Now as Rosie sails in and sees Vera, she stops short, so startled you’d think Vera was the lurking maniac of her own worst dreams. Vera wants to squeeze her, but they don’t even touch.
“How come you’re back early?” says Rosie.
“Long weekend,” says Vera. “Could be really long. Capital The, capital Long, capital Weekend.”
“Earth to spaceship Mom,” says Rosie into her fist. “Testing. Testing.” She likes to tease Vera about being spaced. Vera’s tempted to bring out rent receipts and paid utility bills as proof that she isn’t except she’s afraid of alarming her, of letting her see the thin thread on which it all hangs.
“Bad news,” she says. “I think I’m about to get fired.”
“For what?” Rosie asks, and when Vera tells her, she says, “Are you serious?” It’s not a question but a dismissal. The lawsuit part doesn’t interest her at all, and she considers the synchronicity element just long enough to dismiss that, too. “I’ll bet Solomon told you their names and you forgot. You forget things all the time. Otherwise it’s just impossible.”
Vera wants to ask how someone who spends half her life playing Dungeons and Dragons can take such a hard line about possibility. Often Vera’s eavesdropped on Rosie and her friend Kirsty time-traveling over monster-filled moats into caves with magic doors concealing saviors and villains governed by the forces of Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil.
If they’d had Dungeons and Dragons when Vera was young, she’d have played it to excess while Dave and Norma lectured her about the condition of the serfs and scolded her for dwelling on mythical codes while so many real-life injustices were crying out to be righted. It’s not the best thing to be thinking of when Rosalie says, “I hate to tell you this, but we’re going to Dave and Norma’s for dinner.” Though Rosie loves her grandparents and calls them Gram and Gramp to their faces, she affects their first names and this put-upon attitude for Vera’s benefit.
“I know,” says Vera, though in fact she’d forgotten.
They’ve got some time before they have to leave—Vera should take a shower and change or do something marginally useful like open the phone bill. Instead she finishes a second vodka tonic and lets time pull the afternoon out from under her like a nurse making a bed without disturbing the patient. When Rosie comes in and says, “Ready?” she feels such a rush of pure chemical outrage that she thinks she must have fallen asleep.
Rosie’s long reddish hair is pulled back in a glittery crocheted net she picked up at a rummage sale. Her T-shirt has high, puffy sleeves and she’s taken to standing slightly swaybacked, so that with her long legs and delicate face, she could pass for a young lady of the Florentine court.
“Oh,” says Vera, amazed as she often is by the sheer fact of Rosie’s existence. “You look beautiful.”
Rosie comes close and studies her mother hard for a while and then says, “Don’t you want to wash up? We’ll get there and the first thing Norma will say is how you’re not sleeping.”
Vera washes her face without turning on the light. Careful not to look in the mirror or at the photo of Mount St. Helens or into Dick and Kenny’s shop on the way downstairs, she makes it out onto the street and is passing the community garden when Rosie says, “Would you eat one of those tomatoes?”
“I guess if I was hungry enough,” says Vera.
“Not me,” says Rosie. “Not if I were starving. They’re just reprocessed car exhaust. They eat carbon monoxide all day and at night dogs sneak in and piss on them.” Such talk depresses Vera, makes her think Rosie’s passion for Dungeons and Dragons has less to do with what she wishes for than with what she’s escaping. Once, during the Love Canal incident, Rosie yelled at Vera for picking an apple off the stand and polishing it on her jeans. Suppose the pesticide rubbed into the denim and got her through the wash? Around that same time, Rosie declared herself a vegetarian; she hasn’t touched meat since. And though she talks about not wanting baby lambs and chickies to die for her sake, Vera suspects she’s scared of being poisoned. Vera hates thinking that Rosie’s fears for herself are worse than her fears for Rosie, and closer to reality. Even if Rosie survives the molesters, the childkillers waiting to pounce on little girls wearing Walkmen, what then? Other parents console themselves with memories of crouching under desks for A-bomb drills, but that doesn’t comfort Vera. The fear of something falling from the sky has to be better than thinking it’s hiding in your tomato.
