Beyond Deserving

by Sandra Scofield

  “Did you talk Fish into going?”

  “I got home from dance rehearsal and he was hanging around the kitchen, so I said I’d go if he would.”

  “Did you practice the dance?”

  “It was just a dumb dance! I saw everybody getting all worked up. It was supposed to be a party! But people were mad. All that glowering. Besides, then they all looked at me, didn’t they? I was solo. I was the star.”

  “Sure.” Katie wonders if, when Rhea is this age, Katie’s mother will understand her. June certainly did not have the slightest idea what was going on with Katie, who at fifteen had already learned you could get a boy’s time and attention if you weren’t too prissy about where he put his hands. Maybe it will be easier for June the second time. Maybe Rhea is easier to love. Probably she is.

  Katie pulls up in the driveway. Fish motions for her to go up to the garage. He parks at the curb. Before they get out, Juliette says, “On our way out to River Cove, Fish told me he might build a boat and sail around the world. Do you think he will?”

  “I’d say that is very, very unlikely.”

  “Do you suppose he’s crazy? Like, he can’t help himself?”

  “Depends on what you think a person ought to have control of.”

  Juliette is baffled.

  “Don’t think about it,” Katie says. “It’s for Fish to figure out.” Saying that, she thinks she might have put her finger on something important, something those women in Al-Anon would understand. She can almost see them nodding, smiling, giving her their approval. “There’s nothing that has to be done,” she hears Joyce saying. “There’s only someone to be.” Why does that seem like such a fresh idea?

  What else has she been doing all these years?

  29

  They are hungry. “It looks like dead people live here,” Juliette complains, examining the contents of the refrigerator. A dank odor emanates from it. “My mother doesn’t seem to think anybody eats in this house anymore.”

  Fish laughs.

  Katie, rummaging in the cabinets, finds a can of boned chicken, and another of green chiles. “Is there cheese?”

  Juliette comes up with a very hard chunk of cheddar about two inches square, with a crust along the edges. The waxed paper has crumpled and fallen away from it. “I can cut the dry part off,” Katie said. “How about an omelet? There are eggs.”

  Juliette puts her finger in her mouth and makes a gagging noise.

  “What about those enchiladas you make?” Fish asks.

  “With no cheese?” Something in his easy familiarity bothers her. As though, after all these years, she should not be reminded that she has cooked for him.

  Fish throws both hands up in surrender. “I’ll go to the fucking store.”

  “Cheese and tortillas, that’s all I really need.”

  “Sour cream,” Juliette adds. “Salsa.”

  “Salad,” says Fish.

  “I am NOT cleaning lettuce,” Katie says.

  Fish plunks his keys and a ten dollar bill down on the table. “You go, Katie. I’ll take a look at your car.”

  “Me?” Katie’s heart gives a peculiar thump. She hasn’t been in Fish’s truck since last summer.

  Fish gives her a steady gaze. “You stop driving in the past ten minutes?”

  “I’ll take a shower.” Juliette flees up the stairs.

  “Okay, okay,” Katie says. Fish goes down into the basement. She goes out the front door. She approaches the van with trepidation. Getting in Fish’s lair is too personal. She sits in the driver’s seat a moment and tries to clear her head. All over the dashboard are Fish’s penciled calculations: mileage, gallons of gas, mpg. A couple of phone numbers with initials. She doesn’t know how he makes sense of it.

  In the rider’s seat is a beat-up pink tape player and five or six tapes. She picks some of them up: Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Dylan. Carter would say, You guys are living in another century. A wave of nostalgia sweeps over her. The music goes with times and places, miles and miles in this van. She punches ON. Mick Jagger wails, “High and dry … up here with no warning … What a way to go … She left me with no warning—” Oh perfect, Katie thinks painfully. She glances at the back of the truck. Fish built a bed there, a wooden frame latticed with rope. She has spent a hundred nights in that bed, or more, in this van or the one before it. Now the bed is littered with scraps of lumber, manila folders, paper sacks. That helps. It isn’t so much a bed as a surface for piles of Fish’s stuff.

