Fast Lanes (11 page)

Richard untied his tie and tied it again. “Listen,” he said. “Plenty of women with five children have Ph.Ds.”

“Really,” I said. “I’d like to see those statistics.”

“I suppose you resent your children’s births,” he said,
straightening his collar. “Well, just remember, the last one was your miscalculation.”

“And the first one was yours,” I said.

It’s true. We got pregnant, as Richard affectionately referred to it, in a borrowed bunk bed on Fire Island. It was the eighth time we’d slept together. Richard gasped that of course he’d take care of things, had he ever failed me? But I had my first orgasm and no one remembered anything.

After the fourth pregnancy and first son, Richard was satisfied. Angela, you were born in a bad year. You were expensive, your father was starting in insurance after five years as a high school principal. He wanted the rock, all of it. I had a rock in my belly we thought three times was dead. So he swore his love to you, with that ring he thee guiltily wed. Sweet Sixteen, does she remember? She never forgets.

Angela pasted sugar cubes to pink ribbons for a week, Sweet Sixteen party favors she read about in
Seventeen
, while the older girls shook their sad heads. Home from colleges in Ann Arbor, Boston, Berkeley, they stared aghast at their golden-haired baby sister, her Villager suits, the ladybug stickpin in her blouses. Angela owned no blue jeans; her boyfriend opened the car door for her and carried her books home. They weren’t heavy, he was a halfback. Older sister no. 3: “Don’t you have arms?” Older sister no. 2: “He’ll take it out of your hide, wait and see.” Older sister no. 1: “The nuclear family lives off women’s guts. Your mother has ulcers, Angela, she can’t eat gravy with your daddy.”

At which point Richard slapped oldest sister, his miscalculation, and she flew back to Berkeley, having cried in my hands and begged me to come with her. She missed the Sweet Sixteen party. She missed Thanksgiving and Christmas for the next two years.

Angela’s jaw set hard. I saw her reject politics, feminism, and everyone’s miscalculations. I hung sugar cubes from the ceiling for her party until the room looked like the picture in the magazine. I ironed sixteen pink satin ribbons she twisted
in her hair. I applauded with everyone else, including the smiling halfback, when her father slipped the diamond on her finger. Then I filed for divorce.

The day Richard moved out of the house, my son switched his major to pre-med at NYU. He said it was the only way to get out of selling insurance. The last sound of the marriage was Richard being nervously sick in the kitchen sink. Angela gave him a cold washcloth and took me out to dinner at Señor Miguel’s while he stacked up his boxes and drove them away. I ate chilis rellenos, guacamole chips in sour cream, cheese enchiladas, Mexican fried bread and three green chili burritos. Then I ate tranquilizers and bouillon for two weeks.

Angela was frightened.

“Mother,” she said, “I wish you could be happy.”

“Angela,” I answered, “I’m glad you married your father, I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Angela finished high school the next year and twelve copies each of
Ingenue, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle
. She also read the Bible alone at night in her room.

“Because I’m nervous,” she said, “and it helps me sleep. All the trees and fruit, the figs, begat and begat going down like the multiplication tables.”

“Angela,” I said, “are you thinking of making love to someone?”

“No, Mother,” she said, “I think I’ll wait. I think I’ll wait a long time.”

Angela quit eating meat and blinked her mascaraed eyes at the glistening fried liver I slid onto her plate.

“It’s so brown,” she said. “It’s just something’s guts.”

“You’ve always loved it,” I said, and she tried to eat it, glancing at my midriff, glancing at my milk and cottage cheese.

When her father took over the Midwest and married a widow, Angela declined to go with him. When I went to the
hospital to have my stomach reduced by half, Angela declined my invitations to visit and went on a fast. She grew wan and romantic, said she wished I taught at her college instead of City, she’d read about Sylvia Plath in
Mademoiselle
. We talked on the telephone while I watched the hospital grounds go dark in my square window. It was summer and the trees were so heavy.

I thought about Angela, I thought about my miscalculations. I thought about milk products and white mucous coatings. About Richard’s face the night of the first baby, skinny in his turned-up coat. About his mother sending roses every birth, American Beauties. And babies slipping in the washbasin, tiny wriggling arms, the blue veins in their translucent heads. And starting oranges for ten years, piercing thick skins with a fingernail so the kids could peel them. After a while, I didn’t want to watch the skin give way to the white ragged coat beneath.

