When Linda phoned again to give the latest report about Evie, Mother tapped the side of her head and said to Hamid in an undertone, “His sister.”
“She is . . . ?” And Hamid also tapped his head.
“Completely,” Mother said.
I began to protest. I said Evie only had these spells, but Mother shouted me down. “Of course she’s nuts, completely and absolutely gone,” she said. “The whole family. You’re not trying to tell me,” she said, turning to me again, “that other sister of his, that what’s-her-name, that she’s normal? Or if it comes to that, what about Linda herself?”
“Linda? Why, she’s the sanest woman I’ve ever met. She’s so—so—” I didn’t have the word for my tall, bony, thin-lipped, determinedly energetic mother-in-law, who is always frenziedly engaged in some practical job, like cleaning out the linen closet.
“She’s the most screwed-up of the lot,” Mother said emphatically.
“Who is?” Boy asked, coming in after speaking to his mother on the telephone. We all looked at him, but he told us nothing.
“Well,” Mother said, “are you going?”
Boy looked at Hamid, who said, “Of course you’ll have to go if your sister is . . . not well. If your family is expecting you.”
Boy looked at him, and so did I. There was nothing in Hamid’s eyes except solicitude for Boy. Mother was smoking frantically, dropping ash into her coffee, but Hamid was calm and gentle, at that moment caring only for Boy and his family problem and wanting everything settled. So when Boy left later that morning—Hamid and I dropped him at the airport—he went with a relatively light heart.
Whenever Boy is away, I keep myself occupied with all the household jobs I can think up. As soon as the plane left, I went off to buy pounds of peaches, and later I was very busy making jam that no one would ever want to eat. I was so busy I didn’t wonder where Hamid was or Mother was. “Don’t you care?” Terry asked me. He himself cared terribly. I guess that was why he had stayed behind; the other friends had scattered when Boy left. He wanted to see what would happen—to spy, if you want to look at it that way, or to look out for Boy, if you prefer. He kept following me around to report on his findings, and it irritated him that I didn’t want to know.
“Don’t you care?” he kept saying.
Actually, Terry himself was one of the people who taught me that it’s not good to care too much. I was like him once—for instance, when he and Boy were very much involved with each other—and I used to torment myself by spying, speculating, finding out. But now I don’t do that any more.
It turned out to be the wrong day for making jam. It was terribly hot, with no breeze coming in from the ocean. Mother stayed in her room all afternoon, sometimes calling to me to come in and talk to her. She was sprawled across the bed, and she seemed both exhausted and excited. She was still in her morning wrap, which had fallen open, exposing her thighs. She said she wished she were back in New York—at least there was air-conditioning there, so a person could breathe—but I could see she didn’t mean it. She didn’t want to be in New York, she wanted to be here.
“When is he coming back?” she asked me, and then she answered herself: “I guess he has to put his sister away first. My God, Susie, what sort of a family have you gone and married us into?” She has said this so often that it’s almost become a refrain. And almost in the same breath she said, “Did you see Hamid? He was out on the beach in all that heat. I called to him from the house. I said, ‘You’ll get sunstroke!’ but he just laughed and waved. He’s used to the heat—it must be even hotter where he comes from. I don’t know how people stand it. He seems made different from us, don’t you think, Susie? Don’t you have that feeling about him?”
“I don’t know,” I murmured, pulling at her wrap to cover her thighs.
“You don’t know anything,” she said, pushing the wrap off again. “Sometimes I envy you. I mean, it must be a lot easier to be made the way you are. Wouldn’t you think I’d have got over all that by now? Wouldn’t you think so? That a person would be allowed to cool off? But no such luck, no such luck.” Suddenly she cursed herself and struck the side of her head, like a peasant woman.
I had often seen her do that, when I was a child, only then she had been cursing Daddy, who was usually away somewhere with someone else—someone younger. At that time, Mother had still been very pretty, so quite often she would get up and go over to the mirror to look at herself, and then she’d ask me, “I look okay, don’t I? What’s wrong with me?” And I would tell her that she looked fabulous. But now she didn’t go to the mirror or ask any questions.
Terry came in, with his rather sharp nose pointing out of his thin face, so that he seemed to be sniffing the air for information. When he saw that Hamid was not there, his expression changed from inquisition to distaste. Boy also looks like this whenever he comes into Mother’s bedroom. I don’t notice it myself, but I guess the feminine smell around her is rather strong, with all those perfumes and creams she uses and the little underthings she has discarded lying scattered around the room.
Just then the phone rang, and I went running out. It was Boy. I asked, “How is she?”
“Oh hell, Susie, don’t ask,” he said. “What are you all doing?”
“Mother’s lying down and Terry’s—”
“Hamid’s not there? Listen, ask him—Oh, I’ll call again later. Tell him—I’ve got to go, Susie,” he said as I began to ask him about Evie again.
Terry had followed me, and he stretched out his hand for the receiver. When I told him that Boy had hung up, he said, “Did he ask to speak to me?”
“His sister’s very bad,” I said apologetically.
Terry said, “What are you going to do about tonight?”
