“Mac,” she said kindly. And the tire iron dealt its blow. It was Aunt Helen. He wept.
11
When did he start to do things wrong on purpose? His instincts, if he admitted it to himself, had been perverse all his life. His earliest memory was of a beloved stuffed cat toy, which he intentionally left behind in some bed so that he could suddenly “remember” it and cause his mother inconvenience having to go back. But it backfired! They were miles away when he “remembered,” and she wouldn’t go back! He cried until he was hiccuping and sick. He cried for losing his cat and cried because what he’d done made no sense even to him.
And you know what? If I ever have a kid, I’ll go back no matter how far that cat toy is. Even if it’s in another state, another country! I’ll go wherever it’s necessary to get back your cat toy, kid—stick with me!
He remembered jumping up from bed when his mother’s key rattled in the lock late at night after work, for the purpose of spreading himself out pitifully in front of the television, disheveled and malnourished, so she could bark at him for not being in bed and then curdle with shame. He’d put on his clothes backward, just to dare her to twist them around. Later he took change from Uncle
Richard, grabbing coins from the neat bureau top where his uncle was sure to miss them. He wanted the family man to blow his top. As if in the punishing Uncle Richard would debase himself more than he could possibly debase Mac. After he lost Cesar, Mac made a point of insulting anyone who so much as spoke a word to him. He’d stay locked in his room with his books. And then he began to drink a little too much, night after night, to push away anyone who cared, if only a bit.
Recently, he had overadjusted. He’d put on a disguise. He’d rammed his head into Carolyn’s life wearing the mask of a well-adjusted suitor. But he was prickly and bitter and resentful so close to the surface. It took a lot of work to push that down.
Was he bent on self-destruction? Only once, on a howling, windy day in Tres Osos when he was about fifteen, had he made a plan for his own end. He ran into the hills with a rope. He knew Dick-Dick alone wasn’t worth killing himself over; but this wasteland—brown and crunchy in all directions, empty of beauty and hope and love, and as alien to him as a moonscape—this wasteland was doing him in. Would he become one of those drooling hicks who raped barnyard animals and bragged about it? Who watched his cousin undress through a keyhole? He didn’t even have a pet to love; Dick-Dick said animals made him itch. Nothing for miles to attach himself to. Was he destined to stay in this barren landscape forever? A single oak grew at the top of the hill, a broad, tired oak overlooking the town. That day, he thought about hanging himself from it. He threw the rope over a low branch and watched it wiggle in the wind. He wanted his mother, in the heavens, to see what he was doing. And that was how he knew it wouldn’t work. He wanted more from his life, not less. He really didn’t want to miss anything. It was just that the anger in him had nowhere to go. The anger he carried made him worthy of a freak show. Come and see the Angry
Man! Step right up. The one and only—the greatest! Keep the children away!
“Mac, Mac.” Helen was on her knees, wrapping her arms around him. Fran was patting him on the back. “Mac? What is it?” she said. “Mac?”
“I thought you were Mom,” he said. “I thought you were Mom—”
The rounded forehead, the long, straight nose, the wide cheeks; these features had once been the standard by which he judged the world.
“I’m sorry, Mac,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m not.”
“Let me make something to eat,” Fran said. “That’ll make us all feel better.”
“I’m fine,” he told them, pressing his eyeballs with his palms. “Really. Sorry.”
He followed them into the kitchen like a matted animal. He was sick of himself for wanting his mother so bad, even now, and for showing it.
Fran poured some soup in a pot, chicken and vegetable, served it with tortillas covered with melted cheddar cheese on the side and some strong coffee, stronger than she made it for herself. The combined smells relaxed him, yet he felt sticky with sea salt and low as ever.
“Why are you here?” he asked Helen after a few gulps. “Is everything all right with Uncle Richard?”
“He’s fine,” Helen said. “Can’t I come visit without a reason?”
“You should visit more.”
They stared at him.
“What?” he roared.
“What’s wrong, Mac?” said Fran.
“Who says something’s wrong?” He didn’t feel like talking about his sour personal life.
But then he said: “Okay, something’s wrong, all right.” He took a big, scalding slurp of coffee. “I was just told by my girlfriend’s sweet, kindly father …” He couldn’t go on.
“What?”
“It’s sick.”
“You have to tell us now,” Helen said.
He was panting. “It’s too much! I don’t want to expose you to the guy’s evil machinations.”
“He’s evil?” Fran said.
“Yeah. He said that Mom was, like, a prostitute or something.”
“Who is this man?” said Aunt Helen.
“The author!” yelled Fran.
“What author?”
“The one who wrote that book Mac had when he came to live with us, the Tangier book.”
“ That book? What a sick man. A thoroughly sordid person,” said Helen.
“What a jerk!” said Fran.
“I’ll say,” agreed Mac. Their anger was warming his heart.
“It’s not true,” said Aunt Helen.
“No, it can’t be,” Fran said.
And then a pregnant silence filled the room.
“You sure?” Mac said.
Helen looked at Fran and then at him. “I’m reasonably sure.”
“A lot of guys used to come over,” said Mac wretchedly. He felt like such a child!
