Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  “Of course.” How many times had they talked about the exact hour? And she told her mother she was not the only wife who left her husband to his own devices in the summer. Other wives settled in the Hamptons or on the Vineyard or the Cape and husbands came on weekends; they had many nights alone in the city. Once they went to Fire Island and William laughed that on Friday evenings wives and children went to meet what was called “the daddy boat.”

  On the porch, William had not shaved; there was his faint darkened stubble, his familiarity as Dad and husband. She had smelled coffee on his breath when she stood on tiptoe reaching beyond his chin, where the top of her head came, and their mouths brushed in goodbye. He had grabbed Rick in a crunch that made the boy cry out and look sheepish. Somewhere in the distance an inconsiderate lawn mower began; the smell of grass would reach them if they stayed long enough. When would they get off with her mother here? Mrs. Wynn parked and came along the roadside, her eyes downcast, embarrassed by her arrival. Bile rose to Laurel’s throat. She wanted to drive away, saying, If I wait another minute, I won’t make it with just one night on the road. “I’m not going to keep you,” her mother called, stepping along carefully through damp grass. “I couldn’t sleep.” Her long nails grasping the rolled-down window seemed those of a swimmer holding on to something for dear life. Her eyes briefly met Laurel’s. Her sleeplessness was because of Mr. Woodsum, she meant. Laurel looked away.

  William called, “Hello, old dear. I’ll be right back. Got to go indoors and poo.”

  “Dad.” Rick laughed. “Tell the neighborhood.”

  “Here’s a little money, Rick.”

  “Gran, thanks.” He reached across the front seat. “It’ll help with my twenty-two.”

  “Bah. You don’t need another gun.”

  “He only has a BB gun, Mother.”

  “Bah. He doesn’t need that. He’s not supposed to shoot it in Soundport. That’s why he’s always in trouble with the police.”

  “That’s why he likes Mississippi,” Laurel said. “To be able to use the gun.”

  If she says Bah again, I’ll kill her, she thought. “Bah, he doesn’t need to shoot anything,” Mrs. Wynn said. She meant to remind them she grew up in Mississippi with a passel of brothers clomping mud into the house and bringing in bloody, stinky birds and animals she had to see plucked and gutted and had to smell cooking and finally had to eat. “I brought William my little extra fan. He says the apartment he subleases is so hot every summer.”

  “He’s taking the air conditioner out of my office,” Laurel said.

  “Going to be comfortable.” Mrs. Wynn tried to smile and make eye contact again, but Laurel refused. If her mother attempted to malign William, she would champion him, because it had always been her nature to take up for any underdog.

  Mrs. Wynn looked away toward the neighborhood. “A lot of long days while you’re gone. Sundays are the worst.”

  “Why don’t you start going to church, Mother?”

  “Why? What for?” Her eyes lost their sadness.

  Where had her mother’s feisty nature come from, so unlike her own? Laurel wondered. From having so many siblings? She could remind her mother she could wear her new clothes: people did not particularly go to church for Christian reasons. Between piousness and Christianity there is a fine line, it’s been said.

  “If I go to church, all they’d do would be to start asking me for money, or to be on some committee. They’re always building something.” Her mother’s voice wavered. “Maybe you won’t stay so long.”

  “How can I not stay, Mother? The house is rented.”

  “Do you have Jewish tenants again?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good. They’re the best. Always leave the house better-looking than the way you left it.”

  “Thanks,” Laurel said.

  “I’m not going to any church. When I was little, I had to go to church twice every Sunday and to prayer meeting on Wednesday nights. And then every night for two weeks during protracted meeting.”

  “You mean revival?”

  “Whatever they call it now.”

  Amused, Laurel would not laugh. But she watched her mother walk away with a different sense, noting her short legs, her round ankles, which gave her a peasant girl’s look despite her fashionable clothes.

  “The house looks fine, Mom.”

