Which was right after Uncle Ted had said something like “But they have the best engineers in the country up there, and all you have is your old tank mechanic army pal who never even went to college.”
In that moment of silence, everyone stopped talking and looked at Nana, especially Mama, who looked like something was hurting her feelings and maybe Nana could fix it.
Daddy was looking around and turning red.
Then Nana said, “Oh, Dick, you’re always getting on some crazy idea. Maybe you’re not as smart as you think you are.”
Daddy looked like he’d been slapped in the face.
Uncle Ted smiled, saying, “Those guys know what they are doing up there.”
“That is just plain stupid,” said Daddy.
“Oh, Dick . . .” Mama said.
Then everybody talked at once; “Settle down now!” and “You don’t have to get ugly!” and “Who do you think you are talking like that?”
Then Daddy said, “What do you think, Dad?”
Then there was an even longer silence, in which everybody turned to look at GranDad at the other end of the table, to see what GranDad would say.
GranDad kept looking down and talking about the roast beef being rare enough, while everyone kept waiting for him. I looked around at each one. Each one was looking at Daddy and at GranDad.
Then Uncle Ted and Aunt Celeste looked at each other.
Then GranDad glanced at Nana.
Then Nana said, “Is this necessary?”
Finally, GranDad said what it was he had to say. He went ahead and said, “Well, that’s probably true. If it could be done, they would have already done it by now.”
Then Uncle Ted smiled and sat back.
And then Daddy looked like he might cry, and he jumped up, grabbed his cane, knocked over his chair, and clump-CLUMPed away from the table, stomping off into another room far away in the big house as fast as he could, everyone shouting after him, “Dick, Dick, Dick, Dick, don’t be that way!”
My arms and legs prickled with fear of Daddy and with fear for Daddy when all this happened. I wished I understood all this. I kept thinking, Compound fracture!
But then, and here’s the thing: Surprise! Daddy came back! He turned around out there and walked right back into the dining room, where we were all sitting and looking up at him, and he stood and looked back at each one of us, even at Nana and GranDad, and he smiled!
And he said, “Well, it doesn’t matter, because I already know what I’m going to do.”
And then he went back out onto the back porch for a smoke as Ross and Elise cleared the table for dessert. Pumpkin pie!
I LOOK OVER AT HIM, and now he’s also staring into the fire.
“Daddy,” I say, “will you read me the funnies?”
But he just hands me the comics section, and I lie on the floor to look at it. I can read most of Li’l Abner and of Alley-Oop. I ask Daddy why Alley-Oop dresses like that and looks like that and carries a club and has a dinosaur for a friend.
Daddy says, “Because Alley Oop is a caveman. A caveman had no house, no car, no anything like we have. Even no books to tell him things. No one knew anything. A caveman had to start from scratch, make it all up for himself. He wasn’t as lucky as we are, having so much that’s been given to us. Just look around, kid, at all that’s been given to us. Many generations created all that has been given to us. We should remember to be grateful. It wasn’t always there. A caveman had to make up everything in his world for the very first time.”
Then Daddy goes to the bookcase and brings out volume one of The Book of Knowledge, which he says is for me to use anytime I want, and he sits right next to me, puts his arm around me, his face close to mine, until I smell the lotion on his slicked-back hair, his alcohol and tobacco breath, his voice low and close, and he shows me how to use the index, the table of contents, the different volumes, everything. He shows me how to look things up—dinosaurs, and cavemen. I can read almost all the words now.
Then he goes back to his paper and to himself, and I sit on the floor at Daddy’s feet and read books.
FOR DINNER, WE HAVE SALMON CROQUETTES and mixed vegetables and, after that, pistachio ice cream, my favorite. And no one fights at the table the whole time.
After dinner, I go out in the backyard and look up at the full moon. It’s funny about the moon, how you can look and look at it, thinking, Is that a full moon? or Is it a full moon now?
But when it actually is a full moon, there are no questions. You just know it.
