I Cannot Get You Close Enough (10 page)

“Okay, Anna,” Ed said. “What's your proof of this communist story?”

“I haven't been well, Ed,” I began, slipping into my old Charlotte behavior patterns. Charm and beg for mercy, then disembowel. “I went to Europe because I was upset about Sheila getting hold of Jessie again. She comes into her life and then she disappears. I wasn't spying on Sheila, Ed. I didn't want to find out all of this. But we had to know what she was doing. Daddy said you'd stopped giving her money and she had that place in Switzerland and I had to make sure she wasn't running drugs.”

“Drugs,” Big Ed said. “You're the one to talk. Daniel stays drunk half the time and I've never seen you turn down a drink. Sheila's got her faults but she doesn't take any drugs.”

“She wouldn't take them when she had the operations,” Elise put in. It was the only time she spoke all morning except to take drink orders. “She never liked to take pills.”

“I didn't say she took them. I was afraid she was selling them.”

“You still running around with queers?” Big Ed asked me. “Is it some bunch of queers you got all this crap from?”

“I think Anna has proof of the business about the little boy.” This from Daddy. “We didn't come over here to upset you, Ed. Some of mine haven't turned out too good either, you know that, but now we all have Jessie to consider. To tell the truth we pretty much think Sheila's crazy.”

“Well, what in the name of God am I supposed to do about it?” Ed walked across the room to the sideboard and poured himself a drink from a decanter. “What do you people expect me to do?” He knows all this, I decided. He knew it all before we told him. So does Elise. This is not news to them.

“Tell Sheila she can't take Jessie anywhere,” Daddy said. “We're glad she comes to see her. Glad she'll be around so the little girl can know her mother. She just can't take her off. Do you think Sheila ought to be allowed to go off with Jessie? Take her out of the country?”

“No.” Ed drank off his drink. “But Daniel raising her is not much better. She ought to come over here and live with Elise and me. We can keep an eye on her. She's already getting a reputation. Showing her ass all over the country club while Daniel plays golf all day. I don't like the way she's being raised.”

“So you were going to get her from Sheila?” This from Daniel. He was standing now. “Well, goddamn you, you old crook. It's only out of the goodness of my heart I ever let you see her. I did it to keep peace because you and Dad started together. So you thought Sheila could get her and then you'd take over. Well, I'll tell you something, Ed. She's all I have. She's my little girl, and nobody is going to raise her but me.”

“I'm sorry about all this, Ed,” Daddy said. “Just as sorry as I can be.”

“You ought to be sorry. If Daniel wasn't such a goof-off he and Sheila might have made it. He married her and then he went off fucking every woman he saw. You did this to yourself, Daniel. You did it by letting your dick lead you around instead of your head. I would have taken you into my business if you'd acted right. You'd be a rich man now instead of owing everybody in town. Well, I've had enough of all of you.” He stood by the sideboard, old mangy lion cornered and his teeth gone. Where had I seen that before? It was Sheila, standing in my living room in her black suit, raging and threatening and pretending to have power. This wasn't power, it wasn't even evil. It was the old reptilian brain, old reptile dumbness. Evil is always dumb. How had I forgotten that? Dumb is the animal Ed represents. Big dumb cat with fur on its face. Hoarder, hitter, biter, hater of fish. Of course Sheila grew up to hate anything that lives in water. Anything that lives period, I guess. I stood across the room looking at Ed standing by the sideboard with his thin stringy hair and his back beginning to bend from a lifetime of perceiving enemies and protecting himself from the human race and I knew that no power on earth would ever put Jessie in their power. Jessie's own glory and light, which she had inherited from Daniel, would keep her safe.

Daddy moved toward Ed, feeling sorry for him now. “Go on outside,” Dad said. “Wait for me in the car.”

Ed pushed Daddy aside and went for Daniel again. “I'll tell you something else, Daniel. No matter what Sheila has done, it's not a patch to what I hear about you. You get something straight before you leave here. You start acting like a man. You settle down and stop carousing or I'm going after that little girl myself and when I want her you won't be sending your big sister off to Europe to spy on me.” Ed was on Daniel now, his fingers digging into his arm. “I mean it. You settle down and take raising this little girl seriously. She's all Elise and I have. I don't want to hear about her associating with your lowlife girlfriends. Do you hear me?”

