Black Tickets

by Jayne Anne Phillips

I turn out my light when I know my mother is sleeping. By then my eyes hurt and the streets of the town are deserted.

  My father comes to me in a dream. He kneels beside me, touches my mouth. He turns my face gently toward him.

  Let me see, he says. Let me see it.

  He is looking for a scar, a sign. He wears only a towel around his waist. He presses himself against my thigh, pretending solicitude. But I know what he is doing; I turn my head in repulsion and stiffen. He smells of a sour musk and his forearms are black with hair. I think to myself, It’s been years since he’s had an erection—

  Finally he stands. Cover yourself, I tell him.

  I can’t, he says, I’m hard.

  On Saturdays I go to the Veterans of Foreign Wars rummage sales. They are held in the drafty basement of a church, rows of collapsible tables piled with objects. Sometimes I think I recognize the possessions of old friends: a class ring, yearbooks, football sweaters with our high school insignia. Would this one have fit Jason?

  He used to spread it on the seat of the car on winter nights when we parked by country churches and graveyards. There seemed to be no ground, just water, a rolling, turning, building to a dull pain between my legs.

  What’s wrong? he said, What is it?

  Jason, I can’t … This pain—

  It’s only because you’re afraid. If you’d let me go ahead—

  I’m not afraid of you, I’d do anything for you. But Jason, why does it hurt like this?

  We would try. But I couldn’t. We made love with our hands. Our bodies were white. Out the window of the car, snow rose up in mounds across the fields. Afterward, he looked at me peacefully, sadly.

  I held him and whispered, Soon, soon … we’ll go away to school.

  His sweater. He wore it that night we drove back from the football awards banquet. Jason made All-State but he hated football.

  I hate it, he said. So what? he said, that I’m out there puking in the heat? Screaming ‘Kill’ at a sandbag?

  I held his award in my lap, a gold man frozen in mid-leap. Don’t play in college, I said. Refuse the money.

  He was driving very slowly.

  I can’t see, he said, I can’t see the edges of the road … Tell me if I start to fall off.

  Jason, what do you mean?

  He insisted I roll down the window and watch the edge. The banks of the road were gradual, sloping off into brush and trees on either side. White lines at the edge glowed up in dips and turns.

  We’re going to crash, he said.

  No, Jason. You’ve driven this road before. We won’t crash.

  We’re crashing, I know it, he said. Tell me, tell me I’m OK—

  Here on the rummage sale table, there are three football sweaters. I see they are all too small to have belonged to Jason. So I buy an old soundtrack, The Sound of Music. Air, Austrian mountains. And an old robe to wear in the mornings. It upsets my mother to see me naked; she looks at me so curiously, as though she didn’t recognize my body.

  I pay for my purchases at the cash register. Behind the desk I glimpse stacks of Reader’s Digests. The Ladies Auxiliary turns them inside out, stiffens and shellacs them. They make wastebaskets out of them.

  I give my mother the record. She is pleased. She hugs me.

  Oh, she says, I used to love the musicals. They made me happy. Then she stops and looks at me.

  Didn’t you do this? she says. Didn’t you do this in high school?

  Do what?

  Your class, she says. You did The Sound of Music.

  Yes, I guess we did.

  What a joke. I was the beautiful countess meant to marry Captain von Trapp before innocent Maria stole his heart. Jason was a threatening Nazi colonel with a bit part. He should have sung the lead but sports practices interfered with rehearsals. Tall, blond, aged in makeup under the lights, he encouraged sympathy for the bad guys and overshadowed the star. He appeared just often enough to make the play ridiculous.

  My mother sits in the blue chair my father used for years.

  Come quick, she says. Look—

  She points to the television. Flickerings of Senate chambers, men in conservative suits. A commentator drones on about tax rebates.

  There, says my mother. Hubert Humphrey. Look at him.

  It’s true. Humphrey is different, changed from his former toady self to a desiccated old man, not unlike the discarded shell of a locust. Now he rasps into the microphone about the people of these great states.

  Old Hubert’s had it, says my mother. He’s a death mask.

