But that August evening, with the Pledge folded inside my bra, I was free of my usual dread. I washed my hands, took up four plates and four sets of silverware, and went straight to the dining room, where Dad was already seated and my stepmother, Arlyn (AKA Annoying Arlyn), was opening a bottle of wine—both of them tanned, attractive, even I could see it, compared to most people their age. I set the table. I kissed Dad, gave Arlyn a dutiful nod. One trial lay ahead, a test of my new aplomb. Across from my place at the table was the empty chair that would soon bear the athletic body of my stepsister. Generally I glowered abjectly. But now, while shower water was flushing from Elise any trace of perspiration roused by her tutoring job or tennis lesson, I had merely to touch the spot over my bra where the Pledge resided and I was inured. The chandelier beamed its fairy lights off the beveled glass tabletop, classical violin sang through the wall speakers, I felt largehearted if not rhapsodic. As if the four-way Pledge were all I needed for perfect self-love.
“Kay, what are you smiling at?”
Arlyn had spoken. I tried to loosen my jaw.
“Don’t be shy,” she said. “We like you perky like this. Do you have a secret?”
My father grinned. “I’ll bet she’s in love.”
As usual the kidding felt like an assault, but I remained blissfully detached. Rays of light shot through the overhead circle of prisms and refracted (homage to Carstairs!) onto the bright white walls. Light seemed to bounce from the sprayed-on sheen of Arlyn’s hair (set in what was called a bubble) to the white of her blouse to the glitter of her rings to the white platter of low-calorie chicken she was setting upon the table (to get cold in Elise’s absence, but so what?) to my father’s white golf shirt. I am going to die, I said to myself, suppressing laughter. My friends and I are going to die.
Then Elise swept in, in her white terry cloth robe: skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony and smelling of apricot shampoo. There was something nauseating in the mix of food smells and shampoo that smelled like food, but I let it go. “I made you wait,” she cried. “I’m sorry. Never again, I swear!”
“Want to make a bet?” my father said (my father, not hers), but he was smiling. She smiled back ruefully and kissed his cheek, then Arlyn’s. The violin music swelled, as if just for her.
“What are you all listening to?” said Elise. “Wait, let me guess.” She paused, her face bright with cogitation. “Mendelssohn’s ‘Violin Concerto.’ But who’s that playing—Heifetz?” She sat, finally, pulling her robe over the sculpted bones of her knees.
“Isaac Stern.” Arlyn tossed her head, but her hair didn’t move. “It’s exquisite. But Heifetz sounds thicker somehow. Tom, honey, we have to get the Heifetz.”
I had no opinion about either violinist. All I’d eaten today were cookies and I was starved, even for skinned chicken breasts broiled with lemon. But Elise had more to say. “Itzhak Perlman’s my true love. He was on TV the other day. He played sitting down, and I had tears in my eyes! You know, he’ll be in Chicago next month. I want to go down to see him. They have student rates.” My father beamed approval, although before Arlyn and Co. he’d never turned on the stereo.
When we finally got to the food part of the dinner, it was cold as well as dry, but I ate, chewing slowly, counting to fifty, tasting with every part of my tongue the way the diet book advised. I forked some rice and chewed it to a sweet paste, imagining the people before me receiving the news of our tragic deaths: Jumped! My God! Turning shocked faces to one another, startled out of complacency. How terrible. I don’t understand. Seeking in vain for words of genuine feeling. It occurred to me that the four-way Pledge might convey to some extent the beauty of our act, and I looked around the dining room for a good place to leave the document, where it would be found but not too soon. I decided to stow it in my desk drawer, findable after our bodies came to light. I could picture it: the gathering afterward at this very table, Arlyn pretending to be sad, Elise maybe actually (she had her authentic moments) a little sad, but she’d turn on some classical music or go march to end the war. An image of my father came to mind, crying real tears as he had when my mother died, for months after the funeral. But he sat now at his end of the table with his jokes and his looks at Arlyn, who had saved his life, he said. I forked a green bean and ground it to threads and beyond, counting till my teeth and tongue were chewing on nothing. I asked and was granted permission to go out this evening, pro forma if I gave details: CJ was picking me up. Our destination was Hamburger Heaven. I’d consume nothing but Tab.
