by Mary Robison
“Swimming really seems to help,” I said.
“I know,” Helen said. “Because it relaxes you. I’m dying to go swimming.”
“Me and you both,” Nicky said.
“Well, let’s do go. Doc can find us,” Helen said.
I went for the towels and beach tags and the straw tote full of sun stuff while Nicky began nervously telling Helen about a film we had seen on the late show the weekend before. It was an old comedy, and Nicky had memorized the funniest lines.
Before he had got very far, Helen said, “I’m way ahead of you, Nick. That’s one of my all-time favorites.”
“Yeah? Well, do you remember . . .” Nicky said and told her about the movie anyway.
Pretty Ice
I WAS UP THE WHOLE night before my fiancé was due to arrive from the East—drinking coffee, restless and pacing, my ears ringing. When the television signed off, I sat down with a packet of the month’s bills and figured amounts on a lined tally sheet in my checkbook. Under the spray of a high-intensity lamp, my left hand moved rapidly over the touch tablets of my calculator.
Will, my fiancé, was coming from Boston on the six-fifty train—the dawn train, the only train that still stopped in the small Ohio city where I lived. At six-fifteen I was still at my accounts; I was getting some pleasure from transcribing the squarish green figures that appeared in the window of my calculator. “Schwab Dental Clinic,” I printed in a raveled backhand. “Thirty-eight and 50/100.”
A car horn interrupted me. I looked over my desktop and out the living-room window of my rented house. The saplings in my little yard were encased in ice. There had been snow all week, and then an ice storm. In the glimmering driveway in front of my garage, my mother was peering out of her car. I got up and turned off my lamp and capped my ivory Mont Blanc pen. I found a coat in the semidark in the hall, and wound a knitted muffler at my throat. Crossing the living room, I looked away from the big pine mirror; I didn’t want to see how my face and hair looked after a night of accounting.
My yard was a frozen pond, and I was careful on the walkway. My mother hit her horn again. Frozen slush came through the toe of one of my chukka boots, and I stopped on the path and frowned at her. I could see her breath rolling away in clouds from the cranked-down window of her Mazda. I have never owned a car nor learned to drive, but I had a low opinion of my mother’s compact. My father and I used to enjoy big cars, with tops that came down. We were both tall and we wanted what he called “stretch room.” My father had been dead for fourteen years, but I resented my mother’s buying a car in which he would not have fitted.
“Now what’s wrong? Are you coming?” my mother said.
“Nothing’s wrong except that my shoes are opening around the soles,” I said. “I just paid a lot of money for them.”
I got in on the passenger side. The car smelled of wet wool and Mother’s hair spray. Someone had done her hair with a minty-white rinse, and the hair was held in place by a zebra-striped headband.
“I think you’re getting a flat,” I said. “That retread you bought for the left front is going.”
She backed the car out of the drive, using the rear-view mirror. “I finally got a boy I can trust, at the Exxon station,” she said. “He says that tire will last until hot weather.”
OUT ON THE STREET, SHE accelerated too quickly and the rear of the car swung left. The tires whined for an instant on the old snow and then caught. We were knocked back in our seats a little, and an empty Kleenex box slipped off the dash and onto the floor carpet.
“This is going to be something,” my mother said. “Will sure picked an awful day to come.”
My mother had never met him. My courtship with Will had all happened in Boston. I was getting my doctorate there, in musicology. Will was involved with his research at Boston U., and with teaching botany to undergraduates.
“You’re sure he’ll be at the station?” my mother said. “Can the trains go in this weather? I don’t see how they do.”
“I talked to him on the phone yesterday. He’s coming.”
“How did he sound?” my mother said.
To my annoyance, she began to hum to herself.
I said, “He’s had rotten news about his work. Terrible, in fact.”
“Explain his work to me again,” she said.
“He’s a plant taxonomist.”
“Yes?” my mother said. “What does that mean?”
