Beyond Deserving
Page 9
“It would be nice to go again,” Ursula says noncommittally. Actually she doesn’t see the point in repeating herself, when there is so much world to see. She did a homestay in England in high school, and she went to Spain and Morocco the summer between her freshman and sophomore college years, and then met Fish and Michael and the others in the boarding house that fall.
“It’s so nice to travel,” Juliette says. They went the last six weeks of the school year, before the onslaught of summer tourists. “I’ll never forget it.
“Mother,” she says, climbing out of the tub, “did you know some girls at school talk about their mothers awful?”
Juliette falls again into a sorry mood as soon as she is dry and dressed. She has exhausted her affection. Ursula follows her into her bedroom for a moment, wrapped in a towel, and tries to begin a dialogue about travel again. “I wonder if we went again if we couldn’t plan it around your dance interest, Juliette. Isn’t it Bejart—do I have his name right?—who began a fabulous dance school in Senegal?” But Juliette gives her a withering glare over her shoulder and assumes an invaded-privacy look that sends Ursula to her own room.
Earlier she tucked and smoothed the bed and turned down the covers. She picks up clothes from the floor and then throws them down again. She puts on flannel pajamas—the evening has turned cool—and brushes her hair slowly. Then she looks in on Juliette one more time, expecting to give her a good-night kiss (whether she wants it or not), and then to tackle some of the reading she needs to do.
Juliette’s light is on. Ursula switches it off. Her daughter lies in bed, her head deep in her pillow. “Mommy,” she whimpers. She scoots over and makes room for her mother. “Just for a little while, until I get sleepy?”
As Ursula takes her assigned place, she sees that Juliette has been crying. Ursula wipes her daugher’s cheeks. She cannot remember seeing Michael cry, and she has not seen her son cry since he was a small boy, not even when Ursula’s father died (she took the children to Evanston for the funeral). Of course he was never close to his grandfather, there was never enough time for it.
She doesn’t know what to say. When Juliette is sad or frustrated, words are like tiny packets of potent explosive; it is entirely too easy to say the wrong thing. Ursula is learning that, if you wait, Juliette finally takes the lead.
“I just don’t see how I can make it to the end,” she says. Awash in despair, Juliette does not say what end she had in mind. Ursula chooses the best alternative because it is closest and not so desperate. “There are only a few more weeks,” she says.
“But only dancing matters, and I’m tired all the time. I worry I won’t get to sleep, and if I don’t I won’t get enough rest, and then I’ll be tired in the morning. And Brian will say, no, not on point this time. He’s promised me a small part in the second ballet on point, but I have to have my all for it. And now, if I’m getting fatter, I’ll be off balance. I’ll be ugly.” She bursts into fresh tears.
Ursula thinks of Michael’s hand on her breast this morning. She remembers that when she was young, her libido had a life of its own, stirred by the way the sun hit a windowsill, because of a song on the radio, or because her thighs brushed as she moved in a chair. Now something else has to happen. Some force has to be put in motion. She is especially touched by surprise, and by gentle moments, by the sight of Michael when she does not expect him. She doesn’t know if he has such thoughts himself. He is a good lover, much less restrained than in any other part of his life. He does not seem to mind the places where she has gone soft, the inevitable droops brought on by age and gravity.
“You’re not listening to me.” Juliette’s voice is flat and dismissing. She turns slightly, to give her mother the plane of her back.
“Julie.”
Juliette breathes deeply and noisily and lets the air out in a long whistling stream, through her mouth. “See!” she almost shouts. “I can’t even breathe right! I can—not—RELAX.”
Ursula puts her hand on her daughter’s hair. She remembers when Juliette was small and so full of energy she could not let it go at bedtime. Sometimes she would literally fall over at the dinner table, straight into her plate, but she would lie rigid with wakefulness once put to bed. Ursula had a routine to lull her. “The roots of your hair are letting go. Feel your scalp melting—” she whispers. From Juliette a tiny whimper comes. “And the tips of your fingers, like jelly, melting away from the tightness of your hands.”