Angela comes home in the summers, halfway through business, elementary education, or home ec. She doesn’t want to climb the Rockies or go to India. She wants to show houses to wives, real estate, and feed me mashed potatoes, cherry pie, avocados, and artichokes. Today she not only fixes breakfast for my ex-anniversary, she fixes lunch and dinner. She wants to pile up my plate and see me eat everything. If I eat, surely something good will happen. She won’t remember what’s been important enough in my life to make me forget everything. She is spooning breaded clams, french fries, nuts and anchovy salad onto my plate.

“Angela, it’s too much.”

“That’s OK, we’ll save what you don’t want.”

“Angela, save it for who?”

She puts down her fork. “For anyone,” she says. “For any time they want it.”

In a moment, she slides my plate onto her empty one and begins to eat.

A
t night they shut the door of my room. The shade of the one window was drawn, and the only light I saw was the light along the bottom of the door. It was the light of their world, a razor-thin sliver hovering in space, somewhere between yellow and white. Lying in my narrow bed, I said my name over and over, slower and faster and faster and slower. I was eleven years old: I thought my name was a code for what happened when I said the word that was me, a code for the way my breathing changed, for how the space of the room got big, bigger than the house or the town, quiet and full of crashing. Light flickered behind the closed lids of my eyes. Sudden red flashes erupted like visual sirens and disappeared, sucked deeper into the sound of flying and the lonely, vast whirl of darkness. All of inner space sang with a roar of wind. I could fling myself deeper, endlessly, and all the time my name sounded in the whisper of my voice.

I thought that’s what night was for everyone, that my
mother, Audrey, my father, Wes, my sister, Lenny, all tumbled into themselves, falling asleep as they fell. I imagined my parents in their double bed, lying prone and silent, their heads in the exact centers of their pillows.

And Lenny, my idol, my tormentor, was her night self in my vision, a self washed free of us. I was mesmerized if I watched her as she slept, walked into her room at night after drinking in forbidden fashion from the bathroom faucet. She was fourteen: I remember standing in the dark, looking at her, the delicious metallic taste of tap water still sharp in my mouth. Lenny looked cold, but comfortably so, as though she were meant to be cold, like marble or crystal. She slept like a nun, fearless and still, on her back, her hands at her sides, her head gently inclined to one side. Her face, expressionless, perfect and smooth, seemed a face unconcerned with possibilities, a face waiting to be alive. Her long loose hair was the color of bleached hay, hay that has weathered in fields. All day her hair was bound in a long blond swatch, a silky, blunt-cut ponytail that swung when she moved. Wes, who’d learned to barber in the Army, trimmed it once a month—Lenny in the kitchen or the yard, stalwart in her straight chair, Wes with his sharp scissors and rattail comb. My mother put newspapers under them in winter to catch the hair, but in summer the pale wisps fell into the grass and took flight on any gust of breeze. Those nights in my room, in the black fields of my vision, I imagined Lenny and our father tilting and spinning through space, Lenny seated, our father’s hands in her hair. He was separate from us, a bordering country whose customs and language were mysterious, yet he was part of Lenny. Now that I’m grown, I realize they had quiet, definite rituals, unspoken, barely noticed. Aligned with him, she could not have been as lonely as I was, bearing up under Audrey’s plaintive secrets, constantly told the truth.

Lenny was told nothing. She learned to understand things in a different way. Maybe Wes taught her it wasn’t necessary
to name, label, categorize, compile histories, argue with herself until she knew what she wanted. Our mother had to tell herself stories, recite two or three versions of an event, see where things fit. Always, she was outside what happened, alone, talking to include herself in the picture. Someone had to hear her and believe her. Audrey compiled evidence, stories to support her conclusions, and I was the jury she convinced.