  Laurel smiled, but the little barb had hurt, with a familiar feeling. As she edged the car slowly backward, fir trees beyond the house receded and grew more slim. Well, it was her fault all that work had to be done, cleaning out drawers and closets for other people to use, fluffing down cobwebs she had paid no attention to before. The slim New Yorker who came to rent the house had brought a child who seemed a minor appendage to her life as an executive. How did women acquire such acumen? How did they know how to command offices and make important decisions? Being a writer and staying at home, she was considered by other mothers not to be doing anything. They were running around Soundport on committees. It was therefore logical that she should chauffeur the neighborhood kids. But she would like to be out in the world, jumping into cabs, calling out directions, having a limousine wait for her outside Four Seasons, be recognized in Bendel’s and have little time to shop. She longed to have an engagement calendar scribbled over with appointments and to have to make a lunch date three months in advance. As the tenant inspected the house, Buff came up cordially to sniff the skirt of her daughter, who shrieked in terror. “Don’t touch the doggie,” the mother cried. “The doggie has germs.” “Oh, get away,” Laurel told Buff, meaning the opposite might be true. The poor city child would never love a dog or have the love of one in return. Once again, she had felt how out of her element she had always been in her exposure to New York.

  Mrs. Wynn looked back. “Poor Buff,” she said. She got in a parting shot in a warring game Laurel never played. Just when she could feel sympathy for her mother, Mrs. Wynn ruined the moment; often that was the case.

  “Does Buff mind being in the car two days?” Rick said.

  “No.”

  William on the porch again drew his chin into a long face and wiped at an imaginary tear. “See you soon, pal.”

  “’Bye, Dad.” Rick hung out the window.

  Laurel, smiling through the windshield, thought, No sad face for me and no long goodbye.

  Rick shouted, “Gran, fly down and drive back home with Mom.”

  “I’m not going to Mississippi in August! I lived to get out of that heat, period. Send me a postcard from wherever you’re going out west.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Laurel said.

  Rick settled inside. “I knew she wouldn’t come,” he said.

  He rose onto his knees and looked back until the house no longer filled the rearview mirror and they were around the corner from two familiar people, her mother and her husband. And suddenly, it seemed odd to Laurel that they were there together while she drove away leaving them.

  On the front seat lay a piece of paper covered with what she called William’s “squinchy” writing; it was hardly decipherable. His listing exit numbers and highways for her was the only way she got through New Jersey and Pennsylvania each year. She could not understand maps. In her worse times, she thought his handwriting showed a mean, suspicious, small nature, but Rick’s handwriting had turned into a carbon copy. So she changed her mind, deciding that in handwriting analysis probably opposites were true: small writing meant largesse of mind, a warm, loving, and sympathetic nature. She smiled at Rick, playing with a Slinky train at his age, folding the wire in and out like an accordion.

  Later, as they traveled into New Jersey and passed green exit signs for Princeton, she wondered about Edward and if he still lived there. She fumbled for William’s paper because soon she needed the exit for Pennsylvania. “Mom, why can’t you remember how to go year after year?”

  “I’m stupid. Once we get to Virginia I’m OK. It’s the same highway nearly all the way after that.” All the way ho
me, she thought, home free. In Virginia, the countryside began to feel, look, and smell Southern. She slowed again for a toll. “Do you realize it costs almost eight dollars to get from Soundport to Philadelphia? In the South there are no toll roads.”

  “What am I supposed to say about that this year?”

  “Jesus, God!”

  “What, Mom?” The Slinky train fell from Rick’s hands.

  “I missed the basket. Help me. Help me find the right change.”

  “I thought you’d had a heart attack. Get out and get that money.” But Rick grabbed the purse she held out and found coins.

  “I couldn’t get out.” Laurel breathed slowly again, driving on. “The sign says not to.”

  He repeated, “I thought you’d had a heart attack.” The Slinky train lay in his hands. “Dad says your whole generation grew up afraid of authority.”

  “Oh, be quiet till I get out of this traffic.” She rose in the seat while cars flowed around her, gaining in speed and spreading in all directions; if she was not in the far lane in time for the next exit, she’d wind up in Atlantic City or someplace worse. The sound of a car horn bleating like a lamb in the line of cars that waited while she fumbled at the toll booth came back: another dumb female, William would have said.

