by Lily King
He pinches the tears off the bridge of his nose and shakes his head. Then he laughs. “I can’t fucking believe this.”
“Jonathan.” He is on the other side of the terrace now. “Nothing has changed. I want to be with you. I want a life with you.”
“Not enough. You don’t want it enough.”
Can he not understand that this is not my choice? Wouldn’t he do the same in my position? “What is wrong with you?” Anger snakes its way up. I don’t care what Mr. Emery hears. “Why can’t you get this? Why can’t you see that I don’t want to do this but that I have to do it? Yes, we had a plan. And now I’ve changed the plan slightly. Why can’t you adjust to that?”
“Slightly? You have not changed the plan slightly.” His voice is deep and bare. “You said you were going to work at Berkeley. I turned down Temple to be with you. And then instead of going to California, you came here. For two days, you said. And then you said, six days more. And now you’ve given up the job. Why should I trust that you will ever come to California?”
“I will, Jon.”
“I don’t believe you. You know, you can poke fun at me and my plans, but I have no options. If I want to eat, if I want a roof over my head, if someday I want to support a family, I have to have a plan. But there are no real consequences to your choices. Because you can just set a match to everything and your daddy will pay the bills. Grad school wasn’t just pretend for me.”
I’ve been on my own for eight years. I had a smaller stipend at Michigan than Jonathan. We were impoverished together. And now he’s twisting it all around. “You know what? Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, too.” I’ve never seen his mouth so tight, so mean.
He turns and drops down the stairs. Such a base ending. No better than an exchange between my father and Catherine.
I hear the truck start up, old and loud, and then the tires in the white gravel, and then silence as he reaches the pavement and is gone.
My father comes home from golf well after lunch. For a moment I think he is drunk. For a moment I see a mirage, a flashback to his drinking face, a slackness around the mouth, guilt in the yellow eyes. But as he gets closer and lifts his eyes and catches me watching from the kitchen, he changes back.
“We took no prisoners,” he says when he comes in. Then he looks at me closely. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Just tired.”
“Tell you what. Let’s go out to eat tonight. Anyplace you want.”
17
July passes.
In the mornings, if he doesn’t have a tennis or golf date, my father is full of industry around the house. He mows the grass on his tractor, cleans the pool and gives it its chemicals, or weeds the vegetable garden and goes to the dump. He likes to putter, to play with his tools in the garage, to walk back and forth from house to garage to shed to poolhouse with a purpose I can’t always discern. Occasionally he sits at his desk in the den with his reading glasses on and pays bills. He seems not to miss work in the least. I try to appear industrious too, though I am tired of industry. There is a thick caul of inertia around me. I walk the dogs to the beach, around to Littleneck Point, downtown to Neal’s store. I have begun an essay for lay readers about poverty and community in the Sierra Juarez, but I can’t find my bearings. I can’t get past the second page.
If I’m not careful, my father will have us on the tennis court most afternoons, so I have to come up with alternative activities. At the beginning of August, when my father has a yellow thirty-days-sober chip in his pocket, we drive a half-hour north to the Hook’s Island ferry, which is a glorified raft with flaking green railings and a few benches. Neither of us have ever been to Hook’s. We stand at the stern and my father looks out at the water, at the small white wake and the lobster pots and the handful of Whalers and sailboats moored close to shore, at the gulls who are squawking and diving into the same churning patch of water. The temperature drops as we pull farther from land. The ocean lies in strips of color: pale lavender, powder blue, cobalt, navy. My father looks but he does not comment on its beauty. It may be the first time he’s seen the open ocean all summer.
“My mother rented a house on an island one summer,” he says. “Reminds me of this.”
“I thought you always went to Boothbay.”
“That was after she married Hayes. He had that house in Maine.”
“Where was the island?”
“I’m not sure. Duck Island, I think it was called. Or Buck Island. I was only five or six.”
“Just you and her?”
“And Nora.”
The ferry jerks suddenly and we turn to the bow and the island is right there, all beach at its edges, a hillock in the middle. There are no houses. The whole thing is a wildlife reserve. The boat slides into its slot. The August heat returns.
The tourists hoist their backpacks and wait for the ferryman to unhook the chain. We let a family go ahead of us, a squat man, a willowy wife, two kids with mountain bikes. They smile at us. I can see they recognize that I am a daughter on a picnic with her father. I feel a small swell of pride. I smile back.
The best beach, said the woman who sold us our ferry tickets, is on the other side of the island, and we follow the path she told us about through the woods. It is dim and cool, the ground sandy.
“We played a game with a white handkerchief,” my father says. “It rained a lot. There was a little box for kindling by the fireplace and I hid the handkerchief there every time. Every time. Because it made my mother laugh. I think it was in Canada,” he says.
Prince Edward Island? Campobello? But I don’t want to waste a question on place. I stay silent. I wonder if what they speak about in AA is making him look back. I don’t pry about his meetings; I don’t know if he has a sponsor or if he is doing the steps.
“Nora got sick and stayed in bed. And my mother had to play with me.”
Through the break in the trees I can see the crests of the dunes, overlapping, blown to sharp peaks by the wind.
