Beyond Deserving

by Sandra Scofield

  As soon as they are in the house, Juliette screams, “You don’t CARE that I don’t have any friends. You don’t CARE that I look DUMB in my STUPID clothes and STUPID hair.”

  Ursula reaches for Juliette. She has always dealt with tantrums by touching and holding and waiting them out.

  “I hate you!” Juliette runs to her room and slams the door.

  Pajamas scratches at the basement door in the kitchen, whining to be fed. Ursula opens the door and calls down into blackness: “Fish, you there?” Of course not, she didn’t see his van. But she wishes for company in the house. That was something she liked when she and Michael were first married. They lived in a dump, but their friends crashed for a night, for a week. Carmen lived with them over a year. Not Fish, not then. He was gone those first years. By the time he got back, the marriage was real and solid, their lives had become stable, there was Carter.

  She turns on the light and goes down to feed the cat. A spider floats in the water dish. Ursula washes and refills the dish. She squats down beside Pajamas. The cat attacks the food.

  “Couldn’t you be a little bit of a pal, huh?” Ursula says. The cat moves around so that Ursula is talking to her back-end. “Couldn’t you nuzzle up to me when I feed you?” Sometimes at night Pajamas climbs on Michael’s lap and rubs him all over with her head, pushing into his chest and his belly, then licking his hand or arm, finally settling against him. When the children were younger, Michael used to make them laugh by taking Pajamas’ paws and making her “dance” as he “spoke” for her.

  The cat is getting old. There is a bald place on her rear from a scrape.

  Ursula goes back upstairs and through the living areas, turning on lights. She has read that light is a great balm for depression. She isn’t exactly depressed, but she is a little lonesome. It used to be that Fridays were what you lived for all week. It used to be Ursula cooked great pots of stew or chili, and friends sat around listening to Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, and talked about living in Alaska or Belize, as if any of them were likely to make such big moves.

  Winston lives now in Seattle and drives a school bus. Two hours twice a day, this is his career. Funnier yet, he lives with Carmen, who always preferred exotic men from foreign countries before Winston. Harry Dayton is dead of a violent allergic reaction to some damned mushroom, in Mexico. The Lutters live in Portland still, in a much nicer house than this one, with their four kids. The Edsons have made country life work. In short, nobody is around anymore but Fish. And Katie.

  They have friends, of course. But you call before you drop by. You make plans for dinner. You reciprocate. She can’t imagine how she would get by, if not for coffee and commiseration at work. Social workers always empathize.

  Carter has brought his computer downstairs and set it up on the old receptionist’s counter, left over from the days when this was the chiropractor’s waiting room. They meant to take the desk out, but it is oak, and they haven’t got around to it. It looks silly, but there it is, a perfect place to type, too. Ursula keeps little potted begonias and ivy on top, and stacks magazines on the floor behind it.

  One summer day she found a half-empty Coke can there. There were ants all over the top, all over the counter, running down the sides and into the corner of the walls. She yelled at Carter, who said blithely, “The ants were already there, hiding, Mom. I did you a big favor flushing them out.” It turned out he was more or less correct. She began to see ants on the windowsills, upstairs and down. There were ants in her closet, in the pockets of her dresses. She called an exterminator in. The family left for two days. They drove to Newport and stayed in the new Sylvia Beach Hotel. Carter got the Edgar Allen Poe room, with heavy drapes around the bed. They had an expensive weekend, but a great time. When they came home, they left the windows open, even when a thunderstorm blew in. Michael said next time he would leave something out for the ants, that it wasn’t necessary to poison the whole family, but after that there weren’t any more ants.

  In the dining room, books are spread all over the table. Wads of yellow paper litter the table and floor. It dawns on Ursula that Carter spent the day there rather than at school. She takes a sack from the kitchen and gathers up the discarded wads. Drafts? Notes? Whatever they were, he is through with them. All of his—and his father’s—work is now on floppy disk. She carries the sack and the kitchen garbage out to the can in the alley. On her way to the bathroom she notes that the trash cans lined up outside Carter’s bedroom are still full.

