A Perfect Life

by Eileen Pollack

  “You weren’t even trying,” I said. “You let the wind take us.”

  “I got tired,” he said. “I haven’t had a beer since Tuesday. My mind was on something else. It was on Ted. It would have been a whole lot worse if I’d jumped on the brakes.” It turned out that Ted was hitching from Montana, where he had been working on a ranch. He told his father he wanted to “live for a while” before he went to college, as if he equated learning with death.

  We got back on the turnpike just long enough to reach the next exit. The town of Malvern Hill was a row of darkened souvenir shops, a taxidermist, a diner, and a movie theater that was closed until the following spring. Willie parked beside the theater. The posters advertised an aging Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in The Misfits and Dusty Land addressing a mob of disgruntled townspeople from a mule in Farmer Sinclair. He was the same age as Willie, with the same cleft chin and broad cheeks. The actor on that mule could have been Willie with a crew cut.

  “That’s what it’s like to be famous,” he said. At first, I thought he meant fame kept a person’s memory alive. Then I noticed that some wise guy had traced FUCK in the grime across Willie’s father’s face.

  I asked if he ever watched his father’s movies.

  “I used to,” he said. “The late show. Or revivals in theaters like this. After the curtains closed I’d sit there a long time, like maybe he was going to change into regular clothes and come out.” He threw his voice so the poster seemed to twang in a musical drawl: “‘Hey, kid, how you doin’? Heard you pluckin’ that guitar in your room, didn’t sound half bad. Now, about that girl in your art class. The one you took a shine to. What’s her name? Denise? Here’s how you go about gettin’ her attention . . .’” Willie snorted. “Then I got older, and all I wanted to do was go up there and punch a hole in the screen. Here I was asking him all this important stuff, and all he could do was say those same lousy lines from Farmer Sinclair: ‘Don’t wait up for me, son. I’m goin’ down to Washington to fix what needs fixin’.’” He used his parka to wipe the glass. “This hard for you?” he asked. “Your dad remarrying and all?”

  It was. And it wasn’t. I was happy that my father would have a new companion. But wives weren’t interchangeable. Surely mothers weren’t. “She was so beautiful,” I said. “People used to think she was an actress.” A few dried leaves scraped across the mosaic at our feet. “One time, I went to see this movie at the old Orson Welles Theater. In Cambridge, you know? Before it burned down? Anyway, that woman came on, the woman who holds the torch for Columbia Pictures? That’s who my mother reminded me of. She had that faraway look, as if maybe she was thinking . . . I’ll never know what she was thinking.” My throat knotted. “The woman with the torch never stayed on the screen for very long. You would blink and she’d be gone.”

  He put his arms around me. The damp feathers in his parka made me think of the poultry farms around Mule’s Neck. “Maybe we shouldn’t have stopped here,” he said. “Maybe we should get back on the road.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m hungry. I’ve got to eat.” I dried my nose on his sleeve.

  “You been skipping meals again?”

  “No,” I said. And I hadn’t. I devoured two-sandwich lunches at the deli, then lingered over rice pudding and hot cocoa to delay returning to the lab. One Saturday, I had cooked a slab of London broil for my weekly dinner with Maureen, only to remember that Maureen had gone to Maine, after which I ate both portions myself.

  “We might as well eat an early dinner,” he said. “Maybe the sleet will let up.”

  The Malvern Diner was larger than the Drurys’ trailer, although with each gust of wind it threatened to break loose from its foundation. I ordered the chicken parmigiana, salad, and a side dish of macaroni and cheese. Willie ordered a chocolate frappé. For dessert, I ate apple pie with ice cream.

  “So.” He slurped the frappé. “I’m not sorry about what we did. It’s just, when we got back from that place, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would really be like if both of us came down with the disease. Or if we had a kid who was even more likely than Ted to get it.”

  This was crazy, I thought. He had given me something wonderful, then taken it back, then given it again, then taken it back. And now? What was I supposed to do—turn all his old arguments against him?

