“Well, little old ladies will go and die,” I said, giving his untidy hair a ruffle. “Apparently her children didn’t share her ecological ideals.”
“We might as well have stayed in Garden Hills,” he grumbled.
I wish we had, I thought, but did not say.
Pom bought the house on the river five years before, when a fellow physician at Buckhead Hospital retired and moved to Captiva. He went with his friend out to see his house on the river and called the real estate agent that night. He drove me and the children out to see it the next day, as a surprise. The four of us stood in the pale lemon sunshine of a Georgia autumn and looked at the big stone pile fitted into the edge of the river forest and fronted with green winter rye as smooth as a goofy golf course. Behind it the hardwoods flamed and the river ran swift and silent between its overgrown banks. There were no other houses in sight. Plantings were lush and perfectly tended, chrysanthemums burned in the neatly mulched borders and in big Chinese urns on the terrace, and a small oblong attached to the Realtor’s sign said “heated pool.” The house was intimidating to me; it seemed enormous in the emptiness and the river silence. It was well designed, obviously the work of an architect and not a builder drunk on châteaux and faux Tudor; it fit its site nicely, and there was not a Palladian window in it. I thought it was handsome, and the boys and Glynn frankly gaped in awe. But it did not then and does not now look like home.
“Do you like it?” Pom grinned.
“For what? To live in?” said seventeen-year-old Jeff.
“Where are all the neighbors?” said eleven-year-old Glynn.
“There’s a pool! Cool! The guys will all want to come home with me,” said Chip, who was twenty and in his sophomore year at Wake Forest. His fraternity was so far the dominant institution in his life.
“Pom, I could never keep this thing clean,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. I had Ina three mornings a week now, and I knew that she had more time. In truth, I loved the shabby, bursting Cape Cod in Garden Hills where we had raised his sons and our daughter. I loved my neighbors and the aging, jointly owned pool and playground and the overwhelming sense of community that emanated from the neighborhood like sweet breath. I did not want to move. We had never even seriously talked about moving.
It was obvious that Pom loved the house. We needed the room, he said; the boys already needed a place to entertain their friends and Glynn soon would. Westminster was just over the hill; I wouldn’t spend hours car pooling anymore. There was luxury shopping and some good new restaurants over in nearby Vinings. He was sick of the fumes and clamor of the city; he wanted us to have the peace of the river and the woods while we were still young enough to enjoy them. He had always missed the unspoiled outdoors of his boyhood. He could have the hunting dogs he had long wanted; Glynn could have her pony at last. I could garden to my heart’s content. I could have a splendid custom office for the freelance writing I planned to do, now that the children were older. And it undeniably lent the clinics an air of respectability and substance to have their director living in a house like this. It would be good for business and even better for entertaining, and he was going to have to do increasingly more of that.
“It’s not going to hurt Glynn’s prospects to live here, either,” he said, smiling at her and then at me.
“Prospects for what?” Glynn and I said together.
“Oh…the Peachtree Debutante Club and the Junior League and all that stuff, an appropriate marriage,” he said, flipping the back of Glynn’s smooth, ash-blond Dorothy Hamill cut. “I know you don’t care about that stuff now, Punkin, but you will.”
“No, I won’t,” she said with her lips, but there was no sound behind it. I don’t think Pom noticed. I looked at him in amazement. I did not know he cared about that stuff, either. I didn’t know he used terms like “appropriate marriage.” I didn’t know he wanted a house like this. When had all this happened?
We closed on the house the following week and moved in just after Thanksgiving. Our first Christmas there looked like Lord and Taylor’s Fifth Avenue window. The tree that stood in the two-story foyer was fifteen feet tall. Anything else would have looked like a toy. The children and I crept about the huge new spaces, getting lost and looking involuntarily over our shoulders and out into the dark winter woods, where nothing or anything might be watching us. Pom worked as late and long as he ever had, but he never failed to take a turn around his castle when he got in at night. The rest of us came to appreciate much about it; Pom fell deeper and deeper in love. He hated the encroaching armies of shoddy, expensive subdivisions that swarmed around it as a cultivated Roman might hate the battering Visigoths, and I think the rats came to be a symbol of all that threatened his new kingdom. He would not rest until he ousted them.