  She washes and goes to her daughter’s room. “Juliette?” she says softly, tapping at the door. When Juliette does not answer, she goes back downstairs, curls up on the couch, and tries to read a book review in The New Republic. In fifteen minutes, she is asleep.

  When she wakes, Michael is sitting in his chair across from her, the cat on his lap. He has turned off most of the lights.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  He is petting Pajamas. “Watching you.”

  “That’s not much.” She is self-conscious, rumpled as she is. Whenever she lies down, the bags under her eyes puff up.

  “I was thinking about the last few months you were pregnant with Juliette. You could not stay awake. That’s why you finally took some time off. I swear, you only woke up to eat and bathe.”

  “And gained fifty pounds! Lots was going on. I wasn’t always sleeping. I was gestating.” She is pleased that he remembers, surprised he would bring it up. He doesn’t often wax nostalgic. He took a year off after that, to take care of Juliette while Ursula went back to work. People thought it was a little crazy, but it worked fine for them, and of course now lots of people work things out that way. He had been teaching social studies in a Portland high school, and he was bored, and tired of policing large classes. So the next year he worked on his special education certificate and juggled studies with Juliette’s babysitting needs. Ursula had had her turn with Carter. (Yet she feels closer to Juliette.)

  “Oh, speaking of Juliette,” she says. “Would you mind looking in on her? We had a spat.”

  “Really.”

  “She went off to the mall with some girls, and when I went to pick her up she was late meeting me. For some reason, that made her mad at me.”

  “Maybe you’re the one who should go up.”

  “I don’t know if she ate anything. I didn’t.”

  “We could go get something.”

  “Did you eat?”

  He makes a face. “Meat loaf and dilled potatoes.”

  “Sounds good. Too bad Geneva doesn’t do take-out. How was she?”

  “Comb your hair. I’ll go ask Juliette.”

  Ursula wonders if what has just passed constitutes a conversation.

  She wonders what Michael would say if she demanded, “Tell me something you never intended to tell me. Tell me one of your secrets.” He would say he doesn’t have any. He would say that if he did, he would keep them to himself. Otherwise they would not be secrets.

  If you know what your husband would say, is it the same as knowing what he thinks?

  As they go out to the car, Juliette takes her mother’s hand and squeezes it.

  While they sit in a booth waiting for their hamburgers, Juliette shyly tells them what happened at the mall.

  “I hate them. I really wanted to have a good time with them, and I sort of thought I was having one, I was laughing whenever they did and all, but they went all over the mall making fun of people. They’d say, Look at that UGLEE woman. They made fun of a really tall woman with a short man. It did look funny, but I didn’t think they ought to be mean about it. Then they were mad when I said you wouldn’t take them home.”

  Ursula grinds her teeth. Her dentist threatens to give her a nightguard if she doesn’t stop it. Oh I will stop, she said.

  “They saw some boys from school last year and they went to ask them for a ride. Kids who graduated. That’s where we were, when I came in from outside. We’d been sitting in their car.”

  “At least th
ey were nice enough to wait until your ride came,” Ursula says, wanting to make this easier for Juliette.

  “Come on. They were in the boys’ car smoking dope, Mom. I said I had to go, that you’d be there, and they—” Juliette’s eyes brim with tears.

  “I think we get the picture,” Michael says gently.

  Ursula is horrified. Not Juliette! “You didn’t—”

  Juliette shuts her eyes for an instant, and takes a deep breath. “God Mother, you can trust me. I’m not stupid.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Then I saw your car and I knew you were in there looking for me. I said I had to go, my mom was there. The girls said, ‘Well, we’ll go tell her bye-bye.’ I thought they were going to do something awful. They were stoned, Mom, couldn’t you TELL?”

  Ursula thought they seemed impolite.

  The waitress brings their hamburgers on plates piled with fries.

  “Forget it, darling,” Ursula says. “Let’s eat.” She aches for Juliette. The awful thing is she was a lot more like those dippy girls than like Juliette at that same age.

  Michael eats one of Ursula’s fries.

  Ursula says to him, “I think Carter cut school to work on his paper today.”

