Beyond Deserving

by Sandra Scofield

  “You harass me about it. I have to claim something behind my brow. As mine, I mean.”

  They finish the wine and turn off the light and lie beside one another a long time in the dark, then undress and crawl under the covers. When Michael does not move again toward her, Ursula assumes he has fallen asleep. She lies with her eyes open, thinking about what he said. She thinks about her father’s maps, about maps of all kinds, of a time when there were none, and man’s mind was closed to the world for lack of a concept. Maps seem to float around her, old yellow ones with spidery lines.

  Michael told her once, “You are your father’s daughter, Ursula. You see a map as the layout of a journey, and you want the map to tell you why and how and when and what happened. But a map is not a narrative. It represents information. It marks distance and represents contours. It may project area, height, slope. In geology, it reveals formations. The questions it answers are physical and scientific. Its abstractions are those that allow us to perceive what is too large to see in actuality. The other abstractions are in the reader. The reader makes the map more than what it is.” And Ursula said, “But if someone has made a map, then someone has been there, and if someone has been there, the land has been claimed. It is possessed.” And Michael said, “Not by the map, Ursie.”

  Michael is awake. “You’d make a good ley hunter, Ursie,” he says, turning onto his side to look at her. “You’d love the idea that there’s a system of intersections among prehistoric sites, and that you can walk that system. It’s a way of mapping that is all tied up with lost knowledge and values. It’s so full of significance.”

  “Why does it interest you?” she asks. She is thrilled that he is awake after all. His intriguing notions are incredibly sexy. “Do you believe a ley network exists?” She tries desperately to remember what she knows; he left something lying around, a book, a long time ago. All she can recall is the look of the map, dense with intersections. She doesn’t know what land it mapped. Somewhere in England.

  “I just like the idea of the symmetry and pattern, even if it is only an idea. I like it that it is there before I walk it, and after I walk it, it is there even if I never am. I don’t care about the sites, you know, only the connectors.”

  Ursula thinks a moment. It is very difficult to lie still. She would prefer to have this discussion out of bed, where she could pace, or at least gesticulate. Then something occurs to her. “We could be in different places, and intersect, because where you are would be an extension of where I am.” She smiles hugely. It is all she can do to keep from clapping her hands.

  “You’ve got it,” he says.

  “I like the ley system much better than the idea of Andean lines as UFO landing strips. I mean, I think the smaller English scale suits me.” She can see them now, strolling over green meadows, crossing paths with old codgers in wool jackets with walking sticks. Wind on the heather, all of it.

  Michael strokes her shoulder. “You like everything that means more than can be explained. You like to go away from a conversation with a nut to crack, a cud to chew. That’s why I could never tell you everything, wife of mine. I would fail you if I did.”

  “I love you, Michael.”

  “I’ll show you a ley line,” he says. He takes her hand and moves it lazily from his chest, over the rise of his hip bone, a sharp turn and down. He touches her chin with his lips. “It’s all connected, you see. There’s no need to understand. Trust me. This is our corner of the world. We’re bound to find one another.”

  Ursula is able to lie still for a moment longer only because she knows the next moment will be so good. She tells her surprising, secretive, teasing, remarkable husband one more thing before she has run out of words to speak. “What I like,” she says, “is when we get where we’re going at the same time.”

  THREE: SURRENDER

  50

  Katie is lying on the king-sized bed in a motel near the San Francisco airport, watching The Buddy Holly Story on tv. Sprawled on the same bed, asleep, is her daughter. Across the other bed, by the window, her mother sits under the lamplight, reading Studs Terkel’s Working.

  One of the Crickets just knocked Buddy’s front teeth out, but he sticks them back in with gum and plays on the Ed Sullivan Show anyway. Katie loves the songs in the movie, and she loves the character. She wonders if Buddy Holly really was as sensible and kind as the movie makes him out to be. She can see why the Puerto Rican girl falls in love with him. She loves the way he takes charge of everything. Nobody puts anything over on him.

