I know now that my mother took care of her parents through this long decay, and even made excuses to them for not bringing us when she came. My father did not want us to see the chain smoking and staggering or hear the cusswords or smell the smells that we caught in my mother’s clothes and hair now and then when we came home from school, that stood for our grandparents’ house, their life.
From the sinking ship of that family he had rescued my mother, thrown a magic ring around her, the life her orderliness required. She did not impose her need for order on us, she was secretive about it, and didn’t laugh if my father caught her setting books to right when she passed them, an inch forward or back, or stroking magazines into square piles. After dinner she pushed the chairs up to the table, not quite touching; she ironed sheets and stacked them with the folds forward, even though we had no linen closet then but only a shelf above her dresses.
Over the kitchen window were three prints in a row, of flying ducks. I don’t know what happened to them, not that I would want them. If I see a duck print in an antique store a wave of sullenness comes over me, though my father defended these pictures of his, that had been in the law office of his father. One had a greenish-brown overcast sky. “There’s something in that one,” my mother said. “Some . . . oh, I don’t look at it.”
“She looks out upon the land of the Otts,” my father chuckled.
“I do,” she said.
James, Owen, and Clark. Mary Catherine, Annie, and Natalie. In the first of the three years we knew them, Natalie, whom my father called Natalie Wood, was a baby with heavy, wet diapers, Annie a first grader who could never quite understand or settle into a game. Mary Catherine was then eight, my age, the pretty one. She was the favorite of her mother, who would tell our mother, “I give in to that one, I know I do, because look at her.” No one over there even whined about that, and if the Otts did not know there are no favorites in families, it might be, Laura and I thought, that they did not know anything at all.
Mrs. Ott was in the habit of coming over when the men were at work. Audrey Ott. My mother had only two friends, one of them in another state, but she gave them surnames when speaking of them to my father. It seemed to put a lid on them and then she served them. “Audrey Ott stopped by today.” “Oh, I owe Audrey Ott a dollar ten for the milkman. Don’t let me forget.”
In the kitchen, and in the yard hanging up the wash before we got our dryer, she spent hours with Audrey Ott, who always arrived breathless and sticking the hair back into her ponytail as if she had swum over. She would say, “Billie! Let’s quit for the day and go out on the town.” She would lean on the counter where the stew vegetables were laid out and watch my mother chop them with her little black-handled knife. People didn’t use the big knives they use today. My mother cut vegetables so rapidly, in pieces all the same size, that I always expected Audrey to stop talking and comment on her skill. Being her daughter I thought I knew how she did it. It was a surprise to me that if I cut things up they came out any old shape.
Audrey Ott alternated the same two Orlon sweaters, a green and a brown, and snapped a thick rubber band around her hair when she thought of it, without washing it, in our opinion, and had a wide face of runny freckles and a wide rump that jutted out below her thin top like a holder she had been set in. Mr. Ott was tall and bulky, big in the rear like Audrey, with big dark cup-lidded eyes, set low and so wide apart that it looked as if something might have been erased from between them. But he was supposed to be smart. He worked at Boeing where our father worked.
Every child in the family had his big heavy eyeballs. I used to watch Mary Catherine’s from the side, as they roved to and fro over the things in our room. It was true she was pretty, but being pretty, in her, came close to being funny-looking, and then somehow overshot it. This did not happen with Annie or Natalie, though my mother said when they got older they would look like Mary Catherine.
Mr. Ott did not instruct or tease or in any way lead his family, or, seemingly, take them anywhere, including the church for which the others set off every Sunday before breakfast, bedraggled and hurrying. You almost never heard his voice in the house. When you did it was unexpectedly high, with a fretful sound in it. “Audrey? Audrey?”
He couldn’t help his nature. So Audrey Ott said to my mother, who repeated it, though ordinarily she did not seem to find the things Audrey told her in the afternoon worth passing on, even if my father took up the subject of the Otts at dinner.
