Because They Wanted To: Stories (16 page)

“How did your mother look when you saw her?”

“Well. . .” Daniel hesitated and, to his dismay, smiled. “It was horrible. I almost fainted.” His smile was watery, his lips felt weak—why was he smiling at all? He had exposed a tender spot. “I had to leave the room.”

“It is horrible.” His father vigorously uncrossed his legs. “Horrible and unfair.” He meticulously separated some lobster meat from its shell, then lost interest in it. “You know we had a bad relationship. That marriage was ruined by her family. But your mother and I are still close in a way I’ve never been with another woman. We’re still man and wife, even if we never speak to each other again.” He chewed rapidly and lightly, then swallowed. “Marriage means some-thing to me, and so does family.”

“Me too,” said Daniel.

His father looked up. “I still can’t believe that idiot family of hers. Sitting there letting nurses tell them what to do.” He snorted and poked his tongue around in his mouth. “Probably all doped out on Prozac.”

Daniel noticed a red-haired girl with large sweatered breasts at the next table. Her mouth was darkened with bad lipstick gone awry, but she handled her utensils very gracefully.

“How is Ray?” he asked. “Do you still see her?”

“Sometimes.” His father smiled, a little harshly. “She’s crazy as always. Last time I saw her, we went to some restaurant, pretty late at night. She had coffee and she poured about four sugars into it. I told her it wasn’t a good idea to eat so much sugar, and she went nuts. She said, ‘Everybody hates guys like you. What the fuck do you know about health, you alcoholic asshole?’” His father snorted mildly and shook his head, his mouth a rude line.

Then he noticed the redhead too.

It was late when they left the restaurant. The night cold reached in through Daniel’s nose and seized his lungs. Buildings and cars looked stunned and abandoned in the intense cold. His father’s big car shuddered in the wind. Its rusted, corrugated ass end stuck out beyond the other cars, proud and devastated. They got in the car and sat silently for several minutes while his father worked to make the engine turn over, grunting slightly as if he were lifting a heavy object. In the small, cold enclosure, Daniel felt his father intensely, felt him trying really hard.

Jacquie had never liked his father. “He’s a handsome prick,” she’d said once. “But he’s a prick.”

“Don’t call my dad a prick,” said Daniel. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

They tried to scoot to the far sides of the bed, but it was so mushy in the center that they rolled together anyway.

When he got home he called Jacquie. She was glad to hear from him; she had thought he was still mad at her. “I realized I must’ve sounded cold,” she said, “but that’s not how I meant it.”

“It’s okay. You were just freaked out.” He imagined Jacquie sitting invisible in the car with him and his father, feeling his father. He pictured an expression of understanding slowly altering her face. If they knew each other as he knew them individually, he thought, they would love each other.

“I was thinking about this thing that happened when I was a kid,” she said. “I mean, in relation to what I said to you about the accident.”

He thought of being with her on their bed, massaging the little
ribs between her breasts. These bones were spare, and they gave slightly if he pressed hard. She loved to have them rubbed, especially the places in between the bones.

“We were going to the ice cream social at my school,” she said, “which naturally I liked because it meant a ton of ice cream and cake. But as we were pulling out of the driveway, we ran over our cat, Midnight. She was up under the wheel, and she didn’t get out in time. It was awful, because when we got out we saw her hips were crushed but she was still moving reflexively, trying to get up.”

He listened, alert and puzzled.

“I said, ‘Look, she’s still alive,’ and my mother said, ‘No, it’s just reflex,’ and my sisters immediately began to sob. But I didn’t.”

“Do you think you were shocked?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think I just wanted to go get ice cream. We went to the ice cream social, and I sat there and packed it in. My sisters were too upset to eat, but not me. My mother said, ‘Why aren’t you crying?’ I just shrugged, but later I felt guilty about it.”

“Well, it’s kind of weird, don’t you think?”

“No. And neither does my therapist.”

“What did your therapist say?”

“That I was probably not as oriented toward the sensate as my sisters. That I was probably a cerebral child and that plain death didn’t seem terrible to me. Like, the cat’s dead, there’s nothing we can do, so let’s go have our ice cream.”

“But it’s normal to care about pets.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I just had a different set of responses than the conventional one.”