Unfortunately, I knew at once what he meant. I had already made up my mind that if Hamid and Mother got together there was nothing I could do about it. Actually, I had planned on taking a sleeping pill. I usually do that anyway when Boy is away; it helps me over having to sleep alone.
It never cooled down that night, and we kept everything wide open and wore the minimum of clothes. I forgot about the jam, and it burned and stuck to the bottom of the pan, and the house was filled with the smell of this blackened, sugary mess of peaches. I went into my bedroom and took a sleeping pill. But before it could take effect, Hamid came in and lay down on Boy’s bed to talk to me. It seemed he had gone to see a movie in the afternoon, and now he was telling me the story, which was about a mother and daughter, both in love with the same guy. He slept with both but was really in love with another guy, who was an actor who played cowboy roles. All this seemed very strange to Hamid, and I must say it sounded strange to me, too, and I wondered whether he had got it quite right or whether I was beginning to feel very drowsy with my pill. He went on telling me about the movie, and then I think he told me some incidents from his own life, but by that time I was in a state where I couldn’t quite keep the two apart.
When Mother came in, he said to her, “Listen to this.” So she sat on the side of the bed where he was lying while he went on telling his story. I think it really was his story now, because Mother said, “Well, what do you expect, with looks like that?” and she fondled him with real respect—reverence, even—for his beauty. And he let her do it, as if it was quite ordinary and what he was used to. He was telling her how, some years ago, his visa had run out and he was going to be deported, but there was this very wonderful lady he met. He went to live in her house, and she arranged everything about his papers, so that he could stay. She looked after him very well, and he was grateful to her and enjoyed being with her in her various houses, which she went to from season to season.
“Where is she now?” Mother asked, tangling her fingers in the hair of his chest.
The end of the story was not as good as the beginning. For reasons he didn’t specify, he had had to leave her, and this gave rise to some very bad scenes. At one point, the police had been called in, and for a while his imm
igration papers had been endangered again. But it had all been straightened out, thanks to some other friends he had made in the meantime, and after a while she was all right, too, and had been able to leave the hospital, where her daughter had placed her. It made him sad to remember all this, and he freely admitted that he had not acted well. But it had all been out of ignorance, he told us—youth and ignorance (he had been just eighteen). He had been unaware that it was this bad time for her, when certain physical changes occur in women of her age. If he had known then, he said, what he knew now, of course he would have acted with far greater delicacy and care for her. Then it seemed Mother needed comforting, and I saw him sit up to rub her back. My pill had really begun to work by then, and I was more than half asleep, and after a while fully asleep.
The weather changed, and a wind sprang up from the sea and came blowing through my open windows, so that I woke up for a moment to cover myself. It was still night, and Mother and Hamid had gone from the other bed and I was alone. Terry must have been alone, too, and I could hear him in the living room playing some of last year’s records.
The next day I spent a long time scrubbing out the pan in which the jam had burned. But the smell must have lingered around the house, because the first thing that Boy said when he came home was “What’s that smell?” Unfortunately, Terry was there to overhear, and he said at once, “Well may you ask,” in his very English accent, so I knew he was only waiting to get Boy alone to tell him all sorts of things. But it wasn’t as easy as all that for him to get Boy alone. Hamid was not in when I brought Boy back from the airport, but shortly afterward I saw him making his way from the beach up to the house. Boy saw him first, and he didn’t waste a second. He ran down the porch steps and straight as an arrow down to the beach toward Hamid. They met halfway. Terry wanted to join them, but I held him back. He was furious with me. He said, “Aren’t you going to tell him?” and then, “If you don’t, I certainly will.” But, as I said, he didn’t get the chance so easily, because Boy would not let Hamid out of his sight.
Mother had seen the meeting on the beach from her window. “It’s disgusting,” she told me. “He ran like a—like a—”
“Like a lover,” I said.
“Disgusting,” she said again.
And she really was disgusted. Mother has always liked to think of herself as a woman of the world, knowing all there is to know. I used to see her and her friends huddled close together with flushed cheeks and the tips of their tongues showing, as if tasting something nice, while the maid, pretending to be busy with the tea trolley she had rolled in, would cock her head in their direction and her cheeks would flush, too, at what she heard. When I was small, Mother would say, “Go away, Susie, go and watch your program,” and when I was grown up, she said, “Oh, Susie wouldn’t know anything about it. She’s just stayed a great big baby.”
Mother doesn’t drink an awful lot, usually—only when she is upset, to make herself feel better, and then, because she isn’t used to it, she gets high very quickly. That was what happened on the day of Boy’s return. In the evening, when we were lying on the floor listening to records, she came and stood in the doorway and said to Boy, “You haven’t told us about your crazy sister.”
Although she said this in a very loud voice, the record almost drowned her, so she stalked over and turned it down, and then she repeated what she had said.
Boy went white and bit his thin lips even thinner. He said, “I’m not going to discuss my family affairs.”
“I thought we were all family here,” said Mother, looking around at us all, but especially at Hamid and Terry.
I was afraid of what else she might say in her state, so I went toward her, hoping to take her away to her bedroom. But she pushed me aside.
