Daughters of the Revolution (16 page)

I reached over the bread and wine and plucked Pilgrim’s glasses from his nose. He seemed blind without them, but he didn’t try to stop me. I dipped the glasses in my tumbler of water and wiped them clean on a paper napkin. The metal frames suggested the influence of Benjamin Franklin or John Lennon. When I slid the glasses back on Pilgrim’s nose, he looked as if clear vision changed his view. “Wow, Mei-Mei,” he said. “You don’t really look like anyone’s mom.”

“Thanks, Pilgrim.”

I thought of EV, who would now be standing at the refrigerator, trolling for scraps of food, filling herself with remorse.

Debbie O’Greefe brought the clams and two bowls of butter and broth. “I’ve never had these before,” Pilgrim said.

“Clams?” I said. “That’s extraordinary, as you’re from Connecticut.”

“Jewish mother,” he said.

“How did you come to be called Pilgrim, then?”

“My father was an asshole.”

I detached the veil from the neck of one and dipped it into his butter. Then I lifted it to his mouth, pushed my fingers through his lips and laid it on his tongue.

“Good?” I asked him. He gave me a long, assessing look, which I allowed. I’ve never minded being looked at.

“Very good,” he said.

I fed him another.

“Go on,” I said.

Pilgrim removed the veils from one clam at a time and laid them all in the butter bowl. When he’d finished, he popped the clams straight into his mouth. Butter drizzled down his chin, his bib. When he’d finished, his glasses were filthy again. He pushed them up on his nose. “Ah, the finger bowl!” he said, and plunged his hands in the broth.

Debbie brought our fish—elegant haddock. Under the breading, the fish is white and tender. You can eat all you want, but I limit myself to one piece, and another to take home for lunch. EV and I used to go every Friday night back in the days when EV ate food and we never thought of wine with dinner. The fish comes in a red plastic basket lined with waxed paper to hold the oil. They send out french fries, too, but I taught EV never to get involved with those.

Pilgrim, though, was no product of mine. Let him eat them. He ate quickly, with an intellectual attention, and spoke only to call to Debbie for more haddock. The table filled with red plastic baskets and balled-up paper napkins. When Debbie finally tore the green ticket off her pad, she couldn’t find a free space on the table, so I took it from her swollen fingers. “Thank you, Debbie. This is mine, Pilgrim. It’s delicious to have you with us.”

He nodded, seemed pleased with that.

The evening was warm and the street busy with people coming out of the restaurants, dazed from their big dinners. I suggested that we stop and buy a bag of penny candy for EV.

Lolly’s is the place. It’s been there since I was a girl, when a candy really cost a penny, and old Mrs. Lolly stood behind the glass cases, tall and extremely serious, and waited with her metal tongs while we chose. “One cigarette, one slice of coconut bacon, one chocolate soldier, two lemon slices—no, one lemon slice and one orange slice …” EV and I used to walk over after the fish fry and split a little bag. Lolly’s has new candies now, raspberries and blackberries, and tiny, perfect bananas and peas.

“I’d rather buy her ice cream,” he said.

“Don’t you know her
at all
?” I asked him.

He put his hands in his pockets and went sullen. The pleats in the front of his khaki slacks cradled his little tummy.

“You’re just wrong about the ice cream,” I said. “EV never eats it.”

“She eats ice cream with me,” he said. “I feed it to her on a spoon. In bed.”

My ears rang a bit. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked him.

“Did I go too far? I thought you two discussed all your exploits together,” he said.

“As a matter of fact, no, we don’t.”

I left him there, walked a block up to Lolly’s, pushed the door open and jangled the bell.

Who loved my daughter best? The then-narrow, hungry face of Debbie O’Greefe came to mind. I used to come home exhausted after school—Mrs. O’Greefe marginally “watching” the girls—and come upon the scene of an orgy: buttery toast crumbs, balled-up napkins, a bag of Oreos torn open on the counter next to two glasses containing the dregs of grimy-looking milk. How could they be so hungry? Once I found a “Resipy for an Explosive” scribbled down in EV’s pretty handwriting and atrocious, below-grade-level spelling. The brew included “Baking soda, Lyons milk, erbs, oyel, licker and seedlings,” all congealing together in a Pyrex bowl. More chilling was this note: “I luv u EV,” surrounded by hearts impaled with arrows. I discouraged that friendship in guilty, subtle ways. I wished that I were a fairer, better person. I wished Debbie O’Greefe were the kind of child I could have loved—a biracial child, for example, or an Indian.

I spent $3.75 on a medium-size bag. Even penny candy isn’t sold by the piece anymore; it’s sold by the pound in big self-service bins with plastic scoops. We are a nation of gluttons.

When I came out, Pilgrim was standing on the sidewalk, holding a freezer bag from the fancy summer-only grocery; I’ve
never even stepped in there. He said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t drink.”

“It’s perfectly all right,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said EV went to France with a man. That was indiscreet.”

“I won’t tell.”

We walked peacefully to the car. Pilgrim pulled the keys out of his pocket and opened the passenger door for me. But once behind the wheel, he was lost.

