Falling Angels (16 page)

“Oh.” From his saying he was only “popping in” at the office, she assumed that they were going somewhere else, to a motel, that this didn’t count.

“Be a good girl and go on down,” he says. “I’ll ring you a taxi.” He takes a couple of bills out of his wallet and gives them to her, retrieving his handkerchief at the same time.

The bills are twenties. “This is way too much,” she says.

“Keep the change,” he says. He doesn’t check his appointment book for a night to fit her in.

*

Their father gives up on the basement. If he comes home at all, he leaves again right after supper. He doesn’t have a new Lovergirl, though. There’s no sign of that.

Their mother seems to get it into her head that what’s the matter with him is serious enough to demand her reserves. Since the bomb shelter she has eaten all her meals in front of the t?, but the morning after their father stops working on the rec room, she takes it upon herself to turn up at the breakfast table. She has combed her long white hair and bobby-pinned it behind her ears, and she is wearing a green cinch belt around her housecoat, which almost makes it look as if she’s gotten dressed.

Throughout the meal she carries on wifely chatter, speaking more in half an hour than she has in a month. It doesn’t work, and even Lou can see that it’s not his fault. “As long as Harold doesn’t grab the limelight,” their mother says at one point, pouring milk into coffee that their father now takes black, referring to a man who, it turns out, is Arnold, not Harold, and who left where their father works five years ago. So then their mother says, laughing,“Where does the time fly?” and then she looks out the window and asks whose car that is in the driveway. “But yours isn’t white, Jim,” she protests. He stands up to leave. Straightening her out could take all day.

Still, Lou, stung by their mother’s pathetic effort, says “What a creep” when he’s gone.

Their mother slowly draws the bobby pins out of her hair. “He’s blue,” she says.

“So what?”

“He’s got the blues,” their mother rephrases, her eyes drifting off.

As far as the rec room is concerned, Norma goes on putting up the panelling by herself. But she’s worried about their father. What should I do? she wonders until her inner voice answers.

“Go to church,” it says.

She hasn’t been inside a church in ten years. She decides to go to the Catholic church rather than to the one her family belongs to—the Presbyterian—for it seems to her that God pays more attention to Catholics. On her knees in front of rows of candles she appeals to the huge painting on the wall of the Christ child floating in Mary’s arms. “Help my father,” she prays. “If he saw the look of suspicion in my eyes when he bumped into me, please, please tell him he didn’t really see it.”

Weeks pass. Sometimes as she prays she feels her heart race. She feels that this is the spirit of the baby brother inside her exulting at the sight of the baby Jesus on the wall. At home she keeps her hair clean and brushed and returns to her study regime. She even wears the red sweater on its own once.

When their father comes downstairs for a beer, one evening at about nine o’clock, she thinks that her prayers have been answered. As far as she knows, he hasn’t been in the basement since he stopped working with her. He seems tired but pent up. He opens the beer and comes over to where she is sawing.

“I thought I’d finish off the panelling,” she says shyly. She notices that he needs to go to the barber’s. His brush cut is slanting like dead winter grass. When he looks a mess is when she loves him so much that she can hardly breathe.

“Have you lost weight?” he asks, frowning at her.

“A bit,” she says, in case that’s what he’s frowning about. In fact, she’s lost twenty-two pounds.

He cocks his head and squints at her. “How old are you? Nineteen?”

“Eighteen.”

“How would you like me to teach you to drive?”

She stares at him. “Really?”

“Why not?” He takes a swig of beer. “Time you learned.”

“But—” She lets out a breath. Where is his memory? He’s
said that he’d never let any of them drive his car, that girls shouldn’t drive. “Well, okay,” she says. “Sure.”

His lips tighten into a smile.

“I’m pissed off,” Lou tells the baby. The baby kicks the tube out of her hand. “Can’t say I blame you,” Lou sighs and decides not to apply the cream today. It doesn’t seem to be doing any good; his penis is as red as the first time she babysat him. She feels a little sorry for him—a raw thumb between his legs, a mother too busy to get him a better prescription. Too busy to find him a nice babysitter.

