by Mary Robison
I put a kind of half-nelson on Lolly, who was horrified until she realized I was being friendly—that the grip was an embrace. “When did you become a little teacup?” I asked her.
“I was paying for your new look,” she said, laughing. “I wanted to see how you’d turn out.”
The cab dropped me on H Street, at Lolly’s apartment building. She was going off to lunch with Doug, to discuss her pregnancy and, more likely, to hear more about Doug’s never-ending struggle to get graduated from G.W.
“I’m sorry,” I said, leaning in through the open cab door to look at her.
“You’re sorry,” Lolly said. “Jesus, you just go back to Boston—problemless, unfettered. I’m here with nothing and no one, and I need so much help. I need you, for instance.”
The cab took off abruptly, and I was left with the impression of Lolly’s scared and beautiful face.
The lobby of her building had a lot of silvered glass, and marble the color of tangerines. I had forgotten to get Lolly’s key, and I sat down in a waiting area on one of the cushioned pews that made a ring around a fountain. The fountain’s bowl and cherub wore garlands of pine, and strands of Christmas bulbs were wound into the garlands. A tiny white nylon fir tree, hung with blue bulbs, stood in the corner between the switchboard closet and a wall of brass mailboxes. The switchboard area was watched by an attendant-doorman who had the looks of a wrestler. He had refused to take me up to Lolly’s apartment and let me in.
I was glaring at him now, as I went into my second hour on the pew. “Come on, mister,” I said.
He was reading a newspaper. His face had a burnt-red color, as if he had been out in the cold, which he hadn’t. The ledge of his brow jutted out into a prominence that shaded his tiny eyes.
“Come on,” I said. “You know me. You’ve seen me with Lolly a hundred times.”
“You bother me again and I call the cops,” the guy said. “It’s not me locking you out, it’s policy.”
“You’re a scary guy,” I said.
I had gotten tired of my own reflection, which was coming at me from three directions. My hair clutched at my temples and neck; I couldn’t get it to hang down. My substance seemed to have left me, and it was as though my body had become an armature supporting my coat and clothes. And I was hungry.
“You shouldn’t be here anyway, this long in a private lobby,” he said. “Go find yourself a grating. Outside.”
I went through my wallet, discarding a visitor’s pass to the Senate, which I’d never use, a note sheet of directions to someone’s house near Rock Creek Park, and the worn end of an emery board. I let these things drop onto the rug by my shoe. With a pencil I made a few notes in the margin of a comic page in the Post, after I had read “Judge Parker” and “Rex Morgan, M.D.” It was a little list about Lolly and me.
“Is that your mess?” the attendant said when he noticed. “I say to you, Is that your mess on the floor? Because I’m dialing the police.” When he stood up he looked bloated. His belly sloped out well beyond the belt line of his uniform trousers. “For all I know, you’re plotting a robbery,” he said. “I don’t want any company on my job here all evening. I’m working, see, no matter how it looks to you. If you belonged, you’d have a key. If you were supposed to be here, I’d know it.”
With each of these pronouncements, I nodded my head yes or no, mocking him.
“I’m saying stop that. Fair warning.”
I kept thinking of Lolly’s apartment, just three floors above. It was a beginner’s place, mostly—neat and bookless. “I’m culturally bereft,” Lolly had told me once. But there were fresh sheets, taut on her double bed. There was a glazed dish of Granny Smith apples on the Formica kitchen counter. There were draperies that Lolly had lined and sewn herself, from fabric she got at Laura Ashley. There was a clay pot containing a four-foot avocado plant. There was, on a shelf, a collection of stuffed pandas. Each bear was pristine; two were still in cellophane, and Lolly had displayed the boxes for the bears that came in a box.
I knocked off taunting the attendant and said, “So O.K., I’m sorry I bothered you. I’ll pick up the papers.”
“That’s all I wanted, pick up,” he said. “How am I supposed to know who you are?”
“That’s true. And it’s actually good that you’re vigilant.”
“Whatever that means,” he said. “Are you sticking around for your friend? I have to know.”
