“Well,” she grinned a sheepish, demure, but absolutely fetching overbite smile that made Eddie squeeze her shoulders in appreciation. “Last summer, when I went to Red Fox Music Camp on full scholarship, I stepped off the bus in front of the entire music faculty and my suitcase exploded and all my clothes came bursting out.”
“Oh, Jesus. How indiscreet. Come on. You can do better than that. Let’s talk real embarrassment. You know Paulie Kogan, the stocky guy with the wire rims? Last year, we were supposed to do weight training for some stupid jock thing or another, and he comes to me and says, ‘Eddie, don’t pick me up tonight. I’m leaving town on a family thing.’ ‘Oh, what’s up?’ I ask. ‘My dad’s dead,’ he says. And before I know what I’m saying—stupid, middle-class, knee-jerk—I say, ‘Oh, I hope he gets better soon.’ You wanted embarrassment.” They fell silent; stupid, middle-class, knee-jerk silence. Sarah sensed it wasn’t Paulie’s dad that stopped them in place.
Eddie, brave as the recollection was, kept back the real contenders for the title, the public incidents involving Pop and his proclivity that he might consider telling this woman after he got to know her better. Like in another twenty years. He assumed a virtue, and continued comically. “My life is one continual embarrassment, really. Confusing Lerner and Loewe with Leopold and Loeb. You know, pronouncing epitome like it looks. I hate being at the mercy of words. Gonna hafta learn a few one of these days.”
Sarah stopped. She pulled Eddie to her, and returned the previous favor. To cover her awkwardness when they drew apart, she said, “We ought to do this walk again in the spring, don’t you think? I love it when it’s rained lightly while you are in the theater, and when you come out, everything smells of earthworms and something about to happen.”
Eddie matched her voice, enthusiasm for enthusiasm. “I know. How the air fills with spore cases. You know, how when it rains, water trickles off of tree branches and lands on those bungalow-looking structures? Here’s a couple.” He produced an imaginary sample. “They grow up around the tree trunks, and then the water force makes them release this powder into the air.”
It was, he was suddenly aware, not one’s standard high school dialogue. But something about Sarah made him trust her without being able to help himself. Anything else would be that word: duplicity. “Here’s one. Go ahead; tap it. The spores are in your hair; let me help.” He held her strands up to the light. “These are among your more serious fungi. They aren’t ones to dance around in fairy rings to The Nutcracker Suite, for instance. And look, see how the water pulls itself into spheres on the surface of the leaves? And underground . . .” He overturned a rock, revealing nothing but the frozen ground.
“Bugs!” Sarah exclaimed, a cry of complete fascination. Eddie was astonished at her response. They had somehow jumped together into the same lost place. But since she had proved herself perfect in every other way, he took this additional sympathy in stride.
“Sure. The night’s when they really come out. More beetle activity per square leafstuff at night than anyone imagines.” It was below freezing, and crouched on the ground, they could not help but start to feel it. She was on her knees beside him, peering intently. He put his arm lightly around her, gratefully. “Not too many of them this far north, this time of year. November’s tough on the food chain.”
“What else?” she said. He had seen that look before, a genuine interest in whatever there was to learn. The discovery of the complex world under the rock, making the world above it almost livable.
“I think,” Eddie said, standing and unfolding himself slowly, “that if I hadn’t already made a complete botch of my future, that I would have liked to make a living doing this, what we were just playing at doing. Digging around in the leaves, studying bugs.”
“An entomologist!”
“I’m pretty good at sketching with a pencil, and I can look at things for hours without blinking. I just like to watch life. Maybe see something nobody else has yet.”
“Good Lord, boy. You talk like the chance is gone. Do it, if you love it.”
“Naw, it’s too late already. Don’t have the grades. And I’m not so good at the studies part. You know, turning it into a science, with math and all. My sister Rach got all the math genes. She didn’t even have to study it. The formulas were just there, intact.” He fell silent. Then he began to walk in circles, animated again. “But think of all these combinations, under our feet. The size of it. The possibilities.” Sarah stared at him with a look of incredulity, which he misunderstood. “Sorry. I get that way as the night goes on. As the saying goes, ‘That’s . . .’”
