Tiny Little Thing (9 page)

“Jesus.”

“Well, that’s him all over. Nothing bad can touch him, can it? The bill never comes due. So I was thrilled and said yes and we drank down the whole bottle, there by the road. In the moonlight. I don’t know how we made it home. And I woke up the next morning with the worst hangover in the world and thought, Now what? Mother’s happy. He’s happy. The families are happy. Well, not my sisters, I imagine, but they’re never happy with me. So why aren’t
I
happy? I mean, my exciting life is about to begin at last. Why aren’t I
happy
, for God’s sake?” Her voice died away. She braced one hand on the wall and lifted the other to shield her eyes. “And I’ve been trying to figure that out ever since.”

What was that about a force field? It was down without a trace, every barrier zapped out, the electric fence switched off, leaving only her tender and vulnerable skin between them.

Why aren’t I happy?
He considered the words, which might mean anything. Might mean a spoiled girl doesn’t know happy when it spills champagne at midnight on her pretty young bosom. Might mean a restless soul yearns to break free of her gilded shell. What
was
happy, anyway? Was
he
happy? Did it matter? Or did you just keep on doing the thing you were supposed to do, whatever it was: did your duty, did your part to keep the whole vast machinery of the world clicking along, and leave all the happiness bullshit to bored housewives and college students with too much time on their hands?

Her head was bowed. He wanted to walk over and take her in his arms.

“All right.” He wove his fingers together. “Fine. So you don’t want to get married after all. Why not just call it off? Tell them you can’t go through with it. Call it all off.”

“Oh, God. You don’t understand my family. You don’t understand
his
. They’ll talk me out of it. They’ll tell me it’s cold feet. Every bride feels this way. Nerves. And then they’ll say I can’t back out. Everyone’s counting on me, everyone believes in me. He needs me. He’s the perfect match. And that’s the thing, you know.” A burst of half-hysterical laughter. “He is! The absolute perfect match. I might be First Lady one day, I’ll bet, if we play our cards right. If we put every foot right. Imagine that! What a triumph, what a life we’ll have.”

A queasy feeling stirred the bottom of Cap’s belly. The rear lobes of his brain.

But she was turning now, turning toward him, and her face was so bleak and pleading he couldn’t think of anything else. Just her. Tiny, in her berry-red dress, her luminescent sun-draped skin.

“And I’ll suffocate,” she said softly. “Worse. I’ll become one of them. This is my last chance, Caspian.”

He rose and walked to the kitchenette to fetch his drink, which he finished in a long and greedy gulp. He slammed the glass back down on the counter. Hard enough to make the cupboards rattle. Make the Frigidaire gasp and sneeze.

“You’ll help me, won’t you? I saw you at the coffee shop today. You knew what to do.”

He looked up. She stood right there where his living room met his kitchenette, braced with her white palm high against the wall, just above the top of her head. One stocking foot was curled around the other calf. He wondered if he could span her waist with his hands, like a girl from another century.

“Yes,” he said. “I know what to do.”

P
epper wants to know how long it’s been since I last made love. (That’s not the term she employs.)

I lean against the wall of the shed and cross my arms. “What the hell kind of question is that?”

“A simple, direct one. With a simple, direct answer. Come on. A week? A month?”

“It’s not a fair question and you know it. I lost a baby, remember?”

“Four weeks ago.”

“And Frank’s away.”

“What’s that? I can’t hear you when you mumble like that.”

I push myself off the wall and walk forward to the front end of the Mercedes-Benz. The hood is up, and Pepper’s legs emerge from the side, clad in old blue dungarees and salt-stained sneakers. Her torso is buried deep, lost to view behind the raised metal hood. I place my hands on the edge of the grille. “Frank’s away,” I repeat.

“Oh, yes.
Campaigning
.”

“It’s his job, Pepper.”

“It’s July. The election’s in November.”

“The primary’s in early September. And there’s fund-raising. That’s the big thing, fund-raising. You can never have too much money.”

