Couples (10 page)

He asked her, “Would you like to play?”

“I think not,” she answered, wondering if he knew that she was pregnant, remembering him looking up her skirt, and guessing that he did. He would make it his business to know.

“In that case I better call Thorne,” he said, and went into his house.

Angela, her casual manner restored, told Foxy, “Women sometimes do play. Janet and Georgene are actually not too bad. At least they look to me as if they know what they’re doing.”

Foxy said, “Field hockey is my only game.”

“What position did you play? I was center halfback.”

“You played? I was right inner, usually. Sometimes wing.”

“It’s a lovely game,” Angela said. “It was the one time in my life when I enjoyed being aggressive. It’s what men must have a lot of the time.” There was a flow and an authority in the drifting way she spoke that led Foxy to agree, to nod eagerly, as the sun drifted lower into a salmon overcast. Keeping their pale faces lifted to the pale light, they talked, these two, of hockey (“What I liked about halfback,” Angela said, “was you were both offensive and defensive and yet nobody could blame you for anything.”); of sports in general (“It’s so good,” Foxy said, “to see Ken playing at anything. I think being with students all the time makes you unnecessarily old. I felt ancient in Cambridge.”); of Ken’s profession (“He never talks to me about his work any more,” Foxy said. “It used to be starfish and that was sort of fun, we went to Woods Hole one summer; but now it’s more to do with chlorophyll and all the breakthroughs recently have been in other fields, DNA and whatnot.”); of Piet’s house (“He likes it,” Angela said, “because everything is square. I loved the house you have now. So many things could be done with it, and the way it floats above the marsh! Piet was worried about mosquitoes. Here we have these terrible horseflies from the dairy. He’s from inland, you know. I think the sea intimidates him. He likes to skate but isn’t much of a swimmer. He thinks the sea is wasteful. I think
I
prefer things to be somewhat formless. Piet likes them finished.”); and of the children who now and then
emerged from the woods and brought them a wound, a complaint, a gift:

“Why, Franklin, thank you! What do you think it can be?”

“A coughball,” the boy said. “From an owl or a hawk.” The boy was eight or nine, intelligent but slow to form, and thin-skinned. The coughball lay in Angela’s hand, smaller than a golf ball, a tidy dry accretion visibly holding small curved bones.

“It’s beautiful in its way,” Angela said. “What would you like me to do with it?”

“Keep it for me until they take me home. Don’t let Ruthie have it. She says it’s hers because it’s her woods but I want to start a collection and I saw it
first
even though she did pick it up.” Making this long statement brought the child close to tears.

Angela said, “Frankie, go tell Ruth to come see me.” He blinked and turned and ran.

Foxy said, “Isn’t that Frankie Appleby? But Frank himself isn’t here.”

“Harold brought him. He’s friends with their Jonathan.”

“I thought the Smith boy was years older.”

“He is, but of course they’re thrown together.”

Of course?

Three children returned from the woods—four, counting little Nancy Hanema, who hung back near the birdbath and, thumb in mouth, fanned her fingers as if to hide her face from Foxy’s gaze.

Ruth was a solid tall round-faced girl. Her body jerked and stamped with indignant energy. “Mother, he says he saw it
first
but he didn’t see it at all until
I
picked it up. Then he said it was
his
because he saw it
first
.”

The taller boy, with a clever flickering expression, said,
“That’s the truth, Mrs. Hanema. Old Franklin Fink here grabs everything.”

Young Appleby, without preamble, broke into sobs. “I don’t,” he said, and would have said more, but his throat stuck shut.

“Boo hoo, Finkie,” the Smith boy said.

“Mother,” Ruth said, stamping her foot on the gravel to retrieve Angela’s attention. “Last
summer
we found a bird’s nest and
Frankie
said it was
his
for a
collection
and grabbed it out of my hand and it all came apart and fell into
nothing
, all because of him!” She flounced so hard her straight hair fanned in space.

Jonathan little-Smith said, “Lookie, Finkie’s crying again. Boo hoo, oh dear, goodness gracious me oh my oh.”

With a guttural whimper the younger boy attacked his friend with rotating fists. Jonathan laughed; his arm snaked out and flipped the frantic red face aside; he contemptuously pushed. Angela rose and parted them, and Foxy thought how graceful yet solid she looked, and imagined her as a hockey player standing abstracted yet impenetrable in the center of the limed field, in blue bloomers. Her body in turning showed a trace of the process that makes middle-aged women, with their thickened torsos and thinned legs, appear to be engaged in a balancing act.