He sighed and stuck his feet in front of a furnace vent made of metal strips and dark, heat-breathing slits.

“Actually I remember getting more upset about Midnight’s brother, Walnut. He was obviously very distraught when he saw her body. He walked around the house for days, looking for her and meowing. That did seem sad to me. Partly because he didn’t understand what had happened and we couldn’t explain it to him.”

He got off the phone feeling okay. But later that night he lay in bed, wide awake and furious at Jacquie.

He visited his mother every day during the ten days he stayed in Iowa. He got used to the thin hoop haloing her impaled head. The tube came out of her mouth, and her eyes began to show expression—usually a dull and cantankerous one. Cards and flowers proliferated in her room. Daniel noticed with irritation that nothing had come from Jacquie.

Finally she was able to talk. “How is Jacquie?” she asked.

“Pretty good.”

“That’s good. She’s a nice girl.” Her voice was devoid of inflection, flat and invulnerable. There was an undercurrent of grudging bitterness in it, as if she had concluded some time ago that there was no hope for her but was willing to pretend otherwise so that you wouldn’t feel depressed, even though the pretense was a nuisance. Daniel realized with discomfort that she had talked like this for years. His mother’s eyes shifted vaguely around the room. “She is a nice girl,” she repeated. Her hand began to twitch on the rumpled bedsheet. He put his hand out to still it. It felt like an injured and panicking bird. His hand sweated, and he wondered if it repelled her. No, he thought. Just hold her hand.

“Has Harry been to see you?” he asked. Harry was a talkative gynecologist whom she had been dating for the last three months.

“Oh, yes. Several times. I think he’s afraid of running into your father.”

“How is he?”

“Oh, he’s Harry. He’s incredibly Harry.” She smiled, and her eyes wrinkled elfishly. He saw for a second the pert little girl that smiled at him from old black-and-white photos in the family album. “Tell me about your music,” she said.

He told her about his one steady job, in a dark little bar with a crippled neon sign that blinked “Free Crabs—Funk Nite.” He told her about playing in the park and being chased by cops. He told her about the time the famous piano player had told him he was “the death.” He wasn’t sure what it meant to her. It could seem seedy and pathetic.

He finished talking, and they were quiet. She whispered. “Honey, I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s just sit quietly together now.”

The flat rasp of her voice made the endearment strangely poignant to him. He shifted his sweating fingers, stretched them to
air them out, and then took her hand again. The room was a lulling beige-and-cream terrain permeated by the muted hum of the building. He listened to it and became aimlessly thoughtful. He thought of Mrs. Harris, whose son had been killed in an amusement park accident several years before. He had liked the son, and yet, when confronted with the weeping Mrs. Harris, he’d been embarrassed and hadn’t known what to do. He wished he could see Mrs. Harris again, so that he could hold her and console her.

His mother opened her eyes. “I’ve never felt so much pain before in my life,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.” She closed her eyes again.

Daniel stroked the length of her arm with his hand. When he was little and he had a headache, his father would put his hands on either side of his head and say, “I’m drawing the pain out of your head and into my hands.” He would stand over Daniel with his hands firm on the boy’s skull, a terrible look of concentration on his face. Then he would step away and say, “Now your headache is gone.” Daniel would still have a headache, but it didn’t matter. He loved it when his father came to take the headache away.

He held his mother’s shoulders, watching her face for signs of relief. Her cheeks sagged, her eyes were peevishly closed. It struck him that this was only an extreme form of her habitual expression. She always seemed to be suffering in some remote, frozen way. He had been so used to it that he hadn’t recognized it as suffering. He didn’t think she did, either. It seemed to be her natural state. It seemed natural in part because of her courage, which was also habitual. He thought of her driving on the highway, dressed in her checked business suit, drumming her fingers on the wheel and moving her lips in silent conversation with herself.

The door opened. A dark-haired nurse with a still face came in, pushing a small metal machine. His mother poked one eye open and regarded the nurse like an animal from within a lair. The nurse told her she had to do a test, extract something. “It won’t be painful,” she said.

“Bullshit,” snapped his mother.