“It means he doesn’t have a lot of money,” I said. “He studies grasses. He said on the phone he’s been turned down for a research grant that would have meant a great deal to us. Apparently the work he’s been doing for the past seven or so years is irrelevant or outmoded. I guess ‘superficial’ is what he told me.”
“I won’t mention it to him, then,” my mother said.
We came to the expressway. Mother steered the car through some small windblown snow dunes and down the entrance ramp. She followed two yellow salt trucks with winking blue beacons that were moving side by side down the center and right-hand lanes.
“I think losing the grant means we should postpone the wedding,” I said. “I want Will to have his bearings before I step into his life for good.”
“Don’t wait too much longer, though,” my mother said.
After a couple of miles, she swung off the expressway. We went past some tall high-tension towers with connecting cables that looked like staff lines on a sheet of music. We were in the decaying neighborhood near the tracks. “Now I know this is right,” Mother said. “There’s our old sign.”
The sign was a tall billboard, black and white, that advertised my father’s dance studio. The studio had been closed for years and the building it had been in was gone. The sign showed a man in a tuxedo waltzing with a woman in an evening gown. I was always sure it was a waltz. The dancers were nearly two stories high, and the weather had bleached them into phantoms. The lettering—the name of the studio, my father’s name—had disappeared.
“They’ve changed everything,” my mother said, peering about. “Can this be the station?”
We went up a little drive that wound past a cindery lot full of flatbed trucks and that ended up at the smudgy brownstone depot.
“Is that your Will?” Mother said.
Will was on the station platform, leaning against a baggage truck. He had a duffle bag between his shoes and a plastic cup of coffee in his mittened hand. He seemed to have put on weight, girlishly, through the hips, and his face looked thicker to me, from temple to temple. His gold-rimmed spectacles looked too small.
My mother stopped in an empty cab lane, and I got out and called to Will. It wasn’t far from the platform to the car, and Will’s pack wasn’t a large one, but he seemed to be winded when he got to me. I let him kiss me, and then he stepped back and blew a cold breath and drank from the coffee cup, with his eyes on my face.
Mother was pretending to be busy with something in her handbag, not paying attention to me and Will.
“I look awful,” I said.
“No, no, but I probably do,” Will said. “No sleep, and I’m fat. So this is your town?”
He tossed the coffee cup at an oil drum and glanced around at the cold train yards and low buildings. A brass foundry was throwing a yellowish column of smoke over a line of Canadian Pacific boxcars.
I said, “The problem is you’re looking at the wrong side of the tracks.”
A wind whipped Will’s lank hair across his face. “Does your mom smoke?” he said. “I ran out in the middle of the night on the train, and the club car was closed. Eight hours across Pennsylvania without a cigarette.”
The car horn sounded as my mother climbed from behind the wheel. “That was an accident,” she said, because I was frowning at her. “Hello. Are you Will?” She came around the car and stood on tiptoes and kissed him. “You picked a miserable day to come visit us.”
She was using her young-girl voice, and I was embarrassed for her. “He needs a cigarette,” I said.
&n
bsp; Will got into the back of the car and I sat beside my mother again. After we started up, Mother said, “Why doesn’t Will stay at my place, in your old room, Belle? I’m all alone there, with plenty of space to kick around in.”
“We’ll be able to get him a good motel,” I said quickly, before Will could answer. “Let’s try that Ramada, over near the new elementary school.” It was odd, after he had come all the way from Cambridge, but I didn’t want him in my old room, in the house where I had been a child. “I’d put you at my place,” I said, “but there’s mountains of tax stuff all over.”
“You’ve been busy,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. I sat sidewise, looking at each of them in turn. Will had some blackish spots around his mouth—ballpoint ink, maybe. I wished he had freshened up and put on a better shirt before leaving the train.
“It’s up to you two, then,” my mother said.
I could tell she was disappointed in Will. I don’t know what she expected. I was thirty-one when I met him. I had probably dated fewer men in my life than she had gone out with in a single year at her sorority. She had always been successful with men.