“Don’t say it!” She sounded violent.
“How did you know what I was going to say?” Eddie joked. But he had upset whatever she had been feeling about him. They strolled again, turning by accident almost to the front of the Hobson house before he noticed. “Hey! Look where we are.” The soul of Second Street. “How did we wind up here? I thought the gentleman was supposed to walk the lady home.” Sarah made a joke about the Equal Rights Amendment that Eddie didn’t understand and was afraid to ask about.
“Well, I’d ask you in,” he apologized, “but I’m afraid my motorcycle-gang-intelligentsia family would work you over.” She was the first friend he could remember being reluctant to take inside.
“I’d love to meet them, actually.”
“Well,” he waffled. “There’s just the four of us. The party’s over. My older brother and sister have jumped ship. Chitown. The remaining three would probably grill you until you confessed.”
“Don’t be so down on your family.”
“I’m not down on them. They just never know what to make of my friends.” After an awkward pause, Eddie added, “Want to sit in the yard for a while? We can dig up grubs, or something.”
Sarah nodded eagerly. She smoothed her skirts and began to settle into the cold front lawn. Eddie shot a nervous glance front-porchward. “No, the backyard; it’s better. Darker. We’ve got a swing rigged up, too.”
As they skirted the side corner of the porch, they ran right into the cameo Eddie had dreaded. Pop’s face, as drained of blood as the Mariner’s, loomed up through the dark storm windows, disembodied. Sarah let out a sharp, frightened shout. “Wave to him,” Eddie said, taking her by the hand. “Humor him.” When they reached the backyard, he put on his most deferential face and said, “That’s my dad,” hoping to ease the situation by stating the obvious.
It didn’t work. Sarah was absolutely peaked, as white as the apparition itself. “Oh, Eddie. He’s sick. What’s wrong with him?”
“I told you, I don’t know what’s wrong with him.” And to joke away his having spoken more curtly than intended, he added, “We’re running forbidden scientific experiments on him. Don’t tell anybody, all right?”
Sarah sat on the tree swing and Eddie pushed her gently. They talked the quick, idle, expendable talk used to gloss over sudden shocks. He commented that they hadn’t mentioned Top 40 all night, and that she was a disgrace to her age group. She thanked him. Then, bearing out that very observation, she returned becomingly to the matter. “Tell me everything you think you can about your father.”
He caught her at the apogee and held her waist until she released herself with the kind of brushing kiss one might give after two decades of shared uncertainty. “What do you want to know about him?” Eddie began. “He cleans his teeth with strips of cellophane from Lucky Strike cigarettes. And when Mom’s not around, he tells me shocking—what’s the word for when the first letter of every word . . . ?”
“Acronym?”
“Yeah. He invents shocking meanings for the L.S./M.F.T. acronyms on those cigarette packs. He’s . . . well let’s see . . . he was in the army. But then, so was everybody’s dad. During the war. The war. Is this what you want to hear?”
“Tell me everything that you think I should know.”
“His brother got killed in some freak airplane crash. Stateside, was the weird thing about it. One of
the central events of his life, as far as I can make out. With him every day, since.”
“Is he morbid?”
“What do you mean: does he get schnockered once a year religiously on the date? Not really. No death shrines. No; it just sort of left him with this freak sense of humor.”
“Black humor?”
“Coal dust. He’s funny, all right, only . . . only everything’s fair game. A kind of sarcasm, but not sarcastic. He jokes the way people hug at fiftieth-year reunions: too much back-slapping, when what everybody really wants to do is kiss all those shattered faces and weep. He parodies everything. He never repeats the standard jokes. Dad would never do a one-liner for the one-liner’s sake. ‘All jokes walk in one line . . .’”
“Eddie?”
