by Mary Robison
“Because,” Jack said, “you’re just walking it through. Just saying your lines and walking it all through. My wife is the same way.”
“What way?” Leah said.
“Scared,” Jack said.
“What of?”
Jack fit a piece of meat loaf into his mouth. He said, “I haven’t any idea.”
JACK PLOWED HIS CAR INTO a five-foot cone of dead leaves in front of Leah’s father’s house. Leah’s father, Sweet, grinned widely and banged on the hood of his Lawn-Boy. He was driving snow off his parking spaces with a blade, and hauling a steel utility cart in which Leah’s little sister, Bobby, reclined, smoking a Russian cigarette. “Park it up the street,” Sweet yelled, glowing and glad for company.
Bobby pulled herself from the utility cart and came over to Jack’s car. “You slept on your hair wrong,” she told Leah. She threw down her cigarette. She wet her fingers and crammed a curl behind Leah’s ear.
“Don’t do that,” Leah said.
“Jack!” Bobby said. She leaned in the car window and almost spit her chewing gum. “I just had a birthday. Guess how old I am. I’m twenty-two.”
Sweet climbed down from his tractor. He yelled, “I’m going inside now for dry socks.”
Leah moved Bobby and got out of the car. She brushed a ball of ash from her lap and then she walked up the snow-sopped lawn. “Wet,” she said, touching the lip of the postbox. “The same color Sweet painted his station wagon.”
“The same color he’s painting everything,” Bobby said, chewing. “Including my bicycle. Don’t mess with the mailbox, Leah. Sweet’ll kill you.”
“BUT I’LL TELL YOU WHERE the big money is,” Sweet said, leading Leah into Bobby’s bedroom. Sweet had been trimming baseboards and patching nail pops in the family den, and he was still dressed in working whites, his hands and face flecked with spackle. “Spraying high-rises. Just get a masking pattern cut for you, and a pump, of course, and you can go in there with a gun in each hand and your eyes closed. At fifteen hundred dollars a floor, you figure the numbers.” Sweet stared at the blotter on Bobby’s desk for a minute, then he picked up her wood-burning kit.
“What’re you going to do with that?” Leah said.
“I don’t know,” Sweet said. “Make something.”
They studied Bobby’s closet door, where a collage of photos and cutouts was pushpinned. In one of the pictures, Bobby’s boyfriend, Doug, was poking from an Army tank. There was a clipping about J. Paul Getty’s grandson getting his ear sawed off. Bobby had one of Leah’s sketches tacked up. It was a pen-and-ink on vellum, of a girl balanced tightrope-style on a strand of wire fencing.
Sweet squinted at the sketch and said, “A high school friend of mine knew how to draw. He’s worth a hell of a lot of money now. He’s a sign painter, and he raises Afghan dogs. Which made him rich. One bitch alone gives him thirty-eight pups. At three hundred fifty dollars a dog, you figure it out.”
They had moved into Leah’s room. Sweet leaned on his elbow, which rested between two ceramic birds on the clothes dresser. “I’m proud of this room,” he said. “I tried to keep the walls nice while you were away.”
Bobby came in carrying a shopping bag. She pinched off her rubber boot and emptied water from it into a terrarium that sat in a dying spray of light at the window. “Watch,” she said, as a lump of slush dropped from inside the boot and spattered dirt and moss on the terrarium walls.
She sat on the end of the bed and opened the string handles of her shopping bag. “I bought a puzzle for Doug,” she said. She showed a box, which was still tight in plastic wrap. “It’s Niagara Falls.”
LEAH SAT WITH SWEET, WARMING their knees before the opened gas oven. Sweet turned a wet-looking blue porcelain jug in his hands. “I think your mother wanted you to have this,” he said, “after me.”
“It’s nice,” Leah said.
“It is nice, isn’t it?” Sweet said. “It’s from the war.”
Bobby was bent over the kitchen counter, banging the counter surface with her fist every time the coffeepot perked. She had a transistor radio plug stuffed in one ear and she was shouting a little. She said, “So a friend of Doug’s offers him a hundred dollars for his motorcycle, and Doug’s license is suspended for two more years anyway. Right?” She splashed coffee into a shallow cup and used it to wash down a capsule from a tin-foil wad she kept in her pocket. “But will he take it? No.”
