This is what Ursula most dreads: not that Carter will fail English and embarrass her, not that he will lose his scholarships and cost her more money, not that his room will spontaneously ignite, but that he will turn out to be someone she wouldn’t want near her daughter, a stranger to the values she holds dear, to trust and compassion. It is easier to blame Michael and take it back every time Carter causes them trouble. Meanwhile all she knows to do is to watch her son for signs of vulnerability and tenderness and, finding none, begin sadly to sink into a bog of relief that, at least, he will soon be gone.
She clears away some of the debris from Carter’s room. She fills trash cans from his room, hers, and the bathroom, and lines them up in the hall where he cannot miss them. She turns his mattress and puts on a bottom sheet, then fluffs the soiled comforter and smooths it out, darker side up. She kicks dirty socks and underwear into a pile with her foot, and puts pop cans outside the door. Using one of his undershirts, she wipes whatever surfaces show. She opens his windows wide, then she sits wearily on the bed. From her perch she sees that his Apple is the only neat thing in the room. It sits on a small white iron computer table with a cover over it. Sometimes Carter works at it all night. He is brilliant in math, already far more than just a competent programmer. Supposedly on this machine he composed his thesis about extraterrestrial architects.
She notices a title on the spine of a book on his desk: Mysterious Phenomena of the—She can’t see the rest, and doesn’t care. Maybe her son really does believe in such things. She hears that that is all teenage boys read, sci-fi and fantasy. Maybe Carter sees himself in a spaceship, whirling out into the galaxy, away from his ordinary world. Who can say it won’t happen?
Only, the Apple seems so much like Carter’s brain, tidily covered, while the rest of his room languishes in filth. Still, he could do anything. He has his whole life ahead. That is why Michael doesn’t worry. He can remember being young. Michael never had the chance for youth; maybe what he remembers is how sad it is to grow up too fast.
She decides she will wake Carter in the morning before she leaves for work, and tell him he is to spend every single moment of the weekend at the dining room table writing his paper, in longhand. Only after she approves it can he transfer it to that machine. Or else—what? He fails English, of course. Let him dwell on a summer of eight o’clock classes.
Of course he should go to the Fishers’ party. And she will be gone all day, unable to supervise. She will have to count on the power of natural consequences to keep him working.
Maybe Mrs. Angstrom is going to teach summer school. She could threaten him with that.
She looks up and sees Michael standing at the door, shaking his head.
“Go on and say it,” she says. When he stays silent, she says, “I’m not mad at you.”
“Why would you be?” He puts his hand out for her to take, and makes a big show of hauling her off the bed. She falls against him as she comes to her feet, then regains her balance.
“I decided against spaghetti, Ursie. That salad stuff died days ago. Let’s walk down to the Thai Rose.” The Thai deli, a few blocks away, has good hot, cheap food. Even Fish says it is “fairly authentic”; he orders in Thai.
“What about Juliette?”
“Call her. We’ll bring her leftovers.”
“I could leave her a note.”
Michael nods.
“And Michael. Do you think Carter is—all right?”
“You’ve done just fine, Ursula.”
“I didn’t ask about me.”
Michael kisses her cheek. “Right,” he says, and then, “Let’s go eat. I’m starved.”
18
They eat dishes with lemongrass and peanuts and hot peppers. The fish has a crunchy skin. They concentrate on eating, speaking little except to say this was tasty, this spicy, did you like it. Michael eats chili sauce on his fish, and smiles as tears pour down his cheeks. Ursula loves him for eating the sauce. He laughs at her when stray noodles hang out of her mouth.
Over a pale bitter tea, he mentions that his mother called. He talked to her while Ursula was in Carter’s room.
“She was upset because he was out late last night.”
“But isn’t Tuesday his AA night?”
“And he went. But he brought somebody home, and you can imagine Mom let them both know what she thought of that.” Geneva would have shut herself in her bedroom with the television on high volume, huffing loudly enough to be heard through a closed door. “So Pop gave this old guy a ride home to the VA domiciliary, and I guess they must have talked a lot. Evidently Pop’s done this before. Got all caught up talking to some old fart. It drives Mom crazy.”
