He slides his hand along her belly and makes her wait a long moment.
“Can you get your money back?” he asks. His face is on her belly. His tongue darts around her navel and then along the perimeter of her pubic hair.
“What money?”
“From the lawyer. Do they give refunds?”
Her stomach lurches and settles again. She doesn’t answer him. They both forget what he asked. She can’t tell where his finger is, and what is his tongue. It is so familiar, and so amazing.
“Where should we go?” he says. “Do you want to go to Michael’s with me? Or your place?”
“Let’s drive up to the lake,” she says. They won’t get back in time for work. It will be a long, dark, winding drive.
“Whatever you say,” Fish says. “If you can wait that long.” He gives her a wet, winey kiss. “Me, I’ve been waiting for most of a year.” He turns on the Rolling Stones tape. He backs out of the drive and starts down the hill. “What do I do with those papers now, Katie? What have you done with yours?”
44
Sometimes in the past month, Ursula has felt that she is watching her children on video. They seem inaccessible. Carter is well and cheerful, on a happy slide toward commencement, but he is as remote to Ursula as an exchange student, as if he had another life to go home to when the year is over. She thinks of the confusion and fuss in getting his term paper in on time—she ended up typing it on a borrowed typewriter, working until three in the morning to finish it—with a nostalgic ache. Normal life provides them too little intersection. He is seldom home. She thinks he cannot bear the silence of the robber-stripped house. Michael has been muttering about getting a new system for his music, and he mentioned that they ought to get Carter a computer for graduation, but neither matter has come up again between them. Of course he may have bought either or both, but they are not in evidence.
Recently Ursula saw Carter on the street downtown. She was driving home from the bakery and she saw him with a girl in a red dress. The girl also wore a short black jacket, trimmed gaudily, like a bullfighter’s suit. Her hair was pale and glossy, and even in a glance from a distance, she seemed very well put together. Ursula didn’t recognize her as one of the girls who have been through the Fisher house in the past year. This girl had her arm through Carter’s, and she was leaning toward him as they stood at the edge of the park, near the pay phone booth. Ursula saw her son touch the girl’s hair, and his gentle gesture with this strange girl, on the street in plain sight, sent a shiver of surprise down Ursula’s neck. She saw immediately that there were Carters she had not yet met and might never know, boy-men he would reveal only to young misses, away from the constraints of his parents and home.
Juliette is as elusive, and troubling. She slips by Ursula as if the crossings were prearranged. She leaves the house many evenings just as Ursula’s car pulls into the drive. Ursula assumes that rehearsals are taking much of Juliette’s time. Juliette goes to bed as soon as she is home from them, sometimes quite early, and then she rises in the middle of the night to bathe and wash her hair. She nibbles before dinner is prepared, and so isn’t hungry when it is. She is too busy, too tired, too full, to go with the family for spaghetti or steak, or the hot Cajun shrimp Carter loves at the Bay Leaf Deli. She says she doesn’t need rides anywhere, she can walk.
Sometimes Juliette creeps out of the house after dark and does stretches in the yard. Sometimes she sits on the deck in a lawn chair, her feet drawn up close to her buttocks, her chin on her knee, and stares in the direction of the sycamore, behind which, in a converted shed the size of a laundry room, a Japanese graduate student plays a mournful sax.
There has been no more outright defiance, and no scenes of tears and childish comfort-seeking. Juliette is a phantom.
Ursula thinks about her children’s upbringing, and laments the things she has left out. Where there was no church membership, why was there no visiting of different denominations? Where there was so little athletic emphasis, why were swimming lessons cut off at Porpoise level? Why no tennis, with college courts a five-minute walk away? And how has she so thoughtlessly failed to provide them a sense of family history? She condenses family stories to anecdotes three sentences long, makes jokes and doesn’t bother to explain the context. They’ve done practically nothing to establish family rituals. (What is there to say about Christmas except that the elder Fishers come, dinner is always late, and presents have usually been negotiated to prevent disappointment, thus expunging any sense of surprise? Even Halloween is an embarrassment of neglect; Juliette remembers well first grade, when her teacher had to throw a sheet over her head, lest she be the only costume-less child.)
