Beyond Deserving (5 page)

“I didn't say that he loved me,” Ursula added quickly. Probably, he had not. When he was there, though, when he was “on,” he was almost giddy about love. Sex. You wouldn't have thought that, to see him most of the time.

“—unless you count the girl in Bangkok.” Katie peered at Ursula. “Should I count her, Ursie?”

She had only asked what Ursula thought, not what was absolutely true or right. Ursula thought they should not call the Thai woman a girl anymore. Girls who fall in love and are abandoned are women.

Ursula said, “Certainly not.” Why mix walnuts with cheese curds? A Thai girl—woman—in a setting as remote as the spicy food? The easy sweetness of young whores (who sometimes
were
just girls)? The absolute foreignness of the place? Ursula had tried to ask Fish about it when he got back. He hadn't made much of the love affair, though he mentioned it, anecdotally. He said he felt bad for the girl because she got hung up on her attachment to an American. Ursula asked if he was going to write her, and he turned sour. “Sure I am,” he said, “right after I catch up on my correspondence with the Dalai Lama.”

Why did she mention Fish to Katie at all? She can't remember anymore. They were driving home after picking thirty quarts of strawberries. Their hands were stained red and the car reeked. “I wanted to marry him.” The words came out before she thought. Maybe it was that Katie was having a hard time, and Ursula wanted her to know that they all love him, as much as he will let them. He is their cowboy, challenging their comfortable, busy, straight lives, simply by not living them. Ursula understands the dark tug he can have on a woman, the sense of falling, and wanting to fall. The fear of the light. She remembers giggling and sighing, then waking utterly alone, as someone banished. It was all a long time ago—everything is different now, she is a different woman—but she remembers keeping her eyes shut tight to postpone the day. Now that she has been to graduate school she knows terms for the attraction (the compulsion), and such words make Fish less mysterious, make Katie pathetic, make all of them culpable. How much has Fish done for them all, acting out what they cannot bring themselves to do?

How much have they all used him?

“Fish never has been one to put out energy on a woman,” she said.

Katie was astounded. “Fish is sheer energy! Why do you think it's so damned hard to live with him?”

Ursula would have said that falling, that despair. Maybe Katie truly knows him and Ursula doesn't. She doesn't believe he changed much in Vietnam, just that he has always been good at guarding himself, deep inside, though she has seen him knocked flat and defeated, too, in terrible, public ways. It is hard to say what really hurts him. She knows he is a man in pain, but she cannot name it. He refuses to recognize the norms of success or acceptance, even on the low scale that rose up out of their sixties slow dance. In the corner of him, whatever the weather, he is an immutable essence, which Katie that day called energy. Ursula thinks it might be the opposite, inertia, but in some compelling, negative way, a force with magnetic power. The grand suck of a collapsing star. It could make great demands.

Ursula said, “You're lucky to know that.” They all think Fish is special. Maybe it is time they outgrew that. What he is is lost, like one of those nineteenth century Englishmen who wandered around the Sahara instead of getting a job and settling down. If only Fish had a Sahara! If only Araby.

They had been talking about how difficult he was. They had been talking about whether Katie ought to leave him.

She did not and she didn't come again to Ursula for advice. Ursula feels her guilt and pity tugged by the alliance of Fish and Katie, but she works too hard at managing bad cases in her work not to recognize the false seductiveness of
knowing better
, and the futility.

There have been times Ursula wanted to yank Katie away. There have been times she wanted to lecture Fish (or hit him hard!). She did neither. She did not warn, scold or try to set them straight, even when they seemed headed straight for hell. She even learned not to vent her frustration by trying to enlist Michael, because Michael said, annoyed at her litany of concerns, that he was not going to abet any obsessions about Fish. He has had his share of them. Ursula, wounded, pointed out to Michael that he was wholly preoccupied with his parents, but Michael cut her short, saying, “They're old.” That ended the discussion before she could also point out that Fish, ever the little brother, if only by two minutes, often got the benefit of Michael's interventions yet.

