by Richard Ford
“Alienation didn’t work out, you see.” Lynette speaks energetically from the kitchen. “That’s what we’re finding out now from the colleges. A lot of people want to get back in the world now, so to speak. And I don’t try to force my religion onto them. I’ll stay on a line as much as eight straight hours with some individual and he won’t be Catholic at all. Course, I have to stay in bed two days after that. We all wear headphones.” Lynette walks into the doorway, cradling a big crockery bowl in her arms like a farm wife. Her smile is the most patient one in the world. But she has the look of a woman who wants to start something. “Some crises don’t bleed out in the open, Vicky hon.”
“Whoop-dee-do,” Vicki says and rolls her eyes.
“Now you’re a writer, right?” Lynette says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, that’s awfully nice too.” Lynette gazes down lovingly into her bowl while she thinks this over. “Do you ever sometimes write religious tracts?”
“No ma’am, I never have. I’m a sportswriter.”
Vicki signals the TV to start again, and sighs. On the screen a tiny dark-skinned man is diving off a high cliff into a narrow inlet of surging white water. “Acapulco,” Vicki mutters.
Lynette is smiling at me now. My answer, whatever it was, has been enough for her, and she just wants to take this chance to look me over.
“Well, Lynette, why don’t you stare at Frank an hour or two,” Vicki nearly shouts and crosses her arms angrily.
“I just want to see him, hon. I like to have one time to see a whole person clearly. Then I know them. It doesn’t hurt a thing. Frank can tell I mean only good, can’t you, Frank?”
“Absolutely.” I smile.
“I’m glad I ain’t livin here,” Vicki snaps.
“That’s why you have a nice place all your own,” Lynette says amiably. “Of course, I’ve never been invited there.” She ambles into the steamy, meaty kitchen, leaving the two of us on the couch alone with the cliff-divers.
“You and me ought to have a talk,” Vicki says sternly, her eyes suddenly red and full of tears. The forced air comes on again and drums us both with a cool mechanical influx. Elvis Presley trots to the door and looks at us. “Get outa here, Elvis Presley,” Vicki says. Elvis Presley turns around and trots into the dining room.
“What about?” I smile hopefully.
“Just a bunch of things.” She wipes her eyes with her fingertips, which requires her to duck her head.
“About you and me?”
“Yes.” She makes her pouty lips go sour. And once again my poor heart drums fast. Who knows why? To save me? I don’t have a liar’s clue to what needs to be said between us, but her mood is a mood with unhappy finality in it.
Why, though, can’t everything—just for today—wait? Wait a beat as the actor says. Just go on without change a bit longer? Why can’t every sweet untranscendent thing we know or think we know go on along a little longer without closure having to rear its practical head? Walter Luckless Luckett could not have been more right about me. I don’t like to think of this or that thing ending, or even changing. Death, the old streamliner, is not my friend, nor will he ever be.
Though I can’t put off whatever this is, and maybe I don’t even want to. She is a demon after changes today, her whole person exuding transition. Only there’s no real need for it, is there? (Thunk-a, thunk-a thunk, my heart’s pumping.) We haven’t even had dinner yet, not tasted the lamb cooked hard as a coaster. I have yet to meet her father and her brother. I had sheltered hope that her dad and I could become bosom buddies even if Vicki and I didn’t work things out. He and I could still be friends. If his tire went flat some rainy night in Haddam or Hightstown or anyplace within my area code, he could call me up, I’d drive out to get him, we’d have a drink while the tire was being fixed at Frenchy’s and he would go off into the Jersey darkness certain he had a friend worthy of his trust and who looked down life’s corridor more or less the way he did. Maybe we could take the brother fishing at Manasquan (no need to bring the women in on it). Vicki could be married to Sweet Lou Calcagno’s stepson over in Bamber, have a wonderful life as a beer distributor’s wife with all the hullygully of kids. And I could be the trusted family friend with a heart of gold. I’d renounce my failed suitor’s glower for the demeanor of a wise old uncle. That would be enough for me, just the natural playing out of the pleasing present.
