Ultraviolet

by Suzanne Matson

  Do you know this man?

  It was simple: She knew nothing.

  “Communism is a form of government. Our government thinks it’s dangerous and doesn’t want to see it spread.”

  Samantha nods, but looks confused. This won’t be the end of her questions. But it’s not Vera’s fault that the girl saw things, needs answers. They were simply walking down the Park Blocks.

  “Who’s right?”

  “Who’s right about the war?” Vera wants to tell her the protesting kids are. But it’s different when you say it to a child who belongs to you. She thinks even Carl, with his once-radical politics, would have a hard time saying it to his daughter. And certainly Kay. You want your own child to follow the rules, stay safe.

  “Different people have different opinions. Nobody likes war.”

  Samantha, she sees, could go on probing it all afternoon. Vera feels some responsibility to return more or less the same daughter to Kay and Carl that she received. Do they turn off the news at home? No way to do it completely. Samantha would have seen the film from the jungles of Vietnam, the body bags coming back off the planes. She’s grown up with the assassinations, the televised funerals. It’s all right there in the living room.

  “Let’s think about something else. Too much of politics gives me a headache. Shall we go home and make your purse?”

  Her apartment has never looked so welcoming—the doilies she crocheted to pin over the shiny spots on the arms of the sofa and rocker, her Royal Doulton balloon lady, the Melmac plates in the slots of the dish dryer. She rummages in a drawer for her crochet hooks, Samantha looking over her shoulder and poking at some World’s Fair cards and assorted snapshots that came loose from an album.

  “So much junk,” Vera says, pushing aside vacation maps and brochures.

  “Who’s this?” Samantha asks, pulling a small Brownie photo out of the mix. It is of Carl and Ofelia beside the bay in San Francisco when they lived there, Ofelia’s cloche pulled low over her dark eyes and fashionable bob. Carl is caught in mid-laugh, holding Ofelia from behind in an embrace, her loose white dress a sinuous curve against his dark suit. Kay let the family know early on that her children were not to be made confused by knowledge of Carl’s past wives.

  “Hard to tell,” Vera says, frowning. Hastily she reaches for a few of the World’s Fair cards and spreads them out over the top of an album. “This was a good trip Ernie and I made,” she says, adjusting her reading glasses on her nose and peering down. “The Chicago World’s Fair. We took a full week, stayed at a nice hotel.”

  “Can you tell where this is?” Samantha holds her snapshot higher.

  “Hmm.” Vera glances over. “San Francisco maybe?” Vera counters with another World’s Fair card. “Look at this. The Scintillator—it cast colored lights out all over the lake. The exhibits were all about advances—they called the fair ‘A Century of Progress.’ Things you would take for granted now, like television, but when we saw them at the World’s Fair no one had seen a television before.”

  Samantha nods politely at the World’s Fair cards. But she can’t leave the snapshot: “Dad lived in San Francisco once, right? Is it him?”

  Vera takes the snapshot and pretends to study it. It’s a photo she knows very well. Ofelia made an enlargement of it and framed it. “It could be.”

  Samantha looks hard at her. “You know it is, Auntie. Who’s the woman?”

  Oh, Lord. First the political education and now this. “Your father was very handsome, you know. He had lady friends to go dancing with and so forth. That was way before your mother.”

  “I know it was way before her. Look how young he is.”

  “Yes, so young I almost couldn’t recognize him.”

  “Me either.” Samantha stares. “I don’t even know who he is there. He’s not like my dad at all.”

  Samantha paws through the loose photos and finds another, this one of Carl and their brother Werner smoking pipes, Werner’s arm around Sylvia and Carl’s around Ofelia. “Look, that’s Uncle Werner!” Werner is unmistakable at any age, with his long, dour face. Sylvia, you wouldn’t necessarily recognize right away, she’s so smiling and blond in her youth. “And that’s Dad, and there’s that woman again. Look at them. He loved her, didn’t he? It’s obvious. So were they just boyfriend and girlfriend, or were they more?” Samantha’s eyes are boring into her.

  “More?”

