by Hob Broun
I think it was out of frustration at this that Carla put on lipstick, slipped off her robe, and placed herself, hands on narrow hips, at the edge of the water. Her suit was as red as the lipstick and her skin was as white as the clouds.
“What a picture,” Cordelia said rather sadly.
“Hmmm?” My mother peered momentarily over the top of her book.
Carla pulled the barrettes from her hair, corkscrewed her toes in wet sand. The screaming of children and the screaming of gulls combined with canned music that drifted out of the snack bar. I didn’t know what I felt as I watched her, but whatever it was called was pulling me tight.
The boy who spoke to her was slightly older and much taller. He had a deep scar on his leg and a Dodgers jacket which he kept zipping and unzipping.
“She’s fine,” my mother said when I reported that they’d walked off out of sight.
“A protective brother,” Cordelia sighed. “I wish I’d had one.”
What was with these two? They huddled in the shade, one staring at a book, the other at her bulbous freckled knees, both of them dully immune behind their plastic lenses to the shiny pleasure all around. I saw women sprawled in white chairs, women oiling themselves and being oiled, tugging at their bikini tops and laughing hard enough to spill their drinks, but my sister was nowhere among them. I remembered reading in her diary on my rainy Sherlock expedition.
“What bothers me most,” she had written in her jagged cursive hand, “is that all this being afraid will keep on and get bigger.”
When Carla got back, spraying sand as she pounced into our shade, she was wearing the Dodgers jacket. Her mother reached over without looking away from the heavy book and lightly stroked her face. Cordelia began to pack away the unused towels and tanning creams. I poked my sister in the stomach, looked hard at her. She just laughed and wiped the lipstick off on the cuff of her new jacket.
I had one more observation to make. It came later on that day, during a lull brought on by humidity and imminent departure, and like almost any observation, it was avoidable.
“Go see what your sister is up to.”
I slowly climbed the stairs, my hand slippery on the banister. Silence was thick as the air and a strip of fading sunlight lay like a gangplank on the hallway floor. Carla wasn’t in her room, but a smudge of red registered in the corner of my eye as I passed the entrance to the skylighted bedroom where our mother had been sleeping. Carla, in her bathing suit, took on poses before a cheval glass. She balanced on one leg like a ballerina, bent down like a shortstop. I began to applaud her but managed to brake my hands. She was peeling the suit down to her waist and, with a soft, investigatory expression, touching her little breasts.
“Leave her alone,” my mother said, pulling me across the aisle of the plane and away from her daughter’s knitting, which I had been attempting to pull apart. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing, Ma.”
Into me for sure, pulling me tight. And horribly now, I had a pretty good idea of what it was called. I could have told her.
23
IT WAS AUGUST AND the girls were barefoot, awkward and uncertain in their shorts and sleeveless tops. I was ten years old and peering out at them from an upstairs window. Though a breeze stirred the curtains, which crackled pleasantly against my face, the room was stuffy and hot. I itched inside my clothes. Their laughter was sharp and their faces were pink with excitement. I wanted to barrage them with water bombs, but didn’t.
The grownups were away for the day at a wedding. A paving contractor Gordo knew professionally was marrying his chauffeur’s niece at a country club in Massapequa. Carla had been left in charge of the house. She called up her three best friends the moment the car cleared the driveway and said come on over. She then coldly and quietly informed me that if I was the least bit bratty or tried to embarrass her, she’d lock me up in the laundry room without so much as a comic book.
The secret rites of girls. They’d brought a phonograph out on the deck with extension cords and played the same record over and over. They danced expertly with each other, teased and stretched, tried on hairstyles. They yakked about dream-boat Dick Chamberlain, Dr. Kildare in his white bucks. And my sister yakked the loudest, tried hardest to make the others laugh, sprayed herself with root beer. She had grass stains on her knees and her eyes were big and wild.