Vicki stares out the window at the houses along Arctic Spruce, her arm on the couch back. Sometimes it is possible to see in her face the lineaments of the older woman she will be, when her features will take on dimension, weight around the chin, a character more serious than now. She will undoubtedly be stout in later life, which is not always a hopeful sign.
Amber light has turned the lawns as green as England. In driveways all up the curving curbless street sit bright new cars—Chryslers, Olds, Buicks—each one with a hefty, moneyed look. In the middle distance a great white RV sits in a side yard. Smoke curls from almost every white brick chimney, though it is not cold enough by a long shot. Some doors have wreaths up since Christmas. My trailing wind has arrived.
Someone, I see, has set white croquet wickets around the Arcenaults’ front lawn. Two striped stakes face each other at less than regulation distance. Games have been planned for the day, and here is how I will paint my trapdoor to escape the incoming empty moment I feel.
“Let’s play,” I say, giving Vicki’s arm an uncle’s squeeze. This is not a ruse I’m up to, only a break in the broody unfinished silence we’ve fallen victims to.
She looks amazed, though she isn’t. Her eyes round out like dimes. “In all this wind and the rain comin?”
“It isn’t raining yet.”
“Man-o-man-o-man,” Vicki says, and snaps her fingers in hot succession. “It’s your funeral.” But she is off the couch quick, and headed for some upstairs storage room for mallets.
On television, CBS is trying to get us settled back into basketball, now that things are under control again. However, each time they show what’s happening on the court, a short, bulb-nosed, red-faced man wearing a loud, checked sport coat comes into the picture shouting “Aw, fuck you” soundlessly at someone on the New York team, waving a stubby arm in disgust. This checked coat guy is one of my favorites. Mutt Greene, the Clevelands’ G.M. I interviewed him once just after I’d restarted life as a sportswriter. He was a coach in Chicago then, but by his own choice has since moved up to the front office in another city, where I’m sure life seems better. He said to me “People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.” He was smoking a big expensive cigar in a cramped coach’s office under the Chicago arena. “I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that’s interesting, bub, but I’ll tell you. It’s romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it.” Afterwards we got involved in a pretty lively conversation about grass seeds and the piss-poor choices you face when your trouble was a high water table and inadequate drainage, which was not my problem, but was the case at his home on Hilton Head.
The interview wasn’t very productive on the subject of “seeing the keys” in classic big-man, small-man match-ups, which is what I was after. But I think of it as informative, though I don’t agree with everything he said. Still, he was happy to sit down with a young sportswriter and teach a lesson in life. “Keep things in perspective and give an honest effort” is what I took back to the Sheraton Commander that night. And when you’ve done with that take an interest in a new grass seed or an old Count Basie record you’ve missed listening to lately, or a catalog or a cocktail waitress, which—the last of these—is precisely what I did and wasn’t sorry about it.
On the court no
w the players are paying everyone murderous looks and pointing long bony fingers as threats. In particular the black players look fierce, and the white boys, pale and thin-armed, seem to want to be peacemakers, though they are actually just trying to stay out of trouble’s way. The trainer, a squat, worried-looking man in white pants, is trying to pull Mutt Greene down a runway below the stands. But Mutt is fighting mad. To him, real life’s going on here. Nothing’s for show. He has lost all perspective and wants to raise a little hell about the Knicks’ way of playing. He’s come out of the stands to show what he’s worth, and I admire him for it. I’m sure he misses the old life.
Suddenly the picture flicks and another cliff-diver stands staring down at his frothy fate. CBS has given up.
Elvis Presley trots into the kitchen door again, jingling his little diamond collar, and sniffs the air. He is uncertain about me, and who could blame him?
Lynette is right behind him, her eyes sparkly and furtive but full of good cheer. “Elvis Presley ’bout runs this whole family.” She taps Elvis Presley lightly with her toe. “He’s fixed, of course, so you don’t have to worry about your leg. He idn’t but half a man, but we do love him.”
