by Tom McNeal
Judith said, “Precious is the word I’d use.”
Camille’s expression, already bright, brightened to something like glee, and Judith realized too late that her sour response was exactly what Camille had hoped for.
Judith—she knew she shouldn’t—said, “Pity the poor Joe who marries you, Camillikins.”
Camille held her smile even though she hated the term Camillikins. Malcolm slipped Judith a look. He’d brought up this kind of talk when he and Judith had made their single foray into family counseling. Malcolm and the counselor agreed that remarks of this type could weaken Camille’s self-esteem. Judith said that was fine by her. Camille had oodles of self-esteem. What was in short supply were the odd little commodities like empathy, charity, and humility. Malcolm and the counselor had fallen momentarily quiet, then begun to talk as if she weren’t there. Judith hadn’t gone back.
Camille hugged a pillow to her chest. “This bed is titanic. What if for my birthday I just had two or three friends for a sleepover? We could all sleep sideways on the bed, like we did at Lauren Hartman’s.”
Malcolm smiled. “Lauren Hartman! Lauren Hartman! Must we always play catch-up with Lauren Hartman?”
“Yes!” Camille said, and dropped ten years from her voice. “Catch-up and mustard, too!”
This was a game they played, an exclusive little tea party of father-daughter silliness (and of denial, too—Camille had been wearing bras for four years now, and a few months back Judith had discovered several lacy, vividly colored thongs tucked into a deep corner of the bottom drawer of the chiffonier), and Camille and Malcolm laughed easily, lost in each other’s needs, hers to acquire, his to provide. It was no surprise when he said, “Okay, then, Miss Pie, but the maximum guest list is two.”
Camille’s smile dried up. She seemed capable of crying. “What about Torry?”
The barest moment passed before Malcolm complied. “Okay, three. But that’s it—three, tops.”
Camille plopped back into the fluff of her duvet, thinking.
Judith asked something she’d been wondering since entering the room. “So what did you do with the bird’s-eye maple?”
Malcolm nodded toward the window.
Judith pulled back the French lace curtains. Down at the edge of the bricked pool deck, her father’s old furniture stood clustered in the glaring sun, the bed’s rails, headboard, and footboard sandwiched between the backsides of the commode and chiffonier.
It was not as if something snapped inside Judith. It was more an unfolding, a slow blossoming of resentment. She couldn’t have expected more from Camille, Judith understood that, but what about Malcolm? He was a grown-up, wasn’t he? If he needed to present this whole deal as a fait accompli, couldn’t he soften the fait a little? The unmatched oak stuff they had in the guest room was no better than average, for example—why not put the maple in there and set the oak out to warp and split in the freaking sun?
Though, when she thought of it, that would’ve annoyed her, too, shunting the maple to the guest room, where every day it would be eyed for replacement by Malcolm.
Judith took in three short staggered breaths, which, together, deeply filled her lungs. She held the air a moment before slowly releasing it, and then she repeated the process. This was the only lesson learned in her Lamaze class that she regarded as worthwhile.
When finally she spoke, she was surprised at how calm she sounded. “I’m afraid they’ll blister out there,” she said.
“You’re right,” Malcolm said, “they might. I’ll cover them up.” Within the hour—before he set off in his whites to the tennis club—he’d neatly wrapped the furniture with old bedsheets and bound them at the base with green gardening twine, tied off with a bow knot, a knot that Willy Blunt, long ago, seeing it used by a traveler trying to fasten a tarp, had stepped in to replace with something sounder.
