They took a bus to a village down the coast and rented a thatched palapa. They were there for weeks; she thought she was happy, for the first time ever. One morning they hiked over a hot hill to a lovely stretch of beach lying below a grove of orange trees. She sat on a towel while he waded into the surf. He had just shouted to her to come in when she saw the Mexicans at the edge of the grove. They made a line, squatting against the trees. Katie ran down to the water’s edge. “Come back,” she cried. “I don’t like it here.” Fisher mocked her, but she begged him to come out, pointing to the Mexicans who sat like stones. He told her she was being stupid, but he did go up the hill with her again. As they passed the point closest to the campesinos, there was an audible rush of sound along the line. Then the Mexicans rose and walked away. “What did they want?” Katie whispered. Fisher pushed her onto the hill. “Nothing,” he said. She asked him again when the hill was behind them. “The water had a treacherous undertow,” he said. “They were waiting for us to drown.”
She got diarrhea and couldn’t get over it, so she took a plane out of Mazatlán and went to her parents in Texas. It was high season for her dad’s tire store. As soon as she was well he put her to work on a phone. She called people who had bought tires from him a year to a year and a half or two ago. She let the Texan stream back into her voice, and sold a lot of tires.
Every night her mother made meat and mashed potatoes, and her father came home late. “If he gets home this time every night, it’s not really late, is it?” she said to her mother one evening. June burst into tears, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Then Fisher showed up in another car. Katie bought her mother a blender at the drugstore and left it on the kitchen counter with a thank-you card. They went by the tire store on the way out of town, but her father wasn’t there, and they didn’t want to wait. Katie never saw him again.
The next day it occurred to her that she and Fisher had no agreement. They didn’t even know one another’s age. He had hardly looked up to say goodbye when she left Mexico holding her gut. Now they were on their way to see some friend of his who lived maybe in Mill Valley and maybe in Sausalito. It was crazy. By then they were in Arizona, and there was nothing she could do except read the map and keep the radio tuned. In a roadside park, just past dusk, they made love on the back seat of the Oldsmobile. It made a wet spot on the dove-gray upholstery. She thought it was an awful thing to have done, a kind of trespass. Maybe nobody would know. But when you made love—or did hateful things, at the other extreme—some of you stayed behind. She didn’t know how to explain it, she had never tried to put it into words. She didn’t even know the word karma then. It was simply another of her ideas for which she had no vocabulary. She wondered if everybody who didn’t watch television and didn’t like to read had ideas like hers. If people filled up their minds or went around with them empty. What was important about this idea was that it helped her make moral decisions, when she remembered in time. She knew, for example, that she would never have survived a war. She would never have been able to keep it straight, them and us.
Back on the highway she kept on thinking, and she decided that if it was intensity that left your image, there must not be anything of her anywhere. She felt a kind of constant desperation, small and steady like the hum of a cat; it kept her moving, but it didn’t make her interesting. She couldn’t imagine what Fisher saw in her except accessibility, and though she could see that that might have appealed to him at first, she didn’t think it was going to make much of a bond. What could two people have who were sure they couldn’t have anything else? Yet for her, Fisher was made up of secrets, and she thought that inside him, his hum was louder. It wasn’t just that he was a man, it wasn’t that at all. It was that he had been somewhere that counted, somewhere she couldn’t even imagine, somewhere he was making her think about when it hadn’t ever before crossed her mind. When he said he didn’t mind if they made love during her period, she didn’t say that it seemed only fair, that sometimes she thought she could smell blood on him.
She finally got up her nerve to ask him, “What was the worst thing that happened in the war?” He said it was in an Oakland bar, right before he got out. Some drunk navy kid tried to get a guy to fuck him, right there in the bar, and before Fisher had finished his beer, there were cops and MPs both, beating the shit out of this wimpy kid. “Jesus, Fish, what could you have done?” she asked. She had waited a long time to get up the nerve to ask him, and she didn’t like being put off. “What about the damned war?” She hated ellipses, metaphors, any lies that weren’t up-front fantasies. And here she was, Miss Walking Ambiguity.