“All my life I heard about how smart my mother was, how she won some big prize at Smith and wrote articles about her travels in Egypt for The New York Times even before she’d graduated. But you know what I saw most of the time? A woman sitting in a chair staring at nothing. Even before my father died. Maybe you’d hear her complain that the steak was overdone or her glass had spots or that I was making too much noise. But that was about it.”
“She sounds angry.”
“She was angry. Why? She had a comfortable life. Her parents left her plenty to live on.”
“Maybe she didn’t want a comfortable life. Maybe she wanted a challenging life. You’d shoot yourself if you had to be a smart woman in Dover, Massachusetts in 1930.”
We climb up between two high dunes. The ocean is darker over here, facing directly east, the waves more dramatic. I have read that at sea level the horizon is always only three and half miles away, but right now this seems impossible. I am stunned by the great empty blue enormity of it. After we’d had sex in my car that first time, Jonathan and I sat on the small gravel beach and debated why large bodies of water are so alluring. I said it was all about color, and he said it was space. No one could pave it or build on it or sell anything on it. It’s just a huge relief for our eyes, he said. But for me it’s something more. The water always seems to be saying something to me, urging something from me, though I never know exactly what it is.
“Why do you always do that?”
“Do what?
“Do what you just did with my mother.”
“What did I do with her?”
“Make it all be about her being a woman. It’s like what happened to that kid in Garvey’s class, David Stevens. You remember him? You probably wouldn’t. He wasn’t there long. Came in fifth grade, and then in seventh he cheated on a test and was given a warning. Next test, cheated again, and got kicked out. Parents made a huge deal about it, said it was because he wa
s Jewish. No one knew he was Jewish! His name was Stevens, for chrissake. But for them, that was the reason. That poor kid never had to take responsibility for what he had done.”
I have a vague memory that there is more to the story, that there were two boys cheating and the other one had just been suspended, not expelled. But I don’t want to argue about the politics of Ashing Academy. “So you want me to just say, Wow, your mother was a basket case, and not look at why she might have been unhappy?”
“Don Finch’s mother was an appellate court judge. Shep Holliston’s was a doctor.”
“They were the exceptions.”
“So be an exception. Life’s not fair. It isn’t fair for you and it’s not fair for me. But if you say her life was awful because she was born a rich woman in the early twentieth century, I’m not going to shed any tears. Your generation seems to think men forced women to marry and shoved them in the kitchen. Let me tell you it wasn’t like that. We were the ones being railroaded into marriage.”
“Oh, come on, Dad.”
“It’s true. If you wanted to have sex with a decent girl.”
“From a good family.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“A girl you could take to the club.”
We’ve slid down the dunes and now walk along the beach, looking for a good spot.
“Listen, I don’t like all the whining your generation gets into.” He laughs. “Like that black woman last year who testified against the judge.”
“Anita Hill.”
“Anita Hill. What a beauty. Here she had an opportunity to see one of her own become a justice of the Supreme Court, and she threw herself down on the tracks. She comes out of nowhere to destroy him. First of all, do you really think an important fellow like that, a guy who had been working towards something like this his whole life, is really going to talk about a pubic hair on a can of Coke? And supposing he did, what would you do?”
“I have no idea.”
“I hope, I just hope, that you would get back to work.”
“Dad, Anita Hill didn’t come out of nowhere. When judges are nominated to the Supreme Court, they need references just like the rest of us, people who have worked with them and can answer questions about their character. So she told them what she knew. You could tell she didn’t enjoy it. But she had the courage to speak up and tell the committee that he consistently used his power over her to abuse her and oppress her with a barrage of pornographic language.”
“Sticks and stones.”
“Words are just as damaging, Dad.”
“People shoot the shit at work. If women can’t handle it, they should stay home.”
“Sorry. We’re not going to be herded from the workplace anymore. Women have been kept at home as slaves long enough.”
“That all sounds pretty, but are you a slave? Are your hands bound?”
“Not—”
“Just answer my question. Are you in chains right now?”
“No.”
“Do you have the right to free speech, to vote for the candidate of your choice, to pursue the career you want? Did you have trouble excelling in school because you were a woman? Did you get passed over for that professorship because you were a woman?”
“No, we’ve made progress but—”
“All right then.” He stops walking. “What’s in that picnic basket?”
We eat everything I’ve packed: chicken sandwiches, potato chips, watermelon slices.
“I tell you, Daley. Everyone’s always talking these days about advantages and privileges. Well, it only gets you so far. You know who’s had all the advantages and privileges I can think of?”
I know, but I shake my head.
“Garvey. He’s had ‘em all. Good schools, good breeding, good everything, and look at him.”
“I don’t want to talk about Garvey.”
“All I’m saying is that the guy will be lucky to get into the Rotary Club someday.”
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Garvey and I think you know that. It’s too bad you had such a specific idea of who he should be.”