“But that doesn’t mean—”
“That stuff you gave me last time, that’s what got me into this mess.”
“The things in the box?”
“It’s a Pandora’s box.”
“Oh my. I shouldn’t have given it to you, then.”
Helen, who spent much of her time reading psychology and self-help books, had one childish characteristic: when nervous, she grabbed her hair and pulled on it rhythmically as if milking a cow. She had come for a visit back in May, full of the goodwill of her mission in presenting him with his mother’s rug and the other odds and ends.
“Why did you wait until now, Aunt Helen?”
“You couldn’t have it,” she said, “until you had a place to live.”
“It was a material consideration? Just the old ‘get a house, get stuff routine? Wasn’t based on my emotional development or anything like that?”
“Getting a roof over your head is part of your emotional development, I believe,” Helen said.
“Maybe I wasn’t ready for it,” he said, pushing away his bowl. “It’s obviously because of me, whatever she had to stoop to. I’m a sucking louse.”
“What’s that?”
“A primitive parasitic insect perfectly adapted for siphoning body fluids from its hosts.”
“No, you aren’t,” said Helen. “You are a delightful boy with normal needs!”
“Get me a beer,” Mac barked, and to his surprise, Fran fetched one and popped the top.
“You know how to neutralize the enemy, don’t you?” Fran said. “Pretend he’s right and think, Who cares?”
“Yes, and even if she was, she was probably the very expensive, clean kind,” said Aunt Helen.
“I’m just saying, there are all kinds of prostitution,” Fran said knowingly, making Mac wonder about her inner life more than usual.
“How would he know, unless he was a customer!” spat Helen.
Mac’s brain was spinning. “What does it matter.” He rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted. “She couldn’t stand our life.”
> “How did it come up?” Fran asked. “What possessed him to say that?”
“I was asking for it. I showed him a picture of Mom, and all those envelopes.”
“What did Carolyn say? Was it awkward?”
“Of course it was awkward. Everything in my life is always doomed and awkward.”
“No, it’s not, Mac, it’s going to work itself out,” said Helen.
“I wouldn’t have met her if not for this crap, but here Mom’s crap is gonna wreck what we have.”
“But you’re in love! You’ll have to run away together,” said Fran.
“And live here with you guys?”
“You can make it work!” she said, her heart unabashedly full of romance. “Don’t let this get in the way.”
Maybe she had a point. He flashed ahead to a possible future— he and Carolyn driving up the coast in his leprous car, toward a little patch of land jam-packed with miniature donkeys. Why not?
Aunt Helen nudged Fran’s arm. “This is changing the subject, but tell him. I can’t wait any longer.”
Mac couldn’t take much more. “What?”
“Well,” Fran said, “it’s not ideal timing, and I know you’re tired, but you know all that throwing up I’ve been doing lately?”
“No.”
“You haven’t noticed?”
“Sorry,” he said.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
“Fran, that’s great! Wow. Congratulations!”
“But you can stay here as long as you want. Tim’s office can be the baby’s room anyway. Your room is reserved for you, Mac.”
“No, I’m out,” he replied, but he looked away for a second, to hide his childish gratitude.
He remembered the letters Fran wrote him when he turned eighteen and went off to try his luck in Boston. Though he had cut her down and punched her almost every day, she wrote him regularly, once or twice a week. For her loyalty he sent her souvenirs— pincushions, pencils, mugs—which he pinched from various shops with poor surveillance. She, in turn, mailed him homemade raisin bread every two weeks; even though it often arrived speckled with mold, he could cut those parts off and wolf the rest, and stay connected to a place he called home only if he slipped.
The announcement made, Fran returned to her sink of dishes, and Helen said, “Mac,” and took his hands. “Please. What happened to your mother—trust me, you’re not to blame. Don’t ever think it. It’s very normal for abandoned children to feel guilty. But there’s nothing you could have done to stop her. Is that clear?”
Again his heart rate rose, and his tongue filled his mouth like a wet sock. He clamped his teeth to squeeze it down. He said, “Stop her from going. No.”
“No,” Helen said. “Mac, what I mean is, from being reckless with her life, which was a way of taking it.”
He stood up and walked around the room. Worms of grief bored through his body, rooted him helplessly to the earth in this kitchen, in this life, with this past. No illusion could move him out of it. For years the circumstances had not been forthcoming. It had all been a blur to him—that on her vacation in Paris she had drowned, and Helen traveling to Boston to collect the things that had been impounded from their tiny flat.
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“Mac, just listen,” Helen said.
So he sat and tried. He threw his arms up on the table and cradled his head. His mind wandered at first. That his mother had al- ways been depressed and troubled, that some people seem to be veering in that dark direction all their lives, were among the rote things he expected her to say.
