Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “For god’s sake,” Jim said. “How can anyone be so insecure?”

  “Me? Insecure?” Patsy said, coming up two inches. She peered at him over the collar of the Creature. Jim looked at her for a second and almost rammed the truck in front of them. The truck had a bulldozer on it.

  “Okay, okay,” Patsy said. “I’m insecure. Forget about me. I don’t want our family wiped out just yet, wretched though we are.”

  “I enjoyed Christmas,” Jim said. “I like your family. They’re just like most people’s families. At least they make an effort. Mine just run away.”

  His had gone to Yucatan—they always went south for Christmas. Patsy snuggled down into the Creature and looked out at the gray grass and scrubby trees, trying to imagine how it would be to spend Christmas on a white beach, where the water was very blue. She decided it wouldn’t be any good unless she could wear her bikini, and she was considerably too pregnant for a bikini just then.

  “I’m not just bitching,” she said. “My parents depress me terribly, if I really think about them. The only way I can help being depressed about them is to avoid them. Such sad lives they lead. Why is it somehow worse when people won’t admit that they’re sad? We could never be that sad, could we, old pard?”

  Moved by a sudden impulse to be close to him, she scooted across the seat and put her head against his shoulder. She slipped one hand inside his shirt and rubbed his chest. Jim was moved, glad. He had lost the ability to draw her close to him by his own efforts and was always delighted when she came close of her own accord. He took one hand off the wheel and stroked her cheek.

  “They do lead pretty awful lives,” he said. “It just doesn’t do any good to analyze it that I can see. We can’t change them now.”

  “At least yours like to travel,” she said. She kissed his palm and just as she did a car full of Negroes passed them and recklessly cut in ahead. Patsy shut her eyes.

  “Mine travel without really liking it at all,” she said. “I don’t think they were always that way. When do we get to the freeway?”

  “Thirty more minutes,” Jim said.

  Patsy kept her eyes closed, casting back in her memory for when her father and mother had been different. Her father’s name was Garland White; his father had owned a country hardware store in Denison. Her mother’s name was Jeanette; her father had repaired windmills and windchargers. Garland and Jeanette married in the mid-thirties and moved to Oak Cliff, then a rough suburb of Dallas. Patsy vaguely remembered the little one-story box of a house they lived in, for they were only normal broke oil people then. Garland worked in the East Texas oil camps. What Patsy remembered most clearly was how different her parents’ clothes had been then: khakis, blue sweat-smelling work shirts, thin print dresses, cheap underthings. She had liked as a girl to sit in the laundry basket on the tiny back porch. One of the few things she remembered with nostalgia was the smell of the porch and the unlaundered clothes. The only other memory she had of Oak Cliff was of a row of washer holes in the bare dirt of the back yard, for Garland liked to pitch washers with the neighbors in the evening. Patsy remembered how the washers clinked as they dropped. There were domino games too, and she and her earliest friends chased lightning bugs while the men hurrahed and drank beer and the women sat on straw-bottomed chairs talking about their families.

  Years later, in college, when her friends grew nostalgic about the past—about washer pitching or lightning bugs or old comic books or radio shows—Patsy felt puzzled and a little disquieted, for the memory of such things stirred no emotion in her. What moved her was the memory of how much friendlier her mother and father had been in the days when they did their own laundry, but she could never be really sure that the memory was not just a fantasy of her own.

  Garland had a heart condition that should have killed him but didn’t. It made him florid, made Jeanette permanently anxious, but it had kept him out of the war. He went in with another man and bought a cheap oil rig and by the time the war was over was a small millionaire. Patsy started school in Highland Park, not Oak Cliff. Jeanette was a simple soul. In twenty years of practice she never mastered the game of bridge. Church was the only thing she felt good at. Garland gave up washer pitching for golf, joined two country clubs, bought a little ranch and a little airplane; he tried his level best to learn how to enjoy himself. He failed—but he kept trying. He worked harder at fun than he did at the oil business, but he had come to the oil business at just the right time and had just enough energy and enough judgment to keep himself in the money. It was small money, as oil money went, but it was enough to confuse him. He learned to drink, seldom got seriously drunk but got slightly drunk often enough that Jeanette began a ritual complaint—a complaint that Garland found stabilizing, on the whole. He would not have known what to do with a wife who didn’t complain about her husband’s drinking.

