She worked overtime, grateful for the exhaustion that made it easy to sleep away any time she had at home and excused her from any more than occasional hospital visits. She did not know what to say to her brother. They’d never been close. When Jane was honest with herself, she knew that it was her fault. That it was because she had always resented him. Bobby had been a bright, funny little boy, easy and endearing. Jane, difficult, intense. Why wouldn’t her mother love him better? She understood that. But she could not forgive him for it, nor could she help the mean pleasure she had sometimes felt as he grew into an increasingly troubled teenager, constantly testing the boundaries of their mother’s love.
Bobby lived under the hood of his junk car, his fingernails filthy, his clothes smelling of oil. He cut classes, hung out with his greaser friends. He talked like a greaser, defiantly using poor grammar even though Jane knew he was perfectly capable of speaking correctly. He was smart, probably smarter than she was if the truth were told. Even teachers said he was smart and were charmed by him, at the same time he drove them crazy with his wisecracks and pranks. But he hated school, hated anyone telling him what to do. His single ambition was to get out, get a job, and save up enough money to buy a G.T.O.
It would have been easier if it had been this same Bobby she felt obligated to visit now, she thought. Easier, knowing he’d go back to his cars and loser friends and willful self-destruction as soon as he got well enough to get out of the hospital. But the accident had scared him into a kind of submission she’d never seen in him before. He’d let them cut his hair and he looked as clean-cut as a track star. He was polite to the nurses, wore the old-man pajamas their mother bought him without complaint.
It killed Jane the way his face lit up with shy pleasure when she appeared in his doorway, the way he offered up ideas and thoughts about his future, so obviously hoping for her approval. She could hardly bear to see the clutter of recruitment brochures on his bedside table, visible evidence of how narrow the options for his future had turned out to be. He’d enlist in the service as soon as he’d recovered fully and turned eighteen; this was the deal the prosecutor had offered.
“I’ve pretty much decided on the Marines,” he told her the day before she left to go back to school. He handed her a brochure that showed a young man in dress blues, gold buttons gleaming. “I figure, go with the best. Do something right for once, huh?”
She took it, remembering the former Marine who’d spoken in Dunn Meadow last spring – the empty sleeve of the uniform shirt he wore over his jeans folded and pinned neatly over the stump of his right arm. “Look at what we’re doing in Vietnam,” he’d said, the speaker crackling around the words. “I’m not saying don’t go. All I’m saying is, look first – then decide.”
But what choice did Bobby have?
“Absolutely! The Marines,” Jane said.
It was the one thing she could do: wish him well. She was sorry he’d been hurt. Sorry, too, for the hurt she’d caused her mother – which she would have made right if she could, if it wouldn’t have required stepping backward into the self she had been before she learned what it felt like to be happy.
4
“Tomorrow Never Knows”
Pete had tacked a hand-painted sign on the porch of the old farmhouse: “Land of a Thousand Dances,” though it was the Beatles’ Revolver that he played over and over again. Right now, it was “Here, There and Everywhere.” Next would be “Yellow Submarine,” Jane knew. Then “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It creeped her out, that song. She wanted James Brown or Wilson Pickett. The Stones, the Animals. Wild music to dissolve the last of the summer’s unhappiness. But Revolver was the only thing Pete wanted to listen to – and he was paying the rent on the party house, so it played constantly, always at full blast.
He had enough money to rent the house in addition to paying for his room at the fraternity because his parents’ estrangement had reached an all-time high and, unbeknownst to one another, each had given him full tuition and housing money for the fall. Jane did not know whether to feel sorry for Pete, whom Bridget said actually longed for his parents’ attention, or feel envious of how their self-absorption gave him the freedom to do whatever he wanted to do. She loved Pete because Bridget did, and cared about him, but did not know how to think about the sense of entitlement he felt about the benefits of his parents’ competition over him or about the thoughtless remarks he made that sometimes cut her to the quick.
“Hey,” he said, bragging about the money scam. “It’s a game. Parents want to control you one way or another. That’s where it’s at. Look how stingy your parents are,” he said to Jane. “What do you think that’s about?”