She repins his diaper and puts him in his Bathinette at one end of the dining-room table. Then she sits at the other end to do her homework. But she can’t concentrate, she’s too pissed off. This morning, while she was still sleeping, their father took Norma out for a driving lesson. Lou couldn’t believe it. She said she wanted to learn how to drive, too, but their father said,“Just Norma.” It didn’t matter what argument Lou presented, even the peerless one that she needed to drive to do the grocery shopping, he wouldn’t give in.

“What if I learn from somebody else?” she asked at last. “Can I at least borrow the car sometimes?”

He shook his head.

“That’s not fair!” she screamed and kept screaming it, holding out her arms to block his way to the basement. The vein in his temple began to throb, but instead of backing off, Lou screamed louder.

When he hit her across the side of the head, a look of recognition passed between them, the breaking point being their old rendezvous. Then he shoved past her. She marched down the hall to her and Norma’s bedroom.

Norma was sitting at the vanity, brushing her hair. Her glasses were off, and Lou, her ear still ringing, was bothered by
how grown-up and attractive Norma looked. Like a foreigner, with her brushed-back dark hair and round face. An Eastern European woman. Exotic and persecuted.

Addressing Lou’s reflection in the mirror, Norma said, apologetically,“I’m the oldest.”

“So?” Lou said. “I’m old enough to drive.”

“You know how he is about girls driving,” Norma said, gathering her hair into a ponytail and pulling it through an elastic band. “It’s hard enough on him letting me drive.”

“So why is he?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because of all the work I’ve done on the basement.”

“Bullshit.” Lou knew that Norma didn’t believe this either. When had their father ever handed out rewards? “Bull fucking shit,” Lou said.

Norma gave her a long-suffering look.

The baby is crying. He has somehow managed to twist the blanket around his neck.

“If you’d just lie still,” Lou says, lifting his head to unwind the blanket,“nothing would happen to you.” He glares at her, then squeezes shut his eyes as if he can’t stand what he sees.

They end up pulled over onto the shoulder, the car running to keep the heater on, him drinking a beer, both of them looking through barbed-wire fencing at snowy fields ringed with black, bare trees. The sky is always overcast on these days, which Norma imagines is heaven sympathizing with him. All sorts of ideas enter her mind as she and their father sit there. She thinks, who can say that everything you see isn’t a message from God? She grants their father the message of the whole sky, because she has prayed so hard for him and because she feels that the big things would be reserved for men who get as unhappy and as happy as he does.

She is pretty sure that he’s teaching her to drive without wanting to, that God put the plan in his head to throw them back into each other’s company and to patch up any misunderstandings.

But their father is fighting the setup. It’s obvious he’d rather be driving around with his last Lovergirl. He gazes out the passenger window and sighs. He hardly gives Norma any instructions except to tell her which way to turn. He doesn’t pay attention to her at all, really, unless she takes a corner too fast or hits the brakes too hard, and then he says, a little annoyed but as if it doesn’t matter,“Easy,” or “Slow down,” or he leans over and steers for a few seconds himself.

She hasn’t understood until these drives just how depressed he is. Drinking too much isn’t nearly as explicit a sign as not worrying about his car, or—this is probably even more explicit—not worrying about breaking the law.

“Naw, we’ll stick to the back roads,” he says when she mentions going to get her learner’s permit.

Another sign: he doesn’t talk. When they were working on the basement, he talked all the time, until he started drinking. In the car, though, he’s the same as he is upstairs in the house. Taking his silence as her challenge, Norma tries to start conversations, but he closes his eyes and says “Shhh,” as if she’s interrupted some complicated or precious thought. He has her drive way out into the country and park on a concession road while he goes through at least a six pack.

In the cafeteria at school Sandy hears a girl say that Lou’s friend Sherry is a nymphomaniac for sleeping with guys she doesn’t know.

“That’s not what a nymphomaniac is,” another girl says. “A nymphomaniac is someone who never has a climax.”

Either definition fits Sandy. She almost bursts into tears
right there. She runs into the washroom and makes a promise to herself to ignore any man who flirts with her.

Eventually she feels clean. Not white clean, but no longer black. She’s really lonely, though. She couldn’t say for sure that Reg was in love with her, and she knows that Bob wasn’t, but when they wanted her so badly that they couldn’t wait to get her clothes off, she sure felt loved.