“Well, he was back last weekend. Did you do it then?”

“I’m not going to answer that.”

“So you didn’t. Why not?”

“Pepper!”

“All right, then. Forget the past four weeks. When was the last time you did it? When he got you pregnant to begin with? Oh, shit. Can you find me a wrench?”

I stalk to the toolbox. “What kind of wrench?”

“I don’t know. Any old wrench. But answer the question.”

I grab one of the rusty metal wrenches—at least I think it’s a wrench—and carry it back to the gaping oil-smelling hole in which my sister is immersed. “Here you are.”

Without looking, she thrusts a dirty palm in my direction and plunges the wrench into the hole with her.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I ask.

Pepper’s head pops out from the German innards. Her valuable chestnut hair is wrapped up in a checkered cloth, like Rosie the Riveter. A tiny smear of grease forms a fetching beauty spot at the corner of her mouth. She holds out the wrench. “Tiny, this is a screwdriver.”

I snatch it back and head for the toolbox again. “You would know.”

You might perceive how expertly I avoided Pepper’s last question. The truth is, we’ve had this conversation before, or something like it. Pepper—I don’t mean to shock you—she loves to talk about sex. I let her rattle on, up to a point. Why not? It’s all about the intimacy of watching her work in the dilapidated old shed, brashly taking apart a delicate high-performance Mercedes-Benz engine and attempting to put it back together again, all the while keeping the whole affair secret from the nosy big noses of the Hardcastle females. (Well, Tom, too.) I keep a bucket of suds (soap, not beer) next to the door, so she can wash off the grease before she emerges, and even then I live in delicious terror of her being found out by that fetching smear of black grease on her cheek.

As to why, I have no idea.

It’s not as if I’m actually planning to drive off with Pepper, should she miraculously succeed in getting the damned automobile running again. (No, don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the entire tragic list of casualties and snafus; let’s just say that thirty years of idleness isn’t good for a delicate high-performance Mercedes-Benz engine, especially when tended by one young woman with plenty of moxie but no previous mechanical aptitude, reading from a disintegrating old manual written in German and obtained by Joe’s Garage at great expense from God knew what channels.) It’s not as if I’m not already busy. It’s not as if I haven’t got a million ties binding me to my promising life, to my marriage, to this summertime patch of Cape Cod and its winter cousin on Newbury Street.

Maybe I just enjoy spending a few leisured minutes with my sister, every so often, for the first time in my life.

Pepper’s voice continues, muffled by metal. “So. Poor old you. Pretty Franklin’s a dud in bed. Or else the spark’s just gone. Have you thought about swinging?”

“
Swinging?
”

Pepper leans her elbows against an exhaust pipe. She takes the wrench—at least, I hope it’s a wrench—from my hand. “You know. You meet at someone’s house, you have a few drinks, you eat a few canapés, you switch husbands . . .”

“I know what swinging
is,
Pepper. I’m just not going to discuss this with you. You’re not even married. You have no idea . . .”

“I’m just trying to help, darling. Trying to pry the old prude out of you.”

“You’re trying to pry, period.”

“Well, I’m curious to know why my sister isn’t in love with her dazzling husband.”

“I
am
in love with my husband.”

“Then why aren’t you out on the campaign with him, smiling pretty for the cameras and the big-pocket donors and then screwing like rabbits in the hotel afterward?”

“For heaven’s sake, Pepper!”

“Politicians are sexy, Tiny. It’s a fact. If you don’t, some other girl will.” She laughs and waggles her wrench. (I’ll say that again:
waggles her wrench.
) “Hell, even if you
do,
some other girl might. He’s only human.”

I have no answer for that. I turn away and wipe my hands on my apron.

“In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s right up inside some tart from his campaign office this minute, you know, in the back room where they keep the
VOTE
FRANK
bumper stickers, some shapely little tart like me . . .”

There is a cough from the doorway of the shed.

