Porter popped up from underwater, shaking the wet hair from his face like a puppy. “Betchya can’t catch me!” he yelled, splashing Jonathan and ducking underwater again.
The other children shouted, “You’re it! You’re it!” and swam as hard as they could away from Jonathan, who splashed back to give them time, then dove after them. I took off my glasses to dab lotion on my cheeks and smooth it in, then leaned back, closing my eyes. Everything was all right.
Not long after, my sister Susie showed up at the pool with Robert and Nora. She wore baby-blue hot pants and a scoop-necked t-shirt, and her hair fell past her waist, all of which made her look even younger than she already was. She came over and crouched to kiss my cheek. “How are you?” she asked, her sunglasses mirroring my face in two dark ovals.
“Fine. Have you seen Mom? She expected you for breakfast this morning.”
“Yeah.” Susie grinned. “She’s a trip. ‘When you tell me you’ll be here by ten, I expect you to be here by ten.’” Susie’s imitation was perfect.
I had to admire my little sister. She truly didn’t care what our parents thought of her. “How long are you here for?” I asked.
“The long weekend. I have a date Monday night.”
“Oh? Someone serious?”
She laughed. “Nah. A friend. We just ball, he brings dope. Hey, where’s Min?” she asked. “I haven’t seen her for ages.”
I nodded toward the pool, where my daughter swam clumsily but energetically after Trish, trying to tag her. Jonathan shepherded them toward the steps, then hoisted himself out of the water. He padded over the hot cement, dripping, to offer Susie a kiss. “Good to see you, Susie.”
“You too, Jonathan.”
Jonathan sat down with Robert and Nora on the grass, stretching out his legs and propping himself back on his elbows. Nora lit another cigarette. Her kids went running off back to the house, passing my father, who had appeared behind us and stood with his hands in his shorts’ pockets, surveying us all. When Jonathan waved him over, my father pulled up a lawn chair beside him.
Susie sat down on the cement next to Min and helped her towel dry. “Do you remember me? I’m your Aunt Susie. I’m your mom’s sister.”
Min smiled at her shyly.
“I can tell you’re going to be a strong swimmer, Min.”
“How do you know?” Min asked, squinting up at her.
“Because you dig the water so much. You can already swim in the deep end.”
“I can dive too. You want to see?” Min stood up, ready to jump back into the water.
“Yeah, but let me go in first. We have a rule here. It’s the only one you should never break. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“That’s the first word. No children allowed in the pool alone. It’s a good rule too, because we don’t want you to get hurt.” Susie stood up, took a few steps toward the water, and dove in.
My father leaned forward, frowning. “Susie!” he barked at my sister when her dark head reappeared above the water, the ends of her hair trailing on the surface. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re in shorts.”
Susie floated on her back, fanning gently with her hands. Her nipples hardened beneath her light t-shirt. Embarrassed, I looked over at the others. Robert and Nora were pretending to have a conversation. Jonathan looked at my sister’s breasts outlined behind the wet fabric of her shirt, then at my father. Min stood near the edge of the pool, watching me uncertainly, scratching her leg. I smiled at her. She turned back toward my sister.
“I forgot to bring my bathing suit, Pop, all right?” Susie let her legs drop, treading water. “I’m ready, Min. Let’s see you dive.”
But my father wouldn’t let it go. “You could have borrowed a bathing suit from your sister or your mother. A t-shirt is not appropriate. As you well know.”
“My God, Pop, I’m just swimming. Don’t hit the panic button.” Then she turned her head and said in a gentler voice, “Come on, Min. It’s okay.”
My father grunted and stood up, starting back to the house, his posture as upright as ever. Min looked quickly at me. I nodded at her encouragingly. “Go on.”