“So how late was he?”
Michael didn’t think to ask.
“Everything is relative, right?” Ursula says. “Gully usually goes to bed at nine, maybe ten on Tuesdays. So ‘late’ could have been ten-thirty.”
“He was gone this morning before she got up. Without breakfast. That shook her up.”
“Maybe he had two dollars in his pocket and went to the cafe.”
“Maybe. He goes off in his truck, though.”
Ursula gets a couple of cartons from the Thai girl lounging on a stool by the register, and scrapes food into them. To her dismay, she finds herself wondering if the girl is a good student, the way Asian children are said to be.
“You know, Michael, it sounds like your mother needs to complain. All those years she didn’t. Why now? What’s your poor pop going to do to get in trouble?” Geneva lamented to Ursula recently that Gully doesn’t clip his toenails anymore. She says they will get ingrown. Ursula thinks she was hoping Michael would volunteer to hold his father down.
“He wanders off for longer and longer periods of time. Mom is worried he’s getting senile.”
“She’s worried he’s regaining a little independence!” Ursula says testily, and wonders why she should care that much.
Michael pulls out his wallet. “I haven’t got enough cash on me.”
Ursula pays.
It is dark outside but not cold. “I love this time of year,” Ursula says. “The orchards have budded, they’re so pretty now.”
Two boys, maybe ten years old, are scuffling on the walk as Ursula and Michael go by. “Fuck you, asshole!” one of them yells. Ursula says, “Go home, both of you!” She hopes Michael won’t scold her for her outburst. The instinct for authority in her does sometimes seem silly. But evidently he didn’t even notice.
“Are you supposed to do something now, Michael?”
She thinks Geneva ought to find a group to join. Quilting. Herb drying. Some AA affiliated program. Anything. She needs to tell stories and get support. Or maybe better yet, not get any.
“I do wonder what’s going on with Pop.”
“It’s spring. Gully has a little sap left.”
“Don’t be stupid.” Michael is offended.
“Christ, Michael, I didn’t mean women. I meant life.”
“Mom’s worried.”
“Why don’t you ask him what he’s doing. Ask him what’s on his mind these days? Why doesn’t Geneva ask him? Don’t they talk?”
Michael chews on his moustache as they walk. Ursula would like to take his arm, but he walks with his hands shoved down in his pockets, like a scholar weighing a mighty theory.
The whole dialogue could be reversed. If neither spoke for a few more moments, they could easily pick it up again, with opposite views. Sometimes she defends Geneva, and Michael stands up for Gully. Sometimes, like now, it gets off on the other foot. She tries to realize the incredible reality of Geneva’s fifty years as Gully’s wife. Her own twenty years as Michael’s seem to have gone by so fast.
“Why do we talk about your parents so much?” she asks.
“They’ve only got me. I told you, Ursula.”
So he has, more than once. So he did, when he moved his own family to the Rogue Valley so that he could take care of his parents.
U
rsula was perfectly happy in Portland. She loved her work. She loved the people who worked with her. She loved the house her father helped them into. (She wouldn’t like it now; it wasn’t much of a house, but she didn’t know that then.) Michael said. “Pop’s falling apart, what will she do?” and they moved. There was never any talk of bringing his parents back to Portland. That would have been worse.
Poor Juliette, Ursula thinks. There would have been so much more for her in the city. But who could have known? She was a toddler when they made the move.
Ursula stops in front of a house she particularly likes, a rather ordinary two-story house, maybe forty-five or fifty years old. The owners have painted it turquoise and yellow, with panels of brilliantly colored fabric at the window. “What would you think of painting our house?” she asks Michael.
He runs his hands through his hair, pushing it back from habit, though it is short now. “Gray?”
