The Bride of Catastrophe (38 page)

“So the next day I said—very lightly, like it was something I'd noticed in passing—‘You didn't come in yesterday.' And he looked
guilty!
Just for a second, like he was sorry to disappoint me. And then he got terribly shy and gruff and gave me exact change and went straight back out again and I thought ‘He must really like me!'” She looked down and played with the fringe on the afghan for a minute, as if she'd just said something conceited and was waiting for me to reprove her.

“It's written all over him, how he feels about you,” I said.

“It's funny with a man, isn't it, Beatrice? All the things they can't say, so they just radiate them instead. I figured out ways to let him know without exactly telling him—like one day I said his coffee cup had been in my dream the night before. If you could have seen how he smiled—I could tell it really made him happy. After he left that day, Carrie Listel won a hundred dollars and put it in her pocket and went home, satisfied for one minute out of her life, and just as she was leaving she turned around and said, ‘Watch out, young lady,' in a very severe and kind way … like a mother, and I said, ‘I will, Mrs. Listel,' and I wanted to pick her up and twirl her around, because I knew she'd seen that Butch loved me. The next day he was going over to help his brother put on a roof, and when he said he wasn't coming in, I made sure to sound disappointed (usually I'd be careful
not
to), and then he said, “I'll be back by dinner,” and I said, “I'll be off by then,” and he said, “I know,” and then there was this long silence and I said, “Thank you, Butch, I'd love to have dinner with you.”

She opened her hands as if to let a pair of doves loose, and gave her brilliant, jagged smile. “You know, I think men want sex so much because they have to let their tenderness loose that way, before it, kinda, drowns them,” she said.

“I wouldn't know,” I tried, in my Voice of Experience, but the irony curdled and I missed my mark.

“After that first time, he jumped up and said, ‘I gotta go,' and I thought, ‘What happened?' And then I thought, ‘I know what happened.' I did! It was too good, too right, the kind of thing you have to get away from before something spoils it, and I sat up and looked around and I thought, ‘This is the nicest trailer I've ever been in' and I just burrowed back under the covers and slept there and I thought, ‘I'm home.' And when he came back, he lay down and looked in my eyes and he didn't say anything, but I knew, I could feel it, and I said, ‘Oh, Butch, I do, I love you too.' And he hugged me so tight, I knew, I
always
know, what he's feeling; it's in his eyes, in his hands, but he can't say it.”

She was quiet for a minute, luxuriating in her thoughts, remembering. I considered telling her my story about Lee, though I knew it would embarrass her. I used to love embarrassing Sylvie, because it proved how much more worldly I was, but now I didn't have the heart.

“Which is why I knew it was okay to get pregnant,” she said, stubborn, and pleading. Wouldn't I please see that she was following her inner compass, the only reliable guide? Didn't I also live this way? I nodded. I wanted her dreams—these soft little girl's dreams—to come true.

“What do you mean, you knew it was okay?”

“I knew he wouldn't mind in the end. He saw it as more work and worry, but I knew.”

“So you convinced him.”

“I think I've convinced him,” she said. “I mean, I told him it was the safe time of the month, that's how it happened. Then I acted surprised. I mean, I
was
surprised! There's somebody else inside me. I knew it right away; my period was two days late and I knew it, I could feel I was different, some tiny change in the taste of things, and then I just felt a change sweeping through me like a wave. But I acted like it was an accident, and he believed me.” (She pursed her lips to contain a smile, and I thought how true it was, that if you wanted to feel a man's love, you had to trick it out of him. I was so grateful to be away from that now.)

“He believed me, and he was worried, but I could see he was happy too—proud, like. He knew in himself that we'd accomplished something together. You know when you love a man and you feel him inside you the first time, you know how it seems to be a…” She got shyer and shyer, but more and more determined to say what she was thinking, even though words couldn't really touch it. Still, by speaking, she could begin to turn a mercurial feeling into a solid reality. The sentence she spoke, she would remember, repeat it to herself—and when everything went awry (as it would, because it always does), she'd still have it to bring the past to life again, nearly as reliably as if she could save the essence of that day, that love, in a bottle, to be opened in the depths of old age. “… like, a
holy
thing? And you're so tender and amazed and you can hardly believe you're together and you're facing the wildest danger—the danger of being seen,
known
—facing it
together
. You're full of daring because you love each other, and you look in his eyes, and you feel him—well, you know what I mean.”

