“Estes knows what he’s doing, knows livestock well, cattle, sheep, horses. He’s got a trained eye, learned it from his daddy. And he’s a good businessman, doesn’t jump into anything too fast, always knows the important things about people he’s dealing with. Oh, he can be fooled. We can all be fooled.”
Except for knowing about livestock Emmett had none of the other skills, so while waiting for him to grow into them, Aunt Earlene selected suits at Neiman’s, had Emmett’s dress shirt pockets monogrammed and ordered low cut shoes as well as silk ties for him. They were—anyone could see—the same sort of clothes Uncle Estes wore when he had to go to a wedding or a funeral.
I’d seen Emmett in a suit only once; at dinner on Christmas Day he wore charcoal gray wool flannel and a new pair of black boots, a compromise he’d made with Aunt Earlene. After dinner he’d mumbled something about scratchy britches, changed back to jeans, and charged out of the back door of our house to the pick-up he’d parked in the drive. He could get out of a house quicker than anybody I knew. I envied him that.
Aunt Bertha’s offer of the Balinese Club and her insistence on dancing lessons were maneuvers toward getting Emmett into the summer suit his mother had packed for him. The Chandler women put too much faith in clothes, I thought, as well as too much faith in ways college might change people.
Emmett, quickly tired of defending A&M, fell into the nearest chair.
“Because of yo-o-u,” the tenor wailed nasally.
“Cut that thing off, can’t you, Aunt Bertha?”
Bertha switched off the phonograph.
“Emmett, you said you wanted to learn.”
“Well that was before I got started.”
I sprawled on the porch swing. My feet hurt even though I’d insisted on Emmett practicing in his socks. The swing rocked with a reassuring creak, a higher note joining the deep locust hum from the yard. Bertha went inside to bring us iced-tea. Emmett, who looked hungover, sat in his chair, one hand loosely covering his eyes. Why did the simplest kind of dancing seem so hard to him? I stared at the porch’s blue ceiling. Aunt Bertha’s swing creaked rhythmically; a slight breeze stirred the listless ferns while I daydreamed.
In Leon the Baptist dominated school board hadn’t allowed dances. My friends and I had to organize our own outside of school. Maybe Emmett acted like he did because he hadn’t gone to any of those. I thought of the long afternoons we’d worked hanging spiraled crepe paper from wall to wall and running to the dime store to buy candles for our mothers’ card tables in futile attempts to fill the cavernous VFW Hall we’d rented.
Aunt Bertha handed me a glass of iced-tea.
“You’re going to spill it down your neck,” Emmett warned as I lay back down in the swing.
I pushed a pillow up behind my head.
“Drink up and let’s practice some more.” Bertha said.
Emmett shook his head, “No ma’am. It’s too hot.”
Bertha looked at him closely, judging his tolerance. “All right.”
Emmett frowned. His dark hair fell in curls over his forehead. Nobody was even trying to make him get a haircut.
“I just hope they play that song tonight,” he sighed.
“Which song?” Bertha studied the circles of water on the tray in her lap.
“Because of You.”
“You can always request it.” Bertha smeared the water over the tray with a paper napkin, put it down on the nearest table, and walked into the house. We could hear her turn and go upstairs.
She was abrupt like that at times. Perhaps she was tired of both of us, or just tired of trying to make Emmett act right. She would, when her patience wore thin, or when she felt enough time had been spent in argument, simply walk away from a disagreement. This made Emmett furious. In his family, he was the one who stalked off leaving people fuming. Today, however, he ignored Aunt Bertha’s exit.
He eased out of his chair and came over to the swing. Pushing my legs over, he sat down.
“You were late getting in last night,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“How’s Jane?”
“Okay.”
“I thought maybe she and Rob—” I was trying not to say too much about her. I’d seen so little of him the past few days I didn’t know if he was still interested in her or not. I hoped he was. If he was busy chasing Jane, I could continue to see Luis without interference.