  On Christmas Eve, two days before, Jeanette had had a long fit of weeping, all over Miri, who had inexplicably refused to come home for Christmas. She had called and been pleasant, but had simply refused to come home. The excuse she gave was term papers. but it didn’t convince Garland or Jeanette or Patsy either, though Patsy didn’t care. She was convinced she could have got the real reason out of Miri but, with her parents on the extensions, had no chance to. After supper Jeanette had broken up—it was the first Christmas the family had been separated. She wanted to fly out and find out what was the matter, but she was afraid to. Miri had a rebellious spirit and was very apt not to welcome a visit, and in any case Jeanette was afraid of what she might find.

  “What if she’s pregnant?” she wept. “What other reason could she have for not wanting to see us on Christmas?”

  “She could just be bored with Christmas,” Patsy said. “It’s a possible human emotion. If you ever spent a Christmas away somewhere, without all this trapping, you might find you loved it. It doesn’t mean she’s forsaken us forever. Don’t cry so.”

  “She may be living dishonorably,” Jeanette said. “And be pregnant too.”

  “Probably not both,” Patsy said. “Girls who live dishonorably usually do it sensibly these days.”

  “She might even be smoking marijuana,” Jeanette said, looking to Garland for support. He was wandering around the room in a stiff new Christmas suit, drinking Scotch.

  “Bad influences out there,” he said. “It’s my damn fault. I should have kept her at SMU.” Miri had had an early and disastrous marriage, lasting three months, and since then neither Garland nor Jeanette had quite known what to do with her.

  “You hush,” Patsy said to her father. “She’s probably not pregnant and she hasn’t had time to get on heroin or anything. It’s only been one semester. My god. If you’d kept her at SMU she’d be mentally paralyzed by now. She sounded just fine to me.”

  “But what’ll we do with her presents?” Jeanette said. “She didn’t get a single present from us. We expected her here.”

  “We could open them and divide them,” Patsy suggested. “In my present state none of them will fit me.”

  “I guess you don’t think there’s anything wrong with smoking marijuana,” Garland said. He and Patsy tended to get more and more at each other’s throats as arguments progressed. Their fights invariably reduced Jeanette to a wash of tears.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with it and what isn’t,” Patsy said. “And neither do you.”

  “I know it’s against the law.”

  “I believe it’s against the Reader’s Digest too.”

  It seldom took Garland more than five minutes to drive Patsy to extremes. Soon she was arguing passionately for Communism, free love, drugs, the banning of alcohol, and compulsory racial intermarriage. Finally Jim intervened and turned the conversation back to the Packers and the Cowboys, and all were grateful to him. Jim was adept at calming them down. Patsy and Jeanette went upstairs to look at snapshots, that being the only activity that soothed Jeanette when she reached certain depths of despair.

  In the
early fifties Garland had decided that travel was broadening, so the family, Miri only a tot at the time, had broadened themselves to the extent of five or six trips a year. There were boxes of color snapshots from every trip. They had gone to all the old places—Florida, California, Hawaii, Canada—and to all the new places as soon as they became known. Patsy and Jeanette sat on the floor of Patsy’s bedroom, the boxes of pictures between them, and there they were, hundreds of color pictures of her and Jeanette and Miri the tot, with a background of the Grand Canyon or Lake Louise or the Royal Hawaiian, or a deep-sea fishing boat, sans deep-sea fish, the girls’ grins always toothy and sun-blinded.

  “I was all knees and teeth in those days,” Patsy said. The only funny picture was one taken in Las Vegas. The family was grouped around a roulette wheel, with a thin croupier behind them looking obligingly evil.

  “She was such a darling then,” Jeanette said, holding up a picture of Miri, a tiny curly-haired bump on the back of a mule, about to descend to the bed of the Colorado.