  She realizes she was nervous because of an instinct not to be moved by something so stupidly nostalgic as a bed that has to be tightened every couple of nights to fight its sag.

  One summer they lived in the parking lot at the pier at Honeymoon Bay while Fish worked on a salmon trawler leased out by a nervous college professor. She went out with Fish every day (what else would she have done?) but she wasn’t any help. The most she ever managed to do was to make tea, and once in a while yell at sea lions as they came up to the boat and bit salmon off the lines. She was sick every day. Her weight dropped below a hundred pounds. But she wanted to be with him. She was scared of the fog, for him. She thought if she went along, nothing would happen to him, or if it did it would happen to her, too, and it wouldn’t matter.

  She can only remember one really pretty day, with brilliant sun. It warmed enough for bare shoulders, which were burned by late afternoon. The professor went out with them. He swore he saw a whale. He ran from one side to the other, tossing them around with the movement of his heavy weight in the small boat. Neither Fish nor Katie saw any whale.

  She wanders around the Safeway store like a visitor from out of town. She keeps forgetting what she is in the aisle for.

  By the time she has thrown together the enchiladas (Juliette takes charge of the microwave), Fish comes in and announces he will have to buy parts. “It’s too late today, and I probably can’t get them on Sunday. I’ll take care of it Monday, though, the latest. It’s not a big thing, Katie. You should have done something about that starter a long time ago.” He is confident, chiding. He seems happy to have her there. He seems to have forgotten what hangs between them.

  “You shouldn’t miss your work,” Katie says weakly. “I can take it in somewhere.” The starter suddenly seems too intimate a thing between them. She doesn’t think it should make him happy to work on her car.

  “How would you get it there?” he teases.

  They sit down to eat, but she only picks at her food. Fish asks Juliette when she is going to get her learner’s permit and start driving.

  Juliette perks up at the suggestion. “Nobody’s had time to help me,” she says.

  Katie has her doubts about Fish as instructor (though he more or less taught her to drive, trucks being far out of her limited experience with vehicles), but he is fond of Juliette. Maybe he will draw on reserves of patience Katie has forgotten, or not known how to tap. Both Fish and Juliette seem cheered by Katie’s modest effort with the food.

  Ursula and Michael burst in. “Never again for fifty more years!” Ursula says.

  “What do I smell?” Michael asks enthusiastically. He picks up a plate on the way to the counter. Ursula gives Katie a peculiar look. Katie can’t tell if it is critical or not; she thinks it has more to do with Fish than with cooking in Ursula’s kitchen. Ursula has never minded that.

  “Spinach tarts didn’t do it, huh?” Ursula sits down without taking any food. She taps the table with the tips of her fingers on her right hand.

  “Fish was looking at my car,” Katie says.

  Ursula looks at her but doesn’t say anything. Her left hand joins in the rhythm of her right.

  “Say, Ursula. Could you take me home?”

  Katie says how hard she thinks it is going to be to avoid Fish, unless she avoids them all.

  “Maybe it would be easier if you left town,” says Ursula. “Though I suppose that’s not practical.”

  “The costume shop closes soon. I’d like to work wardrobe
on one of the shows, but I could get away if I needed to. The shop doesn’t open up again until after Christmas.”

  “You could go see Rhea.”

  “Maybe.” The thought brings a lump to Katie’s throat. Sometimes she misses her daughter in a vague, wistful way. It is like thinking of a trip to the Himalayas, something read about in a book.

  “You need to call your mother, Katie. She called our house last night after I talked to you. I didn’t give her your number, but you should. You’ve got to get along with her, for Rhea’s sake.”

  “I suppose,” Katie says. She gazes out of the window, down the picturesque street, with its Victorian houses and showy gardens. Like a movie set. On Michael and Ursula’s street the houses are funky, but no one looks poor. Poor people live farther down, in the basin of the valley. “Do you know what Fish said to me today? He said, ‘Does your new boyfriend love the taste of you?’”

  “Meaning something gross?” Ursula doesn’t seem to make much of it.

