Beyond Deserving (16 page)

He has things stuck up all over his walls. Clippings from the newspaper (the dead doctor; a new find in Egypt; a couple of cartoons; a photo of Michael and some of his students with their birdhouses). There are drawings from each of the kids when they were little. The drawings are brittle and brown around the edges. It does tug your heart to see the charm of children's art.
Their
children. People the same size as the trees beside them. A lion with a curly red mane. Flowers with yellow moons in the center. The drawings were in an atlas during the fire, that was what saved them. There is a photograph of Fish, too, at the radio on board his ship, smiling, looking straight at you. His face is cleanshaven; he looks like a teenager. All the other photographs he sent home from Vietnam for safekeeping were burned up. All the school pictures and report cards, the certificates, merit badges, and ribbons. Evelyn's yellow afghan she made for 4H. It would be a comfort to have it now. There isn't anything of Evelyn left, except a few birthday cards that Geneva saved in a metal box from the fire. Evelyn probably did one of those drawings, but Geneva doesn't know which one. She could ask Gully, but it would make them both sad. He has his own way with memories.

She leaves Gully's room and shuts the door. It does no good to go in there. Her room is hers, and in there there is nothing of the past to cling to, except that one box. She lives in the present tense. She has Gully, that's what there is. Michael has a family. Fish has his ways. Evelyn is dead. They haven't even had a dog in ten years.

She stands at the screen door that opens onto the big closed-in porch where Gully has a wood stove, a shop table, and his appliances waiting to be fixed and sold. She has her laundry room, and the freezer.

Through the screens she can see the men's shapes against the back of the truck. She can hear their voices. They might talk all night. Then Gully will be worn out before the party. Whatever Michael says, Gully seems frail to her. She worries.

Every night of the week, Gully said. Every night, AA meetings, was what he meant. For a long while he was gone two, three, four nights a week some weeks, until she thought she would scream from being left. He needed to go; those people had something to give him that she could not. She didn't say anything, any more than she had said anything when he got drunk and set the shed on fire, any more than when he called Evelyn a slut for coming in late when she was sixteen and looked like a full-grown woman. It doesn't do any good to do battle with a man's needs. You put him in God's hands and go around cleaning up after. You are thankful for the good days.

Now Gully goes on Tuesday. Once in a while he goes out to the VA Domiciliary and talks to the fellows there, besides. And he goes out scouting, not so much for wood as for men who might need him. “What do you spent your time with old sots for?” she asked one night. Gully said he had to. It was something he had to do. “You have to reach out, to keep yourself steady.” She hears him sometimes in his room, whisper-reading from the Bible. He keeps a little notebook too, scribbling in it while he sits out on the porch in the rainy months. Keeping track of his sin and misery, she bets.

“Why don't you talk to your own son then?” she said. What she meant was
All your little quotes don't do any good with Fish
. Gully looked so stricken, she regretted saying it.

“Don't I wish, Ma,” was all he said.

She turns off her light before Gully comes back in the house. She knows he won't say anything if her light is out. He will respect that she is either asleep or wants him to think she is. But it is ten-thirty at night, and tomorrow they are celebrating their marriage, which has lasted more years than people used to live.

She pulls her robe tight across the front of her and ties the belt, then steps to her door, just as Gully goes into the bathroom. She goes in the kitchen and gets a drink of water. Through the wall she hears him splashing. There will be water all over the place.

“You want something?” she asks when he comes out. He takes a glass of water. She sits down at the counter and so does he, across from her.

“How did he get back?” she asks. She wonders where the old man camped. What a way to live!

Gully has taken off his shirt washing up, and has pulled his overalls back up over his bare chest. He looks like a bird with a scrawny neck. The upper parts of his arms are still knotty and strong, but his hands looks frail.

“I put him down in the truck,” he says. He keeps a bed under a canopy for his forays in the woods and mountains. “He'll be on his way at dawn.”

