Uncertain Ground

by Carolyn Osborn

  I turned and ran down the wooden stairway, the wind pushing at my back, rippling my shirt.

  “Fool!” I said aloud. “Fool!” I had come uninvited, and was obviously not welcome. What had I expected? I felt small and ridiculous as if I had been caught spying on someone.

  By the time I returned to the Mclean house it was raining hard. Gusts of wind shoved the wiper blades erratically across the windshield, and when I turned the key off all I could see was water-splotched glass. For a few minutes I waited hoping the rain would slacken then decided I’d rather be wet than sit in the closed steamy car any longer. Running to the house I tripped over some scattered bits of loose oyster shell and almost fell. The side door was nearest, but it was locked. Unfortunately the portico offered no real shelter. I pushed the bell. Most of the mechanical devices at the Mcleans’ barely worked at all. The iron had a short in it that gave me slight shocks every time I tried to use it. Toilets sighed and had to have handles jiggled. Though the washing machine ran, something had happened to the clothes dryer. Aunt Bertha used a line in the tiny backyard. Every fan except the ceiling fans in the bedrooms growled when turned on, and if anyone made the terrible mistake of switching on the garbage disposal, we all had either to leave the house or endure a ferocious grinding noise until the plumber came. The doorbell, however, worked well. Wet and angry, I leaned against it.

  Emmett pulled the door open fast. In one hand he held a telephone receiver. “It’s Mother.” He shook the receiver toward me.

  I waved it away and sank down on a chair to remove my sandals. Rain blew in the open door.

  “Idiot!” I snarled at Emmett and got up trailing water across the carpet to the door. I slammed it so hard that the outside shutters rattled.

  “Sh-h. It’s a bad connection,” Emmett warned.

  I looked at my watch to see if it was wet. Only four o’clock. That was strange. Something must be wrong if Earlene, who practiced all the small economies the rest of the family used, couldn’t wait an hour for the rates to change.

  “What’s the matter?” I whispered.

  Emmett shook his head. “Why do you need me there right now, Mother? Why don’t you come down here if you’re so lonesome? Aunt Bertha has plenty of room.” He shrugged his shoulders at me.

  “No. I’m downstairs. It’s raining like hell. Celia just came in…all wet. I don’t know where Aunt Bertha is, upstairs asleep maybe if the phone didn’t wake her up, or if Celia didn’t wake her beating on the doorbell. Maybe she’s out playing bridge. I just got in a few minutes ago. Youall getting any rain up there?”

  Emmett sat on the floor with his back to the wall listening and nodding as he looked up at the ceiling, the same way he would have listened if his mother were standing in front of him. He thumbed the closed pages of the telephone book.

  I sneezed, picked up my sandals, and started upstairs. It was cold in the house, and I needed dry clothes. If anything was wrong Emmett would tell me. Earlene had probably called just to check on him. Bertha and I had reminded him to write his mother. Naturally he hadn’t. Upstairs I found Bertha, fully dressed, sitting on the edge of her bed where she’d evidently been taking off her stockings. She cradled the receiver to her ear with one hand while covering up the mouthpiece with the other.

  Trying to make enough noise to shame her into hanging up, I stood in front of the closet Emmett and I still shared and dropped my sandals. In a moment I looked around the opened door. Aunt Bertha hadn’t attempted escape. She remained huddled on the edge of the bed with her ear pressed against the receiver and a worried expression on her face.

  “Earlene,” she broke in. “Listen. This is Bertha. I picked up the upstairs phone to make a call and heard you talking. Earlene, listen to me. This sort of thing happens all the time. I know. I know, and I’m sorry, but he doesn’t have to— What?”

  She appeared to be listening when she wasn’t. She made up her mind about things and went right on thinking whatever she’d decided was right.