  “He doesn’t. Jeff doesn’t.”

  “Oh Katie.”

  “I’m not saying he wouldn’t. But some things are still—they still belong to Fish.”

  “Not your sexuality, Katie. Not if you get a divorce.”

  Ursula sounds neutral, like a social worker. She is probably thinking of her bath. She has a thing for baths, with bubbling lotions and loofahs, a radio in the bathroom, a little plastic pillow she leans back against.

  “I’m not divorced yet, though, am I?” Katie says.

  “Not yet. But as I understand it, you’re on your way.”

  30

  The professor who owned the salmon fishing boat came out every week to see how they were doing. He seemed nostalgic about his own sessions on the sea, but when he once went out for the morning with Fish and Katie, it was hard to believe he had ever known which end went first. Several times he brought them hash, good stuff, bestowing it on them with great self-importance. Another time he brought a bottle of expensive wine. He obviously expected them to drink it with him—he had brought a corkscrew with him—but Fish got a laugh out of sending him off disappointed, and then slugging the wine down as if it were two bucks a gallon. The man had a thing for Fish (and not Katie, as they naturally thought at first). Katie assumed it was admiration, Fish doing what the professor would like to be doing if only he weren’t so responsible and straight.

  He quizzed Fish about Vietnam. Fish always answered in short noncommittal ways, not encouraging any questions. But he was getting a very good deal on the boat, because the professor was busy with a special grant. He was a sociologist with an interest in “the alternative culture.” He often quoted books he assumed Katie and Fish knew when they didn’t and he quoted verses from rock and roll songs like someone pulling out his Shakespeare. Eventually Katie and Fish realized that he considered them good specimens. Fish started leading him on. For example, Fish told him about going to Altamont (which they had), and seeing the Angels kill that poor kid (which they had not). Fish could really talk when he got wound up.

  The professor came by one Saturday in August, and said they had to come to his house. There was a barbecue, a rock band, all for his daughter’s seventeenth birthday. The people from Sausalito who did bubble tents were setting them up in the yard. “Gosh, we don’t have a thing to wear,” Fish said. The professor took him seriously. “That’s okay,” he reassured them. “We’ll tell everyone you’re from my boat. Come as you are.” That wound Fish up. He smeared his hand across his shirt. “A little fish guts? Bait in my pocket?” The professor joked and laughed and hit Fish on the shoulder. “Be sure to wear your moustache,” he kidded.

  When they got to the house in the wasteland development in Fremont, the guy took them out in the back yard, behind his hideous fake-Tudor tract house, and showed them his daughter’s playhouse. It was a modified replica of the big house, with electricity and windows that opened and closed. He punched Fish on the shoulder again. “She used to come out here to have tea parties with her little girlfriends. Now she comes out with her boyfriends and wants a lock on the door.” Hah hah.

  He put his hands on Fish’s shoulders hard and peered at him. “Listen,” he said, his voice cracking with earnestness. He was leaning so close Fish was cringing. “If the revolution comes—” He looked over his shoulder. “When it comes—do you think they’ll take my house away?”

  Fish wriggled out of his grasp and took the boat keys out of his pocket and handed them over right there. “Absolutely, man,” he said. “I hadn’t realized what danger we were in, fucking around with you. What a fucking near miss!”

  In the truck he drove eighty on the freeway, so that the metal shuddered. He screamed a long scream, a kind of war whoop Katie imagined they used to psych kids up in Vietnam before an attack. He leaned out the window and screamed, “AAASSHOLE!”

  Fish has told that story a lot of times. Katie has heard Ursula tell it too, though a long time ago. She told it to Jeff, herself. She was trying to make him understand about Fish and her and the times in which they had come together. She was a little self-conscious because, halfway through, she realized Jeff had been in high school when this was going on. Jeff said, “I really don’t want to hear about him. Why are you telling me stories about your crazy husband?”