Unfortunately, I did.

“And out of that comes, a, a…” She started crying; out of happiness, because she was knocked up by an ex-con bartender from the valley and every night she could touch him and feel him want her and she was going to be poor and worried and probably increasingly angry, but this was the price you paid for having just a month, a year of this feeling. She was amazed to have such a lucky fate, and though I could see the troubles stretching ahead, I mostly envied her. She was so happy in her illusion, and as it seemed to me there was no happiness
but
in illusion, I prayed hers could be preserved.

“He
will
love the baby,” she said. “He already does. Because he loves me.” She was tentative, waiting for me to contradict her, but when I nodded she said firmly and quietly, “I know he does. And Bea, I wouldn't have been any good in college … I was never that good in school.”

She'd fallen behind because she missed so much, staying home to keep watch over everything. The teachers would say “Beatrice Wolfe's little sister,” and she'd panic at having to live up to me because I loomed so large in her mind.

“You know, with this Nubestos thing, maybe we can save some money, and who knows what then?”

“Oh, my God, Larry's present!” she said suddenly. “I forgot!”

“What do you suppose it is?”

Sylvie looked up at me with big, naughty eyes, not unlike the eyes of a child who has just decided to spread peanut butter on the cat. She'd done that once, and another time had pushed an impeccably dressed real estate agent off the little log bridge into the brook, because Ma didn't want the house to be sold. “It felt so good,” she'd said both times, when I asked what had possessed her. Simplicity was allowed to Sylvie. Being a good student, a good girl, had left me without the satisfaction any natural human would feel, kneading peanut butter into fur.

“Let's open it,” she said.

“No!' I already knew Ma's longings too deeply; I didn't want to see them in the flesh. Sylvie went to get the package out of the cabinet.

“I guess he couldn't find a box.” It was an awkward shape and the thin paper printed with jolly Santa Clauses had been wrapped around it like a tourniquet, secured with yards of Scotch tape. “We'll wrap it up again. She won't know.”

“Sylvie!”

“He'd have told me what it was if I'd asked.” People had always confided in Sylvie—everyone has so much to tell, and when you find someone who'll be honestly fascinated, of course, you're only grateful.

“Really, I think we
ought
to look,” Sylvie said, “in case it's something that's not such a good idea. They're on the outs, him and Ma.”

“So I gathered. Why?”

“Oh, who knows, with her? He did something, or said something … I don't know, and neither does he but Ma won't talk to him and he's just desperate to make things right.”

At this, she tore off the wrapping, abruptly, like a child stuffing a cookie in his mouth before Mother can say no. And there it was—

“A gun?” Sylvie said.

“No,” I said. “It's chocolate, and you take off the foil.” But Sylvie was shaking her head and the minute I set my hand on it I knew it was real.

“Why?”

“I cannot guess,” Sylvie said.

We looked at each other with as much excitement as alarm. Mine, of course, was an educated excitement: I had studied Chekhov and knew that a gun over the mantelpiece in the first chapter will go off by the end. We both knew that a gun added something to a story, and this one was bound to add a new chapter to our lives.

*   *   *

“
YOU KNOW,
I
think your mother has made an
excellent
choice,” Philippa observed. “Most men don't have a clue in the gift-giving department. This guy obviously loves and understands your mother and knows exactly what sort of thing will please her.”