When the train pulls in, Vera takes the middle car to set an example, though from the way Rosie’s eyes snake left to right, right to left, it’s clear she doesn’t have to. Rosie’s not looking for trouble except to avoid it. But as the train rumbles on, rocking them into something approaching tranquillity, Rosie’s eyes lose their wariness and take on a blank, unfocused stare that reminds Vera of Lowell and of how much he loved the subway. One of his favorite movies was a short film about a crazy guy in a truck stop talking a trucker into taking him on a run because the bouncing of the truck would make his brain feel better. Lowell used to say that the subway made his brain feel better; and Rosie and Vera are both enough like him that, after a few stops, theirs feel better, too. Surely, riding with your bare arm against your daughter’s smooth shoulder beats making eyes at good-looking kids while Bigfoot movies run through your head.
After a while Rosie leans over and tears a length of thick white thread from her hem. Vera’s kneejerk reaction is guilt: her daughter’s skirt is unraveling. What kind of mother is she? Rosie winds the string around her hands, an elegant cat’s cradle. The way her fingers slide in and out of the loops seems somehow as medieval as her hairstyle and the tilt of her long, graceful neck. She’s the princess in the tower, weaving her own drawbridge. Turning toward Vera in a kind of slow motion, Rosie holds out her hands. Vera’s two vodka tonics must still be having some effect, for she’s moving more deftly than she ever could sober as she lifts the cat’s cradle from Rosie’s hands onto hers.
Some motions, some sequences of gestures: the hand remembers no matter what. Vera remembers learning to spin cat’s cradles on her grandmother’s back porch while keeping a nervous watch on the Rose of Sharon tree so thick with bees the whole bush buzzed. She remembers her grandmother telling her how King David, on the run from King Saul’s army, hid in a cave where a friendly spider quickly wove its web over the entrance to make the king’s soldiers think no one could have come through.
Vera slides the web onto Rosie’s fingers, then looks up and remembers what she hates about the center cars: the social life. Across the aisle, an elderly woman’s smiling. And though Vera knows it’s a pretty picture, a scene to make you think a Botticelli has come to life and is riding the D train, she wants to tell the old woman: “It’s not like that! This is the closest we’ve been in months! If the subway weren’t throwing us together we’d be at opposite ends of the apartment! In five years she’ll be grown, gone, we won’t even be riding the same train!”
But maybe the old woman knows this, at least the part about Rosie growing up. Perhaps she has grown children of her own, children she never sees. She’s pleasant-looking, white hair, green eyes, a pretty, unlined face, and suddenly Vera wants to cross the aisle and ask her to play cat’s cradle.
Rosie’s emerging from her trance; they’ll be getting off soon. Meanwhile they’re hurtling past the ancient, half-ruined local stops—Beverley and Cortelyou—where you can look up above the track and see the great gingerbread palazzos of Albemarle and Westminster Roads. Just then Vera realizes: the Greens can’t live far from her parents. And it’s this realization that, through some twisted logic even she can’t follow, convinces her to try and contact them. Once the idea’s occurred to her, it’s all she can think of—a possibility she turns over and over as she and Rosalie walk from the subway through the golden summer-evening light, the flower and fresh-cut-grass and diesel smell of the quiet Brooklyn streets.
NORMA ANSWERS THE DOOR, kisses Rosie, holds her cheek out to Vera. Though she’s never used makeu
p, her skin has a powdery feel. In the living room, Dave’s tilted so far back in his lounger that the soles of his scuffs parallel Dan Rather’s face. He grunts when Vera kisses the top of his head. Vera moves on to the hall, where she finds phone and book set in their arched plaster niche like statues of saints in a shrine. She riffles through the G’s, not expecting anything; a cardiologist listing his home number seems unlikely. So when she reads Green, Martin, M.D., res., she feels a slight electrical thrill, a sensation so physical, so nearly sexual, she goes upstairs, takes the hall phone into her old bedroom, and shuts the door.
It is somehow sexual, not unlike traveling to some distant city and calling up an old boyfriend who lives there, even though it would have been nearly as cheap and certainly more comfortable to have called from home. Proximity is the excuse—not much of one, Vera knows—so she dials before she has time to imagine herself saying, Hi, I’m the one who wrote that story, just happened to be in the neighborhood. She holds the phone to her ear and lets it keep ringing, a simple and regular background rhythm that soothes her as she looks around her room.