Sweet shifted his position in the folding chair and coughed through his nose. He said, “War of the Worlds is on tonight.”
“I’ve seen it,” Leah said. “Anyway, I’ll be gone. I’m staying at my girlfriend Barbara’s. Remember her?”
“The one that married Jack,” Sweet said. “And didn’t poor Jack get skinny? I thought he was your cousin Caroline at first.”
Leah said, “Jack tells me I’m just walking through life. He says I ought to start changing.”
“Could be,” Sweet said. “How are you supposed to change?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me,” Leah said. “Incidentally, he’s going back to school, he thinks. To Yale, in Connecticut.”
“I know where Yale is,” Sweet said.
Doug appeared at the side door holding a white sack of hamburgers and a bottle of Rock & Rye. “Remember the guy I told you about who was called Grandma?” he said to Bobby.
“The Polish guy,” Bobby said. “About three and a half feet.”
“That’s him,” Doug said. “He got blowed up when they were dropping bottom today. He flew all the way across the foundry and landed in the aluminum furnace.”
Bobby crossed the room on her toes and gave Doug a kiss. “I was telling them how that guy at the Shell station is always expressing his interest in your bike.”
“Forget it, Bobby,” Doug said. He dumped the hamburgers out on the kitchen table. “That bike’s worth fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Then don’t cry to me when it rusts,” Bobby said.
“Listen,” Doug said, putting a pickle slice on his tongue, “I’d give it away before I’d take a hundred dollars.”
AROUND MIDNIGHT, LEAH SAW JACK drop over the chest-high cyclone fence. He crossed the yard, and then she could hear him letting himself into the house, where she and Barbara were in bed. Leah propped herself against the headboard and tried to wake up Barbara.
“Go away,” Barbara said through her pillow.
Jack opened the bedroom door and stepped into the room. His dark hair and eyelashes and his gloves and raincoat were wet, and his glasses had fogged over in the wet wind. He said, “It smells like furniture polish in here.”
Leah said, “Shh. These are rich people.”
“My own rich mother-in-law is lying on the floor in the next room,” Jack said, “with a stack of magazines for a pillow, and a cocktail shaker still floating with ice cubes in her hand.”
“What?” Leah said. “Is she kidding?”
“I forgot to ask,” Jack said. He went to the glass back wall of Barbara’s room. “Whitecaps,” he said, “all over the lake, and the sky’s full of snow.” He came back beside the bed and settled into a beer-colored chair. He took out a thin green cigar and set fire to it. “I liked you better,” he said, holding the burning stick match over his head and squinting at Leah, “when you had hair.”
“You worry me,” she said. Sleep and the cold night were in her voice. “Look at how much you’re sweating.”
Jack waved out the match and picked up a pair of rough wool trousers from the end of the bed. “Who does your tailoring?”
“In Italy,” Leah said. She shook Barbara, who wouldn’t turn over.
“Leah, what a lovely back you’ve got,” Jack said.
She said, “You came to talk to Barbara, I think, so I’ll leave.”
Jack started to cry.
“Damn it,” Barbara said. She got up and walked on the bed, and went naked into the bathroom. Jack threw his cigar after her. Lighted ash showered into the carpet. A drop of sweat
broke on his eyebrow and ran over his chin.
“Because I believe you two should be alone,” Leah said.
“Get him out!” Barbara called over the rush of shower water.
Jack pulled his fingers over his cheekbones. He said, “I can’t concentrate on anything.”
There was noise in the hall. Barbara’s father came in. He had a big head and he was wearing dark, expensive clothing. “What is this?” he said.
Jack said to him, “Let me know when you find out.”
“I wasn’t here,” Barbara’s father said, nervously. “I’ve been at a GOP reception for the Governor. I was a little drunk, having a pretty good time.”
He led Jack from the bedroom. Leah pulled on her wool pants and a tiny sweater of Barbara’s and followed the two men to the lighted library. Barbara’s mother was up, sitting in a swivel rocker. She was wearing dark glasses, holding a highball in one hand and a pink Kleenex in the other.
