Family Dancing (9 page)

“Can I help you?” Mark asks.

She laughs. “Your father would be happy to hear you say that,” she says. “He told me from the beginning, I’ll let them hate me, I’ll turn the kids against me. Then they’ll be there for you. He was so damn sacrificial. But no. You can’t help me because I still have some pride.”

There is a clattering of doors in the hallway. Male voices invade the house. Alex and Douglas walk into the kitchen, their clothes even more smeared with mud, their eyes triumphant. “Looks like we fixed that pipe,” Alex says. “Now we’ve got to wash up; Henry’s expecting us to pick up those lobsters ten minutes ago.”

He and Douglas stand at the kitchen sink and wash their hands and faces. From her room, Julie calls, “You fixed the pipe? That’s fantastic!”

“Yes,” Douglas says, “we have repaired the evil leak which has plagued this house for centuries.”

“We’d better get going, Doug,” Alex says. “Does Julie want to come hunt lobsters?”

“Lobsters?” Julie says, entering the room. Her smile is bright, eager. Then she looks at Lydia. “No, you men go,” she says. “We womenfolk will stay here and guard the hearth.”

Lydia looks at her, and raises her eyebrows.

“O.K., let’s go,” Alex says. “Mark, you ready?”

He looks questioningly at Lydia. But she is gathering together steel wool and Clorox, preparing to attack the stain on the bathtub.

“Yes, I’m ready,” Mark says.

At first, when he was very young, Mark imagined the lobstermen to be literal lobster-men, with big pink pincers and claws. Later, as he was entering puberty, he found that all his early sexual feelings focused on them—the red-faced men and boys with their bellies encased in dirty T-shirts. Here, in a docked boat, Mark made love for the first time with a local boy who had propositioned him in the bathroom of what was then the town’s only pizza parlor. “I seen you look at me,” said the boy, whose name was Erroll. Mark had wanted to run away, but instead made a date to meet Erroll later that night. Outside, in the pizza parlor, his family was arguing about whether to get anchovies. Mark still feels a wave of nausea run through him when he eats with them at any pizza parlor, remembering Erroll’s warm breath on his neck, and the smell of fish which seemed to cling to him for days afterward.

Alex is friends with the local lobstermen, one of whom is his landlord’s cousin. Most years, he and Douglas and Mark ride out on a little boat with Henry Traylor and his son, Henry Traylor, and play at being lobstermen themselves, at hauling pots and grabbing the writhing creatures and snapping shut their jaws. The lobsters only turn pink when boiled; live, they’re sometimes a bluish color which reminds Mark of the stain on the bathtub. Mark has never much liked these expeditions, nor the inflated caricature of machismo which his father and brother put on for them. He looks at them and sees plump men with pale skin, men no man would ever want. Yet they are loved, fiercely loved by women.

Today Henry Traylor is a year older than the last time they saw him, as is his son. “Graduated from high school last week,” he tells Alex.

“That’s terrific,” Alex says. “What’s next?”

“Fixing to get married, I suppose,” Henry Traylor says. “Go to work, have kids.” He is a round-faced, red-cheeked boy with ratty, bright blond hair. As he talks, he manipulates without effort the outboard rudder of the little boat which is carrying them out into the sound, toward the marked buoys of the planted pots. Out on the ocean, Alex seems to relax considerably. “Your mother seems unhappy,” he says to Mark. “I try to talk to her, to help her, but it doesn’t do any good. Well, maybe Julie and Ellen can do something.” He puts his arm around Mark’s shoulder—an uncomplicated, fatherly gesture which seems to say, this love is simple. The love of men is simple. Leave the women behind in the kitchen, in the steam of the cooking pot, the fog of their jealousies and compulsions. We will go hunt.

Henry Traylor has hauled up the ancient lobster trap. Lobster limbs stick out of the barnacle-encrusted woodwork, occasionally moving. “Now you just grab the little bugger like this,” Henry Traylor instructs Douglas. “Then you take your rubber band and snap him closed. It’s simple.”

“O.K.,” Douglas says. “Here goes.” He stands back and cranes his arm over the trap, holding himself at a distance, then withdraws a single, flailing lobster.

“Oh, God,” he says, and nearly drops it.

