The Amateur Marriage (15 page)

What the other two suddenly realized was, their parents didn’t have anywhere near the power they’d always claimed to have.

And then the previous Saturday she’d gone somewhere with another girl—a girl with the same raccoon-style eye makeup as Lindy’s, was all they had managed to gather when her car pulled into the driveway—and at seven the next morning she still was not in her bed. Nor at seven-thirty. But Karen must have dozed off after that, because at a little past eight she heard George’s fierce whisper in the hall—“Where’ve you
been,
you numbskull?”—and Lindy’s curt, unintelligible murmur. And when their mother knocked on Lindy’s door at ten-fifteen and caroled, “Lindy? You coming to church?” Lindy was there to give her an answer, although it wasn’t a very polite one. (She always referred to Heavenly Comforter Church as “Heavenly Quilt,” which George and Karen found hilarious but clearly their mother did not.)

So: that could happen again. The clock radio on Karen’s nightstand read 8:25 now, but Lindy could still show up.

On the other hand, maybe this was the day they’d all been more or less braced for. The day she turned out to be gone for good.

At breakfast they didn’t lie, but neither did they tell the whole truth. “Is Lindy getting up?” their mother asked. “Has anyone heard her stirring?” George beetled his brows and grunted in a way that could have meant anything. Karen fixed her eyes on her pancakes and imperceptibly shook her head.

“But she did come home last night,” their mother said. She shot a quick glance toward their father.

George said nothing. Karen, after a pause, felt forced to offer, “Oh, yes! I peeked into her room.”

If not for the “yes,” she would have been blameless. As usual, she had said too much. She bent lower over her plate. She felt a jab of anger, not just at George (the coward), who was smugly tucking butter pats between his pancakes, but also at her parents. Why hadn’t they checked for themselves, for Lord’s sake? And why hadn’t they stayed up waiting last night? Other parents did, with much less reason for concern.

But here they sat, in their bathrobes, ignorant as babies. Their father was reading a newspaper section folded into quarters. Their mother was dreamily watching a sparrow at the windowsill feeder. The two of them were in one of those lulls that generally followed their fights—a huge fight, this time, about a check to the Orphans’ Fund that their mother had written without their father’s permission. He had accused her of wastefulness and willfulness and cottoning up to the woman in charge of collecting. “It wasn’t even a cause you cared about!” he had said. “The Holy Shepherd Orphans’ Fund, when we don’t belong to Holy Shepherd! You just gave that money because you wanted Sissy Moss to like you.”

“That is absolutely not true!” she’d cried. “I care deeply about orphans! It doesn’t matter to me in the least which church is helping them!”

“And all for what?” he had asked her. “Does Sissy Moss have the slightest bit of interest in you? Has she ever invited you to her house? Ever called you on the phone?”

“Well, yes, she has, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh? When was that?”

“Well, on Friday when I called her, she told me wasn’t that funny, she’d just been thinking of calling me.”

“Pauline,” their father had said, in a heavy, sighing tone, and after that had come the usual ruffled feathers and sharp words and tears and shouting and slamming and painful, obvious silences followed by (even worse) the icky-poo reconciliation scene a couple of days later, all lovey-dovey and cooing, the bedroom door shut and furtively locked and their shy, foolish faces afterward. Now there would be peace—for weeks, if all went well. Karen prayed that it would. Her father, refolding the paper, hummed beneath his breath. When her mother rose for the coffee, she trailed her fingers across his back in passing.

If Lindy had been here, even the air would have felt different—spiky and unreliable. Lindy had an entire long side of the table to herself, opposite George and Karen, and whenever she made one of her pronouncements she tended to stretch out her arms and grip both corners as she spoke, taking over not just the table but the whole kitchen. This was a skinny, bony girl (deliberately skinny, calorie-obsessed—a girl who weighed all her clothes before deciding what to wear to the doctor’s office), but somehow she managed to loom; she managed to seem bigger than the four others put together. She spat out words like “middle class” and “domestic” as if they were curses. She quoted a line from a poem called “Howl” that got her banished to her room. She urged books upon her parents—her beloved Jack Kerook and someone named Albert Caymus—but when her father asked if they had Language (as he called it), she said, “Oh, what’s the use? Nothing’s going to change you. I don’t know why I bother.”

