“They’re intended to be funny,” William said, unable to keep silent.
“Funny? I’m not sure about funny,” the principal said. “The one I read is about the sixties and it’s very disturbing. I found it very disturbing indeed.”
Sam was a selective reader, seldom of the books he was assigned to read. He had, for example, read everything he could about the sixties. These were the years in which his parents had finished college and married and gone out into the world. The years Sam had been born. Although in memory Lucy and James McWilliams were as clear as if he had seen them yesterday, living somewhere beyond time, always young, he felt a need, an instinct not an intellectual decision, to place them on a time line, to fix them in history.
There were specific things he knew. He knew that his father, after his first year at the Rhode Island School of Design, had become an American citizen because he felt more American than British and wanted to vote for John Kennedy for President. He knew that his mother wore a locket with a picture of her cousin Noah, who had died in Vietnam when he was nineteen years old. Sam remembered the locket attached to a dark, silvery bracelet that she always wore, the fuzzy picture of Noah with a cap of curly hair and a big smile spreading to the corners of the photograph. He knew James and Lucy had been against America’s involvement in Vietnam, so they must have spoken about it in front of him.
He thought of his parents as James and Lucy, names he had used for them since they had died, altering his relationship to them, giving him some sense of control, of separation from their permanent absence. But when he thought about them as his mother and father, when the pure rush of feeling took over their imagined lives, insinuating their immortal presence into his heart, they were Plum and Jaggers, always Plum and Jaggers in his mind.
Plum & Jaggers began the winter after Sam left the Cage, the evening he was suspended from high school, when he realized that he wouldn’t be going to college. Number 98 in a class of 100, driven only to imagining plays, which he wrote in his math notebook, on paper napkins, on the inside cover of The History of Modern Europe, even on the envelopes of his parents’ letters home. He had no interest in academics, no patience for studying at someone else’s recommendation, just a general restlessness, a sense that in some part of his machinery, stone was being ground to sand.
After dinner, they were sitting in the office playing Monopoly, four chairs around the table, Oliver’s turn to roll the dice, when Sam stood and pulled up two more chairs.
The gesture seemed to come from nowhere, no conscious thought Sam had, no spatial rearrangement in his mind, just a couple of empty chairs in the office that he pulled up to the table.
“Are those for Plum and Jaggers?” Oliver had asked.
Charlotte looked up from the Monopoly board.
“Plum and Jaggers?”
“They are,” Sam said, suddenly drunk with excitement. “These are the chairs for Plum and Jaggers.”
“They’re just empty chairs,” Julia said. “What does that mean?”
“It means the people who sit in them are not at home,” Sam said.
Plum & Jaggers came to Sam at that moment out of whole cloth. It was a story of a family of children whose parents are never at home, who have by accident and necessity become their own parents, isolated by the missing generation from tradition and history and long-term memory, from a context in which to live their lives.
It is always evening in the Plum & Jaggers story, dinner hour for the McWilliams family gathered around the dining-room table, underneath which is a rug and, underneath the rug, the floor and, underneath the floor, a bomb.
“Why?” Julia asked when Sam explained the setting for the story. “Will it ever explode?”
Sam shrugged. “It could.”
“But will it?” Julia asked.
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “That’s the point of the story.”
CHAPTER SIX
JUST AFTER 7 p.m. on July 18, 1985, a month following Sam’s graduation from Shady Hill Friends School, a bomb exploded on the Red Line train at the Cleveland Park metro station. Five people were injured. One was a three-year-old boy.
Sam heard about it on the radio. He and Charlotte were in the office behind their house when the all-music station interrupted with news of the bomb and a warning not to take the Red Line.
“We’re going,” Sam said.
Charlotte looked up from a play she was reading.
“Something could happen to us,” she said.
“I don’t think so,” Sam said.
