by Carlson, Ron
When Bobby Thorson and I reached the church, Linda came out as we were unloading his guitar and said smugly, “Glen, we’re missing the groom.”
Someone called the bakery, but it was too late for a replacement, almost one o’clock. I dug through Brady’s car and found some of her guys: an Indian from Fort Apache with his hatchet raised in a nonmatrimonial gesture; the Mummy, a translucent yellow; a kneeling green soldier, his eye to his rifle; and a little blue frogman with movable arms and legs. I was getting married in fifteen minutes.
The ceremony was rich. Linda read some Emily Dickinson; my brother read some Robert Service; and then Bobby Thorson sang “El Paso,” a song about the intensities of love and a song which seemed to bewilder much of the congregation.
When Brady came up the aisle on her father’s arm, she looked like an angel, her face blanched by seriousness and—I found out later—fear of evil omens. At the altar she whispered to me, “Do you believe in symbols?” Thinking she was referring to the rings, I said, “Of course, more than ever!” Her face nearly broke. I can still see her mouth quiver.
Linda didn’t let up. During the reception when we were cutting the cake, Brady lifted the frogman from the top and Linda grabbed her hand: “Don’t you ever lick frosting from any man’s feet.”
I wanted to say, “They’re flippers, Linda,” but I held my tongue.
THAT WAS twenty years ago this week. So much has happened. I’ve spent a thousand hours on my knees carpeting the rooms and halls and stairways of Stevens Point. Brady and I now have three boys who are good boys, but who—I expect—will not go into the carpet business. Brady has worked hard at her art. She is finished with her new book, Obelisks, which took her around the world twice photographing monuments. She’s a wry woman with a sense of humor as long as a country road. Though she’s done the traveling and I’ve stayed at home, whenever she sees any bird winging away, she says to me: There you go.
And she may be kind of right with that one. There have been times when I’ve ached to drop it all and fly away with Brady. I’ve cursed the sound of airplanes overhead and then when she comes home with her camera case and dirty laundry, I’ve flown to her—and she to me. You find out day after day in a good life that your family is the journey.
And now Linda’s oldest, Trina, is getting married. We’re having a big family party here in Stevens Point. Butch and Linda have all come north for a couple of weeks. Butch has done well; he’s a lieutenant colonel. He’s stationed at Fort Bliss and they all seem to like El Paso.
Trina came into the store yesterday pretending to look at carpet. People find out you’re married for twenty years, they ask advice. What would I know? I’m just her uncle and I’ve done what I could. For years I laid carpet so my wife could be a photographer, and now she’ll be a photographer so I can retire and coach baseball. Life lies before us like some new thing.
It’s quiet in the store today. I can count sparrows on the wire across the road. My advice! She smiled yesterday when I told her. Just get married. Have a friend sing your favorite song at the wedding. Marriage, she said, what is it? Well, I said, it’s not life on a cake. It’s a bird taking your head in his beak and you walk the sky. It’s marriage. Sometimes it pinches like a bird’s mouth, but it’s definitely flying, it’s definitely a kind of flying.
THE SUMMER OF
VINTAGE CLOTHING
RUTH WAS dressing for Vicky’s party when Carl came home and told her he had lost the turkey. She lowered both ends of her necklace and looked at him. She thought: Of course you did. It was a big moment there in the bedroom, Ruth sitting on the bed, Carl standing before her, frowning in concentration, his palms out, and before he could shift his weight or begin anything, she saw him as if for the first time, her husband, a handsome man who had been bright and clever and who was still a good lawyer, but who was, as he stood pantomiming what he might have done with the smoked turkey for Vicky’s party, a man who had spent years growing vague.
Carl thought hard. “I’m in Canyon Market off of Foothill . . .”
“Can you help me with this?” Ruth handed him the necklace. It was a string of small copper disks which they had purchased on last year’s trip to the Yucatán. Carl looked at it now as if it were a puzzle, and Ruth could see his mind was somewhere else.
