Moving On (114 page)

As they left the plane in Dallas Patsy tried to think of what to say to the agents, but no agents appeared. They left the airport unmolested, and the relief carried her through an awkward half-hour at her parents’. Miri was extremely uncomfortable there. She moved restlessly from one room to another; Patsy tried to pack the Ford and yet stay in the same room with her, because it was obvious she would leave if a chance arose. Garland and Jeanette had no idea what to do or say, and Miri shut within herself and would not say a word to them. Patsy made all the conversaton, to Garland, to Jeanette, to Miri, to Juanita. Davey had been asleep but woke as they were transferring him to the Ford. Patsy put Miri in the back seat with him, Juanita in the front with her, and they drove off, leaving Garland and Jeanette standing in their driveway, puzzled, awkward, and helpless. The best she had been able to do for them was to promise they could come and visit when things quieted down.

Davey had come wide awake and wanted in his car seat, and once he was put in it wanted to twist around and look at Miri. She seemed pleased with him and offered him a finger to hold. He held it solemnly. “Can I smoke pot now?” Miri asked.

Patsy was past caring. “I guess,” she said, glancing at Juanita to see how she would take it. Juanita was worried about car wrecks, not marijuana. “What if I get stopped for speeding?”

“I could swallow it.”

“Okay.” Soon Davey got in the back seat and lay on his back; Miri smoked pot and tickled his stomach and played with his feet and he gurgled and babbled and sang.

It made Patsy miss him; she glanced back at him much oftener than Juanita would have liked. “Maybe your sister would like to drive,” she said. “You can play with Davey.” She was not above needling Patsy.

“Listen,” Patsy said. “My sister is flying, can’t you tell? She’s high above us, in a marijuana airplane. You might as well get used to seeing her up there. She’s one of those people who get high.”

“I weel be high if I get to heaven,” Juanita said, yawning.

“Only my sister Patsy is going to heaven,” Miri said with a little giggle. “She’s the only one in the world who only does right things.”

“Give me peace,” Patsy said. “It used to be only Davey and Juanita against me. Now I’ll have to buck all three of you.”

“That’s right,” Juanita said, looking shyly at Miri. “We make you toe the line from now on. We run the house an’ you pay the bills.”

They bantered for a while and Davey babbled, and then they all went to sleep and gave her peace. It was almost too much peace, for she was tired too, and three long hours from Houston. The smell of marijuana lingered in the car. To keep awake Patsy turned on the radio and, as she could get nothing else very clearly, listened to a hillbilly station in Shreveport. It reminded her of Hank. She had not called him since they had seen each other. In only a few rapid days it had become strange again, and unreal. She had no sense, as she drove, that they would ever get together again. Her immediate future was in the back seat. She could not see a future through the windshield. Ahead was the back of a truck with many license plates on it. She could not give her attention to the dark country stretching west. What she wanted was to get home, and once she got back on the long wide stretch of Interstate she pushed the Ford to its top speed, which was seventy-five. There was a mushy fog when she arrived in Houston. The downtown lights were pink and green. Davey didn’t wake up as he was transferred into the house, and Juanita scarcely did. Miri woke up and was downstairs playing a record when Patsy had changed into her nightgown. She went down for a minute.

“I’m half dead,” she said. “I’m going to sleep. Please don’t run off.”

“I’m just playing your records,” Miri said. “We had to sell my phonograph.”

Patsy left it at that. The next morning Juanita found Miri asleep on the couch and covered her. Davey came and stared at her and babbled mightily, but Miri slept until noon.

18

W
ITH
M
IRI’S RETURN
, a different sort of time began, different from any Patsy had known. It could not be called a bad time, and yet it was not good either, not for Patsy. March passed, and half of April, and Houston was hot again. Davey had learned to walk and toddled all over the house and the yard and the park and wherever else he was let to be. Patsy mothered him, and sistered Miri, and bossed Juanita. She ruled efficiently, often irritably, always reluctantly, over her small domain. She brooded, but could not decide whether it was a life she had made because it was the life she secretly wanted, or merely a life circumstance had thrust upon her despite herself.

Miri changed, Davey changed, but she herself did not change, and in her worst moments she felt it to be unlikely that she would ever change again. She could not foresee anything happening that would make her much different than she was.

Where Miri was concerned, only the first week was scary. All that week there was a strangeness in her, an intermittent restlessness. She constantly rearranged her room, she wandered restlessly about the house, and she took baths at the rate of four or five a day. Patsy could not be sure at night that she would awake and find her still there. But Miri didn’t leave. Toward the end of the week she had an eighteen-hour spell of franticness. She wanted Stone and looked at Patsy hostilely for having taken her away from him. She began to try and call him. She called everyone she knew in San Francisco, trying to find him, leaving word for him to call; but she didn’t find him and he didn’t call. For two days she was almost catatonic with despair; she sat by the phonograph for hours playing rock songs until Patsy thought the whole household would go crazy.

