The Lifeguard

by Mary Morris

  Marlene just nods and smiles dumbly at me as if I really only am a pizza chef to this man. “So, Dad,” I say emphatically, “how about a Coke or a nice root beer?”

  “You’ve got a new haircut, I see.”

  “It’s the latest,” I tell him, turning so he can see the lines zigzagging, made by the tiniest razor in the world. “The California special, it’s called.”

  I take longer than I need with their pizza. I make sure the dough is perfect, the edge fluted in just the right way. I arrange the sausage in a special swirl. Put the chopped mushrooms in a nice moon-shaped arrangement. I put it in on a slow bake and watch as my dad holds Marlene’s hands as they sit by the window. He says things to her and she laughs, each time putting her hand across her face to cover her mouth until I realize she’s wearing braces, wired teeth. This, I tell myself, from the man who spawned me.

  I don’t really hate him, but I can’t say that I like him much either. I never did. The thing about my dad was you never knew what he’d do next. One minute we’d be washing salad in the kitchen. Next moment he’d slam me into a wall. One night at dinner we were all sitting around laughing. Next minute he throws a Coke in my face.

  He used to take me out to learn things like golf. He’d put down a ball and say, “Look, kid, here’s a ball. Now you hit it.” Then I’d hack at it and miss until he’d take the club out of my hand and hit a long smooth drive. “See, kid,” he’d say. “Any idiot can hit a nice drive.” My mom said that one day when I was just a little kid and we were at a swimming pool, he said, “Well, time you learn how to swim.” And he tossed me in. I don’t remember any of this, but she said she had to dive in after me and I gagged for an hour.

  My mom told me this just after she threw him out. She’d had a tough time with men, my mom. The guy before my dad was an actor who on his way to the wedding drove past the church and just kept going. At least my dad made it to the ceremony. She said she could have lived with him being unfaithful and not paying bills. What she couldn’t live with was the things he did to me.

  My girlfriend, Sue, tries to understand. Sue actually comes from a happy home where everyone gives each other presents for no reason at all and the hallway is filled with pictures of smiling relatives. She had an easy life until one day her twin choked to death at the dinner table. He was fraternal, so she never felt as if half of her had died, but she’s never felt quite right after that either.

  It’s the O’Sullivans’ night to show up, but so far they haven’t. They weren’t here the week before either, which I found strange since they’ve been every Wednesday since I started. I am beginning to think something is wrong, when I realize my dad’s pizza is ready and it’s smelling very done.

  The crust is a little burnt and I say to myself without him saying a word to me, Can’t you do anything right? If there’s a wrong way to do it, do you have to find it?

  I’m about to take the pizza to them when Sue grabs me by the arm. “Relax,” she says. “He can’t do a thing to you now.” Wanta bet, I think of saying.

  I give them their cheese with half sausage, half mushroom, and Marlene asks for a fork. I watch as she picks off every mushroom, one by one, moving them into a little pile by the side of her plate, like a squirrel hoarding its nuts. “Is something wrong?” I ask. “Would you rather have plain cheese?”

  Marlene just smiles and shakes her head. “I like to save the best for last,” she says, winking at my father. I understand that this is some joke between them, something I don’t want to know about.

  My dad chews carefully on his sausage. “Sit down, son,” he says. “Looks like business is slow. Sit down. I want to talk to you.” I don’t want to sit down and I’m not sure I want to talk to him, but Sue nods for me to go ahead. “I can handle anything that comes in,” she says. I’m hesitating, but just then Mr. Platsburg comes in. I can’t stand Mr. Platsburg, because he always comes in and asks for a giant with everything, then he says just hold the anchovies, the sausage, the extra garlic, and the peppers. And I always say, Mr. Platsburg, why don’t you just order an extra cheese and veggie, no peppers, but not Mr. Platsburg. It’s always the giant everything and what to hold for him.

  “Marlene and I are involved in a small business venture.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I say, giving the diamond in my ear a twirl.