They were going to go, of course. Charlotte knew that. They always did what Sam had in mind they should do. But this hot summer evening, coming on dusk, heavy with the smell of roses and honeysuckle slipping through the open garage window, she didn’t want to see the scene of a bombing.
“On your feet,” Sam said, turning off the fan.
Charlotte put a marker in The Glass Menagerie and closed The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams.
In the last year, she had become an actress—“gifted,” according to her drama teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School; “inspired” described her roles as Emily in Our Town and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet.
Sam had taught her. Evenings after dinner when Noli thought they were in the office doing their homework, they played Plum & Jaggers. Charlotte had the lead.
Acting had come upon her unexpectedly, like a sign on the Road to Damascus, a religious transformation. She discovered that she could leave the quiet, responsible young woman called Charlotte McWilliams in her bedroom reading Anna Karenina and become somebody else whose life she never had to lead. Somebody new. She was giddy with the pleasure of it. Her grades fell. Her dreamy afternoons, lying on her stomach with a book, were over. Her longing for a love affair slipped away.
“We’ll have a company, Charlotte,” Sam had said to her one early spring afternoon in his senior year. “The four of us on the road. Plum & Jaggers Family Comedy Troupe.”
Sam told his grandparents they were going to the eight o’clock show at the Uptown Theatre.
“I hate to lie to them,” Charlotte said, settling into the front seat of their grandfather’s old yellow Mercury, which Sam drove now, Julia and Oliver in the backseat.
“They don’t want to know the truth,” Sam said.
“Anyway, we might go to the movies,” Oliver said.
“I don’t want to go to the movies,” Julia said sullenly. “I want to see the explosion.”
“That’s what we’re doing,” Sam said.
At twelve, Julia was rail-thin, with tiny breasts, a small bottom the size of a muskmelon, and long, wavy black hair with a purple stripe. She had put a full-length mirror on the door in the office of the house on Morrison Street so she could gauge her sullen expressions.
After Sam went to live at the Episcopal Home for Juvenile Delinquents, she did not return to school. She had read a piece in The Washington Post about a girl in second grade who was home-schooled and had persuaded Noli to take on the job of teaching her. She was happy working with Noli, spending her afternoons with Oliver and Charlotte and Sam, keeping up with the culture of her peers by poring over teenage magazines at People’s Drugstore, memorizing the vocabulary, the look, the shifting hip, the expression of endless boredom. The magazines gave her a sense of how to speak and act without actually experiencing the growing cynicism of adolescence; she was wise-seeming but innocent, with a fetching honesty that burst forth with whatever was on her mind.
But recently during the slow afternoons, she had become restless, longing for friends, for younger conversation, and she began to think of going to Alice Deal Junior High for seventh grade, just to try it out.
In preparation, she had dyed her hair and bought dangly silver earrings at the 5&10 and changed her wardrobe from jeans to skimpy silky dresses through which her tiny, perfectly formed nipples were clearly vi
sible.
During the summer, Julia didn’t wear shoes. On the day of the explosion in the Cleveland Park metro, she had painted her toenails black with small white flowers and drawn a vermilion snake with purple dots slithering up her leg.
She sat in the backseat examining the snake, which was peeling.
“I suppose no one died in the explosion, right, Sam?” she asked.
“Right, Julia,” Sam said. “No one died.”
“Bummer.”
It was almost dark by the time they arrived at the fire station beside the entrance to the Cleveland Park metro. Traffic was rerouted, and the crowd filled the street between Newark and Porter Streets. There was nothing to see. The injured had been taken to Washington Hospital Center by ambulance. The report that Sam overheard from a group of people in their early twenties who had been on the subway when the bomb exploded was that no one was badly hurt. But another group, farther on, described the child who had been taken to Children’s Hospital, and the lacerations they had seen didn’t sound minor.
“It was an anti-gay statement,” a young man next to Sam said. “That’s what I think it was.”
“You think?” a woman asked. “Or do you have some valid reason for saying so?”