Ursula pauses and wipes her face with her hand. She longs to get up at that moment and get her moisturizer. She read that you must put on cream at least forty-five minutes before bed, because if you lie down right after, the cream closes the pores and traps moisture in them and you wake with bigger bags than ever.
“That really helps,” Juliette sighs.
On the stairs Ursula smells popcorn.
She turns into the kitchen and looks across it into the dining room. Her son has a pizza box in front of him, and a salad bowl full of popcorn. Fish sits on the same side of the table, swigging from a bottle of dark wine, talking, not just talking, but holding forth. He is saying something about search and seize missions, about a time they found weapons cached on a fisherman’s boat.
“He was this big,” Fish says, pointing to his midchest. “I had him by one arm, like a twig, but I could feel how strong he was. And stubborn. And scared.” He takes a long drink, swallowing hard. “You couldn’t tell, looking. They were so fucking little. But they were like steel wire. So I was holding him, and this other guy—our guy—was radioing for instructions, when my guy—the gook, the little fisherman—kicked me in the fucking shin and nearly knocked me in the soup. I went crazy. I had his neck in my hands, and over his shoulder I saw the piles under the nets. He was moving ammunition and guns, just like they’d told us we’d find, only I’d been doing this harassing of fishermen for four months and all I’d ever found was fucking FISH!” He laughs hilariously. Carter is snorting and cackling. Vietnam, for Carter, is a series of Fish stories.
Ursula walks softly toward the other side of the kitchen where it opens under an arch onto the dining room. Her son looks up at her with his mouth full. His hair sticks up like a patch of yucca. Fish raises his chin in greeting and drinks deeply of his wine. Michael is bent over a yellow lined pad.
“So what’s this?” Ursula asks.
“Listen, Mom, I’m going to have the greatest paper! The first missions of the navy in Vietnam. Mom, Fish was there. So I can have an interview as one of my research sources. He was in the Delta. Everybody knows about grunts, all that mud and guck and getting blown up and all that, but who knows about the Delta, man?” Carter jumps up. “I am thirsteee.” He sweeps by Ursula on the way to the refrigerator.
“So you guys are helping. Granting interviews and all.” Ursula is looking at Fish, who looks back from hooded eyes. She is surprised at his high spirits. She credits them to the bottle. Michael puts down his pencil, and wipes his eyes with the knuckle on one finger. “And you?” Ursula says testily. “What’s your role?”
Michael leans back, tipping the chair on its back legs, the way Ursula asks them all not to do. “Hell, Ursie, we can knock this out in two nights.”
Ursula’s ears are hot. When you come upon men together, for a moment at least, they are always strangers. She is an interloper, and wishes she did not come down. She does not approve. She should have known Michael would take over for Carter, despite all his talk of consequences. She should have known, yet she forgot. Michael does not pull his hair or grind his teeth. He does not bitch or demand gratitude. Saint of all saints, he just does. You cannot make him do.
She feels foolish, and left out. Then she relaxes a bit. There is something in the scene of the old days: Fish, helped by alcohol, moving the moments along on a gush of funny talk. His friends urging him on. Michael, getting something done that needs doing. And Ursula? Waiting her turn, watching. Looking forward to bed.
“Just came to say goodnight,” she says. As C
arter goes by, he offers her a swig of Pepsi from a can. She shakes her head.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Carter says as he settles down. “Fish is really rád tonight, and he’s got books, too, Mom. He’s got sources.” He grins hugely. “I can pick up a few more things at the library at lunch. We’ll knock this out in no time.”
Michael has gone back to writing.
“Which part are you doing, son?”
Carter thinks she is joking. He laughs, a happy, loved young man. “Oh you know, Mom. I turn it in!”
She tries to wait up for Michael. She takes a folder of papers into the bathroom to read. The topic is interventions on behalf of babies born of addicted or diseased mothers. She sits on the tile, because the cold floor keeps her awake.
