Tell Me

by Mary Robison

  “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—knowing it was for the last time.

  13

  While Home

  THE DEFOREST KIDS WERE in the Lakebreeze Laundromat. “Whose treat is lunch?” asked Jonathan. He and little Lana looked over at their older brother, Shane. Severely handsome, he was taking his ease in a kelly-green scoop chair. Lana, who was seven, had been lifted up and set on top of a broken clothes washer.

  “I guess I’m the only one with money,” Shane said morosely.

  A machine, beginning its spin cycle, let off a shivery whir.

  “Tie my shoe for me,” Lana said.

  Jonathan, who was eighteen, had already flicked through all five of the laundromat’s magazines. He gave up pacing now and drew what string remained of Lana’s shoelace back and forth between the lowest eyelets of her sneaker, evening the shredded ends.

  “Tight,” Lana said.

  From his chair, Shane said, “I know who had money. The dog. This morning, I found the corner of a ten in its bed, Lana. The rest of the bill obviously chewed up and swallowed.”

  “No, sir,” Lana said. Rosalie was her dog.

  “Probably my ten,” said Jonathan, as he secured a bowless double knot on Lana’s shoe.

  “You ate the money, if Rosalie didn’t,” Shane said to Lana. He sighed. “O.K., I’ll cover lunch,” he said. “But one of you has to bring it here to me. I’m not sitting in any restaurant in a swimsuit. You’ve got to go get the food—is that agreed?”

  Shane was conscious of his nice good looks and his light voice, which made these orders seem less than demands. He was a sometime model and actor who had come back for a while to recover from a year and a half of spectacular unsuccess in Los Angeles. If he found a decent job here at home, he might just change his plans. His present role, of returned prodigal and older brother, was the best of his career so far.

  “Sure, sure, agreed,” Jonathan said.

  Their town was Ophelia, Ohio, on the lake. The three of them had been swimming in Erie’s friendly little surf. Jonathan’s blond hair formed into stiff bunches now as it dried.

  “Let’s get pizza from Sub Hut,” Lana said dreamily.

  “Too much salt,” Shane said. “I like a subtler pizza.” He took a sandwich Baggie, folded many times for waterproofing, from the buttoned pocket just below the waistband of his swim trunks and extracted a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Hey!” said Lana, in admiration.

  “I’ll have a BLT, rings, and a Strawberry Blizzard,” Shane said.

  “That a regular or a Blizzard Supreme?” Jonathan asked.

  “Second one,” Shane said. He almost had to shout, because water was firing into a nearby machine.

  They had been waiting for their beach things—towels, Levi’s, a pullover, and Lana’s terry cover-up—to finish in the tumble dryer. They had a clothes washer and dryer at home, on the other side of town, but they were temperamental machines, tricky to operate, and their mother had forbidden their use while she was away. She was in Milwaukee, taking care of their grandmother after an operation. “That means especially Lana,” she had said. “No, especially you, Jonathan.”

  Jonathan was on his way out of the laundromat now, but he circled back. “Look outside,” he said, and directed Lana to the front bank of windows. “At this man. He’s coming by any second. You’ve got to see this, Shane. It’s like his hair w
as sculpted on. Like it’s carved out of wood putty.”

  “Here he is,” Lana said.

  “Here, Shane, quick!” Jonathan said. “Is that not carved hair?”

  But Shane did not get up. He sat lower in his chair, with his neck bent. He was hugging himself.

  “Uh-oh. Shane’s thinking again,” Jonathan said.

  “I believe I might be going to have a damned seizure,” Shane told them after a moment. “I only said ‘might,’ so try not to get hysterical.”

  “Nah, you’re not. Are you?” Jonathan said. “Please say no, because I don’t remember what to do. Maybe you just have water in your eardrums. I get it every time I swim.”

  “It’s more than that,” Shane said.

  Lately he had been using a new anticonvulsant for his epilepsy. He had developed an allergy to his regular medication.

  Lana kicked the machine beneath her with the heel of one sneaker. “But this is the first time I was allowed out!” she said.