I could never have spoken to my father the way Susie had, dismissing his concerns so easily, as if they didn’t matter. Sometimes I felt Susie and I were from completely different generations. I had been raised in an era that stressed respect for one’s parents, regular attendance at church, loyalty to one’s government: deference to authority in general. My family was contented with its hard-earned affluence and wanted only to remain that way. During my childhood, politics rarely moved beyond the public debate; when I was in college, except for the first sit-ins in the South, civil disobedience was unnecessary, unthinkable. The best I could do was move far enough away in order to live as I wanted, work steadily toward social justice, and raise Min. But now even that wasn’t enough. The nation was being torn apart by violence. In the spring, watching the nightly news, Jonathan and I had seen city after city erupt in riots and flames for weeks after King was killed. We were saddened, and not only by his death. It seemed to us the last hope for peaceful integration had been snuffed out; the Black Panthers would push their militant agenda now, and whites and blacks would be at each other’s throats. And while the paper reported almost daily another anti-war protest on a college campus or in Washington, complete with arrests and injuries, the war in Vietnam dragged on. Two nights before coming east, we had stood horrified in front of the TV set watching the Chicago police bludgeon protesters in a haze of tear gas outside the Democratic National Convention. I envied those people their willingness to risk their lives, but I knew I wasn’t one of them. I cared too much about the consequences of my actions. What was happening all over the country was exhilarating, and it was frightening, and it was significant, and without even trying Susie was part of it in a way I could never be. Watching my little sister stroke languidly through the water in her clothes, unconcerned, I felt cheated. I had been born years too early.
Min went to the deep end of the pool and backed up a few steps. Then she ran with her arms held out ahead of her and hurled herself into the water head first.
At dinner the conversation eventually turned to the assassinations earlier in the year. My parents didn’t seem particularly interested; in fact, I felt they were almost relieved by the deaths of King and Kennedy, though they didn’t say so. Jonathan was brilliant contending with them from his vast store of facts and his certainty. But it was clear by the end of the meal that he hadn’t changed anyone’s mind.
We moved into the large, comfortable living room, where my father poured us glasses of Drambuie from the bar. This had always been my favorite room in the house. It had a low wood beam ceiling and several window seats and sofas piled with throw pillows. The lamps cast a warm yellow light. We broke into smaller groups, Robert and Nora’s children playing Parcheesi on the rug, the men smoking cigars in one corner, while Susie, Nora, my mother, and I sat near the fireplace. Min wanted to stay near me rather than play with the other children. She settled sleepily in my lap, her curled body warm and familiar. Nora opened her pocketbook and took out her cigarettes and silver lighter. She tapped out a cigarette, bent her head over the lighter’s flame.
“Jonathan’s very passionate about his beliefs, isn’t he?” Nora asked me, blowing a stream of smoke into the air above her. “I mean, I care about civil rights and everything, but don’t you think Dr. King was asking for too much?”
Susie looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I could tell Nora had been holding this thought inside her ever since the subject came up, but she had been afraid to express it at the dining table. She assumed that because my husband was out of earshot, she could voice it now.
“I’m the wrong person to ask,” I told my sister-in-law. “I happen to agree with Jonathan. If white people in this country could get it through their heads that equal rights can never be ‘too much,’ then we might start to make some progress.”
; “I didn’t mean to offend you, Catherine,” Nora replied. “I was upset too when I heard he’d been shot. But most people thought he was getting hard to handle. He would have been assassinated at some point anyway. It was just a matter of when.”
“Are you saying he deserved to die? He should have known when to shut up because whites were getting tired of the uppity nigger?”
“Oh, Catherine, you’re being extreme,” my mother said. She put her glass on the side table next to the sofa and crossed one leg over the other, smoothing the light material of her dress. I glanced down at Min. She was already asleep. “I think you and Nora are essentially in agreement,” my mother continued. “You just have to realize that progress takes a long time. I don’t think Negroes are ready for the changes King wanted for them. Maybe they themselves don’t want to be brought forward so fast. They certainly aren’t acting very responsibly with all the freedoms they’ve already been given.”
