The Times Are Never So Bad (15 page)

‘No.'

‘What did you do?'

‘Nothing.'

He picked up a green cigarette pack, let it fall, pushed it toward Stephanie. He looked beyond Julie at Canadian geese on the lake; his mother and the girls were talking again, and he leaned back in the canvas deck chair and looked up at the blue sky, then closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun, and breathed deeply into the chill of his lie until it was gone, and his mother went to the kitchen, and he opened his eyes and watched the girls talking. They rarely said anything he wanted to know, but he liked hearing their voices and watching their faces and hands: they spoke of clothes, and he looked with tender amusement at their passionate eyes, their lips closing on cigarettes with sensuous pouts he knew they had practiced; hair fell onto their cheeks, and their hands rose to it and lightly swept it back, as if stroking a spider web. From the house behind him, his mother came with a broad tray: a bottle of white wine in an ice bucket, a bowl of fruit, four plates with crepes, a glass of milk, and ringed napkins. He believed Julie—but maybe Stephanie—had asked one Sunday:
What did you do with Dad's napkin ring
? But since he could not remember the answer, he was not sure anyone had ever asked; perhaps he had dreamed it, or had imagined someone asking, and had waited for that; he slipped linen from silver, and his mother asked him to pour the wine. For over a year of Sundays and dinners he had poured the wine, but always he waited for his mother to ask him: he disliked doing what his father had done, felt artificial and very young and disloyal too, as if he were helping to close the space his father had left behind; and he disliked her never saying that she wanted him to pour because his father was gone. While his sisters nibbled and moaned and sipped, he ate fast, head down, waiting for his mother to strike back, knowing she was watching yet would not tell him the truth: that she wanted him to eat with slow appreciation of her work. She would tell him that eating fast was bad for—Then he heard the squeak-skid of brakes and tires and turned to see him at the edge of the terrace, straddling his bicycle, bare-chested, wearing cut-off jeans and sneakers without socks. Walter nodded to him, ate the last of the crepe, and stood, looking at his mother as he swallowed and wiped his mouth.

‘I'm going bike riding.'

‘Who's that?'

‘Mark Evans.' Walking away, he looked back over his shoulder and said: 'they moved in yesterday.'

In the woods near the road he and Mark lay face down in the shadow of trees and looked through branches and brown needles of a larger fallen branch of pine; Mark had dragged it from deeper in the woods, where their bicycles were chained to a tree. Moist dead leaves were cool against Walter's flesh. Out in the sunlight the white handkerchief hung: folded over a length of fishing line tied to trees on either side of the narrow road, it was suspended three feet above the blacktop, motionless in the still air.

‘It's like waiting in ambush,' Walter said.

‘It's better at night. It looks like a ghost at night.'

‘It looks like one now.'

The first car that came around the curve down the road to their left was green and foreign; Walter pressed his palms and bare toes against the earth and saw a second shape behind the windshield, a woman, and then two more figures in the back, and now the driver's face: a man beyond the hood, wearing sunglasses, right hand at the top of the wheel, peering now, shifting down, flowing and slowing, the woman's hands in front of her, pushing toward the windshield, then her head out of the window saying ‘What
is
it?' and the children leaning forward, arms and hands out of the windows, and the man stopped and got out, he was tall and wore a suit, and Walter pressed against the leaves and watched him holding the line and looking down both of its ends; then breaking it, and watching the handkerchief fall, and standing with fists on his hips, turning his head from one side of the road to the other as he spoke: ‘I want you boys to think about something while you're in there laughing and having your fun. You could kill somebody. You could make somebody swerve into another car. I've got two kids in mine. You could have caused something you'd regret for the rest of your lives.' Then he went back to his car. Before he got in, his wife said: ‘Don't just leave it in the road.'

‘I don't want to touch it.'