  Her mother looks up from her book and says, “Is that that boy from Lubbock who got killed years back?”

  Katie says it is.

  June looks back at her book. “It’s really sad how many people hate the work they do,” she says.

  “Mother,” Katie says, “did you ever like music?”

  “Why dear, I still do!” June says. She tucks her bookmark into place and puts the book down on the table. “One of my little notions has been that I would go and live in a city for a while, just so I can go to symphonies and ballets, and operas, too, though I really don’t know if I would like them.”

  “You should stay over and see something here.”

  “I didn’t think of it. Well, there’s always the radio.”

  “Did you ever like Frank Sinatra, people like that?”

  “My yes. When we were first married, your father and I used to love to go dancing. There was so much good music for dancing then. The jukebox was full of good songs. You danced close a lot, not like kids today. Sometimes your father would say, ‘Ready, dip,’ and I’d lean back on his arm.”

  “I never hear you say Daddy’s name. You always call him ‘your father.’”

  “It’s just a convention, Katie.”

  “But how do you think of him? When you remember him, do you think, ‘Katie’s father’? Do you think, ‘my husband’? Or ‘James’?”

  June looks somewhat startled. She wrinkles her nose and sniffs nervously. “I don’t really think about him,” she says.

  “But you lived with him so long.”

  “You don’t know things, Katie. You don’t know how you adjust when your life makes a big change, like when your—when James died.”

  “I know I seem to have Fish in me as much as ever, and I can’t just set him aside.” When her mother called about this trip, she told her the divorce might not go through. Her mother said, “You’ll have to decide.” She didn’t ask Katie one question. Katie thought it was peculiar.

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Why not?!”

  “Shh, Katie. Rhea’s tired. She was so excited, she couldn’t sleep last night. She was awake when I got up at five-thirty, raring to go. She used her little curling iron.”

  “What about me? Why is my being married nothing like you being married?” She is the age her mother was when Katie left home for good.

  “Just think about it for one minute. Your father and I lived a conventional, ordinary life, with you, a house, his business—and I never even thought of divorce.”

  “And Fish and I are flakes.”

  “Darling, please let’s not quarrel.”

  “When did you stop dancing?”

  “When I was pregnant.” June fiddles with her book, sliding her fingers in between pages, then going on to another place in the book. She doesn’t pick it up, or look at it. Katie wonders what sorts of people like their work. Besides the obvious ones like movie stars and doctors and judges. She thinks Fish likes working now, more than any time she’s known him, except maybe when he worked in the Richmond shipyards. He said the black guys always had dope on them, and they would go deep into the ship and get stoned. He said he hoped the people who built airplanes were more together than the ones who repaired ships.

  “But you could have gone afterwards. After you had me.” She tries to make a picture in her mind of her mother flung backwards over her father’s arm, her skirt flapping, her hair swinging out from her neck. Her father us
ed to get red boils on the back of his neck. He would soak a towel in scalding water and lay it across his neck. Her mother would come along behind him, wiping up dripping water with a sponge.

  “Everything changed then. James had his business to build.” June slides the book away, almost out of reach, and crosses her hands on the glass.

  “Did he like what he did? Selling tires?”

  “My, you are in a rare mood,” June says. She pushes against the back of her chair and stretches her arms out for a moment.

  “You mind?”

  “I don’t want to fuss with you.”

  “Mother, I’m glad Rhea’s coming. I promise you I’ll take care of her. She’ll have a good time.” Katie speaks to reassure her mother. She would die if her mother changed her mind, after Katie has told everyone Rhea is coming. She certainly plans to do the best she can, though the truth is she is nervous about what that ought to be. She doesn’t really know how you entertain a nine-year-old girl. But when she told Ursula, she admitted her fears, and Ursula was very sweet and said they should spend all the time they want at her house. She said, “You know how it is in summer, someone’s always around. She can sleep over if she wants, you both can, in the spare bed. When my mother comes for the ballet, you can make a bed on the floor in Juliette’s room, or the living-room.”

