Uncertain Ground (13 page)

Was he at the beach house now stubbornly staring at a canvas, trying to see something, trying to make something?
He’d told me though he always sketched a lot, he never tried to mirror an object when he painted. At times I wondered if he painted partially to push reality out of his head. He might be sitting on the porch staring out to sea, or could he be with his father somewhere else? I didn’t think so, but it was impossible to know, to even imagine how he lived through a whole day as much as I might try.

I used to get Tony Gregory to describe his days in great detail, so I could visualize him in the shower, in his apartment eating breakfast, in class or the library, talking to another student. I had literally memorized his schedule. I wanted to be able to remind myself, “He’s eating lunch now. He’s on his way to that class on contracts. After that he’ll probably go to the library.” Where was he on his way to now? Who was walking through the day with him? Where would he be that evening?

Determined not to think of him, I picked up a book, put it down, and called Leslie.

The Jamaican was sitting on the steps in front of the pier when I got to the seawall. Beside him was his drum. Leslie was nowhere in sight.

“I heard you drumming the other night.”

He looked up. “I didn’t see you.”

“It was late. We just drove by. I was with some people.”

“Come early next time.” He looked away, seemed to draw into himself, to wish, perhaps, I’d leave. A line of conch shells in the shop window above his head gaped like open mouths.

“Would you …? Please tell me your name.”

“I got a lot of names. Here they call me Tom-Tom.” He finally smiled.

“I’ve heard. What do they call you other places?”

“Depends … depends on who’s doing the calling and what place.”

“Jamaica. What did they call you in Jamaica?”

“Cal. My friends call me Cal.”

“I’m Celia.”

“Celia. Your mother name you that?”

“It was her first name. Everybody called her by her middle name, so she gave me her first one.”

“You the first born?”

“Yes.”

Across the street Leslie got out of a car. She waved. The wind blew her dark hair away from her face. Like mine, her hair was cut short except hers curled. The damp air only made it curl more. She had on white shorts and a white shirt neatly tucked in which made her look tidy even when she was windblown.

Later, wading in the surf with her after lunch, I mentioned Tom-Tom.

“He’s here every summer lately.”

“Luis says he has some family here.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Living here you get used to people just showing up. And, except for going off to U T, I’ve always lived on the island.”

Luis hadn’t … he lived there, or in Guanajuato, or in other parts of Mexico, I supposed. I wanted to ask Leslie about him, but asking was awkward. I didn’t know her well. Perhaps she’d be embarrassed by the question. We went to the same university; so did thousands of others. Watching the small waves nibbling at the sand, I fretted inwardly. She was the only person in Galveston I could think to ask, and now that she was here, I couldn’t make myself say anything. I liked her though I hardly knew her. I’d liked her when we first met. Despite the nervous laugh, she was smart and quick. She told me she’d planned to be a counselor at a girls’ camp that summer. Her mother was ill in June, so she’d stayed home. Now, at the last part of the summer, she felt she was only wasting time.

“Mother’s fine now. I run around with Rob and Marion and Jane because I’ve known them always. There’s nothing else left to do till school starts. I’m sick of Galveston. Next summer I’m going to Europe. I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Funny, isn’t it? I had to get out of Leon, so here I am in Galveston.”

We laughed at each other, at ourselves.

She was working on a degree in art history.

“I’ll need an advanced degree before I can do anything much with it. Right now…this fall I’ve got a part time job with an architectural historian … looking up stuff in the library. Actually I’m pretty good at it.” She laughed. “I like finding out about obscure things … how many new chairs Thomas Jefferson ordered for Monticello, what plumbing was like in the early 1900s.”

Her nervous laugh had disappeared. Now she simply smiled.

“That’s my job too, or part of it. I’ll be working at
The Texan
again. I won’t be paid though. Only the editors get paid.”

“I’m really an assistant to the assistant who’s a grad student. And I can’t make enough to go to Europe on. My parents will help, they say. It won’t exactly be the grand tour. I’ll use trains and I’ll bike as much as I can.”

Two other girls I knew in journalism school thought they might work as reporters or go into advertising if they didn’t marry first. Some other friends majored in elementary education, but all of them planned to marry as soon as possible. Leslie was the first girl I’d met who seemed to want to do anything but marry the minute she graduated.