“Now Jonathan,” Angela said, holding each boy’s hand equally, “Frankie wants to start a collection. Do you want to have a collection too?”

“No I don’t give a fart about some old bird’s throw-up. It’s Ruthie he stole from.”

“Ruthie is here all the time and I
know
she can find another in the woods. I want you all to help her. There’s an owl hoots every night in that woods and if you find his tree I bet you’ll find lots more coughballs. You help too, Nancy.”

The child had approached closer. “Mouse died,” she said, not removing her thumb.

“Yes,” Ruth said, wheeling, her hair lifting winglike, “and if you don’t watch out this enormous owl will come and eat you and your thumb will be sticking out from an enormous coughball with eyes on it!”

“Ruth!” Angela called, too late. Ruth had run back to the woods, her long legs flinging beneath her flying skirt. The boys, united by need for pursuit, followed. Nancy came to her mother’s lap and was absent-mindedly caressed. “You have all this,” Angela said to Foxy, “to look forward to.”

Her pregnancy, then, was common knowledge. She discovered she didn’t mind. She said, “I’ll be glad when it’s at that stage. I feel horrible half the time, and useless the rest.”

“Later,” Angela said, “it’s splendid. You’re so right with the world. Then this little package arrives, and it’s utterly dependent, with these very clear sharp needs that you can
sat
isfy! You have everything it wants. I loved having babies. But then you have to raise them.” The eyes of the child half lying in her lap listened wide open. Her lips around her thumb made a secret, moist noise.

“You’re very good with children,” Foxy told her.

“I like to teach,” Angela said. “It’s easier than learning.”

With a splashing sound of gravel, a yellow convertible, top down, came into the driveway and stopped not a yard from their bench. The Thorne man was driving; his pink head poked from the metal shell like the flesh of a mollusc. Standing in the back seat were a sickly-looking boy who resembled him and a younger girl, six or so, whose green eyes slightly bulged. Foxy was jarred by the readiness with which Angela rose to greet them. After an hour of sharing a bench and the sun with her, she was jealous. Angela introduced the children: “Whitney and Martha Thorne, say hello to Mrs. Whitman.”

“I know you,” the boy told her. “You moved in down the road from us into the spook house.” His face was pale and his nostrils and ears seemed inflamed. Possibly he had a fever. His sister was definitely fat. She found herself touched by these children and, lifting her eyes to their father, even by him.

“Is it a spook house?” she asked.

“He means,” Angela intervened, “because it stood empty so long. The children can see it from the beach.”

“All shuttered up,” Whitney said, “with smoke coming out of the chimneys.”

“The kid hallucinates,” his father said. “He chews peyote for breakfast.”

Whitney defended himself. “Iggy Kappiotis said he and some guys snuck up on the porch one time and heard voices inside.”

“Just a little innocent teen-age fucking,” Freddy Thorne said, squinting at the sallow spring sun. By daylight his amorphous softness was less menacing, more pitiable. He wore a fuzzy claret sports shirt with an acid-green foulard and high-top all-weather boots such as children with weak ankles wear.

“Hey, big Freddy,” Harold little-Smith called from the basketball court. The thumping and huffing had suspended.

“It’s Bob Cousy!” Hanema called from the porch.

“Looks more like Goose Tatum to me,” said Gallagher. “You can always tell by de whites ob dare eyes.”

“What whites?” Hanema asked. He hurried over and, taking Thorne by the elbow, announced, “This man is living gin.”

“Those are not official sneakers,” Ben Saltz protested.

“Those are Frankenstein shoes,” Eddie Constantine said. He went mock-rigid and tottered the few steps needed to bump into Thorne’s chest. He sniffed Thorne’s breath, clutched his own throat, and screamed, “Aagh! The fumes! The fumes!”

Thorne smiled and wiped his mouth. “I’ll just watch,” he said. “You don’t need me, you got plenty of people. Why did you call?”

“We
do
need you,” Hanema insisted, handling the man’s elbow again and seeming to exult in his relative shortness. “Four on a side. You guard me. You belong to Matt, Eddie, and Ben.”

