by Jones, Craig
Obscenities were no longer restricted to angry outbursts. They were implanted in the very fabric of social communication. Conversations in the hallway during passing and in the classroom before and after the bell were laced with that verb-turned-adjective “fucking,” used for emphasis in both positive and negative descriptions. “Shit” was reserved for anything difficult or distasteful, as in “This book is shit”; “Don’t hand me that shit”; “That’s a crock of shit.” “Suck” remained a verb and was generally applied to all things oppressive: school, homework, teachers and niggers all “sucked.” “Prick” and “cunt,” of course, were the favored ascriptions for anyone objectionable. Although there were few occasions when any of these words were said to my face, there was a lack of compunction in most of the students insofar as letting me overhear them. If I confronted a student about his/her language, the stock response was disbelief or amusement or “I didn’t say it to you.” Once, a snappy girl told me I shouldn’t be listening in. This is not to say I had no rewards in the classroom or that every day was a misery. However, the general tone of the school, fostered by Rand’s permissiveness, began to take its toll on my energy and patience.
And so did Frank and Regina.
By the time Regina finished the seventh grade, she had gone through puberty and reached the height of five foot eleven. She acquired a lovely shape, which she proceeded to undermine by slouching with her shoulders curled and her pelvis thrust forward. And because her face was plain and undistinguished, she took to make-up with a vengeance. She would not step out of the house unless her face was rainbowed in iridescent color. For two years running, the arguments went on between her and Frank about her appearance. I bowed out entirely after the day she turned to me and said: “Don’t tell me how I should look. You’ve always been pretty.” When I assured her she would be quite attractive if she cleaned up her face and her posture, she looked as if she were tolerating a consummate liar. Then, under her breath, she growled, “I don’t know why I had to look like him.”
And so began the rearrangement of relationships among the three of us. All those years of Regina’s keeping her distance from me, of Frank’s indulging her and actually reveling in her every whim, of my own abdication due to frustration and fatigue—all those years seemed to evaporate in the face of the reversals that came. Gradually, boys entered Regina’s circle of friends. They gathered in our recreation room for dancing and Ping-Pong, and Frank would go down to see if they were having a good time. Regina complained bitterly about “being spied on” and told me she wouldn’t mind my coming down to meet her friends but to keep Frank away.
“What’s the difference who comes down?”
“He’s out of it,” she said. “He wants to know everybody’s name.”
“Nothing wrong with that. It’s being sociable and showing good manners.”
“It’s being nosy. He wants to know their parents’ names and where they live. He’s like a cop or something.”
The next time he went down, I went with him and watched. One of Regina’s girlfriends had brought along a new boy. He was watching the Ping-Pong game, waiting his turn. Frank approached him, shook hands amiably, then proceeded to do just what Regina had described—asking the boy about his parents, where they lived, even where they came from.
Upstairs, I told him I thought he was being too overbearing.
“There’s nothing wrong in finding out about her friends,” he said. “There’s a lot of drugs around and you never know who might be peddling them.”
“You’re not going to find out that way. You’re making them uncomfortable.”
“Are you faulting me for being interested? All I’ve heard from you about your school is ‘parental apathy,’ how the parents don’t show up for PTA meetings and open-school conferences.”
“There’s such a thing as a happy medium.”
Frank’s surveillance continued until Regina announced to me that she and her friends would not be meeting in our house anymore. Instead, they would gather someplace where they would be left alone. At this point, she shut Frank out of her circle of attention almost entirely. She barely spoke to him at all, restricting her conversation to grudging answers to his questions. If she needed to be driven somewhere, she asked me to do it. When she practiced her French for oral quizzes, she would come to me even though Frank had had two more years of the language than I had and his ear for it was better than mine. I was put on the tightrope between them. It was easy to see how Regina felt suffocated by him, and a selfish part of me saw some justice in her about-face because all those years that he had won her attention and her affection cheaply, with indulgence, he had not worked at winning her respect. Of course, it was too late for that. Still, it pained me to see how deeply she was hurting him. But I sensed in him something more than hurt. I sensed panic. Not wild, hysterical panic, but the kind of panic that is kept in check. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would hear him get up to go to the bathroom, listen to him pause at Regina’s door, open it, close it, and come back to bed. Something, something was moving in on us.
The pressures of school, the uphill battle with Rand, the friction between Frank and Regina, and perhaps the fact that Gloria now had four children made me decide to become pregnant. We had visited Pat and Gloria almost every year since that Chicago summer and I had watched her family grow. The idea of our having a second child was not new to me, but whenever I discussed it with Frank, he had always presented a firm argument for how much I would miss teaching. But that argument no longer held any ground now that the school seemed to be crumbling. Naïvely, I thought a baby would be the best thing for us all.
