Mendocino and Other Stories

by Ann Packer

  “You know I'm happy to come here,” I said to my mother.

  She patted my knee. “I know.”

  I swung my legs around and sat upright. “If we wanted to do something Christmasy tonight we could call Ingrid,” I said. “Say ‘Have a merry’ to her and Bruce.”

  My mother frowned; for years she and Ingrid had been on poor terms. (“Have you gotten through to Ingrid?” I'd asked her on the morning after the big earthquake out there; it had taken her hours to reach me. “Once,” she said. “She was about six at the time.”)

  “I'm sure she'd like to hear from you,” I said, although I wasn't.

  My mother sighed. “It's just so tiring talking to her, don't you find? She's so literal-minded, she hasn't changed a bit.”

  “She has,” I said. She's happy, I wanted to say, but didn't. “Maybe I'll call her myself.”

  “Oh, Buddy.” My mother moved closer to me, and I smelled her perfume, the familiar spiciness of it. “I want us to be friends.”

  I smiled at her. “I'm friends. Aren't you?”

  “Then why won't you tell me about yourself?” she cried. “Is there a special man in your life? Are you in love? Do you know, I could die happy if I knew you were in love.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, what about your friends?” She looked up at me. “At least tell me about your friends.”

  I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. “My friends are dead or dying.” When I looked at her again her eyes had widened, and for a moment I anticipated understanding, maybe even wanted comfort.

  “Oh, poor Buddy,” she said. “I know how you feel. Mine are, too. Why, talking to Ruth and Mary Ann these days I have to invent illnesses to get any attention.”

  Should I, at that point, have told my mother what I'd seen at the bedsides of men I'd loved? Would it have been better that way for her? For me? For us?

  Instead I said, “If your friends were as sick as mine you'd drop them in seconds.” And whether or not this was true—and I'm inclined, with all the aching generosity of hindsight, to think that it was not—my mother rose without speaking and left the room.

  MY FRIENDS WERE dead or dying, although I still had Kevin. Have. Have.

  “Why couldn't I have said I was in love?” I asked him after she'd died.

  “Because you weren't?” he said. “I guess you could have made someone up. You could have told her about what's-his-name.”

  “Dean?” I groaned. “I figured out what it was about him—he said ‘dint.’ Instead of didn't.”

  Kevin laughed.

  “Plus those cowboy boots.”

  “You've never been a big fan of tooled leather,” Kevin said.

  When my mother was alive Kevin had a name for me: Robert the Jumper. As in jumping through hoops. He said if my mother called and told me she was thirsty I'd get on the red-eye with a bottle of Evian. I told him if his mother called and said she was thirsty he'd Federal Express her a bottle of Evian with rat poison in it. He laughed and said, “So why are we both gay if you love your mother and I hate mine?” He was in therapy, so he thought about things a lot. I told him it was all much more complicated than that. Or much simpler.

  After my mother died Kevin teased me less, asked me how I was doing, let me tell him stories about her.

  A story: When I was five or six my mother took it into her head that I was Ready for Culture. That, in fact, time was wasting. Saturday after Saturday she persuaded my father to stay behind with Ingrid, for whom culture could apparently wait, while she took me to San Francisco to see ballets, concerts, operas. We had lunch beforehand, in dark velvet restaurants where the waiters brought me glasses of ginger ale and saucers full of maraschino cherries while she drank her vodka martinis. People stared at us, and I was embarrassed because I understood that my mother had invented for us a glamorous hint of tragedy only barely survived: at her cue we spoke in hushed tones, and because she only poked at her food I didn't eat much of mine. We'd get to the opera house just before curtain time and quickly look over the program together, my mother saying something like, “We'll see how they do with the Schubert, Buddy—I have my doubts.” I loved that “we'll”—being included in the practice of judgment—but I knew that this, too, was meant for whatever audience we had. By the end of the performance I invariably had a stomachache from the candy I'd eaten at intermission—entire boxes of Junior Mints or nonpareils; we'd blink as the bright house lights came up, and my mother would rest her hand on the top of my head, or touch my shoulder. Then we went home, to my father at his desk in the study, to Ingrid quietly schooling her stuffed animals.

