The Constant Heart (2 page)

My mother and father were in the kitchen, my father
trembling at the table, my mother by the kitchen sink. Of course, they were too concerned about other matters to notice Sara or me. My father was a tall man who bore a remarkable resemblance to Gary Cooper. Especially around the eyes when he was angry or hurt. My mother had blond hair and white skin and a kind of endless girlish quality that made her the envy of a lot of women who aged faster.

My mother looked out the window. A line of slender trees grew about a hundred yards away, poplars, I think, with trembling leaves. You could see them against the distant light of Albany, just black cutouts.

My mother kept her eyes on those Erector Set towers, which were just black figures, too, and that buzzing came into the kitchen. The wind was just right. She said, with her eyes on the field, “Well, let me tell you something. That's exactly what I did. Just like that. I don't know what got into me. The next thing I knew I was in the motel with him. So, what are you going to do about it?”

Sara put her hand on my leg, as though to say, “Don't move. If they see us, it will just make it worse. Maybe we'll get lucky.”

And I pushed back, as though to say, “No one gets lucky. Not at times like this.”

“I met him in a bowling alley,” said my mother. “He bought me a Singapore Sling. You know, it's got layers of liqueurs and . . .”

My father trembled. That buzzing came into the kitchen, and we knew that studies had shown increased rates of cancer near high-tension lines, but no one was worried about cancer just then. Sara began to stand, as though testing her ability to move without being heard. My mother ran water in the sink
and splashed some on her face. We all sat in that buzzing, as though it were the way information was conveyed. Perhaps gravity exists between people, too, or their feelings, since my father began to turn his head, or it seemed to be pulled so that while he still trembled he faced the living room. The buzzing seemed louder. My mother turned off the water.

“Jake,” he said. “Sara.”

He trembled as though he were sitting on a vibrating bed. Maybe there had been one in the motel my mother had gone to with the man from the bowling alley after the Singapore Sling.

“Jesus,” said my mother. “Oh, Jesus. What is that girl doing here? Can't we even have some privacy?”

“I'm just going,” said Sara.

“No,” said my father. “You know I'm always glad to see you.”

“I better go,” said Sara. She didn't move, though, and she seemed to be stuck, as she was sometimes when she spoke about her mother in that prison. Elmira? Was that where it was?

“Jesus,” said my mother.

“Jake, Sara,” said my father. “I think I'm going to go out for a little drive. But I'd like you to come with me.”

“Where are we going to go?” I said.

“Don't be an idiot,” said my mother.

“I think I'd like some ice cream,” said my father. It was as though someone had told my mother that a polar bear had come into the kitchen.

“I think Jake would like some,” said my father. “And maybe Sara would like something to eat. What did they feed you at the Gulag?”

“Well, it was sort of like Spam, I guess, with canned peas and instant mashed potatoes.”

My father already had his jacket, which he had taken from its hook by the door.

“Come on,” he said.

“What about me?” said my mother.

“You can come if you want,” said my father.

“No,” said Sara.

 

 

AT THE FRIENDLY'S we sat in a booth and held the menus that were in laminated plastic. The manager came out and stared at Sara, but it didn't look like she was going to run out on the check as she had before. My father asked for some chocolate ice cream. I did, too. Sara said she'd have the same.

“Maybe it will work against that Spam I had,” she said.

The spoon trembled in my father's hand and made a tinkling sound against the glass. At least that buzzing wasn't here, but it seemed to linger in some way, a sort of noise version of pain. We sat there. Teenagers with spiked haircuts came in and ordered piles of french fries.

“You know,” said my father. He put the spoon down and then both hands on the table. “I had a paper I brought home from work. It said the geographical range of ruffed grouse is the same as trembling aspen. You know why?”

“Why?” said Sara.

“Because in the winter the grouse can eat the buds or reach the buds when they are sitting in a tree without opening their wings. That's the difference. If they have to reach, they open their wings to eat, and when it is cold, they lose heat. Over time, they die.”

Sara licked her spoon, her pink tongue touched with chocolate.

“This isn't as good as your soufflé,” she said.

“That's nice of you to say,” said my father.

“I better get back to the Gulag,” said Sara. “But thanks.”

In the car, Sara sat in the backseat. Outside, the dark fields went by and the stars showed a little through the reddish smoke from the city.

“So small things make a difference,” she said. “Like those birds.”

My father nodded.

“Yes,” said my father. “Or sometimes small ones are bigger than you think. So thanks for coming out for an ice cream.”

The Gulag was a converted warehouse, brick and frosted glass, with a flat roof and dark stains around the window, barbed wire along the roof.

“Any time,” said Sara.

“Sure,” said my father. “Good night.”

“You know, my mother . . . ,” she said.

“I know about your mother,” my father said.

We sat in the car, in the shadow of the Gulag.

“It's a matter of telling the difference between a big thing and a small one. That's what I have to do,” said my father. “Maybe it's not a big thing.”

“My mother thought it was a big thing,” said Sara.

The windows of the Gulag looked icy in the lights.

“Well, thanks for the ice cream,” said Sara.

She went up the cement path of the Gulag, the darkness of her clothes simply vanishing into the shadows.

“Do you love her?” my father said.

The taste of chocolate ice cream lingered in my mouth.

“Well, Jake,” he said. “It can get complicated.” He took my hand. “Still pals, huh?”

He wanted to make being hurt disappear, out of consideration for me. I loved him.

The essential pattern of life seemed different now, and the difference was big enough that it had changed me, too. Just like that. How had this thing jumped out of the shadows? I sat there like a stand-in for myself. But, of course, that was just the first part.

