Tell Me

by Mary Robison

  “Are they crossing you up?” the woman asked. Her voice was rich, from deep in her throat.

  I listened only selectively to the two of them. I heard the phrases “backup crew on the way … new people going to make it tough … kick off a week from tomorrow—no later … if we plan to get out clean, which we do.”

  “I must explain,” the South American said. He got back all of my attention. I was interested in an explanation.

  “Please don’t. I don’t care,” his woman friend said.

  “Only take a second,” said the South American.

  But the cars rattled over bad track and I splashed tea on my newspaper and missed whatever came next.

  A Visit from Mick’s Folks

  Our house was a raised ranch with multiple additions, east of the East Dismal Swamp and west of the Outer Banks—Pea Island, the National Wildlife Refuge, Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk. It was a nice house, a long way from people.

  The twins were watching a PBS production of Francesca da Rimini. I heard one twin say to our bulldog, “Shut up, hound. Here comes the saddest part.”

  My husband, Mick, took the dog out onto our front lawn, recently mowed. I followed. He walked with dragging, heartsick steps.

  Mick’s parents came cruising up the road. They turned onto the snaking line of pavement that was our driveway. I had the Alfa Romeo parked where they wouldn’t see it, behind some prop-rooted mangroves.

  Mick smelled of Canoe and he had on a polo shirt—lemon yellow. He pushed up a shoulder of the shirt, threw an arm to wave hello. “This,” he said through a gritted-teeth smile, “will be the worst day of our lives—I know, I know. But I wanted them to have a whack at seeing the twins.”

  His father heaved himself from their car. Nearly seventy, the man was bullish thick. He wore chinos that were flat in the rump. His face was the hue of pie dough. Mick’s mother fluttered a hand at us. She was already weeping. She was just as big as her husband.

  My High-School Art Teacher

  Mr. Lee’s house was set high on pilings. On the desk in his living room was a Plexiglas box with a collection of fossil casts marked INARTICULATE BRACHIOPODS.

  “Don’t you hate it when there’s both a knock at the door and the phone rings?” Susan said, beside Hallie on the main couch.

  “It never happens. So no,” Hallie said.

  “Does to me,” said Susan.

  The living room had a lot of black lacquered wood and white leather furniture. There were photographs of faces—very intense—blown up to single-bed size. They hung on three of the walls.

  “Aren’t you two impressed with this place? How could you not be?” I asked them.

  “Sure,” Hallie said.

  Mr. Lee said, “The trouble is, you bring in a bucket of Colonel Sanders, the whole effect’s ruined. Next a Sunday newspaper, a bad pair of bedroom slippers. Horrible. Or your cat drops a Hartz Mountain toy.”

  The Palmetto

  The woman in the silk suit had a good vocabulary, I decided. Her deep, dark voice made a kind of music I didn’t have to listen to all the way to appreciate.

  The train smelled sweetly of disinfectant. Our seats were swivel loungers, upholstered in red. There were napkins clipped over the fabric of each seat’s headrest. The windows were red-curtained, and filtered the dying light so it flattered the passengers.

  The sounds kept me awake—the metal door rocking and, from the adjoining club car, splits of champagne being opened and the buzzer for the microwave.

  A few passengers were trying to sing the show tune “Once in a Lifetime,” and they were trying to stand close together despite the slamming and lurching of the train.

  A Visit from Mick’s Folks

  “Are the twins ready for this?” I asked Mick, too late for him to answer. He threw our bulldog a fluorescent ball. The dog came obediently back to Mick with it. The dog’s coat was tawny, brindled.

  Mick’s dad stepped up to pump my hand. I hugged Mick’s mom. “Rough trip, Elise?” I asked her.

  “I just cry,” she said.

  “She cries at the television,” said Mick’s dad. “At bowling shows.”

  Hallie came outdoors and Mick’s dad called, “There you are. Whichever the hell one you are.”

  “Sometimes I forget,” Hallie said with a tired smile. “Mother? I’m biking into Dunphy for a split second.”

  “You’re not!” said Mick.

  “Let her go. She needs some things. She’ll be right back,” I said.