“Maybe I’d like to do that … to go to Europe.”

“On a bicycle?”

“It sounds like fun.” We waded in the surf, sandals in hand. Later that afternoon, our mouths reddened from licking strawberry snow cones, we sat under an umbrella talking, and I found I could ask about Luis.

“Oh God!” Leslie said. “I didn’t know you knew him. Everybody wonders. I mean … it’s possible, but I don’t know, not really. He’s living in Mexico now, isn’t he?”

“Most of the time.”

“It would be hard to be a queer down there, wouldn’t it? I mean macho is it in Mexico. Maybe—” She gave me a long, questioning look. “Maybe he’s both ways.”

“Oh, come on!”

“No. I mean it. Some guys are. They like men and women.”

“How do you know?”

“My brother. He’s older. He’s told me about— About guys like that.”

“Are there many?

“I don’t know.” She looked out to the water then turned back to me. “I don’t guess you could find out in an interview.”

Leslie leaned back, laughing outright, and I laughed with her hoping she hadn’t noticed my light-hearted reaction was a little forced. My naiveté continually embarrassed and astonished me. I would have been glad for an older brother, glad for someone to tell me things. Kenyon never told me anything. He was far too busy getting in and out of trouble, barely making his grades in high school and going away to military school afterward. I knew it was the wrong choice, but he’d had a friend who promised he was going too, then didn’t. He came home miserable and kept coming until he was AWOL most of the time. Of course our father had liked the idea of him going. He had an almost religious belief in the ability of the army to shape up young men, and he didn’t understand Kenyon. None of us did. At times it seemed I knew so little about anything that I moved through the days managing in a half-knowing way, questioning as I went, but sometimes not even knowing I should question. I had only a wisp of knowledge about homosexuality, the one remark the colonel had made about hormones.

Mother never mentioned any other sexual possibilities. All her instructions concerned the possibility of pregnancy, and everyone else’s mother in Leon was the same. It was a wonder, I decided, that any of the girls I’d grown up with were interested in sex at all. Tony Gregory said all the warnings, all the secrecy, all the repetition of “nice girls don’t” only made us more interested. I’d laughed at him, then agreed. The forbidden enticed. I was fearful of what I’d find out; at the same time I was determined to know. Was that why I was so curious about Luis? Everybody wonders, Leslie had said.

“Listen, have you ever—” I made little circles in the sand with one finger. “In the library. Have you ever looked it up?”

She looked out at the ocean again and shook her head slightly. “Not here … not in the school library. When could you? I mean … you wouldn’t have wanted anybody— Oh, they didn’t have that kind of information in our high school library! Or if they did, we never could find it. At the university there’s plenty. They’ve got Freud and Ellis, stuff like that, but what can you really learn about sex in books?”

She sounded so sophisticated I was embarrassed all over again, so embarrassed I was half-angry at Leslie, half-angry at myself because of my ignorance. I insisted, “Something. You found out something! Anything would be better than total stupidity. Better for me anyway. I’ve got a brother, but he’s too much younger to tell me anything, and he probably wouldn’t if he knew.”

“What about Emmett? Doesn’t he—”

“The king of the cowboys? Oh, he only knows the usual stuff—men and women. He knows the words for the others … probably what they do, or some of it. He doesn’t like Luis anyway. Boys like Emmett—” I shrugged. “He hardly wants to be believe it’s l953. He wants to think it’s 1880, and he just rode into town to hit the whorehouses and saloons.”

“I know. He got Rob to take him over to Post Office Street.”

“Did he?”

“Yeah. The other night … after the rodeo.”

I started to tell her I thought he’d been with Jane and caught myself. Leslie was Jane’s friend, one of her oldest friends. Obviously Emmett hadn’t been there all night. I wondered how Post Office Street was different from Nuevo Laredo, but I wasn’t about to ask him.

