by Mary Robison
Relations
I SAW MY COUSIN JUNIOR three times in San Francisco before we spoke to each other. Twice I saw him at the Southern Pacific Depot, at the cafeteria there. Once I saw him walking in the opposite direction on Post Street. The time we did speak, Junior was sitting on a curb in front of Curl’s Bar, wearing a ponyskin jacket, chain-smoking, letting the rain cool his cup of coffee.
Actually, now that I think about it, it may have been in Chicago, at the Harvey restaurant in the train station, that we first spoke. Junior came in carrying a string-handled Marshall Field sack of tape reels. It was raining. I can say that. A winter rain, with a wind that bent up the spokes of my umbrella. Whatever year it was, I remember Max Roach was playing with Miles Davis still. John Huston was filming The African Queen.
Definitely it was San Francisco, because my boyfriend, Warren, was off at Great Lakes, going to Korea then, and I told Junior how broken up I was. Junior said he was upset, too, only it was over a girl who had chopped off her hair and gone down to San Diego to work in a marine hardware foundry. Right, and Junior had his carton of tape reels pushed under the window awning at Curl’s, to keep it out of the rain. They were radio tapes, I think he told me, made at Voice of America, where he had a job as a technician, or a sound engineer.
So we were talking, and Junior kept complimenting my Shetland Islands sweater, which was new and waterproofed with oil, so that it smelled like a fuel tanker. He wanted me to give him the sweater, and I finally agreed to trade it for his ponyskin jacket. His voice was trembling, I remember. He said he had had a headache ever since Lent. He never gave my sweater back. But then, he never saw his leather jacket again, either.
He took me to his apartment—and now I’m sure it was in California, because I remember it was a ten-room apartment on Shattuck that I had thought of renting. His mother, my aunt Barbara, was visiting, or living there. She was hunched over a sinkful of dishes, wearing yellow rubber gloves.
She went on and on about my father—how sad my father got after I left home. Junior was sharing the cigarette Aunt Barbara had balanced on a soap dish, and he tried to stick up for me in his own way. He said I had never cared a damn whether my parents were happy or sad, and that I wasn’t supposed to, or Aunt Barbara said I wasn’t supposed to.
Anyway, there was a man there, in a checkered suit and felt hat. He wore the hat inside the house and he was drinking bourbon. Junior introduced the man as Brad something, a builder. I don’t know if he was Junior’s friend or Aunt Barbara’s.
Junior and I wandered around the back rooms of the apartment and I opened some doors and said I envied the closet space. Junior had his glasses off, massaging the bridge of his nose, and said he’d rather think in mathematics, in calculus, than in English. He said sometimes, on drugs, he thought in camera slides, and sometimes, sometimes in wallpaper patterns.
He played horn music for me on a tape recorder in a portable valise. I sat at a roll-top desk by a bay window. Junior crushed up Dexedrine cartwheels and poured the powder into his coffee. Then he balanced himself on the steam radiator. He had a rice-paper scroll tacked up that ran the length of the wall. I think I fell asleep on my elbow for a minute. When I came to, Junior was still on the radiator, talking about bamboo-brush painting. After a while he got hiccups and came down and sat on his heels and held his breath. I pounded him on the back between the shoulder blades and cured his hiccups, or maybe they went away naturally, but anyway, we left then. Junior drove me to my flat on Divisadero. He drove me on a motorcycle that was strapped with saddlebags full of tapes from Voice of America, which I don’t believe I ever got a chance to hear.
He kissed me between the eyes. He said he’d visit me again when I stopped being embarrassed.
Years later we met in the Fillmore district. I spotted Junior as he stepped out of a taxi, and mopped his brow on my sweater, which he was still wearing.
The builder, Brad, the one who was Junior’s or Aunt Barbara’s friend, was driving the taxi. He was dressed in the same suit as that night on Shattuck Avenue, but his hair had gone gray, and he wore dark glasses. He was moving around on the front seat of the cab, cleaning the window with a lady’s white glove. He urged me to get in, or Junior urged me, and we rode over to a basement room Junior said was his office.
