“Go fuck calves,” Lou yells at the screen when one of the brothers rejects one of the brides by bellowing,“Beautiful eyes, but what a size!” Lou feels as though it’s Norma she’s defending.
Part of Lou’s irritation is that a moment before, they heard the front door opening. “What are you doing home?” she says when their father appears in the doorway.
He isn’t drunk. His eyes blaze, but they’re focused. For the first time since their mother died, he enters the room. He strides over to the t? and picks up the ashes. “It’s time to scatter her,” he says. He holds the box in both hands, up by his chest.
“Do we have to?” That’s Sandy. Now that she’s about to be a mother, she doesn’t recognize his exclusive right to the part of their mother that was her body.
“Where?” Lou asks their father.
“Niagara Falls.”
Norma reaches the car first and climbs in the back seat. For the last year and a half, anytime she’s had to go somewhere with their father, and he’s driving, she’s climbed in the back seat. Now it’s habit. Sandy climbs in next to her.
“Thanks a lot,” Lou says, getting in beside their father. In Lou’s case, it’s just her lifelong aversion. She has no idea about him making a pass at Norma. Norma would never hand Lou that much ammunition.
On the seat between Lou and their father is the box of ashes. Lou goes to pick it up, but their father growls,“Leave her.” After a few minutes Lou switches on the radio and finds the FM rock station. She even lights a cigarette. He doesn’t say a word.
By some magic every song on the radio is in time with the windshield wipers. Lou leans against the door and takes a hard look at their father. She still hasn’t figured out why she never turned him over to the police.
He’s handsome, she has to admit that, even-featured, a strong jaw, but his mouth curves down like the mask of tragedy, and his eyes are the last word in unhappiness, in anger, in craziness. Lou sees all three aspects sequentially. She always sees them (though not always in that order) when he’s sober, and maybe it’s not being able to decide which aspect is the real one that’s kept her from squealing.
She sighs and shifts to look out her window. Let’s face it, she thinks, she hasn’t called the police because she can’t be bothered, because she hasn’t got the energy, and probably not the disloyalty, either, to pretend she has a case.
Premeditated murderer. She liked the sound of it. The shock value. But the truth is, all he did was screw up. It reminds her of when the cat climbed into the fan belt. It was their father’s fault … but it wasn’t his fault.
When she leaves home, she won’t come back, not to see him, that’s for sure. Hanging around him, she acts like him, she always has, so that for most of her life she’s been somebody she can’t stand. But when she leaves home, she is going to do something great. What? She has to concentrate. Everywhere since their mother died there seem to be signs, such as the windshield wipers clicking to the beat of every song. Such as the fact that it’s raining so hard now you can’t see ten yards in front of you, and all the cars are in a blind chain, trusting some driver miles down the road.
After about half an hour their father reaches over to the glove compartment and takes out a bottle.
“Oh, great,” Lou says.
He drinks steadily and savagely for another half hour or so, until every trace of anger and craziness drains from his face and he looks nothing but unhappy. At this point Lou knows that he’ll do what she says. She says,“Pull over.”
He and Norma trade places. “What if he barfs?” Sandy asks, and she squeezes into the front seat, too, and holds their mother on her lap, an inch of flesh away from the baby. In the back seat he lies down. Luckily the rain has let up enough for them to read road signs.
“You had a roof over your heads,” he shouts. “You had three square meals a day! By God!”
Lou turns up the radio.
Like anyone, the girls have seen lots of photographs of the falls, and they’ve seen the movie Niagara, with Marilyn Monroe. They expect to be wonder-struck. But through rain and from a distance the real thing is just a black-and-white picture. A confirmation that they’ve arrived at the right place.
Lou turns around to their father. “Where do you want to go?” she asks. “To the American side or over there?”
He pulls himself up. Norma slows down the car. “Not here!” he shouts at her. “Not here!” He leans over the front seat and points the whisky bottle at the Horseshoe Falls. “Drive right to the end!”
