Flesh and Blood (8 page)

Now she belonged to her father.

Zoe hung back, embarrassed, but Billy punched Susan's arm and said, “You should get the goddamn purple heart for this. I mean, the whole rest of your life is going to seem safe and tame compared to this.”

She didn't want to be this rancorous girl, standing with a single rose under crepe-paper bunting in the cafeteria as the band played “Cherish.” If she couldn't win she wanted at least to be blase like Marcia, who stood at the edge of the dance floor proud as a captive Amazon, surrounded by her friends—tough girls in makeup and short skirts—and by Eddie Gagliostra, an ill-tempered, handsome boy who was, in Marcia's own words, only good for one thing. One of her girlfriends said loudly, “Let's duck into the ladies' for a smoke,
Princess,”
and Marcia laughed. Maybe she'd prove mean enough to escape her fate, the two-story brick apartment building, the wild husband who couldn't keep a job. Before she left for her cigarette Eddie whispered something to her and she smiled knowingly. Eddie had thick lips and a broken nose, a curl of oily hair that trembled on his forehead. Susan pretended to be listening to Dottie Wiggins but in fact she imagined what it would be like to be Marcia, later that evening, drunk and naked in a car or a borrowed bedroom. She imagined Eddie—those fat, obscene lips. Dottie Wiggins was saying something about college and Susan thought of Eddie, of the sneering self-satisfied pleasure he would take in making a girl lose control. He broke into houses, bullied the younger boys. He had twice menaced Billy in the locker room. Susan imagined the sinews of his arms and thighs, his insolent tongue, the spare hard muscles of his chest and stomach. She returned, flushed, to Dottie Wiggins, who was saying, “—Tufts is a better school but the University of Colorado would be a lot more fun and I think there's a lot to be said for having fun, don't you?”

“I don't think anybody around here has any fun, really,” Susan said. “I think we've all just learned to make a lot of noise together and call it fun.”

Dottie looked at her suspiciously. “Well,” she said, “if you want to get all
tragic
and everything.”

Susan twirled the rose in her hands. “No, honey,” she said. She had never called another girl 'honey' before. 'Honey' was what Marcia called people she considered drips. “No, I don't want to get tragic. I want to have fun, real fun. I honestly do.”

She knew what she was doing. She was starting the story: Susan Stassos got nasty about failing to win. Dottie would tell everyone. She was a good mimic and she would do Susan, standing tense at the edge of the dance floor, twirling her rose and saying, in a voice Dottie would borrow from Marlene Dietrich, 'Honey, no vun hass any fon, not reeely.'

“Well,” Dottie said. “There's no real trick to it. Fun's the easiest thing in the world, especially for someone like you.”

“Someone like me,” she said.

She thought about going home that night. Would her father be awake? Would he have been drinking? Now that she was less than she'd been, how could she ever say no? How could she ever say yes?

Todd returned from whatever duty he'd been attending to. “Hey, Sooz,” he said. “Hi, Dottie.”

“Hi, Todd,” Dottie said brightly, mockingly. She was racked by envy, electrified by it, and her efforts to be brisk and fun and carefree had eaten her flesh nearly to the bone.

“Sooz, you want to go outside for a minute?” Todd asked. “It's a nice night, I wouldn't mind a little breath of air.”

“All right,” Susan said. “See you later, Dottie.”

“See you,” Dottie said, and as Susan left with Todd she knew Dottie was already looking for someone to tell the story to.
No vun hass any fon, not reeely.

Susan went with Todd to the asphalt square immediately outside the cafeteria, where students were officially permitted to go if they left the dance. Beyond the square, which was mercilessly lit, stood the mullioned bulk of the gym and, beyond that, the empty football field. Several other couples whispered in the blaring circle of light. They registered Todd's and Susan's presence, shifted slightly. One, an ambitious boy from the junior class, abandoned his date to shake Todd's hand and discuss his own upcoming campaign for next year's presidency. “Congratulations, Susan,” the boy added. Susan thanked him. Rays of deep red from her cheerleading sweater skimmed through the blinding air as Todd disengaged himself from the boy and led her to the far edge of the light. Out in the soft black, cigarettes flared. Scraps of cloud sped past the moon.

“What a night,” Todd said.

“Mm-hm. To tell you the truth, I'm glad it's almost over.”

He paused. He had something to say. Susan thought, 'If he's been practicing a consolation speech for me, I'll break up with him.' She hoped he would. She was ready to scream.

“Sooz?” he said. “Susan?”

“Yes?”

She twirled the rose, insolently. He was going to advise her to think of this as a learning experience, to thank God for giving her a chance to strengthen her character. She thought of Marcia, called 'princess' as a joke. Marcia moving out into the world, powerful and free.

“Well, you see,” Todd said, “I've been thinking.”