Gray! “Oh when will you be done taking care of them!” she bursts out. What she really wants is to be young again, drinking wine and making love on Indian bedspreads. She wants a yellow house. Of course she has middle-class tastes now. She has china. And Michael has his parents. She respects him for his sense of responsibility; she hopes Carter will learn from it. She just wishes Geneva’s needs were fewer. She hopes that what she senses is a delicate balance in the Fisher family will hold.
Michael answers coolly. “I’ll be done when they die.”
She wonders if he has always known that, or if he came to realize it over time. Maybe he minds but he can’t do anything about it. He does what is right. Maybe it is fair. Maybe parents earn this by not pouring hot soup over your head, or beating you to death. And Michael has his brother’s share to do, and his dead sister’s.
She remembers sitting at her father’s bedside in the house in Evanston as he fell away before her eyes. He had been a professor, an expert on certain Chinese dynasties. “Be sure you go,” he told her. He meant China. She wonders what it was like all those years he couldn’t see anything he longed to see, and then it turned out Nixon opened the doors. Pukey Nixon. Her father sent a photograph of himself his wife, Sheila, took outside the Forbidden City. Her father looked ecstatic.
She tried to talk to him as he was dying. She stayed a week that last time. She wanted to read him Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy,” and thank him for seeing her grown. She wanted to say, “I never had any complaint.” She wanted him to know he hadn’t taken her from her mother, and that it was nobody’s fault she wasn’t ambitious, as he was ambitious for her.
She managed some of those things. She said enough to understand that he already knew. “Take care of your mother,” he said, and immediately amended the admonition. “Well, look in on her.”
Clare doesn’t need taking care of, but plenty of the world does.
“I’m going to take Juliette to France and Italy next spring, she told her father. Like her mother had done with her when she was fourteen. She thought her father winced, though it could have been the pain. She remembered sitting with her mother, drinking iced coffee in a cafe in Nice. Her mother asked her, “Are you terribly disappointed in the beach?” and when Ursula said the beach was fine, her mother added, as though it were an afterthought, “Your father and I are divorcing.” Ursula was angry, terribly angry, and shocked (no, she hadn’t seem it coming; her parents were so polite, and they cared for one another), and she screamed out at her mother, who was there to take the brunt of it. “I’m not going to live with you!” Her mother smiled and said, “That’s okay, Ursula. I’m going to move back to Seattle.”
Had her father minded? Bringing up that memory, with talk of a new generation’s trip to the Louvre? He had a good second marriage, to a woman much better suited to the sweet dull ritual of an academic’s life. Her mother has made a good life of her own in Seattle, full of the eccentricity of artists (she was an agent, and a gallery manager), and later, when she needed more security, in a position as a registrar of a fine arts college.
“Maybe you and Michael—” her father said. Evidently he still meant China. “There’ll be money for you.” She had assumed that was so, but she couldn’t bear to hear him talk of it.
“That’s wonderful,” she said, because he wanted her to, but it sounded terrible. “China. Of course we’ll go.”
“I want him to have my maps,” her father said next. Michael had once wanted to be a cartographer. Ursula wept. She didn’t know if Michael would care, though he did, when he got the maps. Some are very old and valuable. It showed that her father had taken Michael seriously, more seriously than Michael. Michael has been happy to make a perfectly ordinary life, teaching kids other people didn’t like. The maps nearly broke Ursula’s heart.
19
When they arrive home Juliette is lying across her bed, crying over her French. Ursula looks over Juliette’s shoulder at the book. The chapter is focused on the passé composé with irregular verbs, but Ursula knows that what is giving Juliette trouble is that she has never bothered to learn new nouns as masculine and feminine, and now they are piling up on her. A matter of le or la can ruin your life in French. It is hard not to say I told you so.
“If you want, I can look it over.” Poor Juliette looks miserable. She suffers over small things. Dancing, she is radiant.
“Go away.”
Ursula goes downstairs. Tears spurt onto her cheeks. She misses her father tonight, she is tired. She knows better than to get upset over a fifteen-year-old girl’s tantrums.