  “Were they married?”

  “No, dear, the only wedding of your father’s I’ve ever been to was with your mother.” She is grateful for Kay’s technical distinction about Carl’s common-law unions, very useful now.

  “Can I have this?”

  “Let’s keep it here. If you were your mother, you wouldn’t like something like this around, would you?”

  “I don’t see why it would matter. It’s not like Mom even likes him. At least this lady looks like she did. What was her name?”

  “I forget. Let’s get going on the crocheting before we run out of time. I’ve got the hooks. I’m going to show you how to make two squares that you can stitch together to make a pocket. Then we can make a loop for a button, and a strap.”

  “She’s pretty.”

  “So is your mother.”

  Samantha shrugs and moves to return both photos to the drawer. Then she sees writing on the back of the first, and reads triumphantly, “Carl and Ofelia, June 1925. She’s Ofelia!”

  “Yes, that’s right, she was Ofelia. She was way in the past, you can see the date for yourself. Now pay attention to what I do. I’m going to show you how to make a square that you can make big or small. And once you have these squares, you can stitch them together into anything. You can make a purse, like we’re going to do, or a tiny blanket, or a giant blanket. Whatever size blanket you think you’re going to need.”

  By the time Carl rings the buzzer, they’re just finishing sewing on the button for the purse’s loop. Samantha is delighted with it, and Vera sends home one of the hooks and the leftover cotton yarn so she can make another for a friend. They pack Samantha’s things up, and show Carl yesterday’s purchases from Meier & Frank—“Sis, you’re spoiling her!” Samantha throws her arms around her auntie’s neck, and Vera doesn’t want her to go. But she is exhausted.

  Carl and Samantha will be driving past the Park Blocks on their way out of town, and that will remind Samantha about the protest. Will she tell him about it? Or is this the beginning of an older canniness, deciding to keep some things to herself? Vera can picture how Carl will straighten, look over with concern if Samantha chatters on about the marchers, what they shouted, how the policeman talked to Auntie. And what about Ofelia? Will Samantha grill him? Will he let slip that in their common-law arrangement he considered her his first wife? Nothing Vera can do about any of it.

  They’ll be crossing Broadway, then past the elk statue that stands guard over Main, then their tires will hum over the metal grate of the Hawthorne Bridge, the waters of the Willamette below them, until they’re on a straight street pointed to the outskirts. At least a forty-minute drive this time of day. Kay chose the neighborhood, liked that the schools were big and new.

  They’re on the other side of the river now, who can say how far? Vera can’t picture it anymore.

  She puts the remaining crochet hook back in the drawer, sees again the photograph of Carl and Ofelia. The two of them did give off sparks. Also in the drawer is a fob with the key to the Indianapolis apartment, hers and Ernie’s, and the key to their last Buick. It seems, given the tangible fact of the keys, that she ought to be able to grab her pocketbook, drive back, unlock a door, and find the leather easy chair and upholstered rocker where the two of them used to sit, feet up, reading the evening paper after work. Only the stubborn fact of the chairs here, in her Jefferson Street apartment, refutes the possibility. If they are here, then they cannot still be there.

  She picks up a souvenir wooden nickel and smells it to see if any trace of Ernie�
��s tobacco or suit smell remains. Nothing. It was the prop in a joke they had, whenever one wanted the other to do a favor. The wooden nickel came from a bar in Carson City, Nevada, and they passed it back and forth to each other for twenty-five years.

  “Ernie, if you come I’ll give you a wooden nickel,” she says out loud in the dusk of the apartment. But, of course, she is alone.

  They fell in love in a single day, after standing next to each other at the Red Lodge parade on the Fourth of July. He was a stranger, but she liked the things he laughed at, and the things he whistled at under his breath were the same things she admired.

