Beyond Deserving (10 page)

Michael is a man who once made maps, not voyages; who is careful and thorough and loyal and uncritical. And if there is a single central philosophy to his life, it is that we are all out on the sea of life on inner tubes, so that fate becomes a matter of luck and the currents, and maybe a bit of pluck. We're all just flotsam. Some of us have drifted out, farther into the sea, and others have ended up onshore, like Michael, who finds that it suits him to have hard ground under his feet. But Michael also likes a view of the sea, and he has a feeling for the lost souls out there, who are welcome as anything to his hearth, if they show up.

And he means for that to mean Carter, too.

It comes down to this: Carter is eighteen years old and he has had all the making his parents can effect. If he fucks and runs, it won't be because they didn't tell him about contraception. It won't be because Michael won't tell Ursula how he really feels about things. It will be because of something in Carter, some predisposition, as to fat or depression, and because he has made his own choices about who he will be, which might not include looking out for other people.

This is what Ursula most dreads: not that Carter will fail English and embarrass her, not that he will lose his scholarships and cost her more money, not that his room will spontaneously ignite, but that he will turn out to be someone she wouldn't want near her daughter, a stranger to the values she holds dear, to trust and compassion. It is easier to blame Michael and take it back every time Carter causes them trouble. Meanwhile all she knows to do is to watch her son for signs of vulnerability and tenderness and, finding none, begin sadly to sink into a bog of relief that, at least, he will soon be gone.

She clears away some of the debris from Carter's room. She fills trash cans from his room, hers, and the bathroom, and lines them up in the hall where he cannot miss them. She turns his mattress and puts on a bottom sheet, then fluffs the soiled comforter and smooths it out, darker side up. She kicks dirty socks and underwear into a pile with her foot, and puts pop cans outside the door. Using one of his undershirts, she wipes whatever surfaces show. She opens his windows wide, then she sits wearily on the bed. From her perch she sees that his Apple is the only neat thing in the room. It sits on a small white iron computer table with a cover over it. Sometimes Carter works at it all night. He is brilliant in math, already far more than just a competent programmer. Supposedly on this machine he composed his thesis about extraterrestrial architects.

She notices a title on the spine of a book on his desk:
Mysterious Phenomena of the
—She can't see the rest, and doesn't care. Maybe her son really does believe in such things. She hears that that is all teenage boys read, sci-fi and fantasy. Maybe Carter sees himself in a spaceship, whirling out into the galaxy, away from his ordinary world. Who can say it won't happen?

Only, the Apple seems so much like Carter's brain, tidily covered, while the rest of his room languishes in filth. Still, he
could
do anything. He has his whole life ahead. That is why Michael doesn't worry. He can remember being young. Michael never had the chance for youth; maybe what he remembers is how sad it is to grow up too fast.

She decides she will wake Carter in the morning before she leaves for work, and tell him he is to spend every single moment of the weekend at the dining room table writing his paper,
in longhand
. Only after she approves it can he transfer it to that machine. Or else—what? He fails English, of course. Let him dwell on a summer of eight o'clock classes.

Of course he should go to the Fishers' party. And she will be gone all day, unable to supervise. She will have to count on the power of natural consequences to keep him working.

Maybe Mrs. Angstrom is going to teach summer school. She could threaten him with that.

She looks up and sees Michael standing at the door, shaking his head.

“Go on and say it,” she says. When he stays silent, she says, “I'm not mad at you.”

“Why would you be?” He puts his hand out for her to take, and makes a big show of hauling her off the bed. She falls against him as she comes to her feet, then regains her balance.

“I decided against spaghetti, Ursie. That salad stuff died days ago. Let's walk down to the Thai Rose.” The Thai deli, a few blocks away, has good hot, cheap food. Even Fish says it is “fairly authentic”; he orders in Thai.

“What about Juliette?”

“Call her. We'll bring her leftovers.”

“I could leave her a note.”

Michael nods.

“And Michael. Do you think Carter is—all right?”

“You've done just fine, Ursula.”