Michael is putting away the take-home packages. “Juliette doesn’t seem to be hungry,” she says.
Ursula thinks he gives her a rather superior look. He has warned her that she is a glutton for punishment. Doesn’t she know to steer clear of hot stoves, growling dogs, teenage daughters?
Michael goes into the living room, puts on a tape (with earphones), and settles down to read a Natural History. In a moment Pajamas comes along and noses the magazine out of the way, then settles down between Michael’s thighs. Michael’s hand strokes the cat’s head and back idly. His eyes close. The magazine slides to the floor. His mind is probably empty of everything except the music. He can actually not think. He considers it stubbornness on her part that she does not have the same ability to escape.
Upstairs, Ursula runs a very deep hot bath in the old clawfoot tub. When they bought this house, which before them was owned by a chiropractor who practiced downstairs in what is now the dining room, Ursula had the nice fiberglass tub taken out. She drove all over the valley until she found an old tub. She thinks of it as hers.
She is soaking when Juliette comes in.
“Mother?” Juliette says in a little girl’s voice.
“Hi, dear.”
“When I try to be just myself, not to think about what I say before I say it, like you told me—”
“Be spontaneous,” Ursula offers.
“Mother, I wasn’t through!” Juliette sits on the rim of the tub. “I can’t do it, that’s all. I don’t have any ideas. I want to say something so they will like me and I always say something stupid.”
“You’re so bright, darling. Who are they.?”
Juliette races from the room. Ursula lets the tears run down her face, dripping off below her ears, into the water. The tears are soothing and warm.
“Mother?” It is Juliette again. Ursula opens her eyes and nods. It is better if she remembers not to talk. “Can I get in?” Juliette looks very tried, and very young. All of Ursula’s resentment (how can she act like that when she knows I love her?) melts in a glance.
“Will there be room?” Ursula asks, drawing up her knees. “With your big boobs and all?” She holds her breath, hoping she has not said the wrong thing.
Juliette laughs and undresses. As she climbs in she says, “Could you make it hotter?” She sits oddly, with her legs tucked under, and she knees forward, like she was about to play jacks.
Something about the water, their nakedness, the evening hour. They are compan
ionable in the tub. Juliette says, “I’ve been thinking about Europe. Now that I know some French, I’d like to go back. Do you think we could?”
Ursula is surpised, but she does remember how impressed she was at her daughter’s passion for the trip, her love of colors and the textures of walls, her delight at the sounds of people jabbering exotically. Juliette had an uncanny intuition for direction, and for the potential of cafes and pensiones. While Ursula struggled with maps and guidebooks, counting lire or francs over and over, terribly uncertain, Juliette took stride. “Let’s go over there,” she might say. “Oh, look, chocolate croissants.”
Ursula thought her daughter so confident, and this just a year ago. It is painful and disconcerting to see her now downhearted. Ursula cannot deny the effect high school is having on her child; something in the very structure of it fails her. Carter jokes about it, makes it what he wants, and slides by on his mathematical prowess. Who values Juliette’s grace and discipline? Who appreciates her need for time to do things right?
“Remember Madame Serault?” Juliette asks now. “I was so humiliated over that jam!” She laughs merrily, though she cried torrents the night she asked the Madame for jam to go with her bread at dinner. Madame found that hilarious. She was more Italian than French, with huge expansive gestures and a loud voice. Juliette had proven the silly taste of Americans, and Madame enjoyed it, not, Ursula thinks, meaning to be cruel. Juliette, mortified, cried herself to sleep. Now she recalls the episode dreamily, as though it happened in the youth of someone very old. “Rmember she put whole cloves of garlic in the chicken, and I didn’t know what they were?” ‘Oh, but Americans, they cook from jars, don’t they?’ she said. I didn’t even know what she meant! I couldn’t cook!”
“She exaggerated everything. She meant well.”
“She was a great cook. Remember how those German boys ate like pigs? I forgot to eat, watching them.”
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