  That’s what he gets for sucking blood for thirty years.

  No, she says. No, he’s got it too. Look at him! Cancer. Oh.

  For God’s sake, will you think of something else for once?

  I don’t know what you mean, she says. She goes on knitting.

  All Hubert needs, I tell her, is a good roll in the hay.

  You think that’s what everyone needs.

  Everyone does need it.

  They do not. People aren’t dogs. I seem to manage perfectly well without it, don’t I?

  No, I wouldn’t say that you do.

  Well, I do. I know your mumbo jumbo about sexuality. Sex is for those who are married, and I wouldn’t marry again if it was the Lord himself.

  Now she is silent. I know what’s coming.

  Your attitude will make you miserable, she says. One man after another. I just want you to be happy.

  I do my best.

  That’s right, she says. Be sarcastic.

  I refuse to answer. I think about my growing bank account. Graduate school, maybe in California. Hawaii. Somewhere beautiful and warm. I will wear few clothes and my skin will feel the air.

  What about Jason, says my mother. I was thinking of him the other day.

  Our telepathy always frightens me. Telepathy and beyond. Before her hysterectomy, our periods often came on the same day.

  If he hadn’t had that nervous breakdown, she says softly, do you suppose—

  No, I don’t suppose.

  I wasn’t surprised that it happened. When his brother was killed, that was hard. But Jason was so self-centered. You’re lucky the two of you split up. He thought everyone was out to get him. Still, poor thing.

  Silence. Then she refers in low tones to the few months Jason and I lived together before he was hospitalized.

  You shouldn’t have done what you did when you went off to college. He lost respect for you.

  It wasn’t respect for me he lost—He lost his fucking mind if you remember—

  I realize I’m shouting. And shaking. What is happening to me?

  My mother stares.

  We’ll not discuss it, she says.

  She gets up. I hear her in the bathroom. Water running into the tub. Hydrotherapy. I close my eyes and listen. Soon, this weekend. I’ll get a ride to the university a few hours away and look up an old lover. I’m lucky. They always want to sleep with me. For old time’s sake.

  I turn down the sound of the television and watch its silent pictures. Jason’s brother was a musician; he taught Jason to play the pedal steel. A sergeant in uniform delivered the message two weeks before the State Play-Off games. Jason appeared at my mother’s kitchen door with the telegram. He looked at me, opened his mouth, backed off wordless in the dark. I pretend I hear his pedal steel; its sweet country whine might make me cry. And I recognize this silent movie—I’ve seen it four times. Gregory Peck and his submarine crew escape fallout in Australia, but not for long. The cloud is coming. And so they run rampant in auto races and love affairs. But in the end, they close the hatch and put out to sea. They want to go home to die.

  Sweetheart? my mother calls from the bathroom. Could you bring me a towel?

  Her voice is quavering slightly. She is sorry. But I never know what part of it she is sorry about. I get a towel from the linen closet and open the door of the steamy bathroom. My mother stands in the tub, dripping, shivering a little. She is so small and thin; she is smalle
r than I. She has two long scars on her belly, operations of the womb, and one breast is misshapen, sunken, indented near the nipple.

  I put the towel around her shoulders and my eyes smart. She looks at her breast.

  Not too pretty is it, she says. He took out too much when he removed that lump—

  Mom, it doesn’t look so bad.

  I dry her back, her beautiful back which is firm and unblemished. Beautiful, her skin. Again, I feel the pain in my eyes.

  But you should have sued the bastard, I tell her. He didn’t give a shit about your body.

  We have an awkward moment with the towel when I realize I can’t touch her any longer. The towel slips down and she catches it as one end dips into the water.

  Sweetheart, she says. I know your beliefs are different than mine. But have patience with me. You’ll just be here a few more months. And I’ll always stand behind you. We’ll get along.

  She has clutched the towel to her chest. She is so fragile, standing there, naked, with her small shoulders. Suddenly I am horribly frightened.

  Sure, I say, I know we will.

  I let myself out of the room.