2
Judith’s father had been a quiet man with a great ruddy slablike face. His nose, which Judith as a child had loved to kiss, was crooked at the spine and flat at the nostrils—the nose, she would think later, of a brawler, though to her knowledge he’d never been in a single fight. He’d been raised by his mother in San Francisco and then, after her death, by his grandparents in northwest Nebraska. At Rufus Sage High School, Howard Toomey was reclusive, capable, and stolid, qualities that kept schoolmates and even teachers at a respectful distance. He was Howard. No one called him Howie. He read books all the time, even when walking. He rarely spoke, but when he did, it was with a deep and resonant voice that attracted the attention of the school’s musical director, whose invitations to join the school choral group Howard stiffly dismissed. He didn’t play sports or join clubs, and when he won a scholarship to study literature at the University of Chicago, there was almost no one in Rufus Sage, other than his grandparents, to whom he was obliged to speak a parting good-bye. While doing graduate work in eighteenth-century English literature, he paid his bills by taking assistantships and found he had an aptitude for teaching. In the stillness of the classroom he would recite long passages of poetry and prose in a baritone so musical it afforded even listless students a glimpse into their own untapped capacities for exaltation. Girls sometimes responded extravagantly; one of them, Judith’s mother, married him.
When Kathleen Peebles walked into Howard Toomey’s class on “The Age of Johnson,” she was a Delta Gamma girl wearing a long pleated plaid dress, white bucks, and a V-neck sweater, with fresh copies of Clarissa and Tom Jones held against her chest. Judith has a black-and-white photograph of her mother six months later, on her wedding day, astride a motorcycle behind Judith’s father. He is wearing work boots, dark denim pants, and a plaid flannel shirt over a black turtleneck. His flattened nose is seen in profile, but he doesn’t seem to be holding a pose—he’s simply looking forward, in the direction the motorcycle will go, and he seems anxious to be done with the silliness. Judith’s mother, however, seems to want to hold on to the moment. She stares into the camera from behind dark glasses. She’s wearing a tight light-colored sweater and black capris. Her chin tips up; her head is wrapped in a scarf that in the photograph appears merely dark but which Judith, because she now owns it, knows to be wine red. Her mother looks so unlike her mother that Judith has always simply taken her identification as a matter of faith. “That’s you trying to look like Audrey Hepburn,” she said one night to her mother when, as adults, they came upon this picture while going through her father’s boxes of old photographs. Her mother, drinking Pimm’s Cups, said, “Unless it’s Audrey Hepburn trying to look like me.”
Premaritally the relationship between Judith’s parents had been ardent and turbulent, but the ensuing marriage turned gradually sullen. Judith’s father never spoke of its disintegration—it wasn’t his nature—but Judith’s mother, by then already collecting grim metaphors for marriage in general, offered various pronouncements specific to her own failed attempt.
“Your father seemed happiest living in rooms the rest of us weren’t permitted to enter,” she said.
And: “Your father was a strict monogamist, until the second drink.”
She also said, with an unhappy smile, “Few marriages are presented with an actual crossroads.”
She referred to a two-way stop in Dade County, Florida, where Judith and her parents were vacationing one summer with another couple. Dale Irwin was a comp. lit. man in Howard Toomey’s department at Middlebury College in Vermont; his wife, Vanessa, was a nurse. The Irwins, like the Toomeys, had a single child, a girl less than a year older than Judith, who was then thirteen. This was the families’ second shared vacation, and to this point it had been as pleasant as the first. Among the group there was an easy compatibility that, for the adults anyhow, took a mildly frisky turn after 5 P.M., when Dale Irwin began blending rum, ice, and fruit nectars in the stainless steel blender he’d packed for just this purpose. When he presented his concoctions in tall beading glasses, he used a rough approximation of John Wayne’s voice to say, “Try th
is libation on for size.” He made separate rum-free drinks for the girls, whom he addressed, again John Wayne–style, as little ladies.
