by Mary Robison
“It was for Chris’s winning the lottery,” Cleveland said. “Anyway. Where we did go was to Virginia’s condominium.”
“Yeah?” Maureen said.
“So that’s where we went, and since you’re both supposed to be adults, that’s what we did.”
“Oo la la,” Howdy said. “Virginia, I must say!”
Maureen waited a couple of beats, and said, “That’s the most pathetic, most irresponsible thing I’ve ever heard of. How could you behave like that, and what an asinine idea for you to tell me and Howdy. You didn’t tell us because we’re adults. You told us because you wanted to brag. It was completely wrong for you to tell us. Jesus God,” Maureen said. “It was wrong for you to tell us because Howdy and I know this whole romance is a fake. You don’t love this Virginia person and she certainly doesn’t love you. She was pie-eyed from the whiskey sours probably. Or she was lonely, and deservedly so. It’s bad enough when people have indiscriminate sex, but at your age it’s disgusting. You don’t care for that absurd woman. Can you tell us you care about her one iota?”
“Maureen,” Howdy said, uneasily.
“Let her talk,” Cleveland said.
“You’re pitiful,” Maureen said.
Howdy got down on his floor bed. He stared at the television screen.
Cleveland stood with aching slowness and stacked his plate and bowl on the shelf behind the couch.
Maureen stared at her bandaged toe.
“All right,” Cleveland said, and then he walked out of the room.
Howdy and Maureen watched the Charlie Chan movie until it switched to a new one called Home Before Dark.
“Oh, this is good,” Maureen said, tearing at her thumbnail with her teeth.
Howdy stood up and straightened the legs of his jump suit.
“Man, oh, man,” he said before he left for his place.
2
Charity Way was the country club’s road. It started at the club’s swimming pool, ran along and eventually bisected the golf course. A mile in, at the head of the Cleveland drive, were evergreen shrubs and a stand of birch trees. The lazy driveway ran off at a right angle to the face of the Cleveland house—a masonry and stone affair, a sort of rambling chateau with a slate roof and chimney pots. At a bent elbow in the drive was a copse of planting that surrounded an Italian bronze nymph. The girl stood in perpetual surprise, improbably balanced on the ball of a slender foot. Her lips were parted and her large eyes were rolled back to look forever over her shoulder.
The drive split; the left fork ended in a shallow court in front of the new garage. The right meandered through straight poplars, then turned back on itself past the old garage and servants’ quarters. Above was Howdy’s place. The front was an array of louvered doors that gave onto a balcony with a tulip garden. Inside was a fully equipped kitchen and dining annex, hardwood floors scattered with Indian rugs and rush mats, walls painted a light stone color. The living area had a new striped sofa. A junk sculpture of Howdy’s hung on the north wall, auto parts welded into a roughly square shape. Also on the wall were several enormous canvases, all bad, all signed “Sarah, 78.” The room had redwood shelving where a library of theater-related books was braced: plays, criticism, drama reviews. In a corner stood a plaster woman wearing a black corset and garters. There were nine or ten plants set about in pots and baskets.
Stephanie lay naked on her stomach on Howdy’s bed under a clean flannel sheet. The floor-length pleated curtains were drawn open beside her, and the little paved area behind the garage was shadowy and blue in the patchy moonlight.
Howdy strolled into the bedroom and then went out again to put on a record, Mahler. Stephanie sat up and pulled at her frazzled hair, getting it to crowd her skinny face. Howdy came back, braying along with the record and toting two glasses of brandy. His drinking glasses, like Violet’s, had cartoon characters etched on their sides—Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck.
“I didn’t mean for you to wait up, Steph, after you worked so hard. Good God in heaven, I’m nervous about the play. Do you realize it’s the night after tomorrow? No, wait, that can’t be. Yes! It’s the night after tomorrow.”
“I slept since five o’clock,” Stephanie said. She yawned mightily, raising her arms in the air, watching Howdy as he watched her.
He put one of the glasses between her meager breasts. “You’re just like a boy when you yawn.”
“I done myself, twice, waiting for you,” she said. “I was bored, I guess.” She wrinkled her puffy eyes at him.