“I see.” She doesn't, not really.

He reaches over and pats her hand. “That would be me out there, if there hadn't been you.” Then he gets up and says good night.

Geneva goes back to bed and lies in the dark listening to the tree leaves. She thinks about the first time Gully touched her. It was a long, long time ago, but she remembers it very clearly. The last time she has long ago forgotten, but the memory of the first is with her forever.

23

It seems to Katie that the very ease of getting a divorce keeps a person from thinking it all the way through. She feels victimized by the system, as if she is being sucked through a vacuum tube, her life out of her hands, ever since she signed a paper her lawyer thrust at her in return for four hundred dollars. You used to have to show cause—adultery, abuse, mental cruelty. She remembers her mother talking about a friend of the family, saying, “He certainly gave her cause.” If you still had to do it that way, she would never have gone past the idea. Of what could she accuse Fish? How could she build an ugly file of bitter reinterpretations of their past? She was there, too. She is entirely complicit. There have been minor infidelities, but they were only larks to wound her or soothe him, and they passed quickly. There were unscheduled jaunts taken without regard for Katie's feelings, but that was something in his blood. Once when they were in Berkeley, he got mad and left her standing in a Chinese grocery store and drove to Reno with a week's wages from the shipyards. She can't remember why he did that, but she does not doubt that she provoked him.

There was that time he hit her, before she went to Texas, but she already punished him for that, didn't she? She was gone for so long. She can think of more reasons for staying than for going. Fish is like a part of her she can't quite dig out. There are all the things he knows how to do—building, repairing, inventing—that she cannot manage. Once, in B.C., he took a woodshed on a hillside slope—he'd been hired to help the Turkish owner clear the hill to make an RV campground—and turned it into a cozy lodge for them. He brought water down from a tiny creek, made a wood stove out of a metal drum, built them a bed from scrap lumber. He read
The Sotweed Factor
to her by kerosene lamp.

There are all the places he had been before he met her, experiences he brings to her like an abandoned garden of perennials. He tells her stories, like a man plucking flowers.

Maybe somebody could make a case against him because he has so little regard for people in general. They could say he is antisocial. But Fish's attitude confirms Katie's own assessment of most of the world, and it gives her the comfort of a cohort. She knows that Fish dislikes a lot of people, most of them mere flickers of experience across his life, but he loves Katie. She stands out from all the others, with him. He told her her little breasts were perfect. He told her that her skin could be experienced as the organ it is. He said she has a perfect cunt. She remembers where they were when he said those things. She can remember the pile of dirty clothes on the floor near the end of the mattress where they lay. She remembers everything about the times when he talked like that.

Katie's friend Maureen, who lives in the apartment across the hall from her in a cut-up old Victorian house near the theatre, and cooks in a vegetarian deli, says that relationships are like mirrors shining your history back at you. You are what your family has been, she says. You live out the family myths. She talks about her “family of origin.” She gives Katie books to read that are full of case histories to illustrate the impact of childhood on adult life. She also gives her smaller, less densely written books designed for small, quick readings at night, before bed, ones full of good advice about serenity, self-esteem, assertiveness, and intimacy. The second kind of book has a lot of white space, checklists, and bold headings. It makes it easy for you, repeating every point a lot of times, in a kind of literary mantra.

Katie isn't much of a reader, but she has burrowed her way through a good many pages of Maureen's books. What she understands from them is this: Your parents acted out a design of living that was probably made up of their reactions to their parents, and so on. In this manner you learned how men and women get along. Then, too, each parent had a trip to play on you, and all of that taught you how to act with people when you grew up. Your mind got stamped, like visas on a passport to unhappy states. On the one hand, no matter what you thought of your childhood, you looked for ways to bring it into your adult life. You opened presents on Christmas eve, if that's how it was done in your family, and if this conflicted with your lover's ideas about Christmas, you fought it out until somebody gave up. You looked for lovers who could be what you had not been, strong where you were weak, yin for your yang, or was it the other way around?