One disturbing thing about her parents’ house is that it never changes. She’s scared of nostalgia, its seductive hints at oblivion, frightened she’ll fall face down on the pink chenille bedspread till her whole life since high school drops away and turns out never to have happened. At the same time she resents the slightest alteration. Downstairs there’s a tapestry, a folksy bird in a geometrical tree that Dave and Norma brought back from last summer’s course at the Institute at San Miguel; Vera’s caught herself glaring at it as if it were a rival sibling, a newly adopted Mexican child.
Vera can’t walk into her room without thinking of Mount Vernon, Monticello, Dickens’s house, all those relics smelling of lemon polish, carpet dust, and the slightly doggy odor of earnest, rained-on tourists. What’s here? A conch shell pink as a fingernail, a boxed set of Grimm and Andersen illustrated with paintings of Hummel figures lost in the landscapes of Persian miniatures. The shell, those jewellike illustrations—Vera used to stare at them till she felt she’d crossed some invisible line and climbed into them. Now she’s lost that talent, whatever it was. Now all she sees is how much her mother’s thrown out.
Her corkboard, for example. Gone are the tacked-up bits of birthday wrappings, the quotations copied out of books. Vera can’t blame Norma for not wanting to live with ribbon scraps, embarrassing sentiments from Herman Hesse. At least she’s saved the postcards of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, Yeats’s handsome face, the Lartigue of the guy in the inner tube, and—a present from Louise—the Brassai of two lovers in a cafe booth, the laughing woman and her Valentino-haired boyfriend holding her close. Oh, Louise. Who did they think would cup their heads in his hands like that? Washington’s wooden teeth, Jefferson’s dumbwaiter, the blotting paper with the faint mirror image of the first page of Little Dorrit—it’s all the same, the same hollow feeling Vera gets from the photo of her father’s Lincoln Brigade battalion hanging in her parents’ room. In the faded print, the boys kneel, grinning like a high-school football team; some brandish untrustworthy-looking rifles. Dave used to lift Vera up and tell her the names: which ones lived, which ones died.
Then someone answers the phone, and Vera’s so shocked she almost hangs up. A woman’s strained, somewhat out-of-breath hello hints at dozens of reasons why someone might pick up on the two-hundredth ring. She’d just got home. She’d been sleeping. She hadn’t wanted to answer but finally gave in. None of these bodes well for conversation.
Vera takes a deep breath and asks if this is Mrs. Green. Then she introduces herself, confesses to having written the piece for This Week. Her tone of voice makes that a question, too.
“Oh,” says Mrs. Green.
“Is there some time I could come see you?” says Vera. “I’d like to explain…”
“Sure,” she says. “I’d like to hear it.” It’s as simple and as difficult as that. Vera asks how soon she can come and Stephanie Green says she and her family are going away for the weekend. “To get away,” she adds pointedly. “From our own house.”
“I’m sorry,” Vera says.
“Well,” says Mrs. Green. “I should think so.”
“Monday morning?” says Vera.
“Afternoon,” says Mrs. Green. “Around two.”
“See you then!” Vera says, trying her best to sound brave and hopeful and perky. Mrs. Green hangs up.
What a relief to go downstairs where it’s airier, less thickly curtained, where every item of forties spirit-of-the-people decor—the embroidered piano shawl, the frayed Navajo rug, the Mexican tapestry—bespeak thick peasant fingers flying, lives spent shooing pigs and weaving bird-tree rugs in crumbling adobe hovels.
Perhaps it’s that it’s Friday night—Vera finds herself noticing how race and history and the DNA code have crept in around the edges of Dave and Norma’s scientific materialism. How Jewish it all looks! Unfocusing her eyes, she sees the bird-tree as a menorah, the Guatemalan bark painting as a Chagall; two chunky wooden owls recall Kafka’s image of the Torah scrolls: dolls without heads.
