Inner Tube: A Novel (11 page)

So it wasn’t much of a pleasure trip. A field trip, then? A research project? That “unique in all America” line had a distinct textbook flavor. Wasn’t Mother always pointing, naming trees and flowers? It seemed reasonable to suspect we’d been set up for one of those enriching experiences. Anyway, here came three days of uninterrupted rain, and what could we do but observe?

Steamy drizzle outside, puzzlingly overcast inside—the house was large enough to have its own weather. Long and heavy silences were forces to be overcome by the intrepid party. Of course, there were the usual trifles, things learned to be forgotten, like card tricks or the script to a Bozo the Clown record the twins refused to tire of. But there were more lasting, more indistinct things as well: a flimsy feeling in the stagily cluttered rooms, the curiously intense behavior of the adults, conversing in pressured whispers behind half-closed doors. Most of all, there was stout, sighing, distant Cordelia with her childish braids and clumsy motion, the side-to-side uncertainty of someone on a pitching deck as here she came with more cocoa, another plate of pineapple rings. Small things required great effort from her. Sighing, she alluded to her exhausting responsibilities. What? There was a woman from the Virgin Islands to do her cleaning, a man in a pith helmet who mowed and pruned and raked, even hosed down all the white statuary. Well, something was bullying her, threatening any minute to leave her in a clumsy heap on the terrazzo floors. Was it grief? Five years—nearly half my life—had passed since the day Mr. Bontempi attempted to prime his Evinrude and fragmented into the sea.

Carla shrugged. “She drinks too much. So what?”

I went to my mother to confirm this observation, smelled the gin in her grapefruit juice before I’d asked anything. Her face was slack, her eyes seemed very old, and it scared me. Not as much as my sister’s developments, but enough. It was ten o’clock in the morning on the third day of rain.

By that evening the air had cleared, though a few drops still fell. I’d spent the afternoon in random observation, moving from room to room, a junior Sherlock, opening drawers and closets, reading things that were none of my business. Descending the stairs thoughtfully now, my head jammed with clues, I was confronted by a strange tableau: my mother snoring into the sofa, the twins inert among crayons, Carla, open-mouthed and held tightly in her own arms, fast asleep under an oil portrait of Mr. Bontempi, pensive in dark tweeds. Dire tactics! I suspected gas.

“The prodigal returns,” Cordelia said, clumping toward me in her scarlet muumuu. “Seems we’re the only ones left to enjoy the stars.”

That was it. Cordelia had drugged the cocoa. But too late; she’d already grasped me ferociously by the hand, was tugging me onto the patio. We stood in the soft mist, on the wet bricks, and looked up. My hand grew numb in hers.

“Winking lights.” She pulled me against her hip. “But don’t let anyone tell you that your life is written out up there. That’s rubbish, you hear?”

Yes yes, all right. Why was she shouting?

“My hand…”

“Misery may have your name on it, but you’ll be the one to put it there. You and nobody else.”

She let go of me to gesture bitterly at her looming home, and I took off. There wasn’t any way of locking the door to my room, so I braced a chair under the doorknob as I’d seen people on television do. Sleep would have to wait. I stood at the window and looked out over statues glowing thinly in the dark.

Next day we visited a chimpanzee attraction down the coast, where someone let the air out of our tires. Cordelia, dutiful hostess, left her Fleetwood in the parking lot and took us home in a cab. This necessitated borrowing her gardener’s car the following morning so she could take Dan in to have his stitches removed.

Not until our last full day did we make our first visit to the beach, a private beach, part of some club Cordelia belonged to. Waiters came with cork-lined trays when you got thirsty and the glasses, half-filled with ice, were drippy and slick. The members looked well-dressed in nothing but swimwear; they glistened and smelled of cocoa butter. My mother wore khaki pants and shirt, sunglasses, and a canvas hat that appeared to be melting—a redundant costume in the shade of a wide green umbrella, but, like the headache and the absorbing German novel, it went with her sulk. She dreaded returning to New York and was making no secret of it. With all this, though, as was so often the case, she gained a cool serenity. She was indifferent to the complaints of her children, as she should more often have been.