“They aren't lowlife, Ed. The main one I go with is Dobbins Hobart's daughter. She works for Merrill Lynch.”

“Well, just remember what I told you.” We all began to move toward the door. Elise scurried before us and opened it. She won't even call and tell Sheila, I decided. She'll let him do it.

Later that day I went out to Daniel's and picked up Jessie and we drove out to Summerwood and caught the horses and went riding. We rode all the way to the back of the property, past the Deadening to the pond. Jessie moved ahead of me on the old mare, Bess. Her back was as strong and supple as a birch, her neck so long and sweet rising from her spine, her little riding hat pulled down around her ears. Our Jessie, the divine end of all the mess and confusion of the genes. In any world she would be the daughter I would wish for. Now I had helped steal her from her mother. Any act creates both good and evil and comes from both. I watched as Jessie guided the mare down the path into the meadow. I watched her hands on the reins.

When it was settled I went back to New York City to live among strangers for several more years. At that time it was not possible for me to live among my kin. I do not mind suffering in my own life. I believe life is supposed to be tragic, why else would we need whiskey or need God? But things which are bearable in my life are unbearable to me in the lives of my family. I cannot bear to watch them suffer. It is a flaw of character to think I am so above them. As if I say, see, I can suffer, being tragic and brave, but you are too dumb and weak to suffer. Here, let me bear that for you. Let me haul all those crosses. I would rather carry them than worry about you not being able to. Of course it's proprietory to think like that, but I'll defend myself to this extent. I am the oldest daughter. As I once wrote, cause and effect, for whatever percent believe in that.

DE HAVILLAND HAND

1

The creation and first sixteen years of life of Olivia de Havilland Hand, only child of Daniel DeBardeleben Hand and Summer Deer Wagoner, of Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

First there had to be a revolution and there was one. In nineteen hundred and sixty-one the young people of the United States of America looked at their parents and said, Oh, no, I cannot bear to be like that. The girls looked at their mothers in their girdles and brassieres, with their diet pills and sad martinis and permanents and hair sprays and painted fingernails and terrible frightened worried smiles and they said, There's got to be more to life than this. This is not for me. Then the boys looked at their fathers dreaming of cars and killings in the stock market and terrified of being embarrassed or poor, poor fathers with their tight collars and tight belts and ironed shirts and old suits, with their hair cut off like monks, and the boys said, I don't care how much he beats me, I won't look that way. Then the boys and girls turned on the brand-new television sets and saw images of a new president and a new time that was dawning and they said, Let's get out of here, something new has got to happen, something's got to give.

 

Then the earth moved a fraction of an inch to the left or right of its orbit and the music began to change. Singers sang of changing times, feeling good, trying new things. People began to dance sexy Negro dances. Poets appeared in Iowa and Minnesota, in Boston and New York City, in Mississippi and San Francisco and L.A. Smile faces were sewn onto the rear ends of blue jeans. Girls started burning the brassieres. Boys quit going to the boring brutal barbers. Small bags of marijuana began to circulate. Then the children stopped going to school, or else they smoked marijuana, and then they went to school. Let them bore us now, the children chuckled to themselves. Just let them try.

By nineteen sixty-six the revolution was in full swing and taking up the front pages of every newspaper in the United States. News of it had even reached Charlotte, North Carolina.

Daniel Hand was having a hard time in school anyway. Even without marijuana he kept going to sleep reading
The Pearl
and
The Lottery
. What a bunch of nuts, he would think. Why would anybody act that way? Daniel liked to read comic books or books about football or, better yet, nothing at all. He liked to do life, not read about it. Then he broke his collarbone in the first game of his last season in high school and a week later his girlfriend got sent to Switzerland to school and as soon as she was there she wrote and told him she was in love with a boy from Winston-Salem. That was it as far as Daniel was concerned. He tied his arm up in his purple sling and went down to the record store to find out where to buy some marijuana. A month later he was out in California with the hippies.

