Up Island (6 page)

“I guess I should go on,” he said, not looking at me anymore.

“Go on where?”

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“Well…there. To her place. You can’t want me to stay here.”

“Your clothes…”

“I have some stuff there,” he said, almost under his breath.

I knew that if he did, it was new. I knew all his clothes.

There was nothing missing from his closet. Somehow this was dreadful beyond comprehension.

“It’s that new condominium building in midtown, isn’t it?”

I said. “Charlie saw you moving her palm tree in. I thought he was mistaken. He thought she was Caroline. Does she look like Caroline?”

“She looks,” Tee said, “a lot like you did when you were young, and don’t think I don’t know how that sounds. So just don’t say it.”

He picked up the briefcase he had put down beside the bureau the night before, a hundred years ago, but he did not move to go.

“So what about Caroline?” I said. “What about Teddy?”

“This weekend,” he said. “We’ll talk. I’ll come over and the three of us will talk, and then we’ll call Caroline. That will give you some time to digest everything, put it in perspect-ive…”

I said nothing. Finally he moved to the bedroom door. He opened it and then looked back at me, over his shoulder.

“Molly. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s going to. I’m not letting you leave the family.”

He started to answer, but did not. The discarded plastic wrap clung for a moment to his feet, then he kicked it away angrily and went out the door.

The anguish came then.

44 / Anne Rivers Siddons

* * *

I lay curled on our bed, knees drawn up to my chest, arms crossed over it, until the pale square of light on the scatter rug brightened into gold, and then the bled-out yellow of another hot day. I thought of nothing in particular, except that it was mortally important not to move, lest the agony get loose from the pit in which I had contained it, deep in my stomach, and flood over and out, and kill me. I remembered that I had lain that way twice before in my life, when severe menstrual cramps had racked me in my early teenage years, and again when I was pregnant with Caroline and Teddy. Both instances had been about containment. And then I thought, Well, of course, I lay this way before I was born. In my mother’s womb. Huddled as if against cold.

Even then, cold.

Sometime later in the morning I heard Teddy’s TV go on and his heavy footsteps, thudding down the hall, followed by the click of Lazarus’s toenails on the polished hall boards and the jingle of his tags. Before I could move, Teddy hammered on the bedroom door and called, “Ma! Ma, you up? Where’s Dad? Didn’t he come after all?”

I heard the knob begin to turn and found myself in our bathroom, running water loudly, before I realized I had moved. “I’m in the bathroom. Your dad’s here, but he had to go back to the office until late tonight. He’ll see us tomorrow for sure. He promised.”

“Shit on youth brands,” I heard Teddy grumble outside the door.

“Youth brands make your car payments,” I said, wondering where in my shredded depths I found the light, dry voice I habitually used with Teddy. He laughed.

UP ISLAND / 45

“Well, then, if he’s not going to be around till tomorrow, I’m going on to band practice after school, and then Eddie’s.

There’s an Alabama concert at the Fox tonight. I thought I’d stay over at his place. That okay with you?”

“If Mrs. Cawthorne says it is.”

“She does. See you in the morning sometime, huh?”

“Right.”

There was a small silence and then he said, “Ma? You all right?”

“Fine,” I sang out. “Just washing my hair. Listen, Teddy…are you taking Mindy tonight? Because if you are, you’ll have to sleep at home. You know we said no all-nighters if there were girls along.”

There. If that didn’t sound like a normal Ansley Park mother, nothing did.

“Women, Ma. Not girls. Women. Nope. Mindy’s history.

Ol’ Mindy’s toast. Historical toast.”

I felt a shocking wave of pure dislike for my son. The pain roiled and surged at its boundaries. Leaning over the washbasin, I clutched my stomach and stared blindly at the white-faced, wild-haired madwoman in the steamy mirror. Her blue eyes seemed to run like punctured egg yolks.

“It’s so easy for you,” I whispered to Teddy. “It’s just so easy for all of you.”

“Hasta la vista, baby,” my unhearing son called, and thudded down the stairs and was gone.