  “Well, he’s got to get it done. At least he is taking the crisis seriously.” Michael takes a strip of onion.

  “You know how I feel about cutting.”

  “I wish I could stay home the rest of the year,” Juliette says sadly. She is eating heartily, though. She gives Ursula a quick glance. “Sorry,” she whispers.

  As Michael juggles his keys at the front door, Ursula sees that the door is already ajar.

  “Damn that kid!” she says. “He can’t even close a door behind himself.”

  It is warm as summer out. “Think of it as leaving it open for us,” Michael says.

  They go inside.

  “I’m going to bed,” Juliette says.

  “I’m going to run the dishes,” Ursula says.

  “I think we’ve been robbed,” Michael says.

  Juliette calls from the top of the stairs. “What did you say, Daddy?” She creeps back down.

  “You’re kidding,” Ursula says. They have had their turn!

  Michael is staring at the cabinet where the tape deck ought to be. They can see the frame of dust around it. Juliette comes over and slides under his arm. “Oh Daddy,” she whispers.

  “The camera!” Ursula set it out on the highboy so that she wouldn’t forget it for the Fisher reception. A Konica Fish brought back from Hong Kong and “hocked” with Michael long ago. Her two rolls of film are gone too.

  They all run upstairs. Juliette throws herself across her bed and feels along the space between it and the wall. “My radio is still here!” she says happily.

  Michael puts his arm around Ursula. “We don’t have much, Ursie. And we’ve got insurance.”

  Ursula feels like someone has crawled under her covers, waiting to bite her toes. Theft is nasty. “HOW DID THEY GET IN?” She knows the answer as soon as she asks the question.

  She shoves open Carter’s door. Carter is lying on his bunk, earphones in his ears, sound asleep. He has found a fan and set it on his desk. As it blows across him, his hair lifts stiffly.

  Ursula shakes his shoulder violently. “Get up!”

  He comes awake groggily, surprised at the fuss. “What’s going on?”

  “You left the damned door open! You didn’t empty the TRASH CANS outside your stupid door. They’ve been sitting there since WEDNESDAY NIGHT. Now GET UP. What did I TELL you about LOCKING THE DOORS?”

  Michael tugs at Ursula from behind. Carter has managed to sit up and is shaking his head. The earphones dangle like a high-tech headdress, connected to nothing. Carter is wearing jockey shorts. His comforter is twisted around one foot. He looks up at his mother. “Dad?” he says.

  Ursula yanks free of Michael’s hand and goes out into the hall. “Oh God, what about the maps?” She has told Michael a thousand times they ought to be kept in a safety deposit box. He thinks they should sell them. Her father’s maps. She runs into the bedroom, but she cannot remember where they put them. “THE MAPS!”

  “Honey, honey, they’re right here.” Michael pulls all the towels and washrags out of the hall closet onto the floor. At the back are the maps, inside a sweater bag. He holds the bag up. “It’s okay, Ursula. Calm down. They’re right here.”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Carter says from his doorway. “You’re the one with a degree in crisis intervention.”

  Ursula stares at her son with contempt. How dare he put her down, when she’s been robbed! Then she almost laughs. He has an uncanny knack for being right at the wrong time. It isn’t funny, he would get entirely the wrong idea. “You slept through it,” she says calmly. “They might have killed you.”

  “Mother,” Carter drawls. “They just needed something to hock. It’s not that big a deal.”

  “What do you know? Is that what that poor kid at the Minit Market thought when those punks shot him a couple of months ago? Not a big deal? And you in bed. LOOK AT YOUR EARPHONES!”

  Carter takes a moment to realize that his expensive tape equipment is among the missing items. “ASSHOLES!” he shouts. He flings the earphones against the wall.

  Juliette backs into her own room, and slams the door. She lets out a terrible wail.

  Michael crosses in front of Ursula before she can get to Juliette. He leans inside the bedroom, holding the door. “What is it, Julie? What did they do?”

  “They didn’t do anything. I haven’t got anything to STEAL. I haven’t got anything worth stealing.”

  “Then what is it?” Michael asks patiently.