“Don’t do that!” shouts Henry Traylor. “You got him. Now just take the rubber band and fix him tight. Shut him up like he’s a woman who’s sassing you. That’s right. Good. See? It wasn’t so hard.”

“Do that to your wife,” says Henry Traylor the elder, “she’ll bite your head off quicker than that lobster.”

Out of politeness, all three of the Dempson men laugh. Douglas looks at his handiwork—a single lobster, bound and gagged—and smiles. “I did it,” he says. Mark wonders if young Henry Traylor has ever thought of making love to other boys, thinks rudely of propositioning him, having him beneath the boat. “I seen you look at me,” he’d say. He thinks of it—little swirls of semen coagulating in the puddles, white as the eddies of foam which are gathering now on the sea in which they float, helpless, five men wrestling with lobsters.

They go back to shore. The Traylors have asked Alex and Douglas to walk up the hill with them and take a look at their new well, so Mark carries the bag of lobsters back to the house. But when he gets to the screen door to the kitchen, he stops in his tracks; Ellen, Lydia, and Julie are sitting at the table, talking in hushed voices, and he steps back, fearful of interrupting them. “It would be all right,” Ellen is saying. “Really, it’s not that outrageous these days. I met a lot of really decent guys when I did it.”

“What could I say?” Lydia asks.

“Just be simple and straightforward. Attractive woman, divorced, mid-fifties, seeks whatever—handsome, mature man for companionship. Who knows? Whatever you want.”

“I could never put that down!” Lydia says, her inflection rising. “Besides, it wouldn’t be fair. They’d be disappointed when they met me.”

“Of course they wouldn’t!” Julie says. “You’re very attractive.”

“I’m an old woman,” Lydia says. “There’s no need to flatter me. I know that.”

“Mom, you don’t look half your age,” Ellen says. “You’re beautiful.”

Mark knocks and walks through the door, his arms full of lobsters. “Here I am,” he says, “back with the loot. I’m sorry for eavesdropping, but I agree with everything Ellen says.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter, Mark,” Lydia says. “Alex wouldn’t care anyway if he found out.”

“Mom, will you stop that?” Ellen says. “Will you just stop that? Don’t worry about him anymore, for Christ’s sake, he isn’t worth it.”

“Don’t talk about your father that way,” Lydia says. “You can tell me whatever you think I need to know, but you’re not to speak of your father like that. He’s still your father, even if he’s not my husband.”

“Jesus,” Ellen says.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing,” Ellen says, more loudly.

Lydia looks her over once, then walks over to the stove, where the water for the lobsters is boiling. “How many did you get, Mark?” she asks.

“Six. Daddy and Douglas went to look at the Traylors’ well. They’ll be back any minute.”

“Good,” Lydia says. “Let’s put these things in the water.” She lifts the top off the huge pot, and steam pours out of it, fogging her reading glasses.

Dinner passes quietly. Alex is in a questioning mood, and his children answer him obediently. Douglas and Julie talk about the strange sleeping habits of sharks, Ellen about her firm, Mark about a play he saw recently Off Broadway. Lydia sits at the head of the table, and occasionally makes a comment or asks a question—just enough to keep them from panicking, or staring at her all through the meal. Mark notices that her eyes keep wandering to Alex.

After dinner is finished, Julie and Lydia carry the dishes into the kitchen, and Douglas says, “O.K., are we getting ice cream tonight, or what?” Every night since their arrival, they have gone to get ice cream after dinner, primarily at the insistence of Douglas and Julie, who thrive on ice cream, but thrive more on ritual. Ellen, who has visited them in Hawaii, revealed to Mark that they feed their cat tea every morning, in bed. “They’re daffy,” she said, describing to him the way Douglas held the cat and Julie the saucer of tea it licked from. Over the five years they’ve been together, Mark has noticed, Douglas and Julie have become almost completely absorbed in one another, at the expense of most everything around them, probably as a result of the fact that they’ve spent so much of that time in remote places, in virtual isolation. They even share a secret language of code words and euphemisms. When Julie asked Douglas, one night, to give her a “floogie,” Mark burst out laughing, and then they explained that “floogie” was their private word for backrub.

