Wonderland (69 page)

“Look at the mess of crumbs you made,” Jeanne said suddenly.

Shelley said nothing, blushing. It was strange that she did not reply to her sister.

“Why can’t she learn to eat decently?” Jeanne asked.

Something was wrong between them. Wearily Helene felt the jabs and thrusts between them, like the pokings of an elbow.

“Don’t bother Shelley so early in the morning,” Helene said.

“Bother her? Who’s bothering who? She bothers me,” Jeanne said.
She was staring contemptuously at her sister. “She doesn’t have any manners, at her age.”

Suddenly Shelley pushed her plate away. She looked up at Jeanne.

“You can go to hell,” she whispered.

Helene looked with irritated amusement from one girl to the other. What was this? What did it have to do with her?

“Shelley, you can leave the room,” she said.

Shelley jumped up. Clumsily, she backed into the opened silverware drawer, made a sobbing, choking noise—“She promised she wouldn’t bring it up and now she’s going to!” she cried.

“Bring what up? Who’s bringing what up?” Jeanne said.

“You are! You promised you wouldn’t tell and now you’re going to!”

Jeanne smiled in amazement. “Nobody’s bringing anything up,” she said.

“I don’t want to listen to this. Any of this,” Helene said.

“There—you see! There!” Shelley cried.

Jeanne shrugged her shoulders. Her face was sickly in its antagonism.

“I mean it,” Helene said.

Shelley put her dishes in the sink, ran the water noisily onto them, and left the kitchen. They could hear her heavy footsteps all the way out to the front door.

“Shelley—” Jeanne began.

“I said I don’t want to hear about it,” Helene said flatly.

“But—”

“No. I don’t want to hear about it.”

“But Shelley—”

“I said no.”

Jeanne stared at her, startled.

No, Helene could not listen to this, no more news of Shelley, no more bad news. Not this morning.

“All right,” Jeanne said, her voice trembling, “if you don’t want to hear about it, you won’t.…”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

Two weeks ago Jeanne had come in breathless from school to tell Helene that her sister was being talked about even in the high school, that the name “Shelley Vogel” was being passed around and joked
about—that she had done something crazy—Helene, frightened at Jeanne’s ferocity, her anger, had wanted to shake her into silence. But Jeanne rushed on to tell her that Shelley had allowed herself to be picked up by a bunch of high school boys and to be used for target practice by them.

“For what?” Helene had cried.

“Target practice. With rifles. Real rifles,” Jeanne said.

“But I don’t understand—”

“Some boys picked her up and got her to hold out matches for them to shoot at. She’s crazy! I’m so ashamed! They had .22 rifles and instead of using paper targets the way they usually do, they got that stupid fool to hold out matches for them to shoot. And then—this is when the mother of one of the boys looked out the window—then they got her to stand with a cigarette in her mouth, and they were shooting it out of her mouth! Out of her mouth!”

“I don’t believe it,” Helene said.

Jeanne began to cry angrily. “I’m so ashamed. How could she be so stupid, to let them use her like that … to laugh at her like that.…”

“She could have been killed,” Helene said.

She felt faint. She had to sit down.

“I’m so ashamed, everybody is talking about her.… She’s so stupid, so stupid!” Jeanne said. Her tears were hot and spiteful.

Helene’s mind had whirled: how could this be true? She thought of her pretty daughter, with that face she herself envied a little, she thought of that face exposed to bullets.…

When she confronted Shelley with this news, Shelley said nervously, “Oh, they were just fooling around … they’re nice kids … it was only a BB gun and I shot it myself a few times.… Nothing happened.”

“How could you let anyone do such a thing to you!” Helene had asked.

“They didn’t do anything!” Shelley protested, not meeting her mother’s eye. “Oh, Jeanne is always exaggerating things, she hates me, she’s always after me—They didn’t do anything, they’re nice kids and they’re my friends, they just like to fool around—Nothing happened.”