  “We were thinking of opening a small beauty parlor and thought maybe you’d like to come in on it. You’ve got a stable income, some money saved.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I run my hands through my hair. Then I don’t say anything for a while. I just look at him, then at her, then back at him. My dad is waiting, poised, and I am pleased that I am keeping him waiting. Once he kept me waiting. I’d done something wrong at school and the principal called my dad. I don’t know why he didn’t call my mom, but he got my dad and he told me to go home and wait for him. I did that. I was maybe eight years old and I tried to do what I was told. I sat in a room and waited until he came home. Then he tied me to a chair. “You don’t wanta go to school?” he said. “I’ll give you a reason not to wanta go to school.” And he shaved off my hair. I don’t know why. It wasn’t the style like it is now and I just sat there watching as my hair fell off my head in thick tufts.

  “So we were thinking maybe you’d like to put a little of your savings into our project …” I could read right through this one. He’d lost in some two-bit card game and somebody was going to get him if he didn’t come up with a thousand or so.

  I am overcome with this desire to pound my father’s face, then toss him into the air. I imagine myself twirling him on the tips of my fingers. I am about to pull my arm back and do this when my mom walks in with a look in her eyes like she’s breathing fire. She stares at my dad and Marlene. “Whatever he wants, Brian,” she says to me, but she never takes her eyes off them, “don’t listen. Whatever he asks for,” she says, “say no.”

  “Ginnie,” he says with a half-cocked smile, “I just came to see my boy.”

  “He’s doing fine without you seeing him.” My mother is a tiny woman, not one to raise her voice, but she’s acting like she’s ready to go two or three rounds. “You visit him again, I’ll get a court order.” She turns to me. “I was driving by. I saw him sitting here. You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “Gimme a slice to go,” she says to Sue. “Don’t listen to a word he says.” Leaning against the counter but never taking her eyes off my dad, she takes her slice on its greasy slip of waxed paper. “I’ll be home. If you need me, call,” and she’s gone.

  It’s not long before they get up to leave. “Now, listen, Brian,” my father says. “Are you sure you can’t loan your old man a little?”

  “I’m sure. You know, Sue and me, we’re thinking of getting married.” I glance at Sue, whose eyes roll, then smile complacently at my dad. “But the pizza, Dad, it’s on me.” As they leave, I watch my father’s back recede. I take aim at him, as if I’ve got a dart in my hand. It was the one game he actually taught me how to play. I think I’ll never see him again. Or if I do, it’ll be when I need him the least.

  I’m thinking of putting out the CLOSED sign, taking Sue out back, laying her across the butcher block table, and having my way, when the O’Sullivans come in. They seem different somehow and it takes me a while to notice Oscar isn’t with them. It’s just Buddy and Scott and the parents. Mrs. O’Sullivan looks about ten years older and I’m wondering what I should say when she looks up at me. “The usual, Brian,” she says as if nothing’s wrong. “Just give us the usual.”

  I make them a Slice of Life. I order the vegetables and pepperoni in a beautiful swirl like a flower unfolding. The jar with the special ingredients is almost empty. Bennie always fills the jar, but I know he keeps a sack in the back, so I go into the storage room and find it. I reach into the large burlap sack and pull out a slip of paper. It reads: parsley, basil, oregano, thyme. I take a fistful of the ingredients in my hands and sniff it. Is this it? I ask myself, looking ba
ck at the slip. Could this be all?

  I let the O’Sullivans sit there, munching on their crust, as we close up. Sue hardly says a word as she puts the remnants of her choppings into Ziploc bags—mushrooms, green peppers, sausage—for tomorrow’s round. I scrub the counters clean. When they get up to leave, Mr. O’Sullivan comes over and clutches my hand. “Thank you, Brian. You have been very kind.”

  We lock up late. Some nights after work we bowl a few and some nights we go to a club nearby, but this night I want to take a ride near Pelican Point. “Let’s head for the beach,” I say. We get in the car and drive. We drive until we spot the moon, resting over the Pacific, round and orange and perfect. I pull into a sandy ditch and for a few moments stare at the sky. Then I cannot resist, I burst into song. “When the moona hits your eyes like a bigga pizza pie, dat’s amore …”

  Sue puts her fingers across my lips. “Shush,” she says, “let’s just be quiet for a while.”