I was collecting the stuff from my wallet. I told him yes. I thought how his question and my answer had two meanings. I had decided—back in the cab, I realized—to stick around at least a little longer.
The list I made analyzing Lolly and me said that we were both waiting for something, that we had both been lucky and spoiled, and that we expected a lot. We thought alike sometimes. We remembered the same stuff. We were used to each other and could still be a help to each other. Of use.
I went over to the revolving doors. What snow there was had been chased from the street by the wind. A Federal Express truck slid up. The uniformed driver was rushing a package into the building across the street. The pink sodium-vapor light, from all the D.C. streetlamps, gave the sky a hopeful blush, as if it were not twilight.
24
Care
BARBARA LED LEAH THROUGH a coalyard to behind the elementary school. “Now look at that,” Barbara said. “It’s human.” She pointed into the cinders at a blade of bone studded with teeth.
“That’s from a cow,” Leah said.
“No,” Barbara said, shaking her head. The back and shoulders of her coat were soaked with dissolved snow.
“Well, I guess I ought to ask you about Jack,” Leah said. She kicked a coal chip at one of the school’s caged windows.
“I refuse to see him,” Barbara said. “We’re separated, as I’m sure you heard. We’ve been separated four months.” She was still staring at the bone. “For a lot of good reasons. One is that I found this in his tool drawer.” She opened her coat and showed a nickel-plated handgun tucked in at the waistband of her skirt.
Leah said, “Jack is the one person who shouldn’t keep a revolver.”
“He’s so much worse since you’ve been gone,” Barbara said. “My dad thinks it’s because Jack reads so much. You know who Jack always liked, though?” Barbara leaned over and snapped one of the buckles on her galoshes. “Your sister, Bobby.”
“Yes, I think he really did,” Leah said. She sighed, and turned the shard of bone with the toe of her shoe. “You can tell him Bobby’s wonderful. Just remarkable. She takes a lot of speed still. She’s chewed a nice hole in her lip.”
“Bobby’s disturbed,” Barbara said. “You can tell that just from the way she walks.”
Leah blinked at a tiny maroon car that was circling the playground, and Barbara said, “That’s Jack, and I’m leaving.” She turned up her coat collar and ran away along a narrow alley that edged the back of the schoolhouse.
“Now wait just a minute!” Leah called.
“I will not see him!” Barbara called back before she disappeared around the corner of the school’s library annex.
•
Jack drove his car onto the playground and hit the brakes when he had pulled up beside Leah. “My wife moves pretty good whenever I’m around,” he said. His face was chapped red with cold under his watch cap. He used his coat sleeve to scrape at a rust scab on the car door. “I heard you were back in town.”
Leah got into the car. She said, “What have you done to Barbara?”
“My wife is just afraid of me,” Jack said.
“Afraid?”
“Um-hmm,” Jack said. A block away, his car began to shimmy as if it might explode. A waxed cup full of cigar butts slid off the dashboard and into Leah’s lap.
Jack laughed and clicked a fingernail on the windshield, where a helicopter was wading into view.
“What do they want?” Leah yelled over the terrible beating of the machine.
The copter bobbed directly overhead
, then canted off toward the lake.
“Not us,” Jack said.
•
He bought lunch for them at a grocery cafeteria. Leah put her feet up on the seat of the vinyl booth, and watched out the bank of windows. The room smelled of warm food and of the laundered cotton blotters under the casserole trays.
Jack said, “Look at the snow flying.” He nodded at the window.
But Leah saw a boy go by, pushing another boy in a shopping cart on the icy parking lot. The boy in the cart sucked cigarette smoke into his nose, and adjusted a dial on the plastic radio he was holding.
“Want to hear what I’ve been thinking about you?” Jack said, turning to Leah.
“Sure do,” she said.
“I’ve decided that Europe didn’t change you,” Jack said, “like I hoped it would. You still want for something, as if somewhere you’ve been robbed.”
“What have I been robbed of?” Leah said.