“Listen, Jack,” Barbara’s father said as he threw his body into a deep armchair. His wing tips didn’t reach the parqueted floor. He drummed his fingernails on a tray that supported a thirty-cup percolator and clean china cups. “I have a lot of stuff to do. Stuff I’m going to hate like hell doing. Why don’t you make some other friends? How about it? Why don’t you give Barbara a little breathing space?”
“I didn’t come to see Barbara,” Jack said. He raised his voice to a shout: “Hey, Barbara, I didn’t come to see you!”
DOUG WAS UP, LABORING OVER his motorcycle, which he had taken apart on some newspapers on the rug in Sweet’s living room. Bobby lay beside him on her stomach. She was drawing on the torn cover of the Niagara puzzle box with a flow pen. “Sweet broke the furnace again,” she said to Leah. “He made it hot.” She stopped drawing and spun the cardboard flap through the air like a disk toy.
Leah found Sweet watching boxers on television. He had his shoulders hunched and his elbows raised off his knees to catch blows. “Number one,” he said when Leah came in. He smacked the sofa cushion for her to sit down. He pressed a tab on the TV remote control. “Look,” he said, nodding at the television. In the late movie, an eye on a snaking tentacle was searching through an apartment complex. “You can have that,” he said, and pointed to a tumbler of liquid on the sofa arm. “Bourbon and branch water on the rocks.”
Leah got onto the sofa beside Sweet and started the drink. During the next commercial Sweet sat forward and snuffed through his nose. “After the war,” he said, “I had a spray-painting job.” He held his hands out as if they were pistols. “Just for weekends, way, way down, one hundred feet in the hulls of ships they were building. You were on a hairline.” He pointed up and looked at the ceiling. “Hanging there.”
Leah looked up, too.
“That was lead paint,” Sweet said. “To stick to steel, it must be lead. You wore a respirator. But I’ll tell you, most new men fell. Because the lead got them. Leave a bucket of lead paint unsealed for eight hours”—he clenched his fist—“it goes rock hard.”
“Did you see men fall?” Leah said.
“I had a physical,” Sweet said, “once every two weeks, and a urine analysis. Some men, after a while, couldn’t even make water. Plip, plip—pure lead. But I got paid for that work. Your mother and I lived in Red Hook, on a man’s front porch. She was all right then, but she was going to have a baby.”
“That was me,” Leah said.
Sweet bagged a foam pillow behind his neck and sat looking at the frostwork on the opened windows. Snow was sailing in, spitting on the heated TV.
“Are you going ice-fishing with me tomorrow?” he said.
“No,” Leah said. She put her fingers in her bangs. “Jack’s coming by. He’s decided to teach me Russian.”
“I wish Jack could teach Bobby and Doug regular everyday English,” Sweet said. “I’ve been sitting here listening to them cuss all night, not believing my ears.” Sweet yawned with his mouth closed and pulled with his fingers at the white hairs on his throat. “Of course, Bobby’s a little girl, really. She’s got plenty of time to change.”
“I guess so,” Leah said. She finished her drink and made a sick face. “What’d you think of what Jack said? That I need to change.”
“You? Oh, you never will. You’re just your mother all over again,” Sweet said. “You don’t know friends from enemies and you’ll never be able to. When I was taking her to the hospital the last time, do you know what she said? She looked around and saw the tracks she’d made in the snow and said, ‘That’s good.’ And I said, ‘What’s good?’ She said, ‘The tracks. They show where I’ve gone.’ And she was right, but not only that: if you ever looked at your mother, you noticed this. You could tell everything she’d been through. You could tell it on her face. Just like yours.”
“Oh, great,” Leah said.
“No, it’s good,” her father said. “At least for your mother and you.”
Grace
BRISK SUSAN WHIPS HER LINEN from the rope,” said Lawrence, as he stood at the window with his fists in the pockets of his silk robe.
“What is it?” said Grace. She sat up in bed and smoothed the green-striped sheet on her stomach.
“I was quoting Swift,” Lawrence said. “I meant it’s clouding up. It’s going to rain.”
Grace knotted the sheet at her sternum and came to the window. She squinted down on the great lawn, where Lawrence’s partner, Victor Clair, was playing croquet in pointed evening shadows. Clair struck a yellow ball and lazily followed its run up a hill.
Lawrence sat in a captain’s chair. He brought a cold pipe from the apron pocket of his robe. “Did you hear we bought a golf course?” he said.
