Beyond Deserving

by Sandra Scofield

  Katie waves her hand in front of her face. “I hope Michael knows what he’s doing, starting a house with Fish.”

  Ursula props her chin with her fist, leaning on her elbow. “I don’t allow myself to think about it. Michael is going to teach half-time this year, Global Studies, mornings at the high school. He’s completely changing what he’s doing so he can work with Fish.”

  “Fish is lucky.”

  “Michael says he feels like he’s a big winner, doing this. He was in a rut. And he likes working with his brother. For all of Fish’s troubles, he doesn’t have many with Michael, as far as I know. Michael says, the time is right. I think he senses some changes in Fish. The turn at forty-five. Ahh. What a birthday this turned out to be.”

  “Oh Ursula, why do I have trouble?”

  “Maybe because you expect trouble.”

  “They tell you, learn from history.”

  “What Fish did today—going off harebrained as a seventh-grader—it really wasn’t big enough to merit all this that came out of it. From Rhea’s point of view, it was a damned good day, evidently.”

  “So who’s fault is that? Didn’t Fish knock over the grill? Didn’t he make the scene?”

  “Not by himself. I don’t think he could do it by himself.”

  Katie pulls herself up tall in her chair. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t tell him to get on a chair and sing like Mick Jagger. God DAMN it, Ursula, don’t do that to me.”

  “I’m worn out, Katie. I don’t mean to blame or criticize. Don’t you know I love you?”

  The phone rings again. Ursula answers, tells the caller to wait, and hands the phone to Katie. “Carol Lee?” she whispers.

  “Carol?” Katie says. “What’s going on?”

  She listens for a minute, looking more and more alarmed, and then tells the girl to wait. She explains to Ursula. Fish has stormed into the house and started throwing stuff out on the lawn.

  “Damn.”

  Katie is back on the phone. “Michael’s not here, Carol. I don’t know anything to do. I think you ought to stay out of his way. He’s not crazy, really he’s not. He’s mad. He’ll stop for a breath and realize what he’s doing, and go tearing off in his truck. Stay out of his way. Keep the babies out of his way.” She hangs up and begins kneading her fingers, wringing her hands. “Don’t do this,” she whispers. “Please don’t do this.”

  Ursula moves over by Katie and puts her arm around her. “You want to take my car and go out there?”

  The phone rings again. Ursula answers and the same girl, Carol Lee, says, hysterically, that Fish has gone to the back yard and is shooting bottles out of the shed. Ursula repeats, “Shooting bottles!” She hands the phone to Katie.

  Katie listens a minute, looking at Ursula miserably. Tears are streaming down her face. She reaches over and takes Ursula’s hand. Then she tells Carol Lee, “If I were you I’d call the sheriff. There’s nothing I can do. Call the cops.” And she hangs up, turns and leans against Ursula, and sobs steadily for five minutes. When she stops, she says, “They’ll haul him off, won’t they?”

  “I’d think.”

  Katie speaks intensely, almost leaning into Ursula’s lap. “I can’t bail him out or make him be good. He doesn’t want me to, anyway. We never ask him if he wants us to.” She sits up straighter. “I can’t take care of myself worth a damn. And you know what Jeff told me? The guy who made the scene about my car? I saw him in the grocery store the other day, I was ahead of him in line at the register. I waited to walk out with him. I said it was nice to see him. I thought that was a nice thing to say. He walked me to my car, and you know what he said? He said he felt so crazy for having liked me, he was going to see somebody. You know, like a shrink or somebody! He said something about me had appealed to the part of him that hadn’t grown up. I’m standing by my fucking car with egg on my face. I made him crazy, he says. Is that what I do to Fish? Is that what I do to Rhea? To my mother? To everyone?”