  “Well, there are lots of things that can be done. There are ways— Earlene, I know you’re upset, particularly since Estes is gone. All right. We’ll talk about it later, but remember that isn’t the only answer. Why don’t you talk to Martha and Will. They’re bound to— Hush up, Emmett. This is the whole family’s problem whether you like it or not! Earlene, don’t worry. We’ll work something out. I’ll talk to you later. Give Will and Martha a call now. We can all talk more when Estes gets back. And Earlene, please— Calm down. Fix yourself a drink. I think I’ll fix myself one.” She repeated a string of admonitions before she hung up.

  I could hear Emmett running upstairs. I met him at the top landing.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He raised his hand and let it fall again on the banister’s newel post.

  “You don’t know? You really don’t know?” He looked at me closely and laughed. It was a mean dry laugh like the snort a horse gives when you’re standing in front of him getting ready to bridle, and he’s feeling impatient because he hates the bit and, at the same time, knows he’s going to have to take it.

  “Well, let me tell you … since everybody’s telling me.” Raising his voice, he leaned in the direction of the door to Aunt Bertha and Uncle Mowrey’s room. “Nothing’s wrong. These things happen all the time. Nothing in the world is wrong except Doris Lacey’s pregnant, and Mama thinks we should get married right away.”

  Bertha came out to the landing buttoning her housedress as she walked. “You don’t have to marry her, Emmett. Don’t be a fool.” She put her hand on his arm.

  He pushed past both of us to the bedroom and slumped down on the side of his bed.

  “You really don’t have to marry her!” Bertha insisted. She turned and followed him.

  I came behind her. We both stood at the foot of the twin bed that Emmett hadn’t made. He sat on a pile of rumpled sheets refusing to look at either of us. The fan had been turned off. Rain dribbled down the long windowpanes.

  “If she wants to have the baby,” Bertha said, “there are places she can go, homes where she can stay till it’s born. Then she can give it up for adoption. Plenty of girls do that … more than you’d think.”

  “I don’t know. … Maybe Doris—”

  “Well you don’t have to decide right now.”

  “No.”

  “But you’d better be thinking about—”

  “Aunt Bertha—” I looked at Emmett who appeared to be staring through the wet window to the house across the street, then I took Bertha’s arm and whispered, “Better to leave him alone a little.”

  We left him to go back downstairs, Bertha leading. I knew it made no difference to Emmett whether plenty of people were in the same trouble or not. This was his trouble, and he had to take it in.

  I was cold and wet. Water oozed down my neck from my wet hair. Grabbing a towel from the bathroom on the way down, I wrapped my head in it.

  It had all happened so quickly … Earlene’s hysterical call, Emmett’s anger, at himself I guessed, at his mother, and at Bertha. And Doris? Was he angry at her too?

  Uncle Estes, I discovered, was in Kansas checking on cattle he’d shipped to market, so Earlene hadn’t talked to anybody else; maybe she hadn’t even talked to him. She’d had to talk to someone. With the news of Doris’s pregnancy, Earlene was like a small volcano at the point of eruption. Who had told her? Not Doris. I couldn’t imagine Doris Lacey driving out to the ranch to tell Earlene anything. Her father Ed Lacy, I heard later, had appeared at Earlene’s front door when she was home alone. He’d asked for Estes first, then for Emmett. Since they were both gone, he chose to talk to Earlene. Doris, he said, didn’t know he was there.

  Of course she had some pride. Why hadn’t anybody considered that? Why hadn’t they thought of Doris at all? Earlene and Bertha both acted as if she hardly existed, as if Emmett was the only one that mattered, Emmett and his future.

  He’d acted that way himself at first. He didn’t call Doris, wouldn’t
talk to Aunt Bertha except to borrow her car, and walked right past me without a word when he left the house.

  Luis and I were sitting on the top step of his beach house talking and watching the moon rise. He’d been in Houston all day, he said, buying supplies, doing errands for his father and had come by the Mcleans’ without calling. Why did I act as if I believed everything he told me? I needed to, wanted to. I couldn’t ask him whose Austin-Healey had been there that afternoon. I had no right to push him against the wall with questions. Although Aunt Bertha asked him to stay for supper, we went to Gaido’s to eat then drove out to his house.

