by David Rowell
Georgia put her hand to his cheek. “Baby,” she whispered. Ted let his head drop to his chest.
“Sometimes I think about going to China, you know, but I don’t speak the language, and I don’t know if Mai would even let me see her. She hated me when she left.”
“Well, it was a hard time for her,” Lolly said. “And we don’t need to get into all of that. You’re not the same person now. But the thing is, as a father you have rights. By law, you could see her, I’m sure.”
“I don’t even know,” Ted said. “I don’t even know what the law says in China about that kind of thing. Mai took off so quickly. I should have gotten better informed about all of that stuff—my rights, the rules. My lawyer didn’t tell me crap, you know? But I was really out of it back then. So I don’t know what to think. I don’t hate Mai for it. I don’t hate her. I just flaked out on her. I was wasted so much of the time. The shitty thing is, I don’t even know why. We used to have good times. The four of us would go out—those were good times, right?”
Edwin and Lolly nodded with appropriate vigor.
“Right, so why did I go and blow it?” Ted said. “That’s the thing. We had good times. Mai. I loved her, and that’s the truth. And I loved Ling-lee. But I pissed all of it away. And Georgia knows this is nothing against her. You know that, right, baby? I’m not saying—”
“Of course,” Georgia whispered.
“I mean, without Georgia, man. Anyway, Georgia knows this is not about her at all. It’s about Ling-lee. So what was I saying?”
“You were just talking,” Georgia said.
“Yeah, I know, but . . . well, anyway. Yeah, I would love for Georgia to meet Ling-lee. It would be great if she could just spend a whole summer here with us. Take her to the beach, the park. Here, in your pool. Whatever she wanted to do. Whatever she wanted.” Ted looked into the sky, and it was unclear if he was past the point of starting to cry or on the verge of it.
“Why are you so sure that could never happen?” Lolly asked. “Seriously. Maybe it’s time you look into what your visitation rights really are. I’m sure you have some rights. She’s your daughter, too. Maybe the thing you’re describing, a visit like that, could really happen. I would just say, Don’t give up. She’s still a little girl. You’re still her father. You know how to reach Mai. Maybe it’s time to see what’s truly possible.”
The four of them sat in silence for a moment. They could hear the tinkling sound of an ice cream truck. Georgia thought that maybe Ted didn’t want to talk about Ling-lee any further, and she started to say something about the speakers he had been building from scratch when he said, “God, I feel like my heart is about to explode right now.”
“Baby,” Georgia said, getting to her feet. “What’s wrong? Your chest hurts?”
“No, no, I feel something is opening up inside me. Or something. It feels beautiful. Lolly is so right. I’m Ling-lee’s father. What am I doing just dreaming like this? I should be able to see my little girl. Oh my God, Lolly!” Ted stood up and came around the table. He put his arms around Lolly and squeezed until she squealed in laughter.
“Lolly! You are a savior. I swear to God. I’m going to do it, Lolly. I’m not going to just sit around thinking about her anymore. I’m going to figure out what I can do. Even if I have to go to China. Thank you, Lolly. You’ve done something really deep for me!”
Ted wouldn’t let go, and Lolly finally had to squeeze back. “I’ve just been talking—that’s all,” she said. “One friend to another. You deserve to see your little girl. I know you love her. You could still be a good father to her. It doesn’t have to be too late. Seeing her would be good for you. And good for her, too.”
Ted released her, but his entire body was vibrating. “Oh my God,” he kept saying. Georgia took his hand, and then he leaned down and hugged her just as hard.
“You’re going to be a good daddy,” Georgia told him. Ted took her face in his hands and kissed her on the mouth for a long time. Lolly and Edwin looked at each other, and Edwin tried to smile at her.
“I just feel it, you know,” Ted said. “I’ve been so stuck. About Ling-lee, I mean. Like there was nothing I could do, and Lolly’s right. I have rights. Regardless of what Mai says, I know I have some rights. Maybe she could even come this summer, you know. Why not?”