Then, gradually, Miri began to feel better. She did not become the old Miri—Patsy knew she never would—but she became happier. She became friendly again in a quiet way, and soon she began to get her looks back. For a while she was always hungry and ate enormously. Patsy was afraid she would gain too much weight and made sure she saw her doctor regularly. Her cheeks filled out, she lost her pallor, and in a month her complexion was good again. At times she was quite rosy, and once in a while would burst into a peal of laughter at something Davey did. Her periods of restlessness became less intense, and her periods of withdrawal less impenetrable. With everyone except her parents she became talkative and sociable.

Garland and Jeanette came down twice; their visits were horrors of awkwardness. They all skated constantly on the thinnest ice of convention. The visits left Patsy with terrific headaches, left Miri hostile, left Garland and Jeanette hurt and confused. Parents and children could find no safe ground to stand on. They couldn’t talk with pleasure. Jeanette so overflowed with gratitude to Patsy that Patsy felt she would drown in it. By the end of the second visit Garland and Jeanette realized they were at an impasse, and after that they called. It was easier on everyone. Over the phone everyone could believe that everyone else was fine. Garland and Jeanette could hope for a miraculous eleventh-hour proper marriage of some kind, with someone, and Patsy did not get headaches.

Soon Miri was making friends. Emma and Flap liked her but she was a tiny bit suspicious of them, regarding them as Patsy’s allies. Her first friend was Juanita, who soon loved Miri and could not do enough for her. Juanita became the only person who really looked forward to Miri’s baby. If it was Miri’s, it could not but be a precious child, whoever its father was. Juanita talked about babies constantly and could hardly wait.

Miri’s second friend was Kenny Cambridge. He stopped one night to chat and he and Miri sat up all night talking and listening to records. He quickly became a suitor, taking her out to movies and on long walks around Rice. He also became her source of pot. Patsy decided she would have to allow it, but she told them both her largesse extended only to pot. “No acid,” she said. But Kenny introduced Miri to a good many students and one night in April acid turned up at a party and Miri dropped it. It gave Patsy a serious scare. For two days Miri was again in her most downcast state—remote, sometimes crying, sometimes goofy, silent for long stretches, and defensive about her own exaltation. Patsy was very out of patience with her but she was too worried to explode and it passed off. Miri brightened again and seemed to have lost no ground.

It was after that, during the course of laying down the law, that the question of Stone came up for the first and only time. It was late; she and Miri were in the living room. The TV had been moved back down, so that she and Miri could watch it while she played records. Patsy was giving an anti-LSD lecture and Miri was arguing, but rhetorically, with little spirit. She had been cheerful all day but seemed low and lonely. It occurred to Patsy that perhaps she loved the boy. There might well have been a lovable side to him, one that had had no chance to show itself. She had to admit that she had seen him under the worst of circumstances.

“Do you miss Stone?” she asked.

Miri was surprised. Hearing his name caused her face to change. “Why would you care?” she asked, looking hostile.

“Don’t be hostile,” Patsy said. “I care about you and what affects you.”

Miri looked down at the chair, a deep chair done in brown. Her hair was very long and when she bent forward it lay on the arms of the chair. “How can you not miss someone?” she asked.

“I took you away from there because you looked sick,” Patsy said. “You were sick, and you know it. I didn’t say you never could see him again, if you love him. I know I didn’t see him under good circumstances.”

“I don’t think you saw him at all,” Miri said. Talking about him seemed to weigh on her. She sounded very discouraged.

“I saw a very hostile person,” Patsy said. “But I don’t claim to have seen the whole of him. Please don’t look so blue. Talk to me about him.”

“No, I don’t want to.”

“Would you marry him if you could?”

“I don’t want to marry anybody. It’s stupid to get married.”

“Oh? Why?” Pronouncements about marriage by someone who had never been married had come to amuse her.

“Nobody loves anybody very long.”

“Don’t be so cynical. I’m sure people do. You’re too young to be cynical.”

“I’m not so young,” Miri snapped. “You didn’t love Jim long, did you, and he was nice. You don’t love Hank any more, either.”

“I’m not sure I ever loved him,” she said.

“Well, there’s no point in having a lover if he’s not around so you can fuck,” Miri said dogmatically.

Patsy had no answer to that. Miri picked up one of Davey’s socks; he was always losing them. She stretched it and smoothed it across her knee.