Junior’s office had blackboards, graph sheets pinned up, ashtrays as big as fish bowls. He scribbled on the blackboards with pink chalk, and got mad when I asked what his business was.
But the next summer I got a phone call I’m almost sure was from Junior. I had a standing floor fan going in my room, so I could barely understand, but I think Junior said anyone interested in credentials could phone Berkeley.
It was later, when I was working in a Harvey restaurant, in Chicago, that Junior telephoned from O’Hare and said he needed a ride. He was in town for the Democratic convention, he said, and he said that his headache was worse.
It took a long time to get to the airport and then I had trouble parking. Junior was waiting for me at the American Airlines baggage ramp. He wore a beige turtleneck and had a bouquet of mums.
He talked about having children. He asked if I didn’t think having children was a fine idea. He said usually he enjoyed hearing my opinions, or else he said he had never heard my opinions and wondered if I had any.
We were in my Plymouth, on the expressway, passing a red weedfield that was going to be subdivided into a housing tract, when Junior asked to be let out. I pulled onto the berm and stopped. A bad wind was throwing paper trash and Dixie cups around.
Junior said he was going to walk back and sit on a pine bench he had seen. He said after that he might run around in the weedfield until he got lost, and maybe he did, too, because I only saw him one other time before I saw him dead at his funeral—he was hit by a post office truck in a Florida crosswalk on his way to Disney World—and that one other time I saw him was when Aunt Barbara got married to a man who owned a soda-bottling company.
Beach Traffic
VIRGINIA DRANK COFFEE. SHE LEANED against the cosmetics counter in the family store, and watched her daughter, Cheryl, turn a wire carrousel that was hung with lipsticks on cards.
Cheryl, a thirty-year-old in a sand-colored dress, had her hair wound on a dozen metal curlers and covered with a plaid scarf.
“Sonny’s coming,” Cheryl said. She selected a brown eyebrow pencil in a silver tube.
“I hope he doesn’t want Vern to help him caulk his boat,” Virginia said. She went to the doorway at the front of the store, where she could see her husband, Vern, deep in the yard between their store and their house. Vern was planing a board that was C-clamped to carpenter’s horses. A round sucker popped out his right cheek. The paper stick stuck from his mouth like a cigarette.
“Your father is making a picnic table,” Virginia said to Cheryl.
“That makes five tables, and he’s yet to sell one this year,” Cheryl said. “Besides, summer’s over. Maybe Sonny can talk him out of it. May I have this?” Cheryl asked. She held up the pencil.
“Yes,” Virginia said, “but no one can talk to Vern about his tables.” She went out the doorway and walked beneath a line of tall cottonwoods that fronted the two-lane highway.
The road was clear of beach traffic, though it had once been the main route to Atlantic City. Five unfinished picnic tables were set on the wide gravel shoulder of the road. There was a sandwich board, opened on legs, on which Virginia had painted: “$66.00.”
“Good day,” Virginia said.
“Good day,” Vern said, dragging a piece of sandpaper across his board. He stopped sanding, and stared at his work shoe, then squatted and tied the lace. Unfiltered cigarettes fell from his breast pocket into the grass.
“I haven’t seen you today,” Virginia said. “I didn’t hear you get in bed last night, and I don’t believe I heard you getting up this morning.”
“You were having a time,” Vern said. He crushed the lollipop with his teeth and extracted the stick from his m
outh and put it into his trouser pocket.
“What was I doing?” Virginia said.
“Thrashing,” Vern said. “I thought your teeth might be hurting you again.” He picked a curl of wood shaving off his shoulder. “Or you were having a nightmare.”
“Yes, I was dreaming,” Virginia said. “I dreamed of a truck that could go into the sea and bring out fish.”
A salt-stained Buick pulled into the store’s parking lot. An old couple got out and helped each other along the walk.
Virginia followed the couple into the store, and showed them where to find laundry soap and a tin of aspirin.
“Watch the curves if you’re going north,” she said, punching the keys on the cash register. “People are in such a rush.”
After the couple left, Virginia sat on the soft-drink refrigerator. Behind her was a bright wall of unguents and sun sprays.
