“I just can’t,” I said miserably.
I ran into David one day at school. He had on a new pair of green suspenders and he was laughing to himself about something, but when he spotted me, his face turned stubborn. “What’s the matter with you, Bess?” he said coolly. “You don’t look very good.”
I told him that I was tired, that I was depressed about Rozzy and Stewey leaving so soon, and then I told him that no one seemed to know where Bea was.
“That’s crazy,” he said. “Are her things still at the house, did she take a suitcase?”
“God, I don’t know. I didn’t even think of that.”
“See,” he said, taking my arm, suddenly cheerful, “you do need me. Let me drive you over to your house. You’ll feel better.”
But when we got to the house, it was silent and unkempt. Dishes crusted with food were jumbled in the sink. Dust balls floated like tumbleweeds across the wood floors. The beds were unmade, the towels damp and tangled on the floor. A suitcase was gone, and a large part of Bea’s wardrobe. Panic sprouted in me like a green plant, taking hold.
“We’ll go to your father’s office,” said David. “He has to know something about what’s going on here.”
Rozzy and I had both been to my father’s office as children. It was something Bea thought we should do, and I always brought a book along with me so I could settle into the chair by Ben’s desk and read. Rozzy liked to roam around. She always sought out the janitor, who gave her sugar pops, putting his fingers across his mouth to hush her into secrecy. She only got to lick the pop a few times before Ben caught her and snapped it out of her mouth, making the hard candy click unpleasantly against her teeth.
Ben worked in the Prudential Building, on the third floor. David sat in the brown carpeted waiting room while I pushed past the secretary into the office with Ben’s name on it. He was slumped at his desk. He loomed, fat and pale and tired. “Where’s Bea, what’s going on?” I said.
“Shouldn’t you be at school?” he said.
“Why are you being such a bastard?” I cried.
He blinked at me. “Why don’t you ask your mother where she went?”
“I will. Tell me where she is and I’ll call her.”
“I don’t know. Leave me alone, I’m busy. There’s nothing I can tell you about that woman, about what she does.”
I sat in a stuffed black leather chair, stroking the arms, picking at a tiny rip in the leather. “Where is she?” I said.
I don’t think he would have told me anything except that I kept sitting there, glued to that chair, staring at him while his phone buzzed. He abruptly picked up the phone, pressed a button and told his secretary to hold all of his calls, unless it was his wife. He didn’t look at me while he spoke.
He said he had come home on a Thursday. The house smelled of his dinner. It was in the oven, bubbling and crusting over, yellow with cheese, red with paprika. The table in the dining room was set for one, at his usual place. His cot and the bed were turned down with sheets so new and fresh that they snapped at the corners. There was no note, and he went to sleep expecting to see her in the morning, expecting the breakfast smells to rouse him. The next day, when the house was still empty, he called the police. They humored him, they pacified him with tidbits of information, they said it was too early to worry, that cases like this were routine. “Nothing about Bea is routine,” he said.
I stood up, one finger still teasing at the rip in the leather.
“Will you call me if you hear anything?” I said.
“I promise.”
“Are you all right?” I said abruptly, pushing my hands into my pockets, stretching the fabric. He looked at me for a moment and then clicked on the intercom and told his secretary that she could put calls through now. Turning back to me, he said evenly that it was always good to see me.
“Stewey’s here,” I blurted. “Did Bea tell you? He and Rozzy are going back to Madison.”
“Fine,” he said. “Now I have work to do.”
When I left the office, I had a bad taste in my mouth, a film that stretched and smeared over the whole day. David was eased in a chair reading a magazine, but he stood up when he saw me and threaded his arm through mine. “He doesn’t know where she is,” I said, burying my face in his neck.
“Maybe she just went someplace to think.”
“About what?”
David wanted to take me back to his apartment, but I lowered my head. “To Rozzy’s?” he said, sighing.
I shook my head. “No, not there. Could you drop me off in Cambridge? I just want to sit in the movies by myself. It’ll help me relax.”