Carl had been her mainstay; at one time she had counted on him. But now he was gone, lost in another battle with Gerver, totally preoccupied with his own stress. He came home these days and did TV—smoking his cigars, shoes on the couch—that being his phrase as he raised a hand to quiet whatever question she might ask: “Not now, honey, okay? I’m doing TV here, do you see?” On the screen a man would be pressing both fists into his eyes trying to think on The Family Feud, things at a wedding shower. And after doing TV, Carl came to bed and wanted to mount her like a moment’s information, a newsbreak. There had been times like this before in this marriage, and as soon as Carl or Gerver relented, changed their memos, shook hands, he would be back for a while and she could rely on him again. Now Ruth sat on the bed and looked at Carl as he tried to figure out why he had a necklace in his hands.
But it was her son Sean, a boy best described by the ridiculous phrase “the apple of her eye,” who had Ruth most upset. It was what she had heard him say. He’d always been interesting and funny and companionable, a friend in the house really, willing to talk at night sometimes if there was popcorn or ice cream and Carl was asleep on the couch. They’d watch TV together and comment on the characters, and Sean was always surprising her with his observations. “You can tell the total mental state of a person by watching him in the left-turn lane,” and during love scenes he’d point at the screen and say, “It’s some kind of bonding maneuver, as far as I can tell.” Sometimes he would remove his sleeping father’s shoes and say, “Dad, you’ve got to learn to respect the furniture.” And sometimes it was Ruth who slept on the couch, or feigned sleep, lying deeply in the cushions to hear Sean tell Carl about the track coach or the debate trip. Those nights covered her like a blanket and she could feel the soft electricity of it in the backs of her legs, too much and not enough at the same time, these men, talking.
This was the summer of vintage clothing. Sean and his friend David were into old clothes. They’d raid the Deseret Industries thrift shops and come home in three-piece suits and wide silk ties handpainted with animals and birds. Sean mowed the lawn in vests and the two boys played tennis in pleated trousers. It was Ruth’s joy to see the two of them on lounge chairs in the backyard like two barefoot bankers, their ties loosened in the sun. Eventually they’d carefully disrobe, hanging their garments on the pool furniture until the baggy trousers came off revealing their swimsuits, and they’d dive into the blue water.
Lately there had been a third in this game, Dorie, also a sophomore at Suburban, a girl Ruth liked, though it was unclear whose friend she was. David was smoother, more confident and gregarious, but Sean was tall and—the only word Ruth could think of—pretty in a Ricky Nelson kind of way. Dorie was over two or three times a week in flowered skirts and billowy blouses looking like something prime for a country weekend, sometimes a blue or beige suit, the jacket and tight skirt making her look ready to go off to the office. “This hat,” Dorie would say. “Fifty cents.” And she’d turn to show the large straw hat, its band a colorful wrap of red silk.
Mostly Ruth wasn’t included. She watched the three young people from her kitchen window. They tuned the radio to KOY, a station that played only music from the forties and fifties, Patti Page, Robert Goulet, Glenn Miller, Tony Bennett; it was hilarious. Ruth’s friend Vicky stood with her one day at the sink watching the young people and said, “I love coming over here. It makes me feel so young.” That day at the window, Vicky had said, “They think they’re in a movie. I remember it, the feeling. You sit around with your fingers under your chin waiting for someone to ask you what’s the matter. It’s the age o
f loveliness. Everything is terribly important and terribly lovely.”
The women watched Dorie stand and slowly unbutton the front of her blouse and place it on the back of her chair. She moved to the pool’s edge and stood for a dive. Vicky said, “Who is that?” Dorie swam in a sleek one-piece that showed her more woman than Ruth would have imagined.
Your son is fifteen, Ruth thought. He is fifteen this summer and you are the iced-tea lady now. In three years he’ll be gone. And she was the iced-tea lady, kidding them about their getups as she set the large plastic tumblers on the small tables by the pool. They can’t even see me, she thought, I’m just the source of iced tea. Sometimes she hummed along with the ridiculous music. She watched them from her window with nothing as much as pure feeling, three beautiful kids in the sunshine, dressed for the forties.
