“Didn’t ask!” Geneva talked about her anniversary for months. Her hints had the subtlety of a broad board. It was her topic of the day at the Christmas table.
“Nowadays people break apart at the least little thing,” she commented. She had been watching Gully as though he might have fled, too, if not for the strength of her attachment. Gully joined in, his voice tremulous. (He seems smaller and smaller these days.) “We’ve done good,” he said. “Stuck it out, Ma and me.” Nowadays Gully often mentions Geneva’s will and loyalty. He speaks of AA and Jesus, both credited with his salvation. He speaks like a man at the end of a perilous journey, grateful and still weak. One day he came to his senses and there was Geneva, waiting. He owes her everything. His softly gruff, self-deprecatory manner embarrassed the children. Michael asked Juliette, who was staring off in the direction of the kitchen, to please pass the yams. Carter announced that he was never getting married. Juliette said, “Boy is that obvious. Nobody would have you.” Michael, with unusual grace, asked his mother what she had been reading lately. She had been reading a book about the Irish civil war (surprise! thought Ursula, who would have thought it more likely to be a romance), and her talk about it left the rest of them free to eat. She didn’t blink when Carter belched. “Belfast women know something about endurance,” she said, as if she were one.
Ursula is waiting for Michael to come back with the ice. All those miniature crab quiches, delicate cheese puffs, and crackers with salmon paste threaten to erupt with amoebae in the heat. Ursula let the hip young caterer talk her into the menu. The woman wanted to show off. (She cooks in the basement of a renovated church. Upstairs a cabaret theatre serves the desserts she makes.) “Don’t underestimate their pleasure in a beautiful table,” she said to Ursula, speaking of the celebratory couple and their plain folk friends. They would have done better with chips and dips, crackers and cheddar. Ursula prevailed only in the matter of a cake, white, with frosting, as Geneva requested. Ursula now thinks the caterer conned her into a more expensive menu and had spotted Ursula’s uneasiness a mile away. Ursula’s sensibility quivers with guilt where the Fishers are concerned. The food is lovely to see, though, if it will hold up. The hall windows are open and the double doors propped out, but the air is as still as in a closet. The river, which lies across the road, down a short bank, gives off no coolness.
Ursula realizes that she has simply made too much of the day. Half the fun had already happened when Geneva mailed out her silly card with its “recipe.” Ursula asked Michael what he thought of it and Michael said, “There’s something to be said for keeping your rules simple.” Michael does not douse fires where none are burning. He does not probe wounds. He does not worry about whether things could be better, if they are not too bad as they are.
All Geneva really wanted was for people to show up and congratulate her. Both she and Gully came from families rent by death and abandonment. Half a century’s fidelity is their lives’ achievement. And look, the pharmacist is here, the librarian, the grade-school janitor who sometimes fishes with Gully. The minister is here, of course, with his wife. Fish is conspicuously absent. Geneva’s sister Ruby has yet to arrive from Spokane. Katie has not shown up, and Michael’s children refused to come. “Better dead than wed,” Carter stupidly intoned. Juliette asked, “How is Brian going to choreograph a pas de deux with one of us gone?” She said “Bree-ahn,” in that nasal French manner. At least neither of the children said what Ursula knows they know, that Geneva has never especially liked them, though now she says she can see the Fisher nose on Carter, and her own long legs on Juliette. She likes to count the children once in a while: two in this generation, both surviving.
The string quartet from nearby Canyon High School is playing Mozart, if not with zest, at least with a sprightly tempo. The pretty girl on viola had the good sense to wear a sundress. Her shoulders and back glisten with perspiration. Ursula can hear herself later chiding Carter, telling him how pretty the violist was, how her skirt fell down from her knees to the floor like a sheet of flowers. Carter likes girls who wear earrings up in the gristly part of their ears, and fatigue pants or men’s boxers, with baggy shirts and Chinese shoes.