  Her mother shakes her head. She doesn’t know anything about Katie’s sleeping arrangements, except that Katie said she was in an apartment, at least until Fish’s house is vacant at the end of the month. Her mother has to believe Katie will take care of Rhea, or else change her mind, and this is already an expensive operation, meeting in San Francisco and all. “I know you will. I’m glad, too, now that it’s decided.” What she really means, thinks Katie, is that now that it’s decided she will live with it and convince herself it’s best. It has to be best, because it is June who thought of it.

  “I don’t really understand why you’re doing this.”

  “I told you, Katie. She came home one evening from her little friend’s house. Emily’s family was having a reunion. They said she could come over for dessert the next day. She wanted to know what a reunion was. Then, after she had been there, she came home and said, ‘Why is it I don’t have any relatives?’ Your Aunt Christine, gave me this look, all the way across the room. She didn’t have to. I realized that Rhea does have relations. She has other grandparents. An aunt and uncle.”

  “She has a father, too.”

  “Of course.”

  “When I told Fish she was coming, he got very excited. He wants to take her to the beach, up to Crater Lake, and there’ll be a parade on July 4th. It’s important to all of us.”

  June leans so far forward, she puts her hands on the bed for support. “Please, Katie. Be careful?”

  “Sure. Seat-belts, cut her meat into tiny bites—”

  “Don’t be silly!” June’s face has tightened. The creases in her forehead deepen, her mouth is smaller. Katie’s own face is flat and untelling, she hopes. Her heart is pounding.

  “Being in prison did something to him, Mother. He’s changed.” Now her mother will say in what way? and she won’t know what to say. It’s just a feeling she has, a feeling between her and Fish. It’s just a hope. Katie and Fish.

  “I haven’t ever spoken to Rhea about that. I don’t think she has any way to understand.”

  “We don’t go around discussing it. He doesn’t wear his old uniform.”

  “Katie, listen to me a moment. This is your child, yours and Fisher’s. And she is good and sweet and innocent and bright and full of love. I’m anxious about leaving tomorrow, about seeing you and her get on a plane going in the other direction. But when I thought about it, I realized that the risk now—of disappointment, of surprises, of an uneasy fit with the Fisher family, with Fisher—I realized that risk isn’t as great as the one that she will grow up blithely, and then one day feel she was cheated. That she won’t know who she is because she only has me and Christine, and what has been so little of you. I’m not doing this for you and Fisher, though my heart extends to her grandparents, for what they’ve missed for nine years. I’m doing it for Rhea, and I want her to be uppermost in your mind, too. I don’t want her hurt by this.”

  “Mother, you ought to know that I’m not capable of operating my life with a subtext. I understand what you’re telling me, but all I can do is be with her, take her around, and—love her. I can’t give her her identity in ten days.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Katie watches her mother as June walks across the room to the bath. She turns the television up again, and watches Buddy Holly’s story turn inexorably toward tragedy and immortality. Rhea turns over and rearranges herself under the covers. Her little butt sticks up, making a mound in the middle of the bed. Katie can’t think just what Rhea looks like in the face. She wonders what she’ll look like, older. It’s funny how you look at the childhood photograph of someone you know grown and you can see the adult already there, in the face. But then you look back at the grownup—not all the time, but with some people—and you think it’s really too bad the person changed so much, turning out lumpy or scrawny or hard in the face or whatever. Like Gary Busey. She saw him a while back on a late night tv movie about some guys who go to a South American country to rescue two hostages. Gary Busey is this banker who goes along to pay for things, and he is fat and disgusting, nothing like he was when he played Buddy Holly. If he had died he could have been remembered for that terrific movie, the way Buddy Holly is remembered for songs that are thirty years old.

  When Katie told Fish that Rhea was coming, he said, “What got into your mother? She got cancer or something?”

  When June comes out of the bathroom dressed for bed, Katie turns the tv off and crawls under the covers herself. All the lights are off except the one over the table where June was reading. June sits in the chair again, and props her feet on the bed. She squirts lotion on her hands and starts creaming her face.