It was vintage everything, really. The word itself came out almost too often. David would appear at their door in a brown suit two sizes too large and wave a videocassette, saying, “This is a classic. This is vintage Karloff.” The young people watched old films in the den, black-and-white horror films, and lounged so deeply in the furniture it was as if they were hiding. When Ruth came through the room from time to time, she looked for clues about who was with whom, but the alliances were never clear. Some days Dorie lay out on the couch like an actress, the boys in the two big chairs, some days she sat with David there, and then some days she sat on the floor in front of Sean’s chair. Ruth would watch for a moment, the Mummy stepping heavily through the open terrace doors or Dracula opening his caped arms and turning into a bat. She liked having the kids around the house, though they couldn’t see her, but she could tell things were changing. The nights Sean would go down to David’s for dinner or a movie, she would work at her desk, pretend to, and then double-check the porch light. It was hard to read. She wasn’t used to this new thing, waiting for her son to return.
And then, of course, something snapped. Last night as Ruth was rinsing her serving tray, she heard through her open window her son talking to David in the blue night of the backyard. Over the humming of the pool filter pump, Sean was speaking, his voice printed on her life forever, and she heard the words before she had a chance to disbelieve them: “Yeah,” she heard him say. “She is such a cunt.” Ruth felt her elbows take fire and weaken, and she put down the tray in her hands.
“OKAY, OKAY,” Carl went on. “I can get this.” But he wasn’t talking about the necklace. “I spoke to the butcher and he said that it would be a minute, then I ran into Vicky.” Carl had forgotten about the necklace in his hand and was gesturing, setting up imaginary places in the grocery store. He was being logical and retracing his steps. “And she said something about something . . .”
“She said she’d see us tonight at the party and that we’re going to meet her new boyfriend, the Texan.” Ruth took the necklace back from him and tried to fasten it again.
“Right. That’s it.” Then Carl looked at her with surprise. “And she said Tom Gerver’s coming. His wife is one of your accounts? Something.”
“That’s right.”
Carl shook off the distance and said, “Okay, so the butcher handed me the bag over the counter.” Carl hoisted the imaginary bag. “And when I went up front to check out I found I didn’t have any cash. . . .” Here Carl thrust his hands into his pockets until he fished out a paper slip. “So I put it on Visa.” He paused and read the slip very slowly: “Smoked turkey: thirty-four forty-four.”
“What’s the program?” Sean said, dropping a shoulder against their doorway. He was wearing a brown suit vest over a white T-shirt. His trousers were cinched tight around his narrow waist, but they still sagged. “Who’s feeding you guys tonight?”
Ruth had avoided him since last night, and now with the sound of his voice she felt her heart contract. “We’ll be at Vicky’s,” she said carefully. “What are your plans?”
Sean took two steps to Ruth and lifted the necklace from her hands. Deftly he dipped it around her neck and had it fastened before she could move.
Carl was still in the grocery store. “There was a girl behind me with a new baby, and,” Carl turned to where she would have stood, “I helped her.”
“I’ll be here,” Sean said. “David and Dorie may come over.”
“And I took the baby.” Now Carl’s hands were really full. “It was raining . . . her car was next to mine.” Carl seemed to be reading off the ceiling. “She opened the door—it’s a two-door—and I put the baby in his car seat in the back.”
“Dad, you are such a hero.”
“And . . . I . . .” Carl dropped his arms and sat on the bed. “God, I don’t know. I drove home. I don’t know where it is. I lost the turkey.”
“Want me to check the car?”
“No, I’ve been through it six times.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ruth said, feeling her neck stiffen. “Call the market and ask them to set aside another. We’ll pick it up on the way. Get dressed, Carl. Let’s go meet Vicky’s friend.”
When she stood, Sean said, “You look good, Mom. A little modern, but good. David thinks you’re a babe.” Ruth left the room. She could hear the men talking behind her.
THE THEME of the party, Ruth had forgotten, was tequila. There were trays of Shooters and Sunrises and every plate on the buffet had a little card attached that read Tequila something or other, “Tequila Fettucine,” “Tequila Jamboree.” It was still raining lightly and Vicky’s house was crowded with dozens of people. Vicky brought a man over and introduced Ruth and Carl. His name was actually Bo and he was from Houston or near there and he did something with land. Ruth noted Bo’s thin mustache, something you rarely saw anymore, something a man does on purpose. A black line along the top of his lip.
