“Stand away,” Isabel yelled. “Now you can see how this machine derives its magic. Notice the impurities left on the inside wall. In a millisecond, our girl was whisked through the filter, and that standard bathtub ring”—she indicated the ugly gray film—”was converted to this.”
Then they heard a moan. The pretty pink pinafore was drenched with blood. Carolyn was literally coming apart. Mac screamed.
“Don’t worry,” Isabel said. “Though the kinks in this machine have not yet been worked out, every sacrifice we make toward its development will aid humanity. Everyone in the free world owes her something.”
“No! God, no! No! No—”
Four A.M.,darkest part of the night, and Mac tumbled out of bed. He was damp with sweat. What a nightmare! He had to find something in his closet; dust balls as big as rats came out with his things. He pushed aside a tin of bricklike cookies and a desiccated lemon. He threw out a circled-up want-ad page from his first few days with Fran and Tim, when he had set out to find himself a place to live in the city and then gave up.
Then he pulled out his old knapsack. In it, there was a pitiful collection of kid’s innocence. A time capsule from the year before his life changed forever. Pens, matches, a toy tom-tom, a Carl Yastrzem-ski pennant, a green rabbits foot, a deck of cards with a topless Hawaiian girl doing the hula, who swayed in your palm if you snapped the deck, and a button that he used to find hilarious, which said FINK UNIVERSITY.
And finally he plucked out the folder. It was scribbled on, plastered with psychedelic stickers that used to come free with barbecued potato chips. In it were the comic strips about a boy and mother he had been working on right up until he left Boston. Nearly eighty pages of them. He wanted to see something. He wanted to see how he had felt about his mother, back then and there, not filtered through everything that had come between them since.
One was about a boy who feared his mother would make a mess of all that she touched. After covering every kitchen they had in paint, Mac’s mother would lug her portfolio into galleries and cry heartily when they turned her down. There was a grand old place on Beacon Hill she dreamed of someday showing her work in, and the drawing showed her in bed, dreaming of her paintings on the walls.
One day, the boy in the cartoon walked down the banks of the Charles until he reached Arlington Street, and he marched into Back Bay, and wandered through the Public Garden, and watched the Swan Boats pedaling in their silly circles in the man-made pond. Expensively dressed men and women discharged their important duties up and down the street. It was a different Boston from the one where he lived with his mother. From the street, he eyed the hill of the impenetrable gallery. What was so great about the stuff in there? Finally he ended up in a cool restaurant on Newbury Street, where he took a table by himself and ordered his usual, a shrimp cocktail. Whenever he saved up enough odd change, from collecting bottles and cans, from mowing lawns and selling magazines and candy bars and washing cars, this was his idea of a big treat. Everything in this restaurant was serene, and the waiters were polite to the boy, and the tablecloths were stiff and clean and square, and usually when he dined there he allowed himself to relax and dream of his great big future to come.
This time, as he chewed the succulent carcasses of shrimp, he had a fantasy that became, from that day forward, recurrent and exhausting. In this fantasy the director of the gallery was having lunch in the same restaurant. Suddenly a gunman was holding him up. The gunman was a confused artist, like the boy’s mother. The gunman wore a mask and yelled at the director for not showing his work. In one quick movement, the boy pulled out his own gun and shot the pistol right out of the gunman’s hand.
“Up against the wall, buster,” the boy said.
The director said, “What marksmanship. I’ve never seen anything like that. What can I do for you? Anything!”
To which the boy said, blowing the smoke from the tip of his weapon, “Forget it. By the way, my mother has some very unique paintings, with stark lines and haunting messages. Want to take a look?”
Sure he’d been hoping it was brilliant stuff. That it was the pure virgin work of a natural talent. Instead, the figures were gawky, the dialogue awkward, the vocabulary neophyte, the revelations predictable and clichéd. But who cared? The lack of ambivalence was clear. No nasty ironies, no cynicisms, littered these pages. Back then, he had drawn the characters with love.