“You know,” Arlyn said, “you can take your driving test as soon as you lose…”
“You’ve mentioned that.”
“Mom,” said Elise, “don’t you think thirty pounds is a bit much? Twenty’s enough incentive.” She beamed, like she was doing me a favor.
Here was another humiliation, one more rotten spot in the fruit of my family. I set my fork down on the edge of my plate. Elise took small, untormented helpings, competent with the serving spoon, wrists slim inside her loose terry sleeves.
For a while, to my relief, the subject wasn’t me. My father described a chip shot he sank today from the sand. Retired at fifty, he played golf three or four times a week; this town was his paradise. “It was luck,” he said modestly. Early tomorrow he and Arlyn were going to play a challenging course at a club they might join. Conversation ran like a pretty stream. Elise’s boyfriend had just gotten into Stanford, where he had been wait-listed. The vice principal of the junior high school had crashed his car, probably DUI; no one was hurt, thank God. Luck: bad and good. With that mess in Vietnam, thank God they had girls, said my dad, and Arlyn raised her pretty hands in despair. She hated Nixon, but he had the best chance of working it out. “Mom,” Elise said, “I can’t believe you said that!” Tomorrow she and friends were driving down to Chicago to campaign for Eugene McCarthy. Clean for Gene. I glanced at my father, who had fought in Korea and feared Communism more than death. An avoider of emotional conflict, he was busy eating. I murmured under my breath, “I am really going to do it.”
“Kay, you’re in dreamland.”
That came from Dad. At times I’d forgive his need to be loved by everyone in the world; then I’d hear him apologizing to Arlyn for me, which made me hate him more than I hated Arlyn. I eyeballed him till he looked away.
“How’s the exercise program?” Arlyn said. “You haven’t talked about that lately. Are they working you hard?”
“You do look thinner,” Elise said.
“Do I? I mean, thank you.”
Arlyn touched my arm. “And I want to know how you did on that physics test! You know, the one on, on…”
“On light,” Elise said. “Waves, diffraction, refraction.”
I didn’t remember a recent physics test. I’d failed one on motion. Had there been one on light? I pictured myself walking down a hall, looking for a room in which a test was to be given. Corridors darkened. I couldn’t see room numbers. Dream-panicky I tried to remember the morning. Carstairs’s glasses were smudged. “I hate that stuff,” I said quickly. “I mean, it’s not like I’ll ever need it.” A dead moment went by. I tried not to sag under the weight of Arlyn’s opinion of me, and Dad’s, their throats squeezing against my every swallow. “I got a B minus!” I said, as if embarrassed by the mediocre grade. My face felt hot. I hated to lie.
“That’s solid,” said Arlyn.
“Aren’t you at least glad you’re getting it over with?” said Elise. “Your load’ll be that much lighter in the fall.”
You have no idea how light my load is going to be, I said in my mind to Elise, who never doubted her own motives or powers or right to exist and was smart too. In the same month she was voted Lourdes Peach Queen and got into the National Honor Society, and she was going to Smith in the fall—to which I had been advised not to apply (why court disappointment?). Not that I wanted to go to Smith. Or anywhere. Campus, courses, professors. Sorority. Dorm. Frat. Who cared? We who are about to die salut
e you.
All three members of my pseudo family were staring at me now. I forked the last chicken slab from off the platter, cut it into pieces, and arranged them on my plate in the form of a cross.
“Kay,” my father said, “maybe I shouldn’t bring this up at the dinner table, but these days it’s the only place we get to see you.” He looked at Arlyn, who nodded permission, then turned back to me. “You know, we’ve been a little worried about you lately.”
His voice was cotton-candy soft and sweet. I filled my mouth with rice and started counting to fifty again. One, two, three…
“When one of us tries to talk to you,” he went on, “you ignore us or try to get away as fast as you can. At least that’s what it looks like.”
Arlyn smiled. “It hurts our feelings, honey.”