I never knew your dad was an alcoholic until after I married him. The man is a secret still, but he’s an alcoholic as surely as Mina Campbell is. That family has been through hell, I know all about it from hearing Nickel talk and hearing women gab. Years ago now. Your friend Delia was only three or four. Mina’s still okay, but they all walk on eggs. Your dad, he just goes out and drinks and is gone, and I get a phone call from Kentucky, or that time some sheriff called, and he was in lockup at Wildwood Beach, in New Jersey. He won’t ever say what happens. I think it’s because he doesn’t remember. It’s all secrets from him as well. And I never know why he goes off. It never seems to have anything to do with me. It’s all him, his whole life is him. I’m just a bystander
.

If he was away, Audrey carried on as though nothing were different, listening for a phone call. Always, the lines of the rooms glowed with the heat of her disappointment. My mother had wanted so desperately to do well and she had ended up with Wes, an outsider to whom nothing was relative. He compared himself to no one and he worked alone, a salesman of mining equipment. When times were bad and the mines laid off or shut down, he roamed farther and farther to sell machines, the backseat of the car stacked with thick manuals. He drove to Kentucky or the Carolinas, maybe north to Maryland, often on tips from Henry Briarley, who was his friend and cohort. He must have sold machines on the basis of similar friendships with other men,
on the basis of his independence. My mother knew he was friendly with powerful men, men who passed for rich in our sphere. She envisioned being entertained in their homes, living as they lived. The fact that Lenny was friends with Cap Briarley, the daughter of the town Midas, was a further tease. Audrey could never understand why Mrs. Briarley failed to recognize her at school functions, met her attempts at conversation with a withering blankness. She couldn’t think of Lenny and Cap as motherless daughters, daughters admiring of their fathers, independent, detached, open to anything, capable of disappearing. Audrey cooked Lenny’s food, washed her clothes, yammered at her about chores, loved her, I suppose, but she was never in Lenny’s mind. Lenny was elsewhere. She had a pared-down light in her blue eyes. She wasn’t eager, hungry, desirous; she couldn’t be enlisted in Audrey’s struggle to survive in isolation. Oh, my mother wanted so much. Even before she conspired to be loved by someone else, Wes was lost to her. She might have been happy with a salesman, a man whose nature it was to cajole and charm. Wes was the antithesis of his own profession. He wasn’t ingratiating, he didn’t try to please, he wasn’t cheerful or optimistic. He had a solid, masculine presence and an outlaw dignity. “What does he have to feel so proud about?” my mother would muse. Men trusted him.

I wonder what Nickel Campbell knew of my father. They were acquainted; Nickel was Henry Briarley’s day foreman and manager at Consol Coal, where my father dropped in two or three times a week. Nickel sat in the outer office behind a burled mahogany desk. The desk was bigger and fancier than Henry’s, and I remember my father joking about it with Nickel on our back porch. My mother gave a barbecue for Wes’s birthday; it may be an indication of his lack of interest that Lenny and I were allowed to invite the guests. Predictably, she invited Cap, whose parents declined to attend, and I invited Delia, whose parents did. Mina Campbell sat nursing Johnny, who was just a baby then, a
year before Nickel died. It was June and the corn was in the fields, young, pale-green stalks, and the wild fields were not tangled yet with milkweed and pokeberries and their bitter, pronged stems. The sun was setting slowly and an ocher light was on the grass. Must have been Sunday, no sound of cars going by on the road past the house. There were crickets, their melodic, intermittent alarms sounding out like little cries of surprise, and farther off, the panicked warble of a cicada. I was sitting by Delia, my face in her hair, whispering; we spent years in that posture or its reverse, trained on each other like homing devices, deliciously unaware of adults except when we needed their services, or when they interrupted and demanded our attention. I remember the smell of Delia’s hair, like cold vanilla, and the minuscule, starburst scars on the side of her face from chicken pox. I always thought they were pretty. I was seeing them, hearing laughter indistinguishable from my own, when I became aware of my father’s voice, of the two men warily conversing at the other end of the table. It was a picnic table, unpainted and roughhewn, like the ones used in roadside parks in the Fifties. Nickel Campbell sat at the end of the bench, his hands spread on the wood beside his legs as though for balance. He wore a gold signet ring on the smallest finger of his right hand. Girls in a special club might wear such rings, in our small town, to represent a secret. It resembled in design the plastic jewelry we collected from bubble-gum machines.