“William was my late husband’s name,” my mother said. “Did Belle ever tell you?”
“No,” Will said. He was smoking one of Mother’s cigarettes.
“I always liked the name,” she said. “Did you know we ran a dance studio?”
I groaned.
“Oh, let me brag if I want to,” my mother said. “He was such a handsome man.”
It was true. They were both handsome—mannequins, a pair of dolls who had spent half their lives in evening clothes. But my father had looked old in the end, in a business in which you had to stay young. He had trouble with his eyes, which were bruised-looking and watery, and he had to wear glasses with thick lenses.
I said, “It was in the dance studio that my father ended his life, you know. In the ballroom.”
“You told me,” Will said, at the same instant my mother said, “Don’t talk about it.”
My father killed himself with a service revolver. We never found out where he had bought it, or when. He was found in his warm-up clothes—a pullover sweater and pleated pants. He was wearing his tap shoes, and he had a short towel folded around his neck. He had aimed the gun barrel down his mouth, so the bullet would not shatter the wall of mirrors behind him. I was twenty then—old enough to find out how he did it.
MY MOTHER HAD MADE A wrong turn and we were on Buttles Avenue. “Go there,” I said, pointing down a street beside Garfield Park. We passed a group of paper boys who were riding bikes with saddlebags. They were going slow, because of the ice.
“Are you very discouraged, Will?” my mother said. “Belle tells me you’re having a run of bad luck.”
“You could say so,” Will said. “A little rough water.”
“I’m sorry,” Mother said. “What seems to be the trouble?”
Will said, “Well, this will be oversimplifying, but essentially what I do is take a weed and evaluate its structure and growth and habitat, and so forth.”
“What’s wrong with that?” my mother said.
“Nothing. But it isn’t enough.”
“I get it,” my mother said uncertainly.
I had taken a mirror and a comb from my handbag and I was trying for a clean center-part in my hair. I was thinking about finishing my bill paying.
Will said, “What do you want to do after I check in, Belle? What about breakfast?”
“I’ve got to go home for a while and clean up that tax jazz, or I’ll never rest,” I said. “I’ll just show up at your motel later. If we ever find it.”
“That’ll be fine,” Will said.
Mother said, “I’d offer to serve you two dinner tonight, but I think you’ll want to leave me out of it. I know how your father and I felt after he went away sometimes. Which way do I turn here?”
We had stopped at an intersection near the iron gates of the park. Behind the gates there was a frozen pond, where a single early-morning skater was skating backward, expertly crossing his blades.
I couldn’t drive a car but, like my father, I have always enjoyed maps and atlases. During automobile trips, I liked comparing distances on maps. I liked the words latitude, cartography, meridian. It was extremely annoying to me that Mother had gotten us turned around and lost in our own city, and I was angry with Will all of a sudden, for wasting seven years on something superficial.
“What about up that way?” Will said to my mother, pointing to the left. “There’s some traffic up by that light, at least.”
I leaned forward in my seat and started combing my hair all over again.
“There’s no hurry,” my mother said.
“How do you mean?” I asked her.
“To get William to the motel,” she said. “I know everybody complains, but I think an ice storm is a beautiful thing. Let’s enjoy it.”
She waved her cigarette at the windshield. The sun had burned through and was gleaming in the branches of all the maples and buckeye trees in the park. “It’s twinkling like a stage set,” Mother said.
“It is pretty,” I said.
Will said, “It’ll make a bad-looking spring. A lot of shrubs get damaged and turn brown, and the trees don’t blossom right.”
For once I agreed with my mother. Everything was quiet and holding still. Everything was in place, the way it was supposed to be. I put my comb away and smiled back at Will—because I knew it was for the last time.
Daughters
“NOW WE CAN TALK,” DELL said to her daughter, Charlotte. “If you’ve still got your bus fare. You didn’t lose it, did you?”