“Mm.”

“About next year. You know. We didn't apply to any of the same schools. And now it's too late.”

“I know.”

“And we haven't really talked about that.”

“That's right. We haven't.”

“So I've been thinking. Suzy. Wherever I go, I want you to come with me. If it's Yale, you know. Or Princeton.”

His face reddened, and his eyes took on a rheumy, unhealthy cast. She had never seen him flustered like this, except when they had sex. Suddenly she wanted to help him reestablish himself, to find his way back.

“What are you saying?” she asked softly.

“I guess. It seems like I'm saying I want us to get married. You and me. I want to marry you.”

The blood rushed to her head. All she could think of was, This is happening now, right now.' Someone wanted to marry her. He was asking her now, outside the cafeteria, on the night of her defeat. She thought, 'I'm not ready for this. This shouldn't be happening here.'

“Oh, Todd,” she said. “I don't know.”

“You don't know if you want to get married? Or you don't know if you want to marry me?”

“Well, both. No, forget I said that. This is just—well,
could
we?”

She didn't know what she meant by that. She wanted to be told whether getting married was something a person like her could do. She wanted to know if Todd was the kind of boy you married.

“Well, yeah,” he said, and he managed a smile. “We could, if you wanted to.”

“My father,” she said.

“I know he's old-fashioned,” Todd said. “I'd talk to him. I'd be very—”

Then Susan knew the answer. She knew what to do.

She was going somewhere. If she and Todd went home that night and announced their engagement, she'd have a new language to say no in. She'd be protected.

“We could,” she said. “Yes. This is really something we could do, isn't it?”

“Sure,” Todd said, and laughed affectionately. “We can absolutely, positively do it.”

His poise was back. His forthright, practiced Toddness.

“We could do it,” Susan said. “Oh, sure. Let's get married.”

“Really? You really want to?”

“Yes. Oh, yes. Right away.”

“Right away?”

“Well, as soon as we graduate. I can wear the veil under my mortarboard, we can go straight to the church after we get our diplomas.”

“You're funny,” he said. “You know that? You're a funny girl.”

1969/
Mary wrote on the envelope the phone bill came in: I will not steal. She put the pledge in writing. But she 'went on stealing. She didn't know why she did it. She remembered the first day, in Englehart's. She'd gone to look at stationery for Susan's wedding invitations, just to see if Englehart's stocked anything decent or if she and Susan would have to drive to New York. The salesgirl, young, tentatively pretty under too much base, had shown her the samples. Ordinary cream, a yellowish ivory, a blue milky and shallow as a bus ticket. Borders trimmed with lilies, with doves and spectral white bells. Englehart's wouldn't do. She'd have to take Susan to the city after all. Mary thanked the salesgirl, told her she'd think about it. As she rose from her seat at the counter she knew herself to be an attractive woman in her late thirties, carrying a good navy clutch and graciously rejecting the wares of a store that hired salesgirls like this one, a girl whose common prettiness was wearing away with her youth. In her own youth Mary had seen women like herself, prosperous wives who kindly and firmly rejected the merchandise in neighborhood stores. As she stood, as the sheer satin of her slip fell with liquid ease over her nylons, she saw herself with such clarity she might have been standing outside her own body. She might have been the salesgirl, watching as a woman of stature and property, a woman who wrapped all her gifts perfectly, withdrew from the local stationery store, where the quality was not of the best. Mary's heart rose and she knew a calm, shimmering satisfaction that hovered inside her and then turned to uncertainty, quick as a shattered plate. Her older daughter, an acknowledged beauty, was about to marry a handsome boy on his way to Yale. It was a triumph to have a daughter like that and yet, even as it delighted Mary, Susan's good fortune seemed also to diminish her in some way. She worried that when they appeared in public together she looked fraudulent beside her daughter. She suspected Susan found her sad and slightly humorous. She reminded herself, with a pang of guilt and pleasure, that Susan had not been elected queen. As Mary walked toward the door she heard the salesgirl close the sample book; she heard the heavy muffled thump of the cover. On her way out she stopped to look at address books, because it had occurred to her that Billy was getting to an age when he might need one. The address books Englehart's stocked were second-rate. Their covers were simulated leather, their bindings indifferently glued. Mary stood frowning over one of the books, bound in oxblood plastic, emblazoned with the golden word
Addresses,
the final s of which had already begun to chip. It was such a flimsy thing, so beneath her, that she felt foolish even looking at it. She glanced around, saw that no one was watching, and almost before she knew she would do it she slipped the address book into her bag. Her forehead burned. Calmly, walking as herself, in heels and pearl earrings, she left the store with the tacky little address book hidden in her bag, its price tag still attached. The tag, when she looked at it, said that the book had cost ninety-nine cents.