Hadn’t he made her happy? Hadn’t he lived by her rules? He used to pick her flowers on his way home from school. He listened to her stories, laughed at her jokes. He talked about the ranch he would buy her when he became a concert pianist and his cartoons were syndicated all over the world. He never showed his disappointment when things went wrong. Just said to himself, Chin up. Didn’t she know how much he would miss her? Didn’t she care about bringing him up?
Mac’s mother had, that long-ago summer afternoon after breaking her sister’s rib, run down to the banks of the river and torn the leaves and catkins from the sweepy branches. The privilege of being her father’s favorite had turned to a burden. Her own willfulness was a burden. Her loves and her fears were all folded together, and they were burdens, too. She couldn’t see out of her troubles. She wondered if she ever could. She threw handfuls of green confetti into the water and watched them spread on the surface like shattering glass, like atoms blowing apart.
Floating free from one another, the willow leaves became a flotilla of tiny boats searching for help. As each boat touched a molecule of water, it told that molecule the story. Then that molecule told all the molecules around it. As the water poured downstream, soon the whole river was shouting the news. The river reached the ocean. The whole ocean knew. The water told the world. The world knew.
Continuing to strip the switches, she saw the raw summer light start to brighten up the damp soil beneath the tree. How well she knew every rock and root there, for that was where they always went. One by one she painted them in light. She had to go high enough to make it matter; she jumped and pulled and slid down the pliant young suckers. She finally saw the sun hit the trunk. Her palms were bleeding. She didn’t care. She was hiccupping with victory and fear. Her hands were so badly lacerated, they would be bandaged for weeks; he deserved it. The episode was too public and called too much attention to Cecille and the tree, and her father would surely understand the gravity of his behavior from then on. Or at least for six more months, for on Christmas day she’d find him there in the snow. She only knew she was mad and brave enough to try anything after that.
Mom! Couldn’t you have been a little braver?
PART THREE
M.W.
The rivers let me go
where I wanted.
—Arthur Rimbaud, “The Drunken Boat”
12
Mac had been wounded openly, visibly, not in the usual secret way he had to gag down on his own. So he was waiting for word from Carolyn. He woke with the self-righteous glow of the injured, anticipating the consolations coming his way. But by late morning, there had been nothing from her. Wasn’t she gnawing her guts out after her fathers assault on him, wondering how he felt about her now? Maybe his needs were so transparent it was quite the opposite. Maybe she understood that once humiliated, he’d need her all the more.
He ate a bowl of cinnamon-sprinkled oatmeal with Aunt Helen and Fran, then did some laundry and cleaned out his car. What a dump. He pulled out the rope he’d used to deliver the fold-up bed to Filipo, found a shirt that had been hardened into the shape of an aircraft carrier after a beverage had spilled on it, and extracted forty-seven bottles and paper coffee cups.
By lunch, he was anxious, and by midafternoon, he was moving through the house scared.
“Stop pacing,” said Fran. “It won’t help.”
“For some reason, it does help.”
“Worrying only makes it worse,” said Aunt Helen. “Remember the year you had that awful body rash?”
“Of course.”
“Well, so do I.
And so does Richard. He stayed up night after night bringing you bowls of ice cream.”
“He did?”
“Yes, he did. And do you remember when your tongue was paralyzed?”
“Definitely”
“Richard took you to UCLA for tests.”
“I know.”
“He spent three days down there, and you never spoke a nice word to him.”
“My tongue was paralyzed.”
“What about later?”
“I spoke a nice word silently.”
“Does he know that, Mac? He’s not a mind reader.”
“That’s for sure.”
Finally, he could stand it no longer, and he picked up his phone. He wouldn’t play hard to get. He had a window, no matter how faulty, into her world.
But he didn’t reach her. “It’s me,” he said, nothing more. He felt restless and bruised. His jaw was jutting out, frozen in a frown. He saw his face coming through the back of a dartboard, the short, weighted arrows of his destiny punishing his cheeks.