She remembers feeling Carter move for the first time inside her. She had just read an article in a women’s magazine that listed a calendar of mileposts in pregnancy, and she kept it in her dresser drawer, checking it secretly. “The sensation of quickening may be like a bubble of gas, a touch of indigestion—” But it wasn’t that way at all. It was as clearly wonderful as the sun coming up. She felt the rest of her life ripening. She hadn’t even wanted to be pregnant until then. Carter, Carter, he would die to think she had such thoughts about him.
And these poor women, the subject of dry essays—do they think of the life inside them, too? Do they notice?
At two in the morning Michael wakes her with his snoring. She wakes him gently. “Michael, Michael,” she says, “you’re making your funny noises.” He says, “Mmm.”
She puts her hand somewhere he will notice.
He turns and says sleepily, “Am I not to go back to sleep after a day’s work and a long night’s toil?”
“First you have to make it up to me.”
“You’re mad about Carter’s paper?”
“Not now. It’s the snoring. This is twice in twenty hours. It’s not even morning yet.”
He puts his hand on her nice round breast. “You make it awful hard on a man,” he says.
20
Ursula makes herself a cup of tea and switches on the television to wait for the news on PBS. This television, a little black and white, sits on their old highchair, against the wall by the basement door. The Friday evening summary of the financial news is on. Sometimes Ursula tries to listen and learn. She has left her father’s investments in his same funds, just changing ownership, counting on her dad, even now, to know what he was doing—and what she ought to do. But she knows times change, investments should change, she will have to know more to get more. Only an inheritance seems a kind of free money, certainly a gift, and she trusts her father to have remembered that she would have no head for it all.
Juliette phones. “Where are you?” Ursula sputters. She hadn’t realized that it was seven already. Michael has gone to River Cove, to do his duty.
“Mom, Dad wasn’t home either when I got home from dance, and there wasn’t a note or anything—”
“Answer my question. Where are you?”
“Other kids go places without checking in every fifteen minutes. You act like I’m a baby.”
“I’m waiting.”
“The mall.”
“The mall!” The mall is twenty miles away, in the next town. “How did you manage that?”
“Kristi’s mom picked us up and then dropped us off.”
“Who’s us?”
“Oh Mother.”
“Juliette, you can’t go off with anyone without checking.”
“I tried! I didn’t know where you were.”
“Then you should have waited.”
“And missed my chance?”
Juliette’s high whine reminds Ursula that her daughter is feeling cornered. And her complaint is at least partially valid. Ursula did forget to make Friday plans with her daughter. She didn’t even mind until Juliette called.
“Never mind. When are you coming home, and what are you doing at the mall?”
“It’s too late for the bus, Mom.”
“Where’s Kristi’s mother?”
“I told you she dropped us off. Kristi, me, Darlene, and Brie.”
This is not Juliette’s crowd. (Why would anyone name a child after a cheese?) Juliette doesn’t run with a crowd. She spends times with Marina, another ninth-grader, who also dances, and there have been a couple of other girls around now and then. Juliette has never been one for “spending the night,” and she seldom goes to school events. Ursula has heard of these girls, though. They are “popular” girls. Within the last week Brie told Juliette her ends were split, and Juliette wanted to go to the beauty parlor as soon as possible. Ursula said their appraisal would have to wait until school was out, and Juliette seems to have forgotten.
“So how are you getting home?”
“Couldn’t you pick us up? We probably would have come out here anyway.”
“I could not.”
“How am I supposed to get home then?”
“What are you doing?”
“Brie is looking for a prom dress. Kristi already found a bathing suit. I’m just—you know—. Mom, they’re waiting on me, I’ve got to go. Aren’t you going to pick us up?”
“I can’t carry four of you in my car.”
“Someone can sit in the middle.”
“Not without a seat belt. Not in my car.”
“Motherrr!”
“I will pick you up. You, Juliette.”
“I told them you’d give us a ride!”