  “You wanted your mother all to yourself,” Kevin said. “Herself would say you hated sharing her, with your father or with Ingrid.”

  Herself was Dr. Gold, Kevin's shrink. I loved her only a little less than he did; she was reported to have beautiful rugs. “Duh,” I said.

  Kevin laughed.

  “Anyway, what about how she embarrassed me? I was mortified. Mortified at six, you never really get over that.”

  Kevin said he didn't know. He said he'd ask Dr. Gold for me.

  IN THE LONG fall to where we ended up—my mother alone in her little house in Palo Alto; my father alone in Illinois, in a house I knew only as a street address; me alone, mostly alone, in my apartment in New York; among us only Ingrid attached to someone, happily and privately in Medford, Oregon—in that long turning away from each other there were swift lifetimes when I imagined us somehow reunited in a determination to be easy and sweet together. Like TV, but without the washed-out saccharine mother. I wanted my mother, my father, Ingrid, me—but matched. Perhaps because I couldn't imagine how this could come about, I leapt into the future and saw us all equally blue-haired—aged as unconvincingly as Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in Giant—and surrounded by nameless children: certainly not mine, probably not Ingrid's, but children who would save us.

  There were also times—single days—when we fell long distances, turned so resolutely there could be no turning back.

  STANFORD, 1960. This is before the hippies, before the peace signs painted on the asphalt of White Plaza, before the torchlight sit-ins, the broken windows—years before my best friend's younger brother, sixteen and a track star, is shot in the leg at an antiwar demonstration in front of the football stadium. He is seven now and a pest; when, on weekend mornings, his brother and Ingrid and I ride over to the campus, we pedal as fast as we can so he will be left behind. He always finds us, though: the university is the farthest we're allowed to venture from home, and our favorite, inevitable destination there is a small courtyard in the center of which is an octagonal pool with a classically inspired fountain. We like the size, the scale, the modesty of this courtyard; we spend hours here, playing Statues: swinging each other around and freezing in positions we think are sculptural. Like our parents—two professors and their wives—we respect tradition when it comes to art. At the entrance to the courtyard a pair of empty niches face each other across an arcade, and we think it's a shame there aren't statues in them. Nothing modern—our tastes run to small cherubs, or replicas of Pan, flute in hand.

  A hot Sunday afternoon in early September. Tonight is the annual beginning-of-the-year English Department party, a chance for the faculty to get together and welcome whoever is new. My father dislikes large parties in general and these in particular because, unanchored by the hospitality and comfort of real hosts and real houses, they are usually even stiffer than other gatherings of too many people. This year, though, is different: he is Acting Head and as such has adopted the party with a kind of zeal we don't usually see in him. He has commandeered the common room of one of the older, nicer dorms—the parties are usually held in a shabby meeting room on the second floor of the depart-ment—and devised a system whereby everyone will be sure to mix: a parlor game called “Who Am I.” On arrival, each guest will be given the name of a famous person, and a card with that per-son's initials to pin to his clothes, and everyone will go a
round asking questions like “Are you Cordelia's father?” to determine each other's identity. It'll be a kind of walking Botticelli, the trick being that all the famous people will be figures from literature. My mother thinks it's the stupidest thing she's ever heard of, and she is still telling my father so as they are getting ready to leave for the party.

  “At least let me be who I want,” she calls to him; she's in the bathroom with the door ajar.

  My father shakes his head sadly, as if to lament to Ingrid and me our mother's unwillingness to play fair. “Can't do that,” he calls back. “Anyway, I don't have the cards—I couldn't do it even if I wanted to.” He looks at his watch and frowns: he has been ready for fifteen minutes.

  Ingrid and I lie on our parents' bed, arguing, idly, over whether or not to go with them: I want to stay home and read, but Ingrid not only wants to go but insists on my going too—she says she'll have a terrible time if she's the only kid. Our going at all was a last-minute, subversive suggestion of my mother's.

