Ordinary People (2 page)

Razor in hand, he stands before the rectangular, gold-trimmed mirror, offering up a brief prayer:
Thanks. Appreciate all you’ve done so far. Keep up the good
work, while, beside him, his wife brushes her hair. Her face is soft in the morning, flushed, slightly rounded, younger than her thirty-nine years. Her stomach is flat, almost as if she never had the babies. She raises her hands to the back of her neck, pinning her hair into a neat coil at the back of her head. Beautiful hair, the color of maple sugar. Or honey. Natural, too. The blue silk robe outlines her slender hips, her breasts.

“Did you call him?”

“Yeah, he’s up.”

She sighs. “I hate to play golf when it’s cold. Why doesn’t anybody in this league know enough to quit when the season’s over? Leaves on all the fairways, your hands freeze—it’s ridiculous.”

He leans toward her; gives her a kiss on the neck. “I love you.”

“I love you.” She is looking at him in the mirror. “Will you talk to him this morning? About the clothes. He’s got a closetful of decent things and he goes off every day looking like a bum, Cal.”

“That’s the style. Decency is out, chaos is in—” As her brows lift, he nods. “Okay, I’ll talk to him.”

“And the other thing, too.”

“What other thing?”

“Stopping by Lazenbys’ on the way home. Carole called again last week. It’s such a little thing....”

“I don’t want to pressure him about that. He’ll do it when he wants to. Carole understands.”

She shrugs. “When people take an interest, it would seem courteous—”

“We all know he’s courteous.” He turns his attention to his beard. Every morning the same face, the same thoughts. A good time to take stock, though. Calvin Jarrett, forty-one, U.S. citizen, tax attorney, husband, father. Orphaned at the age of eleven. He has caught himself thinking about that lately, thinking of the Evangelical Home for Orphans and Old People, an H-shaped, red brick building on Detroit’s northwest side, where he grew up. Wondering if after all these years it is still in existence. Strange that he has never bothered to check. An odd kind of orphanage: most of the kids had at least one living parent; some even had two. He had moved there when he was four, leaving the tiny apartment where he was born. His mother sent him gifts on his birthday, and at Christmas. Occasionally she visited him. Periodically she explained why he was living there, and not with her: there was no room for him in the apartment, no money; it was no neighborhood in which to bring up kids. She had a friend who knew people that were connected with the Home; just luck. The director had told him once that the Home was financed by “religious benefactors.”

He was named Calvin, for his dead uncle; Jarrett had been his mother’s maiden name. When she came to see him, she came alone. No one claiming to be his father had ever been in attendance; he had no memories of being any man’s son. So, if anyone should ask, he can always point out that he had no example to follow.

And what is fatherhood anyway? Talking to a kid about his clothes. Not applying pressure. Looking for signs. He knows what to look for now: loss of appetite, sleeplessness, poor school performance—all negative, so far. His son eats, he sleeps, he does his homework. He says he’s happy. Another duty: asking silly questions. Are you happy? He has to ask, though; pretends that he is kidding, just kidding; Conrad replies in kind. Pointless. Would the answer have been any different, even if he had thought to ask, before? Good manners have nothing to do with communication, he must remember that. And being a father is more than trusting to luck. That, too. Nobody’s role is simple, these days. Not even a kid’s. It used to mean minding your manners, respecting those who were bigger than you, treating each day as a surprise package, waiting to be opened. Not any more. So what’s changed? Not enough surprises? Too many, maybe.

He has had a vision all these months, of boys, with their heads next to stereo speakers feeding music into their ears, their long legs draped over chairs and sofas. Or their arms, stretched toward a basketball hoop in the side drive (he had sunk the posts in cement himself, when Conrad was eight, Jordan, nine; just after they bought the house). Where are all these kids? Joe Lazenby, Phil Truan, Don Genthe, Dick Van Buren—they are all seniors in high school this year. Is eighteen too old to play touch football on the lawn? Basketball in the side drive? Is it girls? Studies? Since he has been home, Conrad has gone once to the movies. Alone. “Didn’t anybody else want to see it?” Cal had asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t ask.”

