Family Night (5 page)

The train followed the Delaware River and she looked down at the impermeable lead-colored water. She saw the stacks at Edgemoor, the razor-wire partitions at the plant where they made toxic white pigments, and across the river, the mysterious Chambersworks. The
Delaware Bridge is not something to admire; it rises above the sulfurous mist and sinks into it once more. Yet the bridge was the logo on her father’s Econoline vans. The trucks showed a bright cartoon drawing of the bridge with the words
RICE
INDUSTRIAL
SUPPLY
COMPANY
printed in a grand arch. To advertise, he had ordered hundreds of Zippo lighters decorated with a map of Delaware, the bridge, and a minuscule rhinestone to signify the Diamond State. Ballpoints and pocketknives displayed the company’s name, her name, and a picture of the bridge. She liked best the decks of cards with the bridge superimposed upon the suits and, on the back side of each card, a variety of industrial products: winches, hoists, heat-shrinkable tubing, hydraulic jacks, carbide drill bits, belt sanders, compressors, pulleys, nylon fan belts, and links of chain.

Margaret would get off at Claymont Station. It was the same platform where she had been reunited with her sister Jane, after Jane had been missing for two years.

Jane disappeared when Margaret was in high school and Cam was on tour in Korea. Cam was only sixteen, but he had a letter from Wilmington Family Court and the signatures of both parents. It was several years after the war, but the American forces were doing the policing and some cleanup.

Jane had returned from the family doctor and was holding a prescription behind her back that said the words
Marbles, three times a day
. She had been crying; Margaret could see it right off because Jane had the kind of eyelashes that kept the tears in place long after
there was any cause. Even so, Jane could always smile, an odd, drifting line. Margaret was waiting for the explanation, but it didn’t look like it was coming soon, and she said, “That’s three times a day, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right,” her stepmother, Elizabeth, said.

“Well, three times a day isn’t too bad,” Margaret said, but this was just more of her prying.

“If you have to know,” Elizabeth said, “your sister has flat feet. She has to pick up the marbles with her toes.”

“I see,” Margaret said. She tried not to laugh. She had a bad record with that; it was worse with Cam being in the service, since she felt she had to hold up his end. She had to laugh twice as often, twice as dry.

Jane practiced with a tin wastebasket. Jane picked up some marbles with her toes and dropped them in the can. Margaret could hear this throughout the house; they could hear it out on the sidewalk, a sad
plink, plink, plink
. One day Jane took an ink pad and she made some footprints on a paper bag. They were flat as ever. Margaret couldn’t keep out of it, and her own high arch left only a thin crescent on the brown paper.

Margaret wrote to Cam about it; she told him half the marbles had rolled into the furnace grate—she heard them bouncing down the duct. Then Jane disappeared.

The newspaper ran a photograph of Jane with the word
Runaway
beneath it, and they put a question mark after the word. The story said she could be dead or alive. A police officer wanted a list of Jane’s boyfriends. “Jane didn’t have any,” Elizabeth said.

“Are we sure?” Richard said.

“If she did have a boyfriend, Richard, why was she so gloomy all the time?”

“Love is strange,” the officer said.

Cam was home on leave, watching a detective show with Margaret. On the screen they showed the chalk outline of a body. Margaret said, “Look, it’s Jane.” Cam liked the joke, but he elbowed her, jabbing her ribs until she felt a stitch.

Almost two years without word, then Margaret was drunk on wine in a car full of people the night Jane called home. The next morning she drove with Richard to the train station to meet her sister. They parked the car right before the track. Their breath made a mist on the windshield, and her father took his cuff over the heel of his hand to wipe a circle for himself and one for Margaret.

“Don’t be nervous,” she told him. It was a bold thing for her to say to her father.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said.

“It’s everything,” she said, “everything from then until now.”

He studied her face for a moment, as if he could not remember when she was small and speechless. From that minute on, he never again looked directly into her eyes. He was always wary. Jane stepped off the train and kissed her stepfather on his cheek; you could see she had suffered in the planning of it. Jane showed Margaret her smile. It was the same mysterious line.