Since I was already in the bathroom, I climbed into the shower and turned it on as hot as I could stand it, and sat down on the tile floor and turned my face up to it. The hot water was an absolute; while it pelted down on my blinded face I could not focus on anything

46 / Anne Rivers Siddons

else. I sat there until it began to go tepid, and then I climbed out and wrapped myself in Tee’s white terry robe and slicked my hair back and went downstairs, leaving wet footprints on the thin, worn stair carpeting. It was stained with Teddy’s teenaged years and scratched down to the matting with Lazarus’s toenails; we had decided to replace it this fall, after Teddy went away to Georgia Tech. Lazarus, Tee said, was either going to have regular pedicures or get used to sleeping downstairs. Tee said…

The pain writhed and roared.

In the dim, silent kitchen I zapped a container of macaroni and cheese in the microwave and ate it, fed and watered Lazarus and let him out into the fenced-in backyard, got myself a diet Coke, and went into the library. Its cavelike gloom spoke to me of winter nights, with the fire snickering softly behind its screen and the television flickering. Only Teddy used it much in warm weather. I rolled the television set on its stand over to the end of the sofa, lay down full-length, covered myself with the plaid Ralph Lauren afghan Caroline and Alan had given us last Christmas, and clicked on the remote. On the screen a dark-haired, vulpine young woman coaxed hysterical tears from a black teenager and an older woman I thought might be the child’s mother, and made a face of terrible, false sympathy as the tears escalated into screaming. The audience roared its approval. I turned the volume down as far as it would go, and for the rest of that day and into the evening I watched the screen as if the lives of the silent wraiths held captive within it were the only reality in the world. I found that I did not need their sound, only their movement.

At some point, in the middle of the afternoon, I UP ISLAND / 47

think, the phone began to ring. I let the answering machine take the calls until the bell threatened to break the skin of my fugue state, then I got up and tottered on numb legs over to the phone and turned the bell off. I did not play the calls back; I knew who they would be. My mother, wanting to know if I was going to take her shopping in the morning.

The ladies of the Salvation Army auxiliary committee meeting I myself had called, and had missed. Livvy, to see why I had not been at our weekly doubles match with two other Coke wives at the club. I shuffled back to the sofa and watched television some more, watched and watched. Finally, I remembered Lazarus and let him back in, fed him, and scrunched over on the sofa as he settled in beside me, sighing happily, and fell into his familiar, twitching sleep on top of the afghan. Sometime later than that, long after dark, I slept, too.

The overhead light went on deep in the timeless, thick night—hot, because I had been shaking with chills all day and had not turned on the air—and Lazarus groaned and lifted his head. I sat bolt upright, eyes blinded, heart pounding.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” Teddy’s furious, trembling voice cried, and I scrubbed at my eyes and squinted, then saw him, standing over the sofa, his fists clenched, his face red with rage and recent crying.

“Tell you?” I said stupidly. I could not think what he meant.

What time was it? Why was I down here in the library, stiff and smothering from the afghan and the weight of the dog?

“Tell me Dad had a little piece on the side,” he shouted.

“Tell me old Dad was playing hide the wienie with Coke’s pet legal eagle…or would that be

48 / Anne Rivers Siddons

eagless? Goddamn, Ma,
why didn’t you tell me?
I’m not a fucking baby!”

“How do you know that?” I said thickly. “Who told you that?”

“You want to know who told me?
She
told me! Put her hand on my shoulder and stood there and told me like I was her goddamn little brother or something, smiling this shit-eating smile, saying she was sorry for my pain but after everything got straightened out she hoped I would one day be glad to have her in my life, like she was glad to have me in hers. Glad to have her in my life! Yeah, right, glad…Ma, she said you knew…”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said. I did not.

“I saw them!” he shouted, beginning to cry again. “I saw them at the fucking concert! So did Eddie! So did everybody else I’ve ever known from school or anywhere else. And they saw me, and she gets up from her seat—they’re in a box, of course, the Coke box—and comes down and puts her hand on me and says all that…
her.
Not Dad, her. Dad wouldn’t even look at me. I had to go up there to the box…and even then, he wouldn’t really look at me. He said he’d see us tomorrow and we’d talk it all out, and that he was sorry I found out this way; he’d really meant to tell me, but at least now we had it out in the open where we could deal with it. Deal with it! Deal with what? How long have you known about this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it’s not going to happen,” I said, trying to push the words out on a wavering stream of breath. “This is just one of those things that happen to men your dad’s age sometimes. It won’t last, how could it? I didn’t tell you because it’s going to be okay. I didn’t UP ISLAND / 49

want you to worry. Nothing’s going to happen to the family.”

