Homeplace (36 page)

But she didn’t do that, either. She got into bed with a tattered volume of Albert Payson Terhune’s dog stories, and lay propped against the thin old pillows alternately scanning the pages and listening to Sam Canaday’s deep voice and laughter downstairs, counterpointing her father’s frail piping. She could not make out their words. He must have stayed a long time. Her watch was on the bureau, but it felt very late when she heard his step moving toward the front door and heard it open.

“Night, Mike,” he called up the stairs, as if he had known all along she had been lying there awake, listening to the sound of his voice. Her face burned again.

“Night, Sam,” she yelled back.

For the next few days, he was elaborately offhand
with her, as heartily casual as she was with him, and she would turn her head and find his eyes on her, and he would look away quickly. She in turn jumped like a pony bitten by a horsefly when he spoke to her, and took great pains to keep someone … Lavinia or J.W. or her father … in the room with the two of them at all times. John Winship looked from one to the other, obviously enjoying the prickling discomfort in the house, but said nothing. Finally Sam Canaday followed Mike into the kitchen and cornered her there, and said, “Look. I didn’t ravish you and I didn’t proposition you, and you didn’t compromise an iota of your honor and dignity. Your panties and your virtue are safe with me, I promise. I’d like to go out and get drunk with you again sometime, but I can’t if you’re going to act like a newly fallen teenager around me. Okay?”

“Okay,” Mike said in relief. “I was getting awfully tired of being Veronica to your Archie.”

He laughed, and everything was suddenly normal again, as it had been. But a new easiness and a loose, stretched kind of comfort spun out warmly between them. He did not hector her sarcastically anymore, and she did not cast her thin, remote webs of ice over him. He teased her frequently, in a way he had not before, and she found herself laughing often at his nonsense. Even her father seemed to enjoy the running evening banter. The querulousness left his voice, and a frail, high tension in him seemed to ease. It was a small, humming, suspended time of well-being, except for the ever-present leaden ache of the words Bay Sewell had left her with, and the hurt of Rachel’s call. She had tried a couple more times to reach Bay in Boston, but he had not answered, and she did not want to call his office to ask when they expected him back. After a day or two she did not call again. She made no attempt to telephone Rachel. There was between them too much to say, and nothing.

A few days into the peaceful hiatus, on a Saturday, DeeDee called before breakfast.

“I talked to Bay last night, and he said for us to use those guest passes at the country club before they expire,” she said. “Come on, Mikie. You’ve had your nose to the grindstone with Daddy for days now, and we’re not going to get a prettier day for the rest of the summer. August is just around the corner, and then it’s going to be too hot to sit in the sun. Duck’s sister is taking Mama Wingo into Atlanta to the doctor, so I’ve got almost the whole day, and Duck wants to go, too. Everybody needs a break.”

“How is Bay?” Mike said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. But her throat filled and tightened with pain. He found time to call her troublesome sister, but not her. He must be angry indeed.

“Oh, okay. Having some problems with a business deal, I think, but nothing he can’t work out. He said he’d be home soon, and really insisted about the club. He said he was going to call you later, and for me to make you go with us and not let Daddy monopolize you.”

Mike’s heart zoomed and sang, and the sharp lump of submerged anguish that the estrangement from him had left in her chest melted away as if it had never been. It was, she knew, his roundabout way of apologizing. She felt giddy, light, exuberant. Even the prospect of Duck Wingo and DeeDee around a steaming surburban country club swimming pool was bearable; seemed, suddenly, rich with comic possibilities. She could tell Bay about the day, safe in the curtained gloom of the bedroom and the welter of the sheets when he got home, making a wry and funny story of it. Apparently his business in Boston was not going well, and on top of the new trouble with Sally, it would be good to see him laugh. She knew she could make him. She had always been able to.

“You promised we’d do something together soon,” DeeDee cajoled, mistaking her silence for hesitation.

“So I did.” Mike smiled at the telephone. “I’d love to, Dee. What time will you be by?”

“I thought about eleven. We can have lunch there. Bay wants us to. Everybody goes for lunch. Listen, Mike … could we take Daddy’s car, do you think? Duck wants to go over earlier in the good car, and my old junker just looks so awful. Most of the people who belong to the club have nice cars.”

“Of course,” Mike said, her heart contracting with pity for her sister, who was at the mercy of so many hungers. “I’ll tell J.W. to spit-polish it.”