  Emmett swerved Bertha’s Chrysler—evidently she’d relaxed her no-car rule—toward the steps, catching and holding Luis and me in its beams a long moment before turning off the lights. He walked slowly up the steps, the moonlight at his back. A few steps up he stumbled and muttered under his breath. As he got closer, I could smell whisky.

  He grinned at both of us and, as usual, denied the obvious. “I’m not drunk.”

  “Where’s your hat?” I asked.

  “Left it with Jane.”

  “Where’s Jane?”

  “Down at Omar’s drinking with Roby and Leslie and some other folks. That’s what she likes … drinking.”

  Had he gotten her pregnant too? The question came to mind. What a mess that would be, Doris and Jane both pregnant. Not likely even if Jane would party all night. I’d met girls like her at the university. Liquor was a screen they used. Some of them acted as if they were drunker than they actually were. It was easy. You just kept adding water, or soda, or Coke. Nobody noticed. I did it myself at times, especially if I was going out with somebody I liked. It was safer that way. Jane wasn’t playing safe though. She really drank, passed out, according to Emmett. She could drink a lot. Once she started she always wanted to drink too much. What could you do with a girl who wasn’t there? Liquor wasn’t a screen for Jane. It was a magic potion that made her invisible.

  Luis and Emmett were talking quietly. Luis pulled his car key out of his pocket. He carried a single key, one of the reasons he liked to coming back to Galveston. In Guanajuato he had to carry four or five because everything was locked … the door to the wall around the house, the house itself, the bodega—a storage room behind his house—his car, his studio.

  Emmett laughed and said, “I can’t take Aunt Bertha’s car down to Post Office Street. Somebody might believe Uncle Mowrey’s there.”

  I took Luis’s dangling key from his hand. “You’re too drunk—”

  “Nah! Not me.” He grabbed my hand, caught the key by the small leather strap Luis carried it on, and dropped it in his pocket.

  Only half believing what was happening, I turned to Luis. “He doesn’t know how to drive an MG.”

  “I can drive it. Friend of mine at school has one. It’s only got one more gear than any other car.”

  I tried one more time. “Let us take you home.”

  He handed Luis the keys to Bertha’s car. “We’ll switch when you bring Celia in.” He left us to lurch down the stairs.

  I started to rise and follow him.

  Luis caught my wrist. “Let him go. That’s just what he’d like. He’d like for you to follow him. Why do you care where he goes?”

  “He can go to all the whore houses in the world if that’s what he wants. I don’t care. But he’s already too drunk to look after himself. He’ll have a wreck, or get rolled—” I pulled my wrist free and sat down abruptly. I was doing it again, looking after Emmett like all the rest of the family’s women. Beneath the house I could hear the car’s motor start.

  Luis watched me steadily. “I don’t think he’s that drunk. All the business about the car and somebody thinking your uncle was in one of the houses— That was just an excuse to come out here. He wants you to try to stop him. He probably won’t even go down there. If he does, Celia, somebody will look after him. They’re used to dealing with drunks, and if he’s really as drunk as he’s acting— They can’t afford any rough stuff at the houses. Bad for business. There’s always a bouncer around and a policeman not too far away.” He smiled. “In fact Post Office is one of the quietest streets in Galveston.”

  “He’s got that look on his face … that crazy grin.”

  “He’ll be back,” Luis said.

  I watched him paint a thin coat of blue on a canvas. Specks of blue already covered the floor. Turpentine’s clean stinging smell, linseed oil, paint, and steam from coffee together with a light wind coming in over the water rose and floated through the room. The bamboo shades had been rolled to the tops of the open windows. Against one wall was an old couch with an olive drab colored army footlocker at one end. I sat on it holding a coffee cup, my back to the L-shaped kitchen. To my right a doorway led to the bath and two bedrooms.