The years from babyhood through primary school seem in retrospect a time when the children were handed back and forth, their care like a baton in a relay, with only one runner on the track at a time. With a stab of pain—truly and physically located beneath her breastbone—Ursula realizes that Michael has spent hundreds of more hours, perhaps hundreds of more days, with the children than she. Summers off. The three of them have filled time she remembers only as days at work. They have gone swimming and hiking. They have built playhouses, birdhouses, scooters, and hand looms. One year they built a kiln and made a hundred pinch pots. Ursula, laboring for the past eighteen years on a bureaucrat’s schedule, has organized the formal leisure. There were camps: Camp Fire, B’nai B’rith, YMCA, once a ten-day seashore botany camp from which Carter had to be fetched, raging with a fever that disappeared by the time they reached home. She took them to Chicago half a dozen times, to Seattle as many or more. And there was Disneyland; there they were all together.
She has tried never to think of their future lives as something she can mold. She has tried not to desire their careers, their ambitions for them. She feels too keenly, still, her father’s disappointment in her, after the years of kindly discussion of the scholarly life, sustained by his hope of contaminating her with his ambition. But she also understands, though it has been little mentioned, that her mother postponed her intellectual and artistic life for marriage, and for Ursula, because she lacked the strength of conviction and the bolster of family support. Be what you like, she tells her children, but do well, because you have to do a lot of years. She wants them to see a large range of possibilities. Once, watching “Nature” on PBS, she asked Carter (he was eleven years old at the time), “Who do you think sits there and waits for the night flower to open?” He said, “Vampires come out at night,” and, bored, scurried off to play something mindless on his first computer.
Michael does not talk with them about work. He does not share Ursula’s conviction that a good life must include fulfillment, satisfaction, inner reward, in that arena. He says there isn’t enough intrinsic reward to go around; somebody has to shovel shit. He acts sometimes as if he doesn’t recognize that he is in the middle class. The professional class. Yet he has liked teaching, at least not minded too much the things he didn’t do that he once thought he might.
Carter and Juliette have grown up faster than Ursula could see coming. They seem to have grown while she was away somewhere. This is especially true of Juliette, who was such a little girl two years ago. Now Juliette walks with her shoulders slouched, a very un-ballerina posture, and spends too many hours alone. Ursula never sees her eat, though she sees signs of it, and Juliette, although thin, is surely not gaunt.
Ursula would like to discuss the children with Michael, but he says you cannot talk a crop in. Wait and see, he ways. She wants to ask him if that is what his parents did. When was it that the boys became distinctly separate, were they boys or young men? When Ursula met them she sensed immediately they were uncannily bound, although she didn’t know for months that they were twins. Fish seemed then to be on the front line of life, often in the way of people and events, stumbling against convention, while Michael moved quietly in the background, finding his way without disturbing anyone else, or asking too much. She remembers how disoriented Michael seemed wh
en Fish joined the navy and disappeared from his life. She knows he dreamed about his brother, especially after Fish went to Vietnam. He woke Ursula frequently with his tossing, but he said it was indigestion, or a stuffy nose, or a little insomnia. He scoffed when Ursula said twins had ties across all sorts of time and space. He said they were not identical, implying that they were uniquely individual, bound only by family ties and a shared birth date, as if the years had diminished their likenesses rather than endorsed them. And when Fish came home from Asia, for a long time Ursula thought they were really different. They were finally divided by lanes of war and marriage, by Vietnam and Ursula.
She catches him one night in bed. He has been spending his free time with Fish, in the basement or yard, or weekend days at Fish’s house project. She sees them poring over plans and pages of figures, photographs and lists, and she considers listening, to see what is going on, but they speak a different language, elliptical and specialized, and she always remembers the hundred and one things she needs to do, and leaves them alone.