  Ursula isn’t going to listen to this nonsense. The rationality of the caseworker comes back to her. “Whatever your friend’s problem is or was, Katie, is or was his. He probably does need a shrink, a Yuppie shrink for his Yuppie problems. As for you, you did pretty damned well this winter. You put yourself together in a whole new way, including holding a good job. Make Fish crazy? I don’t know how that can be. Who ever loved him as much as you? Who’s stayed with him for damned near twenty years? Who has he always been crazy about, whatever he did not to show it? Fish and Katie. It’s like moon and stars, bread and butter, shoes and socks. I don’t know what to tell you, I don’t know why Fish fucks up, but I don’t think he’s going to hurt those people out there. Maybe he’s shooting bottles because he’s through with them, did you think of that? Maybe it’s his message to the world. Maybe you ought to wait and ask him in the morning. Maybe you shouldn’t give up on the basis of how you feel in the middle of a very long night.”

  Katie says, very quietly, “Thanks, Ursula. You’re always here. I know I haven’t talked to you in a long time. I don’t know why, but I think maybe I had to—leave home, you know? I had to try living outside the Fisher circle.”

  “I don’t think of it that way, as a circle,” Ursula says. “I think of it more as people whose paths all cross. People who are connected. Family, Katie.” God, I love Michael, she thinks.

  Katie gets up. “I do love you, Ursula, and I know you want to help. But would you mind very much if I used your upstairs phone? Would you mind if I called a friend who’s been as messed up as me? And then could I call my mother?”

  After Katie has gone to bed, Ursula lies on the couch in the living room a long time, thinking about Katie and Fish. Her tired mind plays with a sequence of terrible scenarios, a set of might-have-beens, in which Fish and Katie, isolated and hapless, try to raise the baby Rhea. What would they have done with her? Would the child have raised them to a higher level, to better themselves? Or would they have hurt her?

  How many of the children Ursula has seen were from couples no more pathological than this, but twisted, stressed too much, by parenting?

  Her heart feels flooded and painful. She feels for certain “bad” mothers as she has not before, mothers who could not keep their babies out of the road, so to speak. And she feels a large love and respect for Katie, who in choosing Fish, nine years before, may have been choosing Rhea after all.

  She knows she can’t sleep, so she decides to do laundry. She turns on the hall light and collects some clothes from both Carter’s and Juliette’s rooms, without disturbing them. She carries them in a basket down to the basement, sorts them with clothes stuffed at other times down the chute, and starts a load. She switches on the tv and sits on the lumpy couch. An old Natalie Wood film is on, Splendor in the Grass. Jesus, she thinks, don’t let this mean something. She watches Natalie leave a dance to throw herself in dangerous waters. The wash cycle ends. She switches it to the dryer and starts running a load of colored clothes, then goes back to watch Natalie in the hospital, painting and talking her way to sanity. Why do so many women give themselves over to Warren Beatty? she wonders. What secrets does he possess? What does he promise them, and does he deliver? Why do they never seem to be bitter?

  She folds the dry clothes and lays them neatly in the basket, switches off the television—Natalie isn’t going to go back to Warren, who has married someone else anyway—and heads back up the stairs, hoping Gully is okay, wishing Michael would come home. At the top of the stairs she turns to push the door open with her backside, and as she turns again, to head into the kitchen, she sees Pajamas darting toward her and the door. The cat is a second, half a second too late; though she drops the basket and grabs for the door, she is past it, and with its tight spring, it snaps shut too quickly for her to stop it.

  It doesn’t actually snap. It is stopped from the precise click of closure by the head of the cat. It happens too quickly for the cat to know; it doesn’t have time to make a sound.

  Ursula opens the d
oor and scoots the cat back with her foot. Then she rushes to the stairs, sits on a low step, and howls with grief.

  Katie comes tearing down the hall and the stairs. Juliette creeps along in a few minutes. Together, the three of them bury Pajamas in the yard, around the back of the garage, between the old kiln and the fence. It is harder work than Ursula imagined, but with three of them they are able to accomplish it.

  She tucks Juliette in, and kisses her and the sleeping Rhea. “I dread Dad finding out,” Juliette says. “He’s going to be so sad.”

  “He is, sweetheart,” Ursula says achingly. Juliette seems to fall asleep in that same instant.

  Ursula goes down to Katie and asks her if she needs anything. Katie says, “I think I can sleep, believe it or not. Let’s see how it all looks tomorrow.” She turns over toward the wall.

