Cook shivered with a sudden chill. The evidence of former industry, combined with that of sudden abandonment, unsettled him. He looked out the window to the street below. Both of their cars were there. He looked into the park and up and down the street. Not a soul was in sight. It was as if the planet had suddenly been unpeopled.
He went to the door of the bedroom and called out:
“Dan? Beth?”
Sixteen
Shortly after Cook’s lonely search for them, Dan and Beth returned to the house, separately but within minutes of each other. Dan came back with a little bag from the nearby hardware store. This told Cook where he had been, which was good, because Dan didn’t. He made it clear he had nothing to say to anybody. Beth came back empty-handed and tight-lipped.
Whatever had happened in the bedroom—whatever blowup had sent them flying in different directions—they weren’t going to talk about it. The darkness of silence was upon the marriage.
Cook wandered around the house, silent himself, waiting for the darkness to lift. When lunchtime came, by unspoken agreement each of them got solo tenancy of the kitchen long enough to make a sandwich and get out of there to eat it in private. Beth took her lunch into the bedroom and closed the door. At this point she spoke, though since she was alone it wasn’t a very social act. She yelled, “Still no air conditioner in here! God damn it!”
Cook heard this clearly from his bed, where he was eating his sandwich, and Dan heard it too, for he had come into Cook’s room just at that moment. A look of immense fatigue swept over Dan’s face. He waited, apparently for elaboration from Beth, and when none came he calmly asked Cook if he would help him get the ladder back on the van so that he could return it to the rental shop.
Cook asked him if he and Beth had found an alternative camp. Dan made a face and said, “Maybe. We’ve got to check it out.”
They went outside and muscled the ladder onto the van roof, where Dan secured it with rope. Then he failed to invite Cook to go with him. Cook forlornly watched him drive off and went back upstairs. His room was stuffy with the midday heat. He opened the balcony door, hoping for a breeze, and settled on the bed.
He read. Now and then he heard Beth stir in the bedroom below. The phone rang, and Beth talked at length. Her voice carried loudly through the floor, but he couldn’t make out any actual words. He listened and began to find it interesting to see what tone detail made it through the plaster and floorboards to his ears. But at the height of his interest in this, she hung up. He went back to his reading, grew bored with it, and stood up. Without intending to he began to pace.
“Do you mind?” Beth yelled. “Do you mind?”
Cook tiptoed back to his bed. He felt imprisoned. He opened his novel again but found no relief there, only irritation. If the book had been good, Cook thought angrily, then he wouldn’t have grown restless, he wouldn’t have paced, and Beth wouldn’t have yelled at him. Three times already the author had had his character “snap back to reality.” Cook hated that. The hero was forever drifting off into a flashback or a reverie, only to be hauled out of it when some banging door or barking dog or volcanic eruption “snapped him back to reality.” The hero also “thought to himself” a lot. As opposed to what? Cook wondered—thinking to someone else?
He kept hoping for the sound of Dan’s van. He imagined it pulling up in front to the sound of acorns crunching under the wheels; then the front door opening and closing, sending its gentle thud through the timbers of the house; then talk between Dan and Beth—the plain old everyday music. “Mail here yet?” “You seen my keys?” “Where’s the rest of the paper?” That was what he longed to hear.
The phone rang again, and Beth talked and talked. Cook bolted. He hurried into his shoes and fairly ran down the stairs and out the front door. He walked around the neighborhood, following the curving streets until he was good and lost. He enjoyed this state for as long as it lasted—until he saw Dan’s van zoom by, going in the opposite direction. Since this told him where home was, he was no longer lost, so he turned around with a sigh and headed back. Evidently Dan hadn’t seen him when he drove by.
Dan had the rear hatch of the van open and was wrestling with a huge flat box. He brightened somewhat to see Cook. “I got a Ping-Pong table,” he said. “Robbie’s always wanted one. It might ease the blow about Camp Swallow a little.” He hefted one side of the box. “I’d like to get this put up before he gets home.”
Cook grabbed the other side and helped slide the box out of the van. They rested it on the rear bumper as Dan slammed the hatch shut.
Beth came around a corner of the house, carrying a lawn sprinkler and dragging a hose. She looked at them. The corners of her mouth were turned down. They watched her set up the sprinkler and turn on the water. She looked at them again and went back inside.
“Beth never was much of a Ping-Pong player,” Dan said cryptically. Then he said, “Damn. Too late.” Cook followed Dan’s gaze down the sidewalk. Robbie was coming home from school. “Don’t say anything about the camp right now.”
“Of course not,” said Cook.
Robbie walked up to them, his knapsack slung over one shoulder. He read the lettering on the side of the box. Cook watched pure joy fill his face, and he wondered when the last time was that he had reacted so happily to something.
“Oh, wow!” Robbie said, running to touch the box. “They’ve got Ping-Pong at Camp Swallow. I can practice all weekend and be the champ.”