Teddy leaned close over me and closed his eyes and shouted, “He’s going to marry her! You call that being okay?

You call that nothing happening to the family? He’s going to fucking marry her!”

“Teddy, language! Did he say that?”

“No. She did. She said she thought I should know, so there weren’t any false hopes and stuff. She said it needed to be out, clean and honorable. Honorable! Jesus Christ!”

“What did your dad say?” I could barely form the words with lips that had gone stiff and numb.

“Nothing,” my son said. “He didn’t say anything. He had his eyes closed. Mom…he looked
stupid
! They both did. You know what they had on? They had on bike shorts, black bike shorts that matched, and Coke T-shirts. Jesus, Mom, Dad doesn’t even
have
a bike…”

I almost laughed around the numbness, in sheer relief. It
was
some kind of madness, then. Some kind of male climac-teric thing. We could work this out, ride this out. Tee in bike shorts? The image was simply ludicrous, nothing more.

Where was the danger in this?

“Sweetie, it doesn’t mean anything. I promise you. You wait and see. It’s certainly not a good thing, but it’s not fatal, either. In six months or a year we’ll have forgotten all about it—”

“
She has a ring!”

“What are you talking about?”

“She has a ring! He gave it to her! It’s this big, ugly old green thing; she wears it on her right hand, but she showed it to me and told me that it was his covenant with her, and he didn’t say it wasn’t. He didn’t say
50 / Anne Rivers Siddons

anything more. He looked like he was going to hurl right there in the Coke box. I hope he did. All over his bike shorts.

All over hers.”

I could not get my mouth to move. I tried to say something into the wreckage of my son’s face, but I simply could not speak.

“Goddamn you all,” Teddy said in a low, terrible voice and turned and ran from the library. I heard his footsteps pound up the stairs and heard Lazarus jingling behind him, heard his door slam, heard the inevitable music start. But I heard no more from Teddy.

I rolled myself slowly and in sections off the sofa and on to the floor.

“I want my mother,” I heard myself sob. And I cried and cried for the woman only ten blocks away, who could not hear me.

And then I got up and called my father, called him out of sleep, and said, “Daddy, something’s happened and I need to come home.”

“Come on home, baby,” my father said. “I’ll put some coffee on.”

When two become one, as people said of a conventional Atlanta marriage of my time, everyone knows the drill and swings happily into action. There are firm rules and rituals for the treatment of the newly wedded pair, for their fêting and giftings, for their duties and responsibilities. There are even prescribed ways of thinking about the couple that go back God knows how far, especially in the South. All of this saves a great deal of time and bother.

But when one becomes two, the opposite is true UP ISLAND / 51

and confusion reigns. More than confusion, I found. When Tee walked out, he left a kind of free-floating panic and an ensuing ostracism in his wake, only thinly veiled with sympathy. It was as if a sudden stench had settled over me, from which everyone was averting their nostrils while pretending it did not exist. Sometimes even I could smell it, lingering like body odor, and it made me feel slovenly and guilty, as if I should have bathed and so spared my friends, but had chosen not to. It was far worse because I felt in my very marrow that the same stench, if it touched Tee at all, lingered only momentarily. It was, I decided, the fatal fetor of vulnerability. No matter who was angry with him, Tee would not be perceived as vulnerable.

“It’s fear, pure and simple,” Livvy Bowen said, pouring a hefty slug of cognac into the coffee she had made. We were sitting in my kitchen on the third day after All That Stuff, as I thought of it, had happened. I had told no one but my parents and Caroline at the time, but in Atlanta the jungle drums are always out and poised, especially in what is fatuously called the Coca-Cola family, and I knew that almost everyone who mattered to me would know by then. Livvy, however, was the only one who had called, the only one who had come. She was ferociously angry at Tee, and smelled no stench on me. I knew she did not. I could have told if she had.