  Ursula takes her pillow with her back down to the couch, curls up, and falls asleep.

  She wakes to find Michael sitting beside her. He strokes her hip gently. “What time is it?” she asks.

  “Nearly dawn.”

  “Poor Michael.”

  “Pop’s okay. He’ll spend another night there, for observation. He’s going to have a helluva time, though, with a broken right arm.”

  “That’s what wives are for, I guess,” Ursula says. She hopes she sounds appropriately fond, or wry, and not sarcastic. She doesn’t mean to mock Geneva.

  “There’s a problem there.”

  “Where?”

  “With Mom.”

  Ursula rubs her eyes. “I’m not following this, Michael. Where is your mother?”

  “She’s home. But I listened to her rage for two hours. She’s mad about the dog. For some reason she’s mad about Rhea—”

  “She’s jealous. I figured that out tonight. Gully likes Rhea, but he was mean to Evelyn.”

  “Christ. That’s nearly thirty years ago!”

  “I think your mother has quite a file on Gully, honey.”

  “I got a glimpse of it tonight. She says she’s going to call Ruby tomorrow, and if Ruby will have her, she’s going to fly to, Spokane as soon as she can get on a plane. I think she’s serious. She says Ruby has invited her to go to Arizona with her for the winter. I don’t get it, but I think she’s serious.”

  “Who’ll look after your dad?” She laughs and puts a finger to his lips. “Stupid question, huh?”

  “He’s had her taking care of him for fifty years.”

  “We’ll have plenty of room, won’t we?” She doesn’t mean to feel sorry for herself. It just happens to be true. “Actually, I think I could get along with Gully here, Michael. It’s your mother who gets to me.”

  “Thanks, Ursie, I’ve got to do whatever I’ve got to do.”

  “What about Fish?”

  “With Pop?”

  “Why not? They’re related too.”

  “You know how Fish is about Pop. He won’t stay around him any length of time. He has this stupid picture of Pop the way he used to be. I don’t know how Fish remembers it, but I’ll take Pop now. The way he was going, he wouldn’t have had an old age.”

  “I know. Come here.” She puts her arms around her husband and kisses his forehead, then his cheek, and, softly, his lips. “I have to tell you something awful,” she says. She chokes up, but she tells him how she killed his cat.

  He doesn’t say anything. He quietly goes out the back door to the yard. The light is off, and when she looks out the window she can’t see him. In a moment, though, she hears him vomiting, and, she thinks, crying. She steps out onto the deck to wait for him. “Michael,” she calls. “Michael, let me help.” Ohh, she thinks, how stupid that sounds, when she is the one who did the deed. But the thought of her sad husband out in the dark retching is so painful. She doesn’t know how much more she can stand in one night. How many tears are they going to shed?

  She hears Michael, then sees him, at the side of the house, washing and rinsing out his mouth at the hydrant. When he reaches her on the deck, he takes her hand. “Let’s sit out here a few more minutes,” he says. “I’m so tired I’m past it.”

  She leans against his shoulder.

  “There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time,” he says. The stuffiness of his nose muffles his voice.

  “Are you sure you want to tell me now?” she asks. She hopes it isn’t something bad.

  “I should have told you,” he says, but then he starts to cry. His shoulders heave and his body rocks. She slides her arm away, to give him peace.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry about the cat.”

  It takes him a while to get calm again. “I’ll miss her a lot, but she’s not a child. I’ll get another cat,” he says. He turns and kisses Ursula, catching her quite by surprise with his damp face and ardor. Then he says, “Listen to me. It’s about when I went away to the Peace Corps, and came back before the training was over, so they wouldn’t send me overseas.”

  She can’t imagine why he brings this up now. She has given her support to him and his parents, hasn’t she? She’s said it’s all right if Gully comes to live. She doesn’t complain about Geneva except once in a great while. Why does he have to tell her again how he had to give up the Peace Corps for his mother?

  “I left the Corps for you,” he says.