“I just watched,” Fisher said.
4
Katie nursed Rhea toward morning. Someone laid the crying child in her arms and nudged her: Katie, Katie, the baby’s hungry. Katie was in bed. She couldn’t remember moving, or changing. She put her hand down on her hip. She was wearing a flannel gown, probably one of Christine’s. Her mother wore pajamas. The baby was noisy. For a fraction of a moment Katie felt bothered to have her attaching herself so greedily. Then the gargled sucking shifted into an intense, rhythmic tug that Katie felt in her breast and neck and groin. Fisher had watched her nurse, but he had never commented.
As the baby grew less hungry, she stroked Katie’s breast, and Katie spread her free hand over the baby’s fuzzy soft head. Though the urge was gentle, Katie felt the fine hint of hostility in her hand. The possibilities. She shuddered and drew her hand away. Her mother saw, and whisked the baby away. Katie slept again, not thinking, for once, about the territories of the bed. She slept beneath her dreams. When she awoke, she felt better, but she didn’t want to get out of bed. To be a child again herself, the baby instead of the mother—how foolishly she craved that. Refuge, succor, regression: these were desirable things. When her mother suggested moving the crib into the living room, Katie agreed with relief.
Her mother came in and said there was a phone call. “It’s Fish,” she said, looking as if she were holding one. Fish spoke in a nearly inaudible monotone. He didn’t have anything to say. Katie knew the call was as close to an apology as she would get, but it wasn’t enough to acknowledge. And she would never assume the initiative. He had called. “How’s your mother?” he asked, a silly question. “See me shrug,” she answered. Her mother was across the room cutting mushrooms at the counter. “She’s there?” he asked. The momentary focus on the third party—one Katie had betrayed in dozens of stories of minor malice—brought Katie and Fisher momentarily closer. “They’re crazy for the baby,” she said, relenting a little. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Do you know how long you’ll stay?” he asked next. This took some courage on his part. At the airport, she had refused to let him touch her. She told him that, after all this time, she finally admitted it was hopeless. He was a drunk and a beast. He stood docile as a lap dog while she hissed at him. She wanted him to do something vile, to fuel her journey, but he was too tired or too indifferent to her baiting. He stood with his shoulders slumped like a fruit picker at day’s end. She was unmoved. She had every intention of leaving him. Maybe she had left him already. The trip was coincidence.
“We haven’t talked much,” she told him. “I don’t know how much I’ll have to take.” The last words slipped out. Her mother looked up from her dicing curiously. Katie didn’t know what she and Fish were talking about. Oh why did they always talk in riddles? “I’ll write,” she said weakly.
The next day her mother went back to her regular schedule. She owned a small dress shop. She went there around nine and came home around four. She said while Katie was home she would come home for lunch, too. Christine took care of the house and shopping, Uncle Dayton, and now the baby. Katie stayed in bed. She read old magazines and did her nails. She kept thinking she would go back over her marriage, her years with Fisher, and try to make sense of them, but then it would be time for lunch or a cup of tea with Christine, time for a nap or to feed the baby, and she never got started. She only got
as far as that long ride down the length of California in someone else’s car. She couldn’t imagine what references Fisher had given, to make them trust him with a rich athlete’s car. They had laughed a lot. She had put her head down in his lap while he was driving, to see if she could shock him.
Christine came in to talk. She had been quilting. Katie admired the intricate Texas pattern of the quilt on her bed. Her grandmother had made it. Christine said she herself had no talent for it—it was June who could sew however she liked, and Katie had taken after her—but Christine liked the feel of fabric in her hands, so she made quilts out of big squares, and tied them at the intersections. She was making one for Uncle Dayton, double-thick with batting because his circulation was bad.