“Nothing. Just free-associating. He likes catchphrases. Pop is capable of saying, in the same breath, with the same degree of seriousness and importance, both ‘There is more to any of us than any of us suspects’ and ‘The secret of happiness consists in not eating grapes just after you’ve brushed your teeth.’ He is totally maudlin underneath. A sentimentalist who refuses to put himself at the mercy of caring what happens to other people.”
Sarah sat on the now-still swing, her legs underneath her. She pulled her mouth to the side in an urbane twist. “You wouldn’t have picked up any of that, now would you?”
“Me? How can you say that?” His irony proved the simple and unequivocal if self-attacking fact: No Hobsons can be trusted. “He wants to know everything. He reads everything, and then he gets talkative about it all, and drags everybody down into the facts with him. Funny. It’s exactly the opposite with my brother, Artie. The two of them read a lot of the same books and everything. But the more Artie learns, the quieter he gets.”
“And what about Number Three?”
“You talking about moi?” Suppose this girl were already lost. The terrifying thought shot up his backbone, and Eddie hunched over. “I say live all you can. You make things worse for everybody if you don’t.”
Whether she agreed or simply did not want to disabuse his simplicity, Sarah stayed silent. Eddie began talking faster, without looking at the woman he was swinging. “It’s like Pop never made the compromises everybody else makes in growing up. He hit the age of twenty and looked around, you know, ‘These people are off the wall,’ and decided to regress to what the white-bread company calls the formative years. You know, try it all over again from the top. For instance, he’s got this hobby . . .” Eddie trailed off and tried to push the swing. But Sarah would not lift her feet from the earth where they dragged.
“No. Tell me. Don’t be embarrassed. My father plays with model trains.”
“Really? Does he? Well, I suppose you could call Pop’s thing a model-train set. A surreal monstrosity of a model train. He plans this . . . You wouldn’t get it. I don’t get it. He plays at city planner, on the sly. Cheaper than golf, see? And you don’t need an opponent.”
Eddie put his hand inside her open collar and tentatively, almost frightenedly, rested it on her deltoids. “What can I say? The man’s my dad.” She touched her hand to his, not to arrest his forward progress but to give him the powerless gesture of comfort. And to direct him to the right place.
Eddie talked into the black air. “They say if you want to see how the son is going to turn out, look at the dad. That means if you marry me—and I intend to make your life miserable until you do, and probably after as well—I’ll be decked out on the porch in thirty years, like the Big Guy. My belly will be out to here, and my arms and legs will be this little around. And off to the vets’ hospital. Sound attractive?” He understood that he had gone beyond the repartee with which she could live. His words had become ugly. There was no taking them back.
“But why are we talking to one another about our folks? We’re supposed to be talking about how pretty your nose is.” He touched the part in question. “Like it makes any difference what the folks are up to. We’re supposed to give them something to drool about. What a great time the kids must be having, so young and all.”
She laughed, both at how he talked and at the new force with which he suddenly swung her. “Too high, Eddie.”
“High? You haven’t seen high yet. We need to achieve antigravity.” She closed her eyes and kept still. The look of bravery that then crossed her face made him call out, “Know what? I’m crazy about you.”
She opened her eyes wide and just looked. But she had the presence of mind to taunt, “What about Miss Simms?”
“Oh, I’m crazy about her, too.”
All sophistication vanished, and she was once again seventeen. “Jerk! Play nice. That’s not fair.”
“Of course it’s fair. Don’t you think it’s better, the more people you care for? And I’m crazy about those hippos and those twinky horses with wings, and the mouse, and the foreign guy with the music stick, too.” He teased her mercilessly, until he found her on the edge of tears. “No, friend. It’s you. As of tonight.” She brightened. “Still, people are really okay by me,” Eddie pursued. “Doesn’t matter what kind of roof they put up to keep themselves dry, I guess. I defy you to come up with somebody I can’t get along with.”
“What about . . . ?” She cast a furtive glance toward the white wood house.
“What about wh . . . ? Jesus. My family? I love my family. Whatever made you think . . . ?” She looked so hurt at his volume, so genuinely wronged, that he remembered the words that had, naturally, led her to that conclusion. “Oh, that,” he said, eyes appeasing. “That’s ecting.”
