by Wally Lamb
* * *
At the beginning of summer vacation, Jeanette Nord sent me a letter inviting me to come and stay at her house for a week. She had enclosed a snapshot of her and the kittens, now cats. Ma said she couldn’t understand why I didn’t take the Nords up on their offer. I couldn’t quite understand it, either; I just didn’t want to. I preferred to spend my summer days watching TV or sitting out on the porch reading movie magazines and thick paperback romances with the top of my shorts unsnapped for comfort.
My afternoon ritual included walking down to Connie’s at four o’clock each afternoon for an ice-cream sandwich. I was licking the melting edges off of one when Ma drove her Skylark into the alley, two hours early, and sat slumped in the car. She’d put the roof up. Her blond hair looked wilty.
“What’s the matter?” I called.
“Nothing. I just left early, that’s all. Felt kind of sick.”
She got out of the car and sat down next to me on the porch step.
“Lot of traffic today?”
“The usual.” She pried off her wedgies and began to knead her feet. “I’m not sure I should tell you this,” she said. “Guess who I saw today?”
“I don’t know. Jeanette?”
“Your father.”
The two words felt like a sensitive tooth I’d bitten down hard on, forgotten to favor.
“What’s he doing up here? Why isn’t he in New Jersey?”
“He moved back a month ago. From the sound of things, I guess his little fling didn’t pan out.”
“Is he working for Masicotte again?”
Ma shook her head. “He’s working on some remodeling job out at Newport. Part of a crew or something. I told him, I said, ‘You still have a daughter who might like to see you. You didn’t divorce her, too.’”
“I don’t want to see him! I just want him to leave me alone.”
“Well, still. He hasn’t sent money in over . . . Not that that’s any concern of yours, Dolores . . . What’s new with you?”
“Nothing really.”
“Nothing? All day long?”
If I talked, I might cry. Why should he pay for someone he forgot even existed? “Julie on ‘Guiding Light’ lost her baby,” I finally said.
She sighed and chuckled. “He was so surprised to see me, he dropped his change and had to get out of the car to pick it up.”
“What kind of car does he have?”
“I don’t know. Some gray thing.”
“Old or new?”
“Old. You should have heard him apologize. How do you like that? The shit he gave me all those years and what’s he sorry for? Dropping a couple of quarters.”
* * *
Daddy called the next evening during “Hollywood Palace.” Ma and Iggy were on another date. His voice on the phone sounded tinny and far away. I pictured him flat and small but alive, a talking postage stamp.
“I’m kind of busy,” I told him, trying to keep the shaking out of my voice. “What do you want?”
“Just called to see how it’s going, honey. Can’t a guy call up his daughter? How’s Easterly treating you?”
“Fair,” I said.
“So do you miss me or what?”
My whole body shook. But before I could phrase an answer, he interrupted. “Didn’t even notice I was gone, right? Gee, thanks a lot.” His laugh was fake.
“So I guess your mother has that tollbooth job, huh? She tell you I saw her the other day? Jesus, I almost passed out when I pulled up to that booth. How does she like it?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” I said. “You’d have to ask her.”
He laughed again, as if I’d said something good-natured. Then he coughed and cleared his throat. “Look, you sound kind of peeved at me, Dolores. And I can understand that. Only there’s two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.”
I thought of the way his skin looked as I swam beneath him underwater in our pool. Whitish blue, color of a dead man.
“I have a nice apartment now. In South Kingstown—place called Garden Boulevard. Maybe you could visit some weekend. We could get Chinese food, how about that? Order takeout.”
My vision blurred over with tears.
“How about if I pick you up some Friday night? Make a weekend of it?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
I heard his loss of patience. “Things weren’t all pie and cake for me, either,” he said. “Donna and I called it quits, if that’s the bug up your ass. Don’t be so quick to turn your old man into a bad guy.”
“Daddy? . . .”
“I can appreciate that you wouldn’t take my side in things, not that there’s sides to take. I can understand where you feel a loyalty to your mother, especially after the hospital. But sometime you go try living with a person who . . .”
