Crossroads (29 page)

When our parents returned from California, a concerned neighbor, trying to be helpful, informed them that things had been a bit chaotic at our house while they were away and that one morning they had found a pair of girl's underpants on their rosebush, which Renee claimed as hers. When our parents asked Renee about the incident, there flowed from the lips of the perfect child a stream of curses such as our house had never heard uttered before, hurtling my mother into incontrollable tears and my father into paroxysms of rage. Zap was impressed with her for the first time in his life, and I was stunned.

Mom said she'd been such a terrific kid, and Dad threw her out of the house, a useless gesture, since she was already in her junior year at Stanford and hardly ever home. She told him that “the revolution was coming” and that he'd missed his historic mission and was a failure to his own time. Then she hit the streets of San Francisco as a flower child. She took a flat in the Haight and painted naked men at the San Francisco Institute of Art. She sent us a photo of herself with a diamond in her nose and flowers painted on her cheeks, her frizzy black hair grown wild, like Medusa's head.

Renee wasn't going to paint flowers on her cheeks and draw naked men forever. But our parents didn't understand that. They didn't realize times were changing. Juvenile delinquents were graduating from our high school and becoming serious
artists, and our prom queen had a baby out of wedlock in Big Sur. Renee went from the streets of San Francisco to a good job in public relations. She cut her hair to a respectable length and married a periodontist with a good practice in the Loop and began producing children. After three years of barely speaking, Renee and our parents resumed cordial relations, and Mom went to Eddie from time to time for gum work at cost.

After much discussion and several phone calls, everyone agreed it did make sense for me to stay at Renee's while I was in Illinois. My parents were, after all, moving to the Everglades. Downers Grove was an easy, forty-five-minute commute, when the CTA was running, to the Loop. Eddie said it would be “hunky-dory” and “if it's O.K. by her, it's O.K. by me.” Well, it was O.K. by Renee, so I moved in. Renee greeted me at the door in an apron. “I could use the help,” she said with a laugh, kissing me. When she hugged me, our breasts crushed against one another and I realized it had been a long time since I'd hugged my sister. Eddie was in the living room, helping Sam with his toy train, and they all seemed fairly happy to me. Eddie either knew nothing about her sordid past or, if he did, he didn't care. From the mirror they had above the bed, I suspected he may have participated in it.

For dinner my first night at Renee's she served Campbell's beef consommé with sherry and Pepperidge Farm garlic and herb croutons, instant mashed potatoes with Blue Bonnet margarine, Birds Eye frozen peas and carrots, roast beef with instant thick gravy, salad with Wishbone Italian dressing, heat-and-serve garlic bread already wrapped in foil, and, for dessert, Sara Lee brownies with Cool Whip, and Brim with Sweet 'N Low and Coffee-mate nondairy creamer. And my sister had been a vegetarian at a time when they were shooting vegetarians in this country.

After dinner Eddie said he'd do the dishes “so you girls can catch up on things.” Renee helped me get settled in Wendy's room. She moved handfuls of stuffed animals out of the way
and helped me put my things away. Wendy, who was four, would stay with Jody, who was eight, while I was with them. “Now, listen,” Renee said to me, sounding more like my mother than my sister, “I know you've had a rough year and I know a lot has happened. So I just want to tell you, if you want to talk, that's what we're here for.” She was using the royal “we.” “Any time you need to say something, don't sit around in your room and mope. Come out and talk to me. Is that clear?”

I told her it was very clear. That night I was given priority in the bathroom. Sam, who was six, waited outside in his army uniform and saluted me as I went in and out. Jody set and unset her hair three times while I got ready for bed and each time asked me how I thought it would come out. She finally went to bed with huge, pink jumbo rollers all over her head. Wendy came into her room on the pretext of looking for a doll or something. She felt displaced. I'd cleared off a space for myself on her desk, and when she came in she asked me why I'd moved her things. “Oh, I just needed some room,” I said. “I'll move them back when I'm done.”

