*
We pull into the driveway. From the salty iced-paved beginnings I can see that, up near the house, the garage doors are still open, Volvo there but no Saab, which means the old man is not back yet. Long trip for Alka-Seltzer. The trees and bushes are ordered, neatly pruned, dripping water and ice.
“Jack, stop a minute.”
I do, edging the BMW’s rear end out of the street slowly, careful not to get much curbside slush on it. I sit there, letting the soft new engine hum, waiting. She glances at me sideways.
“Look, I—um. I dated this guy for a while, up at State.”
“Yeah?” And I think, Oh great, now she’s going to tell me she’s knocked up or she went and got VD or AIDS. So I don’t look at her, just wait.
“But I stopped seeing him.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Jack, I think I’m queer. Or, like, bisexual, or something.”
“You mean a homo?”
“Yes. Well, not quite. Maybe.”
“Just because you broke up with some jerk?”
“No.”
“Why, then?”
“Because of some stuff, you know, stuff I’m—have been—going through. I mean, I just do.”
Fine, Babe. What am I supposed to say now? See a shrink? Go for it? Just get laid? What I do say comes out of nowhere.
“So you’re a bisexual dyke. So what.”
“Oh shut up, Jack!”
I laugh, automatically shift and the car rolls forward through the smooth blacktop puddles. “Come on, Babe, get real. Knock-knock! This is the world, right? not fantasy land. I mean, I saw you with that guy—”
“Kenny.”
“Right.”
“Okay. But you didn’t see the rest of my life. And, I mean, you don’t know the rest of what it is now—”
We purr into the garage, a perfect fit. Lights blink on; I press the button on the remote control and, behind us, the right-hand door moves quietly down. Without either of us getting out, or even unbuckling a seat belt, she starts to talk, telling me things that, quite frankly, I would rather not hear and certainly will not repeat and that, truth be told, I have kind of blocked out of my consciousness, because who in hell wants to be told that their sister is not just physically damaged, and mentally stuck out there sometimes where the buses don’t run, but a fucking muff diver too?
I do my best to stay where I am, make her think I am listening, really listening. I do my best to make her think that some part of me hears, and understands. But it all really sounds like some kind of sick bullshit to me, and what I really wish is that she’d go see a psychiatrist again and take the right pills or something; because, God knows, I have got other things on my mind, like Christmas dinner, for instance—the catastrophe that awaits us. And I could use a friend right now; I wish the old Babe, protector and ally, was sitting here next to me. So, muttering uh-huhs from time to time, I really just don’t look at her, or say much.
*
Later, I’d keep thinking that if I’d only been able to warn her somehow, like I’d been warning myself all morning and afternoon, things would have turned out differently. We wouldn’t have had all the bullshit we had that day. Which, in some bizarre way, sort of signaled the obvious beginning of things falling apart. Although, if you ask me, things had been falling apart with the whole fucking family, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and their weird little offspring—but without the on-screen laughs—for a pretty long time.
Only, I don’t know how long. Things have to begin somewhere, don’t they? But if you asked me how this all began—this bullshit, I mean, this ruin—I’d say: Maybe it began that Christmas dinner. Or maybe it began when Babe’s plane went down into the Sargasso Sea. Or maybe, just maybe, it happened somewhere long ago, far away. Before my birth. Before any of theirs.
Maybe that’s why I made the call to State. I figured this coach of hers deserved fair warning; to know that it wasn’t Babe fucking up, but the family. Then, too, I needed to talk. I needed a friend.
Christmas Dinner
(BARBARA)
We grew up thinking it was all going to be more of what we knew.
By that, I mean the New England style: summers on the Cape, the rest of the seasons spent in a variety of places less rustic. But we were tougher than the others, those pallid rich Northeasterners. We grew up tall and large-boned, like my mother’s ancestors, rugged Scandinavians who’d settled the Midwest, surviving fever, drought, childbirth, locust plagues, and dust storms to do it, distinguished by our large, quite capable hands and an internal equilibrium that consistently defied all of the world’s attempts to ruffle it.
