Beyond Deserving (11 page)

19

When they arrive home Juliette is lying across her bed, crying over her French. Ursula looks over Juliette's shoulder at the book. The chapter is focused on the
passé composé
with irregular verbs, but Ursula knows that what is giving Juliette trouble is that she has never bothered to learn new nouns as masculine and feminine, and now they are piling up on her. A matter of
le
or
la
can ruin your life in French. It is hard not to say I told you so.

“If you want, I can look it over.” Poor Juliette looks miserable. She suffers over small things. Dancing, she is radiant.

“Go away.”

Ursula goes downstairs. Tears spurt onto her cheeks. She misses her father tonight, she is tired. She knows better than to get upset over a fifteen-year-old girl's tantrums.

Michael is putting away the take-home packages. “Juliette doesn't seem to be hungry,” she says.

Ursula thinks he gives her a rather superior look. He has warned her that she is a glutton for punishment. Doesn't she know to steer clear of hot stoves, growling dogs, teenage daughters?

Michael goes into the living room, puts on a tape (with earphones), and settles down to read a
Natural History
. In a moment Pajamas comes along and noses the magazine out of the way, then settles down between Michael's thighs. Michael's hand strokes the cat's head and back idly. His eyes close. The magazine slides to the floor. His mind is probably empty of everything except the music. He can actually
not think
. He considers it stubbornness on her part that she does not have the same ability to escape.

Upstairs, Ursula runs a very deep hot bath in the old clawfoot tub. When they bought this house, which before them was owned by a chiropractor who practiced downstairs in what is now the dining room, Ursula had the nice fiberglass tub taken out. She drove all over the valley until she found an old tub. She thinks of it as hers.

She is soaking when Juliette comes in.

“Mother?” Juliette says in a little girl's voice.

“Hi, dear.”

“When I try to be just myself, not to think about what I say before I say it, like you told me—”

“Be spontaneous,” Ursula offers.

“Mother, I wasn't through!” Juliette sits on the rim of the tub. “I can't do it, that's all. I don't have any ideas. I want to say something so they will like me and I always say something
stupid
.”

“You're so bright, darling. Who are
they
.?”

Juliette races from the room. Ursula lets the tears run down her face, dripping off below her ears, into the water. The tears are soothing and warm.

“Mother?” It is Juliette again. Ursula opens her eyes and nods. It is better if she remembers not to talk. “Can I get in?” Juliette looks very tried, and very young. All of Ursula's resentment (how can she act like that when she knows I love her?) melts in a glance.

“Will there be room?” Ursula asks, drawing up her knees. “With your big boobs and all?” She holds her breath, hoping she has not said the wrong thing.

Juliette laughs and undresses. As she climbs in she says, “Could you make it hotter?” She sits oddly, with her legs tucked under, and she knees forward, like she was about to play jacks.

Something about the water, their nakedness, the evening hour. They are companionable in the tub. Juliette says, “I've been thinking about Europe. Now that I know some French, I'd like to go back. Do you think we could?”

Ursula is surpised, but she does remember how impressed she was at her daughter's passion for the trip, her love of colors and the textures of walls, her delight at the sounds of people jabbering exotically. Juliette had an uncanny intuition for direction, and for the potential of cafes and
pensiones
. While Ursula struggled with maps and guidebooks, counting lire or francs over and over, terribly uncertain, Juliette took stride. “Let's go over there,” she might say. “Oh, look, chocolate croissants.”

Ursula thought her daughter so confident, and this just a year ago. It is painful and disconcerting to see her now downhearted. Ursula cannot deny the effect high school is having on her child; something in the very structure of it fails her. Carter jokes about it, makes it what he wants, and slides by on his mathematical prowess. Who values Juliette's grace and discipline? Who appreciates her need for time to do things right?