“I’m glad, honey, because I’m all in tonight. Man, you should’ve heard my sister. She went nuts. She practically destroyed my dad.”
Stephanie took the glass and sniffed it and handed it back. “No, thank you,” she said.
Howdy drank both brandies quickly, then got out of his jump suit and shoes and under the sheet with her.
“Am I working tomorrow?”
“Hell, no,” Howdy said. “I can’t have my fiancée mowing the lawn! Pretty soon, my family’ll even be able to know you’re staying here some nights. I’m old enough, and it’s time Dad knew it.”
“I need the money,” Stephanie said.
“Don’t worry about money. Worry about my play.”
“Worry about this,” she said, reaching between his legs.
“No dice,” he said. “What I really want to do is go in the living room and go over my script awhile. You can cue me.”
3
The main house had been built in the twenties by a newspaper publisher. Lola’s bedroom was on the first floor just to the west of the elaborate blue brass-fitted front doors.
Lola sat on her bed and pulled a white wool sock on over her foot. It was still dark, though nearly dawn. A soft gust of rain whispered on her window screens.
“Rumors,” she said. She went to her bureau and, without checking in the round mirror on the stand there, fitted a shell comb in her hair. She hefted a school text, Personnel: Standard Management Techniques. She took the book with her out through the foyer and into the family den. There were low gunshots and a smattering of yelps from the television. Maureen was lying awake in the complicated arrangement of sheets and blankets, her chin propped on a fringed pillow.
She sat up to hunt for a cigarette. “I haven’t slept all night, I swear.”
Lola paid no attention. “I’ve got to concentrate on the books, but no one here will let me alone. The school said if they let me back in I’d have to do well. Being on academic probation means you do well or forget about it. It’s expected you don’t just do average. But who cares? Do you care, with your messiness? Dropping things, always dropping things the minute you’re done with them.”
“Where’s your other sock?” Maureen said, blinking. With her pointed knuckle she shut down the television.
Lola moved toward the kitchen. “Violet?” she yelled. “Violet, you come in here right now!”
Maureen curled her toes and arched her back in a yawn that popped some bones.
“Violet!” Lola yelled.
From the end of the long central corridor, far back in the house, Violet said, “What’s wrong? What did I do?”
Lola came back into the den long enough to turn on the overhead light and scream for Violet. The child came, stumbling, open-mouthed, her eyes slivers. Maureen reached her arm out and Violet fell down beside her. “This is funny,” Maureen said. “Lola’s walking and talking in her sleep.”
“Why did she want me?” Violet said.
“She doesn’t know what she wants,” Maureen said. “But I don’t think we’re supposed to wake her up.”
“She’s not asleep.”
“Yeah, she is,” Maureen said.
“Poor Violet,” Lola said. She had the schoolbook under one arm and a casserole pan in her hand. “My father’s going to whip you.”
“Who’s her father?” Violet said, holding on to Maureen. “The one that ate the peppers?”
“Pay no attention. She’s probably dreaming something, and you just happ
ened to fit in,” Maureen said.
Lola began addressing an empty armchair. “Don’t drive so fast. What did you get me for Christmas?” Lola said to the chair.
“Zombie!” Violet whispered.
“Poor child. Poor everybody,” Lola said. She turned around and went back through the foyer to her bedroom. Violet followed on her tiptoes. From the doorway, she watched as Lola crawled carefully back under the covers with the book and the pan still in her hands.
4
Violet rotated the channel selector, clicking past varieties of electronic snow. She spun back to a station with two men insulting one another.
“Lie still now and turn that way down,” Maureen said. With Violet beside her, she focused on one of the front windows. Out in the yard, a dogwood tree was materializing from the ground mist. One of the men on the TV show was saying, “Our primary concern is not matching funds, but the interdependent children. What the mayor does with the budget interests us as citizens, but not as administrators of a relief project.”
“You call it a relief project?” the other man said.
