Beyond Deserving (14 page)

“You can't make friends doing things you don't really like doing.”

“Mother, I am not some
poor
kid.”

Ursula cannot make her children understand that kids have troubles in all sorts of families. They love to use her job against her. I'm not one of
them
, they always say.

“I bet Gramma Clare will come down from Seattle for your ballet opening. Let's call her this weekend.”

“I hope so,” Juliette says. She sounds seven years old.

“If I sit here, don't you think you can go to sleep?”

Juliette sits up and pulls off her tee shirt. She is wearing a skinny tank top underneath. Her little nipples press like buttons against the knit material. She pulls the sheet back and crawls under.

“I love you so much, Juliette. Maybe you haven't met the right kids yet. This isn't the whole world. Kids with your interests—” Ursula pats the sheet on Juliette's shoulder.

“I never will, here.” Juliette says sleepily.

“Let's just close our eyes a moment,” Ursula suggests, and lies down beside her daughter.

She wakes suddenly from what she thinks at first is a bad dream. Someone is being sick in the bathroom. She walks into the hall. It is Michael, vomiting.

Ursula doesn't know what to do. “Are you okay?” she calls. Michael continues retching. She goes and gets in their bed to wait for him. She expects him to come straight to bed, but he washes and goes back downstairs. She lies awake a long time, thinking about him getting sick. Why can't he just yell like her? Or cry? He was sick like that when they took his father away to the mental hospital. He wouldn't talk about it. but he threw up for days. He called it the flu.

If it was Carter, she would wet a washrag and hand it to him. If it was Juliette, she would be on her knees beside her, holding her until she was finished.

But Michael? On his knees, gagging on theft? Or whatever was happening with his parents? Or his job? The kids? Her?

He still has not come to bed so she goes to look for him. She finds him in the basement with Fish, watching stock car races on TV. “Lucky,” she says. “They didn't think to look down here.”

Fish is drunk. “It's Big Mama,” he says. “Come to collect Daddy.” He sounds almost affectionate.

“Goodnight, Ursula,” Michael says without looking up. The couch he and Fish are sitting on has sprung its springs, and the two of them are at different heights, seated Mutt and Jeff.

“Come to bed?” Ursula pleads.

Michael reaches for Fish's glass. It looks like whiskey tonight. “Later,” he says. “Not now.” He leans forward, watching something on the television, then punches Fish on the knee. “What balls that Turk has,” he says. It sounds so unlike Michael, so vulgar and insipidly masculine, Ursula imagines for the first time his fraternal conversations are secretive, scandalous, pulling out threads of Michael's character she doesn't see, doesn't even know about. She feels, suddenly, desperately afraid of her brother-in-law.

She goes back upstairs to call Katie.

Katie has already gone to bed. When Ursula tells her about the papers being served, she says, “I'm sleepy,” and hangs up abruptly. Ursula is disappointed; she wanted to talk about the burglary.

Ursula goes into the bathroom and sits on the cool floor. She tries to read from a new book she borrowed from Angela that day. It is about family therapy. The author is an expert on failure to individuate. The writing is stiff with current jargon. Ursula supposes there is something to be learned from the author, an eminent psychologist, but she cannot concentrate. Family therapy is a luxury of the middle class, like orthodontia. She finds herself wondering why Juliette wore her socks to bed. It seems more like Carter.

21

Friday is a day all tumbled for Geneva. She is relieved when Gully says he is going to make a sandwich and go scouting for firewood. There will still be a little snow in patches in the high country, but he might also find morel mushrooms and wildflowers lower down. She wonders if he is still looking back over areas where they searched for the doctor who disappeared in February, on his way to Bend. He will look for good places to cut wood. All winter he feeds the stove on the porch. He puts plastic over the screened windows and sits out there in a lawn chair rereading old adventure tales by Richard Halliburton or Joshua Slocum. His only move for hours might be to fetch wood from the woodpile. Now that it is spring, however, he doesn't sit down all day. He always wants to be doing something. He doesn't know how old he is.