Jane shrugged. If she had said, “They’re not stingy; there’s nothing to withhold,” he wouldn’t have believed it. He couldn’t have fathomed the certainty with which she knew her parents would give her anything in the world she wanted, if only they could. Or understood that she loved them, desperately, but no longer knew how to be with them.
Just thinking about her parents made her feel weepy and she regretted, again, the distance between them and how it had deepened after her lie about the weekend was revealed. They hadn’t even argued when she said she’d decided to take the Greyhound bus back to Bloomington, her belongings packed in cardboard cartons.
Still, it was so good to be back. Tom had surprised her at the station with the new MG his father had bought him at the end of the summer. Robins’ egg blue, with a roll bar that his father, an engineer, had designed to keep him safe in case the little convertible turned over. Then surprised her again with news of Pete’s farmhouse. As they pulled into the gravel drive of the farmhouse on that first day, Bridget appeared in an upstairs window. By the time Tom had parked next to Pete’s Corvette, she was flinging herself off the porch, running to embrace Jane and dance her around the yard. She wore old, ripped-up cutoffs and a grimy tee shirt. Her hair was pulled back with a bandana. She smelled of sweat and ammonia.
“I know. I’m disgusting,” she said, finally letting Jane go. “But I can’t help it. I’m so glad to see you. So glad to be back. I’ve been cleaning ever since I got here yesterday. God. This place is so gross. I actually found a perfect little skeleton of a mouse in the front closet. Ugh.” She made a face. “But, Jane! It’s going to be so groovy when we fix it up!”
“We’ve got our own room,” Tom said, reclaiming her, pulling her close. “It’ll be just like it was this summer, at Pete’s. Only we won’t have to go home.”
If her parents knew, Jane often thought in the weeks that followed. But they wouldn’t know. The house, her whole world, was unimaginable to them. She wrote each week, mainly to avoid talking to them on the phone. Cheery letters about her classes, how pretty it was on campus now that the leaves were turning, how life with her new roommate, Bridget, was going just fine. Her mother wrote back, her letters full of Bobby, passing along his news from Marine boot camp. Each with a worn five-dollar bill folded into it that pierced Jane’s heart.
Neither Tom nor Bridget knew exactly what had happened the night she returned from Indianapolis. She’d written to them about Bobby’s accident, but not about what had happened with her mother. Bridget would have defended her. Tom would have insisted on driving up to help her set things right. He’d insist on it right now if she told him, a prospect that sent her into a panic just to consider. Anyway, how could she explain? She could still feel her mother’s fingernails pressing into the flesh on her wrist, still hear the bitterness in her voice when she said, “I don’t want to know anything you don’t want to tell me.”
Which was the real problem, after all. Jane didn’t want to tell her mother about her life – and Tom would never be able to understand that. So she just let him believe that the sadness that leaked out sometimes was all about her brother, the kind of sadness any decent human being would feel.
She wondered sometimes how she could be at the same time so happy and so desolate. Late afternoons, when their classes were through
, she and Tom drove out to the farmhouse and spent long, lazy hours making love in the attic room they’d claimed as their own. Jane loved the slanted ceiling, the plank floors dotted with rag rugs she and Bridget had found at Goodwill, the dormer windows. They’d found silk scarves, too, and Jane had draped them over the worn lamp shades so they glowed when dusk fell.
She lay there now, listening to the last cuts of Revolver, Tom still fast asleep beside her. It was nearly noon. They’d been up late last night: the usual Friday-night party and, after everyone had left and she and Bridget had made the first pass at tidying up the kitchen, Pete had talked them into smoking grass with him. Sitting in the V of Tom’s legs on the floor, her head resting on his chest, Jane had drawn in the smoke and held it as Pete instructed, then lifted her hand so that Tom could take the joint from between her fingers and do the same. A few times around and she felt the world slow down around her and all her cares fall away. She’d felt suddenly giddy – and horny. She smiled, a little chagrined to think of it, but at the same time overwhelmed, again, with desire. She ran her finger lightly down Tom’s backbone and he stirred and turned to her, ready, as if he’d been making love to her in a dream.