How crushing was my disappointment. I thought: This is how she really is. The distant, placidly scornful Carla that I knew was nothing but a fake. All the cunning strengths I’d imagined her to have were lies. She probably couldn’t even beat me up; I’d test her soon. Here I could see her true form: a gumdrop. An empty-headed blabbermouth.
The record began again. “Cupid, draw back your bow / And let your arrow go / Straight to my lover’s heart for me.” The aromas of bubble gum and hair spray reached me in my high window. I pretended I had x-ray vision and could see through their clothes.
It was January and the sidewalks had been salted. I was twenty-three years old and working part-time in a florist shop. Though I had friends who didn’t mind paying for my drinks, I had lately been keeping to myself. I was fractious and horny. I wanted to break away from my circular thoughts, but could not.
The phone wouldn’t stop ringing, so finally I picked it up and there was Carla on the other end. She was down from grad school, shacked up with a biology instructor at the Americana Hotel, and insistent that I have dinner with them that night. It had been six or seven months since I had seen her last and we’d ended that evening arguing bitterly over trivialities. But I was curious about the man she was with and very hungry, so I agreed to meet them at an Italian place in the west thirties.
“Don’t be too hard on Ted,” she urged. “He’s jittery enough.”
“Mr. Charm,” I promised. “I’ll ask him to tell me all about cell division.”
Il Grifone was jammed. I pushed past the nurses and policemen who were three deep at the bar, skirted the chicken-wire-enclosed bocce court that thrust through the middle of the dining area, and found Carla and Ted at a back booth, already tucking into a platter of clams oreganata.
Carla was as beautiful as I had ever seen her, gleaming in silk and tweed, lips glossed, unequivocally in command. Naturally, this did nothing at all for my attitude toward Ted, who came up out of his seat to gladhand the younger brother. His eyes made importunate contact. His hair looked to be just now lengthening into Prince Valiant fashionability. He made me think of a turbine salesman who paints seascapes on the weekend.
“Anything you like,” he said, handing me the wine list.
“We drove the whole way with a broken heater.” Carla embraced herself momentarily. “I was all for grabbing a motel in Connecticut, but Ted convinced me to persevere and now I’m glad.”
“Me also,” I said. “I was thinking you’d scratched me off your list or something.”
She pulled my head to her padded shoulder. “You bonehead. How could I do a thing like that?”
Carla released me. I pushed the hair out of my eyes. Ted righted the sugar bowl she’d upset.
“Since that’s cleared up,” he said, “let the revels begin.”
The veal was somewhat dry, Carla rambled a bit about her doctoral research in Shaker architecture, and revelry was hardly the word. But it was jolly, by and large. Certainly Ted was not the stiff-necked drone my jealousy had cast him as, and the interest he showed me went beyond a weighed desire to cement his position with my sister. Carla, brazen with after-dinner brandies, sang the Canadian national anthem in a clear soprano that had the busboys applauding. Then, while Ted was off buying her cigarettes, she impaled me with intimacy, grasping my hand and pitching her words so low I was forced to lean close in order to make them out.
“It’s Ted who’s smitten, poor kid. I just wanted to get out of Boston for a few days. Not that I mind sleeping with him, but he gets so arduous over things. Makes me want to tromp on his feelings when he pushes them at me so much.”
The following night I returned from a card game thirty dollars poorer and found her straddling a suitcase in front of my door. She had a vivid bruise above one eye.
“Ted,” she said, pointing to it.
As Carla summarized the incident, Ted had been unable to deliver on a promise of tickets to a sold-out musical, she’d made some remarks about boasts that couldn’t be backed up, and, just that fast, he jumped his tracks. She appeared to be more repelled than angry or upset.
“He cried right afterwards. He said he’d never struck a woman in his life, but I’ve got him turned inside out, with all his nerves exposed. What nonsense.”
“Good thing we’re not Old World,” I said. “Else I’d have to go looking for the bastard with a tire iron.”
Carla said, “He wouldn’t be hard to find.” And then she asked would I mind unplugging my phone.