  As we sit, I shape my fist into a round, even ball and point it straight at the moon as if I could smash right through the windshield and blot out the light. Sue must know what I’m thinking, because she reaches across and pulls me to her chest. I bury my face against her shoulder at the place where the unicorn must be. She dusts my hair. “You’re covered with flour,” she laughs, and I let her knead me in her hands like dough.

  The first time Ben asked Laurel to fly to Wisconsin with him to spend a week with his father, Laurel said no. She wasn’t partial to fathers. During the sixties Laurel’s father left her mother for a famous activist. Laurel had tried to stay away from fathers ever since. While Ben went home to visit his father, Laurel traveled through Europe with a friend on a Eurail pass for two weeks. She came back from Europe with snapshots of dozens of Gothic cathedrals, dull gray and stately, which had withstood many centuries. Ben returned with glowing reports of an old timber lodge with a huge fireplace set on the shore of Lake Michigan. Reports of a million berries on the shrubs in the woods, of long walks to pick them.

  “So, how was Martha?” Laurel asked after he finished telling her about the house. Ben could go on for hours talking about the house, barely mentioning his father and never mentioning Martha. Two years after his mother died, Ben’s father married a beautiful woman named Martha.

  “She’s all right,” Ben replied. “They fight a lot.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re unhappy.” Laurel actually was defending herself. She and Ben fought a lot as well.

  “My parents never fought.” He gave his pat reply. Laurel was a reporter for a mediocre New York newspaper and she’d learned a few things. She learned that what gets left out is often more interesting than what gets put in. She looked at Ben. His fingers tugged at his thin, sandy hair, a gesture Laurel knew meant he didn’t want to talk about something.

  He didn’t want to talk about how he used to sit on his hands to prevent himself from putting them tightly around Martha’s throat. Ben passed time when he was younger imagining all the terrible accidents that could happen to Martha in the course of the day. Sometimes he waited for the phone to ring with the bad news that never came.

  Ben began waiting for the bad news right after Harry married Martha. Harry met her in the pathology lab where they both worked. “You know,” Ben said to Laurel once, “I think she was just waiting for Mom to die.” It didn’t do any good when Laurel pointed out that they married two years later. “That was for appearances’ sake,” Ben always said.

  After Ben’s mother died, Harry took him fishing and camping alone for a month on Green Bay. Harry taught Ben all he knew about the different kinds of tackle, bait, and lures. He showed Ben how to bring a fish up from down deep and how to coax it out of a rocky place. He taught him how to pick a fly and cast in a stream. He taught him which plastic lures will snare a pike in the middle of the lake. At night Harry cooked the fish they’d caught in the day over an open fire. One night as Harry cooked, Ben saw two tears slide down his face and evaporate in the heat of the fire. Shortly after that trip, Harry met Martha. Ben hadn’t been alone with his father again since he married her.

  Ben didn’t tell Laurel then, though he’d tell her later, that he felt as if he could choke Martha. But he did confide in her one night shortly after he returned that he saw his mother from time to time. Ben and Laurel were lying in bed together and he stroked her hair as he told her this. “Sometimes I’ll be in the laundromat and I’ll see her sorting my socks. Or in a restaurant, she’ll be laughing at the next table.”

  A few days before she died from a hideous and extended illness, Ben woke in the night and found his mother standing in her nightgown at the foot of his bed. She said she was cold, so Ben pulled back the covers and made a comfortable place for her to lie down. She curled beside him like a lover, hugging him and shivering. In the morning when Ben woke, she was gone. When he asked her what time she’d gotten up, his mother said she had no idea what he was talking about. She’d spent the entire night on the sofa in the den.

  On Thanksgiving Laurel found herself in a plane flying with Ben to Green Bay. When Ben had told her they were going to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving, she’d said no, but Ben wasn’t asking. He was telling. They sat in silence during most of the flight. They’d had a fight in the cab to the airport. They’d fought over the fact that Laurel didn’t want to make this trip. She’d said to him in the cab, “I wish you hadn’t said yes for me.”