Their voices were faint, their outlines blurry. Eleven. Twelve. Through the thick beveled glass of the table my knees looked far away, my feet tiny as doll feet.
“Kay,” said Dad, “you know we’re on your side. But we expect a level of courtesy.” He spread his large, clean hands on the table and leaned my way, radiating generic benevolence.
“I know that. I’m sorry.” The two adults exchanged a look of relief and pleasure. I gripped the seat of my chair. All I wanted, now and forever, was to be gone from here. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.
“I’m really glad,” Arlyn said, “to see you taking your schoolwork seriously. You’re on the right track.”
In two hours CJ would come by. There was nothing in my mouth but I kept on chewing. Thirty. What’s after thirty? Trust no one after thirty?
“You don’t have to be a world-class anything,” Dad said. “There’s no need to be number one. Just do your work, that’s all.”
Time for the subject to change. I swallowed saliva. He said, “But don’t pretend it doesn’t matter to you. The door slams shut on kids who act like they don’t care.”
Shut up, shut up.
“Just do your best,” Arlyn said. “Then we’ll all be happy.”
“That’s what’s important,” I murmured.
“Kay,” Arlyn said mildly, “there’s no need to be sarcastic.”
For maybe the first time in my five years of living with Arlyn, I looked her square in the face. “Of course I’ll do my best. No matter how pathetic it is!”
“Kay,” said Elise, “don’t put yourself down.”
“There’s no putting,” I said. “Down is down!”
“That’s a lousy attitude.” Dad’s contribution.
“Please,” Arlyn said more emphatically. “You’ve got to stop this.”
I wanted to stop. But my mouth was moving, words were coming out, doing for me what words seemed to do for other people, raising up walls behind which I was safe. “It’s not ‘attitude,’ it’s altitude. I’m high as the sky!”
“You are excused from the table.”
My stepmother’s dagger voice pinned me to the cross on my dinner plate. But I was clever, powerful, thrilled with myself. “What did I say, Dad?”
“You heard your mother.”
“My who?”
Arlyn sucked her cheeks in. Dad looked sad, or maybe embarrassed. I am a good person, I told myself. But something gray and sticky that had been gathering in my throat for the past few minutes swelled into a sob. I closed my mouth, swallowed it down.
“You’re on thin ice,” he said.
“As you well know,” Arlyn said.
“You need to work on self-control.”
“You can start by being more respectful to your father and me.”
“Or you can spend the rest of the night in your room.”
This last came from my father, who’d never talked like this, so cold and tight, until he met Arlyn. I looked at my watch. I decided to go to my room and give CJ a call. Maybe he could come early. “I’ll see you guys later.”
Elise looked like she was trying not to laugh, but Arlyn’s lips were white. “Your plans have changed,” she said.
Dad nodded agreement.
“You can telephone your regrets,” Arlyn said. “With a little time alone in your room, you can work on your manners. You’ll be grateful one day, and so will your friends.”
“You don’t know my friends,” I almost screamed. “Or me or anything!” My voice was a balloon I was holding on to, pulling me up and out of here. “You’re all just crucifying me.”
“Kay,” said Arlyn, “you are out of control.”
“Mom, please. Let up,” said Elise, then to me in a whisper: “But give her a break?”
They looked at each other. No one spoke. The music had ended and no one moved to put on anything new. The silence throbbed.
But there was no stopping it, what used to happen at the drop of a hat—what, despite the Pledge, my friends, my attempt at faith in a God who loved fat girls, was happening right now. Sobs heaved out of me one after the other, scattering forever, it seemed, the shards of my self-respect. I ran for the stairs. Elise followed. “Kay, I know. She can overdo it sometimes.”
She was trying to be nice, a part of me knew. But I couldn’t bear her pity or the view of myself as pitiful. Then the phone rang and I picked up the extension in my room, but not before Arlyn had answered it downstairs. It was Saint, with Hamburger Heaven background noise. “Could you tell Kay we have to cancel tonight? Thank you,” he said, and hung up before I could say anything.