“They just go around in the summer when they’re both home. They all go out with each other. Rob brought Leslie last night.”
“And Marion?”
“Gone to Canada, thank God, with his family. We went to a couple of clubs.”
“Anybody ask for ID?”
“In Galveston?”
“Okay! Okay!”
“She drinks too much.” Emmett stared out over the back yard in the direction of the magenta oleanders.
“Jane? I thought you were the one who did that.”
“I’m not an alky. Once she gets started, she won’t stop. I have to take her home just before she passes out.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Goddamn, Celia, don’t be sarcastic.”
“Emmett! It’s just— It’s funny, you looking after somebody else.”
“I don’t know about that. Drunks aren’t any fun, are they?” He laughed. “This is a hell of a vacation. Here I am running around with an alky and you with a spic.”
He didn’t really know anything about Luis. Why would he? Luis was older, and he was— What was he?
Sometimes Luis painted late at night, working against the dark, he said. I’d been to his studio, the living room of a small house way down on West beach. Perched on stilts, wind battered, stained gray by salt air, it looked like it might be carried away by the slightest wind. Inside during the day, light poured through windows overlooking the Gulf. Lack of north light apparently didn’t concern him. The studio was crammed with things. There were jars and boxes full of paint tubes, seashells, an old white kitchen table covered with splotches of paint, topographical maps of the Galveston quadrant of Texas, and maps of Mexico City rolled into tubes stuck in an old crate hanging on the wall. Over it hung his mother’s Panama straw beach hat. An empty luggage rack was propped against the same wall next to a bookcase full of skeletons of fish heads, bones—cows’ I guessed—masks he’d brought from Mexico, stones and a row of rusty metal cans of all sizes that had washed up on the beach. Somehow these looked far more interesting in an awkward line with every dent showing than they might have looked on the beach. Above the clutter or sometimes tucked within it, were pictures, old photographs of his parents and his brother Rico.
It was all random and hodgepodge. He had to have a lot of things, he said, a lot of angles to catch the light. All of it was used—in a way I couldn’t actually understand—in his work. Perhaps the things he’d collected from the world around him curled, pushed, sometimes shattered and fell into his pictures combined with a vision he had, or one he made up as he went along, something he didn’t know he had until he saw it on canvas. I wondered aloud about what he called the work he was doing.
“Abstract expressionism maybe. Call it that if you want. Most people have to call it something, have to have names for things.”
“Does that bother you?” I asked.
“Not really. I’d go on painting no matter what it’s called. One of my teachers, the best one, was an expressionist. I’m still, I guess, trying to paint my way away from him, away from his way of looking. He taught me a lot. Now I have to teach myself.”
Was he at the beach house now stubbornly staring at a canvas, trying to see something, trying to make something? He’d told me though he always sketched a lot, he never tried to mirror an object when he painted. At times I wondered if he painted partially to push reality out of his head. He might be sitting on the porch staring out to sea, or could he be with his father somewhere else? I didn’t think so, but it was impossible to know, to even imagine how he lived through a whole day as much
as I might try.
I used to get Tony Gregory to describe his days in great detail, so I could visualize him in the shower, in his apartment eating breakfast, in class or the library, talking to another student. I had literally memorized his schedule. I wanted to be able to remind myself, “He’s eating lunch now. He’s on his way to that class on contracts. After that he’ll probably go to the library.” Where was he on his way to now? Who was walking through the day with him? Where would he be that evening?
Determined not to think of him, I picked up a book, put it down, and called Leslie.
The Jamaican was sitting on the steps in front of the pier when I got to the seawall. Beside him was his drum. Leslie was nowhere in sight.
“I heard you drumming the other night.”
He looked up. “I didn’t see you.”
“It was late. We just drove by. I was with some people.”
“Come early next time.” He looked away, seemed to draw into himself, to wish, perhaps, I’d leave. A line of conch shells in the shop window above his head gaped like open mouths.
“Would you …? Please tell me your name.”