“Remember Madame Serault?” Juliette asks now. “I was so humiliated over that jam!” She laughs merrily, though she cried torrents the night she asked the Madame for jam to go with her bread at dinner. Madame found that hilarious. She was more Italian than French, with huge expansive gestures and a loud voice. Juliette had proven the silly taste of Americans, and Madame enjoyed it, not, Ursula thinks, meaning to be cruel. Juliette, mortified, cried herself to sleep. Now she recalls the episode dreamily, as though it happened in the youth of someone very old. “Rmember she put whole cloves of garlic in the chicken, and I didn't know what they were?” ‘Oh, but Americans, they cook from jars, don't they?' she said. I didn't even know what she meant! I couldn't cook!”

“She exaggerated everything. She meant well.”

“She was a great cook. Remember how those German boys ate like pigs? I forgot to eat, watching them.”

“It would be nice to go again,” Ursula says noncommittally. Actually she doesn't see the point in repeating herself, when there is so much world to see. She did a homestay in England in high school, and she went to Spain and Morocco the summer between her freshman and sophomore college years, and then met Fish and Michael and the others in the boarding house that fall.

“It's so nice to travel,” Juliette says. They went the last six weeks of the school year, before the onslaught of summer tourists. “I'll never forget it.

“Mother,” she says, climbing out of the tub, “did you know some girls at school talk about their mothers
awful
?”

Juliette falls again into a sorry mood as soon as she is dry and dressed. She has exhausted her affection. Ursula follows her into her bedroom for a moment, wrapped in a towel, and tries to begin a dialogue about travel again. “I wonder if we went again if we couldn't plan it around your dance interest, Juliette. Isn't it Bejart—do I have his name right?—who began a fabulous dance school in Senegal?” But Juliette gives her a withering glare over her shoulder and assumes an invaded-privacy look that sends Ursula to her own room.

Earlier she tucked and smoothed the bed and turned down the covers. She picks up clothes from the floor and then throws them down again. She puts on flannel pajamas—the evening has turned cool—and brushes her hair slowly. Then she looks in on Juliette one more time, expecting to give her a good-night kiss (whether she wants it or not), and then to tackle some of the reading she needs to do.

Juliette's light is on. Ursula switches it off. Her daughter lies in bed, her head deep in her pillow. “Mommy,” she whimpers. She scoots over and makes room for her mother. “Just for a little while, until I get sleepy?”

As Ursula takes her assigned place, she sees that Juliette has been crying. Ursula wipes her daugher's cheeks. She cannot remember seeing Michael cry, and she has not seen her son cry since he was a small boy, not even when Ursula's father died (she took the children to Evanston for the funeral). Of course he was never close to his grandfather, there was never enough time for it.

She doesn't know what to say. When Juliette is sad or frustrated, words are like tiny packets of potent explosive; it is entirely too easy to say the wrong thing. Ursula is learning that, if you wait, Juliette finally takes the lead.

“I just don't see how I can make it to the end,” she says. Awash in despair, Juliette does not say what end she had in mind. Ursula chooses the best alternative because it is closest and not so desperate. “There are only a few more weeks,” she says.

“But only dancing matters, and I'm tired all the time. I worry I won't get to sleep, and if I don't I won't get enough rest, and then I'll be tired in the morning. And Brian will say, no, not on point this time. He's promised me a small part in the second ballet on point, but I have to have my
all
for it. And now, if I'm getting fatter, I'll be off balance. I'll be
ugly
.” She bursts into fresh tears.

Ursula thinks of Michael's hand on her breast this morning. She remembers that when she was young, her libido had a life of its own, stirred by the way the sun hit a windowsill, because of a song on the radio, or because her thighs brushed as she moved in a chair. Now something else has to happen. Some force has to be put in motion. She is especially touched by surprise, and by gentle moments, by the sight of Michael when she does not expect him. She doesn't know if he has such thoughts himself. He is a good lover, much less restrained than in any other part of his life. He does not seem to mind the places where she has gone soft, the inevitable droops brought on by age and gravity.

“You're not listening to me.” Juliette's voice is flat and dismissing. She turns slightly, to give her mother the plane of her back.

“Julie.”

Juliette breathes deeply and noisily and lets the air out in a long whistling stream, through her mouth. “See!” she almost shouts. “I can't even breathe right! I can—not—RELAX.”