He bent and kissed me very lightly on the chin. “Sure,” he said.
I couldn’t think in that theater, and I couldn’t think in my classes the next day, or at Rozzy’s either. Every time the phone rang, it was an assault. I don’t really know at what point the burden of family shifts, at what point the child transforms into the parent, but I began worrying about Bea, about where she was. I fretted about Ben eating and choking, about him rotting away in that house, already stiff before he was found. I kept calling home, but he never answered, and when I phoned him at work, he put me on hold until a busy signal split the connection.
Three days later the line to our house bloomed open. Bea answered. I was suddenly an open palm, twitching to strike. “Where the hell were you?” I spat.
“Kansas,” said Bea evenly, “and you can just drop that tone of voice with me.”
“You worried everyone sick.”
“There were reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“I’ll tell you, but not on the phone.”
“Don’t do me any favors.”
“Would you like me to hang up? I think you should hear me out. You’re old enough to understand.”
We set up a place to meet, but rocking back and forth in my mind, never stilling, was the implicit danger of what being old enough to understand meant.
Bea met me in a Boston café. She was already seated, her smile set, her hair curling. I tugged at my white sweater, at an old jacket of Stewey’s thrown over my shoulders.
I slid into a seat. “Is Ben all right?”
“It’s very difficult to talk to anyone with that kind of look on her face,” she said, smoothly handing me a menu. “Your father’s just fine, thank you. I told him I went on a vacation to think things out, that I was worried about how he looked, the way he had changed.”
“That’s why you left? Really?”
Bea flipped a menu page, frowning before she looked up. “No, not really. I didn’t plan on leaving, it really started when you told me Stewey had come back. He came back because he had to. Certain people are meant to be together, aren’t they? He must really love her. The two of them just seem to keep banging together like magnets, despite everything.”
The waitress appeared and we ordered salads and iced tea, and Bea didn’t really begin talking again until the food arrived. “After I got off the phone with you, I went in to tell Ben, all delighted, but when I saw him, the delight changed into something sticky. He was snoring on the couch. When I first met Ben, at the beach, his muscles slithered under his skin. He was like some stalking jungle animal. I lifted up the cover Ben had thrown over him, and his arm was just lying there, flaccid and pale, on his belly. His breathing was so noisy, so rumbling and uneven. I pulled back the cover and pushed in beside him. There wasn’t much room. I raised myself up to look at him and his eyes were half open. ‘Ben,’ I said, but he didn’t move, so I got up and went into the kitchen.”
I fiddled with my salad. I kept glancing up at her, hearing her speak, seeing her mouth move and shape each word, but I was unable to connect those words with Bea, my mother.
“The phone company has a special number you can call,” she continued. “They have these tapes, one for every disease, and you just tell them what number you want and they ping it in for you. I listened to the tapes on high blood pressure, on obesi
ty, on divorce. Look at these hands,” she said, showing me her palms, and then the backs. “Not one age spot. Not one.”
It was then she told me the details about Walt. I knew, like most children, how my parents had met, who had been there before Ben claimed Bea. I knew the child’s version of those happenings, and now I was hearing the adult story. As I listened, I felt as if I were on a fun house train—the more Bea opened up and sped toward me, the further away she got. “Stop staring,” she said. “You knew about Walt. I’ve told you that story plenty of times.”
“I thought it was just part of your past.”
“There’s no such thing as just part of the past,” she said.
She told me she had dreamed about Walt. He was a giant bird, weaving and dipping. She was way down on the ground, a pinpoint, waving to him. He stretched his talons and started moving toward her, his wings pulsating. She jerked awake. It hurt. She got up and looked at herself in the mirror and then she got into the car and went to the all-night supermarket and bought a box of cookies and some hair coloring, something to put highlights in. She did her hair in the shower, and she let it dry with a towel wrapped around it. She coated her face and body with Vaseline and spread the bed with towels and lay down, waiting for something, for anything, to happen.