Elvis Presley, sits in the doorway and stares at me.
“He’s something,” I say.
“Doesn’t Vicki seem like she’s worried to you?” Lynette’s voice becomes cautionary. Her bright eyes are speculative and she crosses her arms in absolute slow motion.
“She seems just fine to me.”
“Well, I thought maybe since you all went to Detroit, something unhappy’d happened.”
So! Everybody including Elvis Presley knows everything, and wants to turn it to their own purposes, no matter how idle. A full-disclosure family. No secrets unless individuals make decisions for themselves, which runs the risk of general disapproval. Vicki has obviously told an aromatic little-but-not-enough, and Lynette wants filling in. She is not exactly as I want her to be, and as of this moment I transfer fully back to Vicki’s alliance.
“Everything’s great that I know of.” I admit nothing with a smile.
“Well good-should, then.” Lynette nods happily. “We all just love her and want the best for her. She’s the bravest ole thing.”
No answer. No “Why is she brave?” or “Tell me what you make of Everett?” or “In fact, she is seeming just the least little bit peculiar all of a sudden.” Nothing from me, except “She’s wonderful,” and another grin.
“Yes she is now,” Lynette beams, but full of warning. Then she is gone again, leaving Elvis Presley in the doorway, frozen in an empty stare.
In the time it takes Vicki to come back with the mallets, her brother Cade comes pushing through the front door. He has been out back tying down a tarp on his Boston Whaler, and when I shake his hand it is rock-fleshed and chilled. Cade is twenty-five, a boat mechanic in nearby Toms River, and a mauler of a fellow in a white T-shirt and jeans. He is, Vicki has told me, on the “wait list” for the State Police Academy and has already developed a flat-eyed, officer’s uninterest for the peculiarities of his fellow man.
“Down from Haddam, huh?” Cade grunts, once we’ve let go of each other’s hands and are standing hard-by with nothing to say. His speech does not betray one trace of Texas, where he grew up, and instead he has developed now into full-fledged Jersey young-manhood with an aura of no-place/no-time surrounding him like poison. He looms beside me like a mast and stares furiously out the front window. “I useta know a girl in South Brunswick. Useta take her skatin in a rink on 130. You might know where that is?” A snicker and a sneer appear on his lips at once.
“I know exactly,” I say and sink my hands deep in my pockets. Indeed I’ve watched my own two precious children (and once my third) skate there for hours on end while I hugged the rail in estranged admiration.
“There’s a Mann’s Tri-Plex in there now, I guess,” Cade says, looking around the room as if perplexed by getting into this embarrassing conversation in the first place. He’d feel much better if he could put the cuffs on me and push me head-down into the back seat of a cruiser. On the ride downtown we could both relax, be ourselves, and he could share a cruel joke with me and his partner—amigos in our roles, as God intended. As it is I’m from an outside world, the type of helpless citizen who owns the expensive boats he repairs; the know-nothings with no mechanical skills he hates for the way we take care of property he himself can’t afford. I am not who normally comes for dinner, and he’s having a hard time being human about me.
My advice to him, though unspoken, is that he’d better get used to me and mine, since I am the people he’ll be giving tickets to sooner or later, average solid citizens whose ways and mores he’ll ridicule at the risk of getting into a peck of trouble. I can, in fact, be of use to him, could be instructive of the outside world if he would let me.
“Uhn, where’s Vicki?” Cade looks suddenly caged, glancing around the room as if she might be hiding behind a chair. Simultaneously he opens his thick fist to display a piece of silvery, tooled metal.
“She’s gone to get croquet mallets,” I say. “What’s that?”
Cade stares down at the two-inch piece of tubular metal and purses his lips. “Spacer,” he says and then is silent a moment. “Germans make it. It’s the best in the world. And it’s a real piece of crap’s what it is.”
“What’s it to?” My hands are firm and deep in my pockets. I’m willing to take an interest in “spacer” for the moment.
“Boat,” Cade says darkly. “We should be making these things over here. That way they’d last.”
