Beyond Deserving (34 page)

She raises her head so that he can put the pillow behind her. “Of course not. We're too hip, aren't we?” This is a concept Michael despises. He says that bleached oak and odd vegetables are like piss on the corners of the middle class. Don't cross over here in your polyester, eating Twinkies, they say. He brings up a version of this argument (diatribe, really) anytime Ursula considers working on the house, buying a piece of furniture or a good item of clothing. It never comes up when
he
has a consumer-attack, but, she would admit if he pressed her, when he buys it is for his own pleasure and never for show. “And you know I never bought her a training bra.”

“But therapy—you have an investment there. It's your field.” Is she to understand that he
minds
her training?

“That's not fair. I'm not a therapist, though I could be. You know I've chosen to stay in this job, to work in the public—” She gropes for a word, retrieves “sector,” and knows she would gag if she said it. “I work for the bureaucracy in order to help keep a few children out of the hot oil. I'm hardly in the therapy business, and you know so.”

“I allowed myself an unworthy digression,” Michael says. He has shifted into his slightly arch comic mode. She thinks he sees himself cast in a British movie. He leaves one hand on Pajamas's rump, and slides the other along Ursula's. “What's brought this on?” The cat purrs loudly and stretches even longer, looking, in the moment of extension, like a mummy cat Ursula saw in the British Museum.

“Don't you see her slouching toward depression? Don't you find her evasive and solitary?”

“She seems adolescent and sensitive and very much your daughter.”

Ursula pops up from under the sheet to a sitting position. Michael's hand slides off her thigh. “I brought this on?”

“Indeed, Ursula, I don't even see anything to worry about, so I'm not attributing guilt. But weren't you the teenager who drank gallons of lemon water to purify your system, and then turned around and drank cherry codeine syrup to get high?”

“Teenage foolishness is not genetic. Besides, we're not discussing my etiology. Or Juliette's, either.” Actually, Ursula has to suppress a smile. Michael tosses a bit of old history at her, and shows that he heard something she said, a long time ago.

How long ago was it they traded personal narratives?

How long since he asked her a personal question?

“Maybe it's girls,” he says.

“Oh great.”

“You aren't suggesting therapy for Carter.”

“I wouldn't do that to a therapist.”

“He doesn't need any help with his psyche. He just needs time and experience with consequences.” He says this lightly, alluding perhaps to his own Carter rescues, and her disapproval.

“He needs a haircut.” She hears her prim, tense voice and calls up an image of her son that makes her titter. “Admit it, Michael, he looks like a rooster.”

“He has a beautiful girlfriend. Annabel.”

“I think I saw her. At the park the other day. Has she been around? Have you met her?”

“A couple of times. She drives a Honda Prelude. New.”

“Really.”

“She's an heiress, says the son.”

“Is that part of the sudden interest?”

“I don't think it's sudden. I think he hasn't wanted to bring her around in case if didn't pan out. I think he's rather proud of her.”

“Because she's beautiful or because she's rich?”

“Because she breaks his trend. He's proven he's not in a rut.”

“I didn't know there was a trend. There've been so many.”

“Flaky girls, you know they were.”

“That Kincaid girl got 1400 on her SAT's. I heard her mother going on about it at the cleaners.”

“And how long did she last?”

“Or did he? Honestly, Michael, what has he done with girls these last few years? Where do kids go when they go out?”

“Movies, the mall. Games, dances. It doesn't change all that much. Little back roads.”

“You think he's basically your average kid?”

“Somewhere in the middle of the curve.”

“So cut him loose, aren't we about to do that? It's still Juliette who worries me. Not that Carter hasn't in the past. Not that I don't worry about his responsibility, and whether he'll brush his teeth next year, but Michael, stop diverting me, JULIETTE IS HURTING.”

“I know. She's slipped away from you. You don't know what to say to her.”

“Why yes.”

“It's supposed to happen, Ursie. Children push their parents away so they can grow up. Child Development 201. Remember?” He speaks kindly enough; she chooses not to be offended. She wants to say,
I miss her
.