“Well, first things first,” Lolly said, “before you get too ahead of yourself. You have to find out how to contact your lawyer.”
“Yeah, I know his name. That won’t be a problem,” Ted said.
“So start there,” Lolly said. “One step at a time.”
“You’re right,” Ted said. “Just gotta take that first step.”
Edwin finished his beer. He couldn’t remember being so unsure what to do with himself. He knew he had made Georgia uncomfortable in the bathroom, and Lolly was focused on everyone but him. Was it still because of the chlorine? Or was she suspicious about his insistence on trying to help Georgia? Without lifting a finger, Lolly had suddenly made Ted the happiest guy in the world. But Ted should have felt like that without anyone even mentioning Ling-lee, Edwin thought. He had Georgia! Now maybe one more piece of Ted’s life was going to come together. Who could say? He and Georgia and Ling-lee might end up a regular family. And they might end up coming over to his pool all summer long. Georgia would be wearing her wondrous bikini, and she might find a way to say as little to him as possible. Ted would fill his pool with his tiny chest hairs, and Lolly would stay moody all summer. It was early June, and everything Edwin had dreamed about for the summer felt shattered into oblivion.
“You’re a special person, Lolly,” Georgia said. “You really are. I’ve never thought to encourage Ted like that. We haven’t really even talked about Ling-lee that much.” Ted shook his head in agreement. “I know he’s sad about never getting to see her, and I didn’t want to make him more sad by bringing her up,” she said. “But I just heard those little girls playing next door, and I don’t know. I just thought of her—and mentioned her.”
“But don’t you see?” Ted said. “You’re the one that started this. If you hadn’t mentioned Ling-lee, Lolly wouldn’t have thought to say what she did. Don’t you see, baby? It all started with you.”
“That’s right,” Lolly said.
“Oh my God, I guess that’s true,” Georgia said, and she smiled brighter than she had all day. “That makes me happy.”
“Yeah, of course,” Ted said. “You both have done this amazing thing for me. It’s like this harmonic convergence, or something. Everything feels so opened up right now. No, you helped, too, baby.” Ted sat down and held out his hands in an invitation for her to sit in his lap.
Georgia wrapped herself around him, tucking her head under his chin. “It’s funny,” she said. “This is a sad day for the country, but for us it feels like a celebration, suddenly.”
“That’s right,” Ted said. He looked over at Edwin, who looked faint. “And we owe it all to Edwin and his pool.”
“Hardly,” Edwin said.
“I’m serious—think about it,” Ted said. “If you hadn’t invited us over, Georgia wouldn’t have seen those little girls next door, and she wouldn’t have thought to say what she did about Ling-lee. At least not in front of Lolly like that. So all of that happened because you wanted us to be here to help kick off your new pool. Forget the chlorine. It’s a great pool, Edwin. It’s a damned great pool. Thank you, brother.”
“Thank you, Edwin,” Georgia said. She flashed her flawless teeth at him, and there didn’t seem anything false or begrudging about it. Immediately Edwin’s mood began to lift. He was probably never going to touch Georgia again, but he still wanted to be around her. He worked up some hope that she might come over and hug him the way Ted had hugged Lolly, but she remained in the chair.
But what Ted said had softened Lolly’s anger toward Edwin, and she reached over and squeezed Edwin’s soft, fleshy hand, then held it. He studied their hands intertwined like that. Maybe, Edwin let himsel
f think, everything could start over from this day. If there was hope for Ted, why couldn’t Edwin’s life get better, too? Everyone was touching and smiling, and there was a vibe that Edwin could feel, a sense of new possibilities. And for the first time all day he thought about Robert Kennedy—not his funeral train, but Kennedy himself, his selflessness, his compassion for others. So much hope had died with him, it seemed. Who would stand up for so many who needed championing?
He didn’t want to get bogged down in that thinking now, though. Something was happening here in their backyard, and he wanted to try to hang on to it as best he could. Ted did deserve to see his kid. They were all deserving. And if Georgia got to play with Ling-lee the way she wanted, then that was just more happiness to go around.