  Clapping her gloved hands after the last float, she was afraid that the burly man in the straw boater she’d been eying sideways was about to turn and leave. Instead he waited until she faced him, tipped his hat, and asked if he could buy her a lemonade. They spent the rest of the day watching the townspeople gorge themselves in eating contests, balance on poles, and wrestle each other to the ground. They shared stories, and bites of a sandwich, and bumped elbows. When they strolled, he steadied her arm more than strictly necessary. Finally, they were sitting on a blanket spread over the grass, waiting for dark, and Vera’s whole body was alive with nearness to his, just inches away. When the fireworks started, it was a surprise, even though that’s what they’d been waiting for. Her face tilted up with all the others, following the rockets that whistled into the sky, shimmying hard against gravity.

  Every explosion rocked Vera’s chest; there was no getting used to them. Then the sizzle of sparks melted into light that gilded the whole upstretched crowd, all the faces massed together. Each blast was a mini-death as the flesh was shaken, pounded, mortified. Each crackling fanfare of light was a flowering of life given back.

  You needed to take a great love when it was offered, and make room in yourself for its immensity. Not everyone was capable of becoming so defenseless. Not everyone could open the door and let the stranger in, and let the stranger stay, until he was no longer strange, but part of you, even after he had to go.

  VEGAS FOR BEGINNERS

  Las Vegas, 1975

  It’s past midnight and they’re sleeping in a rental car in a supermarket parking lot, seats tilted back as far as they go. The windows are cracked to let a breeze through. Her mother tried to park close enough to the store so they weren’t isolated, but far enough away so they wouldn’t attract attention and be shooed along. The botched reservation was perhaps not her mother’s direct fault. A room will be ready for them by noon tomorrow. But still. Why are they even in Las Vegas?

  Once Samantha dreamed her mother was driving them on a road that suddenly pitched steeply down. Samantha didn’t know if the brakes went out, or if her mother simply decided not to apply them, but she woke up right before they plunged into the Willamette. She imagined her mother stuck in the dream without her, the boxy gray Toyota Corona sinking down in the dark water, a fan of bubbles streaming up. Her mother would be alone on the riverbed because Samantha had bailed; she became conscious in time to save herself. Whenever she thinks of the dream she is unspeakably sad. Also furious.

  Before the trip she spent the summer working in her high school’s office, where she answered the phone at the front desk and typed up dittos for the new school year. The three adult secretaries marveled at her steady accuracy—she rarely had to pull out a razor blade to scrape the waxy purple ink off the ditto master to retype a correction. The job was easy and they liked her. It was a CETA placement, based on her family’s income, which meant they had to take her even if they didn’t like her. Since it was summer, there wasn’t a whole lot the secretaries could find for her to do. She had cleaned and organized all the storage areas in her first week, then typed up the dittos and ran them off while the secretaries spelled one another taking afternoons off and long lunch hours. The smell of the spirit fluid filled the back room as the purple pages rolled off. Samantha straightened the stacks of moist pages, wondering if she were getting high. Getting high wasn’t something she was interested in; she had other things on her mind, and she needed her brain to be working straight.

  Toward the end of the summer, Mr. Knott, one of the social studies teachers and a football coach, came through the office to check his mail. He favored rugby or golf shirts or a Centennial High sweatshirt, even when he was teaching. “You working here?” he said, flashing his joshing grin. He was famous for being well liked, especially by guys on teams. He assigned easy group projects that allowed the kids to talk among themselves while he looked over the newspaper at his desk.

  “Yep.” Duh.

  In his good-guy confidential manner, he leaned over her desk to see what she was reading. It was a pamphlet she had picked up from the rack at the CETA office: “Emancipated Minors: The Law and You.” She hadn’t known there was such a thing—a free pass out of purgatory. She immediately started to make budgets. There were apartment complexes on major bus routes a ten-minute walk from the high school. They always had signs advertising cheap studios. She knew from consulting the school handbook, part of the reference collection on her receptionist’s desk, that she could take early dismissal in the afternoons if she were accumulating enough credits and had a paid job to go to. The secretaries would recommend her to other employers enthusiastically. Her father, an old father, was retired, and along with his social security check came allowances for her mother and herself. Her brother was already out of the house and so his check was sent to him. She could have her dependent check sent to her, too, if she were emancipated.

  “For you?”