“My mother left town,” she does say. “It was easy to make a break.”

“My mother had her teeth clenched my whole childhood. There wasn't anything to break away from.”

She resists a strong notion to say he has not broken yet. Instead, she says, “Keep an eye on her. You're home before me in the afternoons. See if you can spend some time with her. She's off mothers for now. Reassure me.”

“If I can, if I can.”

“You're not humoring me?”

“Of course I'm humoring you.” He spends a moment adjusting his position in the bed. “If I don't humor you, you will lie there and agitate, and how will we ever get around to you-know-what, which we haven't done this week?”

“Michael. Are Fish and Katie back together?”

“Some other time, Ursie. Turn off the light.” He has worked his way down the bed so that his mouth is on her shoulder.

“All right, but there is one more thing.”

“Ursula, Ursula.”

“You've got to fix the kitchen floor. I want a floor for Carter's graduation.”

“They're not holding it in our kitchen.”

“I might have a party.”

“Have you talked to Carter?”

“Not for him, for us.”

“We're celebrating?”

“Not really. More like wallowing in reminiscences. I'd like to get out the baby albums, tell stories. I'd like to see some old friends.”

“Don't they live other places?” She detects a sad tinge to his words. She feels her belly warm, then her knee jerks involuntarily. His mouth is quite hot on her collarbone.

“I'll tell you a story,” he murmurs.

“I'm listening.”

“Come closer.”

He rises, whispers in her ear.

“You're perverted, Michael!” Delightfully so, she thinks.

“And that gets you a gray rubber floor.”

“Deal,” says Ursula to her husband. Juliette slips away, a shadow on a screen. Though somewhere in the house she sighs, there is nothing to be done about her. Not right now.

45

On the Sunday morning before Carter's graduation, Ursula meets a social worker from her office, Teresa, at the bakery. They order cappuccinos, and congratulate one another on getting up and out at seven-thirty in the morning. As they stir in the frothy milk, they plan a route for their long walk, promised one another Friday at the office.

Ursula is surprised that there are so many people out so early on a weekend morning.

“But it's so warm, so summer-like,” Teresa says. “In a few weeks we'll be clogged with tourists. I love it now, when I still feel the city's mine.”

They march through the park into the hills above. By then they have slowed to a mild canter. “God,” Ursula puffs. “I seem to be running out of gas.”

Teresa laughs and says, a little shakily, “Why don't we do this all summer and fall, right up until bad weather?”

Ursula groans. “I'll have to think about it.”

They both stop, gulping air and laughing. Teresa puts a hand on Ursula's shoulder and says, “More immediately, would you want to go together on a yard sale?”

“A sale?” Ursula's mind is filled with images of heaps of clothing, chairs and tennis rackets, lamps in the back of the closet. “That's a terrific idea,” she says. “When? Your house or mine?”

“I'm going to do some major repairs and painting, and buy new furniture, so let's do it in my driveway. I'll take care of the ads. Say a month, towards the end of June?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe your husband's brother could come over sometime and see what I want done. Angela says his work is good.”

“I'll ask him.”

“Let's go back to the bakery. Let's eat something this time.”

Ursula agrees. She swings her arms vigorously. “Do you think we've burned off a rugulach?”

She returns home feeling quite proud of herself. It's only nine in the morning and she's been out of bed for two hours.

Michael and Fish are on the front porch steps drinking coffee. Ursula holds up a bakery bag. “Scones,” she says. The men follow her back to the kitchen.

“We're going to do the floor,” Fish says, and bites into a scone.

“Right now?”

“I told you I would,” Michael says.

Ursula goes upstairs to bathe and change clothes. While she is in the tub Juliette knocks on the door. “I'm dying to go to the bathroom,” she says. “You can come in,” Ursula says, and Juliette makes a sound of disgust. “Hurry UP.”

Juliette goes in quickly as Ursula exits wrapped in a towel.