For my part, I was glad to have the prospect of neighbors, even the kind who would live with Palladian windows and fake crenellations, and their vanguards, the rats, never appalled and disgusted me as they did Pom. I even began, secretly and with not a little shame, to root for them in the ongoing war that they could not win.
Finally Pom settled on a fleet of small wire humane traps baited with unpoisoned birdseed, that he scattered all over the house except in Mommee’s regular orbit. They worked well. We caught rats in droves. He fastened ropes to the traps and simply took them and their writhing cargo down to the river and lowered them. When the traps stopped bobbing and bucking, he hauled them up and dumped out his drowned victims and brought the traps back and set them out again that night. But these dawn executions cut into his working time, and he soon turned the task over to me. I protested, but he held firm.
“Come on, Merritt, surely you can lower a rat trap in the river,” he said. “It only takes a minute or two. Just dump ’em in the weeds afterwards. I don’t want to have to do it at midnight. You can take the dogs for a run while you’re at it. I really don’t ask you to do much of anything extra.”
He didn’t. Mommee was the only exception, and sanctioned time away from her was hardly an imposition. Shamed, I agreed to take rat duty. The very first day I did it the solution struck me. By now, I felt a special bond with the rats. I thought that the good souls who made up the Underground Railroad might have felt something of the same affection for the fleeing slaves who passed through their venues. It did occur to me, early on, that the rats I freed might be simply circling back into the house, but that did not bother me as much as the thought of more poison or neck-breaking traps. It wasn’t as if we didn’t have room for them.
On this day the dogs larruped ahead of me, running in crazy circles in the tall grass and broom sedge that bordered the path, their noses scouring the earth and their fringed tails waving. The sun bounced off their sleek coats. The drone of insects and the buzzing of cicadas and the soft purling of the river as it ran over the small rapids off our bank were the only sounds. Even the rats fell silent. It was very hot and still and seemed no time at all.
I reached the bank of the river and knelt and opened the traps. The two rats blinked and wriggled their snouts for a moment, but they did not move.
“Haul ass, bubbas,” I whispered, and shook the cages, and they streaked for freedom in the weeds, as fast in their clumsiness as small alligators. I looked after them until the underbrush had closed around them, and then I dumped the traps into the river and pulled them out so that they would be wet when I went back and stretched out on the bank in the shade and closed my eyes. I heard the dogs come bounding past me, heard the twin choonks as they went into the river, but I did not open my eyes. I lay still, listening to the cicadas. The heat pressed down on me like a fist. It struck me that I had never heard July flies at the beginning of June before.
It had been a strange winter and spring. Christmas Day had seen an afternoon temperature of seventy-eight, and by February first the daffodils and crocuses were in full bloom. By March everything was lush and green, and then a series of late ice storms blasted much of the green black. April, usually as wet and gree
n as the bottom of a lake, was so dry that grass seared and new blooms withered. May, usually balmy and perfect, was cold again. And now, in early June, there had been a string of days so heat-stifled and stale that it might be late August. But no summer storms swept in from the west to relieve us.
Nationally things were no better. Everything seemed out of kilter. A spring and summer of record-breaking heat was forecast for the West, while in the East neither the National Weather Service nor the Farmers’ Almanac nor the weather wackos foresaw an end to the blistering drought. Some said it was El Niño, some the widening hole in the ozone layer, some a Muslim conspiracy to bring the industrial West to its knees. Everybody had a theory. A renegade climatologist in Mono Lake, California, was predicting catastrophic earthquakes all over the country before fall. Since he was a pupil of the gentleman who had predicted the disaster on the New Madrid fault years before, which had not occurred, the media did not give him much credibility, but accorded him endless ink nonetheless. Even those of us who had tired of the litany of doom the strange, unsettled weather called forth felt a slight, ceaseless visceral unease. The hairs on my arms and at the base of my scalp crawled often, for no reason at all.