Responsibility. That is fatherhood. You cannot afford to miss any signs, because that is how it happens: somebody holding too much inside, somebody else missing signs.
That doctor in Evanston. Make sure he calls him. It is for his own good.
Why? Because his own vision, that of the boys hanging around, isn’t coming true? It has only been a month. All the other signs seem right. Stay calm. Keep it light. Try not to lean. A balance must be struck between pressure and concern.

Back when Conrad was in the hospital, back when the visits were limited to twice a month, he could afford to take responsibility for everything: the sections of gray peeling paint in the stair wells; small gobs of dirt swept into the corners of the steps; even a scar at the side of one orderly’s mouth. Now that he is home again, things are different. The responsibilities seem enormous. Staggering. His job alone, nobody else’s. Motherhood is different, somehow. And what about fathering girls? He must ask Ray Hanley sometime, how it feels. Is there more, or less responsibility? He couldn’t take more.
Your mother wants me to tell you, you have a closetful of decent clothes.
He will smile. “Okay. You told me.” But, in a minute, he will ask, “What’s wrong with what I’ve got on?”

Strive, strive. Correct all defects. All those Saturday trips to the orthodontist, when they were in junior high. Both of his boys had inherited from him, that long, slightly hooked nose; from their mother, the small, determined lower jaw. On them it had required thirty-eight hundred dollars’ worth of work, courtesy Peter Bachmann, D.D.S., M.S. “Hell, what’s a little money?” he had raved. “Overhaul their whole damn jaws if necessary, this is the age of the perfect mouth!” But, secretly, he had been proud that he was able to afford such expenses. He was supporting his family,
his boys,
in style: whatever they needed, whatever they wanted, they got. He had arrived. He was here. Not bad for the kid from the Evangelical Home.

And now? Where is he now?

 

 

 

Beth sets breakfast in front of Cal: eggs, bacon, toast, milk, juice.

Conrad looks up. “Morning.”

“Morning. You need a ride today?”

“No. Lazenby’s picking me up at twenty after.”

He treats this as a piece of good news. “Great!” Said too heartily, he sees at once. Conrad looks away, frowning.

“I’ve got to get dressed,” Beth says. “I tee off at nine.” She hands him his coffee; crosses to the doorway; motes of dust flutter nervously in her wake. Conrad is studying. The book is propped against the butter dish.

“What is it, a quiz?”

“Book report.”

“What book?”

He raises the cover. Cal reads,
Jude the Obscure.

“How is it?”

“Obscure.”

He sips his coffee. “No bacon and eggs this morning?”

He shakes his head. “I only wanted cereal.”

He has lost twenty-five pounds in one year. Another year before his weight will return to normal, Dr. Crawford predicted.

“You feel okay?”

“Yeah, fine. I just didn’t want a big breakfast.”

The bony angles need to be fleshed out.

“You ought to keep trying to put weight on,” Cal says.

“I am. I will. You don’t have to be heavy to swim, Dad.”

Back to the book, and Cal studies the crisp, dry rectangles on the tile floor. Patterns of sunlight. Familiar and orderly. “How’s it going?” he asks.

Conrad looks up. “What?”

“How’s it going? School. Swimming. Everything okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Same as yesterday.”

“What does that mean?”

A faint smile. “It means you ask me that every day.”

“Sorry.” He smiles, too. “I like things neat.”

Conrad laughs. He reaches out to flip the book closed. “Okay,” he says, “let’s talk.”

“Can’t help it,” Cal says. “I regard it as a challenge, people reading at the table.”

“Yeah.”

“So, how come Lazenby’s picking you up?”

“He’s a friend of mine.”

“I know that. I just wondered if it meant you’d be riding with him from now on.”

“I don’t have a formal commitment yet. I’m gonna have my secretary talk to his, though.”

“Okay, okay.”

“We should have the contract drawn up by the end of the week.”

He does a familiar thing, then; shoves his hands into the back pockets of his Levi’s as he rocks backward in the chair. Conrad, after all. A good sign, despite the brutal haircut; the weary look about the eyes. The eyes bother him every day. He still believes in the picture he carries in his wallet of a boy with longish, dark hair and laugh lines about the mouth and eyes; no weary look there. This gaunt, thin figure that sits across from him, hair chopped bluntly at the neck, still grins; still kids, but the eyes are different. He cannot get used to it.

