by Maria Flook
“That’s right,” her stepmother, Elizabeth, said.
“Well, three times a day isn’t too bad,” Margaret said, but this was just more of her prying.
“If you have to know,” Elizabeth said, “your sister has flat feet. She has to pick up the marbles with her toes.”
“I see,” Margaret said. She tried not to laugh. She had a bad record with that; it was worse with Cam being in the service, since she felt she had to hold up his end. She had to laugh twice as often, twice as dry.
Jane practiced with a tin wastebasket. Jane picked up some marbles with her toes and dropped them in the can. Margaret could hear this throughout the house; they could hear it out on the sidewalk, a sad plink, plink, plink. One day Jane took an ink pad and she made some footprints on a paper bag. They were flat as ever. Margaret couldn’t keep out of it, and her own high arch left only a thin crescent on the brown paper.
Margaret wrote to Cam about it; she told him half the marbles had rolled into the furnace grate—she heard them bouncing down the duct. Then Jane disappeared.
The newspaper ran a photograph of Jane with the word Runaway beneath it, and they put a question mark after the word. The story said she could be dead or alive. A police officer wanted a list of Jane’s boyfriends. “Jane didn’t have any,” Elizabeth said.
“Are we sure?” Richard said.
“If she did have a boyfriend, Richard, why was she so gloomy all the time?”
“Love is strange,” the officer said.
Cam was home on leave, watching a detective show with Margaret. On the screen they showed the chalk outline of a body. Margaret said, “Look, it’s Jane.” Cam liked the joke, but he elbowed her, jabbing her ribs until she felt a stitch.
Almost two years without word, then Margaret was drunk on wine in a car full of people the night Jane called home. The next morning she drove with Richard to the train station to meet her sister. They parked the car right before the track. Their breath made a mist on the windshield, and her father took his cuff over the heel of his hand to wipe a circle for himself and one for Margaret.
“Don’t be nervous,” she told him. It was a bold thing for her to say to her father.
“I don’t know what it is,” he said.
“It’s everything,” she said, “everything from then until now.”
He studied her face for a moment, as if he could not remember when she was small and speechless. From that minute on, he never again looked directly into her eyes. He was always wary. Jane stepped off the train and kissed her stepfather on his cheek; you could see she had suffered in the planning of it. Jane showed Margaret her smile. It was the same mysterious line.
The cars kicked back as she stepped off the train and she landed hard on the platform. The soles of her feet were stinging. At the same instant, a rush of cicadas started their shrill ascension, a papery swell through the trees overhead. She saw Cam waving from his car in the small parking lot. He pressed the car horn, a bright snarled note that hushed the insects in the trees.
Cam stood up on the driver’s side of the car, his arms outstretched over the roof. Greetings unnerved him, and he drummed the hot metal. He was making an effort not to lunge for her, but she would have been happy to accept his embrace.
“It’s absolutely steamy here,” she told him. She tugged Cam’s waist, then touched his back in the hollow between his shoulder blades. His muscles felt tight under his blue Oxford. His studied repose seemed comprised of agonizing adjustments in thought and motion. She pushed her fingertip up his spine an inch or two. It was like touching the insulation around an electrical conduit in which a great current pulsed. Then it was his shyness that kept him from offering her the usual help men provided, opening doors and lifting the suitcases. Her case was made out of the same fabric as a parachute. “Don’t bother,” she said when she saw him staring at her bag. “I can get it.” She threw her case in the backseat.
“Is that all you have?” He looked as if he hoped she had some trunks, lampshades, or mooseheads.
“No, this is it.”
“Tracy didn’t come?”
“He might be down later. He’s writing a story for the paper.”
“I wish you hadn’t moved off,” Cam told her.
“Moved off? Moved off sounds so awful,” she said.
“You know what I mean. I could use you around here.”
“I’m here, I’ll get behind the yoke now,” she said. She wondered what she was saying, what was the offer she’d made?
