Tell Me

by Mary Robison

  Other times, too, Dieter kept missing the jokes. In the supermarket, when I was helping him shop, he’d look down and see that I had slipped nine or ten packages of pigs’ feet into the basket. If Dieter knew this was odd, he didn’t know it was funny.

  And then, Dieter would do things, himself, that to me were a laugh, but they weren’t to him. I mean, I’ve never been to West Germany, but there must be less space there. Because Dieter would go into a coffee shop or someplace like that and walk right up to a booth where a couple of people were already sitting, and he’d join them. He’d just sit there and read his newspaper, or he’d start a conversation. I’d hear him calling them “meine Herren” or “gnädige Fräulein”—“Your Lordships” and “Gracious Lady”—and then I’d discover they’d never met before!

  A scary thing about marrying Dieter was that it could also mean three years of being spied upon. We’d have to be completely true to each other and very intimate, because I had heard awful stories of immigration inspectors doing spot checks, or calling in one member of a couple like us and asking all manner of personal questions. What’s her perfume? What color towels were in your bathroom this morning? What was she wearing when she left the house this morning?

  I squinted now at Dieter and asked him, “What’s my favorite perfume, that you see me putting on all the time?”

  He shrugged. He said yellow-colored—“Gelb.”

  “Dieter, that’s any or all perfume,” I said, and rocked my head on my pillow. “We are doomed!” I threw my Boffo jokes notebook into the corner. “Ich bin müde,” I said. “I am ge-sleepy.”

  •

  I watched through a separation in the draperies while Dieter parallel-parked his car in the condo driveport. The wipers quit when he killed the engine. He didn’t get out of his car right away, so I waited some more in my foyer. I ended up taking a place on the little settee there, waiting for Dieter to ring my doorbell—after which he would bow and usually shake my hand before he kissed me hello and finally came inside.

  Today I rushed him through all that. I pulled his angora scarf away and kissed his throat. I held his rain-chilly face between my hands and kissed him some more, although he hadn’t even taken off his perfect topcoat. Today I wasn’t going to put up with fussiness. We were going right into action, and this time that would change my heart.

  But this was Halloween. Dieter had a gift for me, and, he said, hopeful news. His gift was a gold locket. The locket was pricey, I sensed, but there was no photo. “Hey, it’s Claude Rains,” I said.

  Dieter gave me a tilted head, a curious look. At last he said, “The Invisible Man? Because in my locket there is no Lichtbild—photograph?”

  “Way to go, Dieter! That’s exactly correct. How’d you get that?” I clapped him on the back in congratulation.

  He also had a box of candy for me. He had signed the card, “On Halloween, to my clown.”

  I slowed up and made coffee for us. We sat by the fire I had laid earlier. Our view through the bow window at the end of the living room was of mountains and the lake, more brilliant than ever, against an ashy sky.

  The fire rustled busily and we sampled some of my chocolates. “So far, I’ve had bad draws,” I said. “A cream thing and an orange center, and now this one is jelly.”

  Dieter’s eyebrows went up. It occurred to me to tell him about Halloween candy: chicken corn and those tiny orange pumpkins. I decided the info wouldn’t have much utility. I also wanted to hear Dieter’s hopeful news.

  It turned out he had been to the lawyers’. There was a chance that Dieter could get a job as a translator for an international news service. He was smart. He could read six or seven languages. The catch would be convincing an immigration inquiry board that he wasn’t taking the job away from a qualified American. Dieter said he’d have to prove he was the only person qualified. But I was still bent on seducing Dieter and falling in love with him. I stood him up and kissed him hard, no doubt tasting of raspberry jelly.

  •

  I watched the red light on Cary Williams’s camera and held for the noise of the five-second buzzer. I had been on the set only an hour and the wig was toasting my scalp. I didn’t usually admit this even to myself, since it wasn’t a solvable problem. What I did mind was that my cheeks were pasty and stiff because my whiteface had dried to chalk. Like an idiot, I had left my makeup kit in my car trunk overnight. Instead of floods recently, we’d had a snap of fearsome cold—excessive for November. At night, in the car trunk, some of my Boffo cosmetics had actually turned to ice.

  The Halloween visit was our last serious get-together, Dieter had announced. He hoped he’d be around town, maybe still be my friend, but he said he couldn’t go through with a marriage—because, he said, I shouldn’t, not out of simple goodwill.

  He had asked me a question I couldn’t exactly answer: “What if you fall in love with somevun for real?” He said I couldn’t be with the hypothetical someone for three long years.