“See you then,” DeeDee caroled. Her voice sounded young and very happy.

Mike’s heart fell when DeeDee parked in the driveway and struggled out of the Volkswagen. She was wearing a vast striped beach caftan with a thrown-back hood that made her look, with her black, opaque sunglasses and feverish scarlet mouth, like the obese emir of some impossibly rich and savage oil-producing state. She wore giant white plastic hoops in her ears, and one great arm had multicolored plastic bangles on it nearly up to her elbow. On her feet were the gold mules she had worn the night of her dinner party, and she wore a gigantic straw sun hat in a shade of fuchsia that had never bloomed in any earthly garden. It was impossible not to stare at her. Mike knew that the outfit must have been put together with infinite care from the pages of the current
Vogue
or
Elle;
women from Bar Harbor to Boca Raton would wear the same costume this summer. But chic women, rich women,
thin
women. DeeDee must have spent a small fortune assembling it. It couldn’t look worse if she’d tried, Mike thought in pity and annoyance. I wonder if I could talk her out of this awful expedition somehow? Everybody’s going to laugh at her. But from the flush of pure pleasure on her sister’s
face and the lilt in her voice as she sang out, “Morning,” she knew she could not. At least I can keep Daddy from sniping at her, she thought, and hastily gathered up her beach bag and towel and ran down the front steps.

“Don’t you have anything a little gayer than that?” DeeDee said, taking in Mike’s oversized white shirt and the soft old fisherman’s hat she wore in the sun. “These are all new people, and first impressions are everything in this town.”

“Nope,” Mike said equably, getting into the driver’s seat of the old Cadillac, which gleamed with wax and J.W.’s sweat. “What you see is what you get. Relax, Dee. I didn’t wear my teeny-weeny polka dot bikini. Perfectly maidenly tank suit. Nothing shows.”

“What’s to show?” DeeDee said, but there was no malice in her words. She was too excited. She wriggled around on the car seat and drew a mirror from her enormous tote and slicked another coat of the scarlet lipstick on her mouth. Some of it remained on her teeth, making her look as if she had been feasting on the fresh corpse of something small. The caftan slid up her arms and Mike saw, in all the dimpled, shifting whiteness, a peppering of fading old bruises and startling purple new ones, looking suspiciously like fingerprints. She said nothing, but disgust at Duck rose in her throat like gorge, and she did not know, suddenly, if she could even be civil to him. Whether the bruises were the stigmata of his passion or his anger did not matter. They nauseated her.

“Is Duck already there?” she said.

“He left about an hour ago,” DeeDee said. “He has a poker game in the men’s grill on Saturday mornings. Bay usually plays too. Duck never wins anything, but he doesn’t lose, either, and it’s a wonderful opportunity for him. The best new people in town go to the club,
and most of them sit in on the game. He’s gotten to know several of them real well.”

They pulled up in front of the Lytton Country Club, a meager, flat-roofed jumble of vaguely Spanish architecture on a road that had been largely pine woods and farmhouses when Mike had left, and a sullen young black boy ambled forward from the portico to park the car. Looking around, Mike saw other black teenagers piling golf bags into carts, carrying laden trays toward the out-of-sight pool, and scratching at the sparsely planted, sun-blasted flower beds with rakes and hoes.

“Ah,” she said. “Lytton’s solution to blacks at the country club. I wondered.”

“Don’t start on that, Mike,” DeeDee said. “The club has put lots of local Negroes to work. They offered Í.W. a good job on the maintenance crew; he’d have made a lot more than Daddy pays him, for doing the same thing. But he didn’t take it.”

“Maybe J.W.’s particular about who he maintains,” Mike said.

“Mikie
…” Dee’s voice was a wail.

“Sorry,” Mike said. She was. She did not want to spoil DeeDee’s day in the sun. She handed the keys to the boy and they followed the path around the side of the clubhouse to the pool terrace.

