“Uh, Dad,” Cassie had said when, the week before her birthday, Pete still hadn’t mentioned any plans. “For my birthday, maybe you don’t need to be a clown this year.”
“Birthday? Your birthday’s already?” He looked bewildered, lost.
“Yeah. You forgot?” Cassie shot a worried look at Lorena, who bit her lip in guilt. She had forgotten, too.
“No. No.” He smiled weakly. “You don’t want the clown?”
“I’m too old for a clown, Dad.”
“Sure you are.” He drew her close to him in an awkward gesture. “Too old,” he had said in a faraway voice. “You’re too old now for a clown.”
So here they are—mostly kids except for Delia and Molly’s dad, Max, who walked Molly here and then stayed—standing around the barbecue pit in the shelter on the beach, eating cold hot dogs and birthday cake as the wind kicks up sand all around them.
Pete’s a little drunk from the several bottles of beer he’s downed. He’s in charge, bought the weenies, bought the drinks, fixed the beans. Lorena baked the cake. What’s left of it after the starved guests demolished it is a few crumbs and eleven burned candles embedded in a smear of blue-and-white icing. Cassie huddles with Molly and a couple of girlfriends, giggling over something.
Lorena has invited Delia to keep her company and they sit, heads together at a picnic table, whispering like schoolgirls. Lorena ignores Pete when he raises his bottle in their direction and slurs, “Look at her over there, sipping grape Nehi like it was champagne, so dainty with that little pinkie of hers raised high.” He takes a swig of beer.
Lorena is indeed drinking a grape Nehi, holding the sweating purple bottle right at the spot where her breasts disappear into her off-the-shoulder blouse, a peasant thing with smocking and a red drawstring. She’s wearing shorts. Her skin is the color of iodine. Her eyes are ringed in white where her sunglasses had perched when she baked in the sun at the Chamberlin. She tilts her head as Max shambles up to say hello.
“Well, hi, Lorena,” he says, “and who’s your friend there?”
“This here,” she says, “is Delia. Delia, Max Finkelstein. He’s an artist. He’s Cassie’s best friend Molly’s father. Cassie says he’s got paintings in his house that’ll be in a museum someday, they’re so covered with paint. Just gobs and gobs of it, right out of the tube, she says, just squishes it out, bam, right on the canvas.”
“That right?” says Delia. “I paint, too. Got me one of those
Picture Craft kits where you paint by number. I did mountains the other day, hung it in my living room, makes the whole place just sparkle, it’s so pretty.” She reaches up to retie the scarf holding back her tumble of auburn curls, reaches down to tug at the bottom of her shorts.
“I just started another one called Twin Scotties,” Delia says. “It’s dogs. For my bedroom.” Then she gives Max her full display of big and brilliant teeth, a smile so startling that it still amazes Lorena that so many teeth could fit behind those heart-shaped little lips.
It’s moments like this that Lorena wishes Delia would disappear. Sure, she’s her best friend and all, got a good heart, a soft spot for kids, and you got to admire her standing up to Farley. She does have her good points. Most times it’s like it was in high school, hours of gossip, chatter about hair, makeup, men. But times like now, Lorena feels that talking to Delia is like eating cotton candy. There’s nothing there but air.
“Max doesn’t paint by numbers,” Lorena says. “He’s a real artist.”
Delia lifts her eyebrows. “Well,” she says. “I’m going to enroll in the Famous Artists School. What kind of art do you do?”
Max plunks his big body in its paint-spattered dungarees down on top of the picnic table, rests his sandal-shod feet on the seat, drains the last of his Ballantine. “What I do,” he says, “is relate the pigment directly to the canvas so there is no intermediary such as a brush. The shock of pure color. The existential experience of the moment of creation. I feel that I am on the brink, the cutting edge, of the next direction art is taking, a free fall from the figurative into the abstract.
“So why am I in Newport News instead of New York? you may ask. A legitimate question. I need to work in isolation. I need anonymity to develop my skills. I need this job at the shipyard or I won’t be able to pay the rent.
