Carter Clay (14 page)

Carter Clay has prayed to God for forgiveness for the disaster on Post Road. Still, he yearns to say—albeit anonymously—“Please, forgive me” to the girl and her grandmother. “Please, please, please.” Carter Clay—in his red-hot desire for forgiveness—does not understand that for M.B., perched atop the mountain of the accident's outcomes, the idea of
the driver
is merely a dark seam on some lower slope: laboring mule train? crevasse? shadow from an overhead cloud? Up here, where the snow is blinding, and the winds freeze your breath and sometimes threaten to carry you right over the edge, who cares about the driver?

Well, Jersey does.

The accident, in effect, not only has robbed Jersey of her parents, and the use of her legs, it has made her (at least in thought) murderous. Mentally, Jersey has executed the driver many times in many ways. Bullets, axes, trucks, fire.

Once, Jersey informed M.B. of these thoughts, and M.B. felt obliged to speak of forgiveness; still, she could not help admiring the girl's spirit.

One thing M.B. has to grant: her granddaughter has spunk. The way she whips around in that wheelchair as if she does not even notice how people stare—that's spunky, and M.B. thinks of herself as having spunk, too. She feels quite spunky as she asks the Breather, “Enjoying yourself, buddy?”

Though M.B. refers to Carter Clay as the Breather, Carter Clay makes no sound during his calls. Hand over the mouthpiece, he waits for himself to confess. He thinks that maybe if the girl answered the telephone—he has seen the girl at a distance several times now, in that wheelchair that always gives his gut a wrench, on her way to the library or to Fair Oaks to visit her mother—maybe if
the girl
answered the telephone, he might be able to speak.

“Bye, now!” With a bang, M.B. hangs up the telephone, then says to Jersey, “The heroine—her husband's cute, ain't—
isn't
he?”

Jersey says a noncommittal “Mm,” in order to avoid pointing out that the man is the epitome of mindless conformism, a beer-swilling watcher of TV sports who will be one of the first humans taken over by the aliens. To switch the subject, she says, “You hear that little squeal in the background, M.B.? That squeal lets you know the aliens are chasing someone, somewhere. Only, if you haven't seen the movie before, you don't really notice it, see? It works on you almost subliminally.”

In the Exxon station parking lot, as Carter sets the telephone receiver in its cradle, he realizes that he has been standing with one foot on the front bumper of his van, and—full of shame and fear, like a man who has accidentally stepped onto a fresh grave—he stumbles back. He knocks into the window of the Exxon station, inside of which the attendant and a friend sit in lawn chairs, watching
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
on a TV that they have balanced on a pile of radial tires. Carter looks in at the TV. He recognizes the movie's hero. He likes his face. Its homely self-acceptance
reassures Carter in the same way that the faces of Abe Lincoln and Walter Cronkite and Walt Disney reassured him as a boy, and so he stops and he stares at the hero through the gas station window.

In 1966, when Carter heard on the radio that Walt Disney had died, he felt even worse than he had felt when President Kennedy was shot. Only his mother was home at the time, and Carter did not know how to tell her that he was upset at the death of a stranger who dreamed up kid shows and cartoons. He left the house and he walked. It was December, cold and damp, and he ended up at the Bowladrome. He bowled a few games. But even the Bowladrome seemed damp and cold that day, and when none of his friends showed up, he headed for home. He went up the little alley behind the house, and used the backdoor. His father always complained that Carter was too big for the house: Didn't anyone else notice the noise the kid made on the stairs? The amount of food the kid put away? The way he grew out of clothes?

That December afternoon, Carter concentrated hard on being silent as he passed through the house. Everything was so quiet that he assumed his mother had gone out for an afternoon job or she was maybe taking a nap. It was pure luck that he needed to use the bathroom; otherwise he would have missed the pinkish water that slipped, like an SOS, from beneath the bathroom door, and he would not have been able to call the ambulance in time.

An effect of his poor hearing: at first, Carter does not understand that the movie on the gas station TV has been interrupted by a noisy truck advertisement. Carter only sees a pickup bound across a rough rock landscape, then rush toward the camera, shove a wave of gravel in the viewer's face.

Jersey, watching the ad in M.B.'s living room, recognizes the advertisement's horizon, those red rocks: the Moenkopi Formation,
where, on several occasions, she tagged along behind her father and his university students as they examined Triassic trackways.

M.B. looks up at the small moan that escapes the girl. As a reward to herself for not saying more about the girl's braids, she decides that, just once this game, she'll let herself flip the fourth card, not the third, and that little bit of a cheat brings her an ace, and then lots of moves, and makes her happy enough that she asks, “So what do they look like, Jersey? These aliens?”

“Like—people. They take over people.”

“That fella, there, has he been taken over? He looks kind of like your dad, don't he?”

As M.B. has made it clear to Jersey that she found Joe disagreeable, Jersey answers coolly, “That's Matthew, the hero. He looks more like my Uncle Sam to me.”