“Something important,” Jack said. He spilled soda into his mouth. “The crux, the thrust of what—as I see it—is going on with you. And I’m talking about your whole life, not just here this afternoon.” He grinned. “I mean it,” he said. “What you oughtn’t to be afraid of is a little more rarefied stratum, Leah. One thing I learned about being young is that there’s a kind of purity of insight. You know? For example, right now I could decide to be a proletarian, a laborer, an artist, an executive.” He was counting the possibilities off on his spread fingers. “But I wouldn’t be you.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Leah said. She munched ice from the rim of her water glass.
“Because,” Jack said, “you’re just walking it through. Just saying your lines and walking it all through. My wife is the same way.”
“What way?” Leah said.
“Scared,” Jack said.
“What of?”
Jack fit a piece of meat loaf into his mouth. He said, “I haven’t any idea.”
•
Jack plowed his car into a five-foot cone of dead leaves in front of Leah’s father’s house. Leah’s father, Sweet, grinned widely and banged on the hood of his Lawn-Boy. He was driving snow off his parking spaces with a blade, and hauling a steel utility cart in which Leah’s little sister, Bobby, reclined, smoking a Russian cigarette. “Park it up the street,” Sweet yelled, glowing and glad for company.
Bobby pulled herself from the utility cart and came over to Jack’s car. “You slept on your hair wrong,” she told Leah. She threw down her cigarette. She wet her fingers and crammed a curl behind Leah’s ear.
“Don’t do that,” Leah said.
“Jack!” Bobby said. She leaned in the car window and almost spit her chewing gum. “I just had a birthday. Guess how old I am. I’m twenty-two.”
Sweet climbed down from his tractor. He yelled, “I’m going inside now for dry socks.”
Leah moved Bobby and got out of the car. She brushed a ball of ash from her lap and then she walked up the snow-sopped lawn. “Wet,” she said, touching the lip of the postbox. “The same color Sweet painted his station wagon.”
“The same color he’s painting everything,” Bobby said, chewing. “Including my bicycle. Don’t mess with the mailbox, Leah. Sweet’ll kill you.”
•
“But I’ll tell you where the big money is,” Sweet said, leading Leah into Bobby’s bedroom. Sweet had been trimming baseboards and patching nail pops in the family den, and he was still dressed in working whites, his hands and face flecked with spackle. “Spraying high-rises. Just get a masking pattern cut for you, and a pump, of course, and you can go in there with a gun in each hand and your eyes closed. At fifteen hundred dollars a floor, you figure the numbers.” Sweet stared at the blotter on Bobby’s desk for a minute, then he picked up her wood-burning kit.
“What’re you going to do with that?” Leah said.
“I don’t know,” Sweet said. “Make something.”
They studied Bobby’s closet door, where a collage of photos and cutouts was pushpinned. In one of the pictures, Bobby’s boyfriend, Doug, was poking from an Army tank. There was a clipping about J. Paul Getty’s grandson getting his ear sawed off. Bobby had one of Leah’s sketches tacked up. It was a pen-and-ink on vellum, of a girl balanced tightrope-style on a strand of wire fencing.
Sweet squinted at the sketch and said, “A high-school friend of mine knew how to draw. He’s worth a hell of a lot of money now. He’s a sign painter, and he raises Afghan dogs. Which made him rich. One bitch alone gives him thirty-eight pups. At three hundred fifty dollars a dog, you figure it out.”
They had moved into Leah’s room. Sweet leaned on his elbow, which rested between two ceramic birds on the clothes dresser. “I’m proud of this room,” he said. “I tried to keep the walls nice while you were away.”
Bobby came in carrying a shopping bag. She pinched off her rubber boot and emptied water from it into a terrarium that sat in a dying spray of light at the window. “Watch,” she said, as a lump of slush dropped from inside the boot and spattered dirt and moss on the terrarium walls.
She sat on the end of the bed and opened the string handles of her shopping bag. “I bought a puzzle for Doug,” she said. She showed a box, which was still tight in plastic wrap. “It’s Niagara Falls.”
•
Leah sat with Sweet, warming their knees before the opened gas oven. Sweet turned a wet-looking blue porcelain jug in his hands. “I think your mother wanted you to have this,” he said, “after me.”
“It’s nice,” Leah said.