He looked at her and smiled. He rubbed his mouth, ashamed of the rush of gratitude that tugged his features. Margaret said, “How’s Laurence? Did he lose any of his baby teeth?” But she could see this was the wrong thing to ask—it was touchy.
“How’s your job at the prison?” he asked her.
“It’s good. I had to get bonded, can you imagine?”
“They didn’t find your record?”
“My record? That was a juvie record. Besides, they bond anybody unless you’re an active criminal.”
“I wonder what they did with our JV records?” Cam said.
“Oh, in the shredder, I guess. It was ordinary teenage shit.”
“We pinched your typical four-door and totaled it graciously.”
“Please,” she said.
“Remember the half-wit cop writing the report? He says, ‘Any identifying marks?’ ” Cam looked at her to see if she recalled.
Margaret said, “You were all crashed up, twenty stitches, and the guy asks you, ‘Any scars?’ ”
“Just a birthmark on my ass shaped like Italy.”
“That little boot,” Margaret said.
“He takes another look, ‘Kid, you’ve got scars now.’ ”
“Finally, he noticed,” Margaret said.
“They’re stupid. Cops and postal workers, equally vacant,” Cam said.
“What does it take to sort some postcards into a sack?” Margaret said.
“Two mailmen. Two mailmen and what? I don’t know that one. What’s the punch line?”
Margaret laughed. “I wasn’t telling a joke! That was just a rhetorical question.”
“Shit.”
She pressed her hand against her teeth and tried to keep her lips from tingling. She didn’t want to laugh at the wrong times with Cam. Cam liked to bring up these episodes when they were in trouble together. They had reached a certain level of intimacy, standing shoulder to shoulder before the family court, and they might never again achieve that sense of partnership.
They drove over to the Bringhurst Apartments, where Cam managed the units for Town and Country Realty. Cam told her he had to clean the pool and add some chemicals to the water. He was stalling. That was fine with her, she didn’t want to rush home to her parents.
“Do you have everything you need in your apartment?” she asked him.
“It’s not even an apartment. It’s the office. It’s got a Castro, I do fine.”
“That’s ridiculous, you need a real place,” she told him.
“It’s fine,” he told her.
“You don’t have a stove to make yourself some eggs?”
“Look, drop it,” he said, “okay?”
She was happy to get out of the car and walk along the edge of the pool with Cam. He dipped a large square net into the water and skimmed some poplar leaves. No one was swimming in the water or sunbathing in the lounge chairs, and they continued their talk. Cam told her Darcy wanted custody of Laurence, but he wanted to keep his son.
“I didn’t have any of this trouble with Phil. It was uncontested. Celeste gets to visit the robot, she’s with the robot now,” Margaret said.
“You’re lucky, I wish I had it so easy. They don’t give the kids to the men.”
“It’s changing.”
“Wait, you’re forgetting. I screwed up. Her lawyer says I’ve got an incapacity. An incapacity. Is that something you would say about me?” He jerked the white net through the water trying to get a drifting rub
ber loop, a hair tie.
“If he means that time in the apartment, well, that’s a long time ago. You were just making a statement, a dramatic gesture, it wasn’t as if—”
“Look, it was nuts. Holding a gun to my head, saying I was going to pull the trigger? Shit, I’d say that was a little more than a dramatic gesture. I didn’t think then I was going to live to this day to worry about it.”
“So that’s Darcy’s idea of evidence? A moment’s instability? She thinks that’s going to wrap things up? An ancient suicide threat years before Laurence was even born?” Margaret said.
“God, will you not use that word! I was just trying to get my point across,” he told her.
“I know, I know,” she told him.
“My lawyer says it’s impossible for me to get more than joint custody.”
“Could you live with that?”
“Are you serious? If I don’t get physical possession that means Darcy can go anywhere with Laurence. Florida! She talks about going to Fort Lauderdale, can you imagine? She went there on a vacation during spring break in high school, almost fifteen years ago, and she thinks it’s like heaven. I would have to chase after her to see Laurence. It’s a tactic. Some women move around until the fathers give up.”