I think it was out of frustration at this that Carla put on lipstick, slipped off her robe, and placed herself, hands on narrow hips, at the edge of the water. Her suit was as red as the lipstick and her skin was as white as the clouds.

“What a picture,” Cordelia said rather sadly.

“Hmmm?” My mother peered momentarily over the top of her book.

Carla pulled the barrettes from her hair, corkscrewed her toes in wet sand. The screaming of children and the screaming of gulls combined with canned music that drifted out of the snack bar. I didn’t know what I felt as I watched her, but whatever it was called was pulling me tight.

The boy who spoke to her was slightly older and much taller. He had a deep scar on his leg and a Dodgers jacket which he kept zipping and unzipping.

“She’s fine,” my mother said when I reported that they’d walked off out of sight.

“A protective brother,” Cordelia sighed. “I wish I’d had one.”

What was with these two? They huddled in the shade, one staring at a book, the other at her bulbous freckled knees, both of them dully immune behind their plastic lenses to the shiny pleasure all around. I saw women sprawled in white chairs, women oiling themselves and being oiled, tugging at their bikini tops and laughing hard enough to spill their drinks, but my sister was nowhere among them. I remembered reading in her diary on my rainy Sherlock expedition.

“What bothers me most,” she had written in her jagged cursive hand, “is that all this being afraid will keep on and get bigger.”

When Carla got back, spraying sand as she pounced into our shade, she was wearing the Dodgers jacket. Her mother reached over without looking away from the heavy book and lightly stroked her face. Cordelia began to pack away the unused towels and tanning creams. I poked my sister in the stomach, looked hard at her. She just laughed and wiped the lipstick off on the cuff of her new jacket.

I had one more observation to make. It came later on that day, during a lull brought on by humidity and imminent departure, and like almost any observation, it was avoidable.

“Go see what your sister is up to.”

I slowly climbed the stairs, my hand slippery on the banister. Silence was thick as the air and a strip of fading sunlight lay like a gangplank on the hallway floor. Carla wasn’t in her room, but a smudge of red registered in the corner of my eye as I passed the entrance to the skylighted bedroom where our mother had been sleeping. Carla, in her bathing suit, took on poses before a cheval glass. She balanced on one leg like a ballerina, bent down like a shortstop. I began to applaud her but managed to brake my hands. She was peeling the suit down to her waist and, with a soft, investigatory expression, touching her little breasts.

“Leave her alone,” my mother said, pulling me across the aisle of the plane and away from her daughter’s knitting, which I had been attempting to pull apart. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing, Ma.”

Into me for sure, pulling me tight. And horribly now, I had a pretty good idea of what it was called. I could have told her.

I
T WAS AUGUST AND
the girls were barefoot, awkward and uncertain in their shorts and sleeveless tops. I was ten years old and peering out at them from an upstairs window. Though a breeze stirred the curtains, which crackled pleasantly against my face, the room was stuffy and hot. I itched inside my clothes. Their laughter was sharp and their faces were pink with excitement. I wanted to barrage them with water bombs, but didn’t.

The grownups were away for the day at a wedding. A paving contractor Gordo knew professionally was marrying his chauffeur’s niece at a country club in Massapequa. Carla had been left in charge of the house. She called up her three best friends the moment the car cleared the driveway and said come on over. She then coldly and quietly informed me that if I was the least bit bratty or tried to embarrass her, she’d lock me up in the laundry room without so much as a comic book.

The secret rites of girls. They’d brought a phonograph out on the deck with extension cords and played the same record over and over. They danced expertly with each other, teased and stretched, tried on hairstyles. They yakked about dream-boat Dick Chamberlain, Dr. Kildare in his white bucks. And my sister yakked the loudest, tried hardest to make the others laugh, sprayed herself with root beer. She had grass stains on her knees and her eyes were big and wild.

How crushing was my disappointment. I thought: This is how she really is. The distant, placidly scornful Carla that I knew was nothing but a fake. All the cunning strengths I’d imagined her to have were lies. She probably couldn’t even beat me up; I’d test her soon. Here I could see her true form: a gumdrop. An empty-headed blabbermouth.

The record began again. “Cupid, draw back your bow / And let your arrow go / Straight to my lover’s heart for me.” The aromas of bubble gum and hair spray reached me in my high window. I pretended I had x-ray vision and could see through their clothes.

