Only Children (27 page)

“Yes!” Lily shouted.

Again. Right, teeter, left.

“Wow,” said someone.

Right, rock, left. Now faster, ahead to the astonished grown-ups, sounds of triumph pouring from him.

“Homo erectus!” Peter called, and shot picture after picture.

Byron dove at his grandmother Lily when he got close enough, hurling himself recklessly to gain the last few inches in one movement. Lily rescued Byron from smashing onto the rug, took him in her arms, and whirled him around. She clasped him to her breast and began to dance with him, to the amazement of Peter’s relatives. That plump old Jewish woman made herself dainty. She twirled Byron, prancing on her tiptoes, covering his face with smacking kisses, taking possession. “My bubeleh, my beautiful baby doll,” she sang to him, unashamed of her passion.

Peter looked at his mother. Gail’s genuine smile at Byron’s steps was left over on her face, the warm sauce of her amazed pleasure jelled into cold glop.

Then, as if to torment Gail further, Lily danced Byron over to Gail and showed him off, a bride flashing her big diamond. “Isn’t he gorgeous!” she demanded of Gail. “Isn’t he a big gorgeous boy!”

Gail nodded cautiously at Lily, the way she might have responded if she were cornered by a raving bag lady. Gail put on a mollifying smile to veil her embarrassment and desire to escape.

“He can walk!” Lily pushed herself on Gail. Byron grabbed for Lily’s huge eyeglasses.

“Sort of,” Gail demurred.

“What do you mean?” Lily protested.

“He collapsed there at the end,” Gail said.

“What do you expect?” Lily demanded. “He’s one year old. That’s very early to walk.” Distracted by her outrage, Lily allowed her eyeglasses to get within reach of Byron’s grabs. The tiny fingers hooked the frames and sent them flying.

“I could see that was about to happen,” Gail commented.

Diane retrieved the glasses and offered them to her mother. Lily, however, ignored her daughter, attempting to focus on Gail. Lily’s nearsighted squint creased the wrinkled skin into hundreds of new breaks. “He can grab my glasses anytime,” Lily said.

“I’m glad,” Gail answered. Lily studied Gail’s expression to find evidence of sarcasm, but Gail showed a calm and pleasant exterior. “That’s what grandmothers are for,” Gail added. She brushed Byron’s cheek with her tanned hand, lean and long compared with Lily’s plump paws.

Byron, relaxed and laughing in Lily’s arms, fussed at Gail’s touch. “Unhh,” he groaned, and averted his face.

“Don’t be frightened,” Lily cooed to Byron. “She’s your grandmother too. Don’t be frightened of her.”

“Ma!” Diane said. “Take your glasses. Give me Byron.”

Gail turned away and met Peter’s stare. He had been fascinated by her cool reaction to Lily’s insulting behavior. Gail returned his look for a moment. Then she winked.

“Peter!” he heard his stepfather, Kyle, say only a moment before laying a heavy hand on his shoulder. Peter tightened at the touch. “You have a CD player.”

His stepfather didn’t ask questions, he made accusations. Peter nodded sullenly.

“You didn’t get it at the store.”

“You’re right,” Peter answered.

“You paid two fifty.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I’ve got them for two hundred. Sell the disks for eleven bucks. They’re as much as fifteen elsewhere.”

“How do you do it, Kyle?” Peter’s father asked this. Jonathan stood a few feet away, his wavy gray hair combed back from his high brow, worn long in the back, bumping over his shirt collar. Jonathan was half sitting, half standing against the radiator cover in front of the window. His chest and stomach were pushed forward by this pose. Jonathan could be living in the Philadelphia of Franklin, with the big belly, thin legs, and the noble, yet intimidating, features of a hawk.

Peter tried to remember the last time Kyle and Jonathan were in the same room—Peter and Diane’s wedding?

“The old joke. Volume, volume, volume.”

“It’s not boxes falling off trucks then,” Jonathan mumbled into his scotch and soda.

“No. That’s how I got started,” Kyle answered with a sarcastic snort. “Now I play fair and square, Mr. Hummel.” Kyle’s usually subtle western accent—he grew up in Arizona—got thicker from Jonathan’s challenge.

“A rare man, indeed,” Jonathan said, his tendency to affect an English enunciation worsened by a desire to sound equally distinctive.

Peter felt the old anxiety, the short worried breaths of his childhood, the spiritual yearning to escape, wrenched by the stronger magnetism of the drama. Peter used to think that his father would go too far with his teasing and say something unforgivably contemptuous, that Kyle might punch Jonathan at any moment, that suddenly one of them would blurt out—what? Their true feelings? Those were clear.