 

 

IN THOSE DAYS, I took the bus to the library, where I met Sara, and as I rode the engine strained as the bus went uphill, the entire thing shuddering with decreasing power as it gave off a stink of burning oil. The aluminum hatch over the engine banged like a tin flag in the wind. The driver had dropped a tube of Preparation H by the fare box, and he picked it up and stuck it in his pocket, like he was waiting for his break so he could slink off someplace to use it. I made a joke about this to my father, and he gave me a look. I wasn't being sympathetic, and so what if it was embarrassing? Maybe I should wait a few years and see how I felt, he said. My father didn't make me feel bad when he did this, just more alert.

I became an astronomer and my fascination with it started in the library with those pictures from the Hubble Telescope, the Horsehead Nebula, those glowing pink clouds of gas (pink, the same color as Sara's underwear).

One Saturday afternoon, when my parents were gone, Sara
had taken me by the hand into my bedroom, pushed me so I sat on my bed, and when I reached for her hand, she pushed it away, but then began to take off her clothes, which she dropped on the floor. But when she got down to just her panties, she said, “This isn't a good idea.”

“Why?” I said.

She began to put her clothes back on, picking them up like something she had spilled. The hook on her brassiere made a little tick. Then she pulled on her jeans and zipped them up. They were so tight she had to jump a little to get into them.

“Why?” she said. “It might mean something.”

“So, you might care?” I said. “Is that what you're saying?”

“I'm saying I'm getting the fuck out of here,” she said. Then she went out of my room, through the living room, and closed the door behind her with a bang. This just goes to show that things are more connected than they sometimes seem: the birth of stars and how much I was in love.

The library was a brick building with a tower that held a winding staircase. Across the street stood a squat yellow warehouse-like place that looked like it had gone out of business after years of manufacturing lightbulbs, but was, in fact, a women's prison. Actually, it was just a jail where women waited to be tried if they couldn't make bail or while the state got around to finding a place for them, if they had been sentenced, in a real prison, like the one Sara's mother was in upstate. So we called it a prison, but it was only a jail.

The physics books were kept in a room on the second floor of the library, and Mrs. Kilmer, the librarian, guarded the stairs like a creature from the underworld, a previously
unknown one. She existed not like someone who rowed the dead across an inky river, but someone whose job it was to make sure the panhandlers couldn't go upstairs to piss on the calculus books. She had some other motives, too.

So, two days after Sara and I had overheard my parents, I took the bus to the library.

Mrs. Kilmer wore a black dress and her hair in a bun. Her hands went over the meticulous, almost Dickensian records that had to do with library fines. Her clothes gave off the stench of mothballs. Her eyes met mine: Did she know what was in my heart? That I was giddy about Sara?

It wasn't a small town, about eighty thousand people, Danville, about thirty miles from Albany, but it was hard to keep a secret. For instance, Mary Baxter, a girl in my class, brought her mother's vibrator to school (a thing filled with little colored balls like small jelly beans) and took it out when we were reading Chaucer's “The Wife of Bath's Tale.” The buzz was just like the high-tension lines. Mary Baxter's mother hid for a month. Then she found a job, at lower pay, in a failing lightbulb factory in Troy. Mary Baxter had bruises for a week.

“What do you want up there?” Mrs. Kilmer said.

“Books about physics,” I said.

“They're too hard for you. We've got a group for young women studying calculus.”

I shrugged.

“I'd like to try,” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “Of course.” Her voice had a sort of symphony of emotion, since this was the scale of her hopes for my failure. But if I got shirty with her, how would I get to the books? I learned to be insulted.

“Well, you'll find Sara McGill up there. I guess if I let someone like that in, why, you can go, too. If she smokes marijuana up there, I'm going to call the cops. Will you tell me if you see her do it?”

I looked her right in the eyes and stood up straight, as though I were in the army.

“No,” I said.

I was already on her shit list. Because I had done, as my father had taught me, the honorable thing: One doesn't rat out a friend, surely not a woman you love. Mrs. Kilmer hated honor. It got in the way of being capricious. It meant that you believed something and stuck to it, and if a man did that, he was the enemy.

She buzzed the lock on the door, which was like the small gates they have in courtrooms.

“Go on,” she said. She sighed.

Sara sat at the long table in the middle of the room that looked like where a jury deliberated about giving someone the death penalty: oak, long, shiny, and with that scent of paste furniture polish, the yellow stuff the color of Dial soap. Sara took a joint out of the pocket of her shirt, a black one that was stretchy and showed her ribs, her small breasts, her nipples.

“Hey, Jake,” she said. “So how are things at home? Is your father acting like an asshole yet? He was pretty calm the other night, but maybe he got to thinking about it. That brings out the worst. I know what I'm talking about.”

“He's not an asshole,” I said.

“Whoa,” she said. “Father-son solidarity. Amazing.”

“You know better than that. Say it,” I said.

“All right,” said Sara. “I'm sorry, Jake. I know better than that.”

“Say it,” I said.

“He's not an asshole. I know that,” she said. “Do you want to get high?”

“Mrs. Kilmer said she'd call the cops if you lit that up,” I said.

“You think the cops scare me? Let them try. Do you think Mrs. Kilmer scares me?”

“No,” I said.

“I'm thinking about settling her hash,” said Sara. “How about an ad in an online S and M paper? Hot mom seeks someone who is cruel enough . . . No limits. Have enema bag. Give the address and tell the geeks who read the ad to bring roses to the library. Then they take out a whip and a mouth ball. Of course, we will say that her resistance is the way she has orgasms. Huh?”

She rolled the joint back and forth, licked it, then held it. This was the hard thing to know: what was bluff and what was real. She was just testing me, that's all.

“You wouldn't tell her if I lit up, would you?”

“No,” I said.

“But if you did, she might let you off the hook for book fines and stuff like that.”