  Hallie spun off on her ten-speed. The bike made the promising ticking noises of time speeded up, of escape.

  “Mickey kid, this lawn’s a sorry thing,” Mick’s dad said.

  Mick despised the name Mickey. He said, “We’re sort of French about that, Dad. We let some of it go on purpose.”

  “I’d love to weed it, deadhead it for about an afternoon.”

  “He talks big, but he would drop right over in this humidity,” Elise said. Mick’s folks were from Michigan, and they did not like our steamy days—my steamy days, my state.

  “Sometime, could you show my parents that painting you did?” Mick asked me.

  “What painting?”

  “The one with the airplane and the Japanese man,” Mick said.

  “I had to burn it,” I said, and acted sad.

  My High-School Art Teacher

  Mr. Lee’s telephone was ringing. He said, “Don’t answer that, under pain of death.” We were headed out back to view his yellow fringed orchids, which were over three feet tall, many of them, and all with spikes of orange flowers.

  We stayed on the deck. Mr. Lee asked me to go to his kitchen. He asked me to bring him soda and a whiskey glass and his whiskey, and he told me where I could find everything.

  “Children,” he was saying to the twins when I returned. He was implying picture frames with his hands for Susan’s and Hallie’s faces. “My glory, you’re good-looking girls!”

  I shook my head at him, yes. I had been waiting to hear that.

  “Our noses are like doorknobs,” Hallie said.

  “I think we’re fat,” Susan said.

  “Fat kids with doorknob noses!” said Mr. Lee.

  “Would you possibly—this is awful—would you maybe have a spare cigarette?” Susan asked him.

  He said, “I don’t smoke. If you do, at your age, you’re an idiot.”

  “Well, I do,” Susan said. “You think your—uh—friend in there would mind if I had one of his menthols?”

  “I think I’d ask him,” Mr. Lee said.

  “I got the habit from studying,” Susan said. “And now I’ve just, you know, got the habit.”

  “Break it,” said Mr. Lee.

  With My Car Parked at Devin’s

  I was thinking it was interesting, and ominous, that the furniture Mick and I had chosen for the raised ranch was expensive, but all of a movable, temporary kind. We had foam flip chairs, lightweight couches without frames, futons instead of beds, many wicker pieces with detachable cushioning. Our shelves and tables could collapse or fold. Things were stackable.

  Mick was answering our telephone, telling Devin, “She’s not here.” Mick said I had gone to Charlotte to negotiate a contract—probably off the top of his head. I owned a gallery over in Raleigh. Our next exhibit of Jim Dine prints was not to be mounted for a week. Our last show was by a local hyperrealist who did gleaming oils of drag-racing cars. Those were just coming down.

  “Devin’s looking for you,” Mick said to me, after he’d hung up the phone.

  “Well, I’m not crazy to talk to him,” I said.

  “Lie away,” Mick said, and laughed.

  The heavy things in the raised ranch were the paintings crowding the walls. There were so many, and some by big names—an Oldenburg cartoon, a Katz oil, a panel by Helen Frankenthaler.

  I said, “Mick, I could lend you twenty thousand, you know. Substantially more, in fact. Painlessly. You could travel. You could set yourself up somewhere pretty nice.
”

  “Me?” Mick said. “You’re the one who’s leaving, baby.”

  “If,” I said.

  “If what? No ifs. My house, you’re out.”

  “If you think you can keep it up,” I said.

  “Don’t judge me by my parents,” Mick said. “I can pull my own oars in this world.”

  Mick either never understood or he never believed how much I liked his parents. Elise was close to loving, whatever that meant anymore. I didn’t remember my own mother. Long, long ago she had died.

  The Palmetto

  The couple ahead of me kept their reading lights on through the night until dawn. I wasn’t disturbed, but almost grateful I was awake for the night ride.

  I saw, by a linesman’s shed, a lot of finely chewed sawdust on the ground. We drove over a gorge on a rickety-seeming trestle. The train was late. The South American man was talking. “Could you please speed it up?” his woman friend asked him.

  “Quantico!” our porter called out.

  My High-School Art Teacher

  Mr. Lee was the nearest thing I had to a best friend, but I wanted to shake him now with all the strength in my arms and scream, “Wake up!”