Wendy had wide black eyes and black hair, and as she walked toward me, her black eyes got wider. She bent over and bit my arm as hard as she could. Like some Indian being taken into the tribe, I didn't flinch. And when she was finished, she stared at me. “Why did you bite me?” I asked.

“Are you going to tell?”

I shrugged. “I don't know.”

“My daddy is a dentist and he says I have a perfect bite.”

I looked at the red marks on my arm. “Yes, it's very good.”

“Are you going to tell?”

I shook my head. “I don't think so. Are you going to bite me again?”

She said she had to think about it and she left the room.

 

I hadn't forgotten and I couldn't forget Sean. Every day as I rode the CTA to work I thought about him. Every day as I
looked at the bleak city of Chicago I wondered why it mattered to me at all, what city I worked in. In bed at night, I thought of him. I thought of making love to him and I wondered where he was, who he was with. I called my apartment in New York one night, and my sublessee, a dancer who was hard to reach, told me I had some bills, a few phone messages, a letter or two, but nothing from Sean. I thought about him more. I wondered if he'd gotten my letter and if he had, had he answered it. Could the letter have gone astray? Or perhaps he didn't even know I was trying to contact him.

I phoned his apartment. The woman who answered said he'd been on location out west working on a new film. I asked her if she had forwarded a letter to him but she didn't remember any letter. She didn't know where he could be reached but she said he would phone in during the week. I asked her to have him give me a call.

At night I went to bed, legs clamped tight together, because I didn't want to think of that first night, when Sean had gotten me to relax. Sometimes Wendy crawled into bed with me if she couldn't sleep, and both of us slept better. In the morning I went to work. My work consisted mostly of winding down building projects my father still had on the drawing boards and only selectively taking on new work. Two nights a week I took a class in architectural drawing at IIT, and I began applying to graduate programs in urban design for the fall.

The office was more or less the same, though the surfaces had changed. The dull gray rug in the entranceway was now a bright burgundy. Overhead spots had replaced the naked bulbs in the corridors. I worked until five-thirty or six most nights. On the nights I had classes I ate downtown. Other nights I got a ride home with Eddie. Eddie liked to talk about his work all the way back to Downers Grove. He told me about the gold crown he'd removed that afternoon, about the case of gingivitis he'd nipped in the bud on its way to becoming pyorrhea alveolaris. He told me the wonders of laughing gas
and how once in a while, but not often, he liked to take a whiff.

When I could, I tried to stay in the Loop and take the CTA home later. I began working until seven or so in my father's office. It really had hardly changed at all since I was a girl and had gone in the summers to run the switchboard. Clarice O'Leary, my father's secretary, was still there, except now her hair was blue. Clarice was a good Irish Catholic and a widow, who'd lived apart from her husband twenty-five years prior to his death but who'd never had a moment's thought of infidelity. Clarice had only two points of pride. For some reason she was proud of the fact that she'd married a man descended from the family whose cow started the Chicago fire. And she was proud of the tight control she had over the office. She knew more or less how many sheets of paper were in the supply closet and how many pencils “the boys” went through in the course of a week. And she kept a hawk's eye on me.

“You're using too much tracing paper,” she'd say to me. Or, “Don't put on the blueprint machine until you have ten prints to make. It's a waste to get it started, then stop.” It made no sense arguing with her that I needed a certain print at a certain time. Clarice had her way. Who wanted to argue with someone with blue hair? I had to beg her to leave in the evening if I wanted to work late. Basically she wanted everyone to leave when she did so that she could lock up and make sure everything was in its proper place. “Clarice,” I'd have to say to her, “I'm going to work late tonight, so I'll lock up, all right?” Eventually she'd agree.

That summer, in the evenings, I'd often find myself alone in the back of the drafting room. I can't honestly say I stayed late to work, though there certainly was work to be done. I think I was trying to put my life back together in that room amidst the drawing boards, the stools, the blueprint machine. There is something terrible yet soothing about returning to a place where you once lived. You are one of your own memories. And so, late at night, in the dim light of the twilight as the summer
wore on, I thought of walking in and finding my brother, bent over Jennie. I thought how I'd once believed he'd always want to be bent over her and how he'd believed it. But desire can come upon us, then go away. I had wanted Mark more than I'd ever wanted anything and now I didn't want him at all. And I thought about Sean, wherever he was, and how much, to my surprise, I still wanted him.

