“And you.” His voice croaked, embarrassing him.
She started the car. “Do you want a ride somewhere?”
He opened the door. “How long—” he stumbled, finding his nerve. “How long has this been going on?”
She smiled at him. “I met your father in the library, over a year ago. David—?”
“Yes?”
“It won’t help to tell your mother. Really, it will only hurt.”
“Listen, one thing. Did he ever talk to you about Florida?”
She had a merry look. “Oh heavens, we’re always talking about the ocean! Isn’t there some place you’d like to see?” She pulled away.
He ran toward home, his heart banging in his chest. Damn! he thought, as he arrived at his door. What the hell is her name?”
He was afraid the woman would tell his father that he had approached her, and either his father would attack him—maybe even physically—or David’s effrontery would somehow precipitate a decision, an action, which might be worse. If you made someone choose sides, there was always the possibility you would be sorry. But Saul said nothing, a week went by, it was clear the woman had not told him.
David seldom saw his father. Since Joyce Ellen had moved back in the house, Saul had withdrawn, or disappeared, avoiding the company of his swollen daughter. David had anticipated scenes in which Saul railed at his daughter for her stupidity, her fecundity, while Joyce Ellen snuffled and lowed like a farm animal. But Saul was absorbed and indifferent, less quarrelsome than ever. There were small exchanges, skirmishes that revealed a thread of his contempt, but he had moved beyond this bothersome household, David now knew. He floated in some intoxication brought on by talk and sex and fresh dreams. He was easier to live with. He bought a second television and installed it in his bedroom, where he sometimes took his supper and did not come out again. He seemed to be drinking less often, though when he did drink, he did not stop until he was stuporous. Many nights he simply left the house without a word, coming back within minutes of his wife. He seldom took the car, for which David was grateful, but confused. Where could you go in Basin, carless, especially a grown man? After David met the woman, it occurred to him that she must live nearby, within walking distance. There was a newer apartment complex half a dozen blocks away. David drove by slowly a couple of times, thinking that a new apartment would be a nice change from an old house. One night, coming home from rehearsal, he drove around and around, looking for her car, a white Studebaker. He thought he saw it in one of the parking spaces, but someone drove into a nearby slot and David drove away. He had noticed nothing about the car’s interior. There would be no way to confirm that it was hers. And what would it matter? He already knew it was.
He wanted to talk to his mother. He wanted to warn her. He had the idea that if he could say the right thing, Marge could do the right thing, and this threat, embodied in a younger woman (embodied, indeed, very attractively), could be brushed away. But there was no right thing to say. And it was hard to find a moment alone with his mother. Joyce Ellen was like a big sausage, lying about the house, sleeping much of the time her mother was gone, waiting for her mother’s company, and when Marge was home David was in school. On Sunday, when everyone’s time off overlapped, they crowded one another in the small house. David went off to play tennis or to spend time at Leland’s. He seldom spoke to his sister, though he pitied her, and wished her life were different, arranged in a way that would please her and please their mother and take up, somehow, less space.
He managed to catch his mother for a few moments one Monday evening before supper. Saul was in his workshop. Joyce Ellen was beached on the bottom bunk in her bedroom. Marge was seated at the kitchen table, looking through the baby section of a Sears catalog. David sat down across from her. There was no good way to say what he had in mind. Instead, he said, “Do you think Kelton will ever come around on this? Won’t he want to see his kid? Is he sending money?” Marge looked up almost dreamily; she had not been paying attention to the catalog pages at all.
“He was adopted, you know,” she told him. “He never knew anything about his mother. He has terrible thoughts about her, an awful woman who did this bad thing, and then gave him away out of shame. He told Joyce Ellen about it. It made her love him, a man with a mysterious past, a lost mother. But it’s a sickness with him, this bitterness. When Joyce Ellen told him she was pregnant, he turned her into his mother. He said it wasn’t his, she would have to give it away.”
“Why, he’s nuts!”