“I didn't ask about me.”

Michael kisses her cheek. “Right,” he says, and then, “Let's go eat. I'm starved.”

18

They eat dishes with lemongrass and peanuts and hot peppers. The fish has a crunchy skin. They concentrate on eating, speaking little except to say this was tasty, this spicy, did you like it. Michael eats chili sauce on his fish, and smiles as tears pour down his cheeks. Ursula loves him for eating the sauce. He laughs at her when stray noodles hang out of her mouth.

Over a pale bitter tea, he mentions that his mother called. He talked to her while Ursula was in Carter's room.

“She was upset because he was out late last night.”

“But isn't Tuesday his AA night?”

“And he went. But he brought somebody home, and you can imagine Mom let them both know what she thought of that.” Geneva would have shut herself in her bedroom with the television on high volume, huffing loudly enough to be heard through a closed door. “So Pop gave this old guy a ride home to the VA domiciliary, and I guess they must have talked a lot. Evidently Pop's done this before. Got all caught up talking to some old fart. It drives Mom crazy.”

“So how late was he?”

Michael didn't think to ask.

“Everything is relative, right?” Ursula says. “Gully usually goes to bed at nine, maybe ten on Tuesdays. So ‘late' could have been ten-thirty.”

“He was gone this morning before she got up. Without breakfast. That shook her up.”

“Maybe he had two dollars in his pocket and went to the cafe.”

“Maybe. He goes off in his truck, though.”

Ursula gets a couple of cartons from the Thai girl lounging on a stool by the register, and scrapes food into them. To her dismay, she finds herself wondering if the girl is a good student, the way Asian children are said to be.

“You know, Michael, it sounds like your mother needs to complain. All those years she didn't. Why now? What's your poor pop going to do to get in trouble?” Geneva lamented to Ursula recently that Gully doesn't clip his toenails anymore. She says they will get ingrown. Ursula thinks she was hoping Michael would volunteer to hold his father down.

“He wanders off for longer and longer periods of time. Mom is worried he's getting senile.”

“She's worried he's regaining a little independence!” Ursula says testily, and wonders why she should care that much.

Michael pulls out his wallet. “I haven't got enough cash on me.”

Ursula pays.

It is dark outside but not cold. “I love this time of year,” Ursula says. “The orchards have budded, they're so pretty now.”

Two boys, maybe ten years old, are scuffling on the walk as Ursula and Michael go by. “Fuck you, asshole!” one of them yells. Ursula says, “Go home, both of you!” She hopes Michael won't scold her for her outburst. The instinct for authority in her does sometimes seem silly. But evidently he didn't even notice.

“Are you supposed to
do
something now, Michael?”

She thinks Geneva ought to find a group to join. Quilting. Herb drying. Some AA affiliated program. Anything. She needs to tell stories and get support. Or maybe better yet,
not
get any.

“I do wonder what's going on with Pop.”

“It's spring. Gully has a little sap left.”

“Don't be stupid.” Michael is offended.

“Christ, Michael, I didn't mean women. I meant life.”

“Mom's worried.”

“Why don't you ask him what he's doing. Ask him what's on his mind these days? Why doesn't Geneva ask him? Don't they talk?”

Michael chews on his moustache as they walk. Ursula would like to take his arm, but he walks with his hands shoved down in his pockets, like a scholar weighing a mighty theory.

The whole dialogue could be reversed. If neither spoke for a few more moments, they could easily pick it up again, with opposite views. Sometimes she defends Geneva, and Michael stands up for Gully. Sometimes, like now, it gets off on the other foot. She tries to realize the incredible reality of Geneva's fifty years as Gully's wife. Her own twenty years as Michael's seem to have gone by so fast.

“Why do we talk about your parents so much?” she asks.

“They've only got me. I told you, Ursula.”

So he has, more than once. So he did, when he moved his own family to the Rogue Valley so that he could take care of his parents.