The other three musicians, two violinists and a cellist, are boys. This surprised Ursula when she heard them the first time, last February at a wine-tasting fundraiser for the battered-women’s shelter. Ursula’s Carter, eighteen and supposedly poised on the edge of manhood, listens to heavy metal through earphones, and cannot himself play a note on any instrument, though he has had a run of lessons on two horns and the guitar. The only common cultural ground he has with his parents is a liking for the Grateful Dead, and that has been distorted by the cultish skulls and bones on his shirts, on his door, and on the bumper of the car, before Ursula made him scrape them off. Recently Michael commented that he remembered when the Dead had hair and considerably less girth. Carter laughed, cawing like a crow.
The musicians move their bodies gently with their bowing, watching their music with slightly drooped eyes, as though they are enchanted. They play for themselves and Mozart, seemingly mindless of the guests, who give them clearance, like a hot fire.
Michael staggers into the hall with two big bags of crushed ice. His lower lip, sucked in by his concentration and effort, disappears under his moustache, pulling his chin up so close to the moustache his face seems too short. One game old fellow sticks his arms out in an offer to help, but Michael nods his head and picks up speed on the way to the kitchen. Ursula follows him out of the room, talking as she walks. “Do you think Katie is coming? She said she wanted to bring a tape-player and some Windham Hill music. She could borrow it from that woman Maureen, her neighbor. We met her, remember, at the movies when we went to see that rerun of Martin Guerre?”
Michael bangs the ice down on the counter and rubs his arms vigorously. He is wearing a shirt Ursula bought for him last winter, a good-looking forest-green brushed twill, and she sees that he trimmed his moustache that morning. It is close and neat with a fine crisp edge at the bottom. When they make love after his grooming, Michael’s bristly moustache sticks her in the nose and makes her sneeze. Sometimes it is quite wonderful, laughing in those first moments of making love.
She thinks of the frustration of last night. They did not speak of it this morning. Michael seems clearheaded and not too tired, just a little grouchy. He never drinks too much, yet it bothers her when he drinks with Fish at all. She long ago accepted that Fish was going to pickle himself whatever they all did, but she feels uneasy about Michael, who has never even misbehaved under the influence. It is foolish of her, yet she thinks of the drinking as a bad gene that might suddenly take over. It makes her nervous when Carter drinks a beer in their own kitchen. It is her inexperience; neither of her parents were drinkers. Actually she likes the buzz of half a bottle of wine herself, but she is growing so careful lately she will soon be taking her own damned pulse.
She moves closer and puts her hand on Michael’s. He is cold from the ice. “I said, ‘Katie, these people are all old, what do they want with New Age?’ Was I wrong, Michael? To hire a string quartet? Was I so far off?” Geneva and Gully will never say they didn’t like the music; they will feel they ought to have. What if they all feel the same way, wishing for a fiddle instead?
“Pop’s out in the yard, looking acoss the road at the river,” Michael says. “I bet he wishes he was out fishing.” He pulls his hands free and sticks them down in his pants. “He says the women are all talking too loud and he can’t breathe indoors.” This is all said without a hint of humor, just the dry truth of it, Fisher men hating a social occasion. Now that the weather is fair, Gully will only come inside to eat and sleep. In weather like this he likes to park his truck in the woods and sleep there. Geneva doesn’t like it. She says he comes home smelling like sour leaves and fish. She likes to have Gully close by, though not under foot. It is fascinating, the way Geneva exercises control, or thinks she does, while Gully finds ingenious ways to as
sert his independence.
“The kids should be here,” Ursula says. She is sure Michael is bothered by their absence. He thinks they could be better behaved in numerous ways, but he has never been a disciplinarian. He never loses his temper, though he can wear Ursula down with silence, while the kids are more impervious. When Michael talks about children he speaks of the whole population and not just his own. He sees nothing contradictory in saying that boys who drive their parents’ cars should work to pay for the insurance, and failing to impose such a condition on Carter. He is also opposed to Carter going away to college, since there is a college a mile away downtown, but Ursula says she has spent the last two years living for the day she would see Carter off, and that has settled the argument. She has imposed one condition, that Carter work all summer for her friend who owns a fruit and vegetable market on the old highway. She wants Carter to get up and be somewhere every morning, and she wants him to learn a little about the value of a dollar.
When Michael does not say anything, Ursula says, “Carter would have upset Geneva with what he wore, or with his hair pulled straight up like a cock’s comb. She told me Gully had refused to cut his.”