On this evening, though, Fish is out, and Michael takes an unusually long bath and goes to bed, moving one of Ursula’s pillows to join his two for proper propping, adjusting the light just so, and taking up the special National Geographic issue about a new archeological site in Peru, fabulous for its gold and quantity of artifacts.
She asks him if he thinks she should take Juliette to see a counselor.
“About her classes next year?”
“Don’t be dense, Michael,” she scolds.
“You mean a therapist, then.”
“Yes.” Immediately her face heats with embarrassment, exactly as it did when she first brought up the matter of Juliette’s retainer in seventh grade. Michael called that “another middle-class American gouge,” as if they should ignore her mismatched layers of teeth, leaving her to a crooked smile and awkward bite, when they had the means to urge her teeth into place. Of course Michael left the decision to Ursula, and Ursula, if she erred, erred on the side of luxury and caution rather than penury. And, for conscience sake, she contributed an enormous pile of clothing to the Nicaraguan Bus for Peace drive, along with twelve tubes of Neosporin.
“Do you see something coming?” asks Michael. The cat, reclining on Michael’s torso, is stretched out full length. “Do you think she needs guidance in developing her self?” Sighing noisily, making it clear that he feels interrupted and put-upon, he tosses the magazine to the floor and pulls Ursula’s pillow out from under his head. “Are we going to get her started early? Something like a training bra?”
She raises her head so that he can put the pillow behind her. “Of course not. We’re too hip, aren’t we?” This is a concept Michael despises. He says that bleached oak and odd vegetables are like piss on the corners of the middle class. Don’t cross over here in your polyester, eating Twinkies, they say. He brings up a version of this argument (diatribe, really) anytime Ursula considers working on the house, buying a piece of furniture or a good item of clothing. It never comes up when he has a consumer-attack, but, she would admit if he pressed her, when he buys it is for his own pleasure and never for show. “And you know I never bought her a training bra.”
“But therapy—you have an investment there. It’s your field.” Is she to understand that he minds her training?
“That’s not fair. I’m not a therapist, though I could be. You know I’ve chosen to stay in this job, to work in the public—” She gropes for a word, retrieves “sector,” and knows she would gag if she said it. “I work for the bureaucracy in order to help keep a few children out of the hot oil. I’m hardly in the therapy business, and you know so.”
“I allowed myself an unworthy digression,” Michael says. He has shifted into his slightly arch comic mode. She thinks he sees himself cast in a British movie. He leaves one hand on Pajamas’s rump, and slides the other along Ursula’s. “What’s brought this on?” The cat purrs loudly and stretches even longer, looking, in the moment of extension, like a mummy cat Ursula saw in the British Museum.
“Don’t you see her slouching toward depression? Don’t you find her evasive and solitary?”
“She seems adolescent and sensitive and very much your daughter.”
Ursula pops up from under the sheet to a sitting position. Michael’s hand slides off her thigh. “I brought this on?”
“Indeed, Ursula, I don’t even see anything to worry about, so I’m not attributing guilt. But weren’t you the teenager who drank gallons of lemon water to purify your system, and then turned around and drank cherry codeine syrup to get high?”
“Teenage foolishness is not genetic. Besides, we’re not discussing my etiology. Or Juliette’s, either.” Actually, Ursula has to suppress a smile. Michael tosses a bit of old history at her, and shows that he heard something she said, a long time ago.
How long ago was it they traded personal narratives?
How long since he asked her a personal question?
“Maybe it’s girls,” he says.
“Oh great.”
“You aren’t suggesting therapy for Carter.”
“I wouldn’t do that to a therapist.”
“He doesn’t need any help with his psyche. He just needs time and experience with consequences.” He says this lightly, alluding perhaps to his own Carter rescues, and her disapproval.