With all these literary interests you would think she would make straight A’s, but in fact she’d had to repeat a semester of English last summer, and her first-term report card this fall had had no grade higher than a C; and that too was a subject for endless altercation—her father saying, “Caymus-Shaymus, if you can’t even pass a test on
Silas Marner,
” and Lindy saying, “If that is not typical! You’re so stuck in your narrow-minded little money-grubbing rut, nothing matters if it isn’t for credit, if it can’t fit into a high-school transcript, if it doesn’t look good on a resume,” and their mother saying, “Now, Michael, it’s nice she’s doing some independent reading,” and their father saying, “If you wouldn’t always take her side, Pauline, she might learn a little self-discipline,” and their mother saying, “Oh, fine! I suppose it’s all
my
fault your daughter’s flunking out . . .”

Their mother returned with the coffee pot and leaned into their father’s shoulder as she filled his cup. “Thanks, sweetheart,” he said, and he reached up to pat her hand before he took his first sip.

When they found out Lindy was missing, Karen would be held accountable for her “yes.” Oh, yes, she had said, Lindy had come home all right; Karen had peeked into her room. Dressing after breakfast, she felt a dull, dank weight growing in the pit of her stomach. She stripped off her pajama top, tugged on a sleeveless undershirt, and then sat numbly on the edge of her bed, staring down at her rabbit slippers. Her parents would point out that because she had told a lie, the authorities’ search for her sister had been tragically delayed. If Lindy was in trouble somewhere—say, buried in an underground vault with a twelve-hour supply of oxygen—it would be Karen’s fault she died.

Goose bumps were prickling her arms and she was starting to shiver with cold; so she stood up and finished dressing. She put on the underpants embroidered with
SUNDAY
, her rosebud-printed blouse, her pink corduroy jumper and pink knee socks. But no shoes. Instead she padded out the door, making as little noise as possible, and went down the hall to Lindy’s room.

You might expect someone as wild as Lindy to be messy and disorganized, but the odd thing was that she kept her room very neat. Her clothes (mostly black, except for those that their mother had bought without consulting her) hung in a row in the closet. The bulletin board intended for party invitations and team pennants and snapshots of her classmates displayed a single poster: James Dean smoking a cigarette. The books in the bookcase were lined up according to height, and the bureau top was bare except for three family photos in dimestore gilt frames. It almost seemed nobody lived here. Was that the whole point? The phrase “clean getaway” popped into Karen’s mind.

Neatest of all was the bed: the pillow plumped, the top sheet folded over, the coverlet stretched taut. It was unthinkable that anyone glancing into this room could imagine that bed was inhabited.

Karen went to the closet for Lindy’s bathrobe—an old man’s ratty thrift-shop overcoat that always made their mother shudder. She crossed to the bed, drew back the covers, and laid the robe in a long, bulky shape down the center. When she pulled the covers up again it looked as if someone without a head were sleeping there, but she solved that problem by rearranging the pillow, bunching it in such a way that a head might be buried beneath.

If you just peeked in, only peeked, you could be excused for supposing that the bed was occupied.

On her way out, Karen stopped by the bureau to study the photos. One was on her own bureau too, as well as on George’s—though pretty well hidden, in both cases, by piles of clutter. It was their parents’ fifteenth-anniversary picture, a full-color studio portrait that their mother had framed for each of them. Their father was in his dark suit and their mother in a gray dress, so that the most noticeable color was the blue satin fake-sky backdrop. Both of them looked self-conscious and stiff and surprisingly young, although it wasn’t that long ago.

The second photo was last year’s Christmas card,
FROM OUR HOUSE TO YOUR HOUSE, HOLIDAY GREETINGS 1959
, the Caption read, beneath a picture of George and Karen smiling and Lindy scowling. They all three wore red-and-white reindeer sweaters, which might explain Lindy’s expression. An accident of composition—the vertical line of a curtain edge separating her from the other two—accentuated Lindy’s difference, her darkness and thinness and sharpness next to George and Karen’s soft blondness. Their mother had found the photo disappointing, although it was the best of the bunch. Signing the cards at the desk in the TV room, she had repeatedly grimaced. Wouldn’t you know that Lindy would snitch one and go off and buy a frame for it, as if to make a statement!