  “Who do you want to be?” I call to her.

  “Lady Macbeth,” my father says, loudly enough for her to hear.

  She pokes her head out the door. She's holding a lipstick, has already painted her lower lip a deep red. “Ha ha,” she says. “So who has the cards?”

  “We should be there,” my father says. “Dick Traeger.”

  My mother smiles. “Buddy,” she says to me, “run outside and see if the Traegers' car is still there.”

  “I don't feel like it.” A year ago I would have gone.

  “Ingrid?”

  Ingrid shakes her head.

  “Oh, for God's sake, Ingrid!” My mother slams the bathroom door.

  “Go see,” I say, poking Ingrid. “I'll go to the party if you'll go see.”

  Ingrid makes a face and rolls off the bed—literally rolls until she's lying on the rug. My father looks at her lying there: his solemn, brown-haired daughter dressed today, as nearly every day this summer, in the navy blue shorts and white shirt that were her day-camp outfit the first two weeks in July. He looks at his watch again.

  “Better hurry,” I say, and Ingrid gets up and trudges out; a moment later I hear the front door close.

  “Hi, Robert,” my father says.

  “Hi, Dad,” I say.

  Lately I've been having trouble putting my feelings about my family into some kind of order. I've always wanted, more than anything, for Ingrid to try harder to please our mother; so why do I now feel guilty for making her check on the Traegers' car? Perhaps because I know our mother won't really be pleased. Ingrid is nine, two years younger than I; she was born in 1951 and as an act of solidarity my mother named her for Ingrid Bergman, whose recent scandalous behavior she applauded, her theory being that if you didn't live by your heart there was no point in living at all. It is a continuing disappointment to my mother—an affront, really—that our Ingrid has no taste for theatrics of any kind. I have heard my mother use the word “stolid” about our Ingrid, use it with a kind of pleasure.

  “Ta da,” says my mother, coming out of the bathroom and striking a pose. She is wearing a new dress, a very fitted sleeveless yellow dress that will demand from everyone who sees her in it a moment of uninterrupted attention: it is the shortest dress I've ever seen. It's an acid yellow, a shade maybe one woman in a hundred can wear, and she is that one. With her black hair and summer tan she looks glamorous, even dangerous.

  “You've got to be kidding,” my father says.

  “What?” She leans over and runs her hands up her leg, adjusting her stocking.

  “OK,” he says. “You've had your fun. Change into whatever you're really going to wear and let's go.”

  “This is it,” she says.

  “Part of it, anyway,” he mutters.

  She looks at me and smiles conspiratorially. I smile back; I think she looks great, although I wish she wouldn't play him like this.

  “Helen,” he says.

  “For God's sake, Harry, it's just a shift.”

  “And you look pretty damned shifty” is all he can manage.

  She laughs and turns to me. “If he were a woman you'd think he was jealous.”

  He grimaces. “I think ‘envious’ is the word you're after.”

  My mother shrugs. We hear the front door open and close, and a moment later Ingrid comes into the bedroom and announces that the Traegers' car is still there. She doesn't comment on, doesn't even seem to notice my mother's dress.

  My mother goes to the telephone and begins to dial. My father, I notice, looks irritated.

  “Dick?” my mother says into the receiver. “This is Helen—from next door?” An intimate smile curls her lips, and she turns to the wall. “I hear you have the name cards, for the party. Are there any blank ones left?” She laughs. “I knew I could count on you. N.D. Nicole Diver. See you soon.” She hangs up the phone and turns to face us. “Well,” she says, “you kids coming?”

  “Nicole Diver?” my father says. “Nicole Diver? God, that's rich.”

  “Who's she?” I ask.

  My mother smiles but doesn't answer me. She picks up her purse and drops her lipstick into it.

  “Who's Nicole Diver?” I turn to my father. “Dad?”

  “Oh,” he says absently, “she's just one of Fitzgerald's beauties.” He pats his pants pocket, and I hear the jingling of his keys.

