East Into Upper East (25 page)

“I don't
care
!” Boy said.

This was ludicrous. Boy cares more than any other human being in the world. He is so imaginative that another person's unhappiness is as real and painful to him as his own. He is always asking me, “How's your mother? Did you speak to her today?” A lot of the time, he phones her himself, to make sure she isn't dying of loneliness in that big apartment of hers, with the gilt furniture.

Luckily, I remembered something just then. I said, “Your sister Evie phoned last night. I forgot to tell you. She was—”

“What?” he asked in apprehension.

“Well,” I said, “she seemed okay, really. She spoke about going to visit Bobby at his summer camp, but then she—she—” I was upset, but I couldn't help laughing. Evie had told me that she had to call the doctor in, because there were birds roosting in the valance of her dining-room curtains. She was in one of her disturbed states, and spoke very seriously.

“Is she bad?” he asked. “Did Linda phone?”

Linda is his mother. Every now and again, when Evie gets very bad and has to go away for a while, Linda and her other daughter, Paula, are constantly on the phone to Boy. He is the only male left
in the family. His father is dead (drowned while drunk, at East Hampton), and Evie's and Paula's husbands left years ago.

“I guess Linda would have phoned if she was really bad,” he said, putting that problem aside for the moment. “That leaves
your
mother.”

When I started to defend her again, he said, “Doesn't she realize how it looks? That everyone's laughing at her?”

“Who's laughing?”

At this point, Terry came to join us in the kitchen. He is an English boy, studying architecture in New York, and he had come to stay with us for the summer, along with some of the other friends. It's a big cottage, and they all like to be together. Terry was forever following Boy around, and that was why he came to join us in the kitchen. But Boy, wanting to be alone to talk with me, got rid of him quite fast. Poor Terry! How different it had been last year, when Hamid had not yet appeared on the scene and Terry had been the apple of Boy's eye.

“Everyone is,” Boy said, as if no interruption had taken place. “To see an old woman like her making a fool of herself over—The whole beach is laughing. By the way,” he said to me in a different tone, “can't you tell her not to wear a bikini? That scar—I mean, we all know, poor thing, but it makes you feel
sick.
Hamid asked me about it. He said, ‘Who slit her up?'”

“Does it make him feel sick?”

“No, it makes him laugh. Everything about her makes him laugh. He thinks she's a ridiculous, ludicrous, silly old hag. He hates her,” Boy said. He held his head in his hands.

I wanted to stroke his hair—which would have made him mad—so to resist the temptation I took the bowl of batter and began to beat it as hard as Boy had. After a while, he took over again—a good thing, because nobody makes crêpes the way he can, and also it was therapy for him, so by the time everyone came in to eat he was feeling better and was awfully nice to Mother, as if he wanted to make it up to her for having spoken unkindly behind her back.

Later, Linda, Boy's mother, did phone to say that Evie was bad again. She wanted Boy to come to the city to persuade her to go back in the hospital till she was better. His sister Paula also phoned, with the same message. He usually goes when they call him, but this time he was more reluctant than usual. He just couldn't bear to leave
Hamid, especially when Mother was there. It was a dilemma—he and I were very much aware of it, and so was Mother. (She wanted him to go, of course—very much.) I don't think Hamid knew what was going on, though he knew something was up. That was typical of him. He was remote from us and our problems, but at the same time he was extremely sensitive to what everyone was feeling.

When Linda phoned again to give the latest report about Evie, Mother tapped the side of her head and said to Hamid in an undertone, “His sister.”

“She is . . . ?” And Hamid also tapped his head.

“Completely,” Mother said.

I began to protest. I said Evie only had these spells, but Mother shouted me down. “Of course she's nuts, completely and absolutely gone,” she said. “The whole family. You're not trying to tell me,” she said, turning to me again, “that other sister of his, that what's-her-name, that
she's
normal? Or if it comes to that, what about Linda herself?”

“Linda? Why, she's the sanest woman I've ever met. She's so—so—” I didn't have the word for my tall, bony, thin-lipped, determinedly energetic mother-in-law, who is always frenziedly engaged in some practical job, like cleaning out the linen closet.

“She's the most screwed-up of the lot,” Mother said emphatically.

“Who is?” Boy asked, coming in after speaking to his mother on the telephone. We all looked at him, but he told us nothing.

“Well,” Mother said, “are you going?”

Boy looked at Hamid, who said, “Of course you'll have to go if your sister is . . . not well. If your family is expecting you.”

Boy looked at him, and so did I. There was nothing in Hamid's eyes except solicitude for Boy. Mother was smoking frantically, dropping ash into her coffee, but Hamid was calm and gentle, at that moment caring only for Boy and his family problem and wanting everything settled. So when Boy left later that morning—Hamid and I dropped him at the airport—he went with a relatively light heart.

Whenever Boy is away, I keep myself occupied with all the household jobs I can think up. As soon as the plane left, I went off to buy
pounds of peaches, and later I was very busy making jam that no one would ever want to eat. I was so busy I didn't wonder where Hamid was or Mother was. “Don't you
care
?” Terry asked me. He himself cared terribly. I guess that was why he had stayed behind; the other friends had scattered when Boy left. He wanted to see what would happen—to spy, if you want to look at it that way, or to look out for Boy, if you prefer. He kept following me around to report on his findings, and it irritated him that I didn't want to know.

“Don't you care?” he kept saying.

Actually, Terry himself was one of the people who taught me that it's not good to care too much. I was like him once—for instance, when he and Boy were very much involved with each other—and I used to torment myself by spying, speculating, finding out. But now I don't do that any more.