Downstairs, Pete replayed “Tomorrow Never Knows” twice and started it a third time. The agitated droning, the screeching electric guitars and discordant violins, the unrelenting drumbeat – and underneath the wild whooping that always made Jane think of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, its terrible black swirling sky.
The idea of turning off her mind, just floating away, frightened her. She didn’t want to think about dying.
The music stopped abruptly, replaced by Bridget’s angry voice. “Would you quit playing this stupid song?” she said. “I hate it. It’s awful.”
“Don’t be so uptight,” Pete said. “What? You can’t hear the word ‘dying’?”
“It’s not the word, it’s – the whole idea of it. Like nothing matters.”
The song started again, louder. Then there was the shriek of the needle across the record.
“Fuck,” Pete said. “You fucking scratched my album. Goddamn –”
“Buy another one,” Bridget said. “What’s it to you? Ten dollars. Twenty? Five hundred? A thousand? What do you care? You think you’re hurting your parents spending all their money? Refusing –”
“Don’t start that shit again,” Pete said.
The front door slammed; moments later, they heard him rev up his Corvette and screech out of the driveway. Jane untangled herself from Tom’s arms, shivering as she stepped naked onto the cold wood floor.
“Stay here,” Tom said. “Stay out of it. Let them –”
“I can’t,” Jane said. “Can’t you hear Bridget crying?”
Pulling on her jeans and a sweatshirt, she could feel him watching her, willing her to come back to bed with him. It was what she wanted, too. But her happiness with Tom seemed all the more reason to go to Bridget now, to try to do something to make her feel better. Wasn’t Bridget responsible for that happiness, after all? If she hadn’t met Bridget, if Bridget hadn’t decided instantly, for no reason Jane had ever understood, to befriend her . . .
The trouble was, she had no idea how to help her. Those first euphoric weeks after summer break, the four of them had been like a family, heading out to the farmhouse after their classes were through, disappearing to their rooms, making love, napping in each other’s arms, till dusk fell. Then Jane and Bridget would make a simple meal; Tom and Pete would help clean up; and the four of them would settle down to their studies until it was time for Jane and Bridget to go back to the dorm. Fridays, the girls packed duffels and signed out of the dorm as if they were going home for the weekend, but spent the nights at the farmhouse instead.
Then in the middle of October, Bridget discovered that Pete had quit going to his classes and was spending his days hanging out in the television room at the Sigma Chi house.
She was furious with Tom. He should have told her.
“Bridget,” he said. “Pete’s going to do – or not do – whatever he damn well pleases. What am I supposed to do? Handcuff him to my wrist and drag him to the business building every morning?”
“You can make him go,” she said. “He listens to you.”
“Because I don’t nag him. Jesus, Bridge, Pete’s . . . He’s a little crazy, which is what you liked about him in the first place. Now all of a sudden you want to be his mother?”
“I don’t want to be his mother. I don’t want him to flunk out and get drafted, that’s all.”
“Nobody wants that,” Tom said. “But you can’t save him from himself.”
Nonetheless, she became consumed with trying. She was ferocious in her misery, stubborn in her refusal to see that her behavior was only making Pete more determined not to do what she wanted him to do. They fought when she tried to make him go to class or study, when she said he shouldn’t be drinking in the afternoons or needed to drive more sensibly or was smoking too much grass. Increasingly, Pete disappeared for hours at a time, and they fought when Bridget asked where he’d been.
Jane and Tom could hear them in the room below, though they tried not to.
“I love you,” Bridget would cry out, not like Bridget at all.
Jane was almost glad for the respite in the tension that Thanksgiving brought – and the opportunity to mend things at least a little bit with her mother, who’d written to say how much she was looking forward to Jane’s visit. Both she and Jane’s father had picked her up at the Greyhound station, and she’d kept up the kind of bright chatter Jane had been used to forever. Jane reciprocated with bits and pieces of her life she felt she could afford to share: accounts of football games, random things she’d learned in her classes. Her new roommate, Bridget.