“You can’t make commitments for me. I’m not happy about this at all. I’m going to listen to the news before I do anything. Hostages. National defense.” She sighs. “Gary Hart.”
“I’ll leave here at eight, and I want you to be at the Meier and Frank bottom entrance at eight-thirty sharp. By the shoe department. Got it?”
“What am I supposed to tell them?” Ursula can hear tears.
“Tell them to call their mothers. Eight-thirty.”
Driving to the mall, Ursula feels herself softening. She knows what happened. Her sweet Juliette was standing around when those girls were making their plans, and she got swept up in them. Going to the mall with the local Valley Girls. It is understandable. Unusual for Juliette, but not so unusual for an adolescent.
She tries to recall the faces of the girls Juliette named. All she can bring to mind is hair and glare, the standard teenage girl. So these are the desired companions.
She tries to imagine them prancing around the mall, looking at clothes, handling jewelry, scarves, purses, little stuffed doo-dads in the Hallmark shop.
She hopes none of them shoplift.
She tries to concentrate on the state of the world, but thinking about it makes it worse. Sometimes she wakes at night in the classic cold sweat, and realizes she has been dreaming about Chernobyl or Star Wars.
It is eight-thirty when she arrives, and there is no sign of Juliette. She waits in the car five minutes, then gets out and goes inside. That part of the store is almost empty. A very skinny sales clerk stands slouched against the frame of the arched entry into the storeroom of the shoe department. In Electronics, across the aisle, a much older man, tired and fleshy in a polyester suit, is watching the shoe clerk. Two women about Ursula’s age sit on one of the mattresses talking intensely, their heads close together. They reach behind them several times to push against the mattress. Ursula walks past them, past the escalator, to look in Misses. Not a likely place, but if Juliette were early she might have wandered around.
With no sign of Juliette, Ursula goes up the escalator and walks through the store quickly, then looks out into the mall center to see if the girls are sitting somewhere, or coming toward the store.
By now Ursula is worried that Juliette will be at the agreed place, wondering where her mother is, so she hurries back. The couple on the mattress is gone. The girl in Shoes is straightening the displays and yawning, without bothering to cover her mouth. The man in Electronics is not in sight, and neither is Juliette.
I should be angry, she thinks, but already she is imagining horrible things. Small towns are not safe from monsters of madness. You have to move to another country—Canada, New Zealand, Japan—for that. Juliette is naive and vulnerable and dear. Ursula picks up a pair of forty-eight dollar huaraches, dyed bright blue, and examines the sole, the thickness of a crepe.
Juliette comes through the door from outside. Three girls come in with her. There is something formidable about them en masse. Juliette breaks from the others and runs to her mother.
I won’t embarrass her, Ursula tells herself. It can wait. This is not a serious infraction. She forces herself to smile.
“I was worried, honey. Let’s go.” Ursula reaches for her daughter’s hand.
Juliette jerks away and speaks in a hoarse, venomous whisper. “Don’t you dare humiliate me!”
Ursula smiles at the other girls. “G’night,” she calls. They smirk.
“Bye, Brie,” Juliette mews as Ursula pushes the door. Outside, she says, “I hate you!”
Ursula keeps quiet as she pulls onto the freeway. Juliette is rigid in her seat, her face pulled into a paroxysm of anger.
“I will not be angry,” Ursula says sweetly. One good whack is lurking in her hand, but she has never struck a child yet.
“How could you talk to me like that?” Juliette demands.
“Now you just shut up, Juliette. I am the one who ought to be mad here, after cooling my heels for half an hour. Where the hell WERE YOU?”
“You weren’t there at 8:30. I looked everywhere.” Juliette is unconvincing.
“That isn’t so and you know it. You should have waited where we agreed.”
“Where you said.”
“I said. Right.”
“They were going to go and leave me there by myself. I said, ‘Can’t you just wait until my mom comes?’”
“Where were you, honey?”
Juliette begins to sob violently. Though the energy subsides, she cries all the way home. Ursula, provoked but puzzled, bites her lip.