Ursula puts her hand on her daughter's hair. She remembers when Juliette was small and so full of energy she could not let it go at bedtime. Sometimes she would literally fall over at the dinner table, straight into her plate, but she would lie rigid with wakefulness once put to bed. Ursula had a routine to lull her. “The roots of your hair are letting go. Feel your scalp melting—” she whispers. From Juliette a tiny whimper comes. “And the tips of your fingers, like jelly, melting away from the tightness of your hands.”

Ursula pauses and wipes her face with her hand. She longs to get up at that moment and get her moisturizer. She read that you must put on cream at least forty-five minutes before bed, because if you lie down right after, the cream closes the pores and traps moisture in them and you wake with bigger bags than ever.

“That really helps,” Juliette sighs.

On the stairs Ursula smells popcorn.

She turns into the kitchen and looks across it into the dining room. Her son has a pizza box in front of him, and a salad bowl full of popcorn. Fish sits on the same side of the table, swigging from a bottle of dark wine, talking, not just talking, but holding forth. He is saying something about search and seize missions, about a time they found weapons cached on a fisherman's boat.

“He was this big,” Fish says, pointing to his midchest. “I had him by one arm, like a twig, but I could feel how strong he was. And stubborn. And scared.” He takes a long drink, swallowing hard. “You couldn't tell, looking. They were so fucking little. But they were like steel wire. So I was holding him, and this other guy—our guy—was radioing for instructions, when my guy—the gook, the little fisherman—kicked me in the fucking shin and nearly knocked me in the soup. I went crazy. I had his neck in my hands, and over his shoulder I saw the piles under the nets. He was moving ammunition and guns, just like they'd told us we'd find, only I'd been doing this harassing of fishermen for four months and all I'd ever found was fucking FISH!” He laughs hilariously. Carter is snorting and cackling. Vietnam, for Carter, is a series of Fish stories.

Ursula walks softly toward the other side of the kitchen where it opens under an arch onto the dining room. Her son looks up at her with his mouth full. His hair sticks up like a patch of yucca. Fish raises his chin in greeting and drinks deeply of his wine. Michael is bent over a yellow lined pad.

“So what's this?” Ursula asks.

“Listen, Mom, I'm going to have the greatest paper! The first missions of the navy in Vietnam. Mom, Fish was
there
. So I can have an interview as one of my research sources. He was in the Delta. Everybody knows about grunts, all that mud and guck and getting blown up and all that, but who knows about the Delta, man?” Carter jumps up. “I am thirst
eee
.” He sweeps by Ursula on the way to the refrigerator.

“So you guys are helping. Granting interviews and all.” Ursula is looking at Fish, who looks back from hooded eyes. She is surprised at his high spirits. She credits them to the bottle. Michael puts down his pencil, and wipes his eyes with the knuckle on one finger. “And you?” Ursula says testily. “What's your role?”

Michael leans back, tipping the chair on its back legs, the way Ursula asks them all not to do. “Hell, Ursie, we can knock this out in two nights.”

Ursula's ears are hot. When you come upon men together, for a moment at least, they are always strangers. She is an interloper, and wishes she did not come down. She does not approve. She should have known Michael would take over for Carter, despite all his talk of consequences. She should have known, yet she forgot. Michael does not pull his hair or grind his teeth. He does not bitch or demand gratitude. Saint of all saints, he just does. You cannot make him do.

She feels foolish, and left out. Then she relaxes a bit. There is something in the scene of the old days: Fish, helped by alcohol, moving the moments along on a gush of funny talk. His friends urging him on. Michael, getting something done that needs doing. And Ursula? Waiting her turn, watching. Looking forward to bed.

“Just came to say goodnight,” she says. As Carter goes by, he offers her a swig of Pepsi from a can. She shakes her head.

“Don't worry, Mom,” Carter says as he settles down. “Fish is really rád tonight, and he's got books, too, Mom. He's got sources.” He grins hugely. “I can pick up a few more things at the library at lunch. We'll knock this out in no time.”

Michael has gone back to writing.