But could Lolly ever be satisfied if it just remained the two of them? He had his doubts. He looked at Lolly’s face, and more than anything he wanted to take her into their bed and make love to her, with the sunlight streaming through the window, like the old days. He gently tugged on Lolly’s hand, and she understood that he wanted her to sit with him. Lolly let her head fall back, closing her eyes, and a kind of serenity spread across her face in a way that thrilled Edwin. Then she stood up and positioned herself over him. She kissed him for the first time that day, and in the eagerness with which he kissed her back she let the last remnants of her anger drain away. Both couples were kissing now, and the girls next door pressed their faces and their Barbies’ faces against the chain-link fence and watched.
Pennsylvania
Delores had always preferred Ethel to Jackie. Jackie’s beauty made her seem unreal, somehow, as if she belonged under glass or behind a velvet rope in a museum, whereas Ethel looked like she could have been a fun roommate or the head of fund-raising for the PTA. Bobby and Ethel, Delores had read, liked to throw parties that could turn raucous. Once, Ethel had jumped into their backyard pool with her clothes on—to the astonishment of her guests. Soon, Bobby was in the water with his clothes on as well. It was said that Bobby and Ethel’s kids could be a little rough around the edges, and Jackie eventually forbade Caroline and John John to play with them. Delores didn’t remember seeing Ethel in a little pillbox hat even once.
Delores had once believed she would be the wife of a politician herself. During her freshman and sophomore years at Penn State, she dated a boy named Darden Clayton, who had attended Delores’s rival high school. Darden’s dream was to become mayor of their hometown by the time he was thirty-five. He planned to run the town council by thirty, and before that he was counting on being the youngest alderman in the town’s long history. He liked to tell Delores what, as wife of the mayor, she would be expected to do: be involved in children’s charity work, perhaps, to organize the mayor’s Christmas party for the town’s most prominent citizens, to attend with him the openings of a new hospital wing, a retirement home, a new Little League field. Their sophomore year Darden was elected class president, but it proved to hold little training for Delores, as there were few responsibilities to which she, as his girlfriend, was obliged.
Delores took comfort in knowing so clearly what was ahead for her; the idea of having so visible a role in a small town made her sit through classes with a kind of dreamy distance. She enjoyed her psychology and behavioral studies and Introduction to Classical Music classes, but she could no longer invest herself in the course work the way she had in her first semester there. If Darden was going to be mayor by thirty-five, he said, he’d want to have children old enough so that they could sit still and listen intently during his swearing-in ceremony and pose properly when asked by a newspaper photographer. If all went according to plan, by the end of their first year of marriage Delores would be pregnant.
Darden Clayton didn’t yet understand that in politics, so little goes according to plan, but he understood that in times of crisis, a politician must be decisive and steer away from anything that can be damaging. In the spring semester of their sophomore year, Delores believed that she had missed her period. She waited a week before she mentioned this to Darden, though she knew that the more sensible step was to see a doctor first. They were walking in the campus quad, holding hands, and all around them young Alpha Delta Pi pledges in matching blue T-shirts were linked arm in arm and singing “Alley Oop” as a couple of senior sisters led them with the grand, sweeping arm movements of a conductor. Delores felt so keenly happy at that moment, and the possibility of a baby seemed to her, suddenly, like one more reason to be grateful for the direction her life was going. Without breaking their stride she told Darden about the late period. If it did turn out that she was pregnant, she said, they could simply get married early. As she spoke, she was sure he would be impressed with the way she had thought it all through. “I’ve been so distracted by it the last couple of days—but not in a bad way,” she said. “I sit in class and I don’t hear a word the professor says.”
Darden’s face tightened, but already he liked to practice a mayoral sense of calm, and he squeezed Delores’s hand before saying, “Well, we’ll find a way to deal with it, if you are. It’s a whole lot easier to get this kind of thing fixed these days. I know a couple of guys whose girlfriends have done it. It’s not true that your only choice is to drive down to Mexico.”