She didn't know why she'd done it. She didn't want the awful address book. It had not been covetousness she'd felt; the impulse had had more to do with cleaning up. Afterward she'd felt a nervous sensation of relief, as if some promise of bad luck—some debt—had been forestalled but not fully answered. Now she had the address book, this insubstantial thing, and she wasn't sure what to do with it. She couldn't give it to Billy, but she found that she couldn't quite bring herself to throw it away, either. She'd risked so much for it. She removed the price tag and tucked the little book into her top drawer, thinking maybe she'd give it to someone someday. Eventually, she'd be able to put it to some kind of use.

Since then, she'd stolen any number of little things, and always felt the same queasy satisfaction, as if she'd risked herself to create a little more cleanliness and order. The stealing was a minor aspect of her life. It occupied roughly the same interior space a dull hobby would, or the occasional perusal of
National Geographic,
with its simultaneous suggestions that the regions of the earth were unutterably strange and yet, in the final analysis, all more or less alike. Mary lost herself in the plans for Susan's wedding, which demanded endless decisions right down to the rosebuds on the cake. The wedding was so much, it weighed so heavily on her lungs, that she finally asked her doctor if something might be wrong with her and was given a prescription for pale yellow pills. She took a pill on the day of the wedding itself, and was surprised that for an instant, as Susan stood at the altar with Todd, she felt a stab of anger sharp enough to penetrate the pill's sweet flotation. The anger was sourceless—just nerves, she'd tell herself later—and seemed to have to do with Susan's white dress, with the placid handsomeness of Todd's square face as he bent to kiss her. Nerves, Mary thought, and the inevitable fears on a mother's part about her daughter's happiness, given all she herself had learned about what can go wrong.

The wedding was flawless, except for the guests. It had of course been necessary to invite the people who worked for Constantine, and they were for the most part boisterous men in cheap, outdated suits, escorting wives who were variously cowed or shrill but were, in every instance, badly dressed. With the help of Todd's father, Mary had rented the ballroom at the country club, and had had it impeccably decorated with urns of white lilacs and centerpieces of cream-colored roses. She'd enlisted a caterer to provide Rock Cornish game hens, wild rice, and French-cut string beans with slivered almonds for over two hundred. She had made no mistakes, and now into her white-and-cream reception marched a brigade of foremen who'd been hired specifically because they could bully other men into building houses as quickly and cheaply as possible. They were married to just the kind of women you'd expect: brassy, in loud dresses and too much jewelry, their hair teased and tortured into great stiff piles on top of their heads. Todd's mother and his two aunts wore simple page boys and dressed in pure colors, and Mary suffered over her own French twist. Her dress was frosted pink—she silently thanked God she had decided against a ruffle at the bodice. As she danced with Billy, who was straight-backed and self-conscious in his blue gabardine suit, she watched Susan laughing with two of her bridesmaids, and it seemed that Susan had gone to another country, where all the girls were effortlessly thin and beautiful and all the boys had futures sturdy as suspension bridges. Even through the graceful hush of the pill she felt, again, a little storm of emotion that might have been anger and might have been fear. She didn't want either feeling, not on a day like this. She concentrated on her daughter's beauty, her remarkable ease and charm. This one, at least, was safe. Mary hummed along with the band, a few bars of “Begin the Beguine.” She said to Billy, “Seems like the wedding's a success.”

He said, “I guess any wedding's a success, huh? I mean, as long as they really get married, it's worked.”

“If that was all that mattered, they could've gone to a justice of the peace and saved your father about five thousand dollars.”

“C'mon. Did this shindig really cost five grand?”

“You'd be surprised how things add up. You kids have no idea.”

He whistled. “Five grand,” he said. “For one party.”

“When you get married,” she said, “your father'll be off the hook. Your wife's family will have to pay.”

“When I get married,” he said, “we'll go to a justice of the peace. If somebody wants to fork over five thousand bucks, we'll take the cash and spend, like, a year in Europe.”

“The girl you marry may feel differently.”

“I wouldn't marry somebody who felt that differently.”

The number ended, and Billy walked Mary back to her table. As she walked with her hand on her son's elbow, Mary's pink shoes shed their cool minty light against the indigo carpet of the country-club ballroom. This was her son, on his way to Harvard. She was conscious of his new height, the size of his hands. She loved him so. He was still hers, the most intelligent of her children, full of promise and afflicted with a ravaged complexion that only increased the terrible weight of her love. He was at once ethereal and painfully human. He, alone among her children, suffered hurts and prides she could read.