“Don’t you feel it?” I had said to Pom at breakfast just the weekend before, holding up my goose-bumped arms for his inspection.
“Nope. But you’re a walking barometer. Why don’t you go swimming? You haven’t used the pool in ages.”
“Mommee always wants to go in when I do,” I said. “I’m afraid she’ll get in over her head and I won’t be able to get her out.”
“Let her swim with you, it might calm her,” he said, making notes on an edge of the newspaper. I saw that he was adding up a column of figures. “Take Ina in with you. You could surely handle her together.”
“Can you see Ina in a bathing suit, towing Mommee around our pool?” I said, beginning to laugh. Ina was built like an interior lineman, wore faultlessly tailored blazers and slacks and Doc Martens, and was active in NOW. She referred to herself as a personal household assistant. I didn’t care what she called herself as long as she stayed; she was worth every cent of the scalp-crawling salary we paid her. She could have tossed Mommee across the room if she had wanted to, but she did not like dealing with her. Mommee needed, she insisted, her own attendant, a practical nurse or some other substantial companion. I agreed with her, but Pom did not.
“I will not have a stranger changing my mother’s diapers,” he said, and that was that. Diaper duty fell to me. I didn’t really mind. Disposables were not difficult to deal with, and Mommee was usually docile with me. It was implicit in the contract, after all.
“You let Ina get away with murder,” he said, not looking up. “For what we pay her she ought to do a water ballet every afternoon, if you want her to.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. He kissed me on the top of my head and went off to the clinic, still staring at the figures on the scrap of newsprint.
Now I lay on my back with my arm over my eyes, seeing wheeling black spots against dark red and feeling sweat gather at my hairline and thinking about earthquakes. I thought about Laura, too. The familiar dull worry began, deep inside me; the old pain bloomed softly along its pathway of scar tissue. Irritation followed. It was just like Laura to locate herself squarely on top of the San Andreas fault.
Laura lived just outside Palm Springs now, in what looked to be a kind of latter-day Anasazi dwelling carved out of the base of the great jagged mountains that swept abruptly into the desert sky. It looked, in the photographs she had sent when she moved there, strange and ancient and enchanting. It was a condo, and was, she wrote, so expensive that she was sure Sonny shit whenever he wrote out her alimony check. Sonny was her ex-husband, a minor filmmaker and major coke addict. He was her third ex. The other two had been in “the industry,” as Laura called it, but in more major positions than Sonny.
Laura seemed to be marrying in the same descending order that her career followed. She was a photographer’s stylist now, and in her spare time made what she called earth adornments, jewelry made from desert stones and horn and shell, and wrote New Age poetry. In her photos she was still, at thirty-eight, as blindingly beautiful to me as she had been at eighteen, but it was the tragedy of her life that the camera did not find her so.
“The camera doesn’t love me,” she had written disconsolately after her first film, a slight thing about three Southern sorority girls during the civil rights era, bombed spectacularly. “I simply don’t photograph. I had a little surgery; David thought it might be something to do with my chin and nose, but that wasn’t it. It comes from the inside, David says. Whatever I have on the stage doesn’t get through the lens.”
David was her first husband, the director of the failed sorority movie. He was on a fast track then, young and promising and hip, and he left his second trophy wife to marry Laura. Both of them were hot, so the buzz went. The little movie’s failure did not even slow David’s trajectory; his is an awesome name in Hollywood now. But it shod Laura with lead. There had been a few other small movies, because she was obviously a gifted actress, and a good bit of television, but nothing stuck. She had done highly lauded stage work in L.A., and still did some, mainly with touring companies, and a few commercials, but there again the fickle camera refused to connect with her. Now, in addition to the stylist’s job and the jewelry and poetry, she did dinner theaters around the state, and a very occasional low-budget movie, and worked sometimes as script supervisor or makeup or wardrobe stylist, and was thinking of becoming an agent. After all, she wrote, she knew virtually everybody who was anybody in the industry, and David and Marcus, the middle-level studio executive who followed David, owed her. Her contacts were faultless.