“Keep your shirt on,” Lou says.
“Right to the end!”
Norma pulls into a parking lot on a rise of land overlooking the road. The wind buffets the car. Only a few people (“Honeymooners,” Sandy says beatifically) are down by the low wall that runs along the lip of the gorge.
“Shit,” Lou says. “We forgot umbrellas.”
“Where is she?” their father cries. Over the seat Sandy hands him the box of ashes. And then he’s out of the car and hurrying, weaving, across the parking lot.
“He’s going to get hit,” Norma says, opening her door.
Before he reaches the road, Norma and Lou catch up with him. Norma takes his arm while they cross. He tugs like a dog. Behind them, Sandy, shawled in the car blanket, calls,“Don’t throw anything ‘til I’m there!” She isn’t going to run and jolt her baby.
He leads them across the lawn to the wall. It’s only about three feet high with another foot of railing on top. He goes straight to a spot where there’s an inlaid plaque with words carved on it. He doesn’t look at the plaque, but the girls do because their first thought is that it’s about their brother.
“José María Heredia,” Lou reads aloud. “Cuban poet. Exiled patriot called the sublime singer of the wondrous greatness of Niagara Falls.” She looks over the wall.
They are standing directly above the falls, a hundred or so yards from the drop. In her imagination Lou always saw glassy water here, but the water races and tumbles like water already gone over. You can’t see the falls. You see the upshot—a huge mist full of white gulls in pandemonium.
Right where they’re standing, the water doesn’t reach the stone wall. There’s a little bank of grass and small bushes. From where they’re standing, unless you threw a thing, it would hit land.
Lou turns to their father. “Let’s get the show on the road,” she says.
He’s trying to open the box.
“Throw the whole thing, why don’t you?” Norma suggests.
He continues struggling with the clasp.
Lou snatches the box away. “Here, I’ll do it.” From having opened it a couple of times at home, she knows how to undo the clasp. As soon as she flicks it up, he grabs the box back.
“Lean over the railing,” Lou instructs him. The wind is coming hard off the water, and she’s afraid that the ashes will blow back in their faces.
He leans, then throws the whole box anyway. Some ashes spill out and fly in a grey flock into the bushes. The box hits the water just inches from the bank. It capsizes, swirls, sinks, pops up. The girls hold their breath. Their father grips the railing. They are all pulling for the box.
When it goes over the falls, Sandy makes a sound of loss. A seagull echoes the sound.
“Okay,” Lou says. “Let’s go.” She’s soaked and shivering.
“Come on, Dad,” Norma says gently.
He growls and waves her away. From his jacket pocket he extracts the whisky bottle.
“Just leave him,” Lou says. “We can wait in the car.”
“He can’t cross the road by himself,” Norma says.
“We can watch from the car. When he starts heading back, you can run out and get him.”
They turn on the engine for the heater and the radio. The only station that comes in clearly is an American one playing blasts from the past. “Mr. Sandman.” Until their father comes back, Sandy is lying in the back seat. She’s exhausted.
Lou, leaning agai
nst the passenger door, is the one who has a view of him. She pushes in the lighter and fishes in her sweater pocket for the cigarette she felt in there a few minutes ago. It’s not a cigarette, though. It’s a partly smoked joint. “Hey!” she rejoices, holding it up. She doesn’t remember, but she must have pocketed it one of the times she was with Tom.
Norma and Sandy are shocked. No way, Sandy says when
Lou suggests that the three of them smoke it. Norma asks if it’ll make them go wild. She envisions herself driving the car over the falls, and she also wonders if they have an explanation here for Lou’s personality swings. Nah, Lou says. Marijuana just makes you feel good, high, like you’ve had a few drinks, only better. She lights the joint, takes a drag, extends it to Norma. Norma sighs. A capitulating sigh, Lou rightly judges. She puts the joint right at Norma’s lips. Norma inhales.
“That’s the spirit,” Lou rasps without releasing breath. She takes another drag, then passes the joint over the seat to Sandy.