“He needs a haircut.” She hears her prim, tense voice and calls up an image of her son that makes her titter. “Admit it, Michael, he looks like a rooster.”
“He has a beautiful girlfriend. Annabel.”
“I think I saw her. At the park the other day. Has she been around? Have you met her?”
“A couple of times. She drives a Honda Prelude. New.”
“Really.”
“She’s an heiress, says the son.”
“Is that part of the sudden interest?”
“I don’t think it’s sudden. I think he hasn’t wanted to bring her around in case if didn’t pan out. I think he’s rather proud of her.”
“Because she’s beautiful or because she’s rich?”
“Because she breaks his trend. He’s proven he’s not in a rut.”
“I didn’t know there was a trend. There’ve been so many.”
“Flaky girls, you know they were.”
“That Kincaid girl got 1400 on her SAT’s. I heard her mother going on about it at the cleaners.”
“And how long did she last?”
“Or did he? Honestly, Michael, what has he done with girls these last few years? Where do kids go when they go out?”
“Movies, the mall. Games, dances. It doesn’t change all that much. Little back roads.”
“You think he’s basically your average kid?”
“Somewhere in the middle of the curve.”
“So cut him loose, aren’t we about to do that? It’s still Juliette who worries me. Not that Carter hasn’t in the past. Not that I don’t worry about his responsibility, and whether he’ll brush his teeth next year, but Michael, stop diverting me, JULIETTE IS HURTING.”
“I know. She’s slipped away from you. You don’t know what to say to her.”
“Why yes.”
“It’s supposed to happen, Ursie. Children push their parents away so they can grow up. Child Development 201. Remember?” He speaks kindly enough; she chooses not to be offended. She wants to say, I miss her.
“My mother left town,” she does say. “It was easy to make a break.”
“My mother had her teeth clenched my whole childhood. There wasn’t anything to break away from.”
She resists a strong notion to say he has not broken yet. Instead, she says, “Keep an eye on her. You’re home before me in the afternoons. See if you can spend some time with her. She’s off mothers for now. Reassure me.”
“If I can, if I can.”
“You’re not humoring me?”
“Of course I’m humoring you.” He spends a moment adjusting his position in the bed. “If I don’t humor you
, you will lie there and agitate, and how will we ever get around to you-know-what, which we haven’t done this week?”
“Michael. Are Fish and Katie back together?”
“Some other time, Ursie. Turn off the light.” He has worked his way down the bed so that his mouth is on her shoulder.
“All right, but there is one more thing.”
“Ursula, Ursula.”
“You’ve got to fix the kitchen floor. I want a floor for Carter’s graduation.”
“They’re not holding it in our kitchen.”
“I might have a party.”
“Have you talked to Carter?”
“Not for him, for us.”
“We’re celebrating?”
“Not really. More like wallowing in reminiscences. I’d like to get out the baby albums, tell stories. I’d like to see some old friends.”
“Don’t they live other places?” She detects a sad tinge to his words. She feels her belly warm, then her knee jerks involuntarily. His mouth is quite hot on her collarbone.
“I’ll tell you a story,” he murmurs.
“I’m listening.”
“Come closer.”
He rises, whispers in her ear.
“You’re perverted, Michael!” Delightfully so, she thinks.
“And that gets you a gray rubber floor.”
“Deal,” says Ursula to her husband. Juliette slips away, a shadow on a screen. Though somewhere in the house she sighs, there is nothing to be done about her. Not right now.
45
On the Sunday morning before Carter’s graduation, Ursula meets a social worker from her office, Teresa, at the bakery. They order cappuccinos, and congratulate one another on getting up and out at seven-thirty in the morning. As they stir in the frothy milk, they plan a route for their long walk, promised one another Friday at the office.
Ursula is surprised that there are so many people out so early on a weekend morning.
“But it’s so warm, so summer-like,” Teresa says. “In a few weeks we’ll be clogged with tourists. I love it now, when I still feel the city’s mine.”
Beyond Deserving Page 26