It was a lineage marked by stronger legs than arms. In fact, in the nothing North Dakota town they came to own—through hard work and frugality and a superb business sense, complementing good luck with investments—common wisdom held that once a Johnson began to run, you never would catch him.
Never take a Johnson down.’
That is the way my grandfather put it.
And, in the end, the old bastard did compensate somewhat for ruining the lives of most of his available female descendants, early on: He bestowed his excellent physical genes selectively throughout the family; so that, in the particular modern-day unit of marriage and miscegenation to which I had attached myself, to which I had chained my destiny in a fit and folly of romantic love, my son Jack inherited the long, strong legs and reed-slender chest that, deceptively, contains a fabulous pair of lungs; and my oldest daughter inherited the long, strong legs, and the fabulous lungs; and her broad chest and shoulders and long, strong arms from someone less white.
My father’s stock was different: a line of genteel Eastern bankers. From him, I inherited delicate lips and lashes, and a willingness to be shrewd when circumstances warranted.
All of these qualities can be seen in Jack.
And all of them, too, in my oldest daughter. Except, perhaps, the shrewdness.
But that—that is the luck of the genetic draw.
*
My brothers learned sailing and tennis, graduated from Dartmouth, married decently and went into business. I was the youngest, and spent a somewhat coddled childhood learning a mean game of golf. I believe that, in my spare time, I painted dull still lifes with watercolor and egg tempera, and dreamed of performing heroic deeds. My bedroom walls were lined with newspaper clippings of the athletic exploits of Mildred Didrikson Zaharias, who was my only hero. I followed The Babe’s game closely.
*
At night, I dreamed of love.
The pale, handsome boys I dated failed to move me. My fantasies were filled instead with dark dashing pirates and bronzed sheiks, forbidden foreign warriors—who traveled the high seas in search of beauty and raw gain, instead of a good closing price. These fantasy creatures were violent and passionate men whom only I could move to tenderness.
In waking life I went thrill-seeking: standing at the edge of high cliffs during our school field hikes and closing both eyes to see how far I might sway; hitching up my skirt to climb fences at a zoo, embracing the bars of the leopard cage; diving into frigid ocean waves at Maine beaches in early spring; skipping school one afternoon to watch a building burn down, while firemen rushed in with their shining tools and ropes and the neighborhood ran screaming, and I stood there in the glow of the flame until smoke blackened my dress and my hair dripped sweat.
* * *
On that long, hot day, I became intimate with fire.
It was the subtle blue light at the core of each flame that fascinated me. I’d have liked to hold it; and I would have, but for my hereditary good common sense. Still, it filled me with a rippling, expansive feeling that made me want to laugh and weep. It was, I thought, what they meant when they spoke of being in love.
But how did they know, how could they? all of these grownups who would have me marry some straw-colored stockbroker.
And one day, there was Felipe Delgado. Handsome, dark-skinned. Examining me from across the room at a party
, with his molten eyes. Then he approached, his smile very white. He was holding a thick book under one arm. Briefly, he made a motion to me of greeting and deference, as if tipping the brim of a great invisible straw hat.
“What are you reading?” I asked.
“I study languages.”
“English?”
“No. English I know already. Even though you can’t know everything of a language so large, I know it enough.”
“Okay. What, then?”
“The language of machines.”
“Of machines?” |
“Of machines called computers. There are different kinds. They speak different languages. We create new languages to store in these machines. They speak to us with the words we give them. We translate the words of problems into their new languages—we give them the problems, you see; and in their new languages they provide us with solutions. In corporate work, one day soon, I guarantee you, any man who doesn’t speak at least one or two of these new languages will be completely out in the cold. Because soon all enterprise will depend on them. And personally, Miss—?”