Dan’s face fell. He looked at Cook and signaled him to lift it up. They hauled it around to the rear deck. Dan asked Robbie to go down to the basement for his toolbox, and he began to tear the cardboard box apart. He worked in brutish silence. Robbie returned with the toolbox, then began to jump around on the deck, hitting an imaginary ball with the palm of his hand and yelling, “He scores!” Cook wondered if Dan found this as unnerving as he did. Robbie turned to his father and said, “Where are the paddles and stuff?”
Dan’s face fell again.
“We’ll go get them,” Cook said quickly. “Come on, Robbie. By the time we get back, maybe the table’ll be ready.” He looked at Dan. “Just tell me where to go to get them.”
Dan gave Cook a look so grateful that Cook braced himself, expecting to be hugged.
When they returned, the table was ready. Dan was sitting on the deck stairs, staring across the lawn at nothing. When Cook and Robbie appeared he gave them a blank look and said, “Oh.” It was as if he barely remembered them.
They put up the net, and Robbie and Dan played. Cook was content to fetch balls from the grass when they bounced off the deck. Dan began to relax a little. He even seemed to enjoy the game. He let Robbie win a share of the rallies without being obvious about it. Then he ran Robbie through some low-key exercises, practicing certain shots over and over—always the teacher, thought Cook. Robbie grinned through it all. When a rally was especially long, Robbie’s grin would grow with every shot, until he would burst out laughing and flub the shot and collapse across the table.
Beth appeared at the back door. She watched for a while. Dan seemed about to say something to her a couple of times. Robbie asked her to play; she said no, she had some things to do. But she stayed on and watched, half smiling, even laughing once at a funny shot Dan attempted. A little later she went back into the house. Dan grew distracted at that point, repeatedly glancing through the window to follow Beth’s movements. Finally, he told Robbie he had to quit for now. He gave his paddle to Cook and went inside.
Cook was a rabid competitor, not given to the paternal self-effacement Dan had shown. His impulse was to smash the ball every chance he got. He had to create an imaginary context for their play—a secret one, unknown to Robbie—to justify letting Robbie win. After experimenting with a few that occurred to him, he finally settled on the fiction that every rally he won knocked a year off his life, and every rally Robbie won added a year, but if Robbie ever accused him of deliberately throwing a rally, Cook’s IQ would decline twenty
points.
But Cook too became interested in what was going on indoors. He could see through the sun-room window and through the dining room window beyond it all the way into the living room. Beth was sitting on the couch. Dan was leaning against the dining room doorjamb, his back to Cook. They were talking.
Cook said to Robbie, “Do you have any homework to do?”
Robbie said, “Nope. You want to quit playing, don’t you?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Whenever Mom and Dad want me to stop doing whatever I’m doing, they ask me if I have any homework.”
“You’re pretty observant,” Cook said. He laid his paddle on the table.
“I’ve got a good memory, too,” Robbie said. “Remember—a liar’s got to have a good memory.”
“Right,” said Cook, peering through the windows again. He was eager to get to Dan and Beth, where the real action was. He gave Robbie an all-purpose smile and went inside.
• • •
“What’s the good word?” Cook said, realizing as he used it that this lame greeting was on his hate list in The Woof of Words.
Dan, leaning against the dining room doorjamb with his hands in his pockets, looked rather casual from behind. But his face was bleak. Beth sat on the edge of the couch, her legs pressed tightly together.
“We’re in the middle of something,” Beth said sharply to Cook.
“I know.” Cook sat down across from her. She stared at him.
Dan turned to see where Robbie was. Through the windows they could see him tapping a Ping-Pong ball on the table with a paddle.
“Okay,” Dan said to Beth. “You called Camp Meramec, and they were full up, too. That’s when you said we should call the soccer camp.”
“I asked you if you thought we should call them,” Beth said evenly.
“No. You said you wanted to call them. That’s why I got mad.”
Beth shook her head. “I asked you about it. That’s all. And you flew off the handle.”
Dan took a deep breath. “Well, even if you just asked, I still couldn’t believe you’d consider a soccer camp. Robbie would hate it.”
“How do you know? You still haven’t made that clear.”
“Because only kids who are complete soccer nuts go to soccer camp.”
“Are you sure?”
“What do you think—I’d make that up? I know kids who have gone.” He gestured to the front window, as if they were right at hand, outside. “They’re all soccer nuts. Okay?”
“But you didn’t make that clear this morning. You just got mad.”
Dan blinked a couple of times. “Didn’t I say Robbie wouldn’t like soccer camp?”
“But you didn’t say why.”
“I thought it was obvious why. Because he doesn’t like soccer enough.”
“But you’ve got to see why I was suggesting it. Robbie plays soccer. He’s always on the school team.”
“But that’s not the same—”
“He plays soccer out in the park—”
“But at a soccer camp they don’t just play it. They live it.”
“Okay! I know that now, but I didn’t then. Don’t you see? You got mad at me for not knowing something I had no way of knowing.”
“I thought it was obvious.”
“Well it wasn’t.”
“I thought it was.”
“Well it wasn’t.”
A pause fell. Cook hoped they were done with this particular subject.
“Okay,” said Dan. His hands were in his pockets again, his arms stiff at his sides, as if he were cold.
“That’s how it started,” said Beth.
“It started before then,” said Dan.