That night she lay in bed in her nightgown, watching Constantine undress. His body, gone slack and hairy, now inspired in her a tenderness that had almost as much to do with motherhood as it did with passion. Her husband might have been her oldest child, a difficult and obstreperous boy who lived outside the realm of her control. She could love him, more or less, when she thought of him as a wayward boy, one who occasionally did harm to others, who was subject to violent fits of temper, but whose decent heart would outlive his youthful fury. In his middle age Constantine had turned boyish, and she lived with him that way, as a boy with a pudgy body and a petulant streak. Wearing only his Jockey shorts, he sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Well, there she goes. She's married.”

“Mm-hm.” Mary still inhabited the outer edge of the yellow pill, its soft declining side. The world retained its feathery aspect.

“Married,” Constantine said.

“I think the wedding went fine, don't you?” Mary said. “I had a few doubts about the band, but really, on the whole I think it was a real success.”

Constantine rose without speaking, put his pajamas on over his shorts. He had had a few during the reception, he was moving with elaborate caution, but Mary didn't think about that. She thought about the wedding she'd produced, a sit-down dinner for over two hundred. She tried not to worry about its coarse aspects: the off-color toast made by Constantine's partner, the foreman who'd argued with a wife in a dress crawling with fuchsia flowers. She tried not to imagine the future weddings of Susan's bridesmaids, girls whose families Mary scarcely knew because she was an Italian woman married to a Greek construction man. None of Todd's people had gotten drunk.

“I could have done without Nick Kazanzakis's toast,” she said. The hard edges were returning. “What's the matter with him? A toast like that, at a wedding.”

“Nick's all right,” Constantine said. “He likes a little joke. Nobody minded.”

“Betty Emory minded. I was sitting right beside her. I saw her go stiff.”

“Fuck Betty Emory. She's got a stick up her ass, just look at her.”

“Oh, lovely. That's a very nice thing to say about a lady. I'll tell you one thing, she
is
a lady. Which was not true of about half the women there today.”

Constantine got into bed. The smell of liquor was mixed with his old personal smells.

“Let's not fight,” he said. “Not tonight.”

“Fine. I'd be delighted to not fight.”

He pulled the covers up to his chest. She saw how haggard his face looked, how worn. He was getting older.

“This was our daughter's wedding day,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Now her name is Mrs. Emory. Susan Emory.”

“I know.”

She turned off the light. The room went black, and pieces of objects slowly materialized: half of Mary's vanity with its oval mirror, the nearer legs of the chaise on which no one ever sat. Mary lay looking at the room, her mind so tangled with thoughts that she might have been thinking of nothing at all. The bedside clock put out its buzz. There was something else, a strange sound she thought at first was coming from outside but which she realized was the sound of Constantine weeping beside her. He was turned away, and she laid her hand on his back, which was covered with the broad stripes of his pajamas.

“Con?” she said. He didn't answer.

“Con? Are you all right?”

“I'm okay,” he said thickly.

“Con, what is it?”

“Nothing.”

“It can't be nothing.”

A minute passed, filled only with the sound of his weeping. She thought, My life is going on outside me. I don't know anything about it.

He said, “I can't believe she's really gone.”

His own words seemed to inspire in him a fresh wave of sobs, and his crying had a tone that was not quite fleshly, a sound like wet paper tearing. She hadn't heard him cry in years. Mary was sympathetic and irritated, to almost equal degrees.

“She isn't gone,” she said. “She just has a life of her own now. New Haven isn't so very far away.”

“She's gone,” Constantine said. “She isn't ours anymore.”

“Well, she hasn't really been ours for a long time, has she?”

“She's been mine,” Constantine said.

Mary understood. She pushed the thought away.

“You're just tired,” she said. “And you've had too much to drink. Everything will be okay in the morning.”

He turned and faced her. In the dimness, distorted by weeping, his face looked haunted, ancient. Mary saw, with awful clarity, what he would look like when he was helpless, and needed her care to survive.

“Please,” he said. He held out his arms and, when she did not move into his embrace, he took her and pressed his hot wet face onto her neck. “Please,” he said.

“You're just tired,” she said. “And drunk.”

“I'm more than that,” he said. “Oh, God.” He kissed her neck, took her chin in his hand and put his lips on hers. They hadn't made love in—what?—six months? Longer? Tonight would not be the night, not as far as she was concerned. Long ago, she'd started winning the battle with her own feelings. For years now she'd felt desire closing down in her, the lights going out like the lights of a household preparing itself for sleep. At moments, lying right here in this bed, she'd fallen into a panic. This was her fate being made; this was the future stitching itself onto her skin. There would be no other life than this. The feelings, the fear itself, had come to seem familiar to her—they were part of what she meant when she used the words 'my life.' Now, tonight, she was in no mood to change her life. Not with Constantine maudlin and drunk, not after a day as wearing as this had been.

She disengaged her mouth and said, “Honey, go to sleep. You'll feel better in the morning.”

“I can't sleep,” he said.