“And you have to admit I can still hack it in the looks department,” she said in the latest of her letters. I did have to admit it. Despite the periodic dark times she went through, she looked stunning, vivid, and bursting with health and vitality. But I could not read her sherry eyes. They shone with such an opaque glitter that light seemed to bounce back from them.
“Coke,” Pom said matter-of-factly when I showed him the photo.
“No. She promised not,” I said.
“I know it when I see it, Merritt,” he said. “I see it all day.”
“I don’t believe it. She couldn’t hold down all the jobs she does if she was on coke.”
“Sure she could, for a good while. It’s a powerful stimulant. You can run on it twenty-four hours a day. If she’s just started back, she could go for months yet. We’ll know when the telegrams for money start coming, won’t we?”
Pom and I had bailed Laura out of two bad times, when she lost jobs and husbands and condos at the same time. He had always thought drugs were involved. I had put them down to her innate fragility and her inability still to handle being alone for long periods. She was self-destructive then, erratic and inconstant and somehow insatiable. But I had not believed she would turn to drugs or alcohol. She had always been so careful about what she ate and drank, had exercised so meticulously, had had a daunting regimen of self-care and anointing. And it had been years, literally, since the last telegram.
Now, though, I lay in the thick heat of Georgia and thought of my little sister in her magical cave, astride the place where two great tectonic plates met, self-destructing, if my husband was right, all over the high desert.
“I should go get her,” I said to Pom when we had that conversation about her. “Just go out there and snatch her back. She doesn’t do this when there’s somebody around to bolster her. I could steady her. She could make good money in local theater and television. She could help with Mommee, maybe, until she gets her own place. And you know Glynn adores her.”
It was true; the few times that Laura had visited us, flitting through town like a migrating butterfly, Glynn had been fascinated with her. And she had seemed to adore Glynn, spending endless hours with her, dressing up and showing my shy child her exotic case full of stage makeu
p, rearranging Glynn’s thick, tawny hair. Glynn’s first word had been ’Aura. She still called Laura that sometimes. Laura actually courted Glynn, almost flirting with her, watching me to see how I reacted. I didn’t care then. I was glad for the attraction between them. I still thought something might bring Laura home one day.
I still did not see the danger in her.
“Not on your life,” Pom said, when I spoke of bringing Laura back to Atlanta. “She made her bed. Or beds. Let her lie in them. I’m not having an addict in the house with Glynn.”
I did not think he really considered Laura an addict. He had always seemed to like her, to be fascinated with her even in the face of her rejection of him. He was impatient with her inability to order her life, but he had not demurred when the requests for money came in. He simply did not want his own orderly life disarrayed, I thought, especially with Mommee worsening. And he was, of course, accustomed to command. All doctors are.
Nevertheless, the remark about Laura’s being an addict stung.
“No addicts in the house with your daughter, nossir,” I muttered after he had left for work. “Just a madwoman.”
But I was not ready to say this to him. The intimation that his mother might be mad gave him real pain. Sooner or later, I thought, he would work through his denial, and then he himself would see what needed to be done. Action would follow swiftly. It always did when Pom saw the need for it.
The sun moved to the west and broke free of the shading trees. I drifted, sweating and flinching away from the hum of midges and gnats. Their sound, and that of the chuckling of the river, seemed to swell and fade in my ears like the tide. Finally it stopped. I dozed, and did not wake until a shower of droplets hit me. I sat up, blinking stupidly. The dogs were milling about me, shaking themselves. River water was flying everywhere. It felt wonderful, like liquid ice on my sweating skin. The powerful smell of wet dog ran up my nose almost like the scent of skunk, burning not unpleasantly.
Fault Lines Page 5