  “The college did a very provocative play last year,” she says. “It’s called Equus, have you ever seen it?” Katie grunts to say she hasn’t, and June goes on. “It’s about a very sick boy, emotionally sick, and about the doctor who’s working with him. One day, when the doctor is doubting what he’s doing, wondering about a decision he has to make, his friend says to him, ‘One must hold on to priorities. Children before adults.’ That’s how I’m trying to mother your child, Katie. I wish I had done it more with you.”

  The silence is palpable. Each waits on the other, Katie thinks. She would like to say something to put her mother’s mind at ease, or at least respond intelligently to her quoting a play, but she and her mother aren’t operating in the same galaxy. They don’t see the same constellations.

  “When you were born,” June says quietly, “my whole life changed. I wanted to do everything right. It took all my attention. Then when I looked around I realized that James was gone. He had the store to build up. Not that he liked or didn’t like tires, dear. He would have scoffed at such a notion. He was doing what needed doing, in a way that allowed him to run his own life. But he was unhappy. I think he was unhappy almost from the moment you were born. Oh, what a terrible thing I’ve said to you. Don’t think about it, it’s the past.” She coughs and covers her mouth with her hand. She looks quite distressed. So, Katie thinks in wonder, Mother has done this kind of horse-trading before. I was the prize. Poor Mother. “I’ve been trying to understand the past,” she says.

  “By the time I realized I’d had a child and lost a husband, I was desperate to make you worth the cost. So I boxed your ears your whole childhood.”

  “You never touched me.”

  “Not with my hands.”

  Katie feels tears brimming in her eyes. She looks at her mother in the lamplight, and her mother blurs, because of the tears. Her mother has confessed something and she knows she could hurt her very much if she said the wrong thing. If she said, for example, you’ve never stopped hurting me. But what wo
uld be the gain?

  June turns off the light and gets in bed. In a little while, Katie says, “Remember when I broke my arm out in the yard?” June says, “I remember it well.” “Well,” Katie says bravely, “remember we went to the hospital in a taxi? It was the first time I’d ever been in one, I was excited about it and almost forgot about my arm.” June says nothing. “I remember you were very angry. I don’t know why it’s been on my mind. But I keep wondering, was it because I fell down? Was it because I was so much trouble?” Katie thinks her mother is crying now. Her nose makes funny noises, and her voice, when she speaks, is thick and sad. Her mother says, “I was angry with your father because he wasn’t there when we needed him. I was angry because he wasn’t there and I had no idea where he was.”

  Katie doesn’t know if she loves her mother or not, but in that moment she understands clearly that she does not hate her.

  51

  Rhea hugs her grandmother and kisses her loudly on the mouth, hugs her some more, and laughs, almost jumping. “OryGONE,” she says. Katie bends down to her. “Oregon,” she pronounces. Rhea is wearing a bright pink dress with a short pleated skirt and white piping on the collar. She also wears lip gloss, a ring with a fake pearl, a red Swatch watch, and black patent Mary Jane shoes. Katie thinks she and her daughter bear no resemblance whatsoever, except for the color of their eyes (brown) and the slightest upturning of their noses. Rhea’s lips are full, a lot like Fish’s lips, and she has long, nice legs, like Juliette, her cousin.

  June is immaculate and serene at the gate. She kisses Katie’s cheek and says, “I won’t worry. Have a good time.”

  Katie smiles at her mother. “Sometime you should come, too. When we have our house again.”

  June is flustered. “How nice of you to ask,” she manages to say. “I know it’s a lovely state.”

  “Do you have a dog? Do you have a cat?” Rhea asks. “Do you have horses?” She puts one finger in her mouth and sucks on it loudly. When she sees her grandmother looking at her, she jerks her finger out, rubs her ring against her dress, and tucks her top lip down over her bottom one. Katie thinks she has the natural charm of a child in a movie. You look at her, and you know she is going to be in a lot of scenes.