  “I care about you, Jane. I care about you a lot. But we’re going to be part of the same family. We’re going to be stepbrother and stepsister. Think of all those times we’ll be sitting across from each other at some big table with a turkey on it. My mother didn’t even want me to marry Peg. She was furious that we had a kid. She’s terrified, just terrified, that Ted’s going to come down with it. That he’ll have to go through what she watched Dusty go through. So, maybe you could tell me that you won’t hold this against me. At least not forever.”

  I wanted to say I would. But how could I pretend that he was no more to me than a stepbrother when every time I looked at him I would remember what we had done on that island? “I’ll forgive you,” I said. “Someday. But not right now.”

  “All right.” He slapped the table. “You ready to hit the road?”

  We crossed the Hudson at five. The bridge was narrow and high and glazed with ice. The wind kept threatening to snatch the Jeep and toss it in the river. I thought of Henry Hudson pitching on those waves, sailing up that nameless river without a map.

  The directions to Mule’s Neck became more complex. Take that right. Turn left past that barn. It came to me how easily I could have been born somewhere else, born to other parents. Although, if I had been, I wouldn’t have been aware of the fate I had been spared.

  “That’s the exit,” I said, and even at twenty miles an hour, Willie needed to pump the brakes to keep from skidding. I had heard talk that the ramp there curved so sharply because my father had bribed the governor to run the exit past his store. For years, I had been intending to confront my father with this charge, but I had never gotten around to it. I could imagine his defense: the engineers could have found a way to build the ramp safely, or they could have built the ramp farther north. No matter where the exit went, my father would have given money to whatever numskull ran for governor on the Democratic ticket. I told myself that my father’s work for the Valentine’s foundation would benefit far more people than his road had injured, although it also seemed true that, like most people’s children, I would be the only person who would carry out such a detailed accounting of his good and bad deeds.

  We pulled into the lot for Weiss’s, which seemed fuller than I remembered. Since the early seventies, my father’s stores had been losing business to the trendier malls near Albany. He had tried to keep up, but he had never really meant to run that kind of store. When he had come home from the war, it was all he could do to buy the old bait-shop that stood on this site and fill it with watch caps, rubber boots, and knives he bought cheap from Uncle Sam. By the late 1950s, he was able to knock down the bait shop and build this cinder-block bunker with an escalator up, although he never built one down. “Anyone too lazy to walk down a flight of stairs, I can do without their business,” he used to say.

  I was well past the line of registers before I began to notice all the changes. Someone had put in a new mint-green carpet and chrome-and-glass counters with sliding doors. The clerks stood behind those counters looking stunned by all the light, ill at ease among the mannequins who struck poses on their pedestals with sneering mouths and cocked hips.

  “It looks like a whorehouse,” I said.

  Willie’s head brushed an inflatable candy cane that was the closest Weiss’s Supply had ever come to Christmas decorations. “It’s my mom,” he said. “She changes everything she gets her hands on. And if your father knows what’s good for him, he’ll do what she says to do. If my dad hadn’t met her, he’d have ended up a dime-a-dozen alkie cowpoke.” Caught by his reflection in a three-way mirror, he bent and tied his shoe. “How do you think I stopped boozing? There I was in that godfor
saken cabin, pissing and moaning because my wife went off and took my son, the snow’s halfway up the door, and my mom gets through like the friggin’ Mounties. She’s got on these pointy leather boots, hat not worth a damn, nothing in her purse but an airline ticket with my name on it, one-way to Japan. Why Japan? Who knows. She must have thought Asians don’t drink. Which they don’t. Much. Or rather they do, but it’s hard for a foreigner to figure out how to ask for beer. And that sake stuff—I never was much for drinking my booze warm.” All four Willies—the real one and the three reflections—shook their heads. “I’m in this garden in Kyoto, I’m staring at this rock, this little stream, and that’s it, I stopped wanting. I can’t explain it, Jane. You would laugh if I tried. All I’ll say is, I knew that if only I would stop worrying about so many things, I wouldn’t have anything left to worry about. I spent nine months at that temple. Then I scrounged enough money for a ticket home and never touched another beer. Well, mostly I didn’t. Just some nights, when Ted had gone back to Long Island.”