“Thanks a holy arse-licking bunch,” Constantine said.

“How many points are you spotting us?” Gallagher asked.

“None,” Hanema said. “Freddy will be all right. He’s an asset. He’s loose. Take a practice shot, Freddy.” He slammed the ball off the asphalt into Thorne’s stomach. “See how loose he is?”

From the stiff-fingered way Thorne handled the ball Foxy saw he was nothing of an athlete; he was so waddly, so flat-footed, she averted her eyes from the sight.

Beside her, Angela said, “I suppose the house may have been broken into by a few young couples. They have so few places to go.”

“What were the people like who owned it before?”

“The Robinsons. We hardly knew them. They only used it summers and weekends. A middle-aged couple with pots of children who suddenly got divorced. I used to see her downtown with binoculars around her neck. Quite a handsome woman with hair in a bun and windburn in tweeds. He was an ugly little man with a huge voice, always threatening to sue the town if they widened the road to the beach. But Bernadette Ong, who knew them, says it was
he
who wanted the divorce. Evidently he played the cello and she the violin and they got into a string quartet with some people from Duxbury. They never did a thing for the house.”

Foxy blurted, “Would your husband be willing to look at
the house for us? And give us an estimate or some notion as to where to begin?”

Angela gazed toward the woods, a linear maze where children’s bodies were concealed. “Matt,” she said carefully, “wants Piet to concentrate on building new houses.”

“Perhaps he could recommend another contractor then. We must make a beginning. Ken seems to like the house as it is but when winter comes it will be impossible.”

“Of course it will.” The curtness startled Foxy. Gazing toward the trees, Angela went on hesitatingly, as if her choice of words were distracted by a flowering of things unseen. “Your husband—perhaps he and Piet could talk. Not today after basketball. Everybody stays for beer.”

“No, fine. We must hurry back, we have some friends coming from Cambridge.”

Thus a gentle rift was established between them. The two faced differently, Angela toward the woods full of children and Foxy toward the men’s game. Four on a side was too many. The court, now deep in the shadow of the barn, was crowded and Thorne, with his protrusive rear and confused motions, was in everyone’s way. Hanema had the ball. Persistently bumped by Thorne in his attempts to dribble amid a clamor of shouts, he passed the ball on the bounce to the Constantines’ neighbor’s boy; in the same stride he hooked one foot around Thorne’s ankle and by a backwards stab of his weight caused the bigger man to fall down. Thorne fell in stages, thrusting out an arm, then rolling face down on the muddy asphalt, his hand under him.

Play stopped. Foxy and Angela ran to the men. Hanema had kneeled to Thorne. The others made a hushed circle around them. Smearily smiling, his claret shirt muddy, Thorne sat up and showed them a trembling hand whose whitened little finger
stuck out askew. “Dislocated,” he said in a voice from which pain had squeezed all elasticity.

Hanema, kneeling, blurted, “Jesus Freddy, I’m sorry. This is terrible. Sue me.”

“It’s happened before,” Thorne said. He took the injured hand in his good one and grimaced and pulled. A snap softer than a twig breaking, more like a pod popping, shocked the silent circle. Freddy rose and held his hand, the little finger now aligned, before his chest as something tender and disgraced that must not be touched. He asked Angela, “Do you have surgical tape and anything for a splint—a tongue depressor, a popsicle stick? Even a spoon would do.”

Rising with him, Hanema asked, “Freddy, will you be able to work?”

Thorne smirked down at the other’s anxious face. He was feeling his edge enlarge, Foxy felt; she thought only women used their own pain as a weapon. “Oh,” he said, “after a month or so. I can’t go into somebody’s mouth wearing a plaster cast, can I?”

“Sue me,” Hanema said. His face was a strange stretched mixture of freckles and pallor, of the heat of battle and contrition. The other players had divided equally into two sympathizing rings. Freddy Thorne, holding his hand before him, led Angela and Constantine and the neighbor boy and Saltz into the house, in triumph. Yet Foxy’s impression remained that he had been, in the minute before exploitation set in, instinctively stoical.

“You didn’t do it on purpose,” little-Smith told Hanema. Foxy wondered why he, Thorne’s friend, had stayed outdoors, with the guilty. The patterns of union were many.

“But I
did
,” Piet said. “I deliberately tripped the poor jerk. The way he bumps with his belly gets me mad.”