Standing behind her, he put his hand deeper into her shirt. It fit nicely. She struggled up against him, to move his fingers to the right place. Feigning a bout of propriety, she said, “Those are my breasts, young man.”
“I figured as much.”
“Would Donna Reed do this?”
“No, Donna never let ol’ Jimmy do this. Not without certification, anyway.”
And they began to learn about one another in the nimbus of the back-porch light. When the world once more seemed to need speaking about, Eddie said, “Peaceful here. The backyard. A good month, November. Not so cold as you’d expect. I like it. And you?” Without waiting for a reply, he began to sing, “Won’t you come out? Won’t you? And? Dance?”
12
My dear Mrs. Swallow, you marvelous creature of habit:
You are my last certainty. I wake each morning to your daily ritual. I know by heart how you crack open the front door, a litmus test to see what century it is outside today. You haul out your body’s bulk slowly on swollen ankles and close the door behind you. Your key slides the bolt shut so that even I can hear it. Then remarkable instinct takes over. Arthritic bird claws jab at the door handle, jerk it violently, testing its ability to withstand foreign invasion, baffling in advance the burglar’s every alternative. Mrs. Swallow, I am glad you don’t know how easily bolts buckle, panes pop out under the persuasion of jeweler saw and putty.
You head up the walk, take the first main right and you are off: Power Company, Phone, or Water-some public utility where you’ve worked since the war. But total security eludes you. Every other day you turn back after a block, something triggering the fear that this morning you forgot to check the door. You return to the stoop, execute a final handle-jerk. “I thought so,” you think; “But one must be sure.” Locks against alternatives, as if they could keep the outside out. As if every lock could not be beaten. You lose confidence in your current deadbolt. You put on a stronger one, test it. You walk to work, stop, double back, test it again. All a dare, an invitation to escalate. New preventions lead to better burglars.
What drives you? Was your house robbed decades ago? Mrs. S, apocalypse cannot strike a town this size twice. Your trauma is an inside job. Two competing camps split the world down the middle: those who believe precautions keep crime at bay, and those who see that Mrs. Swallow’s burglary takes place daily. Sorry to say, you must include in the second your neighbor,
; Lily Hobson Leeds
Dear Mrs. Swallow,
Sorry to end so abruptly, but I did not sleep last night and needed to close my eyes. I’m afraid I’m back to naps again before noon. I did not mean to judge your little ritual, no more predictable or pitiful than my own. Mrs. Swallow’s burglars. Mrs. Swallow: the bulk, massive ankles, probing birdclaws and darting eyes, whose concern for the nest steals her liberty, whose self-protection cuts worse than snares.
Species-instinct, or true habit? On certain days, your obsession takes you by the brain stem; you come back twice or more, surrendering to extended handle-wrenchings, a bird-mechanism gone wrong, the swallow smacking suicidally into an expanse of plate glass, thinking it the promised opening to spacious places. But if I ever woke in mid-morning to total silence: I feel the panic just imagining it. Only your audible insistence that outside forces threaten you reassures me that none has yet carried out the threat. You are a comfort to me, wrenching the handle, protecting private interests, interests that keep you under house arrest.
You head out each morning for your post, to hover over switches, pipelines, or huge parfaits of trickled power. Or maybe your line is customer complaints. That’s it: you work in Service, answering the accusations of injured parties. You staff a window: Insults and Injuries. All complaints left on your desk at day’s end you get to take home.
Back in the unentered house, you line them up on your mantelpiece, scatter them across endtables: other people’s injuries, the heirlooms you surrender your peace to protect. Someone tried to take them from you once. Now, each morning, it grows harder to leave them. Knickknacks, bric-a-brac, your near brushes with others accumulate through your rooms. Proof that you have lived. Please add to the stockpile of entrapping stuff these thoughts from your admiring neighbor, lost at home for much the same reason.
Prisoner's Dilemma Page 21