“Oh, precisely. Nuts. We have a lawyer now, but of course Joyce Ellen doesn’t want to be divorced before the baby is born. We are advised to wait, but then it will be settled, he will have to give her something.” She sniffed. “It’s cost me two hundred dollars so far.”
“It’s awful!” David exclaimed, truly sorry for his sister, amazed at this dramatic story, which he would not have thought to invent. He felt almost pleased.
Marge sighed and closed the catalog. “A young girl with a baby. She isn’t going to have an easy time.”
“She should get her diploma,” David said. “She could study now, while she’s waiting. She could work on her equivalency.”
Marge smiled. “She’s very lazy now.”
“Mom? Would it be easier someplace new? If we all moved, she could say she was divorced—she will be divorced—or even that she was widowed. She could say anything she wanted, in a new town.”
“She can’t go away! She’s seventeen!”
“No, I didn’t mean her, you weren’t listening. Us. All of us.”
Marge was perplexed. “Go where, son?”
“Anywhere. California! Galveston, maybe.” He was thinking of the ocean.
Marge laughed mirthlessly. “You can’t move away from your troubles.”
David rushed in with his thesis. “Maybe Dad would be—happier—if—.” It was too hard to say, he had not thought it through. “Maybe it would be better if you started over, in a new place.”
“Such a strange idea.”
“I mean it, Ma! Like plowing under last year’s stubble, planting a new crop—”
His mother set her mouth. “What ideas has he been planting in your head?”
“It’s not like that! It’s my idea. I thought—if you changed your lives—”
Marge got up and took lids off the pots on the stove, peered in, banged them back down. “Nonsense.”
“Think about it.”
She turned and glared at him, a hard look in her eyes. “This is what he married. Right here, this is what.”
“Not what, Ma! Who! You!”
“What,” his mother said again. “This is it.”
Later, with Beth Ann, he remembered the whole conversation. Of course he could not bring it up with Beth; he could not think aloud. He thought: It is what, and not who. He looked at Beth Ann. In Texas, you can work very hard and make a lot of money, if you are smart and lucky and not afraid to be mean, but you can join the world of her family, the world of the Kimbroughs, if you have not been born to it, only one way, and Beth Ann is the way.
He felt a thrilling chill along his spine. It was possible. Something in him, something he did not understand but other people saw, made it possible.
And his dreams changed. He stopped thinking about the city, about little offices looking out on green campus lawns, about his name on the spines of books stacked in the windows of bookstores. He thought of himself in a house with a flagstone entryway and a greenhouse, where he might grow orchids, or bright peppers and cherry tomatoes in February. He thought of himself in suits you had to buy in Dallas, of coming home at night and changing to go out again to dinner with friends. He felt himself catapulted by the surprise of his father’s dreams: a woman who talked like a book, thoughts of life on a coast, things David had not guessed. He was thrown headlong into his own fantasy, and it was not impossible, it was not foolish, it was the first thing that had made sense. Hayden Kimbrough would advise him; he was a man without
a son. Hayden wanted the best for his daughter. Maybe David could rise to that. It was worth a try.
He caught his father one night on the front steps. “Wait up!” he called out. Saul was impatient in his old-fashioned short wool jacket. It was already almost too warm for wool.
“Yes, what is it?” Saul pinched his nose, squinted. “What?”
David had practiced what he would say. Very evenly, in a voice as neutral as he could make it. “What’s her name, Dad?”
Saul’s gaze was thick, like something sticky, heavy with hate. David steeled himself for a blow, his father’s curses, but he had to let him know he knew.
His father gave him a false, condescending smile. “Hope,” he said, and spun on his heel and was away.
29.
“Watch!” Ellis said as they started the last set. It was the finals. They had made it. “Watch!” he said, he always said that. All around them, people were watching them. His father was there, his sister looking like Dumbo’s mother beside him. The Kimbroughs were there. But Ellis meant watch what they do. Watch me. Because in tennis, as in chess, you had to have a plan. You had to be ahead of the other players. You had to think: I’ll do this so he’ll do that, and then wham! he’ll be sorry. But David thought, at that fraction of a moment before Ellis watched the first serve across the net: I have to watch Ellis, he always gives me the cues. I need him.