He unfurled the rug he planned to give Carolyn and vacuumed it—as a child, building his kingdoms and war zones while watching cartoons, he had memorized every inch. Flowers and squares and steps to nowhere. An anchor without a rope. A tree without roots. Blue and red were the dominant colors; it would look good in a corner of her bluish room. The rug had been one of the few constants of his life then—wherever they were they could unroll it, call the place home.
“Think she’s going to like it?” he asked Fran and Helen, who were peering in at him.
“Your magic carpet?” said Fran.
“Surely she has a house full of fancy rugs,” said Aunt Helen. “That was your mother’s.”
“I know, but anything less wouldn’t be worth giving.”
“Mom, remember Melinda Kobayashi from Calvert Street School?” asked Fran.
“Yes, you told me you saw her.”
“She came to our party, and she and Mac hit it off, and she’s interested in seeing more of him.”
“Forget about it,” said Mac.
“She was a very nice girl,” said Aunt Helen. “She always wore those dowdy clothes, for some reason. She wasn’t vain.”
“Okay, goodbye,” said Mac, and he herded them out as if they were nosy reporters at a crime scene.
With the door closed, he felt crazed and caged in, so he finished the afternoon off with a long walk around the neighborhood, phone in his pocket. Who in the world can feel good waiting for a call that doesn’t come?
As the daylight faded, he fidgeted in the house. He bleached an avocado stain out of a dish towel. He took three big stacks of newspapers and magazines to the recycling bin. He threw a hatchet over and over at a fruitless mulberry stump next to the back fence. He was good at it. Wood chips flew. Helen and Fran stood at the patio door watching his wretched, miserable, luckless descent. “Come in,” Fran called to him. “I made some brownies.”
“What the hell’s going on?” he cried.
“Hadn’t you better look into it?” Helen said. “Say something to her, and not silently?”
“Yeah, I guess I’d better,” he said, this time without a trace of barbed wire. Time to get back in his car, heading in the same direction he’d been going in for years.
Shortly he was staring up at the face of Carolyn’s house, trying to wring some answers from the cold, clammy air. From time to time, faint silhouettes flickered within the window frames—the image of insects trapped in amber came to him, from a heart-shaped pendant his mother had worn that encased a prehistoric bug. When he was young, he’d stared at that gnat with fascination. He’d thought that gnat was a superstar. He’d thought the gnat had been singled out for greatness. All men would know gnats of its time by way of seeing that one. But he had been naïve in that matter, as in many others. If this house were preserved with Charles Ware inside, what a dirty, rotten specimen of mankind he’d be.
A pale light suffused the corners of Carolyn’s room; Mac placed another call to her. No answer. He considered buzzing the front door, couldn’t bring himself to do it, so he stood by the mock orange tree and waited for a sign.
Loitering, a suspicious figure on an affluent street.
“Young man, young man!” someone was saying. “Are you a young man?”
He looked the other way and beheld an old woman approaching. Pushing a cart full of plastic bags and rags, she was even more suspicious-looking than he was. She had boggy circles under her eyes, her skin was a shade of yellow he’d prefer to see on young bananas, and she had lumps and warts all over her cheeks. She wore two or three sweaters over her dress.
“I have terrible luck,” she said. “Last week, a man pushed me out of my car and drove it away. Car was filled with all my picture al- bums. From my wedding, my whole life. I’m a widow. This is all I got left!”
“Just a week ago?” Mac said skeptically.
She reached into her cart and pulled out a bunch of green grapes. “Feel these,” she said. “They feel like a breast. My breast!”
Mac had a weakness for the down-and-out, but he said “No thanks” all the same.
To get away from her, he began to climb the shoe tree, his hands grasping at the lower limbs, feet hooking over and up, shoulders clearing twigs and branches, finding his footing, standing, and pushing himself higher.