  “I’m going to bed and I never want to get up,” Juliette wails again, and slams her door. Again. She opens it one more time. “Getting burglared isn’t the worst tragedy, you know.”

  Michael tells Carter, “Go take a bath, son.” To Ursula he says, “Let’s go downstairs.” On the stairs he laughs. “Bur-glared.”

  The little television in the kitchen is gone. Michael puts water on for tea. Ursula stares at the highchair. “Why do we still have that thing?” she asks. To hold the tv. She can’t imagine not watching the news while she cooks. When she cooks. Michael is maddeningly calm. Ursula feels drained. “It was probably kids,” Michael says. “This isn’t exactly a high-crime area. It isn’t Portland. And it isn’t the Minit Market. Don’t you wonder where they’ll get rid of the stuff?”

  “They sell it to each other, Michael.”

  “You’d know?” Michael smiles.

  “Remember the year I did crisis intervention? Remember the mother who called because she found her son’s closet full of stolen stereo equipment? Remember the boys who rented space in one of those store-and-lock places to stash computers?”

  Michael says, “I’ll pour the tea and then I’ll call the police.”

  Carter lets out a whoop and bounds down the stairs, holding a towel around him. He sticks his head around to look for them in the kitchen. “You guys see my computer?”

  Ursula puts her head in her hands. Michael goes with Carter into the living room. She hears Carter tell him, “I brought it all down here today to do my paper. I got it all on the disk. All I have to do is print it. WHERE IS MY PRINTER?”

  Carter stomps around the rooms, cursing. Ursula is surprised at the variety of foul words he knows. Some are archaic. “My paper,” he keeps saying. “My fucking paper.”

  In a moment he confronts his mother. “Where’s my rough draft? What did you do with it?”

  “I’ll call Mrs. Angstrom,” Michael says.

  “What’ll she care?” Carter says.

  “What papers?” Ursula asks, to stall for time. She can feel a major headache coming on.

  “We wrote it OUT. You said LONGHAND. Then I put it on the DISK.”

  “When you should have been in school.”

  “Not now,” warns Michael.

  The kettle begins to whistle shr
illy. Michael goes to make the tea.

  “I picked up your trash,” Ursula says quietly. “I took it out to the garbage. The downstairs trash, that is.”

  “I’ll have to do it over. Oh shit.” Carter runs out the back door.

  “Sugar or honey?” Michael asks.

  “Whatever.”

  Michael uses sugar, measuring it exactly, a level teaspoon. Ursula wonders if it is a concern for calories or neatness.

  Carter runs back in, clutching his towel up so tightly around his middle, his bottom isn’t covered.

  “Go put some pants on, son,” Michael says.

  “Mom! God, Mom! You threw the kitchen garbage right on top of my papers. They’re all gucky.”

  “Have fun, Carter.” Ursula sighs. She wonders if this involves friends of Carter’s. Some of the rich ones, doing it for a thrill.

  “Pants,” Michael says.

  Carter goes upstairs. Ursula sips her tea. Michael calls the police. When she hears them at the door, she goes up to look in on Juliette.

  She can hear Michael speaking calmly to the officer. Someone comes to the top of the stairs, pauses, then goes down again.

  Ursula sits down on Juliette’s bed. The room is dark except for the spill of outside light through the blind. Juliette is crying, flung across the bed in her shirt, panties, and socks. Her discarded jeans hang off the bed at the end. “It’s all right, sweetie,” Ursula soothes. “It’s all very shocking, but I’m sure the thieves were disappointed.”

  “What do I care?” Juliette says.

  “And I’m not mad.”

  Juliette moans.

  Ursula considers going to a motel. She is exhausted. Even a cheap, dingy motel sounds good. She still needs to wash her hair, and she longs for a shower. She is due at the caterer’s at eight in the morning. On a Saturday. And she still hasn’t called Katie.

  Juliette begins to cry in earnest. “There’s nobody in the world who cares about me.”

  “Juliette!”

  “Besides you and Dad.”

  “Marina?”

  “We’re in dance together. And French.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re not friends.”