4
Vera
While I lay on my bed wondering what I’d done to alienate Saint and maybe all of my friends, Vera sits outside Hamburger Heaven smoking Saint’s cigarettes and watching a line of ants move across her table. By now dinner-eating families have given way to groups of local teens and lone sleazy men, but her table and its bench are reassuringly cemented to the ground and the little black ant bodies seem to be composed of tiny jeweled bits of color that may be their constituent molecules. A trucker sits down at her table, buys her a Pepsi, and tells her about a hot girl he picked up. Hot for him, he says. You ever hitchhike? She almost asks where his truck is. She has never fucked in a truck. But she isn’t sure she wants to fuck this man, who is missing a bottom tooth. She looks at his hands, decides not. She smokes one cigarette after another, trying not to look at the ants, the tiny hairs growing out of their backs. She never noticed this before. Her eyesight has become painfully sharp. Overhead, the waxing moon is pale and irrelevant in the light from the restaurant window.
Then at last here’s Saint through the heavy front door and walking toward her. By now the trucker is gone, and all the inside customers; the parking lot is nearly empty. She rises to her feet and hugs his arm. She lays her head on his shoulder and breathes his smell of soap, sweat, and slightly charred oil. He stands like a log, like he has no desires or needs inside of him, but she is ready for it. “Let’s not play games,” she says, “with the end so near.”
He stares for a minute, as he does sometimes before he blanks. Then he’s shaking his head. “Like this isn’t a game? You’re stoned out of your mind, Vee.”
He walks to his scooter. His voice is ice-cold, which she didn’t expect. The machine roars, then dies. He says, his back to her, “If I’m so feeble, what do you want with me now?”
“Who called you feeble?”
“Always the victim,” he says. “I guess there’s a hair of difference.”
She remembers having said that, or something like it. But his reaction, so long after the fact, is one of the things she hates about him. “Don’t take it like that.” She looks at his face, sees an expression to be read, and does her best. “I didn’t even know you were pissed, Saint. You were so…so nice and kind today.”
He grabs her by the shoulder and holds on a moment, then pushes himself away from her. He jump-starts the scooter. “Get on. I’ll take you home.”
He is acting as if he dislikes her. Blood pounds in the shoulder he squeezed; she feels a sharp thrill. He flicks on the headlight, swings around. Blinded, she can only wait for what will hap
pen next.
To her surprise, the motor goes off again. He’s looking at her. “Jesus,” he says.
She lowers her eyes under his perusal, wanting oddly to giggle.
He dismounts; with a gentle hand he touches her face. She holds still so as not to scare him off. “What happened to you?” She shrugs. So much has happened. “You have a black eye,” he says, “didn’t you know?” She may have known. It makes sense of some kind.
“Is it bad?” she murmurs, though it doesn’t matter. She hopes it is bad. She’s glad for a black eye, since it has softened him. She strokes the top of his arm. “There’s no danger in touch, remember from chemistry? There’s no actual contact, just molecules reacting to too much closeness by pushing one another away.” She looks out at the world beyond the parking lot, the spreading fields silver in the moonlight. “I know I got on your case this afternoon, Saintly. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“You said what you thought. That’s what you do. Brutal, that’s you.” But he leads her to the bright restaurant window, concerned like a doctor. “I think your nose was bleeding. It’s dried on your chin.”
“It doesn’t hurt. Honestly.” She tries to imagine what she looks like.
“Vera, there’s nobody like you.”
He shakes his head. His hand is still on her cheek; she presses it to her face. What she wants now is to lie down with him and feel his arms around her. His chest against hers. I want to be naked with you. Can she say that? There are dangers in words said, or said at the wrong time, though on acid she has lost all sense of protocol. “Smell is sexy, you know. Molecules of you are already inside me.”
He doesn’t pull away; he may have forgiven her. In the asphalt parking lot of Hamburger Heaven she floats on the prospect of pleasure. So often these days her body feels like a dead thing. Only during certain peak experiences like sex can she feel it, inside and out, scent and texture.
Abruptly he tilts her face up. “Well, are you going to tell me who pounded on you? Was it your father?”
Once, in Lourdes Page 5