They had just run out of the rain and into a concrete bus shelter, which had a long wooden bench. Dell sat down on the bench and pulled Charlotte down beside her. Charlotte was eight—too old to be held on a lap. The rain was falling and blowing in overlapping sheets, and Dell and Charlotte were both soaked.
“Be still,” Dell said. She jerked her head back to avoid the spokes of a toy umbrella that Charlotte was twirling. They were in downtown Erie, in Perry Square, and the sky over the office buildings across the park from them was low and bruise-colored. Charlotte got down from the bench and went to the street curb, with the umbrella trailing behind her.
“Come back here and talk to me,” Dell said. “I won’t ask you again. Get out of the rain.”
“I’ve still got it,” Charlotte said. She stepped back under the roof of the shelter and uncurled her fingers to show a wet quarter. Her damp hair fell onto her shoulders, and her ears were exposed.
“I found a snake,” she said, pointing at the gutter.
Dell got up and went to the curb with Charlotte and held her umbrella above them. They were bending over, watching an earthworm coiled next to the river of water in the gutter, when a new Mercury station wagon pulled into the near lane. Dell straightened up and squinted at the car’s headlights. A Buick swerved to get around the station wagon, and its horn blew.
A man in a black raincoat got out of the passenger side of the station wagon. “We know,” he said to the Buick. He opened a newspaper over his head, and ran over to where Dell and Charlotte were standing. “We thought it was you,” he said, and tried to catch both of them under the spread of his newspaper. He was about forty, with dark hair.
“You remember Pierce, don’t you?” Dell said to her daughter.
Charlotte nodded at the man in the raincoat.
“We’re in a bit of a hurry,” the man said.
Dell said, “You two should just go on, Pierce. Nicholas is going to get rammed from behind, the way he’s blocking traffic.”
Nicholas was behind the wheel of the station wagon. His hand came up and he pressed his palm on the windshield in greeting. He was wearing an old wide-brimmed felt hat.
“Pierce, you really should go on,” Dell said. “The bus will be along any second.”
“I meant for you to hurry up and get in the car,” Pierce said
. “Come on. We’ll take you wherever you’re going.”
“We’re going to my father’s house. We couldn’t think of riding in your car. We’re wet to the skin.” Dell turned to Charlotte, who had the earthworm draped over her index finger. “Put that worm back,” she said.
More horns blew.
“Come on, Charlotte,” Pierce said. He threw his newspaper into the street and grabbed the back of the little girl’s neck. Nicholas leaned over and opened the back door for her. Dell collapsed the toy umbrella and followed her daughter inside.
“Hello, Nicholas, and how are you?” Dell said.
“I’m fine,” Nicholas said, looking at Dell in the rear-view mirror. He was white-haired, and about ten years older than Pierce. The two men were owners of a greenhouse and garden center, and they lived together in a townhouse on the south side of the city. Dell and Charlotte had rented their third floor for a few months after Dell divorced her husband. Charlotte was small then, and just learning to stand.
“We’re both fine,” Pierce said, shouting a little over the whack of the windshield wipers. “We’re moving books. Hey, look at you.”
“I’m sorry,” Dell said. She tried to fluff up the scalloped wet curls around her face. “This is a new car, isn’t it? I can smell the upholstery, and we’re wringing wet.”
“And now you’ve ruined it,” Pierce said. “We’ll have to get an even newer one. Won’t we, Charlotte?”
“So much room!” Dell said.
“It’s a barge and a headache,” Nicholas said, steering the station wagon into the heavy afternoon traffic that ran around the square. A truck horn sounded behind them.
“Pay no attention,” Pierce said.
Dell wiped beads of rain from her handbag. She said, “Could I possibly get a dry cigarette from someone?”
“Lean up, Nicholas,” Pierce said. Nicholas turned sideways behind the wheel, and Pierce fished a pack of cigarettes from his raincoat pocket. “There,” he said. He flipped the cigarettes over the seat to Dell. “That thing by your arm is an ashtray if you pull it out.”