The young man shrugged. “I have a reason,” he said. “There was a gay march to the Capitol today.”
“I know,” the woman said. “I read the paper, too.”
“So that’s what I think,” the young man said. “You don’t just throw a bomb for the heck of it. Right? You’ve got to have a reason.”
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “I don’t throw bombs.”
Sam moved through the crowd, crossing over to the other side of the avenue with Charlotte and Oliver, holding Julia’s wrist. Julia, head flung back, was pretending that Sam, with his splendid bones and black hair, was her boyfriend, not her brother, that she was adult and people saw them as a couple.
Everywhere they went, the crowd was arguing, their voices loud and strident, talking about the bomb, the injuries, the reasons for the explosion.
“Let’s go home,” Charlotte said.
“I thought we were going to the movies,” Oliver said. “That’s what I want to do.”
“I think it’s too late for the next show,” Sam said, flinging his arm over Oliver’s shoulder.
“So let’s go home,” Charlotte said, an edge of hysteria in her voice. She didn’t like large crowds. She was afraid there would be another explosion.
They wandered past the stores on the west side of the avenue, mostly open stores, people milling inside, beyond the doors, which were open in the heat of summer.
Just as Sam was beginning to think that Charlotte was right, they should get out of the middle of this crowd, they walked past Gallagher’s Pub and Oliver said he wanted a Coke and the man at the door said it was okay for them to come in even though they were underage. It was open-mike night, and everyone was welcome.
At the front of the place on a little stage elevated just above the tables was a young girl about Charlotte’s age in a tiny flowered dress and a yellow straw hat singing “Carolina Moon” in a thin soprano voice.
“Look at her,” Sam said, slipping into a chair at one of the round tables in the back of Gallagher’s. He took Charlotte’s hand. “I want to do one of our routines,” he said. “We’re at least that good.”
“We’re not doing one of our routines,” Oliver said. “We don’t even know these people.”
“These people are drunk. They won’t be able to tell the difference,” Sam said.
“Count me out,” Oliver said. At fourteen he resisted every suggestion, even from Sam.
Charlotte was watching the young comedian who had just come onstage, a small, floppy-eared man with a series of jokes that he found so amusing himself it was difficult to hear the punch line.
“I’ll do it,” Julia said. “I’d like to do the one about Marigold.”
“Because you have the main part,” Oliver said.
“Because it’s my favorite that Sam’s written,” Julia said.
“I won’t do it,” Oliver said. “I hope you guys understand that I won’t.”
But Sam was getting up, raising his hand at the waiter.
The waiter pointed his finger at Sam. “The young man in the blue T-shirt,” he shouted. “You’re on.”
“Me?” Sam called.
“You’ve got it,” the waiter said.
Sam moved through the crowded tables to the front of the room, stepping up on the empty stage.
“Ready?” the waiter asked.
Sam nodded, taking the microphone.
“My name is Sam McWilliams,” he began. “And I’m with the world-famous family comedy troupe known as Plum & Jaggers.”
There was a round of applause.
“If someone could help me, I need some props—a table and six chairs.”
A group of people near the stage lifted a table and some chairs onto the stage.
“Now I’d like to introduce my sister Charlotte, who plays the role of my sister Charlotte in this skit.”
Charlotte walked to the stage and took a seat in one of the chairs.
“My brother Oliver will be playing the role of a particularly intelligent German shepherd—Doberman mix, the family dog we call Anarchy,” Sam went on, pulling out a chair for Oliver. “And in this scene my sister Julia plays our cousin Marigold, a young girl who has a reputation as an exhibitionist, recently excused by the juvenile court for the bludgeoning death of her mother, our Aunt Sky Blue or Blue Sky, I forget—her name is mud in our household. The jury concluded Aunt Sky Blue was responsible for her own death because she prevented Marigold from self-actualizing. Thus child abuse, thus Marigold as victim, the failure of the democratic process in late-twentieth-century U.S.A. We all feel terrible for Marigold. Let’s give her a nice round of applause.”