  “She’s a darling now,” Patsy said, but she could not stop her mother from worrying. Worrying had become her function. The one unworried moment she had had in years was when Jim, all handsome and proper, his family wealth three generations old, had landed Patsy, or been landed by her, whichever it had been. Jeanette assumed that with a little one coming nothing could be righter than Patsy and Jim, and when they left to go back to Houston it had taken Jim thirty minutes to load the baby stuff in the Ford. Garland followed him halfway down the driveway, pointing out the financial advantages of buying a house immediately. Real estate was always rising.

  “I must call Miri tonight,” Patsy said, peeking once again at the gray day and the line of traffic. “I sympathize with her not wanting any more Dallas Christmases, but I suppose there’s a chance she might be in some kind of trouble.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted you loose in California at that age,” Jim said. His neck was stiff from the strain of watching the traffic so closely. In fifty miles he had managed to pass one truck and three cars.

  “That’s a little condescending of you,” she said. “I could have taken care of myself.” But she didn’t believe it, really, and rubbed his stomach some more. “I like you better in cars,” she said. “Why is that? You’re so tight at home. That’s my basic impression of you, these days. You’re very tight.”

  “It’s just graduate school,” he said. “That’s not serious. I’ll relax sooner or later. I’m not tighter than you are, anyway. You’re very withdrawn, you know. You don’t even want to talk about the baby, any more. We haven’t even decided on a name.”

  It was true. At first she had had a great need to chat about the baby, to plan and consider and theorize, but as the months passed, that need passed with them, and as the event drew closer she ceased to want to talk about it at all. As soon as it became publicly evident, it became for Patsy very private. She thought about it often, calmly and at length, but she felt no urge to talk to anyone and often found herself even resenting her doctor’s questions. Her life with Jim went badly or went well but it didn’t seem to affect her feelings about the child inside her.

  “There’s time to decide on a name,” Patsy said to close the subject. She sat close to him the rest of the way to Houston, but they scarcely spoke again. Jim was thinking of the finals he would have to prepare for, Patsy of her child and of her sister. Whatever they had been about to conclude about themselves and their parents got lost on the road, somewhere near Centerville, Texas.

  That night, when she did call Miri, Patsy herself grew somewhat alarmed. In the first place, a boy answered the phone, and though she asked clearly for her sister another boy succeeded the first; she asked him for her sister and yet another boy came to the phone. They all sounded friendly, but rather vague and puzzled, and they all kept assuring her that Miri was right there. By the time Miri’s voice finally came over the wire, Patsy was angry. She had spent five long-distance minutes and it was the sort of expenditure that brought out the Scotch in her.

  “Who were those boobs?” she asked. She and Miri were always extremely blunt with each other. Their affection was built on bluntness.

  “Boobs?” Miri asked. “Do you mean breasts, or what?” She did not sound blunt at all. She sounded fully as vague as the young men.

  “Those boys,” Patsy said crisply. “What’s wrong with you? Come on, be incisive. I’ve just paid for five minutes of heavy masculine breathing.”

  “Oh, those were just some guys.”

  “Momma thinks you’re leading a dishonorable life,” Patsy said. “She thinks you’re pregnant and a dope addict and is thinking of coming out to check. In their world it’s a pretty radical thing, not coming home for Christmas.”

  “I didn’t want to,” Miri said. “It’s too much more fun. Out here is too much more fun, I mean.”

  She sounded unlike herself, quite foggy, as if she might simply wander away from the phone at any moment.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Patsy asked. “I hate to probe like this. I don’t particularly care if you’re living dishonorably. I’ll even tell Momma you aren’t, if you’re okay and all. But what’s up? You hardly sound like you’re there.”

  “I’m just high,” Miri said. “It’s okay. I was gonna call you. We’re having a party right now.”

  “It must be a slumber party,” Patsy said. “I can’t hear it. I thought California was noisy. I don’t know if I like you being high if it’s going to cut you off that way. On what are you high?”

  “Just pot,” Miri said. There was a silence. She was clearly having to strain to talk.

  “Exactly as Momma feared. You better watch it now. I don’t know which would be worse, the cops finding you like that or Momma finding you like that.”

  Miri didn’t respond.