  I spoke the movie’s lead-in now. The card on Dieter’s candy box had said, “To my clown,” hadn’t it? The few times I had got to Dieter, he had a barking, punctuating laugh that would have been an incentive to me, I guessed, had I heard it more often. It would have helped me be funnier. I probably hadn’t been funny lately, I realized, even on Boffo’s level, because I’d been shoring up all my energies while I aimed at being a better person than I was.

  I interrupted the movie’s intro. I said to Cary Williams’s camera, “Excuse me, viewers? Ladies and germs? You’ve been being cheated, in all truth. You’ve been seeing a lazy job of Boffo. But stay watching. We’re about to press the pedal to the floor. We’re about to do it right.”

  On the set there, that got a laugh.

  20

  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 was 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 t
oday. 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.”

  “Mi-mi-mi,” Mickey sang, and Denise elbowed him.

  “Shhh,” she said. “There they are.”

  “So grown up,” Mickey said. “I ought to be hanged for leaving the movie camera at work Friday.”

  Altar boys with raised crucifixes headed the march, and behind them came a priest in a cassock and surplice, swinging a smoking bulb of incense. Riva came next, flanked by two boy attendants, who held the hem of her short cape. Beneath the cape Riva wore a blue bridesmaid’s frock. She carried a tiny wreath of roses and fern on a satin pillow. Her face was lifted in the white light. Her throat moved as she sang the Ave Maria.

  A family of redheads who were grouped ahead of Denise and Mickey turned around and grinned. Mickey wagged his head left and right. “Great!” he said.

  Denise slipped a miniature bottle of spray perfume from her pocketbook. “One of us smells like dry-cleaning fluid,” she said. She wet her wrists with the perfume. “Unless I’m reacting to the incense.”

  “It’s me, I’m afraid,” Mickey said. “This suit’s been in storage nine months.” He brought his coat sleeve to his face and sniffed. “Maybe not. I don’t know. Who cares? Let’s enjoy the damn ceremony.”

  The procession had moved into the church and most of the people went in, too. Mickey and Denise threaded quickly through the crowd to the church doors. Mickey took the handle of Denise’s pocketbook and guided her skillfully, but when they got inside the church, all the pew seats had been taken. They stood in back, in the center aisle, directly in front of the tabernacle. Riva was way up in front, kneeling between her attendants at the altar railing. The children’s choir began a hymn about the month of May and the mother of Christ.

  When the hymn was over, a young boy all in white got up on a stool near the front of the church and sang alone. Riva and her attendants got off their knees and moved to the left of the altar, where a stepladder, draped in linen and hung with bouquets, had been positioned next to a statue of the Virgin Mary. The arms of the statue extended over a bay of burning candles in supplication.

  Riva climbed the stepladder, still carrying the wreath on the satin pillow. She faced the church crowd and held the wreath high. Mickey and Denise grabbed hands. Riva’s eyes were raised. She turned and began to place the wreath over the Virgin’s head.

  “Am I right?” a man standing next to Mickey said. “Her dress looks like it’s caught fire.”

  “Dress is on fire!” someone said loudly. There was quiet, and then there was noise in the church. People half-stood in their pews. A young priest hurried to Riva. She was batting at her gown with the satin pillow. The fern wreath wheeled in the air. Her attendants pulled her down the steps of the ladder.

  Mickey shouted, “Stop!” and ran for the altar. He pushed people out of the way. “I’m her dad,” he said.

  The priest had Riva by both shoulders, pressed against him. He folded her in the apron of his cassock, and a white flame broke under his arm.

  “They both caught,” a woman in front of Mickey said.

  The priest smothered Riva’s flaring skirt. He looked left and right and said, “Everybody stay back.” Riva collapsed on the priest’s arm and slid toward the floor.

  Mickey vaulted over a velvet cord in front of the altar. He and the priest picked up Riva and between them carried her quickly across the altar and through a doorway that led into the sacristy.

  •

  An usher with a lily dangling from the lapel of his suit jacket came into the room with a folded canvas cot. “Put her here,” he said. “Just a minute. Just one minute.” He unfolded the cot, yanking at the stiff wooden legs. “There she goes,” he said.

  When they got Riva lying down, an older priest, in vestments, began sending people away from the room. Denise was allowed in. She helped Mickey cover Riva’s charred dress with a blanket.

  “That leg is burned,” the first priest said. “Don’t cover it up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Denise said.

  The two priests sat facing each other in metal chairs, as if they were playing a card game.

  “We called for an ambulance, Father,” the usher said to both of them.

  “It doesn’t look too terrible,” Mickey said as he folded the burned skirt back and examined his daughter’s leg. He glanced around at the priests. “I think we’re going to be okay here,” he said.

  Riva was sobbing softly.

  Denise stood at the base of the cot and clutched each of Riva’s white slippers.

  “Listen, sweetheart,” Mickey said, “your parents are right here. It’s just a little burn, you know. What they call first degree, maybe.”