“I better not,” Sandy says.
“The womb acts like a screen,” Lou rasps,“keeping out harmful substances.”
“How do you know?” Sandy watches Norma take another drag. She’s starting to feel left out.
“I know everything. Come on. This is a big day.”
With Lou holding the joint, Sandy sits up and takes a prim little puff. She coughs it out.
“Try again,” Lou says. “Suck in air at the same time.”
After a few minutes Lou lowers her window an inch. Leaning back against her door, she laughs. “What a suit,” she explains, nodding over Norma’s shoulder.
Norma turns around to look at him. “He’s going to catch pneumonia,” she says. Then she laughs, too. “It’s a pretty awful suit, all right.”
“A nice silk and wool blend, though,” Sandy says professionally. Lou and Norma are silenced. Then all three of them burst out laughing. They can’t stop. Sandy holds her belly to keep it steady. But it trembles. Inside it trembles. “My baby’s laughing!” she cries. Lou passes her what’s left of the joint.
When they quiet down, Lou asks Sandy how someone as smart as she is, when it comes to clothes, anyway, can marry someone as moronic as Dave.
“He’s not moronic!” Sandy cries. And for the first time she is positive that she loves him. Her baby stirs, settling. “Are you sure about the womb having a screen?” she asks.
“Anyway, she’s carrying his child,” Norma points out. Her mood plunges. The only comforting thought is that a baby has tiny lungs. “He’d have drowned right away,” she says softly.
“Who?” Lou says, snapping her fingers to “My Kind of Town.”
“Our brother.”
“Oh,” Sandy says as if the wind’s been knocked out of her. An invention occurs to her—lengths of shammy straps that you wrap around yourself and your baby to bind the two of you together.
“Must have been quite a throw,” Lou says in a quiet voice.
“We don’t know that!” Norma says heatedly. “It didn’t necessarily happen exactly where we were!”
“The newspaper said it happened where there was shore. I remember that.”
“Well, I remember it said there were no witnesses.”
“Why would she throw him, anyway?” Sandy cuts in. “She’d never throw her own baby. You don’t know, Lou. You’ve never had a baby. She wouldn’t.” Her voice breaks. “Why would she?”
“To put an end to the Field line,” Lou says.
“Oh, right,” Norma says bitterly. “I can just see Mom deciding that. If she really threw him, it was temporary insanity. I’ve read about this. It happens to some women after childbirth. Temporary insanity. It’s just a few seconds of not wanting a baby.”
“I’m not saying she didn’t love him,” Lou says, and a thought that she had at the funeral parlour returns to her, and she adds,“Probably she loved him too much.”
“It was temporary insanity,” Norma says.
“She wouldn’t throw him,” Sandy insists.
“Okay, okay,” Lou says. Her sisters’ first time smoking is turning into a downer.
Norma gets out of the car, slams the door and runs across the parking lot toward their father. The way she runs, Lou thinks fondly, is the way she is: restrained, determined, not-too-fast. Lou smiles at Sandy. “Has your little baby stopped laughing?” she asks.
Sandy curls up on her side and pulls the blanket around her. “I thought up an invention,” she says.
“Oh, yeah?”
While Sandy describes some incomprehensible bondage contraption, Lou watches Norma and their father. He doesn’t budge. He doesn’t turn his head. Norma points at the car, then starts running back to the accompaniment of Nat King Cole singing “If I had to choose just one day.”
A gust of rain comes into the car with Norma. “He wants us to drive home and leave him,” she says.
“Good idea,” Lou says. But she smiles to show she’s kidding.
Norma combs her fingers through her short hair, spraying water. “Go on, kiss her,” Nat King Cole sings. “Go on and kiss her.”