They were like an instrument, playing together. All the parts fit. Yet there was something different in Ellis’ play this year, a greater aggressiveness, a tendency to take a little more of the credit, with shots that made the crowd go Ahh!, the way they sometimes did for David, who was showier, if he had the right set-up. Ellis was stronger, this year, with a look of joy and determination. He had become ambitious.
David asked the coach, when all the yelling was over, when there had been hugs and handshakes: “Who was watching?” He wanted to know about coaches and scouts. The coach named three schools, disappointingly small. “There’s a lot ahead, still,” he said, catching the expression in David’s eyes. “And it’s not football,” he added, ruefully. David tasted a bitterness in his mouth, which was still gritty with sand. The real tennis was played on club courts, he knew. This high school shit—who was he kidding? There were boys his age headed for the US Open. He was already behind.
But this was what he had.
He found Ellis again and they threw their arms across one another’s shoulders. First there was a shower, clean clothes, then the barbecue at the fairgrounds. Even with the wind and sand, the city would turn out. There were so many winners, in so many events. The locker rooms were full of shouts and moans and congratulations, the aftersounds of competition among the young.
Ellis’ whole family was at the fairgrounds, except his father, who was working. David and Saul met up with them and went through the long lines to get meat and beans and coleslaw on big paper plates. They sat at rough wooden tables and gorged. “Here we go, partner!” David said, slapping Ellis on the arm. He had thought he would feel more exultant.
Then someone came looking for the Whitteys, and suddenly all around them there was a terrible silence, a parting of the crowd, people staring and moving back slowly, giving the Whitteys room. There had been an accident in the oil field. Ellis’ father was at Basin General, it was bad. David said he would take the younger children home, so that Ellis and his mother could go to the hospital, but Mrs. Whittey said no, they would all go. She pulled two young sons close to her hips. “We have to be together,” she said. You could see in her eyes that she knew the worst had happened. The man who came to get her had said, you have to come, it’s bad, but hadn’t he said, on the way, let me through, someone’s been killed? Give me room, I have to find the widow. Couldn’t she tell, by the look on his face, on the faces of the people he had passed on his way to her? Ellis’ father was dead.
David and his parents huddled at the table to read the newspaper account. He could not think when they had been so close. Joyce Ellen, who could have cared nothing for the Whitteys, lay on her bed weeping.
Mr. Whittey had been struck by a drilling tong and his head wedged against a corner of the derrick he was working on. “Listen to this!” David said indignantly. “Listen to the last line of this article: ‘The rig supervisor said the rotary table kicked out of gear and stopped the kelly before much damage was done to the equipment.’”
“What’s a tong? What’s a kelly?” Saul asked drily. His wife gave him a long look. “What do you care?” she asked. “What does anyone care, except whoever owns the equipment?”
The family went to the funeral together. There were three dozen people in the church, most of them kids; anyone who had wanted to go was excused at school. It was a funeral Mass, long and dull and in Latin. They sat a couple of rows behind the Whitteys. Just in front of David was Betty Leyerbach with her mother; both of them cried all through the service. When the Whitteys entered the aisle behind the casket, Ellis looked at Betty in passing, and as David saw Ellis’ face, so full of misery, he clasped his own hands hard, into two white-knuckled fists.
The next weekend “Antigone” was performed. David had not talked to Patsy in almost two weeks, except at rehearsals. He told himself it was because of their parts, the antagonism and tension between Creon and Antigone. When she looked at him, he saw how remote she had become in her resolve, how capable she was of anger and spite and self-punishment, all to defy authority. When he looked at her, when he heard her fiery denunciations, he felt his spine stiffen and his temples pound. How dare she, he thought. How dare she.