  “What? I thought it was Geneva—”

  “That gave me an excuse. I don’t know why I thought I couldn’t tell you the truth. I realized that Fish would get out of the navy about the same time as I would get out of the Peace Corps, and I was absolutely seized with terror that you’d—you’d want to go back to him, and not to me.”

  “I don’t believe this.” She feels a surge of anger, but she isn’t sure why. That she swallowed so hard, marrying him when she thought he came home for Geneva? That he has known something for twenty years that she did not? Then she realizes what he has said. “You came home for me?”

  “I almost convinced myself it was to save you from my brother. But it was for me. It was my chance to be happy. Remember you picked me. You showed up at my door with your clothes in a box. I’d never have known I could win you. I was the luckiest man in the world, and I could not leave the country and give it up. Besides, I didn’t want to be away from you for two years. I sat in my little dorm room at night, sounds of French Africa dialect in my head, and I thought, Ursula, Ursula.”

  “But you never said!”

  “I was too shy, I guess. Then time passed and it seemed a silly thing to tell. This summer I realized I needed to tell you, that you needed to know. That I loved you. That I love you now.”

  The light turns pink and then the blue of the sky begins to filter morning through the dawn. “I love you too,” she says. “And I want to go to bed. But I think I better tell you one more thing.”

  She tells him where his brother is.

  61

  When Katie doesn’t find them at the trailer, she walks across the road and picks her way along the riverbank. She is wearing khaki pants and tennis shoes, so she feels surefooted. She sees Gully first, sitting on one of those fold-up chairs people take to outdoor concerts, to give his back support. He is writing in a notebook. Nearby, Fish sits on the bank with his knees up, reading a tattered paperback book. It is a glorious Indian summer day in October, and the scene is so peaceful and colorful and tender—Fish and his father above the water—she feels a catch in her throat.

  “Hi guys,” she says, standing just above them. Both turn and see her, then jump to their feet. She scrambles closer. “Gosh, Gully, don’t get up,” she says. She embraces him, smells his sweat and the earth on his overalls. He rubs her back with his hand. “Katie, Katie,” he murmurs, then steps away. She turns to Fish, hesitates for a fraction of a moment, and then hugs him too, more shyly, more quickly.

  She sits on the ground between them. “What are you writing, Gully?”

  He smiles and waves his notebook at her. “I’m writing the story of my life, can you believe that?”

&nb
sp; “That’s great.”

  “That little girl of yours, she had all these questions. When did I catch my first fish? What kind of car did I learn to drive in? I told her my mother took us to live on the reservation near Missoula when I was a tyke, and she wants to hear all about that. I decided to get it all down once and for good.” He slaps his notebook. “By golly, it’s getting to be a long thing.”

  “Michael and I are going to have it typed up,” Fish says. “Pop’s a good storyteller.”

  Gully gets up again. “Makes my arm ache. I can’t go at it too long, but what else have I got to do? I’m going to go take a little nap before supper. What’s for supper, Fish? Katie’s here in time for supper. We could drive into town. That’d be better, we’ll go in somewhere and have a good meal.”

  “That’s okay, Gully,” Katie says. “I’m going to have pizza with Ursula and Michael later. At Carter’s place.”

  “You come over before you leave? You come to say goodbye?”

  She kisses Gully quickly. “I don’t need to. I’ll be seeing you. I’m back.” He breaks into a smile, moves his chair over, and tells her to sit down. “This boy of mine has been taking good care of me,” he says, and leaves.

  She sits on the chair, which is surprisingly comfortable. “What are you reading?” she asks. Fish is still holding his book in his hand.

  “Ray Bradbury stories,” he says, laying the book on the ground. “A quarter, used, at the bus station. Not much to do around here on a Sunday.”

  “Where’s Geneva?”

  “Flagstaff. They’ve got a distant cousin there or something.”

  “I’m surprised at you, living with your dad. What does he do while you’re working?”

  “He has his little outings, now that he can drive again. He spends a lot of time with his friend Austin Melroy. We kept Bounder, he’s in the shed at the house.”

  “I saw him. He seemed a little better-behaved.”

  “He must have been sleepy.”