Toward the end of the week, the couples left the girls home with pizza and the motel television so they could have an adults’ night out. The evening ran late. After dinner at an oceanside restaurant, they took the tip of a busboy and went to a remote roadhouse named Lefevre’s. The two couples danced and drank and stayed longer than they intended. As the evening wore on, allegiances among the couples blurred. A little before 2 A.M., Howard Toomey was driving them all home along the dark two-lane highway. His wife was on the front seat, leaning against her door, staring at him. The Irwins sat in silence at opposite sides of the back seat. An unlighted crossroads presented itself. Howard Toomey swung the car abruptly left. In the sweep of their headlights he saw a car bearing down on them with its headlights dark. He tried to break off the turn, but the tires struck something and wrenched the steering wheel from his hands. The car lurched across the narrow shoulder and down an embankment before a glancing collision with a banyan tree. Some seconds passed. From the back seat, Vanessa Irwin said, “Are we all right?” Judith’s mother wanted to say yes, because this was what she wanted to believe, but she couldn’t make a voice. She was also surprised that her eyes were closed. It seemed now that she couldn’t open them, no matter what she did, and when finally she managed to part them slightly, she saw her husband with his head slammed into the steering wheel, looking as dead as could be. Blood slid from his forehead and covered his face. Judith’s mother, pushing herself away from him, spilled out of the car and dislocated her shoulder on the hard ground.
This, it turned out, would be the most serious injury incurred in the accident. Howard Toomey was not dead, or even seriously hurt. Vanessa Irwin expertly stanched the blood while Dale Irwin and Judith’s mother stood a distance apart, watching. Judith’s father, dazed but not incoherent, said, “What happened to the other car?” and after the other three exchanged blank looks, Vanessa Irwin said, “What other car?” The vertical gash running down the left side of Howard Toomey’s forehead was bloody but shallow. At the local emergency room, it was stitched and bandaged. It would knit, the doctor told him, but scarring was inevitable.
When Judith’s parents returned to the motel, her father’s forehead was bandaged and her mother’s left shoulder, manipulated back into place after an injection of Novocain, was supported by a sling. The Irwins were tense but unhurt, which created for Judith the sense that there had been a fight, which her parents had lost. This impression was reinforced when the Irwins, tight-lipped, hurried their daughter off to their own room, where they packed and departed for Vermont, the early-morning hour notwithstanding.
“What happened?” Judith said.
Her mother told her to ask her father.
“We had a minor accident,” her father said, and that’s all he would say.
They returned home, but for Judith’s parents, it was as if the accident had caused in their marriage a decisive shift in its weights and ballast—it lost its precarious equilibrium. Her father didn’t even look the same. The scar ran vertically from his hairline toward his left eye and caused a bald divide in his left eyebrow.
One morning after he walked out the door for work, Judith’s mother rinsed out her coffee cup, set it into the drainer, and said, “Glenda says she can’t look at his face anymore. She says it’s like a slashed painting.” Glenda lived three doors down and was her mother’s afternoon coffee friend.
Judith didn’t know what she thought about the scar, except that she’d begun hardly to see it.
Judith’s mother said, “I think Glenda’s wrong, though. She thinks it defaced the picture. I think it just completed it. He was always scarred—now it just shows.”
“I don’t get it,” Judith said.
Her mother looked out the kitchen window. “No, I suppose not.” Then, after a moment: “You know what marriage is like?”
Judith said nothing—these questions had become as stifling to her as knock-knock jokes—but her mother went on anyway. “It’s like picking the place you’re going to live for the next fifty years by using a wall map, a blindfold, and what you really, truly, deeply believe is your lucky dart.”
Sullenly Judith said, “I don’t believe I have a lucky dart,” and her mother cast an unhappy smile her way and said, “You will, though.”
Judith’s parents had separated the summer she was fourteen, more or less beginning with the June afternoon her father came into the living room, sat down in the overstuffed floral armchair that was his favorite, and said he’d been offered a position at a state teachers’ college in Rufus Sage, Nebraska.
“Nebraska?” her mother had said.
Judith was in the room at the time. Her father had smiled. “It sneaks up on you,” he said, and her mother said, “So do most kinds of cancer.”
“You’ll like it,” he said. He let his eyes fall on Judith. “We’ll all like it.”
Judith’s mother gazed out the window with what Judith thought of as her Elsewhere Look. Her mother often sang to herself while washing or drying dishes. When she stopped singing to stare out the window was when the Elsewhere Look would appear.
“Kathleen?”
When Judith’s mother turned and spoke, her voice had a chill in it. “I thought you were just using this interview as a way to revisit the cheerless site of your cheerless youth.”