Helene stared at her.

“No, nothing happened,” Shelley said hotly.

Helene had not dared to tell Jesse about this.

Now, this morning, she said slowly to Jeanne: “I don’t want to hear about it. Please.”

Alone. It was a relief to be alone.

She drove out into noontime traffic. At a new shopping center—Wonderland East—she hurried through a few stores on errands. She hated to shop and moved quickly, nervously through the crowds of other women.

Crossing a concrete square—cheaply decorated with “modern” multicolored cubes and benches of garish carnival colors—she heard the start of music, greatly amplified—then it stopped abruptly. The other shoppers, most of them women and many of them middle-aged, glanced around at the noise, bewildered. Then it began again: a crashing of guitars, drums, indecipherable instruments.

Helene wanted to press her hands against her ears. The racket was almost unbearable.

She tried to hurry to her car, but she had to cross these small artificial “courtyards”—square after square of cubes and benches and potted plants, female shoppers, small children, teenagers in slovenly dress, with the screeching, harshly rhythmic music piped at her from speakers set high on posts. It was windy and she had to close her eyes against the flying grit. So much noise, the pounding of drums and voices, the ache in her legs to hurry, hurry, to get her out of this—

It was mocking her, mocking the misery in her body.

You are too old, too old. Give up. Forget. You are far too old
.

She was to meet Mannie Breck for lunch. For days she had wondered if she would really meet him, but now she was obviously on her way. The restaurant was located a few miles from Wonderland East, an older place set back from the white tile and strident signs of newer restaurants and shops, near a park. When Helene drove by the park she noticed a small crowd there, a kind of demonstration, young people with signs, a single policeman on horseback.

Too old, too old. Forget. Forget everything
.

At twelve-thirty she walked into the dim foyer of the restaurant, carrying the sound of the rock music in her head, a little dazed, irritated, frightened. A single unwanted glimpse of her strained face in a mirror—and then Mannie sprang forward to greet her.

“I wasn’t sure—I thought you might not come—” Mannie said.

He was eager, formal, very nervous.

They shook hands like people newly introduced to each other. “I’m so happy to see you,” Mannie said.

He was wearing a light suit and a shirt of some dark, coarse material that threw a shadow up onto the lower part of his face. He was a specialist at the Vogel Clinic in diseases of the spinal cord, especially those in children, in “floppy infants”; there seemed to be something miniaturized about him, his voice, his features, his manner. He was no taller than Helene herself, of a slight frame, his complexion olivish, dark, with a certain dusky, unhealthy pallor. His features were pinched and strained, as if he were constantly fighting a headache. Above his small, wise face his hair rose in stiff bunches, beginning to gray. He had given up a good private practice in New York to join Jesse here.

Helene smiled at him nervously.

As they talked, she found herself recalling the shopping plaza and the windy squares and the blare of music, the music of young people. She recalled the hurrying women, the shoppers with their purchases in colored paper bags and their hair blown in the wind that was not friendly to them. The rhythmic thumping of the guitar, the drums. What had it to do with these women shoppers, with their forlorn faces and mottled legs? She kept seeing herself hurrying away from the music but not escaping it.
Too old. All of you are too old
.

She and Mannie were shy together. He talked about the clinic. Of course. About Jesse. Of course. Asked her about the girls, about her own life. Pausing politely to listen to her account of her own life. Asked about her father. Helene stiffened but managed to say, “He’s living in Palm Beach now. You probably heard that he married again.…” Mannie nodded eagerly. He asked her again about “things at home,” with the attentive, self-deprecating manner of someone who has no home himself and to whom “home” is sacred.

Mannie chattered about his work, his problems, his gains, the words a kind of musical interlude meant to put them both at ease. Helene warmed a little. Listening to Mannie, watching him she wondered why he was attracted to her and what would come of them. The two of them: a couple in this restaurant of strangers, a couple sitting alone together. She felt herself sinking into a warm, puzzled, erotic daze, so that the music she had heard at the shopping plaza flowed, subdued
and lyric and sweetened, in and out of her consciousness. Mannie seemed inspired by her, leaning forward, talking so eagerly that she could see small flecks of saliva on his lips.