  I looked over at the rusty tin cans still propped in a row on the table to a full length picture of Luis’s brother Rico in his Marine dress uniform. Except for his height, they didn’t look much alike. Or maybe pictures of young men in uniform generally showed them looking as determined and serious as Rico did, so they could scarcely look like themselves. They were marines, airmen, soldiers, sailors, men going off to war. I meant to ask Luis sometime if his brother favored his mother since he didn’t seem to resemble his father, but I’d only seen Mr. Platon once, and the lights in the Balinese Room were dim. My brother looked like our mother’s people, while I could see my father’s in my long oval face. Emmett had his mother’s dark hair. … And Emmett’s and Doris’s child … which side of the family would it look like? I hadn’t told Luis about that. It was Emmett’s problem, and I wouldn’t question Luis about resemblance just then. He was working as if he’d forgotten me, Emmett, everyone.

  Though I’d been in the studio before, I’d never seen him at work. Painting was something he did alone usually, and when he’d stopped to pick me up, he’d interrupted his schedule. Or perhaps it was already interrupted. Perhaps he really had been to Houston. At any rate he was only preparing canvas, covering one he’d already stretched with an undercoating. A bundle of paint smeared rags was loosely gathered on the table near his easel, and on the same table was a collection of mashed paint tubes, a dirty palette, brushes in an old pickle jar, a coffee can half full of turpentine. The space in front of him was clear. He’d taken down the topographical map and his mother’s old gardening hat, a floppy yellowed straw. Facing him now was only the corner’s triangle of weathered boards salvaged from old houses; others like them lined the whole room with gray and brown and traces of ingrained white. He slapped on more blue paint.

  “It looks like fun.”

  “Other people’s work usually does, doesn’t it? If you want to try, I’ve got another easel and some boards. They have a texture a little like canvas.”

  “I … I don’t know. I can’t draw.”

  “Most of the painters I know had to learn how to. You have to learn how to see first. You have to keep looking. Then the hands, the muscles somehow begin to know what your eyes see. Here—”

  He walked over to the kitchen, pulled out a tall stool, reached up to a shelf behind me, selected two clay pots, and put them on the stool. From a pile propped against the wall, he took a white board covered with something, some sort of fake canvas. Then he rummaged through drawers until he found a drawing pad. Tearing a sheet of paper off, he clipped the whole pad to the board. In a hall closet he found an extra easel and propped the board on it. He handed me a skinny black stick.

  “Charcoal. Here’s your first lesson. Draw those pots.”

  I’d never seen such a blank piece of paper, such a white, empty rectangle. The longer I looked, the blanker and whiter it seemed. It was a whiteness that would show the smallest mark, a blankness that would surround a speck, and it waited on me to do something, to make something.

  “The pots,” I said. “They’re … they’re sort of dull.”

  “What do you want to draw?”

  “I don’t know … flowers maybe.�
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  “Too complicated. Start with something simple.” Luis hardly looked around to speak to me.

  First I tried to draw the outline of each one. The charcoal was so soft I broke the stick immediately. When I tried to place the stool under the pots, it wouldn’t come out right. Instead of a stool, there was only part of a circle. Nothing was in perspective. I could see that much. The paper was already smudged with lines I’d tried to erase with my fingers.

  “Luis, how do you— These things are flat. I might as well have laid them down and traced around them.”

  “Look.” He tore my sheet off, took the longer half of my charcoal, and made five lines with it. The circle was well on the way to becoming a stool. He handed the charcoal back to me. “Stare at the pots until you don’t have to look at them. What makes them round, low, or high? Where is the light coming from? Search for the shadows. Try to draw the lines you know are there even if you can’t see them.”

  I stared at the ochre yellow pots. Tentatively I sketched shadows, changed more lines. The pots still looked flat to me. I tore the sheet of drawing paper off the board, crumpled it, and let it fall to the floor. Another sheet followed, then a third and fourth. I glanced around Luis’s shoulder to his canvas. He was adding blobs of rust colored paint to his blue canvas although he seemed to be scraping off more than he was putting on. Maybe it was more fun with paint. At least I’d have color then. I looked at the blank page and the dumb pots again and thought about how I needed to learn how to take news photos. I needed a course in press photography, and could probably take one the next semester.