  “Miri?” Patsy asked.

  “Hey, you know I think somebody fell down the stairs,” Miri said. “We have very bad stairs in this house.”

  “If it was one of those boys, don’t worry about it damaging his brain,” Patsy said. “You’re too high to talk to. When do you expect to be down to earth again, like low enough to talk to your sister?”

  “Oh, any time,” Miri said. “I can talk any time.”

  Again Patsy got the feeling that Miri was not on the phone at all but was watching something that was happening in the room.

  “What’s happening!” she insisted. “I can’t believe it’s you. Are you in the midst of an orgy or something?” Miri normally talked her ear off. She was, if anything, more verbal than Patsy.

  “Oh, no,” Miri said. “Don’t tell Momma that. We never have orgies any more, anyway. Nobody’s much interested now.”

  “What?”

  “The guys had just rather get high, mostly. Hey, you’re having a baby soon, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Are you, by any chance?”

  “Me? I’m not having a baby. I’m not even going with anyone special. I don’t think my grades are going to be too good this year.”

  “I don’t wonder. Between marijuana and orgies I don’t know when you’d study. Have you really been in an orgy, Miri?”

  “I guess so,” Miri said. “At least there’s been a lot of us around doing things a few times. But everybody’s done that.”

  Patsy was silent, suddenly very shocked. It occurred to her for the first time that Miri might have become a person she didn’t know.

  “Hey, don’t let Momma come,” Miri said. “Why don’t you come?”

  “I’m having the baby, remember? Now you’ve depressed me. Why don’t you call me sometime when you’re low, okay? And watch out for the cops.”

  She hung up, put on her nightgown and robe, and sat on the couch weeping. Jim had gone to the library to get some books and when he came in her face was red from crying and the front of her gown was damp above her breasts.

  “What now?” he asked wearily. He wanted to take a hot bath and read.

  “Momma’s worst fears are re
alized,” Patsy said in a very broken voice. “Miri’s smoking pot and having orgies. I never heard her sound so disconnected. It upset me. I guess I miss her.”

  Jim looked at the title page of a book on Swift and then looked at Patsy again. “Why should you cry?” he said. “She’s always been pretty wild. It doesn’t surprise me at all. Your father was a fool to let her go to California. Given her temperament, she was bound to do exactly that.”

  “Don’t be so smug about her,” Patsy said sadly. “She’s my little sister. It isn’t her being wild that made me cry. She just sounded so dumb tonight, and she’s always been so bright. She’s really brighter than me, and she sounded like a moron. The boys that answered the phone were as stupid as cows and I bet they’re the ones she has orgies with. I don’t mind any number of boys if they’re bright boys, but it makes me sick to think of her having orgies with morons. If that’s what pot leads to I’m against pot.”

  “She’s very undisciplined,” Jim said. It was unfortunate, but he could not help sounding stiff and moralistic when he spoke of Miri. Her behavior had always annoyed him, not because he cared so much about Miri but because he considered that Miri embodied in pure form all the bad qualities he disliked and feared in Patsy. Miri had had a marriage, a strange love affair with a bisexual gynecologist, and a nervous breakdown, all in eighteen years. Whenever Jim thought about it he grew uneasy about Patsy, for whatever had broken out in Miri might break out in Patsy any time, and he doubted his ability to control it.

  “I think she needs a good psychiatrist,” he said. “It wouldn’t hurt if she were put in a good strict girls’ school, either.”

  “Oh, go away and read scholarship,” Patsy said. “Don’t carp at my poor confused sister.”

  “Poor? She’s had everything money can buy and she gets more pathetic and more neurotic by the year.”

  Patsy stood up in a fury and grabbed an ashtray. His cool assured tone at such times all but maddened her, and she just managed to stop herself from flinging the ashtray at him. “My sister is not pathetic!” she yelled and stood quivering. “Maybe she’s sick but she’s not pathetic! Don’t you say that again. You’re pathetic—you wish I would just vanish and not exist, so you could get on with your work. What are you going to do when I have the baby? You’ll be twice as bad. You’ll have to find some way to hide from both of us.”