“You actually met her, Mom,” she said. “The day I moved in? She was on the elevator when we first went up to see my room. She has red hair and a lot of freckles –”
“Oh,” Mrs. Barth said. “The girl who was going to the roof.”
“Exactly,” Jane said, surprised that her mother remembered, surprised, too, at the pleasure she felt to have given her this small gift.
On the long bus ride back to Bloomington, she felt at peace about her family for the first time in a long while. It hadn’t really been so hard to listen to her mother, to eat the meals she’d prepared and say thank you for them, to say what she knew her mother longed for her to say: she was happy at school, but glad to be home for a few days; proud of Bobby, as they were; and looking forward to seeing him at Christmas.
The time apart seemed to have been good for Pete and Bridget, too. He started going to his classes and, relieved, she became, again, his accomplice rather than his keeper. The two of them would cook a holiday feast the night before they all went home for break, they announced – courtesy of the Man.
First, they stole a cookbook from the public library and made a list of what they’d need. The next day, they appeared with a can of cranberries tucked into one of Pete’s coat pockets and an onion and some broken stalks of celery in Bridget’s purse. They went out again later and scored two cans of green beans, a packet of dry gravy and a loaf of bread for the dressing, then wandered store-to-store stealing potatoes, one at a time, which they thought was hilarious. The day after yielded three bottles of Cold Duck, from who knew where, as well as a dozen dinner rolls, a whole box of butter patties, and a pumpkin pie they’d scammed a waitress at some diner into giving them.
“You did not steal that turkey,” Jane said when Pete triumphantly unbuttoned it from inside his parka, and set it in the sink to thaw.
He just smiled mysteriously, tied on a gingham apron they’d lifted from the dime store and started chopping the vegetables, singing tunelessly along with the Beatles, happy as a housewife. Bridget tied on a matching apron and set to work beside him.
When Tom and Jane got back from class the next afternoon, the house was filled with the fragrant aroma of turkey roasting. There were hors d’oeuvres, also fi
lched: cocktail peanuts, a jar of olives, a jar of Vienna sausages. The table was set with a paper cloth printed with sprigs of holly. There were matching paper plates and napkins. And favors: fuzzy Santa hats, each name written in glitter on the front.
Pete had shaved for the first time in days; his blond hair was slicked back. He wore a starched white shirt with his Levi’s and served the Cold Duck in beer mugs, a new white dishtowel folded over his arm. Bridget wore a maid’s apron. Montovani was on the stereo, a record Jane hadn’t heard before. They’d filched that, too, Jane figured.
She should be appalled, she knew. Instead, she was charmed. It was so funny, all of them affecting civilized behavior as Pete and Bridget served the hors d’oeurves, refilled the mugs of Cold Duck with a flourish.
“We are all as God made us,” Bridget said, in an atrocious British accent. “. . . only many of us much worse.” Spoofing the scene from Tom Jones, she reached for a turkey drumstick and devoured it, sucking, gnawing, licking her lips until the others pitched in, hooting with laughter, eating with their fingers, feeding each other, twining their arms to drink from each others’ mugs. At the end, when they thought they could eat no more, Pete brought in the pumpkin pie and a can of Reddi-wip, squirting so much on each piece that the wedges of pie disappeared beneath it.
“Open!” he said to Bridget, grinning, holding the can at her mouth.
She did – and let him squirt the cream in, gasping to swallow it. Then she grabbed the can and turned it on him, both of them shouting and laughing, tussling to command it until they both collapsed, exhausted, sated on the living room couch. They’d drunk all three bottles of Cold Duck by then, and who knew how much beer. Fat with pumpkin pie, Jane and Tom pushed away from the table and collapsed as well, Jane on Tom’s lap in the easy chair.
She wanted to go bed with him, but she was deliciously tired and couldn’t manage to do more than think about it. Maybe she slept, she never knew. Later, when she tried to piece together what had happened, all she could remember was Bridget’s piercing scream and Tom standing up so suddenly that she flew forward and had to catch herself to keep from falling.
An American Tune Page 7