“Take a right here,” I told him, and sent him up Whalebone Neck, past the big old houses there—most of them undermaintained, rotten really, unoccupied even in this high season. He drove badly, though not, I thought, from the wine. High and nervous, I sat in the unfamiliar passenger seat of my new car. Pilgrim was brittle, his glasses greasy; he could crash.

I put a hand on his leg and squeezed.

He drove off to the side of the road, away from the streetlights, down into a grassy ditch under a maple tree—I assumed we were having an accident—and stopped the car. He unfastened his seat belt, then mine, leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. There was nothing exploratory or sensory about the kiss. It was all transmission, no reception; he might have been having a convulsion on my face. He unbuttoned the front of my blouse, or tried to. I thought of the beautiful French word for confusion:
brouilliamini
. I sprang the little hook in front of my bra and Pilgrim released a childish noise—a whine of frustration or anguish or complicated pleasure. I stroked his head, his thinning baby hair. His hands moved awkwardly to the fly of his pants, which he worked to unbutton.

This was all over very quickly, almost before I understood how minor was my role. He mopped himself with a wad of tissues he extracted from the box I keep between the seats, then crushed the tissues into a ball. He had to turn on the ignition, of course, to buzz the electric window down. The Peugeot roared to life and he tossed the ball—it looked exactly like a snowball—across
the street and onto the lawn of the now-defunct historical society, where it lay all summer like some unseasonal marvel, glowing on the grass.

EV hadn’t bothered to switch on the porch light. The chime on the door pinged anxiously when I opened it. The house was dark, though a small light shone from the kitchen. “We’re home, darling!” I called.

EV wandered down the hall toward us. She’d put on an ancient robe of mine, a kimono I bought on sale at Filene’s before she was born. “You both reek of wine and fried things,” she said.

“Pilgrim found French wine at the fish fry. Can you imagine?”

“I brought us ice cream,” Pilgrim said, squeezing EV’s arm.

“And
I
brought penny candy. Those little berries you like!” I rattled the paper bag in front of her face.

Reaching for the bag, EV looked like a child again, small, greedy and expectant, though of these qualities, she was really only small. I wondered whether I had ever been a good mother to her, and how, under different circumstances, I might have been a better one.

H
e had no way of cleaning himself
out
, God admitted when pressed by Dr. Hauk. He hadn’t ever paid much attention to himself. How could he get under the skin? He shed flakes.

He’d lost a lung to tuberculosis after the war, a few teeth. This last was just a flap, a scrim. But he would be different without it. He stood in the WC and inspected himself, took himself in his hand.

No need for an operation, Hauk assured him, just a procedure. (But then Hauk died, and God had to see the new man, Wu.)

God understood that the procedure would change him slightly forever. Circumcision would fundamentally alter the narrow peninsula God thought of as himself. He dreamed he’d become monstrous, womanly, his body covered with nipples. In horrified fascination, dreaming, he touched them. Then it was as if a presence held him down, as if a body lay on his. He tried to sit up, but he was paralyzed, dozing. The Presence pressed on him; he pushed back. The Presence, having made her point, withdrew. God stood up, wiped a trail of salt from his chin and looked into the smoky, pockmarked mirror on the wall, a glass so ancient, it no longer reflected anything. The mirror was a formality; God knew what he looked like. He opened his mouth to smile and one of his teeth, canine, fell with a tiny clatter to the floor. Ashamed, he secreted it away in the pocket of his pants and lay for the rest of the afternoon in his chair like a spider in its web, shaking a bit, but working nonetheless, trolling for
a beginning to the story of his life. Or had he written that part down already, the history?

The next morning, Mrs. Graves rapped her knuckles on the door—the bathroom door. “What are you getting up to in there, Mr. Byrd?” she asked. “We have to get to the HOM, the HMO.”

He cleared his throat. “Not the HMO—it’s the Veterans Hospital.”

“Oh hell!” she said, and beat her fist against the wall.

He looked at himself. He put himself back in his shorts. Then he buttoned up his pants and went out with Mrs. Graves to her little Toyota. When he’d told her the car service wanted forty-seven dollars, she’d insisted on driving him herself. The figure outraged them both; they would suffer the ride.

The Veterans Hospital stood on a hill overlooking the industrial corridor, accessible via the Veterans Parkway—a narrow river of fast-moving traffic. The VA Hospital reminded God of the war, which had been beautiful and terrible; he had helped to liberate Shanghai.

Mrs. Graves settled into a plastic chair in the waiting area with a magazine. A nurse led God to an examination room and gave him a johnny to put on. When she returned a few minutes later, he was still standing there, wearing his raincoat, with the johnny over one arm, absorbed in a diagram of renal functions. She turned away while he undressed, then folded his slacks over the back of the chair and helped him up to the examination table; he lay back immediately with a kind of crash. She set a paper cup of orange juice down on a tray beside his head and left him alone.

God put his hand on himself and held himself. He protected himself with his hand. The door opened suddenly and God’s hand shot up.