“She’s bluffing. She won’t move out of town. Get another lawyer.” Margaret picked up a poplar leaf from the tiled gutter. She didn’t know what to tell him.
Cam said, “I don’t mind cleaning the pool. We could hire someone else to do it, there’s lots of pool-maintenance companies, but it saves them money and it calms me to come here. It clears my head,” he told her.
“Let me try it,” she said. She dragged the net through the water. The net was heavy, awkward, even when she collected nothing. “Sometimes I wash the dishes twice just to have some time to think, or I iron something, you know, ironing my thoughts,” she told Cam. She pressed Tracy’s handkerchiefs. She liked the heat radiating upward, the fibers scented arid, lemony, near scorching.
Margaret said, “You waited too long to break things off. You were an optimist or a masochist, which?”
“Whatever you want.”
She was sorry to see her brother in trouble. She liked to think of him still single, riding his motorcycles and bringing his friends to the house. She always moped around and tried to sit with them for a few minutes before she was shoved out of the den. She was banished and they took control of the big Zenith stereo console, a polished wedge-shaped piece of furniture with a hinged lid housing a springy turntable. The boys came with a new forty-five still in its paper sleeve, and sometimes she was invited to listen before she was told to leave them alone. The memory was very old, she realized, the records were proof—a Buddy Holly tune, brand-new, with a skip in it. Her brother and his friends discussed the bubble in the record as if it were the end of the world, but Margaret made them play it through anyway. It sounded absurd; Holly’s ordinary hiccoughing style was increased, exaggerated by an imperfection in the recording. She was included in their rounds of laughter and Margaret returned to the room with her own records. “My Baby Must Be a Magician” by the Marvelettes, but Cam’s friends didn’t like these black singers, and she wasn’t allowed to play them.
When he was alone, Cam invited her into the den to play her records for him. Margaret liked what was called the Philadelphia Wall of Sound. She lip-synced to Ronnie Spector records, lifting her arms over her head in a shaky backstroke, imitating the way she saw it done on dance shows like “Bandstand” and “Summertime at the Pier.” She raised her arm, pointed to the left and right, turned her hip out, and sidestepped forward and back. She liked dancing in front of Cam. He was embarrassed but settled back; he started to smile at her. He looked at her face, looked her right in the eyes and never let his gaze drift over her body. She knew she was testing him somehow; it was a pleasant sensation. She liked her momentary height over him, her control. They understood it, the exchange. When it became too great, Margaret stopped dancing, stopped the record, and turned around. She closed the lid of the Zenith and sat down on it to face him.
II
Cam finished high school when he was just sixteen. Margaret had two years more. Cam spent half a year skulking around. After wrecking a car, he went to Fort Dix with a letter from family court explaining his young age and his need for productive rehabilitation through his participation in war games and three-day marches. From Fort Dix he was sent to Korea. The army was sweeping up after Korea while the next war in Asia was just starting. Already, the topographers were drawing up some preliminary blueprints of the Vietnamese jungles. Cam had a rare blood type, AB Negative, and this mix, according to the army physicians, was a hematological find. Part of his routine was to give pints for operations and emergencies in the refugee camps. The army was supposed to feed him some extra beef, but Elizabeth sent over some desiccated liver and tins of chocolate kisses to make up for the foul-tasting supplement.
Margaret wrote to him using the blue Crane stationery, and he sent her postcards that showed near-naked Oriental girls or a city’s narrow streets crowded with surreys and bicycles. Margaret imagined Cam in a rich landscape with bamboo thickets and white egrets, but he wrote and told her it was wet and freezing cold. She wrote to Cam, and his cards came back sometimes three at a time. The cards were delayed in the government mail pouch, her father would tell her. “No soldier has time to write three cards in one day.” Margaret didn’t know whether her father seemed uncertain of Cam’s commitment to the service or if he was jealous of Cam’s commitment to her. She shrugged. She excused her father, figuring that his mistrust of people was a trait that developed when he was orphaned at the age of five. At that age, someone’s trust is like a custard; it either firms up in its proper mold, it sets, or it turns out thin and hard to predict.