Maureen went in and out of sleep until a phrase of violin music caused her to open her eyes. The den was full of sun. On the TV a Japanese girl in a business suit was playing Bach. Her pretty, flat face was tipped sideways over her instrument. A hank of black hair glinted on her cheekbone. “Go back where you came from,” Maureen said.
She looked around, and saw that Violet was gone.
She slid open the glass door in the back wall of the den. On the brick veranda sat her father in a wrought-iron chair at a wrought-iron table. He was in a splash of light that came through the roof of spaced wooden beams and was strained through the webs of ivy. He wore work clothes, his faded chinos and a rumpled blue shirt. He poured from a pitcher of orange juice and wiped his hand dry on his trousers.
“My God, I’m sorry,” Maureen said. She took a seat on the bricks. “I honestly swear I didn’t mean what I said, whatever I said.”
“I’m not made of glass,” Cleveland said. “A kid like you can’t even chip me with a hammer.”
“I’m really sorry,” Maureen said.
Cleveland sipped his orange juice. He watched her carefully. “Ginny’s coming for lunch,” he said.
“Good, good. I want to make up with her. I feel guilty about her too.”
“She’s not your business,” Cleveland said.
“I know that. I really do,” Maureen said. “Hey, where’s Vi?”
Cleveland folded an arm across his chest and scratched the outside of his elbow. “Down in her play yard, I think. Lola gave her breakfast.”
“Already? What time is it?”
“Going on ten,” Cleveland said.
“That’s hard to believe,” Maureen said.
“Don’t believe it!” Howdy came in yelling. “It’s really ten after nine. Daddy, you always lie and make it an hour ahead of time.” He joined them on the veranda. He had a cereal bowl of creamed oatmeal and a mug of tea. He looked tousled and pale in his spattered jump suit. He hadn’t shaved yet or combed his hair. “He’s just trying to make you feel lazy and guilty, Mo.”
“She is lazy and guilty,” Cleveland said.
“You just do that time stuff to make everybody feel bad. You always used to do it to Mom.” Howdy spooned up his cereal, pausing only to stomp a wasp that, wounded mortally, stayed stuck to his shoe. When his oatmeal was gone, he swallowed his tea, and filled up the mug with orange juice.
“You don’t want any of that,” Cleveland said. “I accidentally spilled gasoline in it.”
Howdy passed the cup under his nose. “Screwdrivers! No wonder you look so happy.”
“Remember your stomach, Dad,” Maureen said.
“Drinking before noon. You know what that means?” Howdy said. “First sign of dipsomania. That’s what it means.”
“I’m scared to death,” Cleveland said.
5
Maureen followed Violet’s trail past the toolshed and through a thicket of young birches that screened the back side of the house from the road. Violet’s yard was a sodded peninsula of land between the deepest part of the ravine and Charity Way. She had swings there, pipe scaffolding for climbing, a rusted merry-go-round horse on a massive coil of spring. Violet was in the horse’s saddle, holding on to the hemp reins and rocking wildly. Behind her was a dilapidated badminton net and, out of the shade on ruined grass, an empty inflatable pool.
Maureen’s bare feet brushed the wet lawn. The sun, already hot, was picking out each blade of grass, every sprig of weed and clover. An S-shape—a muddy black slash—moved by her foot. She saw an eye with a tiny sun reflected in its dead center. She screamed.
“You okay, Mom?” Violet said.
Maureen sprinted for the jungle gym and clambered aboard. “I saw a snake.”
“Howdy says they won’t hurt you. Was it black?”
“Yeah, I know it won’t hurt me,” Maureen said. From far down the ravine, she heard the beating noise of a helicopter.
On the other side of the little chasm, across the road, someone cut a golf club, socked a ball, yelled, “Oh, Christ, I don’t believe it!”
Violet rocked the horse, driving its nose so far forward it nearly touched the ground, then she yanked back so that she faced the sky.
“You’ll break your spine,” Maureen said.
“Watch!” Violet said, and on a forward thrust she pushed out of the iron stirrups and scrambled in the air—a floppy doll in a checkered playsuit. She landed heavily on her side.
Maureen dropped over the top rail of the jungle gym, hurrying to extract herself from the maze of pipes. But Violet was instantly on her feet and running for the swings.