“But I’m not complaining,” he says, shifting his bulk backward as the picnic table begins to tip beneath his weight. “I like it here.
I grew up on the rough-and-tumble streets of the Bronx, the asphalt jungle. Knives and shivs. Stickball in the street. I was a delivery boy in the Fulton fish market while I went to CCNY. That smell. It never leaves you. This beach here on a hot summer day at low tide, it reminds me of my youth, fish wrapped in newspaper, guts in the gutter, that silvery sheen on your hands you can’t wash off for days. Call me sentimental, but when you carry that with you, home is home wherever you are.”
“I think I’ll get a beer,” says Delia.
“So,” says Max, sliding into Delia’s seat when she leaves. “Your Cassie and my Molly are like Siamese twins these days, right?”
“Seems so,” says Lorena. “Molly’s a real … unusual girl. Sweet, too,” she adds, not wanting to indicate her discomfort with Molly’s precocious pubescence, or her worries that, thanks to Molly, Cassie was more familiar with sex than any eleven-year-old had any right to be. She declined to mention that she had walked into the kitchen while Molly was stretching one of Max’s rubbers over a cucumber to demonstrate for Cassie how it works. “Very sweet,” she repeats to Max.
“Cassie is quite unusual, too,” says Max. “They seem to be well matched.”
“How do you mean?” asks Lorena, wondering if Cassie was stretching rubbers over cucumbers, too.
“She says she watches some interesting shows on the test pattern,” he says with a chuckle.
Oh, God. She’s telling everyone. “She’s always had a good imagination,” Lorena says, hoping that will explain it all away.
“That’s good. That’s good,” says Max, nodding. “I always encourage imagination in children.” He pauses. “Have you ever thought that, well, maybe … she’s really seeing something there?”
“You mean, for real?”
He shrugs.
“No. Well, no. I mean, what is there to see?” Lorena wishes he would drop this subject. It makes her think about Aunt Lula again, Lula who swore she saw flying saucers, saw them with her own eyes, spinning like tops over Chicken In A Bucket while she was waiting for her bus across the street. Lula was so amazed, so transfixed, that she let that bus just pass her by. The next one didn’t come for fifteen minutes, so she sat on the bus bench and watched those saucers spin and swoop, watched their metallic incandescence dance across the sky. So clear was it, she said, she could see tiny green faces in the windows. And, she added, it wasn’t the first time.
Lorena doesn’t see any point in mentioning Aunt Lula to Max, although mention of a family defect might induce him to discourage Molly’s friendship with Cassie—something Lorena’s thought of herself since the cucumber-and-rubbers thing. But she rejects that option and tries to dismiss the subject with a laugh.
“Ha, ha,” she says. “Kids.”
But Max is not so easily dismissed. “The reason I mention it is that the other day when I asked her what other things she had seen besides the Los Angeles Dodgers win the pennant—”
“Um. Aren’t they from Brooklyn?” Lorena isn’t quite sure.
“Yes. Anyway, she very reluctantly shared some other things she had seen, all very curious. She thinks Ronald Reagan was elected president, and of course, he was just acting, as I told her, even though she insisted it wasn’t a movie.
“But when she told me about the Supreme Court’s decision on integration a week before it happened, it made me wonder, How could she know that?”
Lorena looks puzzled. “She told you about it before it was on TV?”
Max nods. “Intriguing, huh?”
Max runs his hand down his beard several times as if he’s petting a dog. “It makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it?” He looks intently at Lorena. “So. What do you think?”
Lorena doesn’t know what to think.
“WHADDAYA THINK?” DELLA is asking Lorena. “Should I drop him like a hot potato or give him another chance?” Lorena’s lying on her back in bed, twirling her finger around the phone cord while Delia’s latest saga pours through the black receiver cupped to her ear. Pete is downstairs watching the Roller Derby. The crowd’s cheers seep through the floorboards in a rumbling chorus.
“And, hey,” Delia says, “what’s with your friend Max? You two seemed pretty cozy there today. Kinda cute, that way he talks, fancy New York talk, although I sure don’t get what he was saying about fish and guts and stuff. What was he talking about?”