  But his father had already made the reservations and had gotten tickets for the Packers game. “He didn’t give me much choice,” Ben replied.

  Laurel sighed and wondered how she’d gotten herself into this mess. She didn’t want to be involved in somebody’s family. She didn’t want to be involved with anyone in this way. Laurel met Ben through a friend of hers named Stefanie. Stefanie worked on the police blotter and one day Laurel told her she wanted to meet a man. So a week later Stefanie said, “I’ve got a great guy for you. Handsome, sexy, smart, talented, runs his own graphic design studio, loves to travel …”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Laurel asked.

  Stefanie had hesitated. “He doesn’t get involved.” It seemed he’d been Stefanie’s boyfriend for a long time and finally she gave up trying. When Stefanie gave Ben Laurel’s number, he wasn’t interested at first. But then he noticed that they both had a 260 telephone exchange which meant that if they started seeing one another, he could walk home in the morning.

  It began as a matter of convenience. Then one morning as Ben was buttoning his shirt, he told Laurel, “Listen, I think I better warn you. I don’t get serious.”

  “Don’t worry,” Laurel had said. “I don’t either.”

  From New York to Green Bay, Laurel played the scene over and over in her mind. She couldn’t understand how they’d gone from that to this. She couldn’t understand how he’d gotten her on to this plane.

  Harry was a tall, elegant man, like Ben, only with silver hair that seemed to shimmer as he walked. Harry and Ben had the same soft brown eyes, the same wide smile. Harry was a research scientist until he retired a few years before. He had a vaccine named after him, Bancroft’s serum, something he discovered that saved the lives of infants who had a mysterious, and now, thanks to the serum, nonexistent, disease.

  Martha kissed Ben, who took it the way a corporal might take a command from his immediate superior. Martha and Laurel shook hands, but then Martha, as if in an afterthought, leaned over and kissed Laurel as well. Martha was fifty-five but she didn’t look forty. Laurel expected that. What she didn’t expect was that Martha would look like the picture of Ben’s mother he kept on his dresser and she wondered why he’d never mentioned it before.

  When they got into the car, Martha said, “Shall we take them for a ride around town first? I want to show Laurel our little shops.”

  Harry shook his head. “They’re only here for a few days. They don’t need to shop. They can shop in New York.”

  “Oh, well, I just thought …”

  Ben nudged Laurel sl
ightly, making certain she didn’t miss this minor point. But Harry took the route through town anyway. He drove down Main Street and helped as Martha pointed out the boutiques, the small grocers, the fish and tackle shop. Then they drove home. The house was a few miles outside of town and it sat right on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. The Bancrofts had their own beach. The house was an old hunting lodge that Harry and Martha bought a few years before when he decided to give up his teaching post in Madison. As they drove up, Martha said, “Well, this is our little cottage.”

  They walked into the main room, a large, two-story living room with a moose head staring down at them from above the mantel. The moose had glassy, maudlin eyes. Laurel thought the moose had as much business being here as she did. On the wall were paintings, the kind a child had obviously done. Paintings of fish and birds and the lake. There were bright-colored paintings of dunes, sloping gently to the sea, of starfish and whales, swimming with lake trout, mixed with coral.

  Then there were other paintings that seemed dark, with strange figures hovering overhead like ghosts in the air. In one painting there was a tidal wave with a boy, facing the wall of water with fish being flung at him from the wave. In another there was a rainbow-colored fish, struggling on a hook, blood gushing from a gash in its throat, its eyes bursting from its head. The fish stared out of the painting, and seemed to be looking as if to ask some question.

  Ben, noticing Laurel looking at the paintings, said, “I can’t believe he hasn’t gotten rid of these.” He pointed to himself. “From my early fish period.”

  Martha fluttered around, puffing up pillows, saying things like, “I bet you guys are starved. Let me just stick some cheese puffs into the oven.” But Harry said, “C’mon now, dear. Show them upstairs.” Martha frowned, but obeyed, leading them up the staircase into the bedroom. The bedroom had an old brass bed which Laurel felt certain would squeak. “Just make yourself comfortable,” Martha said, patting the crazy quilt. “You do want to be in the same room, don’t you?”