Downstairs Michael and Fish are banging around. The roll of rubber flooring has been brought up.

Ursula takes a cup of coffee into the dining room and calls her mother.

She hears water running upstairs. Knowing Juliette is occupied, she tells Clare how worried she has been.

“Is she actually not eating at all? Is she wasting away in front of you?” Clare asks in a calm, almost leisurely way.

“That's not it, but she's certainly not robust.”

“She's a dancer. They want their bones to show.”

“She's a child, still growing. She's terrified her breasts are sprouting on her.”

“I never knew where you got yours.” Clare is thin and flat and angular, a body type that ages very well. “Your father's mother, I suppose. She was all pillowy.”

“It's not my figure I called to discuss,” Ursula says. She should have known her mother would downplay her urgency. One of Clare's favorite expressions is, “I've seen worse.”

“I'll be down for her ballet opening. Do you think Carter will mind very much my missing graduation Friday?”

Ursula laughs. “A bus load of kids leaves soon after the ceremony. They're going to Disneyland. He has a girlfriend. He thinks it's funny that I even want to attend the graduation. To him, it's already happened.”

“Tell Juliette to call me. When nobody's home.”

Ursula knows that Juliette will want to. She is stabbed with jealousy, and with gratitude, oddly mixed. “You think you can find out long distance if she's too shaky? You'll tell me if she worries you, too?”

“Don't underestimate your mothering, Ursula. You do very well with both of them. I have always admired your light hand.”

“Of course
I
was crazy at fifteen.”

A long silence tells Ursula that her mother is not eager to dip into the past. “I got out of it okay,” Ursula adds.

“Without a lot of intervention, as I recall.”

“You weren't there,” Ursula says, surprised to hear the recrimination in her statement of fact.

“I was on the phone with your father, or with his wife when he was buried in his studies, several times a week, for several years, my dear daughter.”

Now it is Ursula's turn to be silent, this time in amazement. “I had no idea.”

“We all agreed not to make too much of your moods and antics. Your father said he could do so as long as you kept your grades up. He worried so about you getting into a good college. Did he tell you that, or did you just sense it?”

“I don't remember considering it. School wasn't hard, that's all.”

“Your stepmother was the reliable one. It was her idea to send you to England the summer between your junior and senior years.”

“I was hopelessly polite and timid in an excruciatingly proper British homestay,” Ursula recalls.

“Her theory was the experience would distract you.”

“And break my habits?” Like whole weekends in bed, refusing to come out. Her stepmother brought in two trays a day without a rebuking word. Then there were the beer binges, which her father certainly didn't know about.

Her mother says, “I wanted you to come to Seattle that summer. I was managing a wonderful small gallery, and we ran classes all summer. I thought you could work it out if I got your hands in clay or paint.”

“Mother,” Ursula says sadly, because that option was never discussed. She assumed her occasional one-week visits were all her mother wanted.

“I wasn't aggressive enough, and England sounded nice.”

“Well,” Ursula says brightly, wishing she could really “reach out and touch” her mother, “where shall I send Juliette now?”

“Let's see,” Clare says, and then goodbye.

By the time Ursula hangs up, the activity in the kitchen has accelerated. Fish has brought in a battered tape player and put on Janis Joplin.

“Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz,” Ursula sings along. She pulls her knees up to her chest and clasps them. She closes her eyes. “My friends all drive Porsches, I must make a—mends—” She really tries to match Janis's coarse cry.

“—Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color tv,” Fish joins in. “Dialing for dollars is trying to find me—” They laugh.

“Ohhh!” Juliette cries as she speeds through the kitchen and out the back door. Michael doesn't even look up, Fish is still laughing, and Ursula goes to the window of the dining room to peer out on the yard. The window is filthy.

Juliette arranges herself on their one battered lawn chair, stretching her legs out to catch the mild morning sun. She is wearing a pair of shorts, a top from a two-piece bathing suit, and rolled-down anklets with sandals. Ursula wonders why in the world she keeps on socks to lie in the sun.