There it is, looking directly at me, and I am looking directly at it—there is nothing between the two of us—the moon up there so far away, and small lone creature me, just standing out here on the Earth’s surface.
The air is chilly. It’s almost Christmas again on our green little Earth, and we are whirling through the cold machine of the universe tick-tocking around regardless of our feelings about it.
I’m alone out here, but I don’t feel sad. Looking that distant thing in the face, I begin to sense the Girl coming back to say how I have to be brave—brave enough to stand out here alone and just look at what all this truly is, and to dare to live a human caveman life in the face of it.
Skaters
All the way downtown to the Adolphus Hotel in the car, Mama and Daddy argue about how he has to make up with Uncle Ted.
And Daddy keeps saying, “How can I?”
Christmas is coming again. When it’s only two weeks away, GranDad takes our whole family downtown to the Adolphus for a fancy dinner and a show. It’s in a big room with lots of red, black, and gold. There are white tablecloths. Red velvet curtains are hanging here and there.
We sit in the center of the room at long tables right in front of the small stage. Everyone is dressed up. I get to sit with the grown-ups this time. Oliver sits with the grown-ups, too, and I try to pretend he’s not there.
When we arrive, I see Daddy and Uncle Ted speak, but they don’t look at each other or sit together or talk. Mama and Aunt Celeste go to powder their noses. I sit next to Granny and Papaw.
Waiters whisk around with trays of drinks, and I have a Shirley Temple, like all the other kids.
The band plays and grown-ups get up and dance. Granny wants me to dance with her, but Papaw grabs me, and Annie jumps up and gets to dance with Granny.
A blond woman sings while people talk and eat. I hear GranDad saying to Daddy, “You’ll have to go out on your own.”
Aunt Meg and Uncle R.E. get up to dance. Aunt Celeste and Uncle Ted get up to dance. They all know how to whirl around cleverly and with studied grace. Daddy starts dancing with Mama but then leaves after the first dance and goes out to the lobby, where you can see him walking around, staying away from everyone.
Mama goes and talks to Daddy. She looks unhappy. He stays out in the lobby and smokes.
Waiters hurry in all at once, carrying trays, also in a dance of their own, swooping the plates in front of each person, many plates, many courses, piles of food, shrimp cocktails and prime rib on dishes with gold rims, blood on the plate. Daddy comes in and sits at the table with us.
Everyone has bland little smiles on their faces. Nana doesn’t feel well. But she and Granny watch their grandchildren and laugh at the funny things children do. Mama and Aunt Celeste seem to have things to talk about. The cousins fight, and I’m glad I don’t have to sit with them. After the first course, Granny comes over, sloshing her drink in her perfectly manicured hand, and tells me how her cousin in vaudeville told her she could be a big star if she would move up to New York, but she never could do it. Papaw starts whistling his warning whistle behind us. He’s always doing that, issuing warnings with that certain whistle. Mama rolls her eyes when she hears it, and keeps talking to Aunt Celeste. Mama’s smiling, but it’s not a happy smile. How can she look happy when she looked so unhappy in the car all the way downtown?
When it’s time for dessert, GranDad goes around to all the cousins, saying, “Watch this! Watch this!�
�� Then, amazingly, a small stage rolls out like a drawer from beneath the bandstand, and this is covered with sparkling ice.
The next thing you know, out come six young women in short skirts, cowboy hats, short cowboy boots attached to ice skates, lots of tassels and fringe, and they skate dazzlingly around and around on the small ice stage in tight formation, while everyone claps and laughs and is so surprised at the way they can do that. All of the skaters are young and pretty and have big smiles, as if there are no problems at all, and they’ve decided to be happy and have fun for the dance.
The skaters link arms and high-kick. They hold one another’s waists and skate around in a line, then in circles, spraying icy mist into the audience. They jump and dip and twirl together, exchanging positions, some dropping out, then coming back, going in and out alternately and together, the way all things are revolving around and affecting each other, doing first one trick and then another, one dance and then another. Everyone is dazzled by their formation and grace. We all have wide eyes, openmouthed smiles of amazement. I cannot take my eyes off of the way these skaters are doing such an excellent job of being beautiful and smart and amazing in this small square space and time they have been given.