  Sunday my mother goes to church alone. Daniel calls me from D.C. He’s been living with a lover in Oregon. Now he is back East; she will join him in a few weeks. He is happy, he says. I tell him I’m glad he’s found someone who appreciates him.

  Come on now, he says. You weren’t that bad.

  I love Daniel, his white and feminine hands, his thick chestnut hair, his intelligence. And he loves me, though I don’t know why. The last few weeks we were together I lay beside him like a piece of wood. I couldn’t bear his touch; the moisture his penis left on my hips as he rolled against me. I was cold, cold. I huddled in blankets away from him.

  I’m sorry, I said. Daniel, I’m sorry please—what’s wrong with me? Tell me you love me anyway …

  Yes, he said, Of course I do. I always will. I do.

  Daniel says he has no car, but he will come by bus. Is there a place for him to stay?

  Oh yes, I say. There’s a guest room. Bring some Trojans. I’m a hermit with no use for birth control. Daniel, you don’t know what it’s like here.

  I don’t care what it’s like. I want to see you.

  Yes, I say. Daniel, hurry.

  When he arrives the next weekend, we sit around the table with my mother and discuss medicine. Daniel was a medic in Vietnam. He smiles at my mother. She is charmed though she has reservations; I see them in her face. But she enjoys having someone else in the house, a presence; a male. Daniel’s laughter is low and modulated. He talks softly, smoothly: a dignified radio announcer, an accomplished anchorman.

  But when I lived with him, he threw dishes against the wall. And jerked in his sleep, mumbling. And ran out of the house with his hands across his eyes.

  After we first made love, he smiled and pulled gently away from me. He put on his shirt and went to the bathroom. I followed and stepped into the shower with him. He faced me, composed, friendly, and frozen. He stood as though guarding something behind him.

  Daniel, turn around. I’ll soap your back.

  I already did.

  Then move, I’ll stand in the water with you.

  He stepped carefully around me.

  Daniel, what’s wrong? Why won’t you turn around?

  Why should I?

  I’d never seen him with his shirt off. He’d never gone swimming with us, only wading, alone, down Point Reyes Beach. He wore long-sleeved shirts all summer in the California heat.

  Daniel, I said, You’ve been my best friend for months. We could have talked about it.

  He stepped backwards, awkwardly, out of the tub and put his shirt on.

  I was loading them on copters, he told me. The last one was dead anyway; he was already dead. But I went after him, dragged him in the wind of the blades. Shrapnel and napalm caught my arms, my back. Until I fell, I thought it was the other man’s blood in my hands.

  They removed most of the shrapnel, did skin grafts for the burns. In three years since, Daniel made love five times; always in the dark. In San Francisco he must take off his shirt for a doctor; tumors have grown in his scars. They bleed through his shirt, round rust-colored spots.

  Face-to-face in bed, I tell him I can feel the scars with my fingers. They are small knots on his skin. Not large, not ugly. But he can’t let me, he can’t let anyone, look: he says he feels wild, like raging, and then he vomits. But maybe, after they remove the tumors—Each time they operate, they reduce the scars.

  We spend hours at the veterans’ hospital waiting for appointments. Finally they schedule the operation. I watch the black-ringed wall clock, the amputees gliding by in chairs that tick on the linoleum floor. Daniel’s doctors curse about lack of supplies; they bandage him with gauze and layers of Band-Aids. But it is all right. I buy some real bandages. Every night I cleanse his back with a sponge and change them.

  In my mother’s house, Daniel seems different. He has shaved his beard and his face is too young for him. I can only grip his hands.

  I show him the house, the antiques, the photographs on the walls. I tell him none of the objects move; they are all cemented in place. Now the bedrooms, my room.

  This is it, I say. This is where I kept my Villager sweaters when I was seventeen, and my dried corsages. My cups from the Tastee-Freez labeled with dates and boys’ names.

  The room is large, blue. Baseboards and wood trim are painted a spotless white. Ruffled curtains, ruffled bedspread. The bed itself is so high one must climb into it. Daniel looks at the walls, their perfect blue and white.