“Fennelsworth. Barbara Johnson Fennelsworth,” I said, figuring that he ought to at least know from the beginning what it was he’d be getting into. But I smiled, to soften the blow. “In other words, Barbara.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Barbara. Felipe Delgado, a tu ordenes. That is Spanish. It means, ‘at your service.’”
“You’re Spanish?”
“My family’s from Cuba. Personally, I consider myself to be completely American—”
And I smiled. I remember. But turned away, so that he would not see.
“—And, as I was saying, enterprise is the heart of the American system. It’s why my father brought us here to America—for enterprise—”
“Oh,” I said—disappointed for the first time, though not the last—“I thought you’d have said: for freedom.”
He grinned handsomely. “Forgive me, beautiful one, but this is the century of machines. I think that, in human language, anyway, there’s not much difference between those words any more. Freedom and enterprise are the same thing.”
“You’re crazy, Felipe.”
“Phil. Call me Phil—my American name.”
“Fine. Phil, you’re crazy.”
“Not at all, Barbara. I’m a man of the future.”
Thinking what I thought then, I could feel myself blush. His eyes were coal-dark. I imagined them to be Latin, mestizo of some sort, with the exotic African danger around nose and lips. Magical. Dominant.
Which, after all, was everything I thought I wanted.
The white collegiate surroundings seemed to spin away then, for a moment. I held his gaze until, embarrassed, we both grinned, and broke, and the pale, pale party came back into focus. But we already had the look of lovers.
*
Life is full of storms.
Sometimes it comes in unexpected forms. Sunshine, for instance; or the Everglades. I would spill into Miami with him, months later, as if entering a nightmare. Multicolored blinking downtown lights mesmerized me. There was traffic wherever you turned. Heat steamed toward the relentless sun. Lawns were gravel and plastic flamingos, lonely palm trees drooping toward pavement. Jellyfish washed up on beaches to die. I felt cracked inside, instantly, in a way I had never experienced before: riven through with odors of salt and fungus, mosquito venom, plant poison, dripping reptilian fangs. The tropics. Life. Rot of the universe.
It was in a horrid Miami motel room, then—before meeting the wretched remnants of his refugee family—where everything happened. It had come to this—out of deference for my parents’ alarm and disgust; I had made him wait that long. Months and months. It had driven us both half mad.
In this motel room, with cracked shades drawn against the heat, cold water in the bath, cigarette holes riddling the bed quilt, he bowed half naked to brush my knuckles with his lips, kissed my arm to the elbow, glanced up once for confirmation, and I shut my eyes. Then opened myself to him as if we were the last two people on earth. As if survival of the species depended on us, on us alone. In the midst of discomfort, passion, horror. Sun and sea and unforeseen life. And the male-female rot of the universe.
Out of all that came my daughter.
*
It is our girl Maria’s day off today, so I cook alone. It’s all for the best, really—she does fairly well with ordinary dinners and cleanup, but I like to oversee important or special occasions. Potatoes steam. Ham and turkey broil. Gravy smells sift through the air.
*
Babe was born just past sunrise on the first day of August. The previous few days had shattered records for heat; this one did, too. Outside, the sun scorched leaves and grass. People’s shoe soles stuck to the sidewalks.
Immediately, she began to scream. The doctor whacked her some more. An obstetrical nurse sponged the tiny, flailing body of my blood and tissue, and placed it between my breasts. I say it instead of her because, aside from their genitals, infants really do seem entirely androgynous. So, I think, do swimmers in the water. But that is another story. I remember the remains of tied-off umbilical cord wagging in the air, almost phallic, like a miniature flag. I touched one sweating finger to a tiny cheek that was still silky wet, and sighed with deep exhaustion. It was the hardest thing I had ever done. I had not done it alone.
I believe that, in the waiting room, my husband was gulping down coffee, blinking up at pale ceiling lights. Someone must have gone in there to tell him that his first child was a daughter. I don’t know if he was disappointed. The next time I saw him, I noticed that he’d spilled coffee on his shirt. Our daughter was big. Healthy. Perfect. He leaned over us both, smiling, and his eyes lit with tears.