I got plenty of encouragement from Gloria via long distance. Her second had been another boy, and Pat had wanted her to stop there. Her third pregnancy disappointed him, but when it produced twin girls, he cut back on his office hours to spend every available minute with them. Gloria’s favorite story was the one about how Pat liked to sit and watch the babies sleep. One day, he came running out of their room and hustled her back to it. “Come here—listen.” She listened, then asked what the big deal was. “Don’t you hear it? They’re breathing together, in unison!” And he looked down at them as if they were the eighth wonder of the world. I could just picture Frank, Regina and myself pushing each other out of the way to take care of the baby.
But that was not to be the case. When I got the doctor’s confirmation, Frank’s reaction was more than disappointment. It was horror. The color left his face, he stared right through me and said, “But how?”
“The way it usually happens.”
“But how did you let it happen?”
“I just did. My, what a wonderful reception.”
“I’m sorry. But we can’t. . . .”
“Can’t what?”
“Regina’s fifteen!”
“What difference does that make?”
“It’s just so . . . ridiculous.”
“I don’t see what’s ridiculous about it. Do you remember that day you came back from Chicago and we talked about your family?”
He winced. “What have they got to do with this?”
“You made me promise to help you keep them away from us and I agreed. Since then, we haven’t seen hide or hair of any of them. Including Vivian. Maybe that’s the problem. We’ve become so solitary. Barry’s way out in Texas, Neil’s up in Vancouver, my best friend lives thousands of miles away, and we see my parents twice a month at the most. What’s wrong with expanding our own family? I’m sure it’ll be good for Regina.”
“There’s nothing wrong. You’re right.” But there was no conviction in his voice.
Regina’s reaction was not as severe, but it was far from what I wanted. She gave me a long, clinical look and said: “A baby? You’re too old.” After a few weeks she did warm up to the idea, but with more amusement than enthusiasm.
Frank said little if anything about it. I had the peculiar feeling he was watching me the same way he had been watching Regina—with panic. I kept telling myself he would change once the baby was born; the fact that the baby was not born showed me how wrong I was. When I lost it in the fourth month, he made a pretense of disappointment. But I could sense his relief. And after the doctor warned me against trying for another, his relief became obvious. I slipped into a quiet depression, which he tried to lift me from with candlelight dinners and little gifts. I didn’t want his offerings of comfort. I began to think that if thoughts could kill, his thoughts had killed the baby. Within a month or so, he went back to keeping unreasonable tabs on Regina, and my feelings of menace returned.
During the next year and a half, Regina put the finishing touches on the wall that would shut out her father. In his presence, she no longer stooped to sullenness or insolence, for she had found that her most effective revenge was to ignore him. Yet he took her punishment unflinchingly, keeping her at an early curfew and insisting upon being given her exact destination (or destinations) whenever she went out with her friends.
The night she introduced us to Virgil Evans, I saw a flickering of something alien in Frank’s face. Perhaps that was the beginning of the real momentum, because from then on nothing would be the same.
Regina had had exactly three dates by the time she entered her junior year of high school. Whether this was due to her intimidating height, an overeagerness to please, which hid a cache of jealousy and resentment, her unglamorous appearance next to her prettier friends, or any combination of these, I could not say for sure. (Had she gone to Peck, I might have had more ready answers. However, neither of us thought it a good idea for her to be in the school situation with me, although Frank wanted it that way. So she attended Old Central, eight blocks from our house.) What was obvious to me was her jealousy over her girlfriends’ popularity with boys. Friday night was stag night: the girls all went out together. Saturday night was reserved for dates. It was this night that Regina sat at home, sulking and turning down every offer of consolation. Now and then, she would let slip a sour-grape criticism of her friends: they were boy-crazy or they had no taste and would go out with anyone who asked them. At these times, I saw that familiar look on her face, the one that had been there the day she sent Frank out into the vacant lot to drive the kids off the swings and the day she had begrudged Brian her coloring book. What was missing now was the gratitude, the worship, she once had for her father. Without her noticing it, I would watch her from the corner of my eye while she looked him over as though he were some kind of distasteful specimen.
“Why did you marry him?” she asked outright one day when we were alone in the car.
“What a thing to ask. I fell in love with him.”
“What with?” Her voice was cool and hard.
“Of all people, it should be obvious to you. Your father’s a rare man in his own way. He’s intelligent and kind and conscientious and . . . humble.”
“What else?”
“I think that’s plenty.”
“Didn’t you ever go out with any handsome men?”
“Yes; I just never met a handsome man who has what your father has.”
“Maybe you didn’t look around long enough. Your friend Gloria found one.”