Delores nodded, and as Darden looked on at the singing pledges, she squinted to push back the hot rush of tears. “You know, it’s just, you don’t start your career in politics by getting your girlfriend knocked up in college,” he said. “You do that, you can look forward to working as a middle manager at the local water plant. Politics is just that tough. But everything will be fine. If you are—if your period doesn’t come—I’ll help you through everything. I’ll be there for you. We just have to think like a team.”
Five days later, Delores’s period came, but her weepiness over the course of that week had been inexplicable to him, and he became uncertain about Delores as a mayor’s wife. She was too unstable for him, he decided, a possible liability.
Two years after graduation, a girlfriend convinced her to come along on a blind double date. Arch King was just back from Korea and starting up in the tire business. He was large and unapologeti-cally loud, and when he laughed he slapped his wide palm across the table. At the end of their first date Delores was surprised by how easily she let him kiss her—wet, with Arch moaning slightly—and the toothy grin he flashed when they said good night made her feel alive and beautiful.
“I think you’re going to be seeing a lot of me, Delores Banks,” he told her on the front steps of her apartment building, called Langley Arms. When he was walking—backward—to the car, where his buddy sat waiting behind the steering wheel, Arch noticed the sign and flexed his muscles like an old-time circus performer. “You belong in Arch’s Arms.” His laughter exploded into the night air, and when Delores got upstairs and found her roommate still awake, she said, “I am floating!”
By the time they had picked out a chapel for the wedding and arranged the accommodations for a five-day honeymoon at Lake Erie, she had long convinced herself that being the wife of a politician would have given her a rather empty life—an endless parade of gestures and poses that served everyone but herself; with Arch, everything was what it appeared to be. He had no secrets, no deeper aspirations but to work for himself and provide comfortably for his family. He liked to prop his size thirteen feet up wherever he was, and anyone who showed too many table manners was a bore and possibly a snob. And like Darden Clayton, he knew exactly what he wanted and didn’t want for himself. Fighting in Korea, which he generally talked very little about, made you know exactly who you wanted on your side, he said. He and Delores had been married for two months when he told her that—they were tucked into their little backyard table, eating steaks he had cooked to well done. In a year he would get the loans to open up his Tire King shop, and six months after that they would have a baby boy. Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president. He had gotten Arch’s vote both times.
Maryland
Roy too
k a few pictures of Jamie pulling the bowstring back to his ear. “There’s never a reason you should miss,” Jamie said. “Once you work out the physical mechanics, which aren’t that hard, the only thing that can screw you up is your mind.” Jamie had just hit eleven bull’s-eyes in a row, but now he seemed tired. He put the bow down and closed his eyes.
“The old job at the garage is still there if I want it,” he said. “Standing offer from Jurrel. Same crew’s still there. Lonnie and Dave. Fat Phil. Mr. Jurrel said take my time, let him know by July if I want to come back. Basically, if you’re leaning over an engine or underneath the car, one leg’s as good as two. It might be charity, but he knows I know what the hell I’m doing.”
Jamie traced one of the arrows with his fingers. “Maybe Sutton and I will get an apartment together.”
Roy wrote in his notebook. “You said ‘charity,’ a second ago, talking about how some people respond to the war and wounded soldiers. What’s it been like for your family—your coming back under these circumstances? How would you say they’ve responded?”
“Look, what am I really going to say to you, a reporter? Huh? They’re completely flipped out, in case you haven’t already picked up on that. They’re trying to do the best they can, you know, but my mother and Miriam, it’s like I’m some sickly little kid, all the touching and hugs and . . . They don’t know what to do, but, you know, that’s not for your story. My dad’s different. He’s been cool, but for this little article here, let’s say this. Here you go: they’ve been great. Really supportive, just treating me like nothing’s different. They’re glad to have me back home, of course. But they don’t treat me like a cripple, and I don’t think that’s how they see me in their eyes. There, that’s the stuff you’re looking for, right?”
“I’m just looking for anything you want to tell me,” Roy said. “Whatever the truth is, or whatever version of the truth I can get.”