She opened the door but he said ‘Let's go' and got in and shifted and drove slowly by, his wife hunting the woods, her eyes sweeping the fallen pine branch. Then the car was hidden by trees, and he listened to it going faster up the road, and laughing, he stood and squeezed Mark's shoulders and hopped and skipped in a circle, pulling Mark with him, forcing the sound of his laughter faster when it slowed and louder when it lulled; he stopped dancing and laughing, but still quivering with jubilance, he squeezed Mark's shoulder and shouted: ‘I don't want to
touch
it.'

When he rode his bicycle up the driveway, the sun was low above the trees across the lake, and his mother and sisters were still at the glass table; then, coming out of the garage, he saw that it was not still but again: his mother and Julie wore dresses and Stephanie wore shorts; beyond them, downwind, smoke rose from charcoal in the wheeled grill.

‘I'll be right down,' he said.

‘I'm coming up,' his mother said.

He went into the pale light of the house, up the stairs, hearing the screen door open and shut, and the clack of her steps on the kitchen floor then muted by carpets as she followed him up. His room was sunlit. He looked down at Julie and Stephanie, then turned to face the door a moment before she entered it. Her dress was white and, between its straps, a pearl necklace lay on her tan skin. She had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other: a tall, clear one with a piece of lime among the bubbles and ice.

‘Did you have a good day?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where did you go?'

‘Bike riding.'

She put her drink on the chest of drawers and flicked ashes into her hand.

‘That's quite a workout.'

‘We went to the woods too.'

‘You were right across the lake?'

‘The big woods. By the highway.'

‘Oh. You said—Mark?—moved here yesterday? When did you meet him?'

‘Last night.'

‘Where?'

‘Here. He was looking around. '

‘Well, I don't want to'—she glanced at her drink, drew on her cigarette, flicked ashes in her hand—‘I don't want to make a big thing out of it, but why didn't you tell me?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You really don't? That's so—I don't know, it's so—
strange
? 'With forefinger and thumb of her ash-hand she picked up her drink. ‘Well. Will you do something for me? Ask him to come over sometime when I'm home. We'll have dinner. Will you do that?'

‘I'll ask him.'

He looked at the cigarette burning close to her fingers.

‘Good. I like meeting your friends. You have time to shower before dinner, pal.'

‘I was about to.'

She smiled and left, and he followed her to the door and said to her back as she moved down the hall, gingerly holding the drink and cigarette: ‘Will I have time to swim? After my shower?'

‘Plenty of time,'she called over her shoulder. ‘It's pork.'

The apartment in Philadelphia smelled of the city, not only exhaust but something else that came through the open windows: a stale-ness, as though Philadelphia itself were enclosed by ceiling and walls, and today's breeze carried to his lungs yesterday's cement and stirred dust; when the windows were closed, the apartment's motionless air had no smell, and that too, for Walter, was Philadelphia. With his father in the apartment she had filled with plants was blond Jenny, who, that first morning when he visited them for a weekend, knocked on his door, and he woke remembering where he was and said
Yes
, and she came in with a tray holding hot chocolate and bread she had baked last night, wrapped in hot foil—
that child
, his mother had said,
that child. With those clothes from Nashville by way of Hollywood. What is she? There aren't any more hippies. I 'm sorry, children, he's your father but I cannot can not live quietly through this mad time. She was born the year we were married and I've spent twenty-two years giving my life to my husband and my home and now it feels like I was just taking care of him while she did nothing but get taller and busty so he could leave with her
—Jenny sat on the bed and talked to him while he drank the chocolate and ate the bread and liked her, and understood his father loving her, and so shared his father's guilt. He was the first to visit; in two weeks Stephanie would come, and then Julie, because there was only the one guest room, his father said, and his mother said:
He's protecting that girl from handling all of you at once
. Jenny said:
You probably don't like breakfast in bed
, and he said:
No, not even when I'm sick
, and she blushed, smiling at herself, and said:
I don't either. I'll stop trying so hard. Are you all right?
At first he thought she meant the bed, the room, his hunger, then looking at her he knew she didn't, and he said:
Yes. And Stephanie and Julie? They'll be all right. They're not now? They'l get better. Is your Mom? No. That's why they're not. It's awful. I wish—
He wanted to hear the wish: perhaps behind her worried blue eyes she wished his father had no wife, no children, that he and his mother and Julie and Stephanie were dead or had never lived; now sadly he saw them, the woman and girls he had left at home: they were in the living room, talking, then they vanished; for moments their voices lingered in the room and then faded with them into space.
There's too much to wish
, she said;
there's nothing to wish. I just have to hope. For what? That nobody's hurt too badly for too long
. Sunday night he boarded an airplane for the second time in three days and in his life; he had spent most of the flight Friday afternoon imagining the weekend, making himself shy and awkwardly intrusive in his father's new home and life before he saw either. He had met Jenny, had eaten dinner in restaurants with her and his father and sisters; but that was all. Sunday in the plane he liked being alone with the small light over his head and the black sky at his cool window; a man sat beside him, but he was alone: no one knew him, and when the stewardess spoke to him as though he were either boy or man, he felt that his age as well as his name had remained on the earth. Philadelphia was done; Philadelphia was good; he could go back, and now he was going home.