“It is nice, isn’t it?” Sweet said. “It’s from the war.”
Bobby was bent over the kitchen counter, banging the counter surface with her fist every time the coffeepot perked. She had a transistor radio plug stuffed in one ear and she was shouting a little. She said, “So a friend of Doug’s offers him a hundred dollars for his motorcycle, and Doug’s license is suspended for two more years anyway. Right?” She splashed coffee into a shallow cup and used it to wash down a capsule from a tinfoil wad she kept in her pocket. “But will he take it? No.”
Sweet shifted his position in the folding chair and coughed through his nose. He said, “War of the Worlds is on tonight.”
“I’ve seen it,” Leah said. “Anyway, I’ll be gone. I’m staying at my girlfriend Barbara’s. Remember her?”
“The one that married Jack,” Sweet said. “And didn’t poor Jack get skinny? I thought he was your cousin Caroline at first.”
Leah said, “Jack tells me I’m just walking through life. He says I ought to start changing.”
“Could be,” Sweet said. “How are you supposed to change?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me,” Leah said. “Incidentally, he’s going back to school, he thinks. To Yale, in Connecticut.”
“I know where Yale is,” Sweet said.
Doug appeared at the side door holding a white sack of hamburgers and a bottle of Rock & Rye. “Remember the guy I told you about who was called Grandma?” he said to Bobby.
“The Polish guy,” Bobby said. “About three and a half feet.”
“That’s him,” Doug said. “He got blowed up when they were dropping bottom today. He flew all the way across the foundry and landed in the aluminum furnace.”
Bobby crossed the room on her toes and gave Doug a kiss. “I was telling them how that guy at the Shell station is always expressing his interest in your bike.”
“Forget it, Bobby,” Doug said. He dumped the hamburgers out on the kitchen table. “That bike’s worth fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Then don’t cry to me when it rusts,” Bobby said.
“Listen,” Doug said, putting a pickle slice on his tongue, “I’d give it away before I’d take a hundred dollars.”
•
Around midnight, Leah saw Jack drop over the chest-high cyclone fence. He crossed the yard, and then she could hear him letting himself into the house, where she and Barbara were in bed. Leah propped herself against the headbo
ard and tried to wake up Barbara.
“Go away,” Barbara said through her pillow.
Jack opened the bedroom door and stepped into the room. His dark hair and eyelashes and his gloves and raincoat were wet, and his glasses had fogged over in the wet wind. He said, “It smells like furniture polish in here.”
Leah said, “Shh. These are rich people.”
“My own rich mother-in-law is lying on the floor in the next room,” Jack said, “with a stack of magazines for a pillow, and a cocktail shaker still floating with ice cubes in her hand.”
“What?” Leah said. “Is she kidding?”
“I forgot to ask,” Jack said. He went to the glass back wall of Barbara’s room. “Whitecaps,” he said, “all over the lake, and the sky’s full of snow.” He came back beside the bed and settled into a beer-colored chair. He took out a thin green cigar and set fire to it. “I liked you better,” he said, holding the burning stick match over his head and squinting at Leah, “when you had hair.”
“You worry me,” she said. Sleep and the cold night were in her voice. “Look at how much you’re sweating.”
Jack waved out the match and picked up a pair of rough wool trousers from the end of the bed. “Who does your tailoring?”
“In Italy,” Leah said. She shook Barbara, who wouldn’t turn over.
“Leah, what a lovely back you’ve got,” Jack said.
She said, “You came to talk to Barbara, I think, so I’ll leave.”
Jack started to cry.
“Damn it,” Barbara said. She got up and walked on the bed, and went naked into the bathroom. Jack threw his cigar after her. Lighted ash showered into the carpet. A drop of sweat broke on his eyebrow and ran over his chin.
“Because I believe you two should be alone,” Leah said.
“Get him out!” Barbara called over the rush of shower water.
Jack pulled his fingers over his cheekbones. He said, “I can’t concentrate on anything.”
There was noise in the hall. Barbara’s father came in. He had a big head and he was wearing dark, expensive clothing. “What is this?” he said.