T
he cars kicked back as she stepped off the train and she landed hard on the platform. The soles of her feet were stinging. At the same instant, a rush of cicadas started their shrill ascension, a papery swell through the trees overhead. She saw Cam waving from his car in the small parking lot. He pressed the car horn, a bright snarled note that hushed the insects in the trees.

Cam stood up on the driver’s side of the car, his arms outstretched over the roof. Greetings unnerved him, and he drummed
the hot metal. He was making an effort not to lunge for her, but she would have been happy to accept his embrace.

“It’s absolutely steamy here,” she told him. She tugged Cam’s waist, then touched his back in the hollow between his shoulder blades. His muscles felt tight under his blue Oxford. His studied repose seemed comprised of agonizing adjustments in thought and motion. She pushed her fingertip up his spine an inch or two. It was like touching the insulation around an electrical conduit in which a great current pulsed. Then it was his shyness that kept him from offering her the usual help men provided, opening doors and lifting the suitcases. Her case was made out of the same fabric as a parachute. “Don’t bother,” she said when she saw him staring at her bag. “I can get it.” She threw her case in the backseat.

“Is that all you have?” He looked as if he hoped she had some trunks, lampshades, or mooseheads.

“No, this is it.”

“Tracy didn’t come?”

“He might be down later. He’s writing a story for the paper.”

“I wish you hadn’t moved off,” Cam told her.

“Moved off?
Moved off
sounds so awful,” she said.

“You know what I mean. I could use you around here.”

“I’m here, I’ll get behind the yoke now,” she said. She wondered what she was saying, what was the offer she’d made?

He looked at her and smiled. He rubbed his mouth,
ashamed of the rush of gratitude that tugged his features. Margaret said, “How’s Laurence? Did he lose any of his baby teeth?” But she could see this was the wrong thing to ask—it was touchy.

“How’s your job at the prison?” he asked her.

“It’s good. I had to get bonded, can you imagine?”

“They didn’t find your record?”

“My record? That was a juvie record. Besides, they bond anybody unless you’re an active criminal.”

“I wonder what they did with our JV records?” Cam said.

“Oh, in the shredder, I guess. It was ordinary teenage shit.”

“We pinched your typical four-door and totaled it graciously.”

“Please,” she said.

“Remember the half-wit cop writing the report? He says, ‘Any identifying marks?’ ” Cam looked at her to see if she recalled.

Margaret said, “You were all crashed up, twenty stitches, and the guy asks you, ‘Any scars?’ ”

“Just a birthmark on my ass shaped like Italy.”

“That little boot,” Margaret said.

“He takes another look, ‘Kid, you’ve got scars now.’ ”

“Finally, he noticed,” Margaret said.

“They’re stupid. Cops and postal workers, equally vacant,” Cam said.

“What does it take to sort some postcards into a sack?” Margaret said.

“Two mailmen. Two mailmen and what? I don’t know that one. What’s the punch line?”

Margaret laughed. “I wasn’t telling a joke! That was just a rhetorical question.”

“Shit.”

She pressed her hand against her teeth and tried to keep her lips from tingling. She didn’t want to laugh at the wrong times with Cam. Cam liked to bring up these episodes when they were in trouble together. They had reached a certain level of intimacy, standing shoulder to shoulder before the family court, and they might never again achieve that sense of partnership.

They drove over to the Bringhurst Apartments, where Cam managed the units for Town and Country Realty. Cam told her he had to clean the pool and add some chemicals to the water. He was stalling. That was fine with her, she didn’t want to rush home to her parents.

“Do you have everything you need in your apartment?” she asked him.

“It’s not even an apartment. It’s the office. It’s got a Castro, I do fine.”

“That’s ridiculous, you need a real place,” she told him.

“It’s fine,” he told her.

“You don’t have a stove to make yourself some eggs?”

“Look, drop it,” he said, “okay?”

She was happy to get out of the car and walk along the edge of the pool with Cam. He dipped a large square net into the water and skimmed some poplar leaves. No one was swimming in the water or sunbathing in the lounge chairs, and they continued their talk. Cam
told her Darcy wanted custody of Laurence, but he wanted to keep his son.