“Clair told me,” Grace said. “It’s so nice.” She sat on her heels at Lawrence’s feet, her cheek against his exposed knee.
After a while, Clair knocked and came into the bedroom. A navy blazer was draped on his shoulders. He was holding the croquet mallet. “Your Melanie has our dinner ready,” he said to Lawrence. “Snow peas, lamb, mint jelly.”
“May I borrow your jacket?” Grace asked, looking up at Clair.
“It’s not mine,” Clair said.
Lawrence chuckled, and used his pipestem to scratch his white mustache.
“I took it from my brother-in-law,” Clair said. “It’s nothing I’d buy. It looks like Captain Kangaroo.”
“Well, I’m cold,” Grace said.
Clair put the mallet stick under his arm and hung the coat on Grace’s back. “It’s not even a nice coat,” he said, sitting on the corner of the bed. “I just like wearing it because it isn’t mine.”
“I was talking to Grace about the golf course,” Lawrence said.
“That’ll be something,” Clair said. He swung the mallet along the floor.
“I hope you’ll name it after me,” Grace said.
“Like Grace Hills, you mean?” Clair said. “Some name with Grace in it.”
“That’s right,” she said.
“You think we’re a pretty good time—don’t you, Grace?” said Lawrence.
“I couldn’t appreciate you more,” Grace said. She dropped her sheet. “Now get going, please, so I can dress for dinner.”
GRACE WANDERED INTO THE ITALIAN rooms of the art museum and found John DeVier stopped before a Mary and Infant Jesus.
“It’s criminal what they did there for a frame,” she said, standing behind him.
DeVier turned, with raised brows. He said, “Hello, Grace. You look run over.”
Grace slid up her sleeve and read her watch. “I’ve been up for twenty hours,” she said, proudly, “playing Scrabble with my friends, drinking coffee. I feel grand.”
They walked about the atrium of the gallery. Grace had a drink from a hooded water fountain.
“How are Lois and your daughter?” she asked DeVier.
“Don’t mention them,” he said. “They’re worse for me to be around than you used to be. I’ve got a new car,” he said. “Did I tell you? A German car,
very fast. Let’s go driving, you and I, and I’ll watch you sleep.”
“I’m not sleepy,” Grace said.
“DID I TELL YOU I have a hotel?” DeVier said. They were in his car, stopped at a crosswalk. “I only have it for a little while. Loews is taking it in July. We could see it if you’d want to. Nobody’s there but the security men and a groundskeeper.” DeVier’s palm bumped the steering wheel and chirped the horn. A startled pedestrian in the crosswalk struggled with a grocery bag, which split and disgorged colored packages of food.
Grace said, “Tell me about your hotel. I would like to go there.”
“Let’s see,” DeVier said. “It’s on the lake, with three hundred and fifty rooms, a ballroom, a coffee bar, two restaurants and pools, three convention halls of varying sizes. It has five hundred beds, and ninety-two union-made rollaways, or had. They’re all sold. Thirty thousand dollars or so worth of stoves, grills, broilers; forty-nine tons of linen, bedding, napkins, and the like, that went for—I forget what. It closed its doors on Labor Day, 1969, two million in debt.”
DeVier pulled the car onto a concrete drive that led into the mouth of a parking garage. He snatched a ticket from the automatic dispenser. “Now tell me where the hell you’ve been the past couple years, Grace. Though I’m afraid to know,” DeVier said.
“I wrote you about it,” she said. “Lawrence and Victor Clair. That’s where I’ve been the whole time. Nowhere else.” She drummed three fingers on the window crank.
“Great,” DeVier said. “You and two jerks.”
“You and your wife,” Grace said softly.
“That’s right,” DeVier said.
He parked on the eighth floor and got out of the car. Grace looked at the heavily muscled triangle of his shoulders, back, and waist.
“You look very fit,” she said.
“It’s paradise,” DeVier said, leaning back in through the driver’s window. “Everything’s going my way. I can bench-press two hundred pounds.” He twisted the dinner ring on a finger of his left hand. “When I think of anything,” he said, “I think of the beach at Cabo San Lucas, and the jungle, when I took you there. If it makes me ordinary, I apologize.”