  I saw him sitting in his cabin, drinking glass after glass of the chocolate milk he had bought for the son who’d just left.

  “The long and the short of it is, if she wants you to change, you change.”

  He made it sound easy. In truth, I had always thought it was difficult to change. My sister used to spend hours practicing new ways to sign her name, Laurel Weiss, Laurel Weiss, forcing her hand to crown the W and L with curly loops. But whenever she grew impatient, she signed her name with the same blocky capital letters she had learned in elementary school.

  We walked through Men’s Haberdasheries, past ties and suspenders of a quality the store had never carried. I pushed a door with no nameplate and was relieved to see my father’s office exactly as it had been. He sat behind his desk, signing checks. “Janie!” He got to his feet and held me at arm’s length and inspected me. I began to say Don’t, then realized I had been inspecting him, too, to see how badly he had aged in the few months since I’d seen him. “I’m sorry to take you away from your work for this silly business. If it was up to me, we’d just go see the rabbi and get this over with. But Honey wants the real thing. And hell, it’s the broad’s last chance.” He cuffed Willie’s arm. “No offense, son. Your mother may be a broad, but she’s the classiest broad on the planet.” He fingered my shirt. “Why don’t you run upstairs and pick out something nice.” He jerked his thumb toward the ceiling. “You ought to see it. Fancy sofas and chairs. Whatnots on the tables. Honey’s still hocking me to redo the fitting room—you know, divide it into stalls. I say, what’s the matter with the fitting room the way it is, all one big space? One dame doesn’t like to see another dame in her gatkes? And she says no, if women see each other trying on clothes they start comparing themselves, each one thinks the other one is skinnier or she’s got a bigger bust, and next thing you know, everybody’s got their own clothes back on and they’re headed out the door.” He waited to hear whose side I would take.

  “That’s okay, Dad,” I said. “I already have a dress,” and I offered silent thanks to Maureen that I did. I had been avoiding that fitting room for years, as if my mother’s reflection might still be flitting from glass to glass, trapped in the room where she had spent so many hours trying on the latest clothes.

  “And what about you?” My father jabbed Willie in the ribs. “We’ve got some irregular suits on special. Not that I would expect you to pay, now you’re family.”

  I needed a moment to understand he meant Willie would be his stepson. Never mind Willie’s mother, what would my father think if I dated—or married—Willie?

  “Thanks for the offer, Herb.” Willie returned my father’s jab. “But I’ve got the clothes situation under control.”

  I asked if my father wanted us to pick up some groceries on our way through town.

  “Ahh,” he said, “you didn’t shlep all this way to cook for me. Besides, Honey ordered a crate of stuff from New York. She worries I don’t eat right when she’s not here.”

  Which he probably didn’t. Since my mother’s death, he had subsisted largely on sandwiches and hot dogs he brought home from the snack shop at the store.

  “I’ve got to finish these checks. Maybe you could do me a favor. It’s her things. Someone needs to get rid of them before Honey moves in.”

  “Her” meant my mother. But I wasn’t sure which “things” he meant me to throw out. A week after my mother’s death, my father had given all her clothing to the thrift shop. He had kept only her hairbrush and her cap from graduation.

  “The kitchen things,” he said. “You know how women are,” as if I weren’t one myself but had studied them at college. “One woman doesn’t want to cook with another woman’s things. Your mother’s books are in the basement. If you want them, they’re yours. If not, just get rid of them.”

  We left him at the store, doing work he had manufactured so he wouldn’t have to watch his daughter throw out his wife’s textbooks from college. The Jeep crawled slowly up the hill, Willie peering out the windshield like an elderly woman afraid of breaking a hip. “I’ll come in for a while,” he offered. “If you want me to come in.” But I could tell he was anxious to drive to the motel where his mother and Ted were staying. “He’s hitching in,” Willie said. “I used to hitch all over. But it’s not like it used to be. And Ted, well, he’s not much of a fighter. I know it doesn’t matter if I wait up for him. But I’d rather be there, in case he calls.”