  Riva said nothing.

  “When this thing is over,” Mickey said, “and you’re taken care of—listen to me, now—we’ll go up to Lake Erie, okay? You hear me? How about that? Some good friends of mine, Tad Austin and his wife—you never met them, Riva—have an A-frame on the water there. We can lie around and bake in the sun all day. There’s an amusement park, and you’ll be eighteen then. You’ll be able to drink, if you want to.”

  The priests were looking at Mickey. He blotted perspiration from his forehead with his coat sleeve.

  Denise said, “I’m surprised they are not here yet.” Her glasses had fallen off and she was crying with her mouth open, still holding Riva’s feet.

  “Give them a little longer,” one of the priests said.

  “You know,” Mickey said to Riva, “something else I just thought of. Tad’s wife will be at Erie some of the time. Remember how I told you about her? She’s the one who went on television and won a convertible.”

  “Will you shut up?” Riva said.

  21

  Your Errant Mom

  My High-School Art Teacher

  “AND THERE WENT KURT Schwitters’s Merzbau—an incredible piece of art—devoured by the Nazis. He built another one, also destroyed,” said Mr. Lee. We were outside on the grounds of my old school in my home state of North Carolina, where the soil is sandy loam and the state motto is “To Be Rather Than to Seem.”

  There was a warm crosswind from the sea just over a wall, down from the school grounds, below the baseball diamonds. I said, “That must be like what happened to pointillism. When Seurat died so young, I mean.”

  “Nope,” Mr. Lee said. He wasn’t a patient man, nor did he have time for expected details. For instance, he was now in need of a haircut. His black-and-white mane flopped left to right in the wind. And he wanted a diet, and a more careful shave.

  Over the sea’s pounding, I heard one of my twin daughters. She said, “I’ve been bitten by something. Now I get polio!”

  “Malaria, maybe. Not polio,” said the other twin.

  Mr. Lee was sipping from an aluminum can of Diet Slice. He fished three neatly folded sheets of paper from his trouser pocket. He opened the pages and said to me, “You know what this is? An essay you once wrote for me. The criticism exercise? I still keep it.”

  I confided in Mr. Lee about my girls. I said, “The best thing about Hallie’s being back from Chapel Hill for the summer is she persuaded Susan to come with her. So I get them both. But now that could go out the window. Susan has been talking to Army and Navy recruiters.”

  “You may have the wrong kind of kid,” Mr. Lee said.

  The twins closed in on us. They wore seersucker shorts, huge T-shirts. Their heads had crisp blonde hair, Peter Pan style—youngish for twenty-one-year-olds. Susan was saying, “It’s just a welt, Hallie. A small—it’s sort of a big welt.”

  “Now you’ve met the twins,” I said to Mr. Lee.

  I was suddenly overcome with the chills that accompany a serious headache. I was suddenly sick, and I told them so.

  “You?” Hallie said. “I’m the one with yellow fever!”

  My Birthday Present from My Boyfriend

  I turned forty-three, and Devin gave me a white Alfa Rom
eo Spider. He took me out to Blackbeard’s Galley for supper—a long trek. We rode the car ferry across Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke Island, on the Outer Banks.

  I stayed in the Alfa on the ferry. I was savoring the car, and I didn’t want to wreck my dinner dress and hair. Devin hung on a rail and watched the sunset playing on the crinkled water.

  The light was fading as we entered Blackbeard’s—named after the pirate who was captured off Ocracoke by the British and executed. We sat on a plush sofa in front and drank Campari, waiting for our name to be called. The place was in season, bustling. There were antique mahogany furnishings, high ceilings, Waterford chandeliers.

  My temples stopped throbbing eventually. They’d been at it for two weeks. And eventually Devin put his chin on his palm and told me about his wife. “She dropped dead the first day of nineteen ninety-four,” he said. He smiled. “I had to miss the Rose Bowl Parade.”

  “What did you think of my daughters, truthfully? Did you like them?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Didn’t you think Susan was funny, telling about—”

  “No,” Devin said.

  “You’ve got to admit that for their age they are very, very attractive.”

  “Not to me,” Devin said.

  “Well, I like them. I was proud of them,” I said finally. I was furious with Devin, but I couldn’t help smiling about my birthday present.

  The Palmetto

  A porter in a linen jacket and alligator shoes took care of me on the train. He gave me a newspaper. I read the obits while I ate a raisin Danish. I had brought my own Twinings China Black tea bags. I drank the tea, plain. I had steeped it in Amtrak’s pot of boiled water.

  “Should’ve flown,” said the dapper man in the seat ahead of me. He had mentioned he was from South America. He was talking to a woman in a suit of twilled silk.