“No civilization, clothes, or homes,” the woman muttered, continuing on her way. “Darkness in a blind new world!”
In no time he was as high as Carolyn’s windows, surrounded by weathered shoes. He reached for a stiff child’s sneaker. It wasn’t hard to yank one loose; without much thought, Mac heaved the rubber-soled shoe at Carolyn’s windows.
She came to the French doors and parted them, peered out into the dark. His heart leapt at the sight of her. She was in a pair of salad green pajamas, even though it was only around nine o’clock.
“Don’t be scared, Carolyn, it’s me!”
She peered into the mist, saw him through the leaves. Leaning over, she picked up the old shoe from the balcony. Heaved it back at him.
“Hey!” he said.
“Get out of my tree!”
She looked so sweet, he could hardly stand it. “Why can’t I be in your tree?”
“Well . . . because I’m going to bed, and how can I go to bed if I know you’re out here in the tree?”
The lofty interior of her room looked cozier than it really was; all the time he’d spent in it seemed to have happened to a lost boy in a story.
“Last night, Carolyn, I was thinking about this one book my mom had on her shelf, and when I first noticed it I was excited, because it was called The Handy Nasty. I thought it was a sex guide. Naturally, at my first opportunity I snuck a peak at it. But you know what it was?”
“No, how would I?”
“It was actually a book about the Han dynasty. Write it down and you’ll see what I mean. So what I’m trying to tell you is, something might look like the handy nasty when it’s really something else. Your father doesn’t know anything about her.”
She nodded as if persuaded. It was one of the things he liked about her. “He’s horrible. I didn’t believe it.”
“Really?”
“I think he said it to scare you away.”
“Oh, just that.”
“Which is disgusting, but it makes things hard.”
“Why should it make things hard?” he yelled.
“Be fair, Mac. He’s my father.”
“A couple days ago you were pummeling him.”
“I don’t think you understand how much he depends on me! He’s not the strongest person in the world. Not even close. You’re a much stronger person than he is.”
Mac rested his head on the branch. He didn’t feel strong. He was sick of covering for people who claimed they weren’t strong. “Your mother seems to have cottoned to me a bit,” he finally said.
“She’s a husk, so it doesn’t count.”
“A husk,” Mac repe
ated.
“But it takes one to know one. I’m a husk, too.”
“What exactly is a husk?” He shifted on the branch and it shook, and little pods full of seeds pelted the sidewalk.
“It’s something that looks like what it used to be, but now it’s empty,” she replied.
“Would you quit saying that? You’re the least empty person I’ve ever met.” He said this with greater tenderness than he’d expected to.
“I’m empty by choice.”
He was starting to feel like a possum; he had sap on his fingers, and he was hugging a cold trunk. “Carolyn, isn’t it time to break free? Like, for starters, moving out of your parents’ house? We could get our own place. Wouldn’t it be great?”
“Of course it would be great. But—” Her voice caught, a rabbit in a trap. She reached for something—a rhubarb-colored shawl— pulled it around her shoulders. “It would be vast.”
“So what’s stopping us?”
No answer.
“I’m making you something, it’s a surprise. And I have a very nice rug. I also have a plastic cactus,” he said, laughing at his dowry.
“Hmm. I guess it’s a place to start.”
“Know what?” he said, encouraged.
“What?”
He leaned farther out in the tree so she could see him better.
“My cousin Fran’s pregnant. The baby’s due next April, so I’ll be a second cousin, or something like that.”
“That’s exciting.”
“I’m going to move out, even though she says I don’t have to.”
“That’s right. Get as far from the baby as possible,” she said.
“Huh?”
She shivered, pulled the shawl tight around her shoulders. “Other people’s babies are so very annoying.”
“Not really. Can’t I come in?” he asked.
“We have to get up early,” she said. “I think I’d better go to bed.”
“It’s the last time I’ll see you for a while.”
MacGregor Tells the World Page 17