Geneva has an appointment with Aggie Kolvitz at Heads Up for a permanent, and between the mess and stink of that, and all the gossiping Aggie likes to do, no way is Geneva going to get out of there in time to make lunch. Besides, Michael is coming by after school. She is going to make dinner so he will stay longer.

One of the things that pleases Geneva about their lives now that Gully is retired is her authority over the schedule of their meals. She spent a lot of years baking bread and cooking pots of food for dinner on the dot of six, with all the mess to clean up after. Now she makes the main meal in the middle of the day, and they eat leftovers or soup around five. When Gully in summer goes fishing, with plans to camp for the night, she is happy as can be to have crackers and milk before bed, if she eats at all. Anybody knows this is a healthy way to eat as you get older and your bowels get crotchety.

She made meat loaf on Thursday and there is enough of it left for a meal, along with nice red potatoes sprinkled with dill the way Gully likes them. She has a freezer full of packaged vegetables. Gully sometimes helps out at the fishing lodge a few miles upriver, when something mechanical breaks down or there is mending to be done—fences, porches, roof gutters, what have you. The lodge manager pays him partly in frozen food, canned milk, and appliances they are replacing. Gully fixes up the appliances and sells them for a nice bit of pocket change. The other day he cleaned a mouse nest out of a dryer, and it ran like new. Now he has two washers on the porch. It wouldn't surprise Geneva if she found buyers by mentioning them to Aggie Kolvitz.

Gully is late. Michael arrives first, looking unhappy and tired. He says school is getting him down. She is surprised; Michael has never been a complainer. He takes after her in that. His slow, almost drawled expression of fatigue and discouragement pinches her, the way her ovaries used to do midmonth.

“I know I ought to think of them as cans of soup, going by me on the line, but Ma, I can't do enough. I just fill time.”

He was such a good student. All A's and stars on his papers, then National Honor Society and a rash of small scholarships to help him go to Portland State. He wasn't always looking for a way to skip, like Fish, though both boys liked their outings, mostly together. Fish might have done more—he was smart as a whip, too—but Gully never took their education seriously enough, and Fish never listened to anything Geneva said. He wanted to be like his Pop, he said. Lord he might have meant a hundred different things by that. Gully had had his own rough times when he was young, but he had had more school than Geneva. To her stepfather, she had been a coolie; somebody, along with her brother, to hire out, often to farmers, sometimes to odd labor, like the time they tore down a tenth-rate little hotel. Two half-grown kids with a crowbar between them! Her stepfather hadn't been hard on Ruby, maybe because she was the youngest—nearly ten years between her and Geneva—or maybe because she was pretty. Ruby used to sit on the old fart's lap and sweet-talk him to get a nickel for ice-cream. She always went to school. She always had a lunch.

“It's a good job, son,” Geneva tells Michael. When he was a boy he used to say he would live in the jungle and make maps of rivers. He used to pore over
National Geographic
. Geneva bought them at garage sales, and later by subscription. “Listen to this, Ma!” Michael would shout, and read about some remote tribe in the heart of the Amazon. Or Borneo, or the Congo. Fish would say, “I'll go too, and build us a boat.” Gully would say, “Better that than this.” Which hurt; he was talking about their lives. They all sat around the table one night looking at an atlas when Gully said, banging his fist on the book, “Maybe we can't go to New Guinea, but by gum we can see the country we're in!” That was when he went out and brought an old school bus and fixed it up. That bus was home to them for ten months. Gypsies. What a time they'd had.

She doesn't know what schools pay their teachers, but they give them insurance and pensions; good benefits. Teachers have unions. It gives Geneva a great deal of comfort to know that Michael is secure. Young people don't remember what it was like when you only had what you had and when it was gone you had nothing. Insurance still seems like a miracle to her. Why, the medical costs of the past fifteen years would have wiped them out entirely, without the union insurance. There was Gully's breakdown, and small crises after that: his angina, her bad feet and hiatal hernia. She wonders if she is working on an ulcer. Now they get a little pension from the union fund, and Social Security. With what Gully picks up fixing appliances for sale, doing odd jobs, and Geneva sometimes helping with the cooking for big dinners at the lodge, they do all right. Michael and Ursula have a lot more. Their big house, two cars. Clothes, tvs, video machines, cameras, skis. Well, that was what Gully and Geneva hoped for their children. When you grew up poor, that was how you kept going a lot of the time, by thinking of the lives your children would lead if you were strong and persevered.