The notion intrigues Katie. She has spent a lot of time trying to think what it means for her. Truthfully, she can't remember much about her family. Her father was from Mississippi, and his parents had already died before Katie was born. Her mother's parents lived on the other side of Texas, and she hardly ever saw them. And Katie's own parents seem vague, like people viewed through a mist.

She grew up in a house where no one had much to say, except for her mother telling her what to do. Her father, when he spoke, said things he might have said to anybody's child. Pass the potatoes. Here's the funnies. Pull the shade down, change the channel. He didn't notice when she cut her hair and outgrew her dresses. When she broke her arm he didn't notice the cast until it was pointed out to him, and then he only said, “Did it hurt?” and he turned away before she could tell him what a surprise it had been.

What Katie has figured out now, amateur that she is, is that her father was remote to her mother, too. He was an inaccessible man. It may be true that Katie married a man who isn't always there, but Katie has never attempted the kinds of accommodations her mother made for her father. She has not tried to pretend she and Fish are an ordinary couple. She wonders about her father, wonders if he was a drunk who stayed away on binges, or went to bars on the way home. She remembers that he slept on the couch frequently, and she knows he was late very often, but she cannot remember anything that suggests alcohol. She always assumed her father worked hard. She always thought it was because he was trying to please her mother.

Maureen is not willing to let go of the possibilities in this analysis, though. They have a lot of free time, and talking about childhood fills some of it up. Katie lounges in Maureen's apartment, which has better furnishings, left by a prior tenant. While they play old Donahue programs on tape, and are sometimes distracted into discussions about the problems Donahue has packaged for them, they tell one another their stories. Maureen's are richer tales. She says she has worked on the details. She is disappointed that Katie hits so many blank walls, but Katie's “amnesia” excites her, too, because, she says, when Katie probes a little deeper, and the walls come tumbling down, oh boy, watch out, Katie will break out, feel the pain, and break free.

All of this supposition is based on Maureen's premise that talk heals. Maureen says at first it doesn't even matter if anybody tells you anything in return, if they'll only listen. Later, though, you need a sponsor, and later than that, maybe a therapist, or a spiritual mentor.

Maureen used to be in Alcoholics Anonymous. She still goes to Al-Anon, because she keeps falling in love with guys who stay high, and because she worries too much. Lately she has also been going to a group for children of dysfunctional families, run along the same AA lines of twelve steps, anonymity, and sponsorship. Her mother was a drunk, and Maureen has learned how many ways her mother's dysfunction affects her, even now. Maureen has a sponsor in each group, and is a sponsor to several people, but she can't afford a therapist. She says this means it isn't time yet. Once or twice a year she goes to a workshop to help her growth. Her last one was about personal mythology; she learned new insights into her tremendous sense of being doomed. The workshop before that one was a Celtic ritual. Everything feeds your transformation, she says. Her favorite step is number twelve, a spiritual enlightenment. She says next she is going to read Hildegard of Bingen.

Maureen tends to use a lot of catchy phrases and words from the books she reads, and Katie thinks maybe Maureen takes a little too much for granted about what Katie is able to absorb. Katie wonders if, when Maureen says “Talk heals,” she isn't really talking shorthand for a more substantive process Maureen hasn't quite got a finger on, or can't quite describe. Or it may be that there is a formula for transforming yourself that doesn't translate outside of twelve-step groups. It's like, Coke isn't Pepsi.

Maureen says, “Anybody as strained in her relationship with her mother as you are has something she hasn't worked out. Including a lot of anger, I bet.” She hastens to add that you cannot change the past. You have to change yourself. Katie protests that her mother isn't especially important to her anymore, that her mother has no power over her. She knows how weak that sounds when you consider that her mother is raising Katie's daughter. This is a shocking thought: that Rhea is being shaped by a woman with whom Katie cannot bear to spend five minutes.