Kissing Stella returns to Norma so vividly, so physically that she has to close her eyes. She takes off her glasses and lies back on the head rest. She has settled with herself that what happened between her and Stella can’t be compared to what happened between herself and their father (for one thing, Stella isn’t related to her; for another, she was in love with Stella). All the same, she realizes that from Stella’s point of view, the two events wouldn’t seem all that different. Norma suspects that unconsciously she must have wanted Stella to grow up. “I know,” Stella said when Norma cried, but what did Stella know? Norma measures her own life by the change she saw in her face the day their father made the pass. She thinks about seeing the change a lot more than she thinks about the reason for it.
Their mother dying has changed her again. She knew this when she accepted the marijuana cigarette. Why not? she thought, watching Lou inhale and imagining their mother floating up to heaven, unburdened enough and brave enough to float because of having nothing left to be afraid of.
Lou is humming in a distant, off-key way that Norma takes for mourning and that makes her sad. But she also feels as if she is floating, as if she and their mother are holding hands. “I wish,” she says,“we could drive to Disneyland. Right now. Just drive south and west, south and west, ‘til we got there.”
“Let’s hit the road,” Lou says.
Her eyes still closed, Norma smiles.
Lou glances at the back seat and sees that Sandy is asleep. She switches off the radio.
The rain falls softly in grey, bad-television-reception lines. Everything that Lou is looking at is grey and dirty white. Except for their father’s ridiculous green-and-red suit. The typical used-car-salesman’s suit. She remembers him going off to work in that suit and that hat. His confident, military walk to the car. On the lookout for the neighbours’ slip-ups. It’s no compensation, Lou thinks, addressing him, referring to what she figures would be his defence of those grey years: “Nobody can say that Jim Field didn’t own a colourful outfit!”
Norma is asleep now. Snoring. Dead stoned, Lou thinks and is reminded of when the sight of Norma at the end of the street made her want to cry and then made her want to make Norma cry. How could she have been so mean? To Norma, of all people? Look at her asleep there. Her kind, plain face. A saint’s face, Lou thinks, good and kind and unprotected by beauty.
Their mother was good and kind and beautiful. Lou smiles at the thought that she used to get their mother mixed up with the Virgin Mary. Beauty was no protection against people dying on their mother, though. First her own mother died of a stroke, then a few years later her two brothers got killed in the war, and then a few years after that the baby died. If throwing the baby was just speeding up the inevitable, Lou wonders why their mother didn’t throw herself, too. Of course, you could say that she did—she threw her life. And yet she didn’t seem unhappy. Except …
> Lou remembers something. She has a revelation. Her heart begins to pound, and she rummages in her pockets for a cigarette, but she hasn’t got any. She takes the roach out of the ashtray and eats that.
What she has remembered is the morning that she dropped acid, and their mother talking about an urge to be where the baby was when she let him fall. That’s not exactly what she said, but it’s what she must have meant. Because on the night she died the highest place she could get to was where she went.
Ever since swallowing Maternal Instinct at the funeral, Lou has believed that their mother loved the baby with a mother’s blind love. Whether or not their mother threw the baby or dropped him, whether it was an act of craziness or sacrifice, whether or not all these years she has been sorry, it dawns on Lou that sometimes she must have been haunted by the moment at which she was standing at the railing, and there was the thunder of the falls, and her eyes were glued to the water that was on the verge of going over—nothing could stop the water now—and she had that weight in her arms. The moment at which the thing she loved enough to die for, she let die.
“I have to be up high,” she said when she wanted to get up on the roof, when Lou and Norma tied her up with the skipping rope. Lou lets out an astonished laugh at the memory of tying her up. She wipes the windshield with her sleeve, but nothing happens, and she realizes that why she can’t see out is because she’s crying.
God, I’m stoned, she thinks, pressing her palms into her eyes.
The rain is suddenly falling hard again. Lou wonders about their father and leans forward to look out Norma’s window. What is he doing? She sits straighter. What the hell is he doing?
Jesus Christ, he’s climbing the wall!
She covers her mouth with a hand that smells of marijuana. God! He’s got over! She pulls on her door handle. It’s stuck. “Come on,” she mutters, bumping the door with her shoulder.
Falling Angels Page 20