Fisher is the worry. He will be forty-five the Fourth of July, just like Michael, and he is still rootless and unhappy. She hoped he would make the navy a career, but she should have known better. Too many things to go wrong. The service is, above all, an homage to authority. Fisher couldn't see the advantage in turning yourself over, that yielding decisions could be a release. He came to that rightly enough, from a double line of malcontents and drifters. Fisher has his father's dislike for folks in charge, and his suspicion of promises. He has his taste for wandering, too. All that, without Gully's iron spine that kept him on his feet through a depression, when his mother had to say she didn't have the where-withal to feed him. Fisher talked about switching to the Coast Guard when his navy time was up—it sounded better suited to him, smaller and more interesting, and maybe, in a war, safer—but one day he was back in Portland in civvies. The Coast Guard hadn't wanted him. He never said where he'd been since his discharge. He was nearly a year getting home.

Gully and Geneva have paid cash for everything they ever had their whole married lives. The only thing was, Evelyn's sudden death caught them by surprise. Geneva had to take money from Ruby to pay for the funeral, though they paid it back, all of it, in three months' time. Geneva stood beside the open grave in a drizzling rain, watching her first-born, her girl-child, laid in the dirt, and she thought, minding it something awful,
I never thought I'd have to ask Ruby for help
.

“It is a good job,” Michael agrees. “And by September I always feel up to it. I always like the kids.” He grins at his mother and pats his belly, which has grown rounder in the last year. Fish's still looks like a board. “You put on a little weight, it drags you down,” Michael says, as though he can tell his mother something about aging. “People think it is so sweet, summers off. But by the time you go to school, and you squeeze in extra jobs to make ends meet while your salary is so low, I figure it's summer keeps older teachers at it. They're worn out, and it would be too much if you didn't have that long break to look forward to.”

“So now you're one of the older ones?” Geneva thinks her sons are good-looking and sturdy. They have their father's strong will before any physical challenge. But neither of them has any real idea of what it is to work past the point where you think you can.

Michael takes a milk carton out of the refrigerator and pours himself half a glass of milk. “Don't you figure forty-five is some kind of dividing line?” He drinks and pulls the glass away to reveal a white moustache, which he wipes with his forearm, as he has done since he was three years old.

Geneva knows something about current thinking. She reads magazines, and an occasional book of popular psychology, if Mary Courter showed her a new title. “Don't tell me you're in one of those crisis things,” she teases her son, hoping it is a joke. “I saw a show on
Oprah Winfrey
about middle-aged men who decided they would rather be women. Imagine that.”

Michael laughs, and Geneva relaxes. “The way I figure it, son, life is an unpredictable series of jolts to the system, and God judges you by how high you bounce. Having kids, having troubles, getting old. I can't even tell you much about any of it, things change too fast. You have to do everything your own way now. Though it does seem it ought to be easier for you, with your education.” She rinses Michael's glass and sits down at the counter that juts out at a right angle to the line of the kitchen cabinets and sink. Her foot catches the little plastic garbage can and almost knocks it over. She sets it upright before she speaks again. “Now don't take this as criticism,” she begins. Michael's face is perfectly placid. He never shows what he is thinking. His father has a habit of blinking when he dislikes the way the conversation is going. It warns her, his eyes flapping. If she doesn't back off he will walk away. “But it does seem to me it
is
a lucky thing to have summers free. You have a chance to stoke the fire a little every year. Most people don't get that. The most paid vacation your father ever saw was two weeks in a year. You know what his idea of a vacation was? Changing jobs.” Though he took off a few times. Once he went from work to the train station. He sent her a postcard from El Paso. He was only gone a month, though. Came back, said he didn't know what had got into him. Said he saw a lot of sights, then went back to work. “There were plenty of summers your dad would have liked some time off, but in Oregon you work hardest then, in good weather, if you're a laborer.”