  Lana had been confined to the Deforests’ front yard for the past couple of weeks. This was for her own good, her mother had reminded Mr. Deforest and the boys before she left, because Lana had recently come home, after an afternoon at the little Kristerson boys’ house, with her dress on backward and the buttoning sequence missed by two.

  “Please wait until after we eat, and then you can,” Lana said to Shane. “You shouldn’t lie down here or anything.”

  “Lana, he can’t control when,” Jonathan said.

  Without taking his eyes from the floor tiling, Shane said, “No, and I really think I’m going to.”

  •

  Back home, Shane rested in a rope hammock that was strung between two sweet-apple trees. He had not had a seizure. “Quit waiting!” he ordered Lana.

  She kept watching him. She was lying on her belly on a green upholstered chaise outside the trees’ shade. She had stripped down again to her red-checked gingham swimsuit, which she had worn at the lake. “I’m not bothering you,” she said.

  “You’re waiting for me to have a convulsion. If you weren’t, you’d be helping Jonathan dig or you’d chase Rosalie. You’d be doing anything but lying still, Lana. I know you.”

  “I don’t care,” Lana said.

  “Not responsive,” said Shane.

  “Tomorrow I want to help Jonathan. Today I’m getting more suntan,” she said.

  Jonathan was on the other side of the modest yard, working a patch of worn lawn with a shovel. Whistling rhythmically to himself, he jimmied loose a stone and then kicked the point of the shovel into the ground again for a new bite of dirt. He was digging a shallow trench around a mound of earth he would eventually dress with rocks—making a strawberry patch, he had announced. His real idea was to strengthen his back and shoulder muscles. He wanted to be able to manage a more serious, faster motocross bike than his aging Suzuki. He had talked this over a few days before with a mechanic at the Cycle Corral—a fellow who had once raced professionally.

  “I’d forget about a KTM or a Husky, if I were you,” the mechanic had said. “A real thunderbutt bike’d just intimidate you. Way too much power in the midrange, with your little arms. You’d get blasted out of the saddle. See, I could give you this 495 and take your old bike and in the woods I’d still beat you, because you have to stay lower in the power band or lose it. While you’re fighting, I’m gone. And you won’t want to take a monster bike off to college with you anyway. Not freshman year, you don’t.”

  Jonathan twisted his shovel on a carrotlike section of root he had struck. He chopped at it, rested, and chopped. He looked up as two young women approached the split-rail fence that bordered the yard. The Deforests’ neighborhood was old enough to be very shady, but the women were in a stretch of sun at the moment, walking jauntily and seeming carefree and entertained by each other.

  “Shane,” Jonathan said in a low voice. “Two girls coming.”

  “Describe them,” Shane said without raising his head.

  “They look nice. One has sort of beaming red hair. I mean bright-bright.”

  “It’s Kay,” Shane said. “A chatterbox and sort of a rival. I don’t want to see her. Are you positive they’re coming here?”

  “They’re here,” Lana said. “Open up your eyes and find out, Shane, instead of always asking Jonathan.”

  “Can it, Lana. I have a good reason. I can’t just gape around at them. I mustn’t show interest. Kay works at the store where I’ve been desperately trying to get a job.”

  “Well, I’m not here,” Jonathan said. “They’re your problem, Shane. I’m not talking to them.”

  Sitting forward in the hammock, Shane said, “Kay—hey, hello.”

  The girls had stopped, still in the sun. They had roller skates slung around their necks.

  “Shane? I remembered your name,” the redhead said. She folded her pretty freckled arms on the fence’s upper railing and planted a green espadrille on the lower. “And you remembered mine.”

  “His name is what?” the other girl asked. She was more delicate than Kay, and darker.

  “It’s Shane. Isn’t that cool?” Kay said. “Hey, there, Harpo!” she called to Jonathan.

  “He’ll never forgive you,” Shane said. “He hates his curls.”

  Jonathan had turned abruptly and was facing in the opposite direction now, digging away at the already trenched earth.

  “That, whose whole life you’ve just ruined, is my brother, Jonathan,” Shane said. “This is Lana, my illegitimate child.”

  Lana made a show of covering herself up to her nose with her beach towel.

  “He’s joking,” the redhead explained. “That’s not his kid.”