“It got worse,” she said. “One night Ben’s snoring woke me. He wasn’t even sleeping with me. I couldn’t roll over a quarter turn and shove him awake or move him onto his stomach. I couldn’t even tell which room he was sleeping in, where the sound rumbled from. I got out of bed. He was in Rozzy’s old room, snuffling and snoring on her bed, fully clothed, his face to the wall. The bed sagged under his weight. I shut the door and went into the kitchen. I don’t know why, but I started calling information for Kansas City. I got every number that might turn out to be Walt’s. There were ten of them. I didn’t know what the time difference between Kansas City and Boston was, and I didn’t care. I dialed each of those numbers, one right after the other. What did I care that people might be sleeping, might be making love, what did I care that Ben might overhear? The people must have sensed something in my voice, because no one got angry when I jangled them awake for someone who wasn’t even living there. Finally, with eight names inked out, I got Walt. I knew it was him as soon as he spoke. I’d always remember that voice, how the cadence touched me. As soon as he said hello, I hung up. I was afraid. I called the operator back and got his address. They’re not supposed to give out that information, but I got it. I sat down and wrote Walt a letter saying I was planning to visit the area and would he like to see me, and then I mailed it, airmail, and I waited.
“I got an answer back almost immediately. Yes, he said, yes, come see him. I thought of what to tell Ben, reasons why I might take a trip, but they all felt alien and hard in my mouth, so I just packed and left.”
“Why are you telling me this now, if you didn’t think to tell me before you left?” I said. “Why am I suddenly your confidante?”
“Who do you want me to discuss this with?” she said. “With Rozzy, who won’t even see me? With Ben, who’s buried under fat and ill health? You’re family. And you’re an adult now. It isn’t as if you were living at home and this would affect you personally.”
“This doesn’t affect me?” I said, incredulous. Bea was suddenly silent. She stirred some sugar into her tea, not looking at me. “So you were at Walt’s,” I said.
“Things hadn’t changed that much,” she said. “He was still married, a little older, no children—as he always said there wouldn’t be. He trailed me around the house, he kept me up all hours talking, toying with ideas. I told him you and Rozzy were adults now, on your own. Jess, his wife, was pleasant, friendly. One night, after she went to bed, Walt offered me a job in one of his book places. He said he could find me an apartment nearby.” Bea grinned. “You know, I liked Jess. 1 really did. She spent time with me mornings before she had to go to cap some kid’s teeth. She had all these funny stories about her patients, and I laughed so hard I almost wet my pants. She said Walt was a real baby when it came time to fill a cavity, and sometimes she had to give him gas because the needle for the Novocain scared him. She didn’t mind when Walt and I went in his battered VW to take a ride and talk. Walt told her I was thinking of leaving Ben and she was as understanding as my own mother. She made herself available to me.”
“Bea,” I said, carefully searching for words, but she waved her hand at me.
“I still love him,” she said. “You never forget your first love. He cried when I took the plane back. He couldn’t understand. Jess kept hugging him, telling him they could come and visit.”
“Are you going to divorce Ben?”
She paused. “I don’t know.” She sipped at her coffee and then asked me abruptly whom I would choose to live with, if they did divorce and I were living at home. Just as abruptly, she said never mind, that that wasn’t a fair question.
Unfair, but considered. Rozzy and I had played that game once, when we were kids. Each parent would have one of us, and we would be at opposite ends of the country, never to see each other. “Who would you pick to go with?” we demanded of each other. I never could say one name, Bea or Ben; guilt would set against my teeth like tin foil. Rozzy always said Ben, and then, bitterly, as if it would hurt him, she pronounced Bea’s name, like a judgment.
“What happens now?” I said.
“I don’t know.” She gave me a funny smile.
Something small leaped within me. “You don’t know?”
“That’s right, baby, your mother doesn’t know.”
“When do you think you’ll know, what are you going to do, how will you decide?”
She shook her head. “Something will tell me. I know I sound like a simpleton, but it’s the way I am. It’s always been that way for me.”
“What did you tell Ben?”