“You’re not unhappy about anything …?” Mannie asked.

“No,” said Helene.

“People who live alone are often unhappy because they think too much. They have nothing to do at home but think,” Mannie said with a smile. “That’s my trouble. I was very attached to my family, my parents, and now … now things are all changed.…” Ugly little man, with that monkeyish face! He was weak, charming, harmless. A brother. A child in the form of a small man, masquerading as a man.
I want Jesse
, Helene thought in a sudden misery. “It’s wonderful that your father has remarried, at his age. I imagine you’re happy about it …?”

Helene hesitated. Her father, at the age of sixty-seven, had married a woman of no more than forty-five, a “speech therapist” in Boston with dyed blond hair, a regal, swaying, hard-corseted body, supposedly a widow. They had driven out to Chicago to visit, in an enormous black automobile. Cady had talked incessantly about the car and a boat he was buying and the home he had bought for his bride, with a quarter-mile frontage on the ocean. His face was tanned from Palm Beach, his clothes youthful and nautical in style, with brass buttons. He had retired from his work entirely.

“Yes, I’m happy about it,” Helene said tonelessly.

Mannie sensed her mood and fell silent, embarrassed. Then he changed the subject: “Did you see the antiwar demonstration across the street? The kids?”

“Is it an antiwar demonstration?”

“I don’t think they have a permit. There’s some complication.”

Mannie talked about the war for a while, shaking his head sadly. Helene did not pay attention to him, wanting to ask about Jesse, her husband—what was he like?—what was he really like? Another man might know him. As they ate lunch self-consciously, Mannie went on to talk about the effect of the war on America and what it had done to people he knew. His small, dark face would be matched by a small, dark body; there would probably be dark curly hair on his chest, swirls of hair on his stomach. Short, pale legs, knobby feet. He would be a gentle lover, fearful of failing her.… Jesse was not afraid of failing her. He did not think of her at all.

“Even in my own family something happened that would not have happened a few years ago,” Mannie said. “My sister’s girl, who is only twenty, dropped out of Smith to get married. She and the boy bummed around Europe and when they came back they had an infant with them, which they plan on giving away for adoption—in fact, I think they already have given it away. My sister is heartbroken. This is her only grandchild. She didn’t even know her daughter had had a baby, and now the girl is giving it away, coldly and deliberately … she won’t even let my sister bring the child up, she wants it given to strangers.…”

“Why does she want to do that?” Helene asked, genuinely surprised.

“We don’t know. It’s killing my sister. The baby is only a few months old, a boy.…”

“Women shouldn’t be allowed to do things like that,” Helene said slowly.

“Exactly, she shouldn’t be allowed, because in a few years she will regret it. When she grows up. She will regret it the rest of her life. Nobody can talk sense to her.”

“But what about her husband?”

“He wants to get rid of the baby too. Neither one of them wants to be held down. My niece says she isn’t interested in being a mother. She isn’t interested!”

Helene felt her face warming with anger. An abstract, mysterious ferocity. Ah, how she hated—

But she did not know exactly what she hated.

“Did I upset you with that news? I shouldn’t talk about such ugly things,” Mannie said uncertainly.

“We always wanted to adopt another child, a boy. Two more children. Jesse wanted two more children,” Helene said vaguely. “I wanted to have another baby but … but there was some risk.… I shouldn’t have listened to my doctor. I don’t think he was right. And so we were going to adopt another baby.…”

Mannie nodded sympathetically. “Yes?”

“But it was never the right time, I don’t know why … Jesse was always so busy with the clinic, and for a while Jeanne’s health was bad … she had pleurisy one winter.… I don’t know what happened. But we never adopted a child.”