  Of course it wasn’t “stories,” it was one story. Katie told Jeff to get the hell out and not come back. She was an artifact from the sixties. She was embarrassed. She had had all that to say (when she seldom said much), and it had come back at her like that. A few days later Jeff showed up again like nothing had happened. He teased her about her braids, and tickled her hairy armpits and called her “my little hippie.” She knew he was covering up for the fact that he’d discovered things about her—a part of her—that he didn’t like. That part had been with Fish, eating Saltines and joshing a puffed-up academic. Maybe it has become too difficult with Fish, but she has not become another person altogether. She still hates arrogance and people who have to be “in,” and she still takes pride in never having joined anybody’s club. Maybe that part is only a sixth of her, an eighth. But if Jeff doesn’t like it, it doesn’t mean she can throw it away.

  She told Maureen about the quarrel, if you could call it that. She doesn’t think Maureen would know zip about the sixties, if John Lennon hadn’t been murdered and everything dredged up to make money on that. Maureen isn’t yet thirty. What she said was that no man wants to hear about a former lover, especially a husband.

  “But everything I’ve ever done my whole adult life has been with Fish!” Katie wailed. What history would she have if she eliminated him?

  Besides, Fish knows her, and Jeff doesn’t.

  Maureen insisted. “Didn’t you ever hear of a clean slate?”

  Katie thought that sounded like she was the one who had gone to jail. “Shit,” she said. “What’s Jeff going to think when he hears about Rhea?”

  31

  Jeff comes at six-thirty and takes her to a new Mexican restaurant not far from her place. It is run by a couple from Southern California. They put black olives on everything. Katie doesn’t want to say she just made enchiladas, so she claims to have overeaten at the reception. She nurses a Coke while Jeff eats fajitas. She picks something green out of his dish. “I like that,” she says. “What is it?”

  He says it is cilantro. “You should help me cook,” he says. “You can help me make chutney soon. I’m putting it up for next winter.”

  They each have a beer, and he tells her about the conference in Eugene where he has spent the last three days. Agricultural geneticists living it up at the Riverside Inn. He is twisting in his seat. “I really have something to tell you.”

  She has to fight a yawn. The day has been exhausting. His excitement is not contagious. Actually, there doesn’t seem to be much that excites him, except for his fruits and vegetables, and a certain way she touches him in bed.

  She just cannot stop thinking about Fish. “I’m sorry for any way I ever hurt you,�
� Fish whispered to her in the corner of the Grange Hall. “I wish I could be a better man.” That was a lot for him to say. She was embarrassed. Men make her feel responsible for their vulnerabilities. She learned that from a book Maureen lent her.

  Jeff suggests they walk. He isn’t pleased with her sleepy nonchalance, but on the street he can’t help being happy.

  “The grape-growers are sending me to France!” They are standing beside the duck pond in the park. “I’ll probably visit pears, too.” Visiting pears sounds silly.

  What can she say? “That’s nice.”

  “Nice!” He squeezes her hand and marches her up the street, up the steep hill to her back entrance. “Nice, the lady says! I’m going to France, and she calls that nice!” They go into her apartment, and he puts his arms around her and kisses her. “Did they serve him the papers?” he asks, leaning against her the same way Fish did in the afternoon in the Grange.

  “Oh yes, they did that.”

  “Good.”

  “He came out to his parents’ anniversary party all worked up. I shouldn’t have done it.”

  Jeff pulls away.

  “I should have waited until next week.” Her mind is suddenly full of Geneva’s forbearance, the sister’s good-natured brazenness, the awful food that should have been good. And Juliette with her arms above her head. It would be too much work to explain all that to Jeff. He wouldn’t be interested. It makes her tired even to consider talking through all that.

  “Now it’s started. Nothing can happen until that’s behind you, Katie.”

  “Fish,” she says stubbornly. “Fish is not a ‘that’.”

  “That tie, I meant.”

  She doesn’t ask: What happens then? She hasn’t thought ahead and doesn’t know if Jeff has. He is closer to Maureen’s age than hers. He was surprised when she said she was forty. Besides, she doesn’t have much curiosity about him, or about the future in general. If there is anything she believes in, it is fate.