June came home early and pulled a chair close to Katie’s bed, like Katie was a patient in a nursing home. Her mother said she wanted to tell Katie about a time when Katie was an infant, and Christine had come over to help out. She said Katie had been terribly colicky and that she, her mother, had not managed well. One day she had slapped Katie quite hard while Christine was in the house. Christine didn’t go home for a week. “And I went to bed,” June said. “When I got up a week later, I was sane again, and of course I was mortified. It is a very serious thing to hit a tiny baby. I certainly never did it again.” She stopped talking, and Katie waited for the moral. Her mother was full of admonitions. Maybe her mother meant to say she understood how Katie was feeling. Or she might be letting Katie know that one week was the limit. But Katie wanted to know how many times there had been when her mother might have hit her if there had not been the memory of that single harsh blow, struck too early.
Neither of them spoke for several moments, and Katie saw that her mother wasn’t going to clear up any of Katie’s questions if she didn’t ask them. Katie wanted nothing from her mother that required the asking.
“You know I never liked Fisher,” her mother went on finally. Katie was expressionless. “It’s not just that he came through her and collected you without a pause for courtesy—” Katie knew that was one of the reasons. “It’s not that you haven’t had a real home all these years, or that it was such a long time before the two of you married.”
Katie interrupted her mother. “What was it, exactly?”
June looked at her oddly, with what Katie decided was distaste. “It’s that your relationship with Fish has done nothing to change you.”
“That’s his responsibility?” Katie asked.
“I do think a good relationship helps you to grow up. Helps you to become a better you. Fisher doesn’t seem to have been good for that. I assume the same is true the other way around.”
Katie thought of leaping, cat-like, in an arch, to scratch her mother’s eyes out. “While you are here, I want you to think about it,” her mother said. Katie could feel her hands twitching.
“Think about Fisher’s failure to mature me?”
“Think about what you want to be, and what you are.”
“You’re incredible!” Katie spat. She was crazy to have come.
“No, I’m normal. Many straight people are perfectly normal.”
She didn’t know that those categories were obsolete. Katie, who had risen stiffly from her pillows as her mother spoke, now fell back against them with a thud. Damn her! She struck the mattress with a fist. She had wondered what the price of her mother’s hospitality would be. She had expected a little advice on mothering. But no, she was to consider alchemy. To be something she was not, when neither of them knew what she was.
5
The subject of marriage had come up when Katie and Fish had been together about a year. Not their marriage. His. She heard him talking to Winston about a girl in Bangkok, where he had spent four months. The two men were laughing about Fisher’s “first wife.” Paper Lady, they called her, and Blossom Juice, and Dragon Wife. Her name was Chee Sum (Chum See? something like that). Katie tried to ignore the talk but couldn’t get it off her mind. She confronted Fisher with it. He wouldn’t tell her anything. He said there had been a girl in Bangkok, yes, but not a wife. There had also been the best restaurants in the world, he evaded, with fish caught that day, and peppers that put your eyes out. She wanted to know what was so funny about the girl. Fisher said she would never understand. She hadn’t been there.
She pointed out that Winston hadn’t been there, either. But Winston had been in the army, stationed in Japan. “Eyes up, eyes down,” Fisher laughed. “Forget it, Katie. It has nothing to do with you. Or with me, anymore.” She did try to forget, but his mother forwarded a letter to him that came from Bangkok. She came on him as he was reading it. She cornered Winston and demanded to know what he knew. Winston said there had been a civil ceremony of some sort, to save the girl’s face. Her father wouldn’t let her live at home anymore any other way. Fisher had spent a lot of time with the family. Her father owned a bus line in Bangkok and lived very well in a nice house on the outskirts of the city. Katie wanted to know where Fisher had met her. Winston said in a whorehouse. The girl wasn’t herself a whore, but one of her friends was. Fish had once told a story about a whore who sat in a plate of mushrooms on a bar. That whore? Winston became edgy. “Shit, Katie, how would I know something like that?”