“Such a little hank back there, you’d think she could leave him alone,” Michael growls. He only cut his own hair short within the last few months. Fish kept his shoulder-length mane even in jail. It seems to Ursula that the Fisher men have peculiar ways of asserting themselves: Gully refuses to wear any socks but white, and there are those overalls of his; Michael insists on pepper from a grinder at the table and changes his toothbrush twice a month; Fish wears his tee shirts until they hang like rags.
“Don’t worry about Mom,” Michael says. “It’s her party. Fifty years of hanging on. Isn’t that what it’s for?”
Ursula does not know if Michael means the party or marriage, and if marriage, his parents’ or everybody’s. There have probably been times when he has been unhappy with Ursula and has thought of himself as “holding on,” though Ursula cannot think offhand of when those times might have been. She herself has never been seriously unhappy with her marriage, though she has been angry with Michael and, especially in the early years, has yearned for sweeter attentions. She has not worried about Michael. He isn’t one to back out of his commitments.
“She has endured,” she says. It is Geneva’s own word.
“There have been times,” Geneva has said, “times when I thought about marching straight out the door.” They all know what those times were: when Gully went from work to the train station and rode all the way to Guatemala; when Gully drove a truck into a tree on purpose because it had a cracked block and he couldn’t fix it. Ursula supposes this rather frail old man has, in his own way, been a tyrant as well as a drunk, at times unreliable, maybe even mean. Ursula is sure of none of these things. Geneva makes veiled references to “hard times” and “those days.” Michael says his father always worked hard, but sometimes took off, usually only overnight, to escape the family and wrestle with his demons. Nonetheless, the two boys always looked to Gully and never to Geneva. Geneva’s comfort was a daughter, a year older than the twins, but Evelyn turned out dumb and wild and, finally, mortally foolish, the victim of a botched abortion, when it is so easy now.
“Fish sure as hell ought to be here, though,” Michael says. He surprises Ursula. He seldom states expectations of Fish. He is more likely to say, “What did he do now?” when Fish’s name comes up, though he has never refused to rescue Fish when Fish was rescuable. He does not now elaborate, and there is little expression in his mild voice, but Ursula is certain she detects resentment. It must have been hard, forty-five years the good son while everybody worried about the other one.
Katie does appear, breathless and scowling in a bright yellow leotard and an Indian print skirt. She often looks like someone left over from the sixties. She buys her clothes secondhand, or makes them. “Voilà!” she says now. “I know I’m late. My damned Datsun. The starter. I had to find a neighbor to give me a push. Nearly seventeen years living with Fish and I still don’t know anything about cars.” Fish, like Michael, often has a car or truck in pieces. “You know, I bet I haven’t even filled my own gas tank ten times in all these years, unless Fish was out of town.” Katie gives Michael and Ursula a weak smile.
Out of town? Fish has just spent a year in jail! Once he went all the way to Kansas to harvest wheat on Winston’s brother’s farm. He has been to Canada, Mexico, Idaho, Utah. He has spent time in rented rooms, and in Michael’s basements. Katie calls all that “being out of town”?
“I hardly used that car last year,” Katie says. “I was right downtown, you know? Then when I signed all that stuff to start the divorce, it hit me: I don’t even know how to change my oil.”
Katie has a boyfriend, a pear geneticist. You would think he would be smart enough to advise Katie. Katie hasn’t mentioned him in a while—Jeff, wasn’t it?—and never to Michael, only to Ursula. Ursula couldn’t be enthusiastic, though the truth is she thinks Katie has the right. Besides, Katie deserves some regard for trying to live her own life, after so many years of abetting Fish. She is a stitcher for a repertory theatre company. She has friends now that Ursula doesn’t know. “Stitcher” is a new word to Ursula.
Ursula begins digging out roasting pans and platters from the cabinets around the big kitchen. It isn’t the right moment to let herself feel, or Katie know, what she thinks about Katie’s fruit scientist, or Katie’s years of dogged constancy, or Katie’s decision to cut Fish off at last. It just is not the time, not because of this reception, but because of something going on inside Ursula that she has not yet named. You cannot be married to a twin without looking at the other one now and then. Ursula wonders if Michael has more of Fish in him than he lets on, something much more significant than a propensity for moustaches and taciturnity.