It was already crowded at eleven thirty. Children and teenagers jeered and splashed in the pool, shouting something incomprehensible over and over that sounded to Mike like “Marco Polo” and seemed to have to do with a noisy water game. Young women in knots lay on chaises or sat on the edge of the pool, halfheartedly watching the children while they talked and laughed and oiled their reddening hides with lotions. All wore bright, brief, shiny scraps of suits and sun hats, and a few lay back with white cups over their eyes, stunned under the punishing fist of the sun. On an upper terrace, tables of older women in flowered and
skirted suits or cover-up sunsuits played bridge and sipped at virulent pastel drinks brought by the bored young blacks. A haughty young woman in a wet T-shirt that said “Go Dawgs” and white zinc nose ointment was apparently the lifeguard; she sat staring into space atop a tall chair, ignoring the preening, jostling pack of preadolescent boys milling about the base of the platform. It was an indolent, completely banal little suburbanscape, with nothing in it that Mike could see to so charm and succor her sister. The younger women had slack bodies and snub, vacuous little faces; one or two wore pink plastic curlers under scarves. The older women all seemed to have the same swimsuit and freshly teased hairdo. The pool apron was cracked and sprouted valiant tufts of weeds here and there, and the cars in the lot beyond the pool did not run to Mercedes and Jaguars, but to compact wagons and TransAms. There were no men in sight over the age of sixteen or so. It was a little aquatic kingdom of women and children.

“Isn’t this something for Lytton?” DeeDee said proudly, surging down the steps to the pool terrace like a billowing, deflated circus tent. “I hope we can work it out so we can join by next summer. It’s too late to get anybody to stay with Mama Wingo this year, but Bay’s going to put us up sometime this winter.”

Behind her dark glasses, Mike looked around. At their entrance, the heads around the pool and the bridge tables lifted and myriad sunglass-shielded eyes were fastened on them. As had been the case all summer, she saw no face she recognized from her time here before. Maybe old Lytton, as DeeDee persisted in calling it, did not exist; had never existed except as a context for her childhood. Or perhaps it surfaced only once a century, like Brigadoon. In any event, the focused eyes had in them no ken for Mike Winship.

She could see that all conversation had stopped.
DeeDee sailed down the steps and across the apron like the QE2 coming into Southampton, nodding to a group here and giving a little offhand wave and a trilled hello to one there. Her eyes played back and forth over the pool area, assessing and cataloging the crowd. Her smile included one and all. It was definitely in the nature of a royal progress. Mike, trailing in her sister’s wake, saw what DeeDee did not: the rolled eyes, the hands clapped to mouths to stifle laughter, the heads coming together again to follow her elephantine promenade. Mike’s face burned with embarrassment and fury. She wanted to crack the teased and sprayed heads together; she wanted to shake her sister for her preening complacency. She decided, feeling the virulent bite of the sun through the nylon of the fishing hat, that she would plead a headache and escape immediately after lunch. DeeDee could ride home with Duck.

DeeDee settled herself at an umbrella table at the far end of the upper terrace, and pulled off her sun hat. Her hair was loose again, down her back, spread like a cape over the sausagelike bulk of her shoulders. Mike could see the precise line near her scalp where the ebony dye ended and the rusted black of Dee’s own color began. She prayed that her sister would not remove the caftan. She could not imagine what she would look like in a bathing suit. DeeDee didn’t.

“Let’s have lunch first,” she said. “Then we can swim. Or you can. I’m thinking of playing a little bridge with Helen Apperson and her crowd over there, and I know you hate cards.”

She waved gaily at a thin, dun-colored woman at a nearby table, who gave her back a stiff little salute and a perfunctory baring of huge Chiclet teeth. The other three women at the table smiled, cutting their eyes at Helen Apperson and then staring again at DeeDee and Mike. Mike knew that they would talk about them both, the grotesque Wingo woman and her strange northern
writer sister whom nobody ever saw around town. She could feel their eyes on her back, almost feel the smoking pits left by the avidity of the sensation-starved eyes.

“Come on over and I’ll introduce you,” DeeDee said. “I’ll take you around to all the others after lunch.”

“Oh, let’s eat first,” Mike said. “I’m starved, and they’re in the middle of a game.”

“Well, then, maybe you’d like to ask somebody to join us,” DeeDee chirped, favoring the assemblage with a sweeping smile. “Oh, there’s Lolly Bridges. She’s darling. Her husband’s a pilot and she does catering, really cute things. She’s real creative. Everybody’s using her now for weddings and anniversaries. Hey, Lolly,” she called to a leathery red-haired woman in a golf skirt and sleeveless shirt who had just come onto the terrace and was obviously looking in vain for an empty table. “Come join us and meet my little Yankee sister. She doesn’t know anybody anymore, and I was just telling her about you.”