Chewing, he sat on the end of her twin bed. He’s delighted to drop out, Em thought. It’s a relief. And in the Reed family, clerking in a drugstore is a step up. Over my dead body, she thought.
“You haven’t told anyone?” she asked anxiously. “In Admissions, I mean?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. I’ll talk to my parents.”
“About what?”
“My Van Vliet stock.”
He gave her a dark look.
“Our st-stock. It’s preferred, so we can’t s-sell, but—”
“What’re you getting at?”
“It can be c-collateral. You won’t let me work—you’re right. A b-baby’s first years are formative. But I’m sure we can borrow enough.”
“For what?”
“You must finish.”
“Listen to me, Em, and listen good. We’re getting this straight for once and all. To cut down utilities, us boys bathed once a week in the same water. I didn’t take piano lessons, I don’t have a cashmere sweater to my name. Face it, I’m ordinary. And there’s one thing us ordinary joes do. Support our families. Next Monday I’m starting.”
“Sheridan, Upper Division is hard for everybody. After a while it gets easier. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Afraid?”
And swallowing the last of his peanut butter sandwich, he raised his right hand. Slowly. Deliberately. A sharp sound rang inside her skull. The slap wasn’t hard. But it jarred into her brain an image: Sheridan’s black-and-white snapshot of his father, a fat, brutal-shouldered man who, or so she’d been told, wore a hernia truss from moving overstuffed Kansas upholstery and who had beaten his sons (his wife, too, Sheridan hinted) with his belt buckle, a man who hadn’t gone beyond sixth grade. In that brief moment Em realized how much she despised the poor. Tears glittering behind her glasses, she stared at Sheridan.
“Just letting you know,” he muttered, “who wears the pants in the family. We won’t have any more, Em. And that’s that.”
Her tears, flowing now, bore no relationship to the slight sting on her cheek. She wept because she was realizing the violence (and unfairness) of her prejudice against the background of the man who had rescued her, miraculously, from spinsterhood, the man whom recently, in the eyes of God, she’d vowed to cherish and obey. Unlike Caroline, Em cared little for luxuries. It wasn’t important to her that Sheridan make a lot of money. Rather, it was the idea that without a college degree, without a profession, he would be only a cut, a very small cut, above his father’s class. She wept because up until now she hadn’t realized how ruthless her snobbish proclivities were. It must be the Van Vliet in me, she thought. And argued no more.
Sheridan moved on the bed, stroking thin, pale hair, breathing peanut butter on her, calling her his little puffy.
2
Exactly nine months to the day of their wedding, Sheridan drove Em to the hospital. Her labor was hard and protracted, lasting over thirty hours. She did not, however, beg for additional painkillers. There was no talk—as there might have been—of a cesarean section. In due time she was given a spinal. Around noon of March 28, she gave birth, normally, to twin sons. The first weighed in at eight pounds two ounces, the second, who was longer, at seven-thirteen. A huge burden, Dr. Porter told the bleary-eyed father, for so tiny a woman.
“Boys,” Sheridan beamed, proud. “Twins.”
“Fraternal, not identical.”
3
When Sheridan came to the hospital that evening, he kissed her freshly rouged cheek, presenting her with gladiolus. “Should’ve bought two bunches,” he grinned, sitting next to the bed.
“What do you think of Van Vliet?” she asked.
“For a supermarket?”
“For one of the names.”
“Roger, after my father. We already decided.”
“We have two babies.” (Em, until she’d been wakened by the delivery room nurse with the news, had refused to speak of this eventuality.)
“And you aren’t calling either of ’em after a market, Em.”
“A Family name.”
He shifted uneasily on the chair. “Yours.”
She lay back on the hospital pillow. This was not a gesture of weakness—she’d been strengthened immeasurably by her two-day battle—but because she had a splitting headache.
“Vliet for short,” she said.
“No.”
She stared him down. I’ll win, she thought. This was the first time she had considered their marriage in terms of victor and vanquished. I’ll win.