To avoid running into Reg, she has started taking her coffee breaks in a greasy spoon across the street from the fabric store. There’s a man who always seems to come into the restaurant the same time she does, and whenever she looks up from her fashion magazine he’s smiling at her. He has grey hair at the temples, wears expensive suits, and laughs and jokes with the waitresses.

One day he saunters over to her table.

“I’m trying to read,” she says. He sits down across from her anyway. She looks into his rugged, friendly face and gets a whiff of his manly aftershave.

His name is Rob. The cross between “Reg” and “Bob” doesn’t escape her. After work that evening they go to the Nap-a-Wile motel, which she recommends for its vibrating beds. He sticks breath mints up her vagina and fishes them out with his tongue. He tickles her and tells her jokes. Everything strikes him as funny, even intercourse. “I’m having a hell of a good time,” he laughs as he enters her.

So is she.

Since he’s a travelling salesman for an aluminum company, he can see her pretty well whenever he wants. That’s two or three times a week. From the towns he visits during the day he brings her postcards with dirty jokes on them. Sandy is flattered to be treated like a grown woman.

In March he and his wife go to Florida for ten days, and Sandy misses him like crazy. The night he returns, they make love three times. Afterward, in the car, he asks her what she thinks of swinging.

It sounds familiar. She thinks it has to do with sex, but she’s not sure what. “I don’t know,” she answers.

“I’ve got a twin brother,” he says. “He wants to meet you.”

She figures he’s changing the subject. “An identical twin?” she asks.

He laughs. “You prefer that?”

When he picks her up for their next date, two of him are in the car. The one in the passenger seat gets out. “Hi, I’m Ron,” he says in Rob’s voice, throwing an arm around her. He points to a purple peanut-shaped birthmark on his chin. “The only difference,” he says.

But she notices another difference—Ron isn’t wearing a wedding band.

She sits in the front seat, between them. She feels like a mirror. “You’re even going grey the same,” she says, looking back and forth. On either side of her there is roaring laughter.

They drive to the Nap-a-Wile. Out of the trunk Ron produces a case of beer and a bottle of sherry with a white ribbon on it,“for the lady,” leaving her with no choice but to accept the glass he pours when they are in the motel room. She has never drunk sherry before, or wine, or even beer, which Rob knows. It’s gentlemanly of him, she thinks, not to give her away. He sits beside her on the edge of the bed, and Ron stands across from them, leaning against the desk. The two brothers tell jokes, supplying each other’s punch lines and laughing the same rip-roaring, head-thrown-back laugh. She laughs at the amazingness of being with two Robs.

Is she the only one drinking sherry? The bottle is half empty, but she can’t remember filling her glass. Sherry tastes like Lou’s friend who is named after it. It tastes way better than what she remembers whisky tasting like.

That reminds her. “Tell Ron the joke—” She giggles. “Tell him the joke about the drunk lady who thinks the naked man is a cigarette machine.”

“Hey, free hand lotion,” Ron says.

“You know it!” she cries, laughing. It’s her joke, one Reg told her, and she only told Rob a couple of days ago.

“‘Fraid he knows them all,” Rob says, putting his arm around her.

She laughs into his shoulder. “Free hand lotion,” she says. She can’t stop laughing.

Rob pulls her down onto the bed and starts kissing her all over her face.

“Rob,” she laughs. She attempts to sit up.

“It’s okay,” he says. He pins her down by the shoulders. She stops laughing. “We’re going to have a great time,” he says, undoing the top button of her blouse.

He undoes all her buttons. She lies perfectly still, chained to his smiling eyes. Then he begins rubbing her breasts, and she comes to and rolls away from him. He catches her arm. “Your brother’s watching,” she whispers.

His brother laughs. “Hey, go right ahead,” he says. “Don’t mind me.”

“Come on, baby,” Rob pleads. Baby—that’s new, from him. She sinks into the bed and lets him kiss her on the mouth, and almost forgets that they aren’t alone, until his hand slides up her leg.

“I can’t,” she says, turning her face away.

“Don’t do this to me,” he says. He sounds so strange and unfriendly that she has an alarming thought.

“Are you Ron?” she whispers.