“He’s a fine baby,” Kyle said. He smiled at Jonathan as best he could, his broad jaw yielding reluctantly. “You have a fine grandson.”

“Say, Peter,” Jonathan called to him as if he were across the room.

“Yes, Dad?” He knew from the smirk on Jonathan’s face a witticism was coming.

“Do you know why grandfathers and grandsons get along so well?”

“No, Dad.”

“They’re united against a common enemy.”

Peter lowered his head, looked down, down, down. He felt smaller, battered by the hubbub of sounds in the room, wanting to be alone, afraid to move. Jonathan laughed at his own joke.

“Don’t get it,” Kyle said. “Who’s the common enemy?”

“Me,” Peter said. He looked up from his shy, oppressed childhood—looked up through the sullen fog of adolescence, up to the equality of armored adulthood. He met their eyes bravely, a grown-up again, and they were old. “Me,” Peter repeated with the knowing smile of a teacher’s brightest student. “Both son and father. I’m the common enemy.”

T
HE LIGHTS
of the car shone against the lead-glass windows and glared into white circles on their distorting surface. The chug of the engine sounded loud against the country silence. Eric worried that Nina and Luke would be wakened by it. He turned on the driveway floods and went out the door.

“Hey!” called Brandon, Nina’s older brother. “How ya doing!” Beside Brandon, in the passenger seat, was his second wife, Wendy. She sat staring ahead in a daze.

“Shhh,” Eric said.

“Ah,
il bambino
.” Brandon remembered. He shut off the engine. “Asleep?”

Eric nodded. “Probably not for long. Where are your parents?”

“They stayed over in Ogunquit. Be here tomorrow.”

From the house they heard Luke’s unhappy squawks. “Excuse me,” Eric said, and dashed for the door.

“My nephew! That’s my nephew!” Brandon called out.

While he rocked Luke, Eric heard Brandon and Wendy enter, find their room, talk in whispers so dramatic they were somehow louder than low voices, until finally Nina’s sleepy talk joined them.

Go to sleep, Eric said to Nina in his head. Luke was restless in his arms, the eyes closing with each rock back and opening with each rock forward, a doll perversely designed for suspense, never completely awake or asleep. In Maine, Eric and Nina alternated night duty, to allow the swing shifter to make up the rest in the morning. If Nina stayed up to chat with Brandon and Wendy, she wouldn’t be able to handle her morning child care. When, because of exhaustion, she lost control, Eric couldn’t sleep. He’d hear her yell or allow Luke to cry, and Eric would get up, take Luke, and order her back to bed. He’d learned that much: Nina was a fine mother as long as she had energy. They would need a housekeeper. How much would that cost? Two hundred? Two fifty?

The whispers got closer. “Eric?” Nina called from outside the door. “Is Luke asleep?”

Luke peeped and arched his back, a hand clawing the air.

“No,” Eric admitted.

They came into the cramped nursery, an invasion of giants. Brandon insisted on taking Luke.

“Hey, fella, how ya doing!” Uncle Brandon shouted into the miniature eleven-week-old face.

Luke’s eyes shut in horror, his mouth gaped, and then he wailed.

“Great lungs!” Brandon said to Wendy. She stood beside him, her shoulders slumped, her eyes blank.

She’s stoned, Eric decided. “Oh, baby,” Nina said, and took Luke from his uncle.

“God, look at those feet! He’s got your dogs, Eric. They’re huge.”

“Aren’t they!” Nina said, excited. She had been alone with Eric and Luke in Maine for a month. Before that Nina had been dead to happy sensation. This was her first exhibition of maternal pride. Dammed up for so long, a flood of anatomical praise burst from her while she showed Luke off: his long fingers, his straight black hair, his almond-shaped eyes, his strong chin, his soft white skin. Nina looked beautiful as well, her thick brown hair flowing wildly down to her broad shoulders, her pale blue eyes soft from sleep, her skin as white as Luke’s. She carried her baby into the living room—he squinted and mewed at the light—and raved about him to an enthusiastic Brandon and an impassive Wendy.

“And he’s smart,” she said while Eric tried to make a fire, worried that Luke was cold. “I talk to him and he listens.”

“We should have a baby,” Brandon said to Wendy.

“Yeah,” she said to the floor. She looked over at Eric. “Do you have any cigarettes?”

“I don’t think you should smoke around the baby,” Brandon commented.

“It’s okay, Brandy,” Nina said. “I smoke around him all the time. I’m terrible.”