  “They’re all out to get you, Mom,” Rick said.

  “All right, Dad.” She smiled again at his mimicry. Not until they flew down a ramp like a roller-coaster ride did she stop praying: God, William, somebody help me.

  Rick looked at her curiously. “Why are you always so afraid?”

  “I held everybody up. They won’t love me.”

  “So afraid,” he said, like a whisper. “Dad says you do so many things great. Why don’t you have any confidence?”

  “Because of the past Dad spoke about.”

  “Dad saves every rubber band off the Sunday paper, and you have a drawer full of candle stubs. You both save every teensy bit of aluminum foil. He says that’s because you both grew up during the Depression.”

  “It marked our lives. My father yelled so about bills, I dreaded having new clothes. If we weren’t already poor, I thought we were going to get poor. Gran shopped for dresses in bargain basements when she could afford not to. But my father never let up about money.” Gran, Laurel thought: everything was not easy.

  “You and Dad are the best parents of anybody I know. I’m glad I didn’t grow up like either one of you. I wish I could have known my grandfather, Pappy.”

  “I wish so too. It was unfair he died when you were four months old. I’d always wanted to have a boy for him. What he had craved was ‘a tough little nut.’ It was a terrible disappointment when I was a girl.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because a black woman who was Gran’s best friend’s maid told me. She was there when I was born: Sudie. If I knew where to find her, I’d peel me a niggerhead.”

  “Mom?”

  “You know I’m kidding. That’s the kind of thing I grew up hearing: Ah’m goin’ peel me a niggerhead: phonetic. Boys used to go coon-conking, or said they did. I don’t believe any of them really drove around Delton throwing eggs at Negroes. Back then, blacks couldn’t have done anything about it. What a turnaround. They used to be terrified of us, and now we’re scared of them.” Justice was a word she believed in.

  “Why’d that maid tell you?”

  “I guess she didn’t assume it would always hurt. I wanted to have a boy for Dad too. Men want sons.”

  What was she to say if Rick ever asked why he was an only child? She wasn’t certain why; after a time, another baby just never came. Perhaps he thought he already knew enough. When William brought home flowers for their tenth anniversary, Rick said, “If you’ve been married ten years today, how come I’m—?” And then he hushed; his eyes had a light that lasted, closed. Later, she and William dissolved into one another’s arms. “Whew,” he had said. “Well, that’s over, and a lot sooner than I’d have expected.” They had both been impressed at how quickly things had dawned on Rick. But what had it meant to him to know his mother was knocked up when his parents married?

  Laurel said, “What are you smiling about?”

  “I was thinking of Dad at home in Pappy’s old robe.”

  “You can inherit it.”

  “That robe sucks. And it’s all worn.”

  “Apparently, Pappy thought it was too fancy. Dad and I gave it to him. After he died, my mother said he never took it out of the box.” Why be told that? Why were people so unsparing?

  “I’d chuck it out.”

  “You’re a spoiled Soundport kid.”

  “Am I?”

  “No. Don’t worry. And your parents aren’t rich.”

  “I’m glad,” Rick said. “I know kids who’re already talking about what kind of car they want in high school.”

  “You can use mine. I’m always home.”

  Rick gave her a loving pinch without hurting. “You’re a good mother. You’re always under my thumb.”

  “I know it. How come I do everything my squirt of a kid tells me?”

  “And the most famous mother in the neighborhood. How old was I then?”

  “Seven.”

  She had to repeat the story exactly: how when she won a large monetary award for her first novel, she was written up in the Soundport paper. One day Rick said, “You’re famous in our neighborhood. Did you know that?”

  Thinking he had overheard parents talking of her literary achievement, she’d said modestly, “No. Why?”

  “When we play touch football in the backyard you bring out lemonade,” Rick said.