“I didn’t have any of this trouble with Phil. It was uncontested. Celeste gets to visit the robot, she’s with the robot now,” Margaret said.

“You’re lucky, I wish I had it so easy. They don’t give the kids to the men.”

“It’s changing.”

“Wait, you’re forgetting. I screwed up. Her lawyer says I’ve got an incapacity. An incapacity. Is that something you would say about me?” He jerked the white net through the water trying to get a drifting rubber loop, a hair tie.

“If he means that time in the apartment, well, that’s a long time ago. You were just making a statement, a dramatic gesture, it wasn’t as if—”

“Look, it was nuts. Holding a gun to my head, saying I was going to pull the trigger? Shit, I’d say that was a little more than a dramatic gesture. I didn’t think then I was going to live to this day to worry about it.”

“So that’s Darcy’s idea of evidence? A moment’s instability? She thinks that’s going to wrap things up? An ancient suicide threat years before Laurence was even born?” Margaret said.

“God, will you not use that word! I was just trying to get my point across,” he told her.

“I know, I know,” she told him.

“My lawyer says it’s impossible for me to get more than joint custody.”

“Could you live with that?”

“Are you serious? If I don’t get physical possession
that means Darcy can go anywhere with Laurence. Florida! She talks about going to Fort Lauderdale, can you imagine? She went there on a vacation during spring break in high school, almost fifteen years ago, and she thinks it’s like heaven. I would have to chase after her to see Laurence. It’s a tactic. Some women move around until the fathers give up.”

“She’s bluffing. She won’t move out of town. Get another lawyer.” Margaret picked up a poplar leaf from the tiled gutter. She didn’t know what to tell him.

Cam said, “I don’t mind cleaning the pool. We could hire someone else to do it, there’s lots of pool-maintenance companies, but it saves them money and it calms me to come here. It clears my head,” he told her.

“Let me try it,” she said. She dragged the net through the water. The net was heavy, awkward, even when she collected nothing. “Sometimes I wash the dishes twice just to have some time to think, or I iron something, you know,
ironing my thoughts
,” she told Cam. She pressed Tracy’s handkerchiefs. She liked the heat radiating upward, the fibers scented arid, lemony, near scorching.

Margaret said, “You waited too long to break things off. You were an optimist or a masochist, which?”

“Whatever you want.”

She was sorry to see her brother in trouble. She liked to think of him still single, riding his motorcycles and bringing his friends to the house. She always moped around and tried to sit with them for a few minutes before she was shoved out of the den. She was banished and they took control of the big Zenith stereo console,
a polished wedge-shaped piece of furniture with a hinged lid housing a springy turntable. The boys came with a new forty-five still in its paper sleeve, and sometimes she was invited to listen before she was told to leave them alone. The memory was very old, she realized, the records were proof—a Buddy Holly tune, brand-new, with a skip in it. Her brother and his friends discussed the bubble in the record as if it were the end of the world, but Margaret made them play it through anyway. It sounded absurd; Holly’s ordinary hiccoughing style was increased, exaggerated by an imperfection in the recording. She was included in their rounds of laughter and Margaret returned to the room with her own records. “My Baby Must Be a Magician” by the Marvelettes, but Cam’s friends didn’t like these black singers, and she wasn’t allowed to play them.

When he was alone, Cam invited her into the den to play her records for him. Margaret liked what was called the Philadelphia Wall of Sound. She lip-synced to Ronnie Spector records, lifting her arms over her head in a shaky backstroke, imitating the way she saw it done on dance shows like “Bandstand” and “Summertime at the Pier.” She raised her arm, pointed to the left and right, turned her hip out, and sidestepped forward and back. She liked dancing in front of Cam. He was embarrassed but settled back; he started to smile at her. He looked at her face, looked her right in the eyes and never let his gaze drift over her body. She knew she was testing him somehow; it was a pleasant sensation. She liked her momentary height over him, her control. They understood it, the exchange. When it became too
great, Margaret stopped dancing, stopped the record, and turned around. She closed the lid of the Zenith and sat down on it to face him.