Tonight, Ellen is peculiarly agreeable. Usually she resists these ice cream expeditions, but now she says, “Oh, what a great idea. Let’s go.” Mark wonders what led her and Lydia to the conversation he overheard, then decides he’d prefer not to know. “Let’s go, let’s go,” Douglas says. “Mom, are you game?”

But Lydia has her face buried in the steam rising from the sink of dishes, which she has insisted on doing herself. “No,” she says. “You go ahead.”

Douglas backs away from the sorrow in her voice—sorrow which might at any moment turn into irritation, if he pushes her harder. He knows not to. “How about you, Dad?” he asks Alex.

“No,” Alex says, “I’m pooped. But bring me back some chocolate chip.”

“Give me money?” Douglas says.

Alex hands him a twenty, and the kids barrel into the car and head off to the ice cream parlor in town. They sit down at a pink booth with high-backed, patent-leather seats which remind Mark of pink flamingos on people’s lawns, and a waitress in a pink uniform brings them their menus. The waitress is a local girl with bad teeth, and Mark wonders if she’s the one Henry Traylor’s going to marry someday. He wouldn’t be surprised. She’s got a lusty look about her which even he can recognize, and which he imagines Henry Traylor would find attractive. And Douglas is watching her. Julie is watching Douglas watch, but she does not look jealous. She looks fascinated.

Ellen looks jealous.

They order several sundaes, and eat them with a kind of labored dedication. Halfway through the blueberry sundae he is sharing with Ellen, Mark realizes he stopped enjoying this sundae, and this ritual, four days before. Julie looks tired, too—tired of being cheerful and shrieking about fixed faucets. And Mark imagines a time when his brother and Julie will feed their cat tea for no other reason than that they always have, and with no pleasure. He remembers one weekend when Julie and Douglas came to visit him in New York. They had taken the train down from Boston, where they were in school, and they were flying to California the next afternoon. All that day on the train Douglas had been looking forward to eating at a Southern Indian restaurant he had read about, but the train arrived several hours late, and by the time he and Julie had gotten their baggage the restaurant was closed. Douglas fumed like a child until tears came to his eyes. “All that day on the train, looking forward to that dinner,” he said on the subway ride back to Mark’s apartment. Julie put her arms around him, and kissed him on the forehead, but he turned away. Mark wanted to shake her, then, ask her why she was indulging him this way, but he knew that Douglas had indulged her just as often. That was the basis of their love—mutual self-indulgence so excessive that Mark couldn’t live with them for more than a few days without thinking he would go crazy. It wasn’t that he wasn’t welcome. His presence or absence seemed irrelevent to them; as far as they were concerned, he might as well not have existed. And this was coupledom, the revered state of marriage? For Mark, the amorous maneuverings of the heterosexual world are deserving of the same bewilderment and distrust that he hears in his sister’s voice when she says, “But how can you just go to bed with someone you’ve hardly met?
I
could never do that.” He wants to respond by saying, I would never pretend that I could pledge eternal allegiance to one person, but this isn’t really true. What is true is that he’s terrified of what he might turn into once he’d made such a pledge.

“So when’s the summit conference taking place?” Ellen says now, dropping her blueberry-stained spoon onto the pink table. Everyone looks at her. “What do you mean?” Julie asks.

“I mean I think we should have a talk about what’s happening with Mom and Dad. I mean I think we should stop pretending everything’s normal when it isn’t.”

“I’m not pretending,” Douglas says.

“Neither am I,” says Julie. “We’re aware of what’s going on.”

Mark watches Ellen’s blueberry ice cream melt down the sides of her parfait glass. “What has Mama said to you?” he asks.

“Everything and nothing,” Ellen says. “I hear her when she’s angry and when she wants to cry she does it in my room. One day she’s cheerful, the next miserable. I don’t know why she decided to make me her confidante, but she did.” Ellen pushes the sundae dish away. “Why don’t we just face the fact that this is a failure?” she says. “Daddy doesn’t want to be here, that’s for sure, and I think Mom’s beginning to think that she doesn’t want to be here. And I, for one, am not so sure I want to be here.”

“Mom believes in tradition,” Douglas says softly, repeating a phrase they’ve heard from her a thousand times.