A man with a helmet came in and walked toward the magazine rack. He wore tight vinyl chaps over his dungarees. Triumph was silkscreened on the back of his jersey.
The man had a cigarette while he looked at magazines. Virginia got off the refrigerator and went behind the register. She stood in front of a display of photographs she had taken. She’d cut mounts from illustration board and framed the pictures with aluminum and glass. One photo showed Vern riding alone on a Ferris wheel. Another picture was of Cheryl at the shore. The photograph was cropped to an extreme close-up, and overdeveloped, so that Cheryl’s eyes and mouth looked black and torn.
“Cousin?” the motorcyclist said.
“May I help you?” Virginia said.
“What are those?” the man said, nodding at Virginia’s photographs.
“Nothing.”
“You sell many of those?”
“No,” Virginia said, “because they aren’t for sale.”
“Why are they there, then?” the man said. “Did you shoot them?”
Virginia began to take the pictures down, stacking the frames against her breasts.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “I like them.”
“Were you going to buy something?” Virginia said.
Cheryl reappeared in the doorway. She had painted her eyes, and brushed her hair into thick waves.
“Hello, cousin,” the man said to Cheryl.
“Sonny still isn’t here,” Cheryl said.
“Who is Sonny?” the motorcyclist asked.
“My former husband,” Cheryl said. “He’s very big.”
“Well, he’d have to be,” the motorcyclist said. He went to Cheryl and put his arm on her shoulder. “Do you like being this tall?” he asked her. He turned Cheryl around toward the lot so she could see the large motorcycle tilted on its kickstand. “Want to go for a ride?” he said.
“I saw it,” Cheryl said. “Of course not. I’m waiting for Sonny.”
“And if she weren’t, her father would have yard work for her to do,” Virginia said.
The motorcyclist took his arm off Cheryl and lit another cigarette.
Sonny’s car, towing a boat trailer and with the amplified radio at full volume, turned into the parking lot. On Sonny’s trailer was a fiberglass catamaran, and on the roof of his car a twenty-foot mast was fixed with cable. Orange safety pennants licked the wind at both ends of the mast. A radio voice from inside the car sang, “Your mamma won’t mind, your mamma won’t mind.”
“Looks like Sonny’s got a catamaran,” the motorcyclist said to Cheryl.
Sonny came into the store. His cheeks were burned and he was wearing wraparound glasses. He grinned at Virginia, and shook his fingers on Cheryl’s head, mussing her hair.
“Is that your bike?” Sonny asked the motorcyclist.
“Well,” the man said, “I did all the work on it myself.”
“What happened to your photographs?” Sonny asked Virginia.
“I got tired of them,” Virginia said.
Sonny tilted open the lid on the floor refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of soda. “So, what have you been doing?” he said to Cheryl.
“I’m hurt you didn’t take me sailing this morning, Sonny,” she said.
“I had to take someone I owed a favor to. She was not a good sailor.”
“Is that right?” the motorcyclist said, blowing a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. “She was not a good sailor?”
“What’s going on?” Vern said from the doorway. He was holding a spanner wrench.
Sonny said, “Vern, you look well. I see you have your picnic tables all lined up by the road. And how about that new one you’re working on? What’ll it go for?”
“A lot of money,” Vern said. “It’s redwood.”
“Everybody likes your tables, Vern,” Sonny said. “But they don’t fit on cars.”
“Same old argument,” Vern said. He pointed his wrench at the motorcyclist’s stomach. He said, “Who is this, Sonny? A friend of yours?”
“A customer,” Sonny said. “He got the word on your tables. He’ll take six.”
“I was leaving,” the motorcyclist said. He put on his helmet, and crushed his cigarette against the floor with his boot toe. “I might come back,” he said to Cheryl and Virginia.
“Please don’t,” Sonny said. “You’re too ugly.”
“Aren’t I ugly?” the motorcyclist said, snapping his chin strap.
VIRGINIA PUT COLD HAM AND paper plates of cream salad on one of Vern’s tables in the backyard. Sonny made a pitcher of mint tea. He told about sailing and about television shows he’d seen. He talked about the city—how dangerous the city was.