He went to the cast party at Mr. Turnbow’s house alone. Beth Ann had gone with her mother to Houston to a baby shower for a cousin. She had not said anything about missing the play. David was shocked; all along he had assumed she was impressed by his leading role in a classic play, but it was obvious that it meant nothing to her. The play was merely something for him to finish up, so he would have time for her when she had time for him. At least his own family was there; his mother took off work on Saturday to come. Afterwards she kissed him and said, “I knew you had it in you.” Saul shook his hand and said, “What are the wages in this line of work, son?” David, hurt, said lightly he had no idea. “Acting is for fun,” he said. “I’m going to be a lawyer.” His father did not comment.
Of everyone, Sissy was the most excited. “I love theatre!” he heard her say over and over at the party. Her eyes were glittery. She never sat down or stood still for long. David asked her how she was getting home; he had his mother’s car. She said Leland was coming for her. “Well, then, I’ll say goodnight,” David said. They were in a corner of the kitchen. Someone had spilled a Coke on the counter and it had run toward the sink, a rivulet dripping over the edge onto the floor. She saw him looking at it. “Yuk,” she said. She looked around. She took a damp towel from the table and wiped up. She rinsed and wrung out the towel, then hung it over the faucet. All the while, he leaned against the refrigerator, watching. She turned around, close to him. “Sissy,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder, leaned toward her, and kissed her mouth. It was a sweet kiss, the kiss of a friend, it was his admiration for her tidiness and generosity, her kinkiness and independence, it was his appreciation for her dating Leland. It was a gift.
“Gee, now I can die happy,” she whispered.
He touched the lobe of her ear with his thumb. It was soft and faintly downy. “You deserve a lot more than that,” he said. He was suffused with a feeling very much like shame.
Ellis did not come to tennis practice. David felt lost. The coach paired him for doubles practice with Burt Lasky. They did not make a good team. David played badly, resenting Burt’s smug competence. The coach slapped David on the back. “This Whittey thing is bad business,” he said.
David felt like throwing up. “I’m going in to shower,” he said.
He went straight to Ellis’ house. His mother was in the kitchen setting biscuits. When David let himself in, she smiled and told him to sit
down for a minute, and she would get coffee. “I don’t want you bothering,” he said. “I just came to see Ellis. I wondered when he’s going to come to practice. I thought it might help if he played.”
Mrs. Whittey wiped her hands slowly on a big white towel, then sat down at the table across from David. “Ellis is what we have now,” she said. “You have to understand. He isn’t thinking about tennis.”
David was embarrassed. “I didn’t mean—”
She patted his hand. “You meant well. I know you love Ellis. But he’s the man of the house now.” She got up and poured them coffee. David put too much sugar in his cup, and gulped the coffee down. “I wish I knew how to help,” he said, pushing the cup toward the middle of the table. “I wish it hadn’t happened.” He felt tears welling, his face burning. Mrs. Whittey leaned over and laid her open hand along his cheek. The cool feel of her flesh comforted him. Her belly pressed into the table’s edge.
Ellis called late that night. “I’m not going back to school. I’m going into the field, just like my dad. I’m starting in the morning.”
“Oh shit, man,” David said. He felt rigid with fear, as if Ellis were calling to him from a pit of quicksand. Don’t go under, he wanted to say. Don’t leave me by myself.
“What else can I do?” Ellis said. “My mother can’t work, with the baby coming.”
“Didn’t they give you anything? Wasn’t it somebody’s fault?”
“His supervisor brought a ham,” Ellis said.
At the country club meet, David lost to Burt Lasky early, a humiliating defeat. Lasky went on to quarterfinals and lost to a kid from a little town with no team sports. David slunk away without speaking to any of the Kimbroughs. He felt that Ellis’ father’s death had brought him bad luck. If there had been a little more time, he told himself. If he had had a little more time to get his game together.
He opened the car door and reached across to lay his racket on the floor. For a moment he held it in his hand, wondering if it was his, it felt so strange to him. He laid it down and drove to Patsy’s.
Walking Dunes Page 22