“Mm.” A painful subject to both M.B. and Jersey: Sam Alitz. A stage actor who made of his post-accident visit to Florida a kind of demonstration of his inadequacy for the task of taking Jersey into his bachelor household. Upon arrival at M.B.'s—Jersey was still in rehab at the time—Sam announced that he could not eat the lovely rolled flank steak that M.B. had prepared for their Sunday meal, and would M.B. mind if he just went out to the kitchen and whipped himself up one of his health food concoctions in her blender?

M.B. stayed at her place at the dinette, but raised herself from her chair to peer into the kitchen from the pass-through. She was astonished—and somewhat pleased—that a person twelve years her junior could look older than herself. She also noted that the main ingredient in Sam's blender drink—a sprinkle of brewer's yeast, a dollop of yogurt and honey—was the Glenlivet he carried in what she would have had to call a purse. “Truth to tell,” Sam called over the blender's little roar, “I never cook. That's probably why I've developed such an odd repertoire of tastes!” Well, Sam could smile as he carried his drink to the dinette, but M.B. felt silly and furious over her efforts on his behalf (potatoes and gravy, meat, green beans, molded salad). Really, she wished he would just shut up, but on he went:
M.B. was lucky to be so
firmly settled. Why, he hadn't been home more than two days running in months!

Before Sam's arrival, M.B. had practiced saying to her bathroom mirror, “Sam, we need to figure out a way for us to care for the girl when they send her home.” Once Sam arrived, however, she saw that he could not (would not) take care of the girl.

The truth: Sam knew Jersey even less than M.B. did. The longest stretch of time that Jersey had ever spent in her uncle's presence was the night she sat in front of a television set for ninety minutes while he appeared in an American Playhouse performance of
Job's Children.

Still, on that Sunday afternoon when Sam loped into the recreation room at St. Mary's Rehab, his resemblance to his brother affected Jersey deeply.

At St. Mary's, for consolation, Jersey sometimes imagined that her father was her opponent in her solitary games of chess. She was involved in such a match when she looked up and saw Sam. At that moment, Joe's face blurted out of death's dark like those ghost landscapes—swollen trees, rush of lawn, flowers, shed, swing set—revealed by the flash of late-night lightning. Jersey wept and threw her arms around her uncle's neck, and would not let him go. M.B. wept at the sight, as did a physical therapist who happened to pass by the open door. Sam wept, too. Though the changes he had seen on his visit to Katherine had made him almost ill, his niece was still charming. Her disabilities, however, terrified him, and he itched to leave St. Mary's almost as soon as he arrived.

“I've got a message machine,” he told the girl. “You call me whenever you need to, okay?”

She looked up at him with sad and lovely blue eyes. Doves, he thought of, and seashells, and clouds and ice. Three times he had played the role of Tom in
Glass Menagerie
, but it was a shock—well, he had known it would be bad, but it really was a different thing altogether—to disentangle himself from a girl who lived a life of loneliness and paralysis as opposed to an actress who portrayed such a thing.

Was he right to leave her with M.B.? It was true, he drank too much. He
was
rarely at home; and though his third-floor apartment in the West 70s was a nice airy place, it consisted of one room that could be reached only by a set of steep granite stairs.

And M.B. and Jersey do have fun together sometimes: picking out nail polish at Walgreen's; making elaborate sundaes; listening to old musicals, which, to M.B.'s delight, the girl likes as much as M.B. herself does. The first time Jersey sang along with a recording of “On the Street Where You Live,” M.B. remembered something she had forgotten: Kitty used to like to sing along with the musicals, too.

At any rate, it is M.B. with whom Jersey lives, and M.B. with whom she watches
Body Snatchers
, and M.B. who asks on her way to the kitchen, “You want anything, kid?”

“No, thanks.”

M.B. turns on the kitchen overhead, transforming the pass-through into a square of trembling fluorescence through which M.B. pokes her head to cry, “I can't believe your mother let you watch such a movie!”

Jersey wonders: Does M.B.'s shock refer to the nakedness of the actor now struggling to rise from a mud bath? The quaking of his muddy buttocks, as the kindly bathhouse attendant, Nancy, guides him to the showers? Or is this expressed shock really just some excrescence of M.B.'s guilt over the fact that she—a lifetime teetotaller—has gone to the kitchen in order to get a little tipsy on MD 20–20?

“This was one of my mom's favorite movies,” Jersey says—then corrects herself—“
is.
My dad liked the original.”

“Your grandfather wouldn't have allowed me to see such a thing!” says M.B. “He thought too highly of me. As a lady, see? He thought there were things a lady shouldn't see.”

“I guess we aren't ladies, then,” Jersey says with a sniff, while, on the screen, the fat customer asks Nancy to turn off the recording of classical music she plays in the bathhouse. Jersey, who has seen the movie five times, knows just how Nancy will respond, and so she wonders: if she could rent a VCR and show her mother
Body Snatchers
, would that repetition of experience help bring her mother back?