One night on my way to class I decided I was becoming a creature of habit, always walking up La Salle and down Washington. I decided to alter my route and go past the Picasso statue. It was a hot night in early July and I paused to look at the statue. It was a strange, animal-like so-called woman he'd given to the city, and some people thought it was a big joke.

When I turned to cross Dearborn, I saw on a marquee the name of the film
Minor Setbacks
. It had just opened in the Loop and was playing right across the street. The theater smelled of stale popcorn and cigar smoke. I found a seat but a man started breathing down my neck, so I moved to another seat. The theater was almost empty, so I went near the back where the usher stood, and no one bothered me.

The film wasn't bad really and the story was something like what Sean had told me, but not exactly. The parallel lives of two Italian boys, one who makes it out of the neighborhood and into an ad agency in Manhattan, the other who runs his dad's pizzeria. Somewhere in the middle of the film, the ex-girlfriend of the boy who went away tries to seduce the boy, now a man, from the pizzeria. But he is a man of character. As she leans against the railing of his porch, her blouse half-opened, he understands she is just trying to get back at her former lover. She moves toward him but he pushes her away. “Listen,” he says to her, “when I touch wood”—he grabs the railing—“I want to feel the wood, and when I touch cloth”—he touches her shirt—“I want to feel the material, and when I touch a woman, I want to feel that woman. I want that woman to be with me and not with someone else.”

The next night I sat through the film twice in that stale popcorn-, cigar-smelling theater, listening to the words Sean had once spoken to me being repeated on the wide screen. Then I cried on the commuter train all the way back to Downers Grove. I cried as I walked from the station to Renee's house. While I cried, I decided to write to Sean directly, care of Four Tracks Films, Incorporated. This time I would receive a reply.

 

Shortly before they left for the Everglades in the beginning of July, my parents came to Renee's for a barbecue, one of Eddie's infinite varieties. During the summer Eddie had barbecued everything—pork, chicken, T-bones, ribs, shish-kebab, ham, corn, potatoes. Our parents arrived at one-thirty sharp. They are the only people I know who can actually manage to be early but never late. “So,” said Mom, bursting into the living room, “who's glad to see Grandma? Sammy, are you happy? Jody? Where's my baby Wendy?”

“Hi, Grams.” The kids waved lethargically. Mr. Rogers was on the tube.

“Aren't you going to kiss Grandma?”

The sound of a rattling motor coming up the street made me look out the window. A black and blue Volkswagen bounced to a halt in front of Renee's placid development, and Zap and Brenda got out. My brother looked thinner and he'd trimmed his hair. Brenda was small, only about five feet, and she looked like a miniature person as she walked beside him. They came up the steps laughing over something. Brenda had a camera around her neck and a box of candy in her hand. Zap toted a small pack. They had met, Zap told me over the phone, in anatomy class and shared a cadaver. He was a rather plump and pungent old man with a permanent smile on his face, nicknamed Smiley, which was coincidentally what our mother called our father.

Brenda was the eight millionth woman Zap had brought home, so it was difficult to take the relationship too seriously,
but there was something I liked about her right away. Most of Zap's women were passive creatures who stretched out in chairs and moved only when he asked them to or when they somehow sensed a need of his. But Brenda was right in there, and though I'd gotten a funny impression of her on the phone, she wasn't really flaky at all. “Hi,” she said, walking into the kitchen. “Are you Renee?”

“God,” I replied, “do I look like the mother of three children?”

“I'm the mother of three children,” my mother piped up.

“Oh, you must be Debbie. Listen, I'm sorry I was so stupid on the phone . . .”

Zap scooped me into his arms. “How's my favorite little sister?” I reminded him that I was still eleven months older than he. “Hey, guess what?” he whispered into my ear. “I'm going to marry that girl.” I told him I'd believe it when I saw it.