“I got a lot of names. Here they call me Tom-Tom.” He finally smiled.
“I’ve heard. What do they call you other places?”
“Depends … depends on who’s doing the calling and what place.”
“Jamaica. What did they call you in Jamaica?”
“Cal. My friends call me Cal.”
“I’m Celia.”
“Celia. Your mother name you that?”
“It was her first name. Everybody called her by her middle name, so she gave me her first one.”
“You the first born?”
“Yes.”
Across the street Leslie got out of a car. She waved. The wind blew her dark hair away from her face. Like mine, her hair was cut short except hers curled. The damp air only made it curl more. She had on white shorts and a white shirt neatly tucked in which made her look tidy even when she was windblown.
Later, wading in the surf with her after lunch, I mentioned Tom-Tom.
“He’s here every summer lately.”
“Luis says he has some family here.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Living here you get used to people just showing up. And, except for going off to U T, I’ve always lived on the island.”
Luis hadn’t … he lived there, or in Guanajuato, or in other parts of Mexico, I supposed. I wanted to ask Leslie about him, but asking was awkward. I didn’t know her well. Perhaps she’d be embarrassed by the question. We went to the same university; so did thousands of others. Watching the small waves nibbling at the sand, I fretted inwardly. She was the only person in Galveston I could think to ask, and now that she was here, I couldn’t make myself say anything. I liked her though I hardly knew her. I’d liked her when we first met. Despite the nervous laugh, she was smart and quick. She told me she’d planned to be a counselor at a girls’ camp that summer. Her mother was ill in June, so she’d stayed home. Now, at the last part of the summer, she felt she was only wasting time.
“Mother’s fine now. I run around with Rob and Marion and Jane because I’ve known them always. There’s nothing else left to do till school starts. I’m sick of Galveston. Next summer I’m going to Europe. I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Funny, isn’t it? I had to get out of Leon, so here I am in Galveston.”
We laughed at each other, at ourselves.
She was working on a degree in art history.
“I’ll need an advanced degree before I can do anything much with it. Right now…this fall I’ve got a part time job with an architectural historian … looking up stuff in the library. Actually I’m pretty good at it.” She laughed. “I like finding out about obscure things … how many new chairs Thomas Jefferson ordered for Monticello, what plumbing was like in the early 1900s.”
Her nervous laugh had disappeared. Now she simply smiled.
“That’s my job too, or part of it. I’ll be working at The Texan again. I won’t be paid though. Only the editors get paid.”
“I’m really an assistant to the assistant who’s a grad student. And I can’t make enough to go to Europe on. My parents will help, they say. It won’t exactly be the grand tour. I’ll use trains and I’ll bike as much as I can.”
Two other girls I knew in journalism school thought they might work as reporters or go into advertising if they didn’t marry first. Some other friends majored in elementary education, but all of them planned to marry as soon as possible. Leslie was the first girl I’d met who seemed to want to do anything but marry the minute she graduated.
“Maybe I’d like to do that … to go to Europe.”
“On a bicycle?”
“It sounds like fun.” We waded in the surf, sandals in hand. Later that afternoon, our mouths reddened from licking strawberry snow cones, we sat under an umbrella talking, and I found I could ask about Luis.
“Oh God!” Leslie said. “I didn’t know you knew him. Everybody wonders. I mean … it’s possible, but I don’t know, not really. He’s living in Mexico now, isn’t he?”
“Most of the time.”
“It would be hard to be a queer down there, wouldn’t it? I mean macho is it in Mexico. Maybe—” She gave me a long, questioning look. “Maybe he’s both ways.”
“Oh, come on!”
“No. I mean it. Some guys are. They like men and women.”
“How do you know?”
“My brother. He’s older. He’s told me about— About guys like that.”
“Are there many?
“I don’t know.” She looked out to the water then turned back to me. “I don’t guess you could find out in an interview.”