“Philippa!” I said (in a shocked whisper; I was huddled under a blanket on the couch so Ma wouldn't hear me), but I had to laugh. Philippa's parents lived in her mind as vengeful gods enforcing immutable laws. They did not suffer drunken brainstorms and rush out to buy flocks of sheep or ping-pong ball factories. They'd never asked themselves if they were happily married; they'd never dreamed of divorce. They didn't fall desperately in love with figments of the imagination, nor fly into sobbing rages when those figments failed to come alive … banishing the former beloved back to the netherworld, only to lie pounding their fists on the ground, hoping to raise the dear figment again. But if they had done all this, and one or another of their shades had arrived on Christmas Eve with a gift-wrapped pistol, they would have
given the pistol back
. What good were they, to a woman whose term of highest praise was “lurid”? None.

*   *   *

“
HE MISSES
me,” Ma said, with tears in her eyes, turning the thing in her hands. “He misses me; he wants me to know he's thinking of me.”

“Flowers are more customary,” I said.

“Oh, flowers! Oh my God!” she said. “What an idea! I cannot even imagine Larry carrying a bunch of flowers.”

“That is the
point
.”

“Oh, Beatrice,” she looked at me with great tenderness—not maternal feeling but the sympathy of a missionary toward her dear aboriginal flock. I did not understand love, did not understand men, the way she did.

“He knows I've been frightened here, all by myself,” she said. Having so few resources, she made use of everything. The fear would draw Larry to her, make him feel stronger and more confident, less her student and more her protector. Soon he would forget that
she'd
been supposed to guide
him
. “He wants me to feel safe.”

“Ma?”

“Don't you see, Beatrice?” she asked, gazing intensely into my eyes. “
Don't you see?
He's giving me something from
his
world, he's showing me what he can do for me. It's a token of
love
.” What depths this word held for her; I could hardly look. “I sent him away,” she whispered. Her tone was from the wrong movies: tearful, overwrought. Philippa wouldn't have let these films into her festival. But poor Ma had only been to the teachers' college.
I
was the one whose mother made sure I got a
real
education. “I told him to get out of here and never come back. I told him he was a boy with a crush on his teacher, that he'd misunderstood me. I told him everything I told Jeff Rush.” Jeff Rush was the high school principal.

“Why?”

“Be
cause
,” she said, angry at my stupidity, or her own—who could tell, and anyway what was the difference? A daughter's idiocy is only her mother's brought to bloom. “Because he doesn't love me, not really. He has some kind of fantasy, but it's not
me
. I need someone who loves
me
.”

“Well, you can't expect—”

“I know!” she said, with the sharpest grief. “I know. I can't expect anyone to love me.”

Why did she have to grab half a sentence and jump off a cliff with it like that?

“So there,” I said gently, pointing to this gun. “He
does
love you. He brought you a gift.”

She nodded, looking down at it as if she wanted it to promise her something, so that I knew she'd put it in a drawer like her love letters, and consult it daily or hourly as a talisman, until she'd gotten used to it and it lost its power. She cried so sadly, I was afraid I was going to cry with her. And then what? We'd be lost. We were clinging by our fingernails already—we had one job, Sylvie's waitressing—between us. By some accident of grace we had roofs over our heads. We had venison, thanks to Butch's reckless driving, and Teddy had liberated a bit of light.

“You've got to give it back to him,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“It's a gun,” I said. “You need a license for it, and you don't have one. So it's illegal to have it, it's a crime.”

She laughed, incredulous at my naïveté. “Innocence is a luxury
some people
can't afford,” she said, worldly-wise. “We can't all be like you.”

Oh, she was proud, and with good reason—her spirit, her intelligence were immense. And what strength she had needed, to keep herself perfectly still as one era after another bound her to the rack! But she'd been good, she never struggled, never let her ambition surface except when she looked into my eyes.

As she did now, her mascara leaching into her crow's-feet with her maudlin tears, ridiculous, yes, but not without magnificence. She was a giantess of promise, struggling up and out of the depths, dripping with the old notions of femininity, bellowing her fury and confusion that something so potent, so able as herself should find no path forward in the world. And to see her, to feel all the pity and admiration, yearning and fear, that I did in her presence, was to be very, very glad I had Lee, and the strangeness and forbiddenness of my own life. It worked against her like garlic against a vampire.