  “Don’t disturb him. He mustn’t be awakened at this time of day. Please. The living room,” whispered Mr. Lee’s housemate.

  We both stared at the sleeping form in the blue wash of light from the bedside clock radio.

  The housemate was a thin, neat man in a gauze shirt and straw sandals. There were crow’s-feet by his eyes, but he was as soft-haired as a preteen.

  We moved out of the bedroom. “You don’t know. I have to leave town soon!” I said.

  “That may be, but why tell us?” asked the housemate.

  “Because. It’s necessary to say good-bye to someone.”

  “Look,” the housemate said kindly, mildly, in the tones of total understanding. “If it’s come down to Lee, you should just go.”

  A Visit from Mick’s Folks

  Mick’s arms were all chigger-bit. The scent of his cologne seemed so thick now, it renewed my headache.

  “Tell the truth. Are the twins going somewhere?” I asked. I had heard their voices, coming animatedly from upstairs.

  “You’re going somewhere,” Mick said.

  Our bulldog crept under the dining table, where we were. The table was a collapsible kind, on casters. The dog was hiding from the beckonings of Mick’s mom and dad, who were in the next room, pretending ignorance of us and interest in art magazines.

  “Then they’ll come with me, and enroll in schools up North,” I said.

  “They’ll visit you up North. Eventually.”

  Later, before I closed the bedroom door on Mick, he asked, “Why’d you have to take them to Mr. Lee’s? Let alone their meeting Devin.”

  “I figured you’d be hurt. It’s too bad you found out,” I said. “I just couldn’t stop myself from showing them off.” I meant any of them—Hallie, Susan, Mr. Lee, Devin.

  Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

  The faucets in the new place gave the coldest water I ever felt from a tap. And the rooms were appealing shapes—not all square. Bushes of bittersweet grew like mad against the edifice.

  Entertainment most evenings was dancing with Devin to jump versions of old songs. He called me his heart tonight. He used the French word coeur.

  I watched a Richard Burton movie on the tiny Quasar, had a snack of toast and well-chilled beer. There was a street map for here, wonderfully thorough, that I had scheduled to study. Instead, I chatted with my own twin, Fran, over the phone. At first, this was punishing for me. My situation revealed failure in at least two of my biggest roles. But Fran said, “Relax. Modify and revise your plan, is all. You try to be a hundred things, you’re bad at all of them, no?”

  “Time to learn to swim?” I said, and I could hear her smile through her answer: “Probably.” Between us, learning to swim meant not asking others to buoy us up and keep us safe.

  A bronzed reproduction of Degas’s The Spanish Dancer had arrived at last—a nostalgic doll for me. Also delivered was a photo collage that the twins had made. It had pictures of a living crocodile and the bait shops at Nags Head, and some artsy snapshots of dried swamp grass.

  I would sleep on my stomach now, without a pillow, and with no sustained thoughts. I wanted what I wanted. Before bed, I had read stories with I-narrators who could’ve been me.

  22

  The Wellman Twins

  “YOU NEVER LIE TO ME,” Bluey wrote before the nose of his cedar pencil snapped. He shrugged, reread the page. He had meant to come off as someone firm, plain-minded, blunt; someone deliberate. He thought in the past he had too often seemed moony and fragile.

  He was on his hip, on the discreet floor matting. He was comfortable, with his elbow buried in a cushion he had filched from the great couch. He lay near a box speaker—one of six that was wired into the house sound system. The song that raged was “Take Her,” a twenty-minute song with locomotive rhythms, done by an English band called Island of Agathas.

  Bluey thought the music might warm him into his new attitude.

  He kept his writings, his “Letters to Ivy,” in a loose binder that was now so fat you needed two wide rubber bands to keep it square and manageable. There were seventy letters, something in the region of five hundred sheets. He wanted to finish this latest one with a lie. But his pencil was broken and, besides, the lie was so ill-conceived it dissolved in Bluey’s mind even as he was trying to frame it in words: “So I’ll tell you. I’ve met a girl who is lovely, who is a model, who is much older, who is much younger, but wise, and a mermaid in the moonlit breakers.…”

  There was noise at the front door—calling and banging. The family dog left his toy, a cherry-red plastic mouse, and went to answer. Bluey followed, shutting up the Island of Agathas as he passed the turntable.