After so long, Fish and Katie seem indissoluble. Ursula only wonders if they can survive themselves.

With Fish as the correlate, she observes her own husband Michael and counts her blessings. Fate has moved her to the right side of the Fisher coin. Michael has his faults (she thinks of them as Fisher faults), but he is steady and kind. If only he did not make her feel becalmed, like a boat on a vast still lake. If only she did not have such a craving for little squalls, to stir the water.

Fish is around again. He can provide a storm or two. Come to think of it, they might just be counting on him.

12

Ursula wakes one May morning to the sounds of Michael's snoring.

He disclaims such sounds when Ursula complains, but just last week, as he lay stretched out on the lumpy basement couch, his jaw a little slack, he made the particular sound that bothered her the most. They had been watching long-faced Sherlock Holmes on PBS for the third time, and Michael made this short, wet sound, a bubble-popping sound, through his mouth. “Hey, that's it!” Ursula shrieked. Michael was indignant. He wouldn't laugh even when Ursula doubled over laughing. She knew he had heard himself. He had a look. “What a dumb thing,” he muttered, and went off to get a bowl of Almond Mocha ice cream. “It's just now the good part!” she called after him. He ate his ice cream in the kitchen and missed the end of the show.

The noises aren't so funny in the night. At first she was able to make him stop. He makes noises when he lies on his back, and stops when he turns onto his side. When he wakes Ursula, therefore, she lets him know, and he revolves compliantly. Sometimes he manages to say “Sorry” as he heaves onto his side. This used to touch her—she does love Michael—but eventually she realized he was not much disturbed by her nudge. Only she is bothered.

The snoring has been going on for about two years. Michael has developed a new version that sometimes overcomes the disadvantage of lying on his side. It involves a quick blowing of air, as though he were releasing pressure in his sleep. She regards this variation as an escalation. She wonders what twenty years will bring. Subtly, her reaction has been changing, so that where once she would have tapped him gently, she now sometimes jabs him with her outstretched stiff fingers and exclaims, MICHAEL, YOU ARE SNORING.

It is not quite dawn, the middle of the week, and the sky is a streaky gray, dry and soft, though it was drizzling when she went to bed. She knows she will not fall asleep again, and she minds. She hates mornings. She knows women who rise at 5:30 and go off to the Y to bounce around with weights on their ankles, all this before work. She doesn't care what such a regimen might do for her heart or weight or self-esteem. She craves oblivion before full sun. The best she can manage is to sleep until the exact moment the alarm bursts in her ear. Now, though, she knows she might as well shut it off, since she is fully awake.

Resentful, and chagrined that she feels so, she pokes Michael with her knee, digging in his thigh and hissing, “Ssstop!” She falls back woefully on her pillow. All her life she has been able to sleep anywhere, to fall asleep in any position, on any surface. There have been second-class Spanish trains, church benches, the back seats of cars, and a line of beds, none very good and some hardly deserving the name, and she thinks,
This isn't anything that needs to change
! Why this, a blessing, when other habits and conditions rot in a compost of piled years, a swamp of established life? Tedious, awkward Christmases with the Fishers, pickle jars and milk cartons stacked any which way in the pantry, and a thousand extraneous things in the basement. Quarrels with her son about hygiene and English. The clacking and rattling of cars driven too many miles, as though a new one would be an act of treachery against some higher principle. She longs for a luxurious accounting, a sojourn in a kind of emotional fat-farm for midlifers. She knows she needs realignment, to remember what matters and what does not. Some days she feels sentenced to her life. Other times she feels it shudder, only a 1.5 on the Richter scale, but a warning that the plates beneath her can shift.

If only Michael would surprise her. Doing what, she can not imagine. Nothing bad, please, the way some of her friends' husbands have surprised them, pulling out of marriages that seemed like rocks. Adequate, at least. “What did he want?” Carol Beyers wailed the week before, standing outside the Red Lion Motel after a meeting. An insurance executive, her husband left for Gabon to work laying a pipeline. After that he thinks he may go to Texas.