“Susie is healthy,” she informed Boy. “A healthy, normal human being like her mother and her father and everyone in our family.”
“Why don’t you ask her about last night?” Terry said to Boy in a cool, smiling way. “That should be interesting.”
Hamid, who had continued to lie on the floor with his eyes shut, sat up and blinked like one awakened from deep sleep. “Who turned the music off?” he said.
“Or you can ask him,” Terry said.
Hamid got up from the floor and went over to the record-player and turned it up again. Now he and Mother were the only ones standing; the rest of us were on the floor looking up at them. Hamid made sensuous movements to the music. “I wish I could dance,” he said.
Mother, completely forgetting about Boy and her anger with him, said, “You can’t? I’ll teach you.” She even had to show him how to hold her.
“What happened last night?” Boy asked Terry.
“I was making jam and it got burned,” I said.
“Oh really, Susie,” Boy said impatiently. “Are you a fool or something?”
Mother was laughing loudly at Hamid, who was playing dumb and doing everything wrong—on purpose, I think, to amuse her and, if possible, the rest of us, too. “It’s like teaching a bear to dance,” she said. Then he pretended to be a bear and lurched around the room. Mother went after him, laughing her head off, trying to make him come back and hold her again, but he got away from her. However, the room wasn’t big enough for him to escape her for long, and she soon had him cornered by the bookcase. Then he made quite a clever move. Still pretending to be a bear, he shook her off and lurched across to me and said, “You teach me.”
Well, I’m not much of a dancer—not like Mother, who is fantastic—but I saw that this was the best solution, so I got up and let him lead me. He danced quite well, it turned out. I can’t say I enjoyed it and I guess he didn’t much, either, but the other three were staying quiet, watching us, so we just went on dancing.
Later, Mother let me take her away and help her undress and get into bed. While I was doing this, she kept moaning, as if she were in pain or as if someone had just died, but otherwise she was quiet and seemed only to want to be put to bed like a child. And like a child, lying there in her nightie, she let tears flow down her nose in a natural, unashamed way, and childishly she said, “He married you for your money. For Daddy’s money.”
This was a familiar accusation, which I no longer bothered to answer. And it is true that Boy is poor—so is Linda and so are the two sisters. Their father lost everything with terrible speculations, before drinking and drowning. It is also true that Boy has very refined tastes and needs money. But he likes me, too—and yes, he needs me, just as much as he needs the money.
He came into the room now, and saw Mother in bed. “Is she all right?” he asked.
“What do you care?” said Mother, letting the tears flow.
“Of course I care,” Boy said.
He sat near Mother’s bed and told us about Evie. He spoke quite freely, in a quiet, restrained voice, about her terrible and unhuman behavior. He made it clear that he wanted to hide nothing from Mother and me and that he considered it our right to know.
Mother was horrified. I think that once she had heard him out, she would sooner not have been told. Boy explained that at first they had tried to get Evie to go to the hospital voluntarily, but she had resisted so violently that it wasn’t possible. So then they had to call the people from the hospital to take Evie away. I saw Boy tense up inside himself as he said this—she had had to be taken away like that once before, and he had been there that time, too, and he had told me that he never wanted to see it again.
Now Mother really had something to cry about. So many things! Boy and I sat on either side of her bed and she pressed both our hands and said, “Children, children.” All that crying completely washed away her make-up, and she suddenly looked her age.
“Poor Linda,” she said. “Oh, poor soul. What shall I do for her? Does she need money? Can I send her a check?”
“I’ll let you know,” Boy said. He would, too. His mother always needs money. She is really hard up, and he couldn’t afford to let such an opportunity go by.
&nbs
p; “I wish I lived closer to her, so I could help. Or if she lived near me. Do you think she’d want to? I have this goddamn stupid apartment. My God, who needs all those rooms?” Now Mother was really getting carried away. The idea of those two, Mother and Linda, living together . . . Boy and I caught each other’s eye and had to look away quickly. But Mother seemed to like her line of thought. “We wouldn’t have to see each other every day. We wouldn’t even have to cook or eat together, except maybe like Sunday brunch or something. And you two could come, too—it’d be fun. Just Sundays. And if you had—if there were some kids . . . Lots of people adopt kids. It doesn’t make any difference, they say; you love them just the same. How would you like me as a grandma—what do you think? Grandma Bea?” She giggled.
Hamid could be heard calling outside the door. Mother let go of our hands. “Don’t let him come in!” she said frantically. But he was in already. Mother quickly turned out the light by her bedside. Boy had stood up.
Hamid said, “What, all finished? Everyone gone bye-byes? Then I will go bye-byes, too. Good night.”
Boy said, “We could go for a walk. On the beach? There’s almost a full moon.”
He was excited and entirely different from the way he had been only a moment before. Mother, too, was entirely different. She called out from the semi-darkness of her bed, “Yes, let’s go for a walk in the moonlight!” She tried to make her voice youthful, but it cracked on too high a note.
“Why are you in bed?” Hamid asked her. “Are you ill? And in the dark . . .” He leaned over to switch on her lamp, but she caught his hand and said, “It hurts my eyes.”
East Into Upper East Page 21