It was January and the sidewalks had been salted. I was twenty-three years old and working part-time in a florist shop. Though I had friends who didn’t mind paying for my drinks, I had lately been keeping to myself. I was fractious and horny. I wanted to break away from my circular thoughts, but could not.

The phone wouldn’t stop ringing, so finally I picked it up and there was Carla on the other end. She was down from grad school, shacked up with a biology instructor at the Americana Hotel, and insistent that I have dinner with them that night. It had been six or seven months since I had seen her last and we’d ended that evening arguing bitterly over trivialities. But I was curious about the man she was with and very hungry, so I agreed to meet them at an Italian place in the west thirties.

“Don’t be too hard on Ted,” she urged. “He’s jittery enough.”

“Mr. Charm,” I promised. “I’ll ask him to tell me all about cell division.”

Il Grifone was jammed. I pushed past the nurses and policemen who were three deep at the bar, skirted the chicken-wire-enclosed bocce court that thrust through the middle of the dining area, and found Carla and Ted at a back booth, already tucking into a platter of clams oreganata.

Carla was as beautiful as I had ever seen her, gleaming in silk and tweed, lips glossed, unequivocally in command. Naturally, this did nothing at all for my attitude toward Ted, who came up out of his seat to gladhand the younger brother. His eyes made importunate contact. His hair looked to be just now lengthening into Prince Valiant fashionability. He made me think of a turbine salesman who paints seascapes on the weekend.

“Anything you like,” he said, handing me the wine list.

“We drove the whole way with a broken heater.” Carla embraced herself momentarily. “I was all for grabbing a motel in Connecticut, but Ted convinced me to persevere and now I’m glad.”

“Me also,” I said. “I was thinking you’d scratched me off your list or something.”

She pulled my head to her padded shoulder. “You bonehead. How could I do a thing like that?”

Carla released me. I pushed the hair out of my eyes. Ted righted the sugar bowl she’d upset.

“Since that’s cleared up,” he said, “let the revels begin.”

The veal was somewhat dry, Carla rambled a bit about her doctoral research in Shaker architecture, and revelry was hardly the word. But it was jolly, by and large. Certainly Ted was not the stiff-necked drone my jealousy had cast him as, and the interest he showed me went beyond a weighed desire to cement his position with my sister. Carla, brazen with after-dinner brandies, sang the Canadian national anthem in a clear soprano that had the busboys applauding. Then, while Ted was off buying her cigarettes, she impaled me with intimacy, grasping my hand and pitching her words so low I was forced to lean close in order to make them out.

“It’s Ted who’s smitten, poor kid. I just wanted to get out of Boston for a few days. Not that I mind sleeping with him, but he gets so arduous over things. Makes me want to tromp on his feelings when he pushes them at me so much.”

But I saw the way she nestled against him as they waited for a taxi, nodding raptly while he recited an anecdote about his travels in Surinam in pursuit of a noctilucent freshwater shrimp; and through condensation on the back window I watched her fingers lace around his neck as the taxi pulled away. Then I walked myself home, fifty-three miserable blocks.

The following night I returned from a card game thirty dollars poorer and found her straddling a suitcase in front of my door. She had a vivid bruise above one eye.

“Ted,” she said, pointing to it.

As Carla summarized the incident, Ted had been unable to deliver on a promise of tickets to a sold-out musical, she’d made some remarks about boasts that couldn’t be backed up, and, just that fast, he jumped his tracks. She appeared to be more repelled than angry or upset.

“He cried right afterwards. He said he’d never struck a woman in his life, but I’ve got him turned inside out, with all his nerves exposed. What nonsense.”

“Good thing we’re not Old World,” I said. “Else I’d have to go looking for the bastard with a tire iron.”

Carla said, “He wouldn’t be hard to find.” And then she asked would I mind unplugging my phone.

After that it was like we were kids again, only better. We watched terrible old movies on TV and ate peanut butter and red onion sandwiches. We told all the jokes we could think of and when Carla laughed I could look in and see every silver filling in her mouth. But it got later and we decelerated. Something had been settling on us all the while, like dust.