  “So let me take a guess where you two are going,” Shane said. “I have the gift of sometimes seeing right into the future. You’re on your way to … to Skateland.”

  “Astonishing,” the red-haired Kay said.

  “One of my gifts,” Shane said.

  “You didn’t get the job at Carlton’s,” Kay said to Shane. “Have they told you yet? They’re hiring this other guy.”

  Shane had met Kay before his interview at Carlton’s two days ago. She worked in the ladies’ half of the apparel store, which specialized in expensive tailored wear. He had applied for a position as a clerk and salesman. With his modeling history and his looks, he figured he’d be good at fitting and convincing menswear customers, although he had no experience at the work.

  “They haven’t said anything official,” Shane said.

  “Well, they’re not hiring you,” Kay said. “Say, I forgot. This is Maria. Remember, I told you about Maria? My friend that lives in the other half of my double? Only she owns, I rent. She’s my landlady! Aren’t you?” Kay said to Maria.

  “It’s true, I swear,” Maria said. “I’m sorry about it.” She patted Kay’s arm.

  Shane closed his eyes again for a moment, and both girls were instantly quiet, watching his beautiful profile.

  •

  Later on in that week, Mr. Deforest sat in his carpeted kitchen, watching TV. He was home on his lunch hour. The air in the kitchen was cool and full of the aroma of the oniony egg salad Mr. Deforest had just prepared.

  “Looks good. Thank you and greetings,” Shane said, as he entered through the archway. “Now, please, Dad, say only the best things you can think of about my appearance.” He was dressed in a poplin suit, a blue shirt, a navy-and-yellow silk tie. He was going to another interview in the afternoon.

  “You’re good enough for a royal wedding, but you’ll have to model somewhere else, honey,” Mr. Deforest said. “You’re blocking Beirut.”

  “Dad, this suit failed me once before at a job interview. Does it look cheap or something?” Shane said.

  “Affordable, I always say, not cheap. But no. Hell, no, Shane. It’s a better summer suit than anything I own. You look like a store-window dummy.”

  “Maybe that’s the trouble.” Shane scraped some egg salad from its bowl with the wire whisk and ate
very carefully, his head far out over the table.

  Lana darted into the room and immediately took her father’s lap for a seat. Jonathan came in from the yard, shirtless and newly sunburned. “Surprise, surprise, everybody. Egg salad for lunch,” he said, sitting down.

  “If you know how to make anything different, I pass the apron to you,” said Mr. Deforest. “I’m a genius with thermocouples, but this and potpies are just about it for me and cooking.”

  Lana was eating handfuls of the salad, straight from the bowl. “Sure hope you washed your hands,” her father said.

  “A month of eggs,” Jonathan went on. “Our family cholesterol level must be right off the charts.”

  “We’ve had lots of other foods,” Lana said. Her face was smeared with mayonnaise.

  “I’m seeing this guy today, over in Lorain—a sporting-goods store,” Shane said. “My last shot. If he doesn’t hire me, I’m closing out my savings and heading back to L.A.”

  There were groans of protest from the table. “Your mother wanted you around at least until she got back,” Mr. Deforest said. “Grandma’s getting better every day. Why don’t you hang in here a little while?”

  “Because it’s devouring my pathetic bank account, Dad, and I’m also sponging off you. When I was out on the Coast, I made fun of this place, and now I don’t feel good enough for it, since nobody around here will hire me to shine shoes. So to hell with it.”

  “Will you be in movies?” Lana asked.

  “Yes,” Shane said absently.

  “He really could be. That was next,” Jonathan said, more to Shane than anyone else.

  The television news ended with an admonition from the anchorwoman: “It’s twelve twenty-eight and ninety-four degrees, so have yourselves a record-buster, but take it slow out there. Stay cool.”

  “Talking directly to you, Jonathan,” Mr. Deforest said. “You ought to take some salt pills if you’re still going to work on those strawberries.”

  “Salt pills after this egg salad? I’ll be the only teenager to die of sodium poisoning,” Jonathan said.

  An old episode of Hawaii Five-O started up, and Mr. Deforest ticked his spoon on the table in rhythm to the show’s opening theme. “I wish I could stay for this,” he said.