She did. In less than a minute he surrendered.
“Which one?” he asked.
“The blond. He looks like Family.”
“The older?” Sheridan had been given the routine peek at his offsprings’ lack of deformity and sex. He wasn’t yet sure which was which.
“No. The older one’s heavier, dark. He looks like you. He’s Roger. This is the longer, thinner baby.”
“Vliet?”
Em smiled secretly. She said, “Vliet Reed.”
They brought her babies alternately.
Just from the holding, blindfolded, sightless as a mole, Em could have told them apart. Roger, the dark boy, had a heavier center of gravity, he cried more lustily, kicking out, relaxing totally when he took the bottle, finishing every drop. The blond baby, Vliet, the longer one who resembled Family, whimpered rather than howled, and never finished. One evening he smiled up at her. “Gas,” was the opinion of the nurse. Em knew better. She stroked soft white down with her forefinger. Van Vliets could be hard, cruel, yet their smile held charm.
Mrs. Van Vliet stood in front of the nursery window gazing at two bassinets in the front row: Reed male 1, Reed male 2. She rapped glass with her emerald. The dark-haired baby looked up with unfocusing blue eyes. He flailed his arms. Sleeve drawstrings were tied, hiding his hands. The other infant slept on. Mrs. Van Vliet glanced from Reed male 1 to Reed male 2 and back, her amused appraisal bearing no relationship to the grandmaternal clucking and cooing around her.
She went to the desk, requesting in her clear voice to know Mrs. Reed’s room. The head floor nurse, although busy with charts, clasped red hands subserviently, leading the way through corridors that were crowded with visitors to this, the heavy first crop of postwar babies. Em presented her two roommates to the tiny lady in the sable coat. Both girls gawked. The head nurse drew green curtains, marking off Mrs. Van Vliet’s domain.
“The blond one has the family nose,” said Mrs. Van Vliet.
“We’re calling him Van Vliet,” Em said. “Vliet.”
“He’s prettier.”
“Roger,” Em said, careful not to stammer, “that’s the dark one, he’s stronger. And I think smarter.”
The warm smile that Em always had considered Caroline’s preserve broke.
“That he is, that he is,” said Mrs. Van Vliet. “You’re a good mother, Em. You’ll try never to show partiality.”
“They’re both mine.” Em’s face was fierce.
Mrs. Van Vliet patted hospital linen over Em’s knee. “I’m giving them each a five-hundred-dollar bond.”
“Oh Grandma! That’s awfully generous. Of course we’ll save it for their education.”
“What a serious child it is,” said Mrs. Van Vliet, leaning forward to touch her lips to Em’s cheek. She smells, Em thought, like spring flowers. “My first great-grandchildren. Em, truly, my cup runneth over.”
Sheridan took an hour off to drive his wife and sons home. Caroline and Mrs. Wynan were in the dinette, where the babies would sleep. Crowded next to the secondhand crib that Sheridan had sanded stood a new Baby Line with cutouts of frolicking blue lambs. Unhesitating, Em put Vliet into this magnificence. Sheridan laid Roger, who was wet and howling, in the refinished crib.
“It’s amazing how different they are!” Caroline exclaimed.
“Double trouble,” Sheridan beamed, lighting a White Owl, one of the box he’d handed around.
E
m pushed at him. “Not in here,” she cried.
She was always pooped. Yet never could she resist a phoned, “Is it all right to drop by?”
She wanted everyone to see her pride of sons.
Van Vliets bearing blue-satin-tied boxes descended on the tiny apartment. Omega Deltas flocked to exclaim over the babies and to stare, awed, at Em as though she’d been elevated to a Greater Panhellenic. Beverly Linde (she was very quiet and pale) dropped by with Mrs. Linde. Old and new neighbors. Mr. Cambro and his employees came by.