“Daddy, I have to go now. Honest to God.”
“I’m not going to bad-mouth her the way I’m sure I’ve been bad-mouthed for two years.”
“Really, Daddy.”
“Do you need anything? Because if you need anything, you just say so. Why don’t you let me give you my telephone number? Then when you want to come visit, you can just call me up. All right?”
“All right.”
“You have a pencil?”
“Yes.”
He spoke a jumble of numbers that I let go by. Then Grandma was at my side, her hand around my wrist. “Do you want me to take it?” she whispered. “You want me to talk to him?”
“Your mother’s been getting the money I’ve been sending, right? Did you know I send you something every month?”
After I hung up, Grandma told me not to worry—that if he called again, she’d say I was out. She asked if I wanted to play some more cards.
“Could you just hold me?” I asked.
The request seemed to startle her, but she obliged me. Her small body felt stiff and unnatural. She placed one hand against my back, trying hard to get it right, then the other. I leaned my forehead against her shoulder.
“Don’t cry, now,” she said. “You’re turning out to be a good girl. Stop that crying.” I sobbed and shook against her. Her body wouldn’t relax.
* * *
My mother and Iggy Zito had two more dates before she pronounced him a square and stopped seeing him. When other men called, Ma would leap for the phone. “Hell-ooo,” she’d purr, in a sleepy voice lower than her normal one. Her new dates mostly tooted the horn out front or met her wherever they were going. Daddy called back once more. True to her word, Grandma said I was “over at a playmate’s.”
In mid-July, Mrs. Tingley died of a stroke and Cutie Pie was driven away in a Humane Society truck. Grandma fretted about being forced to rent to beatniks or “cuckoo heads” and wished to Betsy she could afford to just go without the rent income. She had the third-floor apartment repainted and rid of dog stink, then took an ad out in the paper.
Jack and Rita Speight, a dazzling young couple in their mid-twenties, were the very first people to inquire. They reminded Grandma of “the quality of people who used to live on Pierce Street” and moved in on August first. The three of us—Grandma, my mother, and I—fell promptly and hopelessly in love.
5
Rita Speight wore Windsong perfume and blue eyeliner. She was so tiny, she needed a cushion to see over the steering wheel of her green Studebaker. Each morning she drove to Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, where she worked as a pediatrics nurse. “Like a little china doll,” Grandma murmured admiringly, watching Rita’s departure. Grandma’s church friend, Mrs. Mumphy, knew Rita’s aunt. “She had a miscarriage when they were living in Pennsylvania,” Grandma confided to me in a whisper. “Of course, that’s between you and me.”
Jack Speight, tall and blond, was a disc jockey at W-EAS Radio. He hosted a talk show called “Potpourri,” told elephant jokes, and played the kind of farty music my mother listened to on her car radio. He drove a maroon MG with a license plate that said JK SP-8. He was twenty-five, thre
e years younger than Rita.
We were in the middle of a heat wave the afternoon they moved their belongings up the side stairs. I positioned myself on the front porch with sunglasses and a paperback and checked out each exotic item as it passed by: stereo cabinet, Hawaiian tiki lamps, beanbag chair, matching love seats upholstered in orange fur. Jack took off his T-shirt midway through the job. I checked him out, too.
From inside, Grandma watched the Speights’ caravan of possessions. She trusted neither sports cars nor “hairy furniture,” but within the week of their arrival, Jack won her over by climbing a borrowed aluminum ladder to the dizzying height of the sloped roof and fastening a loose antenna wire that had been plaguing our TV reception with snow. From the ground below, Grandma and Ma and I watched him, our hands visors at our foreheads. Grandma handed my mother a ten-dollar bill as Jack descended the rungs. “Make him take this, Bernice,” she whispered.
Ma held the money up to him as he reached the ground. “Here,” she said. “This is for you. We insist.”
“No, really. I was glad to do it,” he said. “Thanks anyway.”
A laughing kind of dance followed, ending with Ma holding him by the hip and stuffing the money into his pants pocket while Grandma and I smiled hard and watched intently.