He thought about Dick-Dick in Tres Osos pacing the big, perfect habitat by himself. No one to boss around, only himself to face. Surely by now the burly drip had faced himself. He’d had a heart attack two years ago. He’d received angioplasty in San Luis Obispo. Now he ate salads all the time and, as if life were short, took Helen on Elderhostel trips. So far, they had visited Turkey and New Zealand and had enjoyed themselves. All good news, but the man still had a full deck of annoying habits. Mac thought about how, when Richard visited in Redwood City, he always brought a bag of cleaning fluids, as if Fran and Tim weren’t sterile enough for him. Mac was offended, but they weren’t. In fact, they loved Dick-Dick and had, in him, a father.
Now Helen was saying something else, about the sad divide between them from the earliest of days. How Cecille would tell people Helen wasn’t her twin but a robotic replica. And then there was their father, difficult and moody, taking his uppers and downers, and Cecille ever trying to take his hand. So much so, it left their mother feeling like a third wheel, and Helen like she wasn’t even on the cart.
The father in question, John West, a dreamer with a temper, was a troubled person who had run away from home himself. He’d spent years drifting from job to job, ending up as a caretaker on a large estate with a place to call home for his family. Painting was his all-consuming love; for him the girls posed when they were young. Nymphs in a sylvan glade. Slivers of pale flesh on a mossy bank. “There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s natural, they’re my beauties!” But as the girls grew out of childhood, Mrs. West began to object.
“The summer we were fourteen,” Helen said, “I had a crush on a boy named Matt Gerslaugher, and on this beautiful, glorious, warm but not humid day, we’d gone off on our bikes together and ended up kissing for hours out in the softball field by the school. And he told me he’d liked me all year and we rode into town and he bought me a little ring at a five-and-dime. And—”
“Mom, stop it, it sounds like you’re reliving it.”
“All right, well, the point is that it was looking like the most beautiful day of my life. I’d never had a boyfriend, though boys had been after Cecille for years. I rode back up the dirt road to our house in a dream state. I considered keeping the news to myself but also couldn’t wait to flaunt it. Cecille thought I was a prude and a chicken.
“Well, Mother had gone away that day, on a trip with a friend into New York. She’d had it planned for months. I found no one in the house and for some reason headed down in the direction of the river, which ran right behind the cornfields. I still recall the rustling of the stalks and the light whisper of passing birds, and the stillness of the air.
“I heard her voice then. A teasing, murmuring laugh, like flowing water. It came from under the old willow down at the bank where we’d played many games over the years. I caught a whiff of turpentine fumes, and realized my father was painting there.
“I—” Helen stopped. “It was just as it always had been, Dad with his stool on the bank, his painting bag down on the ground, his palette and brushes within his reach. But Cecille was posing for him, on a tapestry beneath the tree, fully undressed. It was so shocking to see her like that—it was my body, too, you see. Yet there was something so womanly and knowing about her posture that my kiss with Matt seemed juvenile by contrast.
“I suppose what happened was my fault. I started yelling at them, even throwing a few rocks. Before I knew it, Cecille had jumped up and came running after me. It happened so fast she caught me by surprise, brought me down, and began to pummel me on the back so hard I couldn’t breathe. I had mud between my teeth.”
“Why are you telling me this story?” Mac said. “It’s really depressing.”
“Well, several things resulted. My kidneys were bruised, and she broke one of my ribs. And somewhere on the bank, I lost my little ring.” Helen took a sip of cold coffee and puckered her lips. “My father turned his head. He pretended he didn’t see a thing. Not only that, but on the way to the hospital, he told me that, as far as the doctors were concerned, I’d fallen on the rocks, nothing more.”
“God.” His mother had never hit him, but she was capable of volcanic rage. He had seen her vent it on different men, on doors that didn’t open or close, on a malfunctioning toaster, and even on strangers if they crossed her.
This day was too much. He wanted to black out and be done with it.
“But s
he regretted it—she swore she did. And besides, she ended up there with me a few hours later. She had some kind of fit and mutilated her hands on that willow tree.”
“That’s how it happened?” said Mac. His mother had never explained to him the curious raised ribbons on her palms.
“I’ve never told you about this before,” Helen said. “I hope you’re not angry with me.”
“No.”
“I have come to believe that it wasn’t her fault,” Helen said. “And I’ve forgiven her. And maybe someday, you’ll be able to do that, too.”
“But it’s not the same,” Mac said. “It’s just not the same.”
Isabel Porter had set up a booth. She wanted volunteers. She had a new hygiene machine. A pretty little girl in a pink dress presented herself. She wore white gloves and patent leather shoes. It was Carolyn.
“This is revolutionary,” Isabel Porter said. “You’ll never have to bathe again. How would that suit you?”
“I take a bath every night after dinner. I clean the ring for fifty cents.”
The crowd laughed. “Now, step inside,” Isabel pressed on. Carolyn entered the tube, her white gloves pressed against her sides. “This little child is going to come out clean as a whistle, and besides, she’s going to get a prize,” Isabel declared.
The crowd murmured.
Isabel flipped a switch. A rumbling sound emanated from beneath the cylinder. Carolyn looked out at them proudly, a pioneer. Then she was up, up, zipping through the top, swished up so fast they barely saw her go, and there she was again, thudding like a wet log on the cement. On the inside of the cylinder, a gray film oozed down the glass.
MacGregor Tells the World Page 16