Leslie leaned back, laughing outright, and I laughed with her hoping she hadn’t noticed my light-hearted reaction was a little forced. My naiveté continually embarrassed and astonished me. I would have been glad for an older brother, glad for someone to tell me things. Kenyon never told me anything. He was far too busy getting in and out of trouble, barely making his grades in high school and going away to military school afterward. I knew it was the wrong choice, but he’d had a friend who promised he was going too, then didn’t. He came home miserable and kept coming until he was AWOL most of the time. Of course our father had liked the idea of him going. He had an almost religious belief in the ability of the army to shape up young men, and he didn’t understand Kenyon. None of us did. At times it seemed I knew so little about anything that I moved through the days managing in a half-knowing way, questioning as I went, but sometimes not even knowing I should question. I had only a wisp of knowledge about homosexuality, the one remark the colonel had made about hormones.
Mother never mentioned any other sexual possibilities. All her instructions concerned the possibility of pregnancy, and everyone else’s mother in Leon was the same. It was a wonder, I decided, that any of the girls I’d grown up with were interested in sex at all. Tony Gregory said all the warnings, all the secrecy, all the repetition of “nice girls don’t” only made us more interested. I’d laughed at him, then agreed. The forbidden enticed. I was fearful of what I’d find out; at the same time I was determined to know. Was that why I was so curious about Luis? Everybody wonders, Leslie had said.
“Listen, have you ever—” I made little circles in the sand with one finger. “In the library. Have you ever looked it up?”
She looked out at the ocean again and shook her head slightly. “Not here … not in the school library. When could you? I mean … you wouldn’t have wanted anybody— Oh, they didn’t have that kind of information in our high school library! Or if they did, we never could find it. At the university there’s plenty. They’ve got Freud and Ellis, stuff like that, but what can you really learn about sex in books?”
She sounded so sophisticated I was embarrassed all over again, so embarrassed I was half-angry at Leslie, half-angry at myself because of my ignorance. I insisted, “Something. You found out
something! Anything would be better than total stupidity. Better for me anyway. I’ve got a brother, but he’s too much younger to tell me anything, and he probably wouldn’t if he knew.”
“What about Emmett? Doesn’t he—”
“The king of the cowboys? Oh, he only knows the usual stuff—men and women. He knows the words for the others … probably what they do, or some of it. He doesn’t like Luis anyway. Boys like Emmett—” I shrugged. “He hardly wants to be believe it’s l953. He wants to think it’s 1880, and he just rode into town to hit the whorehouses and saloons.”
“I know. He got Rob to take him over to Post Office Street.”
“Did he?”
“Yeah. The other night … after the rodeo.”
I started to tell her I thought he’d been with Jane and caught myself. Leslie was Jane’s friend, one of her oldest friends. Obviously Emmett hadn’t been there all night. I wondered how Post Office Street was different from Nuevo Laredo, but I wasn’t about to ask him.
We were all dressing in the big upstairs bedrooms. Aunt Bertha, whose collecting passions seemed to ebb and surge like tides, had at one time been struck by the desire for Victorian dressers; the three she’d bought had been stationed, one on her side of the room, two on our side. I’d used the mirror over the sink in the bathroom to put on make-up. It felt funny, like a tight mask on top of my tan, but there wasn’t time to wash it off. We’d had to take turns getting dressed in there. Now I had trouble seeing if my slip was showing in my dresser’s high mirror. I looked up to catch Emmett, his back to me, frowning at a spot of dried blood on his chin. Uncle Mowrey, over on his side, stood engrossed in the problem of spacing thinning hair over his scalp while sharing his dresser with Aunt Bertha who screwed and unscrewed tops of a collection of small bottles on the marble top and muttered about her make-up. We could have been mother, father, brother and sister, a family like my own, though my own never finished dressing in a room together. Mother might come to my doorway, or I might walk through Kenyon’s room, but whenever we wanted, we stayed in our own rooms and shut our doors. Here that privacy was impossible.
Uncertain Ground Page 10