When the skaters take their bows and file away, and the little drawer of ice rolls back to hide again beneath the bandstand, and the band starts up again, small but big-band dance band–style, Daddy stands away from the table, smoking a cigarette.
Elegant Aunt Celeste goes over to talk to the cousins. Beautiful Mama’s sitting alone, and it seems to me there’s a sadness behind the smile on her face. She seems small. I move over and sit in an empty chair beside her.
“Mama?” I say.
“Yes,” she says, and her voice is flat.
“Mama, there’s not really a Santa Claus, is there?”
“No,” she says. “There’s not.”
Then I reach over and put my arm around Mama.
And she lets me do it.
The Bullfrog
They came with Shasta daisies in masses, so the flagstone patio would be more “natural” in the photographs, they said. From my color-coordinated Early American bedroom, banished, pouting, crying, dreaming runaway dreams, after being spanked for refusing to clean the blue protozoa-shaped swimming pool, I could hear my father hurl his ginger ale across the kitchen, shouting that House Beautiful could goddamn well photograph it the way it was, instead of the way some fag New York photographer thought it ought to look! And next my mother would, of course, come upstairs, mad at me for getting my father upset in the first place, like he really was after that last spanking, since I was about as big as a grown-up by this time, which was why I was being banished for not apologizing, for reacting to being ordered to do things in such a tone, as if I were some low slime barely making it across the Earth’s surface, and just to do his swimming-pool, fancy-house bidding.
And you know what? I was glad he was upset.
Not that cleaning the swimming pool wasn’t a job that I sort of liked—slowly, slowly skimming the leaves and then slowly, even more slowly, sweeping the underwater, black-segmented, tightly wound-up doodlebugs, swirling them just right to swim-dance in whirlpool circles around and around, down and down into the deep blue, into the gently pulling-down drain—seemingly, at least, of their own accord.
From my bedroom picture window, I could look across the rolling St. Augustine grass, where they were bringing the daisies, and bringing the daisies, and arranging the daisies here and there, and my father was out there pacing up and down, showing them at least where to place the “goddamn daisies.” And I could see all the goings-on out there, just like a movie—the swimming pool embedded in the lawn like a big sparkling jewel in a navel, and my father and all the men hurrying and scurrying back and forth, the short sleeves of their summer white sports shirts sticking out like little wings, and the photographer and my mother pointing and talking up on the patio, shading their eyes and sometimes patting the heads of the squirming matching brindle boxers pushing against their legs, red tongues lolling out of their black-as-tar-baby, foo dog–grinning mouths.
The truth is that I wanted to be out there teasing, running with the dogs, or seeing how far to lean over the pool, moving the skimmer in slow motion to trap one more leaf, fencing around and around, until the whole water surface seemed to vanish into floating sparkles, dazzling the eye that looked now into the mysterious undulating shadow blue pool floor, along which I’d then slowly scoot the long-handled brush, firmly feeling along every curving surface, insinuating gradually so as not to stir up the whole pool at once, but persuading, inducing bits of leaves and dirt, a few snails, and hundreds and hundreds of doodlebugs to rise up, whirling and swirling in dozens of undulations from each brushstroke, circle after circle down into the deeper blue at the inevitable drain at the deepest center at the deepest part of the pool—down where my sisters and I played mermaids, transformed underwater into lithe fish creatures, never surfacing, our seaweed hair writhing—not covered by the rubber caps we really had to wear to keep the overtreated (our eyes red all summer) pool from being dirty and disgusting, and like some low somebodies might have in their pool. But then sometimes we would all three be Esther Williamses, endlessly pursued by Latin men, only having to hold in our stomachs real hard, take on and off those bathing caps, and backstroke and sidestoke up and down the pool a lot, just as in the movies they would take us to see—even before we had to move to this fancy house—on Thursdays, the maid’s day off, after having gone either to the country club for the family buffet or to El Chico’s for lessons in restaurant manners, and for secret flirtings with a particular black-eyed waiter.