She lifted her straw from her water, creating a vacuum by putting her finger over the top of the straw. “He doesn’t know about Walt. Nothing’s changed between your father and me. Ben wasn’t angry when I came home, why are you? Why are you suddenly so righteous when it comes to him?” She sighed.
“Rozzy doesn’t even know you were gone,” I said.
Bea looked up abruptly, lifting her finger and letting the water from the straw slide back into her glass. She flashed me a sudden smile. “You know, Walt’s a little afraid of Ben. He won’t call. I call him. Stop looking at me, what do you want of me? Do you expect me to worry myself sick over a situation that might not even happen? You don’t understand love, do you?”
“Let’s go,” I said. “It’s getting late.”
“I’d still like all of you to come for dinner,” she said, fishing her money from her purse. “Things are still good with Stewey and Rozzy, aren’t they? Nothing’s gone wrong?”
“Things are fine,” I said, standing.
I didn’t want to tell anyone about Bea. I avoided David at school and I didn’t answer the phone. I wouldn’t even have told Rozzy, except that, like Bea, it was not a question of want anymore, but of need.
“Call them up right now and say we want to come to dinner on Wednesday,” said Rozzy, her mouth set. “It’s not the same thing at all, Stewey coming for me, and that Walt and Bea.” She looked down at her fingers. “Is it?” she said.
A cold spell had set in when we started driving toward home. Rozzy was bundled up in an old wool sweater, a hat pulled down over her brow. She shivered and complained and moved so close to Stewey that it was difficult for him to drive. We listened to the radio on the way over. They said there hadn’t been a chill like this since 1905, and snow might even be expected. “I can’t bear this,” said Rozzy. “God, but I hate winter. It’s an unnatural season.”
We pulled up into the drive around two. Bea prodded the heavy front door open, holding out her hands, smiling. She grabbed for Stewey, pushing back his hair, while Rozzy stood there, her own smile stiff. “Come inside, all of you,” Bea said. “Isn’t this weather
something?”
She called for Ben. We were all sitting on the couch in the living room when Ben plodded in. He moved as if he were sleepwalking, his hair pulled away from his scalp, and the buttons on his shirt had tugged open. Rozzy dug into her pocket and lighted a cigarette. “Hey, you quit that,” said Stewey, trying to take the cigarette from her, but she pulled her arm back fiercely and took a defiant draw, blowing out the smoke in circles.
“Here’s Ben,” said Bea pleasantly. Only Ben’s eyes were the same. They took Rozzy in, and then, just as swiftly, discarded her. He thrust out a hand to Stewey. “So you’re back,” he said.
“Hey, where’s David?” said Bea. “I thought you’d bring him.”
“He’s not home,” said Rozzy.
We all sat in our old places for dinner, even Stewey, who got the mismatched kitchen chair. No one talked very much, except for Bea. All through dinner, Rozzy kept glancing at Ben, at the way he was taking third helpings of everything. Whenever Bea got up from the table to refill a water glass, he would heap his plate again, glancing at all of us, condemning us to secrecy. He gulped down his fish; he swigged down wine. Rozzy ate very little and drank three glasses of water.
In the middle of dinner, when the candles started to drip red wax onto the tablecloth, Ben got up. He tossed his cloth napkin into his plate, drawing the wine sauce from the fish into the cloth and staining it a shade deeper. Ben lumbered off toward the bathroom, and then there was the sudden sharp sound of choking, a gagging which ripped into the air. Rozzy’s eyes stayed fixed on the hall, on what she couldn’t see. Bea began noisily clearing dishes, stacking plates and cups into a clattering pyramid.
The bathroom was suddenly silent. “He has a doctor,” said Bea flatly. “He has medicine.”
Ben didn’t come back to the table. Bea whisked away the dishes and the old tablecloth, and reset the table for a dessert of fresh fruit and cheese. “Such silence,” said Bea. “Do you like my hair this short, Rozzy?”
Bea clicked on the radio by the window. The weather report boomed on. There were storm warnings, and Bea clucked her tongue, shaking her head. “You stay the night,” she said.
Meeting Rozzy Halfway Page 25