There had been a constant stream of company that Sunday afternoon—the twins were almost six weeks old. Em finally succumbed to her weariness. For the first time she left Sheridan in charge of the boys while she dozed on her bed. Sheridan played with the twins on the couch. Vliet somehow toppled down onto the rug. The baby screamed bloody murder while a large bruise promptly rose on his forehead. Em dialed the pediatrician, careless (for once) of expense, insisting on a house call. The doctor pronounced the infant fine, but added that vomiting is a sign of skull fracture and to watch for it.
Em watched. She was still watching at five the next morning.
Sheridan yawned his way into the dinette-nursery. “Everything okay?”
“He hasn’t thrown up.”
“Good,” Sheridan said, both hands on her aching shoulders. “Now get some sleep.”
She shrugged him off.
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Sheridan said.
“That’s what you were doing.”
“You’re making something out of nothing, Em. A kid falls off a couch—big deal. Holy God, I fell from a second-story window.”
“These aren’t slum children!”
He looked at her, startled as if he’d been bitten by a shrew he’d mistaken for a tame little mouse. “I looked away one second, no more, I swear it,” he muttered. “He’s fine. You can’t go without a whole night’s sleep.”
“Oh can’t I? I can stay awake as long as I have to. I’m strong. You don’t understand that, Sheridan. You make a lot of noise, but you don’t know what real strength is. You think it’s war and hitting with belts. Well, it isn’t. Strength is carrying on when you want to drop. It’s finishing what you start.” Her heart hammered wildly. How could she, Em Wynan Reed, be shrilling this? She was small, drab, female. Sheridan, her husband, male, God’s surrogate on earth. I must be out-of-my-head tired, she thought. She focused again on that angry-prune bruise mounding her Vliet’s forehead. “You don’t understand, do you, Sheridan? Well, my sons will. They’ll understand. Every single thing that they start, they will finish.”
She held a hand to her terrified heart. He’s going to hit me, she thought. Instead, he was moving backward, away into the dark. She was safe from punishment.
So why should she have this pang of loss, this overwhelming sense of disappointment?
The evening after her six-week checkup, Sheridan arrived home with a small bottle of Je Reviens. Her spine was ready to snap in two. Lack of sleep made her bilious. Down there hurt from Dr. Porter’s speculum. Yet she pulled on her good satin nightie, unworn since the third month of their marriage, dotting her new cologne in the teaspoon-size hollow at the base of her neck. Sheridan waited in bed. His arms circled her, one hard leg pinioning her down, and he didn’t say an encouraging word, her name, even. All the time she kept weighing on her personal scales her pain versus his deprivation. He won. Poor Sheridan, months it had been.
He rolled onto his side. She held still until that involuntary jerk which meant he’d fallen asleep, then—quietly—she slipped out of bed, pulling off the torn gown, standing under scalding water until she turned crimson from her neck to her thickish ankles. Through steam she glimpsed a can of Bon Ami. She poured the powder into her washcloth, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing every inch of her small body.
4
Thursday mornings Caroline had no classes.
“I’ll sit, luv, and you go run your housewifely errands.”
Mornings the babies napped. Em gratefully hugged her tall younger sister. “You’re true blue,” she averred, and hurried off.
Sheridan needed a shirt. In Thompson’s Menswear she was torn between the Sanforized Arrow at $3.75—Em had faith only in name brands—and the one for $2.50, which was unlabeled but within her budget. She was holding a shirt in either hand when she happened to look to her left, into clear, hot morning. Strolling along Colorado Boulevard was Sheridan.
Sheridan and a girl.
As they passed the display window, Sheridan’s hand crept up on the tight blouse. He fingered yellow rayon. Cheap, was Em’s first coherent thought. Oh, cheap. They had passed from her range of vision before she recognized the elaborately curled red hair. It was the cosmetics girl from Cambro’s Drugstore. Violet or Viola? Did she choose my cologne? Violette, that’s it. Em left both shirts on the counter, moving into daylight, squinting after the tall, wide-shouldered man and the redhead with swinging hips. They turned toward one another, smiling, and it seemed to Em those smiles were impersonal and explicit as rutting animals. Dark crew cut dropped toward dyed red hair. An old lady slowed, gazing curiously at Em. Em realized she was weeping right on the sidewalk of Colorado Boulevard.