“You can’t always help who you fall in love with.”
“If you’d married someone else, I wouldn’t look like him.”
“If I had married someone else, you wouldn’t be here.”
I was well acquainted with the preoccupation teen-agers have with looks, but I was also aware of how Regina would tune out if I started in on the topic of “other qualities.”
“I wonder what the baby would have looked like,” she said.
I didn’t answer. The baby was not a favorite topic of mine. It only rekindled feelings of resentment for Frank, feelings which would distract me from defending him to her.
“We did heredity in biology last year. It seems weird to me I didn’t get anything from you. It’s all him. If anyone looked at you and me together, they wouldn’t think you were my mother at all.”
What she said was true and I had to think quickly. “Sure they would. You’ve got red highlights in your hair and you’ve got a very good figure. You certainly didn’t get that from your father. In fact, sometimes you remind me of Grandma.”
“Which one?” she said pointedly.
“Grandma Rutledge, of course.”
“How come he hasn’t got any pictures of his family?”
“They were very poor. They probably couldn’t afford a camera.”
“I’ll bet they were all ugly, every last one of them.”
“That’s not true. Your Aunt Vivian—” A twinge of guilt stopped me.
“What about her?”
“She’s a very striking woman and she’s very tall.”
“How come I’ve never seen her? Or any of them?”
“It’s very complicated. It’s the way your father wants it.”
“Everything’s the way he wants it.”
“Never mind that. Your father is not ugly and neither are you. I wish you would get that out of your head.”
“It’s easy for you to say.”
I waited a moment to think out my words. With Regina, they always had to be carefully chosen. “Since we’re on the subject of your father, are you aware of how you’ve been treating him?” She rolled her eyes and put on that “Here we go” expression. “You know, he’d give up the world for you.”
“I don’t want him to give up anything for me,” she said flatly.
“You’ve been shutting him out completely.”
“I don’t like him breathing down my neck.”
“Regina, I wasn’t an only child, but I was an only daughter. My father was very possessive of me too.”
“He’s always watching me. He gives me the creeps.”
“He loves you.”
“I don’t want to be loved like that.”
If she only knew just how much she was my daughter. That desire for independence, the rigid adherence to her own opinions, even the callousness—I had had them until I met Frank.
Her withdrawal from Frank was so complete that it included his friends as well. Bernie and Sylvia and Sylvia’s husband, John, who had lavished attention on her for years, were now dismissed as “a jerk” and “a dog” and “out of it.” She seemed to be shaking all identification with Frank, and although she didn’t move completely into my corner, my company was always preferable to that of her father.
It was in her junior year, in late September, that she lost her appetite and sat dreamily at the dinner table. She spent most of her time in her bedroom. The eye make-up was toned down, the lipstick grew lighter, the rouge disappeared altogether. The second Thursday in October, she announced she had a date, and on Friday at seven-thirty, Virgil Evans rang the doorbell.
He was as handsome as anyone the movies or TV had to offer. Just half an inch taller than Regina, he had the solid, sinewy build of a swimmer. His sandy hair was not fashioned in the popular layered look but cut close to the scalp, with a part on the right side. His features, strong and angular, were softened by large brown eyes and full, almost overripe lips. When he smiled, he showed slightly gapped teeth, similar to Frank’s. Frank shook his hand and invited him to sit down. Regina said they couldn’t or they would be late for the movie. Frank said they could come back to our house for a snack afterward. Regina rolled her eyes at me with that all-too-familiar message “Get him off my back.” But Virgil liked the idea. Regina’s face changed. It was apparent that any idea Virgil had would be just fine with her.
It was when Frank closed the door after them that I saw that alien look on his face. He stood there gripping the door handle, his eyes squinted and his j
aw pushed forward. For a moment, he appeared to be calculating something; then his lips tightened and he opened the door with a furious yank and glowered at the street as they drove away.
We both sat in the living room grading papers. Now and then, I would look up to find him staring at the floor. At ten-thirty, he began checking his watch, which he continued to do at ten-minute intervals until they walked through the door at eleven forty-five. I went into the kitchen to put the pizza in the oven. I wasn’t gone five minutes when Regina burst in.
“He’s starting again!”
“What?”
“Asking all those questions about Virgil’s family, where they live, everything!”
“He does have the right to know a little bit about a boy who takes you out.”
“Then I’ll tell him! I don’t want him asking questions. He never stops. Will you please go in and shut him up? I’ll watch the pizza.”
When I got to the living room, Virgil was telling Frank how he had just recently come up from Florida to live with an aunt after his father died. Right now, he was looking for a job until he entered the community college the following fall.
“Where in Florida?” said Frank.
“Fort Lauderdale.”