His mother and sisters ate dinner in Boston, then met him at the airport, and he sat in the back seat with Stephanie; the night was cool, and in the closed car he remembered what he had forgotten to remember until now: Jenny and his father smelled of soap and cloth and flesh, and no smoke drifted toward his face through the still air of their rooms. He started to say this, nearly said:
At least she doesn't smoke
; then he knew he must not.

‘So how was it,' Stephanie said, and watching his mother in part-profile, hair and upper cheek, her hand on the wheel, smoke pluming from her mouth he could not see, he told of the weekend without once saying
Jenny
. For the next few nights, when at dinner they questioned him or he remembered something about the weekend that he wanted to make alive again with words so it would be more than just a memory, he glanced from his sisters to his mother's face, her eyes quick and lips severely set, and said
Dad
and
we
and all but twice was able to avoid saying even
they
, until finally he could no longer bear the shame of loving two women and betraying them both, and he kept his memories in silence. Then Stephanie went to Philadelphia and came back, and he watched his mother's face at the dinners and said nothing or little and began to rid himself of shame, and in the week after Julie's visit he knew he had never had reason for shame, that he had not been afraid to tell his mother he loved Jenny too, that it was not him but she who needed the lie; and, loving her, he felt detached and older, and at times he was lonely.

The extended family, she calls its. I hope we can be like sisters someday; she actually said that. What did you say? I wanted to say Right, airhead: incest. She gives him three eggs a week. She doesn't know what to call him. When she talks about him to us. She said that. She feels funny when she says Walter and funny when she says Your father. So what does she do? She takes turns. And if she's talking to him she says Hon. Or Darling. No: nobody says darling except in books. She watches his salt too. And every day before dinner they go to this health club and swim. How cute. She's the one who needs it, old thunder thighs. She had a pimple. She looks out of those big blue eyes and talks about how much he cares about us, and I wanted to tell her if he cares so much why is he here with you, and she's got a pimple on her chin—

He watched them: their faces over plates of food glowed with malice, the timbre of their voices was sensually wicked, their throaty laughter mischievous. They were eerie and fascinating; he had never seen them like this. He knew his silence was not disloyal to his father and Jenny; sometimes he gave his mother's eyes what they had to see: he smiled, even laughed.

At night the handkerchief was a pale shape in the air, then lit by headlights, and he knew that to the driver it had suddenly appeared without locomotion or support, and the cars stopped faster, and the voices from them were more frightened and then more angry. One night they rode past the woods to the bridge over the highway and leaned on the steel fence and watched the four lanes of cars coming to them and passing below. They pressed against the vertical railings and pissed arcs dropping into headlights.

‘I've got to shit,' he said, and started for the woods.