She managed to get home. As soon as Caroline left, Em poured Je Reviens down the toilet, jerking at the handle. Be fair, she thought, there’s no proof. A sharp vision of dyed red hair stung her, and her emotions whirled like the scented water disappearing down the trap. I always let him no matter how tired I am, she thought. And flushed the toilet again.
Roger began to cry, hungry.
She fastened both boys in their low Babee Tendas (purchased with Artie Van Vliet’s check), sitting on the ottoman, porringers of Pablum at her side. The twins had reached the plump, neckless stage. Roger held onto his spoon as she fed him, according to Gesell and Ilg extremely advanced behavior. When it was Vliet’s turn (his tow hair she’d brushed over her finger into a crest) he turned away, holding up both hands to play peekaboo. Em’s back ached, her hands shook, her throat hurt from weeping, but other than that she was fine. She was smiling at her Vliet, wasn’t she?
She didn’t lunch.
She sat in the narrow, dim living room. Thinking obsessively. She reached three conclusions:
1. She cared for her sons more than she cared about herself.
2. She cared for her sons more than she cared about Sheridan.
3. She must provide the best of everything for her sons.
After a while she poured herself a jigger of the Southern Comfort that they saved for special company, the first straight liquor of her life, tossing it back with a jerk of wrist as men do in Westerns, snorting and choking as the sweet mash went down. Her stomach was empty. The liquor acted fast, soothing her. She sat on the ottoman, receding chin in small hand, planning.
They ate dinner at the coffee table, as usual, side by side on the couch, not comfortable, but the best she could do, what with the twins in the dinette. She waited until the Grape Nuts pudding.
“We can’t manage here forever,” she said.
“We won’t have to, I promise you that.”
“The boys need a room of their own.”
“They do,” he agreed.
“And a fenced yard.”
“I’ll put up a basketball hoop,” he said.
Em managed a smile.
“First, they need one of those whatchamacallums?” he asked. “For climbing?”
“A jungle gym, yes.”
“The kind with swings,” he said.
“Sheridan, you’re a good father.”
“Except once,” he admitted sheepishly.
“They’re very active for their age,” she excused.
“He scared me shi—to death.”
Em poured coffee from the Pyrex. “Why not go back to school this fall?”
Sheridan’s eyes slid toward her. “We’re talking about a house,” he said uneasily.
“No. The future.”
“That’s fo
r sure. Right now we’re barely breaking even.”
“With you at Cambro’s, clerking, we’ll never do more.”
“But can we afford college?” he asked through taut, angry lips.
From her apron pocket she took a used envelope. Down the back ran columns of her small, neat numbers.
“What’s that?” He gave his short, abrasive laugh. “The Gettysburg Address?”
“Here’re the boys’ bonds.” She pointed. “Seven fifty for cashing them in now.”
“That’s their education money.”
“Another seven twelve fifty a year from our preferred.”
“Em!”
“Plus the GI and—”
“I’m warning you!” His knee jolted up, hitting the low table. Steaming coffee splattered. Em ran for a dishcloth.
“You’ll work this summer,” she said, wiping. “I’ll be careful, very. People manage on the GI. We will.”
“I’m dragging my butt for you.” Sheridan was breathing loudly. “I might not be up to your fancy Family, but I give you and the boys all I’ve got and then some!”
“When you graduate, you’ll have your pick of pharmacies.”
“You’re sucking for a bruise, Em.”
“Nobody’s going to hit me,” she said, sipping coffee, no longer calm but pretending calm. “The house keeps a file of tests and term papers, so if you need help—”
Sheridan was on his feet, crew cut hunched forward, glowering, a bull with the bewildering picks in him. Now, she told herself. Now.
“Or do you have some particular reason for hanging around Cambro’s?”
Rich Friends Page 6