  It’s a piece of candy, he says.

  Yes, I say, hugging him, wanting him.

  What about your mother?

  She’s gone to meet friends for dinner. I don’t think she believes what she says, she’s only being my mother. It’s all right.

  We take off our clothes and press close together. But something is wrong. We keep trying. Daniel stays soft in my hands. His mouth is nervous; he seems to gasp at my lips.

  He says his lover’s name. He says they aren’t seeing other people.

  But I’m not other people. And I want you to be happy with her.

  I know. She knew … I’d want to see you.

  Then what?

  This room, he says. This house. I can’t breathe in here.

  I tell him we have tomorrow. He’ll relax. And it is so good just to see him, a person from my life.

  So we only hold each other, rocking.

  Later, Daniel asks about my father.

  I don’t see him, I say. He told me to choose.

  Choose what?

  Between them.

  My father. When he lived in this house, he stayed in the dark with his cigarette. He sat in his blue chair with the lights and television off, smoking. He made little money; he said he was self-employed. He was sick. He grew dizzy when he looked up suddenly. He slept in the basement. All night he sat reading in the bathroom. I’d hear him walking up and down the dark steps at night. I lay in the dark and listened. I believed he would strangle my mother, then walk upstairs and strangle me. I believed we were guilty; we had done something terrible to him.

  Daniel wants me to talk.

  How could she live with him, I ask. She came home from work and got supper. He ate it, got up and left to sit in his chair. He watched the news. We were always sitting there, looking at his dirty plates. And I wouldn’t help her. She should wash them, not me. She should make the money we lived on. I didn’t want her house and his ghost with its cigarette burning in the dark like a sore. I didn’t want to be guilty. So she did it. She sent me to college; she paid for my safe escape.

  Daniel and I go to the Rainbow, a bar and grill on Main Street. We hold hands, play country songs on the jukebox, drink a lot of salted beer. We talk to the barmaid and kiss in the overstuffed booth. Twinkle lights blink on and off above us. I wore my burgundy stretch pants in here when I was twelve. A senior pinched me, the
n moved his hand slowly across my thigh, mystified, as though erasing the pain.

  What about tonight? Daniel asks. Would your mother go out with us? A movie? A bar? He sees me in her, he likes her. He wants to know her.

  Then we will have to watch television.

  We pop popcorn and watch the late movies. My mother stays up with us, mixing whiskey sours and laughing. She gets a high color in her cheeks and the light in her eyes glimmers up; she is slipping, slipping back and she is beautiful, oh, in her ankle socks, her red mouth and her armor of young girl’s common sense. She has a beautiful laughter. She and Daniel end by mock arm wrestling; he pretends defeat and goes upstairs to bed.

  My mother hears his door close. He’s nice, she says. You’ve known some nice people, haven’t you?

  I want to make her back down.

  Yes, he’s nice, I say. And don’t you think he respects me? Don’t you think he truly cares for me, even though we’ve slept together?

  He seems to, I don’t know. But if you give them that, it costs them nothing to be friends with you.

  Why should it cost? The only cost is what you give, and you can tell if someone is giving it back.

  How? How can you tell? By going to bed with every man you take a fancy to?

  I wish I took a fancy oftener, I tell her. I wish I wanted more. I can be good to a man, but I’m afraid—I can’t be physical, not really …

  You shouldn’t.

  I should. I want to, for myself as well. I don’t think—I’ve ever had an orgasm.

  What? she says, Never? Haven’t you felt a sort of building up, and then a dropping off … a conclusion? like something’s over?

  No, I don’t think so.

  You probably have, she assures me. It’s not necessarily an explosion. You were just thinking too hard, you think too much.

  But she pauses.

  Maybe I don’t remember right, she says. It’s been years, and in the last years of the marriage I would have died if your father had touched me. But before, I know I felt something. That’s partly why I haven’t … since … what if I started wanting it again? Then it would be hell.

  But you have to try to get what you want—

  No, she says. Not if what you want would ruin everything. And now, anyway. Who would want me?