Susie seemed distracted. She was going to be no help at all. “That’s ridiculous,” I began.
Susie interrupted. “Mom, what would you say if one weekend I brought a black boyfriend to visit?”
Our mother visibly stiffened. “Are you dating a Negro, Susan?”
“The term is ‘black.’” Susie shrugged. “Not necessarily.”
I stared at my sister. Was the lover she had mentioned to me earlier a black man?
“Well, what’s the hassle?” Susie asked my mother. “There’s already one minority person in the family.”
“That’s different,” my mother said, looking away. “Min is Oriental. It’s not the same thing at all.”
I felt caught up short, as though someone had punched me in the stomach. “Why does everyone keep harping on Min’s race?” I demanded, furious. “Why does anyone care? It’s not important. Can’t you see that?” Can’t you see, Andy? She belongs here. It doesn’t matter what she looks like.
The three of them stared at me. I stared back. I was so enraged I was barely aware of what I had said. My hand trembling, I finished off my drink and put the glass down on the arm of my chair. In her sleep, Min shifted a little. I held her to me securely.
“You’re so uptight sometimes,” Susie said after a silence.
“I am not,” I insisted. “I get angry when defenseless people get picked on.”
“You do always stick up for the underdog, don’t you?” Susie commented, as if she had just understood this about me.
“Don’t you?” I asked, and then I realized that Susie wasn’t actually interested in political change. She simply ignored what she didn’t like.
She shook her head. “No, not always. But you’ve got an argument for everything. The only person you never seemed to fight with was Andy. I don’t know why not. He could be such a freak. Remember when he stole my diary? Maybe you were at Smith by then. He took it to school and read it to his friends. It took me months to forgive him.”
I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, as if a hand had gripped my heart and squeezed. I was afraid I might black out. I wanted to leave the room, but I couldn’t move. I looked away from Susie. I didn’t say anything.
“I remember,” my mother chimed in, “how as a little girl you used to defend both Susie and Andy when you thought they were being unfairly punished.” She turned to Nora. “I’ll never forget when Andy brought home a few fish from the stream in a jar that he kept hidden in his room. When they died, Douglas was furious at Andy for bringing them into the house in the first place. Catherine argued with her father that Andy didn’t know any better.”
Astonished, I listened as though I didn’t know this story. My mother had never been someone who reminisced about the past. She had always been impatient, telling us to put aside what was over and move ahead. It occurred to me that maybe Andy’s death had changed her. I didn’t know what to do with that possibility.
“How old was Andy?” Nora asked.
“Six or seven. You see, he had wanted a pet and his father wouldn’t allow it. Catherine argued that it was Andy’s way of solving the problem. Now that the fish were dead, she told her father, he didn’t have to make it worse by scolding Andy.” She turned to me. “Although I think the word you used was ‘berating.’”
As my mother spoke, I remembered Andy holding the jar of stagnant water, the fish floating unmoving on the surface. By the time my father had finished, Andy’s mouth was trembling from trying to keep back tears. The painful tightness in my chest wasn’t letting up. I blinked, slightly dizzy. I felt myself receding, so that I watched my mother and sister and sister-in-law sitting together in the warm, lighted room from a great distance.
I said, “I have to put Min to bed. It’s getting late.” I looked down at my daughter. Her mouth was beginning to fall open. I saw her stubby black eyelashes resting on the tender, slightly clammy skin of her cheeks. I felt a stab of sympathy for her, for the bewildered helplessness of children. I thought, She’s your niece. Why couldn’t you see how beautiful she is? I sat gazing at my sleeping child, feeling unreal, feverish, feeling so far away from that room that I could have been asleep myself.
“You never want to talk about him,” Susie said. Startled, I looked up at her. Nora stubbed out her cigarette, stood up, and went to sit on the rug with her children, folding her legs beneath her. “Whenever I bring him up, you change the subject,” Susie went on. “It’s been four years. He was our brother. Can’t we remember him together?”