“Stone’s already forgotten me,” she said and then added in a different, apologetic tone, “He doesn’t have a very good memory,” as if it were his housekey he was prone to forget.

“Was it that one-sided?”

Miri got up and went upstairs to her room without answering the question, and Patsy never asked about Stone again. When it came time to decide upon a last name for the baby, Stone was not considered. They talked it over among themselves—Miri, Patsy, and Juanita, with Emma an occasional consultant. The phone book stayed on the kitchen table for a month. Often, while Patsy idled over lunch, or drank iced tea or read magazines with her feet propped on the table, Miri, who would be just up and having breakfast pushed at her by Juanita, would read out names and the three of them would discuss their qualities. They also discussed stories for Jeanette and Garland to tell their friends. Miri was resistant on that point; she didn’t want to tell any lies at all.

“Look, don’t be so selfish,” Patsy said. “Think of them a little. It’s terrible for them. The point is that any good story we make up about it they’ll come to believe, and it will be better for them to believe a sort of decent lie that they can tell their friends. It’s awful for people like Momma and Daddy not to have something reasonably acceptable to tell their friends.”

“Okay,” Miri said finally. “You make it up.”

Patsy had been putting them off by telling them that Miri simply wouldn’t talk about it. Finally what she told them was that Miri had been engaged and had gotten pregnant just as she and the boy found they weren’t right for marriage. She invented a fictional boy named Raymond Hammett, amalgamating the name one night when Kenny Cambridge, a detective-story buff, was haranguing them about the respective merits of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Miri listened almost with awe as Patsy gave their parents, via the telephone, a description of young Mr. Hammett, making him seem a highly desirable, proper, respectable, but confused and impetuous young man. She also made them promise to leave him strictly alone and told them he was paying all bills and acquitting himself respectably, under the circumstances.

“How was that?” Patsy asked when she finished.

“Great, except I’d never screw anyone like that,” Miri said. “Also you forgot to tell them he was a spade.”

“Well, according to you, maybe he wasn’t,” Patsy said. “We’ll cross that bridge when and if we come to it.”

From then on, when they were in good moods, they sat around and made up stories about Raymond Hammett. Miri confused the issue by referring to him as Dashiell Chandler, or, as she usually put it, “my former lover, Dashiell Chandler.” Eventually even Juanita came to believe someone named Raymond was the father. They were particularly prone to talking about Raymond Hammett-Dashiell Chandler when Kenny was around. He took detective writing as seriously as he had once taken Augustine Birrell and felt that the girls were being a little too frivolous. It irked him too that neither of them would read
The Maltese Falcon
or
The Big Sleep
or anything else he wanted them to read. He and Miri did agree on records, though, and spent hours and hours discussing Bob Dylan, whom they both idolized. They went to see his movie four times.

For a time Patsy had a feeling that Miri and Kenny were going to get thick, and they might have had not Kenny introduced her around so much. One of the people he introduced her to was a boy named Eric Flanigan, and within a week Eric became her accepted boy friend. He was a first-year graduate student from Menlo Park, California, and he and Miri had an immediate meeting point in that they were both nostalgic for the Bay Area generally. Patsy liked Eric almost as much as Miri did and soon he was a regular feature at supper. He was slightly unhappy in graduate school and spent his free afternoons playing tennis, at which he was quite good. Often Miri would go to the court and meet him and walk him to Dunstan Street. He would come in in his tennis clothes and gratefully consume quantities of Patsy’s food while Miri chattered. He was a good-looking boy, blond and loose, with a short beard—one of those young Californians who, it seemed to Patsy, must almost constitute a new breed, they were so healthy and so alike. For Eric was a sort of shorter Barry, shy, immediately friendly, bright, but so quiet it took weeks for his brightness to show itself. He was so relaxed and at home with himself physically that it was a comfort to have him around. He was charming to watch with Miri, because she pecked and chattered and sniped at him and he took it so quietly that it was hard to decide whether he was afraid of her or merely tolerant. Eric liked Patsy’s house better than his own apartment, and he spent most of his evenings there. He was having difficulties with his eighteenth-century seminar and would sit on the floor frowning mildly, usually still in his tennis shorts, reading Collins and Gray and the Whartons while Miri tussled with Davey if he was still up, or listened to records or watched TV if he wasn’t. Patsy generally lay in splendor on her couch, wearing a long green caftan and watching TV or arguing with Miri or debating with Eric the merits of the various writers he was reading. She had debated most of them with Hank the year before. Eric, like Flap, was in awe of Jim’s scholarly library, though it had not grown by one book since Jim had left.