“I thought so, too,” her father said.
When he didn’t elaborate, Judith’s mother said, “Does this have anything to do with the house?”
The house was one that his grandparents had owned and, upon their death, left to him. It stood on a good-sized residential lot in town. Judith’s mother had never seen the house, but when he inherited it she’d shuffled through a few photographs of the property and seen a tallish blockish house painted bright yellow and trimmed in a Kelly green that made her laugh. “Good taste takes a holiday,” she’d said good-naturedly. “How soon can you sell?”
He hadn’t sold, though. He’d kept and rented it, and now, on this June afternoon, sitting forward in his floral armchair, he said, “The renters moved out last month, so yes, that adds an element of convenience, but no, that’s not why we’d be going.”
Judith’s mother gave him another severe look and left the room, but a few seconds later she abruptly returned and said, “If you take that job, Howard, Judith and I are not going with you.”
Before her mother’s sentence was complete, her father’s gaze had begun turning toward Judith. Their eyes met for an instant, then his slid beyond her and he did something characteristic. He brought his fingertips together in front of his face, rested his chin on the joined thumbs, and set his joined fingers gently against his lips. It was his habitual attitude of contemplation, and though to a younger Judith it had suggested silent prayer, she now thought of it as the cage where he kept his thoughts locked.
And so he had gone to Nebraska, but Judith heard, or overheard, no talk of divorce, and there was no separation of goods (her father packed only a few cardboard boxes of clothes and books in the trunk of the Bonneville before leaving). These observations allowed Judith to view the change as temporary. Still, it was during these months that she began to plan her own life, how it might be constructed, of what kind of job, of what kind of house, and of what kind of husband, if any at all.
In her father’s absence, Judith’s daily routine evolved in unsettling ways. Meals were more haphazard; the house was a mess; bills lay unopened on bookcases and bathroom cabinets. For fourteen-year-old Judith, that her mother seemed happier didn’t count for much. The telephone was intermittently out of service, and if Judith and her friends came to the house after school and found that Central Vermont Public Service had cut off the electricity, the only thing more mortifying to Judith than the unpaid bill was her mother’s cheerful adaptation to it: as she lighted candles and fixed them in melted wax on pottery saucers, she would be chattering on ab
out how, except for washing machines and possibly stereos, we’d all be better off without electricity anyway. Her mother was enthusiastically shedding her former life. She took a part-time job waitressing at the Satellite Coffee Shop and enrolled in an evening drama class, and when Judith and her friends exchanged their skirt-blouse-and-sweater combinations for miniskirts and tights, or T-shirts and thrift-shop Levi’s, her mother began borrowing Judith’s clothes. She let her hair grow long and straight as a folksinger’s, and that spring, as the Vermont winter finally gave way, she stopped wearing hose and bras.
Judith had seen boys ogle her mother, and even wait to get one of her tables at the Satellite and leave twenty percent tips, and girls with whom Judith wanted to be friends—girls whose elevated status allowed them to look sportively upon girls like Judith and their mothers—were happy to report what boys might say about her. Judith laughed and pretended amusement, but she fooled no one. The stories kept coming, and her resentment swelled.
One day Judith approached a boy named Mack Stanton in the school cafeteria. Her body felt at once burnt and brittle. Mack Stanton was sitting among friends when Judith walked up and said, “So, where would your hands have to be at the time?”
Mack Stanton was known as a cool customer. He gave her a quizzical look and said, “Hold on, now. Where would what have to be when?”
Judith said, “You told Marjorie Williams you could get a hard-on just thinking about my mother, and when I heard that, I wondered where exactly your hands would have to be at the time.”
The other boys at the table were suddenly one in their expectant grins. They looked at Mack Stanton, who tore a ragged section from his sandwich and popped it into his mouth. “Look,” he said mildly, “this is the kind of thing that ought to be discussed in private, don’t you think? Besides, it was, you know, kind of a compliment. I didn’t mean anything by it.”