After that it was like we were kids again, only better. We watched terrible old movies on TV and ate peanut butter and red onion sandwiches. We told all the jokes we could think of and when Carla laughed I could look in and see every silver filling in her mouth. But it got later and we decelerated. Something had been settling on us all the while, like dust.
“Do you ever want to turn around and go backwards?”
I didn’t quite know what she meant, but I said sure.
“Like you missed the turnoff somewhere and are getting more and more lost? It’s that way for me about half the time. And Boston, the people around me all trying to be so hip and loose and ending up mostly just trying.”
“Could be you’re getting too old for school.”
“Compared to what? Remember, I had two whole years to think about it and what did I do but go running on back. The institutional setting. And I haven’t earned a single gripe, have I? So I’ll get my degree and go to work for a museum or someplace where I can restrict myself to old things. Because I’ll tell you, this new stuff is too goddamn flat for me.”
I pictured her on a landing strip in the middle of Nebraska with no trees anywhere around; and I could share the terror of a horizon that began at the edge of her shadow and never really stopped.
I said, “There’s a Randolph Scott western on channel two.”
Where I wanted to give comfort, I could offer only distraction. And the bruise above her eye, now shading into a dismal range of purple-brown, was like a litmus gauge of her feelings.
“It’s late and I really have to turn myself off,” Carla said.
Persuading her to take the bedroom, I stretched out on the couch with a folded topcoat for a pillow. I didn’t expect to sleep much anyway. I saw the strand of light under the bedroom door go out. I picked at dead skin on my lip and listened to the radiators knock. Herding my thoughts through the minefield of inadmissible love was no easier than it had ever been. I composed a fantasy of Carla and me living in a windmill. We had leaded windows and wooden utensils and a garden like a Brueghel painting. There were soft, forgiving contours as I dozed slowly off.
I came awake to the sound of running water. Carla emerged from the kitchen with a drinking glass and became in the blue cast of the streetlamp a character from a 1915 children’s book. I pretended to sleep, my lids raised just enough to see. She had a man’s white shirt on and her hair spilled over the collar in a way that made me dizzy. Pressing the glass against her swollen brow for a moment, she looked down at me with what I imagined to be tenderness. I would never know. She placed the glass on the floor next to me and went back to bed.
I did not sleep again until the sun was up, and briefly then. But Carla moved on in that time. Her note said she was taking an early train in order to catch a friend’s on-campus dance recital. For breakfast I had a bowl of coffee ice cream. I dusted and mopped and rearranged the contents of the refrigerator. Finally I went in and sat on the bed. I noticed that it was snowing, had been for some time. There were pigeon footprints on the white sill. I would never know. Rolling onto my stomach, I inhaled what I could from the indented pillow.
The phone rang only minutes after I plugged it back in. It was Ted. He sounded unhinged. He told me he’d been drinking all night, submerged in remorse and confusion.
“I don’t understand what she does to me. It’s unearthly. She’s so steady. She’s so impervious. How do I figure out what goes on inside her?”
I hung up on him. What he had to say I already knew.
24
THIS, SOMEHOW, IS MY fourth day off in a row and I feel listless, out of touch. Didn’t I have more stamina when I was young? Wasn’t it easier keeping the balls in the air? I head out for the Boyers place to say how’s business, hoping something or other will chime.
They’re in the garage, packing up orders—boot knives, freeze-dried stroganoff, like that. The slogan is stenciled on the wall: YOUR KEY TO SURVIVAL IS KNOWING WHAT THE DOOMED WILL NEVER LEARN. Last year Sonny went up to Denver for a three-week course in mail order merchandising.
“Where you been holed up?” he says.
Dawn turns her back, picks at a line of window putty.
“You know, the usual places.”
She’s wearing cracked mules and a coral housedress; her soft swaying bulk seems lethal. Sonny busies himself moistening strips of package tape on a gray sponge ball, and something strains against the seam of his mouth. It’s awkward in here, thick with the poorly hidden anguish of a hospital waiting room. Always expecting bad news, these two. Maybe they’ve had some.