Moping was what my father called it, but Mr. Ott was not a listless or a sighing man. Something interested him in an intense way. Whatever it was it knotted his jaw muscles and made his glance, if it fell on you, go straight down like a bird in a dive.
“Mary Catherine says her dad doesn’t know our names!” Laura marveled.
“He may not know theirs,” my father said from the next room. “Gil Ott is always minding the store,” he would say, raising his eyebrow in the way we liked, “the store being himself. If he gets any gloomier they’ll have to put windshield wipers on him.”
No one said “depression.” We didn’t know the word, even my mother. We knew my father was never in a bad humor and did not believe in being down in the mouth or bored, or in mentioning it if you were. If we were sick he was in our room with plans for our being well the next day. He would bring in his Brehm’s Life of Animals, or a volume of the Century Encyclopedia, so we could go through everything that began with A through C and forget our complaints.
Privately Laura and I drew up explanations for the bad luck of the Otts, every one, including the dog Mosquito. They just don’t know. Mosquito has never been trained. Mosquito was tiny, a terrier of some kind, with splayed whiskers that made him look like one of those fish that suck the algae off aquarium sides. His joints were stiff and he bit. Often he had worms, from eating whatever he came across when he rooted in the ivy to find a place to lie down away from the Otts. When they found him he would come out snapping, pawing his fringed eyes. A car had hit him on our street, tearing his nose and dislocating his jaw so it stuck forward in an expression of fury. After she drove Audrey back from the vet, my mother said, “Mosquito’s going to live. For once things went right for them.”
“Yes and no,” said my father.
Mosquito did not like to be petted or taken for walks. He was sensitive about the pads of his toes and could lick them for an hour at a time. He barked in his high, outraged register at cars, kids on bikes, flies on the windowpane, noises in the house at night.
Laura and I had no dog but we had rules for the treatment of animals. We instructed Mary Catherine, but not teasing animals was another doctrine mislaid or forgotten in their house. Mosquito was often trapped in Annie’s doll carriage, being wheeled around panting. “He’s carsick!” moaned Laura, who could not ride any distance in a car without throwing up, and could not even ride her new bike, to her bitter chagrin, because it made her dizzy. If James saw Mosquito in the carriage he would lift him out, under the arms, and cradle him away from Annie. For this, and for the long eyelashes that hid his opinions, we excused James from our dinnertime stories of the Otts, and even Mary Catherine left him out of her denunciations of her family.
Our house and the Otts’ next door were on a street that was really a road, at one time a country road, my father said, with yards big enough to hold a horse and chickens. Some of the yards had tractor tires with flowers planted in them. We were in the broad valley south of Seattle, with the mountains in the near distance, close to the Boeing Company plant where the men worked, and behind our two houses was what we called the ivy field. It was a steep bank running up to dense holly trees that had marked the beginning of woods, though now there were houses you could see through the line of trees.
The ivy field was blanketed with a second crop of vines, morning glory, making it a lush, varied green from a distance. But it was dusty if you got into it, with things embedded in the vines: bottles, broken china, doll heads, and square gray sponges that had been news
paper, and pieces of stiff plaid shirt with the outlines of stems pressed into them. Cats and raccoons had made trails you could follow and broaden if you went in on your hands and knees through the anthills and cat leavings. Higher up you ran into fallen brown holly leaves that could stab you like thumbtacks, and thousands of dried-up holly berries that my father said were the toes of children who never found their way out. The smell inside the ivy was of many things dried and maybe edible, like pepper or tea.
For a while we played there with five of the Otts, Natalie being too little and bare, but eventually the ivy field came to belong to James and Owen, with Clark as guard because he was a crybaby who didn’t go in under the vines, while we played at the edge, Laura, Mary Catherine, and I, and Annie if we couldn’t escape her. Sometimes we would receive from James a password that allowed us to crawl in.
If you crawled in far enough, about halfway up to the holly trees, you dropped into a dusty cave in the slope where the vines went on uninterrupted above and the space seemed deliberately hollowed out for three or four to lie down in. There we played dead.