 

A year before, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Summer Deer Wagoner, who was two years older than Daniel, had become bored with her brothers and sisters and trying to be a Cherokee Indian in the modern world. She was bored with living in a tiny house with seven other people on the outskirts of Tahlequah. Summer Deer had known about marijuana all along. It grew wild in the Ozark Mountains and bootleggers had been harvesting it and selling it to Mexicans for as long as anyone could remember. Then some white kids at universities around the area began to smoke it and some of the more ambitious ones began to drive out to Colorado and California to sell it to richer kids at richer schools. The year Summer Deer was eighteen she was invited along on such a trip. She told her brothers and sisters goodbye and headed west in an old Buick with four of her friends. By the time Daniel arrived in Berkeley she was settled in and was well known for her common sense and her unbelievably long and beautiful black hair. She was also much admired for her promise as a poet. “The White Man Is No Man's Friend” was a poem she had written that had been printed up as a flyer and tacked to a thousand telephone poles in the area.

The white man is no man's friend,

Even his own woman

Even his own child

So sorrowful, like a river

Without water

That was the whole poem. It was the only poem Summer Deer had written. The sight of it tacked up on telephone poles was very strange to her. Sometimes it made her happy to see it tacked up beside notices of meetings to stop the war or pleas to outlaw prefrontal lobotomies. Mostly, however, it made her afraid to write another poem for fear it would not be as good as the first one.

On the day Summer Deer met Daniel she was sitting on the lawn in front of Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus. She was sitting cross-legged on a blanket breathing in the morning air and cultivating her reputation for reticence and silence. Occasionally she would reach down into a bag from the baker's and take a bite of the cinnamon roll she had bought for breakfast. Then she would go back into her stillness. Daniel did not know of Summer Deer's reputation for enjoying solitude. He thought she looked like she was lonely. He was lonely. He had been in Berkeley for three days without finding anyone to talk to for more than an hour at a time. He stopped his bicycle to admire her long black hair. Then she smiled at him. She was wearing shorts and a khaki T-shirt that said
KISS
in long drips of red paint. Underneath the letters her breasts moved and rearranged the word. Daniel returned her smile. He was a gorgeous young man with curly dark blond hair and eyes as blue as the sky. Summer Deer liked the way his hair lay against his forehead in ringlets, plastered down by the sweat he had worked up riding the bicycle to the campus from his rented room twenty blocks away. She smiled through her solitude. She smiled again.

“Hello,” he said. “I'm Daniel Hand from North Carolina. I just got here. I'm looking for friends.”

“You want to smoke a joint?” she asked. She lifted her head and smiled at him again. One breast moved into the angle of the
K
, the other moved into an
S
. Her hair fell across her shoulder.

“Sure,” he said. “You got anything? I've got lots of money if you want to buy anything.”

Six hours later they were in her room near the campus smoking Arkansas Razorbud marijuana and making love on a pallet of hand-loomed blankets. By midnight they were eating pizza and telling each other the stories of their lives. By the fall equinox they were married in a ceremony in Golden Gate Park attended by fourteen of their friends and several hundred other people they barely knew. In January, on a night when the moon was full and they weren't even stoned, they made Olivia. Neither of them had dropped acid for a week. Fog was blowing down the street and beginning to lift. The moon rode high in the January sky. Four miles away the great whales rolled against each other in the ocean. All around them the children of the revolution slept in their lumpy rented beds and sleeping bags and bedrolls. In the living room of their tiny apartment four guests from New Orleans were curled up on the floor. In the midst of that Daniel rose from his sleep and took Summer Deer into his arms and they made Olivia. Or, to be exact, Daniel contributed his sperm and the next day Summer Deer's egg began to fall. It was at ten o'clock the next morning when Olivia was actually made. Summer Deer was walking home from the market where she had gone to buy vegetables and eggs for lunch. She stopped beside a tree and put the basket down, feeling the sharp quirky pain of ovulation, and she remembered that she had forgotten to use the sponges in the night. What the hell, she told herself. She couldn't get pregnant. She had been screwing nonstop for two years and she wasn't pregnant yet. He was so sweet last night, she was thinking. He looked like a movie star doing the dishes with that yellow hair. If I go to India with the Peace Corps he'll come along. I know he will. Jesus, he's got the most money of any boy I ever shacked up with. Where does he get all that money? He doesn't even sell dope. I ought to send a picture of him to Tahlequah. They won't believe I'm shacked up with someone so good-looking.