It turned out to be the wrong day for making jam. It was terribly hot, with no breeze coming in from the ocean. Mother stayed in her room all afternoon, sometimes calling to me to come in and talk to her. She was sprawled across the bed, and she seemed both exhausted and excited. She was still in her morning wrap, which had fallen open, exposing her thighs. She said she wished she were back in New York—at least there was air-conditioning there, so a person could breathe—but I could see she didn't mean it. She didn't want to be in New York, she wanted to be here.

“When is he coming back?” she asked me, and then she answered herself: “I guess he has to put his sister away first. My God, Susie, what sort of a family have you gone and married us into?” She has said this so often that it's almost become a refrain. And almost in the same breath she said, “Did you see Hamid? He was out on the beach in all that heat. I called to him from the house. I said, ‘You'll get sunstroke!' but he just laughed and waved. He's used to the heat—it must be even hotter where he comes from. I don't know how people stand it. He seems made different from us, don't you think, Susie? Don't you have that feeling about him?”

“I don't know,” I murmured, pulling at her wrap to cover her thighs.

“You don't know anything,” she said, pushing the wrap off again. “Sometimes I envy you. I mean, it must be a lot easier to be made the way you are. Wouldn't you think I'd have got over all that by now? Wouldn't you think so? That a person would be allowed to
cool off? But no such luck, no such luck.” Suddenly she cursed herself and struck the side of her head, like a peasant woman.

I had often seen her do that, when I was a child, only then she had been cursing Daddy, who was usually away somewhere with someone else—someone younger. At that time, Mother had still been very pretty, so quite often she would get up and go over to the mirror to look at herself, and then she'd ask me, “I look okay, don't I? What's wrong with me?” And I would tell her that she looked fabulous. But now she didn't go to the mirror or ask any questions.

Terry came in, with his rather sharp nose pointing out of his thin face, so that he seemed to be sniffing the air for information. When he saw that Hamid was not there, his expression changed from inquisition to distaste. Boy also looks like this whenever he comes into Mother's bedroom. I don't notice it myself, but I guess the feminine smell around her
is
rather strong, with all those perfumes and creams she uses and the little underthings she has discarded lying scattered around the room.

Just then the phone rang, and I went running out. It was Boy. I asked, “How is she?”

“Oh hell, Susie, don't ask,” he said. “What are you all doing?”

“Mother's lying down and Terry's—”

“Hamid's not there? Listen, ask him—Oh, I'll call again later. Tell him—I've got to
go
, Susie,” he said as I began to ask him about Evie again.

Terry had followed me, and he stretched out his hand for the receiver. When I told him that Boy had hung up, he said, “Did he ask to speak to me?”

“His sister's very bad,” I said apologetically.

Terry said, “What are you going to do about tonight?”

Unfortunately, I knew at once what he meant. I had already made up my mind that if Hamid and Mother got together there was nothing I could do about it. Actually, I had planned on taking a sleeping pill. I usually do that anyway when Boy is away; it helps me over having to sleep alone.

It never cooled down that night, and we kept everything wide open and wore the minimum of clothes. I forgot about the jam, and it burned and stuck to the bottom of the pan, and the house was filled with the smell of this blackened, sugary mess of peaches. I went into my bedroom and took a sleeping pill. But before it could
take effect, Hamid came in and lay down on Boy's bed to talk to me. It seemed he had gone to see a movie in the afternoon, and now he was telling me the story, which was about a mother and daughter, both in love with the same guy. He slept with both but was really in love with another guy, who was an actor who played cowboy roles. All this seemed very strange to Hamid, and I must say it sounded strange to me, too, and I wondered whether he had got it quite right or whether I was beginning to feel very drowsy with my pill. He went on telling me about the movie, and then I think he told me some incidents from his own life, but by that time I was in a state where I couldn't quite keep the two apart.

When Mother came in, he said to her, “Listen to this.” So she sat on the side of the bed where he was lying while he went on telling his story. I think it really was his story now, because Mother said, “Well, what do you expect, with looks like that?” and she fondled him with real respect—reverence, even—for his beauty. And he let her do it, as if it was quite ordinary and what he was used to. He was telling her how, some years ago, his visa had run out and he was going to be deported, but there was this very wonderful lady he met. He went to live in her house, and she arranged everything about his papers, so that he could stay. She looked after him very well, and he was grateful to her and enjoyed being with her in her various houses, which she went to from season to season.

“Where is she now?” Mother asked, tangling her fingers in the hair of his chest.

The end of the story was not as good as the beginning. For reasons he didn't specify, he had had to leave her, and this gave rise to some very bad scenes. At one point, the police had been called in, and for a while his immigration papers had been endangered again. But it had all been straightened out, thanks to some other friends he had made in the meantime, and after a while she was all right, too, and had been able to leave the hospital, where her daughter had placed her. It made him sad to remember all this, and he freely admitted that he had not acted well. But it had all been out of ignorance, he told us—youth and ignorance (he had been just eighteen). He had been unaware that it was this bad time for her, when certain physical changes occur in women of her age. If he had known then, he said, what he knew now, of course he would have acted with far greater delicacy and care for her. Then it seemed Mother needed comforting, and I saw him sit up
to rub her back. My pill had really begun to work by then, and I was more than half asleep, and after a while fully asleep.

The weather changed, and a wind sprang up from the sea and came blowing through my open windows, so that I woke up for a moment to cover myself. It was still night, and Mother and Hamid had gone from the other bed and I was alone. Terry must have been alone, too, and I could hear him in the living room playing some of last year's records.