6
As the day wore on, Maureen and Violet strapped on bikini bathing suits and spent almost an hour blowing up Violet’s swimming pool. They screwed a garden hose to a spigot in the laundry room, and together they wove the length of hose through shrubs and around patio furniture and got the nozzle to reach the pool.
Violet was supine in the few inches of cool water. Maureen lay with her head propped on a softened volleyball. “This is most pleasant,” Maureen said.
It was airless where they were, the heat popping and ticking chaotically with bugs.
“Last night, that was so weird,” Violet said.
“You mean Lola?”
“Can I be the one that tells her?” Violet said.
“Sure. I don’t care,” Maureen said.
“I know where she is. I saw her in that red scarf at the window of Grandma’s—I mean, Grandpa’s—piano room.”
“Cripes, you’re afraid to say Grandma?”
“I am not.”
“You are too. I can tell.”
They were quiet awhile. Violet drifted her fingers to and fro in the water.
“I’m not mad at you,” Maureen said at last. “Of course, you’re terrified to use the name Grandma around here. I practically am. But that piano was strictly your grandma’s property. Can you think of anyone else who plays? Not counting Uncle Howdy because that’s not playing. I wish I had a recording of your grandmother. She could sing so splendidly. Now spit that out, Violet. Gad!”
Violet had been sitting up paddling the water with a plastic Frisbee. She had let the Frisbee fill and drunk from it. She was staring back at her mother, her cheeks ballooned.
“Spit it out!” Maureen said.
Violet swallowed.
“Ooh, yeck, Violet. Why would you do that? Don’t you know people’s feet have been in this water?” Maureen snatched the Frisbee and sent it out into the grass under the swings.
“Mine are clean,” Violet said, showing her feet, the skin puckered and fish-belly white.
“Yeah, where do you think the dirt went?” Maureen said.
Violet got out of the pool, flexed her knees, squeezed her hair into wet pigtails, creased her nose at the sun, and marched haughtily in place a dozen beats. Then she threw herself onto the ground
on her stomach. “Tell me what else about Grandma?”
“I will in a second,” Maureen said. “First I want to finish with this other, immediate thing. Never ever do that again. There are countless diseases in this water. They’re lying in wait—invisible to us—in germs.” She got cross-legged on the ground before Violet, who was smiling drunkenly from tickling her nostrils with a weed.
“So, as I said, Mother’s singing was the thing I really remember. She did it in a startlingly high voice called a soprano. Mine is like below that. A contralto, or whatever. And the whole time she worked around the house, she sang, too. If you heard her, you knew she was cleaning.”
“Wouldn’t Lola clean?” Violet said.
“No, we didn’t have Lola then. My father wouldn’t hire a maid or cook. Though, if the truth were known, we were even richer than we are now. My mother did every scrap of cleaning herself—and the marketing, the meals, the housekeeping, the laundry. Ironed the shirts. See, you don’t know this, but your grandpa was a real hick. Only he happened to make a lot of money out of luck or something, but mainly from his soda-pop business. Mother, on the other hand, was loaded with dough to start with. Her parents had each left her buckets of it when they died. Anyway, so she was just raised a different way than your grandpa was. She never expected to have to scrub out the oven or load stuff for the dump. You employed somebody for that if you were like people from Mother’s family. They were very mild, very gentle people. Like my mom had this tremor—which means her hands shook, just ever so perceptibly—when she poured tea.”
“Aww, Grandma,” Violet said.
Maureen was holding out both hands, making them tremble. “You just want to go, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but you can still tell me about Grandma after we get Lola.”
“No, it’s okay. Forget it,” Maureen said. “I can’t expect you to be interested in someone you’ve only heard horrifying lies about. But that’s what they are, baby—lies. You just remember when your grandpa talks about your grandma, that no matter what he’s saying, he’s making it all up. Everything about drinking or about ranting and raving? That’s all rubbish. If anyone ever drank too much, it was your grandpa. You’ll see when we go up to the house. He’ll be passed out like a big hog, and it’s all from drinking all the time.”