But even though I wanted to be out there, saying “Oh well” and cleaning the pool anyway, how could I give in now to Daddy’s world’s-worst-gloater victory smirks? I knew he’d look at me as if to say, “So, you finally saw it my way.” Or else: “And these are all the reasons why I am right.” Or even: “I’m acting humble, but I win again and can barely keep a straight face about it.”
So I stayed in my room, watching through the picture window, the daisy placement–frenzy movie, hearing the “Now that’s what I call music” big-band sounds piped all over—even outside and even in my room—until I put on my own 45 records and had to keep turning them up louder and louder. And then I saw him out there, hearing it, and getting that eager, Aha!, furious look, wheeling around to charge the house and then my room, yelling about “trashy nigger music”—music like the kind of kids that would have the nerve to drive up in a car to my father’s fancy house, yelling, “Hey, Let’s go swimming!” would play.
But I knew that if I did hang around with those kids, he might just go crazy again, the way I had seen and heard him go crazy before, with drinking and breaking things, and going out with guns in the night, and then even being forced and tied and carried away with a crash and a cry that I cannot forget, and with Mama saying, “What are you doing up?” as if something was my fault. And then Daddy coming back after months, and being bathrobe-sad in the house for more months. So I was really a chicken about having those kids as my friends, worrying whether they’d drink beer or get hair or grass in the pool—so it was hopeless probably. And then he’d say, “How could you be friends with those people?” and, “How could you listen to what isn’t even music?” and, “If you don’t change your tune, you’ll find yourself on your own out on the street someday!”
So then my mother would come in again for a talking-to, asking, “Why can’t you just humor him instead of, just like him, always having to stir up some kind of big upset?”
“Why can’t we just be happy?” she would say, looking at me. And I’d glare at the floor and hide under my pillow my secret paperback called Tomboy, with the bulging yellow sweater on the cover, who always gets in trouble with the leader of the gang, who’s always threatening to tie people up and burn them with cigarettes, and who’s secretly her boyfriend, but neither one of them knows it. I wouldn’t say much, and Mam
a would say that maybe I could think about it while they were out for the evening.
But I knew I wouldn’t think about it, but would wait until they had gone to their dinner party at some other house ready to be photographed for House Beautiful. I’d be baby-sitting and waiting until dark—with all the Shasta daisies white ghosts of flowers in the dark—to go out and turn on the pool light, to find there a giant golden spotted bullfrog come up from the creek where he used to swim flat out for miles, but now he was trapped in the glowing, undulating, bluer-than-blue pool, powerful legs pumping and stretching to coast the blue width and length, pushing off from one side and then the other, from one end and then the other, stirring the whole pool and all the leaves and doodlebugs into whirlpools on all sides as he repeatedly, frantically, swam, back and forth and up and down, with no place to get a leg up, banging back and forth—that bullfrog, leapfrog, frog in the throat—pushing off the deep end, then the shallow, then the deep, then the shallow, ranging the shape and size of the pool, being the shape and size of the pool, forgetting that there was ever anything else but the shape and size of the pool.
Acknowledgments
My thanks go to Dawn Raffel, Erika Goldman, Kris Elliott King, Rick Whitaker, Lisa Wohl, Sheila Kohler, Victoria Redel, Campbell Geeslin, Nancy Allen, Richard Omar, June Roth, Maria Gabriele Baker, Molly Elliott, Gordon Lish, and others who have read whole or parts of this material, given encouragement and feedback, and listened to my whining over many years. I am forever in their debt.
BELLEVUE LITERARY PRESS is devoted to publishing literary fiction and nonfiction at the intersection of the arts and sciences because we believe that science and the humanities are natural companions for understanding the human experience. With each book we publish, our goal is to foster a rich, interdisciplinary dialogue that will forge new tools for thinking and engaging with the world.
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Page 21