“Here,” she says to Katie. “Pile these with ice, and we’ll lay little tidbits in them, and go around and urge everybody to eat up before the ice melts and the food floats and sinks. Then when Ruby gets here we’ll bring out the cake.” Ursula’s table is going to look like an emergency food station in a dusty third world country. All those pots.
“What about the punch?” Katie asks. “I saw it, coming in.” She makes a face.
Ursula feels a twinge at the base of her spine, and she puts her hand there to press it out. She says “I’ll try to find something for water.” Michael meanwhile has been crawling around on his knees straightening out the chaos Ursula has left in the cabinets. She is habitually messy. By the time she gets up in the morning, the bedclothes are usually on the floor. She cooks all over the kitchen. Michael is slower with his messes, which accumulate over time. He often comes along behind her, tidying.
“I don’t know what I was thinking, having those papers served on Fish just now.” Katie is standing at the refrigerator with the door open, handing plates to Ursula. “Geneva will think I am a real bitch for sure when she hears. Did you see that stupid announcement they sent out? Stick to it. Who do you think that was meant for? She held on, why can’t I? She thinks there’s salvation in digging in your heels. I bet she still thinks, Evelyn could have had that baby. God, what a life. Look at her. Do you see me like that in thirty years? Do you see Fish?”
“Do you have enough pans?” Michael says, slapping shut another cabinet door.
Katie says plaintively, “My lawyer was on my ass.” She looks straight at Michael. “I tried to stop it, didn’t I?”
“I’m going outside to see about Pop,” Michael says. He puts his hands down in the ice in the pan Ursula is handling, and shakes them above his head, his face turned up to catch the drops. “Forest fires and family quarrels,” he says, summing up projections for summer after a spring drought. Then he leaves. He isn’t one to stick around to hear his sister-in-law talking about divorce. Ursula doesn’t know if that is because he doesn’t care, doesn’t know how to help, or is bored at the sound of two women talking. She doesn’t know what he thinks half
the time. Half the time! She never knows what he thinks unless he says, and from what he says, she still has to extrapolate. He claims that keeping busy keeps his mind free. Ursula thinks keeping quiet keeps him uncommitted; on some deep level she has always craved his commitment.
“Geneva won’t know it until you tell her,” she tells Katie briskly. “So tell her some other time. When this is over, when the divorce is over. You know she’ll never ask what’s going on.” None of my business, that is Geneva’s anthem, but then Ursula’s mother says that too.
“If Fish doesn’t show today, she’ll want to know why, won’t she?” Katie says this lightly.
Ursula sighs. “Geneva told me she used to cook supper, stick it in the oven, and forget about it. I supposed then she meant she never knew when to count on Fisher men. She doesn’t expect much from Fish, does she? Who does?”
“Where’s Juliette?”
“She dances Saturday mornings.” Ursula catches herself before she sighs again. “They’re rehearsing, getting ready for the dances in the park that start next month. You’ll come? I’ll remind you. Juliette couldn’t possibly disappoint that little French pimp who directs them.” Ursula bites her lip. She picks up a big roaster, now filled with ice and spinach tarts. It takes a moment for her to get her balance, with the roaster held up against her chest. Katie chooses that moment to catch her eye.
“I don’t know what else to do, Ursie. I don’t know how else to get myself together.”
Was it the boyfriend? Or has Katie read something? Joined a group? Has she just run out of patience?
Ursula gestures with her head, back over her shoulder, at the pans on the counter. “Grab something, Katie. Say cheerful things to all the fogeys. Let’s get this show on the road.”
“WHO is going to eat all this!” Geneva says loudly as they start laying it out. People drift their way and take up the little white paper plates with primroses at the edges. Geneva bends over ingloriously, going in her purse beneath the table to get her camera. “Say cheese,” she says to everyone when she straightens up. Her camera has a cheap little flash that will give everyone orange eyes. They should have given her a decent little auto-flash for a gift, Ursula thinks with a pang. She thought the reception was gift enough, but it isn’t really tangible. There aren’t any favors.
Beyond Deserving Page 14