I spin. Pepper bangs her head on the hood of the Mercedes and drops the wrench—
clangedy-clang-clang
—on the pile of delicate high-performance Mercedes-Benz engine parts scattered next to the front fender.

My hands freeze inside the folds of my skirt. My throat freezes, too. It falls to Pepper to greet the new arrival, which she does in typical Pepper fashion, throaty on the vowels, double on the entendre.

“Well, hello there, Frank. We were
just this second
wondering where you might be.”

•   •   •

I
must have been seventeen or eighteen, still in school but nearly a woman. I went to the kitchen in my old quilted dressing gown, looking for a glass of milk from the icebox. It was late, which was unusual for me, so I suppose I’d been up reading. Anyway, I didn’t need to go hunting in the icebox, because the milk bottle was on the kitchen table, and Daddy was pouring himself a glass. He looked up, surprised, as if it were some extraordinary thing, finding your own daughter in your own kitchen.

“What’s the matter, Daddy?” I asked, reaching for a glass from the cabinet, because I saw from his face that he was drinking the milk because he was trying not to drink the Scotch.

“Oh, nothing,” he said, and then, as an afterthought: “Lost another case.”

I sat down and poured the milk into my glass. “You win some, you lose some, I guess.”

“But I lose a lot of them, don’t I?” His hair was rumpled, his eyes bruised.

I remember wondering why he cared. It wasn’t as if Daddy’s career was anything more than a hobby; it wasn’t as if the family’s capital wasn’t safely invested in nice straight government bonds, yielding just the right amount, enough to pay the maintenance on the apartment and the house in East Hampton, enough to pay the housekeeper and cook and driver, the school fees and the dresses, the club dues and the fresh weekly flowers.

I ventured: “If you don’t enjoy it, you could always retire, couldn’t you?”

He laughed deep. “Quit! That’s right, I could quit, couldn’t I? Before they ask me to resign from the partnership. I could just goddamn quit. Wouldn’t your mother be so proud.” He drank the milk. “Proud as ever.”

I covered his hand. “But she
is
proud of you.”

“No, my dear, she is not. Why should she be? If she’d married the right man, she could have been First Lady. She could really have been somebody. Instead she married me.”

“Mummy loves you, though. She does.”

At this, my father leaned forward, and though he was not a man of strong passions, though he was not an intimate kind of daddy, he looked at me like he meant it, and his eyes became fierce. I had never seen his eyes like that. I had always thought of my father as a man without any fire at all.

“Listen to me,” he said. “A little fatherly advice. You’re a lovely girl, Tiny, a good sweet girl, but you’re tender. Your sisters, they can take care of themselves, they’ll be happy running around town making trouble all their lives, but you need a husband like a vine needs a tree. So I’ll tell you this. You want to be happy? Marry a man who can take you places. Marry a man you can be proud of, a man with a future ahead of him. A woman’s never happy if she can’t respect her husband.”

“But Mummy does respect you.”

He leaned back and smiled and shook his head, and that was all. Fatherly advice, over and out. We finished our milk and went to bed, and I lay awake on my pillow, staring at the ceiling, until I heard my mother arrive home, the sound of her heels skidding on the parquet hall, and I thought, for the first time, My God, she’s miserable, isn’t she?

And then: Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’m just a vine after all, a vine in search of a tree.

•   •   •

Y
ou can’t tell Granny Hardcastle about the car,” I say.

Frank cranes his neck toward me, keeping his eyes carefully on the road. The engine of his little yellow roadster is loud; the wind is even louder. “What’s that?”

I cup my hand around my mouth and lean toward his ear. “The car! You can’t tell Granny Hardcastle!”

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” he shouts back. “But why not?”

“She’ll put a stop to it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She puts a stop to everything.”

“What’s that?”

“
Everything!
”

He makes a sort of half smile and nods, at the same time straightening himself before the windshield to end the conversation. To save his voice, which he’ll need tonight.