“When?”
Dan hesitated, his eyes roaming the corners of the room. “It started with the way you approached the whole thing. The way you yelled up the stairs that our summer was ruined.”
“Oh come on.” Beth sounded more bored than angry, as if she had heard this kind of thing before. “I was upset. Okay?”
“You said it like it was all suddenly my responsibility—”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“—like you were saying, ‘Our summer is ruined, and it’s your job to make it better.’”
“I didn’t mean that at all!”
“But it felt like that’s what you meant.”
“Well I didn’t, okay? How many times do I have to—”
“Okay okay. Anyway, my point is the way you brought it up got us off to a horrible start.”
“How should I talk? Can’t I say what I feel?”
Dan took a deep breath. “Try not to begin conversations with desperate absolutes. ‘Our summer is ruined.’ You can’t say stuff like that.”
“Why not? Why not?”
“You just can’t.”
Beth looked hard at him. “If I can’t say things like that, it’s hopeless. There’s just no hope for us.”
“All right. You can say them.”
Cook looked closely at Dan. He wasn’t joking.
Beth took a moment to react. “Why this sudden permission? You just said that’s why we fought—because the first thing I said was hysterical.”
“I didn’t say it was hysterical.”
“You almost did. That’s what you meant.”
Dan pressed his lips together. “Okay. I will say it. It was hysterical.”
“That really pisses me off.”
Dan gave a helpless laugh. “Shit. I thought you were giving me permission to say that. Can we take a look at it? Can we do that?” His hands came out of his pockets and he used them to present the sentence. “Here it is: ‘Our whole summer is completely ruined.’ Right?”
Beth said nothing.
“Now,” Dan went on, “let’s look at that sentence. Was it true?”
“It felt like it was.”
“I mean, was it true when you said it that our whole summer was completely ruined?”
“Well, our trip was in danger, and the trip was the main thing happening this summer, and if we couldn’t find a camp for Robbie it was probably off, so, yes, it was true.”
“But there are a lot of conditions to that, aren’t there? ‘If we couldn’t find a camp’—that’s a condition. You didn’t even know for a fact that Camp Swallow had been canceled.”
Beth frowned at Dan. “But it was.”
“Yes, but you didn’t know that for sure at the time. You just had it secondhand. Or thirdhand. Or—”
“So what? The point is it was canceled.”
“Don’t you see what I’m saying? You yell at me that our summer is ruined, when in fact there’s this huge possibility of error. Don’t you see?”
“This is ridiculous! The camp was canceled!”
“I know that. I’m trying to explain why we had a fight. My first thought was Jesus Christ, she’s all freaked out and she doesn’t even have the facts.”
Beth sighed deeply. “Can we get off this point? It isn’t what we fought about.”
“But it established the tone. It set my teeth on edge.”
“Fine. Great. Now can we get off it?”
“Sure,” said Dan. “Where were we?”
“Soccer camp,” said Cook.
They looked at him.
“Right,” said Dan. “We decided not to call the soccer camp. That left Big Muddy Camp.”
Beth nodded. “You called them.”
Dan turned to Cook. “Beth had been doing the calling, and we’d been striking out. We thought our luck might change if I called.”
Cook nodded.
“Not because she was failing or anything,” Dan added quickly. “It was just superstition—you know, time to try something different to change our luck. All the camps were full, and …” He turned to Beth. “Actually, that’s what scared me about the place. They had vacancies when nobody else did.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Beth retorted. “All by itself it doesn’t mean anything.”
> Dan started to speak to this, stopped, and turned back to Cook, preferring to address him at the moment. “We had it all planned,” he said, a nasality in his tone protesting the fickleness of the gods. “Robbie’s camp was going to overlap exactly with our trip—two weeks, starting Monday. He loved Camp Swallow last year, so we weren’t worried about being out of the country—you know, in case it was a horrible experience or anything. There just wasn’t any danger of that. But then poof!—Camp Swallow is out of the picture. Big Muddy is a camp he’s never been to, none of his friends go to it, and we’ve never even heard of it.”
“What about Beth’s parents?” Cook said. “Couldn’t Robbie stay with them for the two weeks?”
This question produced an awkward pause. Dan went stiff and looked at Beth—he would let her answer.
Beth shook her head. “No,” she said simply.
“It’s out of the question,” said Dan. “They ignore him. I won’t have him be ignored for two weeks.”
Cook looked at Beth, expecting her to challenge this or to tone it down. She said nothing.
“So where do things stand?” Cook asked, a little confused.
Dan shrugged. “We made a tentative reservation at Big Muddy for Robbie. We’re going to drive out there with him tomorrow to check it out. If it looks good, we’ll go with it.”
Cook said, “It sounds like you agreed on a plan. So what’s the problem? Why didn’t you speak to each other all day?”
“Beth made a bad suggestion,” said Dan, looking at her, “and we had a few words about it.”
“Oh, drop dead,” she said, but without much feeling.
“What was it?” Cook asked.
“She suggested Robbie stay with her parents for the two weeks.” Dan’s eyes widened and he gave a funny laugh.
The Full Catastrophe Page 20