by Maria Flook
When Margaret went into the house, Cam took her aside. He told her, if she wanted to, they could go once again to Ocean City. He would try to reach that fellow and make an official appointment to test the Donzi. His face looked electric, newly chiseled with fresh concerns. His eyes were black, dilated, the pale gold of the iris dissolved except for a tiny flashing band. He pleaded with her. “We need a small vacation,” he told her, “we deserve it. A little cruise is the thing,” he was telling her.
“I have to go home,” she said.
He looked puzzled. He looked as if he didn’t believe she existed outside of their forty-eight-hour triangle. “I guess it doesn’t matter. It had nothing to do with you in the first place,” he said.
She didn’t want to be dismissed like this. Didn’t he see that she felt awful abandoning her post? Wasn’t she the navigator, folding the map into a manageable square? Didn’t she light Cam’s cigarettes, taking the first drag, the tiny pink lines of her lipstick smearing the filter? Didn’t she punch the radio, finding all the chart-busters? Now it was over? She still felt the vibration of the Duster and a high ringing in her ears like the imperceptible seismic shuddering that makes an entire anthill pick up and go elsewhere to start over. Whatever it was, she insisted to Cam that her participation in his search must have had an effect on the outcome.
She embraced Cam. The hug’s brief force seemed simultaneously felt and delivered. She rubbed her eyes, rotated the hooded spheres beneath her fingertips. She was suddenly weighted with the knowledge that all of experience must be memorized. She would always have to recall the truth and also what the truth summoned, what the truth seeded in her imagination. There’s just no end to it. All of childhood, imperishable, and now this. The truth, the existing truth as it must be recognized, and years from now, rebirthed, reinvented.
She sat against the edge of the drop-leaf table made of glossy wormwood. She fingered the gullies, the tiny mars and spirals that gave the wood its value, its beauty. She wanted to ask Elizabeth if it really was worms, if worms designed these golden planes.
There was the doorbell. Margaret went to the front hall and tugged the heavy door. It was a woman in a breathtaking Kelly-green suit. Her hair was dark auburn and fell in several loose crests. It was beautiful, like Elizabeth’s hair had once been, and Elizabeth took notice of it. The woman was the social worker Cam had mentioned. She wanted to speak with Cam, and Margaret went to get him. Cam walked the woman out to the front lawn and they stood on the flagstone path. She was explaining something to Cam, and he listened, his head cocked in hopeful submission. The woman was trying to help him keep his son, and Margaret thought the woman looked strong, efficient, like she might be able to do it. Then Margaret wondered if maybe this person was using Cam’s difficult case to further her career. Margaret wondered about this woman. Her suit the color of the healthy turf.
When the social worker departed, Cam stood alone on the flagstone sidewalk. He waited for her car to drive away and he lifted his arm, keeping it high; then he let it drop back. Next, it was Darcy pulling up in Cam’s Bronco. She edged onto the lawn’s velvet shoulder, but Richard was around in back and couldn’t tell her to roll it back onto the road. She walked into the house, calling the name of her boy. Laurence ran into the room, leaped up, falling against her. Margaret noticed that Darcy did not bend her knees, she did not meet her boy’s wild greeting. She stooped just slightly, her kisses hardly fell upon the boy’s hair. Darcy was dressed up; her skirt was pale pink pleats that belled at the knee like an inverted flower. She had her hair in a tight spiral with a tortoiseshell clasp. Her lips were edged with cinnamon liner, her eyes accented in ascending hues of smoky coral. Cam went forward and Darcy lifted herself up on the ball of one foot to reach his lips. The kiss was a public gesture, neither stiff nor friendly. Darcy was making a claim without promising any further contract.
Margaret was filthy, the hair at her temple burned into a scruff; the rest was knotted from riding with the Duster’s windows wide open. The two women nodded at one another in an agreement to remain uncompromised by conversation. They didn’t share small talk. After a moment, Darcy asked, “Are you wearing my shoes?” She knew perfectly well they belonged to her. Margaret tugged the pumps away from her feet, but she didn’t hand them to Darcy, she arranged them on the piano, and Darcy collected them.
“The Duster has new tires,” Cam said.
“New tires? Why?”
“They’re radials,” Cam told her.
“That’s bizarre.” Darcy was frowning. “Why the new tires?”
“A second thing, it’s going to need some body work. I’ll take care of it, don’t worry. We backed into something,” Cam said.
“I didn’t think you could go anywhere and not smash something. Well, as long as you pay for it.” Darcy was taking Laurence out the door, she was taking him home. She didn’t even notice the cut on his forehead. Then they saw Darcy was taking the Duster. She left Cam’s Ford sinking into the sod and she walked behind the house to get the other car.
“Have you got anything left in the Duster?” Cam asked Margaret.
“No, I have everything.”
Cam said, “You have those little boxes?”
“Celeste has those.” They might have been thinking of Tracy’s cousin Franklin, or the storefront with ELITE CHICKS. It might have been something different for the two of them, but together they enriched their private memory in one synchronic, scary sensation.
The wall phone jangled in the kitchen and Margaret went in and lifted the receiver. She recognized Tracy’s tenor. He was singing. He was singing some Bob Dylan lyrics:
“Down along the cove, I saw my true love coming my way …”
“You need help,” she told him. She turned the receiver upside down as she spoke into the mouthpiece. She tried to tell him one or two of her thoughts, but the Dylan song was still coming from the inverted speaker.
“Do what you have to do,” she told him. “Go right ahead. Sing. We’re not together. We can’t live together.”