I want to say: How much did you hear? Do you agree? Are we having enough sex? Are we in love? Were we ever in love? Are you having sex with other women? Because politicians are sexy, and you’re only human.

I want to say: I have something to tell you. A few tiny little things to tell you. A bit of a confession, in fact.

I look down at my lap. My pocketbook rests in the crease of my thighs, which are covered in a skirt of blue linen, below a neat square jacket of blue linen and a necklace of fat irregular freshwater pearls. Matching earrings, of course. Shoes of blue. Stockings of nylon. Gloves of white kid. Legs long, waist trim, lipstick pink. Bones dainty and symmetrical, hair dark and obedient.
You’ll have to hurry and get ready, I’m afraid,
Franklin had said, as we strode across the driveway oval to the Big House.
Cocktails start at six. I’m sorry to have to drag you out, I know you’re happier here, but Dad thinks you need to be there.
So considerate, Frank. Not a single allusion to Pepper’s provocative conversation. Not a single raised eyebrow, not a shared conspiratorial wink, husband to wife:
We know better, don’t we, darling?

I say, “Do I look all right?”

He doesn’t hear me. His hands are steady on the wheel; the hot wind ruffles his hair. I think, That’s odd, he looks a little pale. A little tense around the mouth. The eyes, squinting intently at the windshield, focused on some detail far away from the two of us.

I lean closer. “Are you all right?”

“What’s that?”

“Are you
all right
?”

He reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “Yes, all right! You?”

“Yes!”

There’s no point saying anything else, when he can’t hear me.

•   •   •

F
rank’s father is waiting for us in the hotel suite, drink in hand. I set my pocketbook on the coffee table and kiss his cheek.

“I’m sorry to drag you into town,” he says. “Hot day like this. Drink?”

“Yes, please. Vodka tonic.”

He turns to the cabinet and unscrews the top of the vodka bottle. Frank walks to the window and lights a cigarette. The room is full of polished brown furniture. A stack of briefing folders sits in the center of a rectangular sofa, upholstered in the kind of murky florals that can disguise any stain, no matter how guilty. Frank always likes to overnight in a hotel when he’s campaigning, even when we’re in Boston. The separation from our domestic environment puts him on his game, he says.

“Photo call at five,” says Mr. Hardcastle, as he plucks ice cubes from the bucket, one by one, “and then the donors come in. Cocktails at six, then dinner. You brought evening clothes, I hope?”

“Yes. Frank filled me in. I’m all packed and ready.”

Frank turns around and leans against the windowsill. “She knows what to do, Dad. Don’t worry about Tiny.”

Mr. Hardcastle smiles and hands me the drink. “I never do. Thanks for coming in, my dear. I hope it wasn’t an imposition.”

“Not at all.” I sip and swallow. My gloves are still on, my hands sweating beneath.

“You’re feeling better, then? Join us on the campaign trial?”

“Of course. You only have to ask, you know.”

“Well, we appreciate it. It looks a hell of a lot better, you know, when the wife’s by his side. To say nothing of your personal charm with these donors we’ve got tonight.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” The room is hot. I set down my drink, take off my gloves, and unbutton my jacket. The blouse beneath is silk, pale cream. Mr. Hardcastle glances briefly at my chest, at the spot of dampness between my breasts.

“Franklin, open the window,” he says. “The other thing is, the poll numbers are slipping.”

I look between Mr. Hardcastle and Frank, who has turned to open the window. His suit jacket is off, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. “I didn’t realize that.”

“We didn’t want to worry you. It’s this goddamned Murray, he’s hitting hard on Vietnam, rousing the fucking—excuse me—rousing the rabble.” He slams his drink onto the cabinet and looks at Frank, who has turned around again and propped himself against the open window, the yellow afternoon sun. “Nothing we can’t handle. We have a plan. You’re part of it, if you don’t mind. For one thing, you photograph like a dream. Murray’s wife can talk, all right, she can talk your fucking ear off, but she looks like a constipated rat.”