“Well …” Lorena hesitates. Ordinarily she tells Delia everything, but she’s embarrassed by what’s happened to Cassie, her obsession with the test pattern, her crazy talk. How did she get a kid like this? Lorena wonders. Maybe she had no business being a mother. She just doesn’t understand kids at all. Filled with remorse, she blurts out her problems to Delia.
“Max was talking about Cassie,” she confesses. “She’s been acting strange. I’m worried she’s gonna be like my aunt Lula.”
“Lula?” Delia asks. “Crazy Lula?”
“Well,” says Lorena. “I don’t know if I’d call her crazy.” Although she did.
“What’s going on with Cassie?”
“She’s seeing weird things. On the test pattern. Things that aren’t there.”
“Big deal. Kids make things up. Remember the stuff we used to make up? Like when we told everybody Miss Muncy’s fiancé died in the war?”
“We made that up?”
“Well, yeah.”
Lorena falls silent. She had thought it was true. Maybe she, too, was like Lula.
Lorena pictures Lula at her kitchen sink, cleaning up after one of her Sunday dinners so many years ago. Lula, her feathery wisps of hair frozen in place by an elastic-bound net, scrubbing a hopelessly burned pan with Brillo, pausing now and then to wave the rusty pad airily about her head as she spun one of her fantastic tales.
“Tell me about the flying saucer,” Lorena had said to Lula, wanting to believe. “Tell me again how you saw their green faces.”
“Well,” Lula had drawled. “Not much to tell. Just saw them clear as I’m looking at you right now. But then,” she added, “they never came back. And they promised they would.”
“They talked to you?”
She nodded. “In their own way.” She scrubbed vigorously for a minute, then said, “You know, things pop into my mind all the time. I don’t know where they come from. People tell me they’re not there, but it don’t matter because to me they’re real all the same.”
“How can you tell what’s real?”
“Well,” Lula said after a thoughtful pause, “true to tell, I can’t. Sometimes I don’t know what’s inside my head and what’s out. It all could be inside for all I know.” And then she had flashed her false teeth at Lorena in a blue-white grin.
“Hey,” Delia is asking into the phone. “You still there?”
“Huh? Oh yeah. I was just thinking.”
“Well, if you ask me, sometimes you think too much about what might happen, and don’t pay enough attention to what’s happening right now. I always say, unless thinking’s going to get you somewhere you wanna go, maybe it’s best not to do too much of that.”
Lorena thinks on that a moment. “I guess I do tend to worry a bone to death,” she agrees, and hangs up. Sometimes, she has to admit, Delia is really smarter than she looks.
* * *
“COMMIES,” PETE MUTTERS around a mouthful of peanuts. “Commies are everywhere.” Feet sprawled in a V on the coffee table, he glares at the TV and echoes the accusations spit through Roy Cohn’s curled lips at the army’s counsel. The camera pans over to Joe McCarthy, who smugly sneers his approval of his protege’s outburst. Pete is rooting for McCarthy as if the Army- McCarthy hearings were a football game. Lorena hasn’t chosen sides yet, although she thinks Joseph Welch is making the army’s side look pretty good.
“Close your eyes and just listen to him,” she tells Pete. “Doesn’t Welch sound like you think Abraham Lincoln must have sounded?”
“Now there’s a Commie for you.”
“Lincoln?” She always liked Lincoln, even if she was from the South.
“Well, he started it all.”
“Started what?”
“All this Commanism.”
Lorena frowns at the TV set. She doesn’t understand what it’s all about, “Commie” this, “Commie” that. She knows the Rosenbergs were Communists, that they gave A-bomb secrets to Russia, but she figures they were caught and executed, so that was that. But McCarthy said that Commies were everywhere in the government, even in the army. She wonders if Binky knew any Commies when he was in the army.