  She gave a curt nod. Mr. Knott looked so shocked it embarrassed her.

  “Listen, Samantha,” he said. “Whatever it is can’t be that bad.”

  She kept her eyes down.

  “Once you go out there—you know, start supporting yourself—it never ends. How old are you?”

  “Sixteen next month.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t want to go to work. You want to go to college.”

  She was insulted that he thought she wouldn’t go to college. “I’m working now.”

  “Well, sure, but that’s different. Right now, you can spend it on clothes and stuff, right?”

  She nodded.

  “So why do you want to start having to pay rent and food and all that jazz?”

  She shrugged. She wasn’t about to go into it with him. He made her promise to talk to the school counselors, and she said she would. Anything to get him to move away, looking like an old high school jock in his athletic gear, today a Trail Blazers jersey over a T-shirt and cargo shorts. Mr. Knott seemed most at home in the halls of Centennial, whereas all she wanted to do was move on and start her life.

  It sometimes suited her mother to pretend she was grown up, too. Before coming to Las Vegas, her mother tried to age her cosmetically for the casinos so they could pal around together. What they saw in the mirror was a fifteen-year-old in red lipstick and teased hair. Samantha told her no way, rubbing the lipstick off with a tissue until all that remained was a faint stain. It was a mystery to her, trained to understand her mother’s inner life better than anyone, why she would choose this particular destination, where the gaming laws of the state of Nevada mandated their separation. The thing her mother hated above all was to be alone.

  The sun wakes them up, baking through the glass. Samantha takes one look at her mother, drawn and grim, and decides to stop sulking. No one needs to tell her this was a stupid idea, badly managed. It has always been her job to shore her mother up. Fix what can be fixed.

  “Let’s go eat, Mom.”

  “We could get something from the store.”

  “No, we’ll go crazy sitting here any longer. There was a Denny’s, remember? Let’s go back that way and sit in the air-conditioning and have a real breakfast.” She wishes she could take the driver’s seat, but her Oregon learner’s permit isn’t legal in the rental. So her mother points the Datsun the way Samantha directs. She seems stunned by where
they have landed, and it does resemble the moon’s surface, a stark, stripped place. Samantha remembers the way, one long straight mile, then a turn and another straight mile. They go past auto dealerships and pawnshops and massage parlors and strip malls with real estate offices and chiropractors. Then there is the yellow Denny’s sign, and with it a weird feeling of home.

  Samantha admits she likes seeing the wizened men with cowboy hats and the slot machines in the lobby and the waitress with the piled red hair and the sun-tough skin. All this daylight brightness, combined with the menu, with its splashy photos of pancakes and hash browns, especially after their cramped and fitful night, starts to make her feel like they are on vacation. She says it, to buck her mother up: “Well, we’re on vacation. I’m having a waffle.”

  “Good for you.” Her mother’s voice is still wan. “I think I’ll just have coffee right now.”

  Their hotel lets them check in by the time they arrive, and because of the mix-up they are given complimentary buffet vouchers. Her mother cheers up quite a bit at this windfall, along with the standard booty of the free drink coupon, the free keno coupon, the double-down blackjack voucher, the free pull on the Big Bertha, and the daily grubstake of twenty nickels in a packet. Samantha doesn’t point out that the clerk didn’t mistake her for a second adult and give them double casino swag. Even with her retainer in its plastic case.

  They are traveling as a pair because her mother filed for divorce from her father, feeling she finally had a steady-enough job at the electric company, one with benefits and vacation time, of which she’s now taking a week. For now, her father still lives in the house, sleeping in her brother’s old room with its ski posters of Vail and Aspen. Samantha’s brother is working a summer job and living in an apartment with roommates before he goes back to college. So it’s just her and her mother, six days before school starts, and there is no point anymore in wondering why her mother so persistently needed to go to Las Vegas. Samantha is pretty sure she doesn’t know why herself. “We’ll be at the pool together,” her mother had said. “We can go to the restaurants together. It’s just for the couple hours a day when I want to play the slots we’ll be apart.”