Awake at four in the morning, Daniel thought of calling Jacquie again. But he was still mad at her about the cat story and half afraid
that if he called she’d say something else that would piss him off. He sat alone at the kitchen table, swatting his drum pad. He felt he was learning something important, something to do with families and with himself that he needed to sort out.

But Jacquie had a thing about families; in the abstract, the subject almost always made her scornful and antagonistic, especially toward parents. She was the kind of person who saw child abuse everywhere. When she went to visit a married friend, her friend’s daughter, who was three, brought home painted Easter eggs she’d done at day care. The kid had wanted to eat them, and her father had said no, because he didn’t think they were free-range chicken eggs. The child cried and threw an egg on the floor. Her father spanked her and made her clean it up. Daniel didn’t think that sounded so bad, but Jacquie was furious. She was even madder at their neighbors, who she said “mocked” their children.

“Ercie will run up to him to show him something she’s found, and he’ll say, in baby talk, ‘Oh, look what Ercie has.’ And then he’ll look over her head at me and sneer and say, ‘Really interesting, huh?’ And she looks crestfallen.”

“Maybe he’s embarrassed to be talking baby talk in front of you. Like you’ll think he’s uncool or something.”

“That’s no excuse. She’s going to grow up and have all kinds of problems with men, and nobody will understand why. Not even her.”

“I don’t know, Jacquie. It doesn’t sound that bad to me. Kids are okay as long as you love them, basically.”

“But what’s called love in most families is inadequate shit.”

“Loving doesn’t mean being perfect.”

“I’m not talking about perfect. I’m just talking about respect and kindness for your own kids.”

He didn’t understand her when she talked this way. Jacquie was a strong girl. She had square shoulders and a muscular butt. She took karate classes. Competence and spirit seemed built right into her. Most of the time he could see her spirit in the animal vibrance of her gold eyes. But sometimes her eyes would reflect a sense of stubborn injury that he could not quite locate. It was an expression that seemed to regard competence and spirit as contrivances that, while they kept her going, had nothing to do with who she really was.

He felt the look in a different way when they had sex. They would embrace, and he’d feel her engage him from the surface of her skin to the wet muscularity of her hidden organs. But there always came a moment when he stopped feeling her. She held him close, but she was somewhere else. He would look at her face and see it twisted away from him, her eyes closed as if she were looking at the inside of her own head in horror and fascination and need. There would be a moment of tension like a fishing line pulled taut, and then he would feel her slowly return. She would open her eyes and look at him and clasp his hand, her ardent palm open against his, her expression fierce and triumphant.

He decided to call her, even though it was two o’clock in San Francisco. There were four rings and a laborious click; his recorded voice asked him to leave a message. He hung up. He wondered where she was.

He sat back in his chair and remembered her naked, kneeling over the low coffee table with her thighs open wide. “If I fucked you in the ass I would own you,” he’d said.

She turned over quickly. “No, you wouldn’t. What a ridiculous thing to say.”

An hour later he called again, but she wasn’t home then, either.

The last time Daniel went to see his mother, he went with his father. In spite of what his father had said in the restaurant about how close he was with Daniel’s mother, there was a sense of overwhelming discomfort between them. It was clear that they were both sad, but they seemed to be sad in separate, restricted ways, as though they were hoarding it. His mother’s mouth was sarcastic, as if she found it ridiculous to be suffering before her ex-husband. His father was gentle, but the gentleness was excruciating. He didn’t say anything to her about his new business. They didn’t refer to the past or to her family. They talked about the accident, about Albert and Rose, and a little about the country club they had once belonged to. When Daniel talked, he felt that he was, in a more advanced and subtle form, serving the same function he had when they relayed messages through him.

They had been in the room for about half an hour when two
interns came in. They said they needed to do a brief examination. One of them asked, “Are you Mr. Belmont?” Daniel’s father said yes. “And you’re the son. Then you can stay if you want. This will only take a few minutes.” Then, with gestures that would have seemed rapacious had they been less efficient, they stripped the sheet from Daniel’s mother, jerking up her gown to expose her lower body. Her pelvic bones stuck out. Her pubic hair was thin and snarled. Gross metal pins attached her at the joints. “Whoops, sorry,” said an intern. He pulled down her gown and absently patted her belly. “All in the family.”