Until the hearings were on television, she didn’t follow politics much, just what she skimmed in the newspaper. All she knows is that it’s Eisenhower and the army against Senator McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and Herbert Hoover. But she’s not quite sure, now that she sees the actual people in front of her on the TV screen, which are the bad guys and which are the good. It was easier when somebody told you, like in a history book or the Bible. Then youcould just take their word for it. Seeing real people gets confusing. Like Hoover. He’s kind of cute in a Jimmy Cagney way, but he’s on McCarthy’s side, and McCarthy looks mean.
“I’ll tell you who else is a Commie,” Pete says, interrupting her musing.
She shrugs, not interested. If he thinks Lincoln was a Commie, he could name anybody.
“Max Finkelstein,” he says.
“Max?” She grabs the peanuts away from him. “You’re crazy.”
“Think about it. He’s an artist. A bo-hee-mian. From New York. I bet he believes in free love and all those Commie things. And,” he says, hammering his point home, “he’s Jewish.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Commies are always Jewish.”
“Roy Cohn’s Jewish.”
“Yeah, well,” Pete says, “he’s one a them good Jews. But most of ‘em are like the Rosenbergs.”
“Stalin wasn’t Jewish.”
“He was Russian. Over there, you don’t have to be Jewish to be a Commie.”
Lorena used to assume that everything Pete said was right, that he was smarter than she was because he was a man. But she’s beginning to realize that that made as much sense as saying Max was a Communist. Matter of fact, there were some times she didn’t even think Pete was as smart as she was.
She rattles the last peanut in the can, retrieves it, pops it into her mouth. “I like Max.”
“I bet you do,” Pete grumbles. “I saw him looking down your blouse at Cassie’s birthday party.”
“Oh, good grief,” she says, but she’s flattered anyway. Max was looking down her blouse? She hadn’t noticed. He was neuter in her mind, a fuzzy bear person whose physical appeal was more of an invitation to pat and nuzzle than to perform even the remotest of sexual acts. Now that Pete had said that, about Maxlooking down her blouse, his image momentarily took on a more erotic cast in Lorena’s mind. But the moment was fleeting. Max wasn’t her type.
The mention of Max swings her thoughts to Cassie. Uh-oh, she corrects herself, there I go again. Thinking. Like Delia said, if thinking’s not going to get you somewhere, it’s best not to do too much of it.
Still, she pictures the faraway look in Cassie’s eyes that she’s had since she was born. It still startles Lorena when Cassie stares at her as if she were looking at something beyond her. Well, Cassie’s just strange and that’s all there is to
it, all that wondering about colored people and stuff. It’s okay to wonder about those things, like you wonder if there’s life on other planets, or if Hitler is still alive, or if the Communists are going to take over the government. But some things are just the way they are and that’s the way they’ll always be.
“TURN IT OFF,” Pete is demanding as he waves his hands in front of his face. “I can’t look at him. Her.”
“What?” Lorena looks up from the Photoplay she picked up when the news came on. She glances at the TV. She sees a primly smiling woman wearing a head scarf over her blond hair. “What did she do?”
“It’s that … that guy who turned himself into a girl. Christine Jorgensen. Remember? He had this operation in Denmark where they …” Pete grimaces. “Well, you know. Operated. And now he’s this … Thing.”
“Oh, yeah. I wondered what happened to her.” Lorena studies the woman on the screen. She looks like a schoolteacher, heavy eyebrows lowered just slightly as if in admonition. Lorena wonders how she got her hair to make that little wave over her forehead. The voice-over is talking about the opening of Miss Jorgensen’s nightclub act, her operation, her new life. “She
doesn’t look like a Thing,” Lorena says. “She looks like a She.”
“Makes me sick.” Pete makes a throwing-up face.
“Why does Christine Jorgensen in a dress make you sick, when Milton Berle in a dress makes you laugh?”
“Jeezus, what a question.” He heaves himself up from the couch to rummage through the refrigerator. “We outta beer?” he calls from the kitchen.
She hears him clanging milk bottles and cans around in his search. There is beer, but she forgot to refrigerate it and it’s sitting beneath the sink, not his usual Ballantine but Hamm’s.
“I bought some,” she ventures. “I forgot to put it in the Frigidaire.”
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