Winston hated being put in the middle. Katie thought he owed her some loyalty because she had known him first. She had met him in the bar where she worked, and had introduced him to Fisher’s circle of friends. But he was a man. He was Fisher’s friend now. They drank togther. They went to Hood River and picked apples together. They did finish work on sleazy tract houses together. Sometimes they were drunk and hateful. Katie went back to waitressing, to have someplace to go at night. She was ashamed to tell Ursula how lonely she was.
“Listen, Winston, a girl takes it seriously, and with a ceremony!” Winston said the girl knew it was for show. Fisher wasn’t one to make false promises. But the girl had gone to the Americans, and that was when she found out it really did amount to exactly nothing. A joke on her, whatever her father had believed. Somehow she had obtained Fisher’s home address. It had taken her a year, but here was the letter. Katie didn’t think a girl could have managed that unless there was a baby. Fisher tore the letter up in front of Katie. “She wants a free ride,” he said. “And didn’t you?” Katie retorted.
Some days later—she and Fisher weren’t speaking since the letter scene—Katie came home and found Fisher gone. That was the first time he went off like that, though not the last. Winston, who was now sober, was cleaning her kitchen. He had picked up all the little flimsy blue pieces of overseas letter paper, some of them stuck against the base of the cabinets, or under the stove.
“What are you trying to make up for?” she asked, but there was more affection than resentment in her voice. Winston said Fish had gone to B.C. to see friends, Nam buddies who had settled on Sechelt. Katie panicked. She begged Winston not to leave. He was uncomfortable. “I’m not asking you to sleep with me,” she said. Men had no idea what women were about. “I need company.”
They went out for hot Indian food, and washed it down with a lot of bitter beer. “I can’t figure him out, I’ll never understand him,” she complained over the dirty table. “He contradicts himself all the time. I wish I had known him before he was in the navy, so I would know what is him and what is them. So I would know if he might change, when it all wears off.”
Winston shook his head. “Man, I wouldn’t count on that.” He took her home and stayed with her. Maybe he felt sorry, or thought he did owe her something. He tried to help her understand. “There were those who thought you laid low. Shadow grunts. Others said keep moving. Different schools of survival. Fish still hasn’t figured out which way to stay alive.”
That was when Katie realized how deep she was in with Fisher. She only cared what he thought so she could please him. She had to find out with delicacy, like a man on patrol. Only they were on the same side! It wasn’t sabotage she had in mind. It was love.
If they could inv
ent fast shallow-draft boats just for the waters he had patrolled; if they could send out cutters on barrier patrols in monsoon weather, there could be this, there could be love where there had been none before for either of them. Neither spoke of their parents. They came out of nowhere, needy in the way rootless people are, for touching without grasping. There was, in all the world, only each other, but they had never said that. “Someday I’ll have told you everything.” Fisher did say that, once when he was high. Later she asked him if he had ever been in love. He was drunk and slightly miserable. “Aw shit,” he told her, “love is like the fucking Delta, man. You look down from the air and it looks so easy and open. So sweet. Then you get down on it and it’s so dense it chokes you.”
The next time the subject of marriage came up was four years later. She thought she was pregnant. Right away she said she would rather be married than not, though she didn’t mean it as an ultimatum. Fish agreed as readily. They signed papers in front of a minister someone at Ursula’s office had suggested. The minister, who was wearing purple beads on a gray turtleneck shirt, couldn’t believe they didn’t want him to say anything. “They even say things to launch boats,” he said. Katie held her breath, waiting for Fish to say something. He would wonder what a minister who combed his hair across his bald spot would know about ships. Katie rushed around to get the minister a glass of Cold Duck. It was flat. Fisher had opened it and taken a big swig that morning. It turned out Katie wasn’t pregnant.
Beyond Deserving Page 2