“So how’re the boys?” I say clumsily.
Dawn sends a black look to her husband. “Off at Curry’s on a sleepover.”
Sonny, breathing hard, makes a wet weave of the tape.
“Clear them out to clear the air,” she adds cryptically. Her tough, shiny hair is rumpled, like a doll’s pulled from the bottom of a toy box. “Not like they done anything.”
I notice the can of Mace fastened to Sonny’s belt and I wonder about domestic strife with so much weaponry at hand. I study cobwebs, look at my watch.
“It’s not any of their decision,” Sonny says.
Dawn brushes past me. “Ain’t anybody’s.”
Then, through gypsum board, we can hear her clanging and banging in the kitchen. The chalkboard is in there, the textbooks reinforced with masking tape, homemade stools where the boys sit to receive instruction from their mother—a little diorama of the pioneers.
Sonny drops onto a stack of sealed cartons; his lips contort. “They say if you give respect you’re supposed to get it.”
Things aren’t chiming so much, but I’m curious, drawn in. Otherwise I’d make some sense, say, “Came at a bad time,” and get moving. All these tools collected here, canteens and manuals, the hard details, convince me there’s something to look for. I want to light a cigarette but I’ve left them in the car.
And now Sonny has on his bully pulpit face. He wants me to know that every American child will consume by the age of eighteen the energy equivalent of sixty thousand gallons of gasoline, that in a minute’s time twenty-five babies are born for whom there are no protein resources.
“Dawn doesn’t want to grow up.” He shrugs. “I just don’t get through to her.”
“Why can’t you meet in the middle?”
Smiling, Sonny confides that later in the week he is scheduled to enter Cherry Ames Hospital for a vasectomy.
“Dramatic,” I say, but it isn’t the word I want.
“I know, I know. My old man was alive, he’d say just chop the damn thing off and be done with it. I come from five brothers and three sisters, fruitful. But that was then and this is now.”
Suddenly I feel like a tired cop pressed by duty against the rancor of s
trangers. I really want that cigarette.
“And it’s no more than what she wants for herself. She’s got to grow up and face up.”
He looks straight at me, his tight eyes asking me to take sides.
Trying to change the subject, I ask, “Still planning that extension off the back of the house?”
But for Sonny there is only one subject. “Crying for the space, God knows. All squeezed like we’re in a toothpaste tube. Something to face up to is the plain and simple limits of where we’re at. I’m not getting rich with this mess,” slapping the cartons under him, hunching himself as if yoked, in traces. “Just to get us all through, all together. I’m no fucking swami.”
The family man deflected by his family. He looks up, down, looks ahead, looks for an escape hatch. The only reassuring thing I can think of is it isn’t me.
“Self-sufficient,” I remind him. “You’re keeping an edge.”
He agrees reflexively and begins an aimless rummaging through the clutter of his family business. What the doomed will never learn. But it seems that Sonny, if only for the time being, has gone off the edge of his map. This comforts me; I feel less out of touch. And probably Sonny will regain his bearings in the clean, fresh, pastel symmetries of Cherry Ames, in the confidence of highly trained professionals and the irrevocable snip.
No daughters for Dawn. I see her sulking at the sink, molars clenched as she peels crust from a skillet. Her grudge will be immaculate and worth holding on to. Her back will be a broad wall in the bed, her face thick and curt in the long mornings.
I am expecting to be asked for dinner, and certain I will stay.
25
SON OF A LOAN officer, debating team captain and cum laude grad, Tory essayist, figure man, braggart, moralist, fixer, my father goes through life with antennae fully extended, alert for the smallest threat and ever ready for battle. No grievance escapes notice, and no surly mechanic or slow-witted bank teller escapes imperial rebuke. He is a tireless author of letters to the editor, will hang on the phone an hour or more, waiting his turn to cross swords with a radio talk jockey.