I wanted to be able to talk with her, but how could we? No one in my family ever said what they felt. I could see how remembering Andy gave my family something back of him: the knowledge that he had once been part of their lives. Telling their affectionate little anecdotes gratified them. They could take comfort in each other’s memories. But sharing memories of Andy was the last thing I wanted to do.
I rubbed my left temple. My headache was coming back. “I don’t think about Andy,” I told Susie. “There’s no point. He’s gone.” She stared at me, her face changing. I hated her for pitying me. When had she ever offered me real concern?
I said, “Min, it’s time for bed now. Let’s go brush your teeth.” I rested my hand on the top of her head, smoothing her glossy hair.
Min started and looked up at me. “But I’m not tired,” she said.
I smiled. “Come on, let’s say goodnight.”
“Are you ready?” I asked Min from the doorway of her tiny bedroom. I put my palms to my temples and pressed. My headache had reinstated itself, full-blown. The light from the hall threw a rectangle of brightness into the unlit room. Min lay with the blanket and sheet thrown off, her sleeveless cotton nightgown twisted and crumpled beneath her.
“It’s hot,” Min said.
I crossed the room to push the single window up as far as it would go. “I’ll leave the door open a little when I leave so you can have the cross breeze, okay?” She nodded. I sat down next to her on the edge of the bed.
“How many days until we go home, Mommy?”
“You’re not having fun?” I asked, resting the backs of my fingers against her warm cheek for a moment.
I heard a creak behind me. Jonathan walked softly into the room and sat down on the other side of the bed across from me. We looked at each other briefly in the half dark.
“Hi, Daddy,” Min said.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he answered, bending over her.
“Will you tell me a story? One with you and me in it?”
He brushed her hair back from her forehead with his fingers. “Not tonight, Min. It’s late. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll give you a backrub instead.”
“Okay.”
Min turned onto her stomach and pulled up her nightgown. In the gloom of the room, the white sheets were startlingly bright beside her olive skin. Jonathan began to knead her shoulders, then rub her back. His hand looked huge against her small body. With his fingers spread out, his palm easily spanned the width of her torso. I had never seen him give her a backrub before; usually one or the other of us put her to bed al
one. Gently, Jonathan brushed his fingers down her spine and up again. He touched his daughter with so much tenderness it made my throat ache. I sat mutely by, watching. There was nothing for me to do.
When he was finished, Jonathan pulled down Min’s nightgown and patted her back.
“Bear hug,” he said.
“Rhinoceros hug,” she mumbled against her pillow.
“Elephant hug.”
“Whale hug.” Almost asleep.
“King Kong hug.”
“That’s too big,” she said, rousing briefly. “I’d get squished.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Jonathan said. “I would never squish you. You know that.” She was smiling. She had everything she wanted.
He bent over and kissed her hair, then stood up. I kissed her too and followed him out of the room, leaving the door ajar.
A few steps down the hall I whispered, “Jonathan! I want to talk to you.”
He turned back to me. “What about?”
“Not here. Let’s go to our room.”
“Can’t it wait? Your father offered me brandy.”
“Please. I need to talk to you.” I didn’t know why I was begging. My headache was worse.
He shrugged. “All right.”
We passed the living room and climbed the stairs to my childhood bedroom, ducking our heads where the ceiling came down at a sharp diagonal.
In the room Jonathan closed the door and fell onto the bed, the springs squeaking, while I went over to the bureau and fumbled for the switch on the lamp. I opened the aspirin bottle and swallowed four of the little white pills. The weak lamplight threw long shadows over the floral pattern on the walls. I remembered my dream of trying to keep my head above water in the perpetual dark, and the fear that something would grab me from the deep and pull me down.
His hands behind his head, Jonathan looked ordinary and familiar. My throat ached again as I looked at him, because I was afraid.
“Why are you standing way over there? Come here,” Jonathan suggested, patting the covers beside him.
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