Dave sighs and so does the La-Z-Boy Norma gave him at retirement: every workingman’s dream. With his thin, hunched shoulders, thick eyebrows, hooked nose, Dave looks like a condor or an eagle. His eyes are black and bright, and every so often he makes nervous, darting motions with his head. Without giving Dan Rather time to finish his goodnight, he scoots forward and switches to the twenty-four-hour-news channel.
Dave’s been retired from the sporting-goods store for a year and, not counting their two weeks at San Miguel, has done nothing since but watch TV news. This worries Vera, but while Norma agrees that it’s not the best thing, physically speaking, is it any worse than retirees who spend all their time playing golf and chasing young girls? Vera thinks it’s lots worse than chasing young girls. But Norma—who worked thirty years as a high-school guidance counselor—insists it’s a phase he’ll outgrow.
Right now, a young woman is reporting a terrible story out of Arizona. A weird old loner in a trailer court tells the neighbor who’s befriended him that he’s found a lovely widow named Mabel and got married. Mabel’s shy and never goes out, but one day she calls the neighbor and invites her for tea. So the neighbor goes next door and the old guy—dressed up in women’s clothes—buries an ice pick four inches into her skull.
“The things people do,” says Dave. Vera thinks, MOBILE HOME MABEL: A MANIAC’S MASQUERADE, and just at that moment Dave says, “You should write that one up for your paper.”
It’s by no means a casual remark. Dave’s convinced Vera’s wasting her talent, though he’s never said what he thinks her talent is or what better use she might put it to.
“Ice picks in the skull is more Mavis’s department,” says Vera, trying to keep it light.
But Dave’s not so easily appeased. “So, Miss Lois Lane, you’re planning to write Abominable Snowman interviews the rest of your life?”
It occurs to Vera that her life at This Week may have ended as of that afternoon, but this is hardly the context she wants to discuss it in. When Vera was in high school, she and Dave fought constantly. Now they’re like an old married couple, so rooted in compromise they no longer remember who liked the window open and who liked it closed.
She turns back to the news, where now a Russian dissident poet is arriving at Kennedy airport, rejoining his wife after five years in the Gulag. Vera leans forward and studies their kiss as if it’s a clue to something she should know. But mostly what she sees are the backs of reporters’ heads.
Dave points his foot at the reporters, but before he can suggest she join their number, Vera says, “Don’t even think it!” And Norma—attuned, as always, to the first signs of a clinch—runs in to referee. “Vera, sweetheart,” she says. “Come help me.”
Just outside the kitchen, Norma—like a teenager with a younger sister she doesn’t really want to bring to the party—rushes ahead, leaving Vera to stand in the doo
rway and watch Rosie and Norma chop salad vegetables on the butcher block by the window. “What can I do?” Vera says.
“Nothing,” says Norma. “Keep us company.” Company? They don’t even know she’s there.
The warm early-evening light recalls the paintings of Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School, the luminous pastel skies of Vera’s Brooklyn childhood. Actually, it doesn’t seem quite bright enough for that sharp cleaver Rosie’s using. It takes all Vera’s self-control not to ruin the moment by yelling, Turn the light on! Watch your fingers! Though probably Norma and Rosie know instinctively, as she does: if they turn on one less-than-absolutely-necessary light, Dave will come in and shut it off.
There’s a period in Dave’s life he rarely mentions: after Spain he spent two years teaching English in the Soviet Union. Stalin was in power. Vera thinks of purges, of Osip Mandelstam, of wide, bleak skies and crowd scenes from Doctor Zhivago. She’s asked, but the only thing Dave’s ever said is how the shelves in the markets were bare except for huge boxes of US-Army-issue cornflakes, and he said it every Sunday when Norma cooked big breakfasts—waffles, popovers, eggs. The first time Lowell met her parents, she’d brought it up, hoping that Lowell would tell his story about cornflakes airlifted up to the Alaskan tundra and that he and her father might come together over a shared history of breakfast cereal. But Dave just got quiet and later that evening called to ask her not to talk about his trip to the Soviet Union in front of strangers. It was then—and not at dinner, as she’d planned—that Vera told him she and Lowell were already married and she was expecting a child.
Bigfoot Dreams Page 7