“Hey, let me,” Brandon said to Eric, going over to the fireplace. He removed an unsplit pine log from the top of the smoking pile. “This is choking it.”

“It’s almost going,” Eric protested.

“Let Brandy,” Nina said. “He’s the champ firemaker.”

“Family arsonist,” Brandon said. “You know how to make money, I know how to make things burn.” Brandon pushed the remaining split birchwood apart and blew gently on the smoldering mass of newspaper and kindling beneath. They burst into flame. “Gotta breathe to burn,” Brandon commented. He took more newspaper from a pile and started to roll it into a tight twist. “Lasts longer this way.” He nodded at the sooty pine log. “We’ll dump her on when she’s going good.”

“Cigarettes?” Wendy said to Eric.

Eric rushed to get them, even though he felt Wendy’s tone was arrogant, an order to a waiter. She didn’t thank him. “You want something to drink?” Eric offered.

“I know where it is,” Brandon said. “You want any?”

“No,” Eric said. He felt reproved, convinced Brandon had meant to remind Eric that
he
, not Brandon, was the guest. The slight hadn’t been in his brother-in-law’s tone, however. Eric sat down on the couch beside Nina and Luke. He told himself to relax. He felt like a big awkward Jew with Nina’s family—ungainly, at war with himself, his emotions either hostilely squelched or naïvely blared, never expressed with their even, self-confident voices. For them, life was an easy chair; for Eric, a hard bench.

Brandon poured two big glasses of Rémy Martin, giving one to Wendy. Although she hadn’t asked for it, she took it greedily. “You breast-feeding?” Wendy asked, and swigged the Rémy like soda.

“Of course,” Nina said. “I think they passed a law that you have to.”

Brandon laughed. “Everything in nature is good.”

Luke squirmed in Nina’s arms, hiding his face in her bosom, his hands reaching blindly into the air. “Maybe he’s hungry,” Nina said.

“He’s sleepy,” Eric snapped.

Nina seemed to miss the point. “I’ll feed him. That’ll put him to sleep.”

“It’s not the schedule!” Eric protested.

“Give my nephew a break,” Brandon said casually. “He’s not an airline.”

“Eric’s right,” Nina said quickly. She must have guessed how provoked Eric would be by Brandon’s comment. “Just to relax him.” She excused herself to Eric. “He won’t really eat.” She unbuttoned her nightshirt.

Brandon and Wendy both stared at her blimp of a breast, the spreading purple of her areola, the chubby projection of her nipple. Nina revealed it unselfconsciously; they watched without shame. Eric was appalled by both attitudes.

Luke latched on eagerly. “What a deal, kid,” Brandon said.

There was a silence while they intently watched Luke’s absorption and satisfaction. The little hand reached up to Nina, yearning for something to hold. She lowered her chin and the fingers caressed it.

Brandon took another long drink from his glass and belched. “Sorry, Mom,” he said to the beams.

Nina laughed with girlish pleasure. It annoyed Eric that he hadn’t gotten that good a laugh out of her since Luke’s birth.

“Did you hear about Earner’s windfall?” Brandon asked.

Nina shook her head no. Eric was alert. The family money had never been discussed in his presence.

“Grandpa’s land in California. Someone bought the whole six hundred acres to develop. Father made a killing.”

“Grandpa’s land?” Nina wondered. “I thought he sold that years ago.”

“You mean the Virginia stuff. That was peanuts. This is six hundred acres. Sold for ten thousand an acre.”

“You’re kidding!” Eric said in an explosive challenge, sitting forward, apparently ready to pounce on Brandon if he confessed it was a joke.

“Thought that’d get your attention.”

“How much is that?” Nina asked, very calmly, just curious.

“Six million,” Eric spat out, staccato. “Six million dollars.”

Brandon let his head back and laughed to the ceiling. “You love money, Eric. ‘Six million, six million dollars,’ ” Brandon imitated Eric, exaggerating the rapid delivery into a breathless, lustful pant.

Eric cringed. Brandon had a knack for seeing through people’s little social hypocrisies and enjoyed rudely announcing his insights. The more Eric tried to camouflage his true nature, the more naked he was to Brandon’s eyes. Eric understood this, but the instinct to attempt concealment was too powerful to fight.

“Money’s his business,” Nina said, not ashamed. “Eric hears six million dollars and he starts thinking of investments.” Somehow she made it sound natural and harmless.

“That’s why I brought it up,” Brandon said. “I told Father to get Eric’s advice.”

“Isn’t he handled by someone at First Boston?” Eric said, in a rapid, almost hostile tone, as if he were conducting a verbal ambush.