It struck me, over the next few days, how immediately maternity ward nurses come to know an infant’s distinguishing features and characteristics. They can pick one out by name from rows of seemingly identical babies. My daughter was tagged right away as a screamer, an attention-getter of epic proportions. There she goes again, they’d say, yelling. There goes the Delgado kid. She really was louder than the others; I imagined her howls to be a combination of rage and celebration; but perhaps those feelings were more clearly my own, at the time.
Still, her tiny face turned scarlet. Her little hands pounded the air. And, when she slept, it was the sleep of the righteous.
She seemed so ruddy, dark-skinned, boisterous and without shame. I named her Mildred, after my only hero. The nickname Babe just seemed to apply immediately.
My husband was a little upset. He’d wanted his daughter named Teresa Maria, after a favorite aunt of his who had remained in Havana. But I stood firm. I told him he could name his next daughter Teresa Maria. This one would be none other than Babe.
*
I fill a pot with water. Set it on the stove to boil. In a strainer, the string beans wait: fresh-cut, washed, pale green, symmetrical.
*
Babe grew up splashing through the water off the eastern Massachusetts shoreline. She was a healthy child, and—as long as she got plenty of attention—her smites lit up the universe. She was big-boned, stocky like my husband’s side of the family, and walked early. For a while, she even held a reign of terror at nursery school, collecting every building block in the place and organizing all the other children into a kind of slave colony; she then forced them to build a palace according to her specifications. One of the teachers called me in for special consultation on the matter.
I confronted Babe later with a kind of dread. As often as not, during these confrontations, my daughter would win out. Even now, when she protested tearfully that she had made the others build her palace for their own good, I could see her point: She had simply wanted them to have a beautiful place to play with, instead of the wretchedly ordinary little hovels they usually built when left to their own devices.
“Yes, honey, but you can’t make people do something just because you think it’s good for them.”
�
�Why not?”
“Because it isn’t right.”
“Why not?”
“Because it is never right to make someone else afraid.” I didn’t quite know if I believed this myself, but it sounded good at the time—firm, authoritative, absolute.
“Why not?”
I could feel myself losing control. The truth of the matter is that I was certainly not going to engage in any dialogue about beauty and terror with a four-year-old. So I spanked her.
The blows were few and light. Still, she sobbed; and, afterwards, I remember suffering days of self-loathing—I remember feeling, at the time, that if I ever again did anything to fracture my daughter’s pride, it would be my own end as well.
But this was a feeling, not a truth. Like all such feelings, it would pass.
*
The water’s boiling. I turn it to low, add a pinch of salt. Slowly, delicately, stir the string beans in. I check the ham—bubbling brown sugar—and baste the turkey; steam beads across my face with the effort of lifting, of reorganizing heavy, heated pans, on different racks, in the oven.
*
“Señorita de mi corazón!”
Every night when he got home from work, my husband would toss her in the air. He’d twirl her in circles like an airplane, dangle her upside down, faithfully play bucking bronco while Babe perched astride him, digging in her imaginary spurs. I was probably a little jealous. I adored them both to distraction. But things were not the way I had imagined. The country, too, was becoming strange to me; much of what I had grown up expecting—all the old traditions—had been smashed utterly over the course of a decade: now all sorts of people were mixing and mingling. And, I suppose, I myself was part of the brand-new stew.
But something about it stank to high heaven.
What I had once thought of as fine and preservable—part of which was, I believed, enduring love—became diluted and faded among the hedges and lawns and ugly gravel driveways of an appallingly nouveau riche suburbia, where no one was ever really well-to-do enough, and nothing was ever really pretty enough, to compete with the America I had once known. We did well, I suppose, according to the new classless, race-less standards of the day.
The Sea of Light Page 28