  I shook my head to clear the image of my sister driving to Mule’s Neck on the back of Cruz’s motorbike. That icy ramp, unlit. Cruz, a stranger, unaware of how sharply the exit curved.

  “See you at the wedding,” Willie said. And he left me standing in front of the house in which my mother had lived and died and in which my father would be getting married to another woman the following day.

  I tottered up the walk, balancing my weight between my suitcase in one arm and the mouse cage in the other. For weeks I had been trying to get the homozygous mouse to mate. Despite Maureen’s report that he had humped that rubber toy, he had refused to mount a real mate. Maybe the disease had rendered him infertile. Still, I kept hoping. Some mice are just picky. Before leaving Cambridge, I had placed a new female in the cage; I had brought along the pair because I needed to record the exact date they mated—this involved a twice-daily gynecological exam of the girl mouse—so I wouldn’t miss the birth.

  The dining room had been enlarged and an extension added. The new room looked like a greenhouse, with tropical flowers and potted plants. In the corner stood my globe, so exotic and oversized it might have been a meteor that had landed in the middle of the new Persian rug. I found the spot where Mule’s Neck would have been if the mapmaker had marked places that small. Until now, my father had left his hometown only to be a soldier in World War II and to pursue a cure to the disease that killed his wife. I spun the globe, praying that he and Willie’s mother would have time to travel everywhere, to make love in strange beds, to eat good meals, to see interesting sights.

  The new kitchen was double the size of the old one, all butcher block and tile. Lined up along one wall were my mother’s old dishes, which had probably cost twenty dollars for the set when she had bought them at Weiss’s. I wrapped the dishes for the thrift shop. In another carton, I packed the glass dessert-bowls in which I had displayed the eggs for my science-fair project. But I kept the Waring blender, which my father had brought home from the store to help my mother make baby food to suit Laurel’s finicky taste. I stroked the jar of ribbed glass, the beveled silver base with its four upright prongs. The year I had spent nursing my mother through the last ravages of her illness, I had used this blender to mix chicken for her dinner. I had tied a beautician’s smock around her neck, tilted her body forward, and spooned the gruel in her mouth. I had reminded her to swallow, made sure her mouth was clear, then spooned in more gruel, following the method I had read in a pamphlet that began: “So, you got the news, your loved one has Valentine’s.�
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  Once, just to hear myself talk, I had explained to my mother that a blender exactly like this one had been used to perform one of modern biology’s most famous experiments. The blender was the perfect equipment with which to shake loose the tails of viral phage from the bacteria they had latched on to, allowing scientists to study the DNA with which the virus had infected the cells. I hated that blender, remembering all the times I hadn’t run it long enough so the meat was too thick and my mother gagged, or the times I had neglected to strain the puree and my mother had coughed and coughed, spraying pap across the room. Still, this blender had kept her alive a year longer than she might otherwise have lived.

  I set aside my mother’s tablecloths for Laurel, and the little yellow corn-holders Laurel and I had bought our mother for her birthday one year. It was after eight thirty. My father couldn’t invent things to do much longer at the store. I went down to the basement and found the box of books. On top of the stack was a spiral-bound notebook with a psychedelic cover. Given all the money that my mother’s parents had wasted on their sons’ education, they hadn’t been inclined to send her to college, too. She hadn’t started school until the 1960s, a middle-aged housewife in tailored suits amid long-haired kids in jeans. Like Laurel, I had resented her new career. I was still at that age when I assumed my mother’s attention should be devoted to me. But I couldn’t help but feel proud that she was smarter than other mothers. Bored as I was at school, she allowed me to skip my classes and go to hers. We rode back and forth to Albany, chatting about astronomy or math. Once, during lunch, I asked about the smell in the college cafeteria. It was like my father’s cigars, only sweeter.

  “Oh, it’s marijuana,” she told me absently. “Some of the boys were smoking it in organic chem the other day.” She didn’t seem to care what her classmates smoked. She was too intent on making up for all those lost years—after she finished her undergraduate degree, she started taking classes toward her doctorate in biology—to notice that the men wore earrings or the young women went braless or her notebooks were covered with multicolored sequins that changed their patterns when you moved your eyes.