* * *
Grandma’s blank second-floor ceilings were now a theater of sound, and I became a devoted student of the Speights’ routines. They ate supper every night at six-thirty, talked while they did the dishes, then watched TV. Their bedroom was exactly above my bedroom and I woke up at six A.M. to their alarm clock. By quarter of seven, Rita would hurry down the steps in her crisp white uniform, and her Studebaker would rattle out of the alley. Jack stayed in bed until ten of eight. I could make out his whistling as he dressed.
Grandma cashed in six S&H green-stamp books for a portable radio and put it up on top of the refrigerator. We both abandoned our afternoon soap operas for “Potpourri.” On Tuesdays, her day off, my mother listened, too.
“He plays such nice music,” Ma said one lunchtime as she stood frying us grilled-cheese sandwiches and humming along with the McGuire Sisters. “He and I have the exact same taste in music.”
“That’s how much you know,” I said. “He has to play that corny stuff. He likes rock’n’roll.”
Grandma snorted in disbelief.
“He does. Yesterday when he got home from work, he played a Rolling Stones album. He was dancing all by himself. It shook my whole bedroom.”
Ma said he was probably doing jumping jacks. Grandma supposed that if he was dancing at all, she was sure it was with his wife.
“Okay, fine, don’t believe me,” I said. “You two love him so much, I just thought you might be interested.”
* * *
The Speights went to the same Sunday mass as us and by the second week Monsignor had nabbed Jack to pass the collection basket. He winked at me and jingled the change as it passed by my face. My heart pounded almost audibly as I watched him work the pews. One time I caught Ma following his movements, too, lip-synching to the offertory prayer rather than praying it. When she saw me watching her, she jerked her eyes back to her missal and cleared her throat, prayed louder.
Out in the parking lot one Sunday after the services, Rita appeared at the Skylark’s side window and tapped against the glass with her wedding ring. Ma braked hard; Grandma practically slid off the front seat.
“Hi, you guys,” Rita said. “Jackie and I were wondering if you’d like to come upstairs to dinner tonight. Nothing fancy—just some tacos and my world-famous chili con carne.”
I imagined Grandma lunging again at the description of the menu, but not even the threat of spicy foreign food could keep her away. “Why, that sounds lovely,” she said. “We’ll be there, won’t we, girls?”
Girls, I chuckled to myself. As if we were the Marvellettes.
Shortly before we left to go upstairs that evening, Ma made Grandma promise that she’d keep still if she saw anything she didn’t like.
“You’re telling me how to behave properly, Bernice?” Grandma said. “If I were you, I’d just button up that second blouse button and worry about myself.”
We clomped up the back steps, my mother carrying a bottle of wine, Grandma armed with a package of Mylanta tablets. Rita answered the door wearing a red velvet sombrero with pom-poms. “Olé!” she said. Ma laughed louder than necessary and pushed the wine at her.
I was in love with what they’d done to the apartment. A bookcase made out of cinder blocks and plain boards held dozens of paperback romances. The bottom shelf was bowed down with the weight of what looked like over a hundred record albums. I sank into one of the beanbag chairs and gazed up at the saddest, most striking painting I’d ever seen: a Negro girl on black velvet. She was clutching a rag doll to her chest. One glistening tear—so fat and wet it looked real—sat stopped on her cheek.
Grandma declined Jack’s offer to relax on the fur recliner and requested a straight-backed kitchen chair instead. She sat down, one hand on each knee, and I saw the painting catch her eye as well. She stared at it for some time. “Say, that’s quite a picture,” she said finally to Jack. “And I’m not overly fond of the coloreds.”
Both of the Speights doted lavishly on Grandma, in just the ways she liked. Rita inquired about Grandma’s blood pressure and knew exactly the pill she was taking for it. When we were called to the kitchen, Rita reached into the oven with a polka-dot mitt and extracted a little homemade chicken pot pie. “I thought you might prefer something a little milder, Mrs. Holland,” she said. Grandma’s initials had been poked into the crust with fork holes.