You had to get onto your back, feet down the bank, and be still, not even scratching. You could look up and see bits of sun running like mercury up the vines. At the same time we had made the provision that although dead, you could speak in a singsong voice and give reports of the place you had gone when you left your body.
“I wish my mom and dad would hurry up and die and get here!” Laura said, transported wholly into death and breaking, as she often did that year she was six, the rule that parents did not exist as part of any game.
“Not them!” Mary Catherine hissed, although she had been underfoot in our house trailing our mother all year, on the days she stayed home from school with her headaches.
Mary Catherine did not have headaches, Laura and I felt sure. She had the idea from her father and she wanted to be with our mother when we were not home. Around our mother, my father said, Mary Catherine was like a cat hoping to be stroked.
“I miss Mosquito,” said Annie in the whine she thought was the dead voice, scrambling up so that her head hit the woven roof and showered us with seeds.
“Well, go get him then,” said Mary Catherine, pushing Annie, knowing she would never crawl out alone. “He can be dead, too.”
We had to stay there until the boys found us. When they did, they fell into the cave with their weapons, taking up all the room, jabbing us with sticks and knees and elbows. “We’re dead,” Mary Catherine protested angrily. Being found by her brothers, and by the unsmiling, intently playing James in particular, did not carry the queasy excitement for her that it did for Laura and me. But they drove us back along the slanting passageway and out into the sun where, once we were upright and squinting, captive, with dirt in our hair, they lost interest and went off to play basketball.
James was two years ahead of me in school when the Otts moved in, though he was to fall back. The third year after they came, when I was in the sixth grade, he got polio.
He just disappeared one day, into polio. Polio was vaguely related to what my father called the “conditions” at the Otts’, which covered everything we could report of their shorted-out TV set, the scorched enamel of their stove, the failure of Owen and Clark to be properly toilet trained, their bent lawn mower that had run on its own up into the ivy, where the next spring all but the handlebars sank out of sight under the morning glory that wound itself onto the ivy.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” my mother said. “You girls are as prissy as a couple of parakeets. I’m going to write all of this down and read it to you when you have kids.”
“Only please don’t have six,” my father said.
My mother said, “Audrey Ott does what she can with the situation.”
“What situation?” we wanted to know.
“Mr. Ott,” said my father with a wink.
But my father couldn’t find anything to say when James got polio. During the school year he had put up a basket for James on our garage and taught him to shoot. James was out at the garage every morning before school and every afternoon when he got home. In no time he was better than my father. It was getting so he would call his orders out to us from under the basketball net, rather than lead the way into the ivy or be there barring us from it. “Go on in,” he would say to me over his shoulder, which had changed shape. His upper arms showed muscle giving on muscle, sinking and locking in a way that offered a kind of rudeness to someone looking at them. “Go on in there, I don’t care.” But I didn’t want to.
My father said, “That boy’s going to play ball. This year. Hasn’t got the height but he’s accurate and he’ll make the JV with his speed. The boy floats, Billie.”
“I see that,” my mother agreed. It was taken for granted that a man wanted a son.
After the basket went up Mr. Ott came out onto the porch and my father invited him to shoot with them. He put up his stiff hand to ward off the idea.
“Oh, Neil, he’s heading down again, he’s sad,” my mother said. She always waved to Mr. Ott in the yard and sometimes sent my father over to help him with the lawn mower, before he aimed it at the ivy and let it go.
“There are the sad,” my father said, “and there are the sad sacks.”
Mr. Ott would be rubbing his little finger with his thumb, and then he would give the mower a heavy kick and wrench it over onto its side so that nuts popped or the gas cap came off and the gasoline ran into what grass was left in the yard. It was hard to say why these things were not funny when Mr. Ott did them.
My mother said, “If you men got together, Neil, Gil Ott could ride with you, and Audrey Ott could have the car once in a while.” Once or twice when his car was not running Mr. Ott rode to work with my father, but this did not become a habit.