  THE BOREDOM OF being a child ignored by a group of adults. Ingrid and I skulk around the hors d'oeuvres table, spearing Swedish meatballs with toothpicks, using our bare fingers to pluck from their red sauce several pigs-in-a-blanket each. We sit on straight-backed chairs against the wall, and while Ingrid plays with her hair, braiding one lock and then another, I study the grown-ups in an effort to place my parents on a scale of normalcy.

  It takes no time at all to see that it was my mother's goal to set herself apart from the other wives. They wear full-skirted dresses of ordinary colors and modest lengths; but the difference reaches way beyond my mother's yellow dress. The other women talk to each other, but my mother talks only to men—to groups of them, four or five or six at a time. And she has a way of scanning the room while she talks—at first I think she's looking for us, but she keeps doing it long after I've had eye contact with her. I realize, in the way you can realize old, familiar knowledge, that she's looking around to see if people are looking at her: that she wants them to be. I start to feel tense for her—I'll feel tense for beautiful, hungry people all my life—and I force my attention to my father.

  About him, I cannot be so clear. He's wearing a summer suit and a tie, like all of the men except for Dick Traeger, our neighbor, and one or two others, who wear dark, open-necked shirts under their jackets. I'm happy to see that he's having a good time; he's making the rounds, taking people drinks as if this place were his home. But something else about him: his cheerfulness seems to depend on a kind of wall he's built around my mother, to keep her from coming into his line of vision.

  Ingrid hits my leg. “Let's go to the courtyard,” she says. “This is stupid.”

  Reluctantly, I stand up and follow her out of the room. She hasn't unbraided her hair, and sticking up from her head are two tiny braids that aren't coming undone by themselves.

  It's seven o'clock on a Sunday three weeks before the start of classes, and the campus is deserted. When we get to our courtyard we head for the empty niches and climb into them—Ingrid's favorite thing to do when we're here alone. We sit facing each other across the arcade.

  “You should see your hair,” I say.

  Ingrid touches the top of her head and encounters the braids; she makes quick work of disassembling them. “Look at that man,” she says.

  I lean forward and look: sitting on the edge of the fountain is a thin man with stringy shoulder-length brown hair. “So—he's not bothering you.”

  “I think something's wrong with him.”

  I look again. He's hunched over unhappily, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands: his feet a
re bare. He looks up and sees us looking at him; instantly he stands and heads our way. “Great, Ingrid,” I say.

  He stops when he's just a few yards away. He looks from me to Ingrid, then back at me. “What are you guys doing?” he says. There appears to be something wrong with his teeth.

  “Just sitting,” Ingrid says.

  “Our parents are just over there,” I add, waving in the direction we came from.

  “You look like statues,” he says. “What're your names? Mine's Bug.”

  “Your name is Bug?” Ingrid says.

  “I'll bet yours isn't any better.”

  “It's Ingrid.”

  “You win.”

  She smiles. “Bug must be your nickname.”

  He turns to me. “So what're you, mute?”

  I shake my head.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Your parents are just over there.”

  I look at Ingrid and try to send a signal: stop talking to him. But she either doesn't get it or ignores it. “They're at a cocktail party,” she says.

  “How chomming,” Bug says. “Is there perchance food at this affair?”

  “Why?” Ingrid says. “Are you hungry? We could get you some.”

  “No, we couldn't. We should be going, Ing.” I mean to jump out of the niche, but somehow I don't move.

  “Are you?” Ingrid says.

  Bug reaches into his pocket and pulls out a stone. He studies it carefully, looking at both sides—it's almost as if he were memorizing it—then he puts it back. “I can't remember what it feels like not to be.”

  “Are you starving?” Ingrid asks him.

  “Well, I guess the answer is compared to who?” He runs a hand through his greasy hair. “I'm not in danger of dying today.”

  “When was the last time you ate?” she says.

  He looks at me, and I see that his face is truly gaunt. I decide that he's probably telling the truth, but still, I want us gone.