As Ruth and Carl laid out their tray, Vicky stuck a little sign, “Tequila Turkey,” on the platter. She handed Ruth a sweet Sunrise, which puckered Ruth’s mouth. “Battery acid,” Vicky said, pointing to the hinge of her jaw. “They give you a little sizzle right there, don’t they? Battery acid. You get it from chocolate and beer too.” Vicky looked at Ruth and asked, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Something. Somebody in our house is fifteen.”
“Who? Carl?”
“Funny. We’re doing growth at our house,” Carl said. “You can feel the limits groaning.”
Ruth looked at her husband and thought, How would you know?
Tom Gerver came up behind Carl and nodded at Ruth as a greeting. He took Carl by the arm, leading him into the other room, which Ruth could only interpret as a good sign.
“Is Sean still dressing for dinner?” Vicky asked.
Ruth nodded, aware she didn’t want to talk about it really. There was something too personal about it, this summer. A moment later Vicky pointed to where Bo was making drinks at the bar table. “So, how do you like him?”
“He seems quite . . . manly.”
Vicky smiled. “Don’t you hate it,” she said. “If it weren’t for that trait, they’d be all right. Actually he’s a nice guy. A little too willing to please. Very considerate. Very . . . in bed it’s this and that for three hours. Newly divorced men are like that.”
Vicky went over and escorted him into the party. Throughout the evening as Ruth drifted through the rooms, a lot of her friends commented on how tall Sean was now, and there were some funny things said about his costumes, divided between those who thought he had decided to run for office and those who thought he was going into the ministry. Everyone said the word fifteen wistfully. “Fifteen,” one older woman said. “Wonderful fifteen. It’s the first time you’d like to sell them.”
Ruth relished being alone at the party, not engaging in long discussions, just wandering from room to room. Several people complimented her on her necklace and she had a feeling she hadn’t had in a long time—since parties at her sorority house—t
hat something was going to happen next.
The rain let up sometime after eleven and as groups of people began to venture out onto the back deck, Ruth searched the house for Carl. The doors and windows were open and the fresh cool air seemed like fall. She found him flat on his back in the wet side yard, side by side with his buddy Tom Gerver, both of them absolutely drunk. From the position of their bodies, flung out and imbedded in the grass, it looked as if they had fallen from an airplane.
“Hi honey,” Carl said. “Tom and I were taking a break.”
As she helped Carl up, Tom said, “You’re a good woman, Ruth.” He rose to an elbow and said with drunken sincerity, “I’m sorry about your turkey.”
Ruth didn’t care that Carl was so far gone or that she’d have to drive home. She’d driven him home before and she was relieved that he seemed to have made peace with Tom. When they were in the car, he was chatty. “What’s bugging you about Sean?” he asked. “I like his girlfriend.” He folded his arms, then finding they didn’t fit, refolded them. They were waiting to turn left onto their street.
“How does he know about necklaces?”
“What?” Carl looked at her.
“There’s something to know about necklaces,” she said.
“What is it? What is there?” Carl pointed down the empty roadway, “You can turn now, Ruth. There’s nobody coming.”
Ruth measured the turn with exaggerated care. “She’s not his girlfriend,” she said.
AT HOME the house was empty though the television was on. Ruth stood and watched it for a moment—a high-rise building was burning. Carl slumped through the room, his eyes half shut, waving both palms at her and going straight to bed. Ruth sat down and slipped off her shoes. On television now, two blond men smeared with camouflage grease in sleeveless T-shirts, carrying automatic weapons, detonators, and a strange sphere, entered an elevator. This is where Sean would say to her, “Those are the bad guys, Mom.” It was one of their jokes—the way she had always talked to him as a child when he watched television. Ruth watched the screen. She had distinctly heard him say it, “She’s such a cunt.” Several of the upper stories of the building exploded, spraying fans of white sparks into the night.