Ursula was perfectly happy in Portland. She loved her work. She loved the people who worked with her. She loved the house her father helped them into. (She wouldn't like it now; it wasn't much of a house, but she didn't know that then.) Michael said. “Pop's falling apart, what will she do?” and they moved. There was never any talk of bringing his parents back to Portland. That would have been worse.

Poor Juliette, Ursula thinks. There would have been so much more for her in the city. But who could have known? She was a toddler when they made the move.

Ursula stops in front of a house she particularly likes, a rather ordinary two-story house, maybe forty-five or fifty years old. The owners have painted it turquoise and yellow, with panels of brilliantly colored fabric at the window. “What would you think of painting our house?” she asks Michael.

He runs his hands through his hair, pushing it back from habit, though it is short now. “Gray?”

Gray! “Oh when will you be done taking care of them!” she bursts out. What she really wants is to be young again, drinking wine and making love on Indian bedspreads. She wants a yellow house. Of course she has middle-class tastes now. She has china. And Michael has his parents. She respects him for his sense of responsibility; she hopes Carter will learn from it. She just wishes Geneva's needs were fewer. She hopes that what she senses is a delicate balance in the Fisher family will hold.

Michael answers coolly. “I'll be done when they die.”

She wonders if he has always known that, or if he came to realize it over time. Maybe he minds but he can't do anything about it. He does what is right. Maybe it is fair. Maybe parents earn this by not pouring hot soup over your head, or beating you to death. And Michael has his brother's share to do, and his dead sister's.

She remembers sitting at her father's bedside in the house in Evanston as he fell away before her eyes. He had been a professor, an expert on certain Chinese dynasties. “Be sure you go,” he told her. He meant China. She wonders what it was like all those years he couldn't see anything he longed to see, and then it turned out Nixon opened the doors. Pukey Nixon. Her father sent a photograph of himself his wife, Sheila, took outside the Forbidden City. Her father looked ecstatic.

She tried to talk to him as he was dying. She stayed a week that last time. She wanted to read him Sylvia Plath's poem “Daddy,” and thank him for seeing her grown. She wanted to say, “I never had any complaint.” She wanted him to know he hadn't taken her from her mother, and that it was nobody's fault she wasn't ambitious, as he was ambitious for her.

She managed some of those things. She said enough to understand that he already knew. “Take care of your mother,” he said, and immediately amended the admonition. “Well, look in on her.”

Clare doesn't need taking care of, but plenty of the world does.

“I'm going to take Juliette to France and Italy next spring, she told her father. Like her mother had done with her when she was fourteen. She thought her father winced, though it could have been the pain. She remembered sitting with her mother, drinking iced coffee in a cafe in Nice. Her mother asked her, “Are you terribly disappointed in the beach?” and when Ursula said the beach was fine, her mother added, as though it were an afterthought, “Your father and I are divorcing.” Ursula was angry, terribly angry, and shocked (no, she hadn't seem it coming; her parents were so polite, and they cared for one another), and she screamed out at her mother, who was there to take the brunt of it. “I'm not going to live with you!” Her mother smiled and said, “That's okay, Ursula. I'm going to move back to Seattle.”

Had her father minded? Bringing up that memory, with talk of a new generation's trip to the Louvre? He had a good second marriage, to a woman much better suited to the sweet dull ritual of an academic's life. Her mother has made a good life of her own in Seattle, full of the eccentricity of artists (she was an agent, and a gallery manager), and later, when she needed more security, in a position as a registrar of a fine arts college.

“Maybe you and Michael—” her father said. Evidently he still meant China. “There'll be money for you.” She had assumed that was so, but she couldn't bear to hear him talk of it.

“That's wonderful,” she said, because he wanted her to, but it sounded terrible. “China. Of course we'll go.”

“I want him to have my maps,” her father said next. Michael had once wanted to be a cartographer. Ursula wept. She didn't know if Michael would care, though he did, when he got the maps. Some are very old and valuable. It showed that her father had taken Michael seriously, more seriously than Michael. Michael has been happy to make a perfectly ordinary life, teaching kids other people didn't like. The maps nearly broke Ursula's heart.