Elizabeth was standing in the kitchen doorway. “Who is that? Is that Lewis?” she said. Her color drifted, whitened. She walked out of the kitchen, taking careful steps as if she were crossing a glass bridge. Margaret hung up the telephone and went into the living room. Cam was leaning forward on the piano bench, ripping loose bits of cat hair from the carpet.
“The beat goes on,” Cam said.
“I think he cracked up. Tracy has lost it. He might need some money to get back to Providence. He might be stuck out there without any cash,” she said. “I didn’t inquire.”
“Sometimes it’s better not to find out,” Cam said. “Isn’t that right?”
Margaret said Cam was right.
Elizabeth came into the room. She was wearing some lounge pajamas, something crazy. Her shoulders were bare and gleaming with dots of baby oil she hadn’t worked in. The gown was translucent and gauzy, it wrapped around her torso and flared at her ankles. The fabric was draped in taut folds, flecked with silver threads. She looked like the angel of a burn victim. “What are you wearing? What the hell is that?” Margaret said.
Cam touched his fingertips to his temples, he rubbed the bridge of his nose; he couldn’t look at his mother without massaging his face.
“Well, is he going to show up here?” Elizabeth said.
“Who?”
“Cam’s attention span is that of a flea,” she told Margaret. “I’m talking about Lewis, of course. Is Lewis going to grace us with his presence?”
“Your Better Half took the bus back to Chicago,” Cam told her.
“Lewis took the bus?” Elizabeth said. She looked pleased that Lewis wasn’t going to show up. “Lewis got on a bus? Really? He used to jet around, he did everything top shelf.”
“Circumstances change.”
“He’s down and out?”
Cam declined to answer.
“He doesn’t have to rehash this with me? Wasn’t that the whole point? H
e gets off scot-free—” Elizabeth moved to the picture window and stared at Richard smoothing the flecked marl at the edge of the terrace.
“You tell me,” Cam said, “what did he get away with? Oh, I wanted to thank you, thanks for removing that picture from the chandelier.”
“That picture?” Elizabeth looked confused.
“That embryo,” Cam said.
“Just an innocent victim,” Elizabeth told Cam.
“Who’s innocent?” he asked her.
“We are. Each one of us, innocent. To begin with.”
Margaret was disappointed. She was following what Elizabeth said; it sounded as if she was on the verge of soothing them, she was their mother. Then Elizabeth turned back; she had made a qualification; she told them, “Innocent. To begin with.” What could they say for themselves now? She had been sure Elizabeth was trying to evoke a sense of hope, but it wasn’t to be. It was like those days when they coasted downhill. They leaned forward on the vinyl car seat, they were refreshed by the new possibility. With help from the law of averages, it might turn out in their favor, they might glide all the way to the end. In that bright plunge, Margaret’s bangs lifted off her forehead, but then the vehicle stalled, her hair washed back over her eyes.
Elizabeth was laughing. She told Cam he was acting foolish. He was making a production. How did she deserve such a moody child? How did he get like that?
“Just born with it,” he told her.
“That’s what I mean. Why, though? It rubs off on people. Why make me suffer?”
Cam said, “Don’t ask me. The child is father to the man?”
“That’s stupid—that’s just an old saying.” She prowled back and forth on the carpet; her peculiar attire was beginning to unravel. One veil drifted behind her, catching on a chair. She tugged it free and fingered the folds at her waist, then smoothed them flat with the heel of her hand. She said, “That’s just it, I’m asking you a question. Who’s torturing who? Can either of you tell me that?”
Cam stood up; his foot snagged one leg of the piano bench and it toppled over. Yellowed songbooks and brittle leaves of sheet music fanned across the carpet. Everyone’s eyes searched for the bold print of the song titles, the familiar tunes, any of the old favorites. There was nothing. Margaret saw the parallel lines of the staffs, the dark, singular whole notes or ones in wild clusters.
Richard came into the room and told Cam that while he was away there had been a problem over at the apartments. The Edgemoor plant had released corrosive ash and the vapor had blistered the paint on the cars in the tenant parking lot. Du Pont was looking into it, but Cam had to take statements and get the vehicle ID numbers from the dash plates for a written report.
Margaret said her good-byes to her parents and she went with Cam to the apartments. From there, he would drive her and Celeste to the train. Cam tried to tell her what to do about Tracy. She asked him to whisper because of Celeste. Cam instructed her, “Put all of Tracy’s belongings in boxes and put the boxes out on the sidewalk. Go down to the police and fill out a written complaint. They’ll put somebody on it. Don’t open the door without the chain.”
At the apartment complex, they looked at the damage to the cars, tiny veins and nickel-sized webs where the paint had crackled. The corrosive discharge from the chimney stacks had been checked, the vapor had cleared. There was nothing to worry about, but Cam thought he should test the water in the pool to see if the pH was altered. Cam took water samples and measured chemicals from his kit. The water was fine. Celeste wanted to swim and Margaret decided she would like it, too.
It was the three of them. The twilight made the water murky, and Cam switched on the underwater floodlights at either end of the pool. The submerged beams swelled in a golden crisscross as Celeste nosed back and forth on a Styro paddleboard. The water was silky; its surface tension seemed peculiar. Cam said that it was ironic, but there might have been softening agents in the industrial fallout. Margaret swam laps for a few minutes and halted at one end. She studied the skyline. Stars collected like froth, sudsing the horizon. The night was clean. Cam called to her from the opposite side. He was going to swim the whole length underwater and touch the floodlight. One breath. He sank below the gutterline and pushed off the tile. He followed the glassy funnel, glided toward Margaret. He drifted to the finish, into its phosphoric lens.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maria Flook has published two collections of poetry. She teaches writing and lives in Truro, Massachusetts.