  He opened one of the double doors to Greer, his twin sister, whose arms were busy with a nylon tote, a cased viola, a bottle of champagne, and a fountain of sweet rocket—flowers that were fitted into a tissue-paper cone. She had knee-thumped the door.

  “At last!” she said, and, “Guess what? Sixty-seven tax-free dollars I made! So there!”

  “Yeah, but you spent it on flowers and wine, right?” Bluey said.

  “Up yours,” Greer said.

  She was a street musician, or had been recently. She played to the lunch crowds in Newport. This was instead of having a real summer job, though neither twin had to work just yet. They were provided for by their mother, who was provided for by the life insurance, the stock portfolio, and the investment planning of her late husband, the twins’ father. He was Wellman of Wellman’s Valve in Kingston, Rhode Island. He had never seen his children. He had died during his wife’s pregnancy.

  The twins were one-month alumni of U.R.I., where they had graduated without honors, but had both been pre-med, and had both been accepted at University of Maine’s medical school.

  “You’re not really wearing all that eyebrow makeup. Tell me I’m seeing things,” Bluey said.

  “Lemme by,” Greer said. “Goddamn it, Deuce, stop!”

  Deuce the retriever was bounding at Greer. Bluey hooked the dog’s choke collar with a finger and took the champagne bottle from his sister with his free hand. He let Greer pass, though he gave her a look of impatience.

  Greer went right, to the kitchen.

  Bluey tapped the dog’s flat head very lightly with the bottle. “You get peaceful, I’m warning,” Bluey said, and then loosed the dog and went Greer’s way.

  •

  She was whistling, already stacking together a sandwich of raw vegetables on protein bread.

  “What do you do, comb your hair with a scissors?” Bluey said. “And what’s with the survival wear?”

  Greer was in a shirt with a camouflage pattern. The shirt had deep pockets and long sleeves that were turned back in big rolls over her delicate arms.

  “Is that sandwich for you? It lo
oks like rodent food. It looks like you’re making it for a gerbil or a ground chuck.”

  Greer said, “You don’t mean a ground chuck. Where’s the clover honey, please? Ground chuck is meat. You mean a woodchuck or a groundhog. Maybe a hedgehog.”

  “I mean it looks too dry for a human being to swallow—and, wow, will Mother do a back flip when she sees your hair.”

  The twins’ mother was having her summer in Hawaii, in a time-share condo she had bought into.

  “Are you listening at all, Greer?”

  “Go be someplace else. Give me my booze,” Greer said.

  Bluey did, but said, “You’re lucky you’re still young. Soon your body won’t be able to metabolize these ungodly amounts of alcohol.”

  “Oh, spare us. I’m allowed to celebrate.”

  Bluey remembered the letter he had been writing and hurried to put it away.

  Deuce was in the parlor, coiled on the center seat of the mammoth couch. “You’re not serious,” Bluey said to him. Deuce beat his tail and ducked his head.

  “Leave him alone, too!” Greer shouted.

  Bluey took his notebook and new pages to his room—what had once been his father’s study and at-home office. The walls were tacked over with blank watercolor paper, which was Bluey’s idea, and the furniture was white-painted cane. Matchstick blinds screened the window light. Bluey propped a side chair under the knob of his lockless door.

  •

  Deuce was allowing his haunches to be used as a pillow for Greer’s head. They were on the sofa—both drunk, Bluey decided.

  “Good. Savor the fruits of your labor. I am jealous, I guess. Not about the money, but of the nerve you must have to stand up and perform in front of an audience. Real people who can react—good or bad—right there to your face. Did you give Deuce some Mumm’s?”

  “Oui,” Greer said.

  “Congratulations on the sixty-seven dollars,” Bluey said.

  “Who’s this different person from an hour ago, Deuce? Do we know this guy?” Greer asked the dog.

  “I like your clothes, too. I like the fatigue pants,” Bluey said.

  Greer did a leg raise. “These pants fought in the D.M.Z.”