My father sits on his towel, tall pointy knees up near his shoulders, pouring sand onto a piece of cellophane. A family nearby has gone swimming and the gulls are pecking at their open box of saltines. “You know,” he says, “when Garvey was in the fourth form, he won a prize for a short story. Your mother and I went to this big event and all the runners-up read their stories and then Garvey gets up there last. His tie is crooked, his shirt untucked, and he reads the most boring godawful thing you’ve ever heard in your life about these people going to a cocktail party. Somebody passed around a flask of gin and thank God for that.”
“What happened in the story?”
“Nothing! I couldn’t understand for the life of me how it won first prize.”
“What did Mom think?”
“Oh, Garvey was the Christ child to her. He could do no wrong.”
I smile. She would have understood that the story had been a satire.
“Did you like St. Paul’s, Dad, when you were there?”
“Yeah, it was all right. Except for the religion. Chapel every five minutes.”
“Do you see any of your friends from there?”
“No. They all went to New York or someplace. I was in touch for a while with my tennis coach, who was also my history teacher, though I didn’t do so well in his classes. He was a friend, young guy at the time. But then I saw him in Boston once and that was it.”
“What do you mean?” I picture a sexual advance, a hand placed on my father’s thigh.
“He called me up and told me to meet him at a fancy French restaurant and when the check came he just let me pay. A hundred bucks for two people, which was a hell of a lot of money then. He calls me, chooses the restaurant, and then has me pay for the whole thing. I never spoke to him again. He was a good guy, though. Great player. But that whole thing was a setup.”
I can feel how open he is. It’s like I could ask him anything. “Did your mother drink?”
He nods. “Even though Nora was sick that week on the island, every night she had to get up and help my mother to bed.”
“Do you think it started when your father died?”
“No idea. But it didn’t improve when she married Hayes, that’s for sure.”
“Was he a drinker, too?”
“I think so. But with him it was harder to tell. He was a big guy. I was a little pipsqueak next to him.”
“Did he ever hit you?”
“No, he never hit me.” I notice a slight emphasis on me.
“Your mother?”
“I think so.”
“Oh, Dad.”
“Yeah. Well,” he says, pushing the cellophane down deep and smothering it with sand. “They’re all dead now. Good riddance.”
He lies down then, tips his face away from the sun, and very soon his hand twitches twice and he is asleep. I walk down to the water. The sand is loose and cold and a wave breaks and rushes at my ankles, then pulls away hard, sucking the sand beneath everything but the very center of my feet. The outdoors always brings Jonathan so much closer. He’d stand here with me and feel the sand get sucked away, feel the thin line beneath each foot you were left balancing on. I can feel his fingers on my arm as I start to walk back to the towel. Wait, he’s saying, one more time. Why didn’t I take him to Ruby Beach? Why didn’t we go right there? I’d had the dogs’ leashes in my hand. We could have watched the dogs sprint down to the water in their clouds of sand. We would have said different things there. We never would have been so cruel to each other. When I think of our exchange of fuck-yous I feel like someone is lighting my stomach on fire.
I read The Gate of Angels on my towel. I dab sunblock on my father’s nose when it begins turning red, and he barely wakes up, just murmurs a thank-you and drifts off again. Eventually I put my book down and try to rest, too.
But I can’t. Resting and sleeping have become harder since Jon
athan was here. My mind churns. It wants to pore over what happened on the terrace, and then it wants to go back. It wants to relive everything, as if in the process it can change the ending. Now we’re on his bed, the first time I ever spent the night at his place. We’ve been touching and talking for hours. It’s 3 A.M. and he’s lying against me sideways, his head on my stomach, the backs of his fingers running along the inside of my arm. He’s telling me about Wicker Street.
“I was surprised the first time someone referred to my building as ‘the project on Wicker Street.’ Projects were something else. The projects weren’t where we lived.” When he entered fourth grade he had to go to a white school they were trying to integrate thirty minutes away. To get inside the school from the bus, they had to walk through a thin space between two lines of white parents hollering at them to go home. “We would have liked to go home, let me tell you.” Their parents told them to keep their heads down and keep walking. They put their fists in their pockets. “There’s a photo of it my mother cut out of the newspaper. If you look really closely you can see the outline of my friend Jeff’s middle finger flipping them all the bird.” Once they got into the school they were fine. It was the parents who gave them the most trouble. His first white friend was a boy named Henry. Henry had a cat, and whenever they went to Henry’s house this cat would be curled up on the couch and Henry would give it a stroke and then Jonathan would give it a stroke and it would leap five feet in the air.
The worst thing he could be called by one of his older brothers, he told me, was white. “They’d see me playing with my friends and they’d say we played white. This brown pair of shoes my mother bought me was white. The way I took off my shirt was white. And then my mother would knock me upside the head and say I was acting like a nigger.”
When his mother got her nursing license, they moved into their own house. They had a backyard with one tree. “I remember sitting alone in the evening on the grass one of the first nights we lived in that house and looking up at that tree, just a slender little tree with smooth bark, and I got this feeling about the tree, that I liked it and it liked me. And it occurred to me that the tree didn’t care if I was black or white. Really, honestly, didn’t care. It didn’t matter to the tree. And for a few seconds I kind of felt like I was floating. I think that’s the first time and maybe the last time I felt free, truly free.”