“I’m amazed you’ve lasted this long,” Cheryl said. “Working in an office.”
“Don’t start an old fight, Cheryl,” Sonny said.
“I’ve learned how to strike back,” Cheryl said, grinning. She shot her fists in the air in combinations and, from a low crouch, drove a whipping left into Sonny’s thigh muscle.
Vern said he was going to put some apple chunks out for the squirrels. “And if you want some color in your pictures,” he said to Virginia, “get your camera. You can catch some jays swooping in.”
When Vern left, Sonny said, “He seems recovered.”
“Oh, he’s weak, but he doesn’t complain, Sonny,” Virginia said.
Cheryl said, “For a while after, his words were slushy.”
Out on the highway, a siren whooped and they listened to it fade.
“That’s an ambulance, not the patrol,” Virginia said.
“It’s probably that motorcyclist,” Sonny said.
VIRGINIA SAT AT THE PICNIC table awhile with her legs crossed and her arms folded. Sonny and Cheryl went to the middle of the lawn, out of the shade, and spread Sonny’s boat sails to dry.
“I’m going in for a sweater,” Virginia called to them.
In the house, in the bedroom, she lifted a large yellow box from the top of a dresser. In the box was a twin-lens camera and a light meter.
Virginia was taking a small can of film from the refrigerator when Vern came in.
He said, “You going to use that, Ginny? I’ll tell the kids.”
“Don’t tell them,” Virginia said. “I was just thinking about it.”
“Better get a picture,” Vern said, with his hands on his hips. “Everyone looking so nice.”
They walked back to the lawn. Virginia began to take light readings with the meter.
“Get ready for pictures,” Vern said to Sonny.
Vern licked his palms and smoothed back his hair. He twirled up the points of an imaginary mustache.
“What’s the occasion?” Sonny said, taking off his glasses.
“Just a good day,” Vern said, “whenever you come by with your boats.”
“Calm down,” Virginia said, “until I’m used to the light.”
May Queen
I SEE HER SKIRT, DENISE,” Mickey said to his wife. “It’s blue. I can’t see her face because her head’s lowered, but the two attendants with her are wearing gloves, right?”
He wa
s standing on the hood of his new tan Lincoln Continental, in a parking space behind the crowds of parents outside St. Rose of Lima Church, in Indianapolis. He had one hand over his eyebrows, explorer style, against the brilliant noonday sun. He was trying to see their daughter, Riva, who had been elected May Queen by her senior high-school class, and who was leading students from all the twelve grades in a procession around the school grounds.
“There’s a guy with balloons over there,” Mickey said.
Denise stood with the small of her back leaning against one of the car headlights. Around her there were a good three or four hundred people, scattered in the parking lot and on some of the school’s athletic fields. They held mimeographed hymn sheets, loose bunches of garden flowers, little children’s hands. Some of the women wore straw hats with wide brims and some of the men wore visored golf hats, against the sun, which was cutting and white, gleaming on car chrome and flattening the colors of clothes.
Mickey and Denise had been late getting started, and then Mickey had had trouble parking. “It’s a damn good thing that the nuns picked Riva up this morning,” Denise had said. “We’d have fritzed this whole thing.”
Mickey moved cautiously along the hood of the Lincoln and jumped to the ground. “They’re headed our way,” he said. “They’re past the elementary annex and rounding the backstops.”
Denise said, “How does she look, Mick? Scared?”
“Sharp,” Mickey said. “Right in step.”
“I know,” Denise said, clapping her hands. “I love that dress, if I do say so.”
“I keep forgetting it was your handiwork,” Mickey said.
Denise pushed her glasses up on her nose and made a mad face. Her glasses had lenses that magnified her eyes. “So is this, you forget,” she said, pinching the bodice of her dress. She stood away so Mickey could admire her sleeveless green shift and the matching veil pinned in her shining gray hair.
After a while she said, “You know, three other parishes are having May processions today. I don’t care. Ours is best. Ours is always the best, though I do like the all-men’s choir at St. Catherine’s.”