His old self.
That is the image that must be dispelled. Another piece of advice from the all-powerful Dr. Crawford, Keeper of the Gate. “Don’t expect him to be the same person he was before.” But he does expect that. As does everyone. His mother, his grandmother, his grandfather—yesterday, Cal’s father-in-law had called him at the office: “I’ve got to admit, Cal, that it shocked me. He looked so—” and Cal felt him hunting for the painless adjectives “—tired out. Run down. I would think, for the kind of money you paid, they would have at least seen to it that he ate properly, and got enough sleep. And he was so quiet. Just not like his old self at all.”

And who was that? The kid who got straight A’s all through grade school and junior high? Who rode his two-wheeler sixteen times around the block on his sixth birthday, because somebody bet him he couldn’t? Who took four firsts in the hundred-meter free style last year?
Last year.
No, he is not much like that kid. Whoever he was.

He says his piece about the clothes, and Conrad nods absently. “Okay. I just haven’t thought about it much. I will, though.”

What, no argument? No raising of the eyebrows, no hint of sarcasm in the reply? What kind of a sign is this? Surely not good. Okay, now is the time. Lean, if you have to.

“Another thing,” he says. “That doctor in Evanston, what’s his name? Berger? Have you called him yet?”

An immediate reaction. The look on his face is tight; closed. The chair legs come down. “No. I don’t have time.”

“I think we ought to stick to the plan—”

“I can’t. I’m swimming every night until six. He didn’t say I had to call him, Dad.”

“No, I know.” He waits while Conrad stares at the table. “I think maybe you ought to. Maybe he could see you on the weekends.”

“I don’t need to see anybody. I feel fine.”

A strained silence. Conrad pushes the cereal bowl, lightly; left, then right.

“I want you to call him anyway,” he says. “Call him today.”

“I don’t finish practice until dinner—”

“Call him at school. On your lunch hour.”

An obedient boy. Polite. Obedient. Well mannered. Even in the hospital, with his fingernails bitten to bloody half-moons, the dark circles, bloody bruises under his eyes; always, always his behavior was proper, full of respect.

“Thanks for coming.” Each time he would say that, as Cal readied himself to leave. The shirt he is wearing today—the way his shoulder blades shove out beneath the soft skin of jersey—it is a shirt he used to wear in the hospital. Growing up is a serious business. He, Cal, would not be young again, not for anything. And not without sponsors: a mother and father, good fortune, God.

He sits on the front porch steps, waiting for Lazenby. The air is crisp and cool, and he rubs his hands together, shivering in the thin denim jacket. He should go back inside; get a heavier one, but he doesn’t want to risk it. Not that she will care, or say anything. But the hurdle has been jumped once today. Enough. He glances again at his watch. Almost eight-thirty. Lazenby has forgotten. He hopes for a moment that he has; then, prays he hasn’t. She would have to drive him. She has a golf game; it will make her late. The wrong direction, across town the two of them alone in the car and he not wanting to screw up and say the wrong thing.
Haul ass Lazenby crissake don’t make me stand here until she comes out.

Abruptly he jumps up, walks to the end of the circular drive. Another thought nags at him, threatening to surface. He shrugs it off. Something unpleasant. Facing the house, he stares up at his bedroom window. In the early morning, the room is his enemy; there is danger in just being awake. Here, looking up, it is a refuge. He imagines himself safely inside; in bed, with the covers pulled up. Asleep. Unconscious.

The thought surfaces. His father has noticed. Whatever is wrong is now visible. That command: not, “Call the guy,” but, “Call him
today. ”
Worrying. There is something to worry about, as he has suspected. He did not want to have his suspicions confirmed. In cooler moments, the fear can be shoved back; thought of as overactive imagination, too much hot sauce. Now he has infected his father, and the gray disease is dangerous to both of them. His grandmother was eager to inform him: “Conrad, if you
knew
the strain that man was under these past months, the money was nothing, compared with the strain, my heart went out to him, I can’t tell you.”