No footsteps.

Neither daring to leave the other to call the police, Rick grabbed his bat and I the poker. We stood at either side of the door, bellowing “Hello.”

Through a gap in the curtain I saw a sleeve. The pattern looked familiar. Recklessly I tore aside the curtain. It was Monty, a deaf mute.

The story, I realized, was intended to reassure my brother, a classic things-aren't-as-scary-as-we-make-them.

On the drive home I pulled Rick over for an antique shop. My sprayed-stucco Tucson apartment needed some genuine old Wilmington, I said. Rick, in his Def Leppard sweatshirt and pummeled leather jacket, cupped porcelain shepherdesses in his hands as if they were baby birds, and chatted up the proprietress while I browsed, counting on intuition. I'm no connoisseur.

Rick spotted the plain, bowed-back wooden armchair, part of a display cordoned off with silk rope. “The bedroom. Perfect,” I said. No one was looking. I sat in it. Roomy, and with red velvet cushions it would be comfortable.

“‘Windsor tavern chair,'” Rick read from the catalogue. “Sixty-seven dollars. That's not such a rip for a place like this.”

“Incredible
. Rick, what an eye you've got.”

“I'll buy it.”

“How?” He was out of a job.

“I've got some part-time. I want to. It'll be a memento.”

“I love it,” I said, standing to hug him. I checked the entry. “Circa 1750. This is sixty-seven
hundred.”

He grabbed the pamphlet. “To throw your ass in? Christ,” he yelled. He kicked the chair. It sprang away from his boot, rebounded from the wall and onto its side.

Rick bolted.

The four legs pointed at me. The spindly ribs nestled into the stubbled carpet. The chair lay on the floor like a breach of natural law. I ran, too.

My last morning Dad asked me to walk him around the reservoir. “His pep when you're here, it's night and day,” Mother remarked.

“Keeping busy, Claire?” Dad said. I was steering him across icy patches, hands at his elbows.

“Best job I've had.” An L.A. law firm had rushed open a Tucson office, defending a megadeveloper against a titanic subcontractor. Desperate for help, they'd made me a legal secretary despite no previous experience. I am a quick study. Admitting that sleaze would rule, whoever won the case, we employees joked incessantly, uneasily. But my research was stimulating, the pay good, the lawyers cynical and funny. Beautifully dressed and groomed, they were like models from premium liquor ads.

“Two parents with half a brain equals a kid with a whole one,” Dad panted. We rested.

“Last time I was here, Rick was living in Elsmere, with a girl,” I said.

“I believe that's so, Claire.”

I pressed. Shouldn't Rick find his own place? Couldn't he get on with Sabo Electric again? Was he dating?

“He's got the T-Bird,” Dad said. “A car is less upkeep than a woman.”

“Aw, Dad.” I spanked his hand. “You can't talk like that in the '80's.”

Because Rick had never left, he had become invisible to Dad. In grade school Rick biked to Dad's work sites. He quit high school, joining the paint crew full-time to keep the business afloat, just as Dad was preparing to sell out. Now Rick broke leases, lost jobs, always returning.

I flew in from Wilmington racing, unable to settle down. I'd had no personal life outside Jim, and Leah was the only person I could think to call. We made a date for Saturday morning, her beginning ballet class. I'd never taken dance in my life.

Tiptoeing onto the particle-board floor, we lurched through chains of plieing pink babies, a handful of adolescents. My butt and boobs bulged out of the saggy old leotard. Leah didn't shave her armpits. Repeated in wall-length mirrors, we were a spectacle. But Leah retained vestigial technique from childhood lessons, and my calves were so strong that my sautes impressed the ballet mistress. Stringy and brown, at least sixty-five, she dressed in black from wrists to ankles, catching her hair in an orange kerchief. Referring to herself in third person, she would say, “Madame Rifi is not pleased with port de bras today.”

At the end of class Madame Rifi offered me a role in the spring recital, “Babes in Toyland.”