Julia walked to the stage and stood next to one of the tables, smoothing her small silk dress.
“It’s dinnertime. Our parents are not at home. We are sitting—Charlotte and I—at the dinner table eating Cheerios and chocolate marshmallow fudge ice cream with a glass of red wine. We haven’t spoken for a year, and I, for one, have forgotten the reason for our disagreement, only that it was significant.
“I should add one detail. Beneath the floorboards on which the table sits is a small pipe bomb, which should not concern you. So far, in all our performances, it has never exploded.”
Sam and Charlotte began to eat. Anarchy took a chair between them, sitting on all fours, with his chin on the table.
“The empty chairs are where our parents would be were they ever at home for dinner,” Sam says, pretending to take a sip of red wine.
SAM: Anarchy?
(ANARCHY cocks his head.)
SAM: Ask Charlotte where Mom and Dad are tonight.
(ANARCHY barks at CHARLOTTE.)
CHARLOTTE: Tell Sam that Dad’s at one of his twelve-step programs. Overeaters Anonymous or Overspenders, I forget.
SAM: Great.
CHARLOTTE: And Mom’s having dinner with the children at the homeless shelter, and then she’s spending the night with Al, who’s here from L.A.
SAM: Tell Charlotte I said “Great” again.
(ANARCHY barks at CHARLOTTE.)
CHARLOTTE: What does Sam think I am? Deaf?
(Enter MARIGOLD.)
MARIGOLD: I guess you guys heard what happened. (She moves next to CHARLOTTE, speaking directly in her face.)
MARIGOLD: So, did you hear or not?
CHARLOTTE: We heard.
MARIGOLD: Did you hear about the abuse charge?
CHARLOTTE: I’m up to my ears in abuse, Marigold. Everybody in my class is abused. It’s hard to keep up.
MARIGOLD (Striking a pose, one hip up, face pouty): So I’ll t
ell you what really happened.
(CHARLOTTE and SAM, patting ANARCHY on the head, continue to eat.)
MARIGOLD: This is what I told the judge. I come into the house on Friday afternoon, May 11, and Sky Blue is watching her guru on a video. I ask her can I go to the Moon Spew concert with Marco and she says no and I ask why and she says we don’t have the money and I say, Bullshit, of course we have the money, and she says no, I can’t, on principle, and I say I will, and she calls me a name which I can’t even repeat in front of the judge because he could be religious, and so I hit her quite a few times with the VCR and she dies. That’s the story. I suppose you two knew the whole thing.
CHARLOTTE: I did.
SAM: So did I.
MARIGOLD: So?
The mood in the hot, crowded room at Gallagher’s was uncomfortably silent. The audience was no longer laughing, and Sam looked over at Charlotte.
“Keep going,” he whispered.
“They hate it,” Charlotte said.
Sam folded his arms across his chest.
SAM (To MARIGOLD, forgetting what line was supposed to come next in the script): So?
Marigold (Out of character): I don’t know. I forget.
Oliver got off his chair and crawled under the table, his back to the audience, which was beginning to laugh.
“Let’s get out of here,” Charlotte said.
And then, in a gesture too swift to anticipate, Julia took hold of the back of her short silk dress, pulled it over her head, dropped it on the floor, and she was standing onstage in nothing but a pair of tiny bikini panties covered with red balloons.
“What were you thinking, Julia?” Sam asked, driving up Morrison Street.
“She thought she was doing the right thing,” Oliver said. “She thought she was helping us out of a tough spot.”
“No one was laughing,” Julia said in a voice thin with tears. “And I made them laugh.”
“Plum & Jaggers is not a strip show, Julia,” Sam said. “It’s high comedy.”
“The show isn’t funny.” Oliver looked over at Charlotte, raising his hands in a gesture of resignation.
Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 8