“You’re right about that,” I say. “It’s too bad.”
“I mean, what’re you gonna do if you’re out on the ocean and this thing cracks? Like this.” One greasy finger fine-points a hairline fissure in the spacer’s side, something I’d never have noticed. Cade’s dark eyes grow hooded with suppressed annoyance. “You gonna call for a German? Is that it? I’ll tell you what you’d do, mister.” His eyes find me gazing stupidly at the spacer, which seems obscure and unimportant. “You kiss your ass goodbye if a storm comes up.” Cade nods grimly and pops his big hand shut like a clam. All his feelings are pretty closely positioned into this conceit—the strongest chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and he’s resolved never to be that link in his personal life, where he’s in control. This is the central fact of all tragedy, though to me it’s not much to get excited about. His is the policeman’s outlook, mine the sportswriter’s. To me a weak link bears some watching, and you’d better have replacements handy in case it goes. But in the meantime it could be interesting to see how it bears up and tries to do its job under some bad conditions, all the while giving its best in the other areas where it’s strong. I’ve always thought of myself as a type of human weak link, working against odds and fate, and I’m not about to give up on myself. Cade, on the other hand, wants to lock up us offenders and weak links so we’ll never again see the light of day and worry anybody. We would have a hard time being good friends, this I can see.
“You been to Atlantic City lately?” Cade says suspiciously.
“Not in a long time.” X and I went on our honeymoon there, stayed in the old Hadden Hall, walked on the boardwalk and had the time of our lives. I haven’t been back since, except once for a karate match, when I flew in after dark and left two hours later. I doubt Cade is interested in this.
“It’s all ruined now,” Cade says, shaking his head in dismay. “Hookers and spic teenagers all over. It useta be good. And I’m not even prejudiced.”
“I’d heard it’s changed.”
“Changed?” Cade smirks, the first sign of a real smile I’ve seen so far. “Nagasaki changed, right?” Cade suddenly flings his head toward the kitchen. “I’m hungry enough eat a lug wrench.” And a strangely happy smile breaks over his tragic big bullard’s face. “I’ve got to go wash up or Lynette’ll shoot me.” He shakes his head, appreciative and grinning.
&nb
sp; Suddenly all is good cheer. Whatever troubled him is gone now. Atlantic City. Weak links. Faulty spacers. Spies. Criminals he will someday arrest and later want to joke with on the long ride downtown. All gone. This is a feature of his outlook I have not expected. He can forget and be happy—a real strength. A good meal is waiting somewhere. A TV game. A beer. Clear sailing beyond the squall-line of life. It isn’t so bad, when you don’t think of it.
In the front yard Vicki displays for me the most excellent way to hit a croquet ball, the between-the-straddled-legs address, which lets her give her ball a good straight ride that makes her whoop with pleasure. I am a side-approacher by nature, having played some golf at Lonesome Pines and when I first married X. I also enjoy hitting the stupid striper with one hand, though I give up touch every time. Vicki gives me dark and disreputable looks when I hit, then even more aggressively straddles her green ball and hikes her skirt above her knees to get the straightest pendulum swing. She’s half around the course before I’m through a wicket, though I’m a tinge dreamy now, my mind not truly on our game.
The Detroit weather has arrived finally, though it is not the same storm. All the anger has gone out of it, and it consents to being just a gusty, plucky breeze with a few sprinklings of icy rain—a mild suburban shower at best, though the light has passed from Sunday amber to late afternoon aquamarine. In fact it’s wonderful to be out of doors and away from the house, even though we play under the eyes of crucified Jesus. I have no idea where Vicki’s father is. Is this interpretable as a dark sign, a gesture of unwelcome? Should I be asking what I’m doing here? I was, after all, invited, though I feel in an unavoidable way as alone as a nomad.
“You havin fun?” Vicki says. She has managed to nest her green stripe close enough to my yellow ball to give it a good clacking whack under her stockinged foot, scooting it through the grass and into the flowerbed where it is lost among the snapdragons against the house.