“Well, you are just the cleverest thing,” Grandma cooed, patting Rita’s hand. “It’s so pretty, I hate to eat it.”
Ma plunked herself right down between the Speights. I got stuck sitting next to Grandma.
Jack kept refilling my mother’s glass with the wine she’d brought. With each sip, she acted more and more like Marilyn Monroe. Grandma was so taken with her special meal, she seemed hardly to notice Ma’s behavior. She even reluctantly accepted a glass of wine herself, and went so far as to wet her lips at the rim.
Passing the chili bowl, Jack suddenly turned his attention to me. “So what does Dolores Del Rio do with herself all summer long?” he asked.
“Who’s she?” I said.
“You don’t know Dolores Del Rio? Latin beauty of the silver screen?”
“I’ll tell you what she does with herself all day,” Grandma butted in. “She sits in the kitchen and listens to a certain so-and-so on the radio. You have yourself quite an admirer.”
I could have stomped her foot. “Me?” I snapped. “You should talk!”
“Dolores Del Rio is exactly who she’s named after,” Ma said. “When I was a teenager, I saw Journey into Fear about fifty times.”
“You know what ‘Dolores’ means?” Jack asked me.
I shrugged.
“It’s Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?”
The four of them were watching me. I looked down at the table and the room went silent. Suddenly, I was sad—overwhelmed with sadness. “Who’s sad?” I said.
Ma began telling a complicated joke she’d heard at work. Then she stopped and whooped, throwing her head back so far, I could see her fillings. “Oh, no,” she said. “I forgot the punch line!”
Jack teased her and she reached over and poked him. He poked her back. Rita laughed and passed the seconds.
The Mexican food tasted fiery and delicious. I wiped the sweat off my top lip and watched Jack drink his wine. “You know what?” I said. “That stuff is the exact same color as your car.” It had come out spontaneously; I felt immediately stupid.
Jack grinned at me. “Mrs. Holland,” he said, “this descendant of yours is a genius. Now if only she’d quit swiping money out of the church collection basket.”
Caught off her guard, Grandma was momentarily startled before she realized the joke. T
hen her eyes shimmered behind her gold-rimmed glasses and she reached over and slapped Jack timidly on the arm. “You keep telling fibs and I’ll give you a licking,” she chuckled.
Jack grabbed the red sombrero and placed it squarely on Grandma’s small head. It sank down, bending one of her ears forward.
I held my breath, waiting for Grandma to bring the evening to an abrupt halt. Instead, amazingly, the pom-poms began to rock with her laughter. It was the first time I’d ever seen her risk foolishness.
* * *
That night I lay in bed with the evening’s images spinning before me. I felt energized, as if electrical current were passing through me. Sleep was impossible, I told myself, then dozed, lulled by all the answers to the question of why I was so sad.
I awoke in stages, puzzled by an unfamiliar squeaking sound. Half-asleep, I imagined it was Jeanette Nord’s kittens, loose somehow in my room. Then I realized—suddenly and totally—what it was: the scritching and creaking of bedsprings up over my head. Low, murmuring voices followed—nothing like their doing-the-dishes talking. “Please” was the only word—Rita’s—that I could make out.
I knew I had no business listening—that I should be blocking them out with sober thoughts: Jesus dying on the cross, bullets ripping through President Kennedy’s head, ink needles stuck into Roberta’s customers. But my thigh muscles shook and my mind raced wonderfully with what, during a girls-only assembly, Sister Margaret Frances had called “impure thoughts.” I kept imagining them up there, half-naked and feverish—like lovers on the covers of paperbacks. I drew my pillow slowly toward me, kissing it first with my mouth closed and then with it open. The tip of my tongue poked out, touching the dry fuzzy cloth. “Please,” I whispered. “Please.”
* * *
The following morning I slept through their preparations for work. At ten-thirty I dragged myself out of bed and downstairs, ate two bowls of Cocoa Puffs, and thumbed haphazardly through The Nun’s Story, the book Rita had lent me the night before.