The third photo was Grandma Anton, who had died when Karen was in kindergarten. Karen barely remembered that seamed and pocketed face, that no-color, no-style hair, but Lindy still missed her because their grandma had loved Lindy best, or so Lindy claimed. She claimed Grandma Anton was watching over her from heaven; that nothing could go wrong in her life because she was under Grandma Anton’s constant care, which she knew for a fact because at difficult moments her grandma’s favorite song, “Whispering Hope,” would come wafting into her head for no reason. Karen thought Lindy was probably right. It was such a namby-pamby song, so old-ladyish (nothing like the hammering rock-and-roll music Lindy ordinarily listened to), how else to explain its presence?

Their grandma had died of a stroke, and their mother had taken it terribly. This was their father’s mother, not their mother’s, but their father had acted just quietly sad while their mother had cried for weeks. She said she should have been more sensitive to Grandma Anton’s feelings, more considerate, more responsive to her complaints. She worried that God would punish her; that she would get old herself one day and find out how it felt to live far away from her friends, the only grandma in the neighborhood, nothing to do and no place to go unless her daughter-in-law condescended to drive her, which she oftentimes might not. Their father told her she was making too much of it. “Making too much!” their mother cried. “How can you say that!” and their father told her, “Now, calm yourself, Poll.” The C word, Lindy called it. “Calm yourself; calm down”—always guaranteed to get their mother going. Plus she hated the name Poll. Everybody knew that, most certainly including their father.

Lindy herself hated the name Lindy. She said it sounded like a girl in pink gingham. At the beginning of this school year she’d started making all her teachers address her by her full name, Linnet. (She’d been named for an English bird that a soldier had mentioned to their mother during the war.) At first Karen had tried to call her that too, but it had felt so unnatural that she’d gradually given it up. Still, she sympathized, and once when a teacher phoned and asked for “Lin-NET Anton’s mother or father”—stressing the wrong syllable, as everyone tended to do—Karen had felt a kind of bruise deepening in her chest. She had had a glimpse then of what it must feel like to be misunderstood and peculiar and not well thought of by grownups.

She set an ear against the door, listening for her parents, before she stepped out of Lindy’s room and padded back to her own.

In the car, their mother said you couldn’t very well force children to go to church if their own father wouldn’t go. Then she slammed on the brakes and said, “Oh! I’m so embarrassed! I thought part of this road was for me.” She was speaking to the driver of an oncoming station wagon, although of course he couldn’t hear her. “I beg your humble pardon,” she told him. Then she took a sudden right without a signal, her right rear tire bumping over the curb. It was Karen’s turn to sit up front and she pointedly grabbed the dashboard, but her mother wasn’t paying attention. “Mimi Drew makes her children go to church and Sunday school both,” she was saying, “and afterwards at the dinner table they each have to talk about one thing they learned there. But then, her husband is a deacon. Whatever a deacon is.”

She was silent for a moment, perhaps considering the question of deacons. When she wasn’t talking she drove better. She had on the blue angora knit that she worried made her look fat; it did cling slightly to the gentle swell of her stomach but it also showed up the blue of her eyes, which Karen always thought of as
true
blue—a deep and sincere blue. A nearly invisible blond fuzz gilded the skin above her pointy-lipped, bright mouth. Karen’s friends were constantly telling her she had the prettiest mother. Karen always said, “Oh! Do you think so?” as if it were a brand-new idea. Secretly, though, she agreed.

They took a left on Turtle Dove Lane, where Karen’s best friend Maureen lived; but Maureen went to church in the city somewhere and they hardly ever got to see each other on Sundays. Karen stared longingly at Maureen’s house as they passed it—the screened side porch where they’d spent the summer weaving lanyards, and the little staked tree in the yard with its leaves turning such a vivid yellow that they made her eyes squinch up.

“If your father went to church I’d be more in my rights to tell Lindy she had to go too,” their mother said. “I know you can’t cram religion down people’s throats, but church would give her sort of an outlet, don’t you think? She could join the Sunday-night youth group and meet a more wholesome brand of young person. What did she say, George?” she asked, looking at him in the mirror. “Did she say she wasn’t coming to church because she was opposed to church, or just because she wanted to sleep?”