We were all dressing in the big upstairs bedrooms. Aunt Bertha, whose collecting passions seemed to ebb and surge like tides, had at one time been struck by the desire for Victorian
dressers; the three she’d bought had been stationed, one on her side of the room, two on our side. I’d used the mirror over the sink in the bathroom to put on make-up. It felt funny, like a tight mask on top of my tan, but there wasn’t time to wash it off. We’d had to take turns getting dressed in there. Now I had trouble seeing if my slip was showing in my dresser’s high mirror. I looked up to catch Emmett, his back to me, frowning at a spot of dried blood on his chin. Uncle Mowrey, over on his side, stood engrossed in the problem of spacing thinning hair over his scalp while sharing his dresser with Aunt Bertha who screwed and unscrewed tops of a collection of small bottles on the marble top and muttered about her make-up. We could have been mother, father, brother and sister, a family like my own, though my own never finished dressing in a room together. Mother might come to my doorway, or I might walk through Kenyon’s room, but whenever we wanted, we stayed in our own rooms and shut our doors. Here that privacy was impossible.

I backed further away from the mirror and still couldn’t see the hem of my skirt.

“Is my slip showing?”

“Just a minute,” said Emmett. He and Uncle Mowrey had begun tying their ties. Both of them leaned toward the center of their mirrors, Mowrey threading his tie through the knot efficiently, Emmett struggling with his like a man who’d decided to hang himself and be done with it.

Aunt Bertha kept dabbing on lipstick with one finger. Every time she missed the outline of her lips she used another tissue.

“Why don’t you go downstairs, Celia, and look at yourself in that full length mirror in the living room?” She crumpled another tissue in her hand and let it fall on the small withered pile in front of her.

After avoiding that mirror since the first day I’d been there, I had no intention of running downstairs to use it. The distortion I knew I’d find would spook me again.

“It isn’t true,” I said.

“It’s true enough to see whether a petticoat is showing or not.”

Emmett turned around. “It isn’t showing.”

I put my hands over my eyes. “Aggh!”

“What’s wrong with you, Celia?’

“You can’t wear that tie!” I peeped out at him between crossed fingers.

“Why not? It’s a perfectly good tie!”

“It’s perfectly hideous!”

Uncle Mowrey looked up from the coat he was brushing and Bertha, clutching her glasses in one hand, twisted around to see. We all waited until she put her glasses on and lifted them higher up on her nose.

“Lord!”

The tie, much wider than anyone wore, was a painted monster with a covered wagon and horses roaring down its full length. A cloud of yellow dust followed two brown horses and a bright red wagon. Green prickly pear grew on either side of the yellow and brown road.

Uncle Mowrey cleared his throat but said nothing.

Aunt Bertha said, “It’s … it’s a little active.”

I went to the corner closet to search for the tie Aunt Earlene must have selected for him to wear with his new navy suit.

“You won’t find it.” Emmett waited behind me. “Mother forgot to pack my tie, I guess. I bought this one this morning.”

“Why don’t you borrow one of Uncle Mowrey’s?” I whispered.

“I’m not going to borrow anybody’s tie. If I’ve got to wear one, it’s going to be one of my own.”

I pushed the closet door shut. “All right. Wear it then. I hope you choke on it.”

“You children!” said Aunt Bertha.

We walked over to her part of the room, Emmett looking correct and sober, his tie splotched on his white shirt. My cheeks were flushed, and my hair fell wildly over my forehead. I ran my fingers through it.

Bertha handed me a brush. “Here.” She smiled. “Luis might be there. His father gambles at the Balinese often.”

Emmett, obviously pretending not to hear, stared at the ceiling.

“All right then. Let’s go.” Aunt Bertha led the way.

A parade. That’s what we were, the fat lady first followed by clowns. Oh, look at the one with the funny tie. Oh, look at the one with the funny hair. And there’s the ringmaster following.

Uncle Mowrey, holding the rolled newspaper he’d been reading while Emmett and I quarreled, tapped the banister with it as we marched downstairs.

I was wearing the first dress and high heels I’d had on since arriving in Galveston and felt hampered by so many clothes. My slip clung to me. Stockings and garter belt encased all my lower body, and in place of the knotted shirt I usually wore, a belt was tightly buckled around my waist. My dress outlined my breasts; a necklace coiled around my neck. I would have gladly kicked off the shoes and ripped the binding layers of clothes away. Everything scratched, slid, irritated. I thought longingly of the pleasures of nakedness, of women who tied a piece of cotton around their hips and sauntered barefoot on island sands … islands far away where no one wore make-up and where no nightclubs existed. Surely there was an island left somewhere without a nightclub. I’d looked forward to going to the Balinese Room. Now I didn’t want to go at all, not even to see Luis.