  Pretending now to be an interviewer, using her writing name, he asked, “Which way had you rather be famous, Miss Wynn?”

  “For writing or for lemonade? I’ll choose lemonade. I think that’s what life’s really about.”

  On the next morning, they passed Knoxville and wound through gray morning haze in the Smokies over a circuitous two-lane mountain highway. Truck drivers suggestively tooted diesel horns if she passed them—they somehow felt that seeing a single female on the road gave them the right. Then she was saying, “I can’t believe you’ve done this, Rick.” He had held his Slinky train out the window, it unwound, and now it was wrapped somewhere underneath the car. “You’re too old to be playing with a Slinky train.”

  He was frightened; something serious might be wrong with the car. Laurel controlled her temper; she had always thought herself too irritable and as a mother wanted to change her ways, though to change her spots seemed impossible. Her parents always made such large issues out of the smallest happenings, and she did not want Rick to have that past. Whatever she had done wrong seemed to them beyond belief. “I swear,” they would say in turn, with a finality that included the past, the present, and the future.

  “I just don’t know what to do about the car,” Laurel said.

  “Well, Laurel.” Rick drew down his chin and deepened his voice into his father’s. “I’d back carefully. If there’s a problem, I’m sure Rick will run to that garage and see about a tow truck.” Distantly, they saw a dilapidated cedar structure and a typical country store with two gas pumps in front.

  “Good thinking.” Backing along the shoulder of the road, Laurel was proud of being able to go in a straight line. She equated this ability to being her father’s daughter, as she equated her tenacity on the road to him and her ability to make the long trip alone, too. Sometimes she worried about having what seemed too much male strength; for instance, she had never shed a tear in front of William.

  Laurel parked in cinders before the grocery. The landscape beyond it seemed to beat and pulsate with a lonely silence. There was nothing but emptiness and yellow spurts of stinkweed sticking up for miles. Buff waited on the porch, looking through a screen door with cotton wads stuck to it, hopefully warding off flies.

  She nudged Rick. “You ask.”

  He held up Buff’s plastic dish. “Is there a place I can get my dog some water?”


  A woman sat on a stool, her hair skinned back so tightly, her eyes looked Chinese. She had the vacuous, blue-eyed look of country people who seldom see anyone and have no news. Nearby an old man sat in a rocker spitting tobacco juice into a can labeled Bartlett Pears, which brimmed full. Yuck, Laurel thought. “There’s a bathroom back yonder I hate for you to see.” Rick followed the woman’s directions, carrying the bowl ahead as if soliciting.

  This was not really her countryside here, and yet she felt a sense of coming close to it; here it was possible to stand without air-conditioning and not be soaked in perspiration, the air was not so heavy. In the rackety cedar building beyond, a man stood humped over welding, sending blue and green sparks into the air. Laurel explained about the car. “Bubba could he’p you if he has a mind to,” the old man said, spitting.

  Rick came back, the bowl slurping water to the floor. “Hey, Mom,” he said. “Fireworks. Can I get some?”

  “You’ve got money.”

  “That boy don’t want to use his’n.” The woman laughed.

  Laurel tried to whisper. “Get them at Loma’s. I like to buy as much as possible from her.”

  “Last year she didn’t have anything good. They’re getting stricter in Mississippi. How about at least five bucks’ worth? Remember last year I doubled my money selling firecrackers back in Soundport?”

  “I’m not bailing you out of jail for selling illegal contraband. Five bucks? Use your money.”

  “It’s for the gun.” He adopted a younger kid’s whining: “Pleee-se, Mom.”

  “Oh, here,” she said.

  “I’ll use my own quarter for this paper.”

  “What do you want a newspaper for?”

  “It’s got an article about Mickey Mantle.”

  “Mickey Man-till. Where’d you get that accent?” She wondered what his accent was. He’d grown up hearing southwest Tennessee mixed with Beacon Hill Boston and Connecticut suburbia. And what was that? “We have to ask that man if he’ll help us.”

  “I’ll be picking out fireworks.”

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “You can go alone, Mom.”