When James got polio, all the activity in the boys’ room that we had watched from the tree came to an end. The boys went somewhere else in the house, where you couldn’t see them, although their voices and the barking of Mosquito could still be heard. The doctors decreed a long period of quarantine, during which we were not allowed to play with the Otts. Any one of them could get polio and all of them probably carried it. During this time my mother’s eyes followed us wherever we went. Every day she would look at our throats and feel our necks at the jawline and say with a tense look, “You don’t feel achy anywhere?”
My father said, “Billie, you are going to have to face the fact that these girls are not going to pass away and leave you their money.”
Mary Catherine waved whenever she passed a window, and stopped to twist her mouth into a scream, roll her eyes, and wind her hair in a strangling motion around her neck. Sometimes her voice on the phone would whisper, “It’s awful over here.”
“I know it is,” I said. She belonged, we agreed, where there was no polio and for that matter none of Audrey’s dried-up fish on Friday, no sister who couldn’t learn to read and brothers whose smelly sheets had to be hauled out to the washing machine on the screened porch by Mary Catherine—a female responsibility that went with not needing punishment—and no father dumb with headache at the dinner table.
At Boeing Mr. Ott did something with chemicals that gave him headaches. When he had one of them he got a decayed look, like the fatigued bears we saw when we went up to the Woodland Park Zoo. He didn’t go into his own bedroom and lie down on his own bed, and no wonder, everything in the house ended up there, he would have had to make room among the diapers and newspapers, and crumbs from eating toast in bed, and damp towels because the rods in the bathroom weren’t fixed, and laundry, and Audrey Ott’s old blue chenille robe with the hanging pocket.
He went into his boys’ room and stretched out on one of the lower bunks. Laura and I looked in from the sycamore. You could see James’s arm hanging off the bed while he read his comics, and Mr. Ott with his arm across his eyes in the other bunk that formed an L with James’s.
Unlike us, with our sense of importance, Mary Catherine found nothing to
o private to tell. She told where the boys kept things they had stolen, how Owen and Clark both still wet the bed and the test showed Annie had a low IQ and Clark had ringworm on his penis because he played with it with his dirty little fingers. She told when her father worked for weeks on a letter to the newspaper about the Korean War. He had fought in it and had the idea no one understood things that had happened there. His letter was not published on Veterans Day, for which he had written it, and was not published in the ensuing weeks while the family waited. She told when her mother had diarrhea all night, and when she cried. Worst of all she told the story of a shooting witnessed by her father.
The husband of a secretary came in with a gun and shot his wife, and Mr. Ott, who was standing right there, didn’t do a thing. Mary Catherine told how afraid he had been, so afraid he had had to drop into a chair with a pain in his chest.
“Hmm,” said my father at dinner when Laura finished with the story.
“Well, I wonder if he shouldn’t have made a citizen’s arrest,” said my mother in a voice that did not prevent Laura from starting to tell it all over again.
“This is a gal who drove her husband nuts,” my father said. “I do know”—raising his glass of milk to my mother—“I’d want somebody other than Gil Ott to be there if you were going to get shot at.”
“How about these girls?” my mother said.
“You mean you!” Laura shouted, pointing at him. Our father was not out in the open at Boeing the way Mary Catherine’s father had been, he had an office.
“Well?” said my mother. “Well? Is she dead?”
“She’s fit as a fiddle. All he did was wing her.”
“Oh, is that all he did?” said my mother. “Well. Well then. She could just keep right on typing.”
“Now, Billie,” my father said.
The afternoon the police came, Mary Catherine was in our room. The quarantine was over; James was supposed to begin his recovery. “He can’t pee, though. Mom’s so worried she screamed and yelled at Dad and then she stayed up all night in the kitchen.” How strange, Laura and I thought, to hear your parents speak of things they did not know what to do about, things that made them scream. “And when they make up—they always do that, make up—oh, oh, oh, that’s even worse!”
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