Cam sent her a jewelry box. The cardboard package showed Oriental lettering; it must have said Fragile in that strange ladder of signs. The jewelry box was glossy with horses galloping over the lid. The horses floated over the landscape of black enamel, legs extended, eyes white, nostrils flared open like lotus petals.
After she received the jewelry box, Margaret wrote to Cam and asked him what it was like to give blood all the time, to give it to the Koreans. She told him she knew that he didn’t mind not giving it to white people, but did it make him tired? Was he eating the desiccated liver, she asked him, because it looked disgusting.
He wrote back and told her that he put the liver in gelatin capsules and swallowed it that way, but he didn’t do it often. She should tell Elizabeth not to send any more. He said he was sick for the last week with fever sores all over his lips because they weren’t waiting enough time before taking more of his blood, and he was still doing the regular work there without any more rest than the others. He was getting pretty sick of being a volunteer donor.
She wrote back and told him to put his foot down. She said she hated getting fever blisters; they looked like leprosy. Cam told her that all the grunts had fever blisters, rashes, funguses, anything that takes hold of the flesh overnight after drilling all day or working too hard. It was better to be in Korea giving a pint now and then than to be leaking it yourself somewhere in a war. He was satisfied to be where he was, and he wasn’t about to complain over his fever sores or his collapsed vein. They had been using the same vein until it got too bruised; now they were sticking him somewhere else. At least his arm wasn’t sore from junk; some of the fellows were developing addictions, but he wasn’t. He told her that some troops were sent to Vietnam to retrieve equipment for the French and two men were killed. Margaret wondered when the army would decide that Cam’s blood was more useful circulating in his own veins, circling like a target.
It turned out otherwise. Cam contracted hepatitis. After two weeks in an infirmary in Manila, he was discharged with honors. He served eighteen months and was freed. They didn’t wait for him to get better and he came back to Wilmington looking yellow as butterscotch. He landed at Dover, Delaware, where they o
ften send U.S. casualties. The place was empty. Cam told Margaret if he was lucky only once in his life, this was it.
Cam slept for two days because of jet lag and because his condition left him weak. Margaret put a pitcher of ice water beside his bed in case he woke up and was thirsty. It was the old blue pitcher, its shiny glaze crackled with dark veins. She set the ice water down and stared at the pitcher as Cam slept; its round shape mimicked an eight ball. She stared at the pitcher until it started to sweat.
Elizabeth didn’t give Cam more than a couple of weeks before starting a family discussion about his working at Rice Industrial Supply. Cam wasn’t interested. “Think of the benefits,” Elizabeth said. “You can be a partner one day, then who knows, when Richard retires, you can be king!”
“King of material-handling equipment? King of the double nylon fan belts, of planetary winches? King of worm-drive hose clamps—”
“Why won’t you work with your father?” Elizabeth asked him.
“I would, I would work for my father,” he said. “Tell me, what was his line? Modeling? Do I have the profile for that? Or what was it, Prince Valiant Escorts? An escort service of some kind, if I recall, for women of all shapes and sizes. Isn’t that right?”
Elizabeth touched her hair. She plucked an auburn wave and let it bounce to her cheek again. She lifted her necklace, running her thumb under the chain. She tugged the amethyst left and right, then let the pendant fall against her blouse. She walked out of the room.
Cam refused to work in the family company and moved out of the house into an apartment. Margaret helped him arrange his things in boxes; she took two thick towels and the pin-striped sheets from the closet and stuffed them in his duffel. There was an ID tag on the duffel that said Cameron Goddard instead of Cameron Rice.
“You really did this, you changed your name?”
“I didn’t change it, that is my real name.”
“I know. But you never even knew your father, you never even met the guy.”