Whatever I want, Ursula thinks, it's not that.

Michael crawls out of bed, goes across the hall to the bathroom, and blows his nose. He would wring it out if he could. Ursula plumps her pillow and puts the fat part under her neck, which had not relaxed through a whole night's sleep, so that she will go into another day with yesterday's tensions still biting the base of her skull. She listens to her husband's careful blowing, and she forgives him this vulgar aggravation. After all, she sometimes leaves pantyhose draped over the closet door for weeks at a time. She wills kindness toward him, her husband, who is never ill except for a cold, and that only once a year or so. He is her companion and helpmate, toward whom she feels enormous affection, and a certain steady admiration for his immunity to consternation. He is a rock. She, who belongs to so many people, who has to reach out every day to others, whether they want her to or not, she is a puddle.

She drifts. Their old cat Pajamas nuzzles her shoulder and settles in Michael's still warm indentation. Ursula strokes the cat's hip, but the cat wants only Michael's smell.

Ursula hears Juliette's alarm, far away and muffled, like the tinkle of a hawker's bell. Juliette, by nature as slow-starting as her mother in the morning, nevertheless rises at an ungodly hour to bathe and braid her hair, and to push herself through the day's first stretches, sighing and moaning as her legs part, as she leans her cheek against her thigh and strains to grasp her instep. This is Juliette's head start. It gives her an earned aplomb in her astonishingly early ballet class, which meets before school. Juliette calls school—a succession of academic classes required of high school freshmen—Slow Death. After school she dances again. She maintains a solid B average, but when it gets harder, as it must, Ursula doesn't know if Juliette will have any more to give it. Juliette simply thinks it unfair that she has to learn anything she doesn't need to dance. It is going to be hard to defend Algebra II-Trig, Biology, Personal Finance, and the like. You don't need those courses to get into a dance school, only to get out of high school.

Carter, named for Ursula's deceased father, who was a serious scholar, is certainly turning out nothing like him; his intellect is hot and quick and contemporary. Morning comes and Carter sleeps on. He goes to bed in his underwear—today's, if he bathed last night, yesterday's, if not—and rises at the last possible moment, after Ursula is already out of the house. He has only to pull on his clothes and spike his hair in the front to be ready. He doesn't really wake up until second period. He sails through math and science though. He has what the world wants. Ursula thinks that is at the heart of Juliette's dislike for him. That, and his mouth-breathing.

When kids ask Juliette if Carter is her brother, she says, “You have got to be kidding.” Ursula cannot remember the last time she heard her children speak to one another civilly.

Michael speaks softly. “Ursie, I've got coffee for you.” She smiles in surprise. There was a time when he brought her coffee in bed every Sunday morning. It went on for years and years. She loved the luxury of slowly sipping the coffee, made from beans he would have ground fresh. Then one Sunday quite a long time ago, she came up out of a terrible dream and raged at Michael to leave her the hell alone on her days off. She wanted to sleep until she decided to wake up. He went away. Mortified, she listened to the rattle of the cup in its saucer as he took the coffee back to the kitchen. She wanted to run after him, not only to apologize, but to tell him about the dream, in which Carter—still inside her grossly distended belly, age four or five—was plucking at her flesh and gobbling it, eating her, inside out. All she managed was to pull on her robe and wander down with an embarrassed, amused, intimate acknowledgement of her bad behavior on her face. But Michael was already out of the house. Nothing was ever said. And he stopped bringing her Sunday coffee.

“So what's this?” she says as she sits up. Her flannel gown is unbuttoned, and her splayed breasts shine, pale between faded purple flowers. Without thinking, she clutches the neck of her gown together and buttons the last two buttons. She pats the bedcovers, to urge Michael to sit with her, but he ignores her gesture. He holds the cup straight out and says, “After you drink this, you need to call Katie back.”

She glances at the clock. It is a few minutes after six. She did not hear the phone. So she did sleep a little. “What in the world does she want at this hour?”

“I wouldn't get up yet,” he answers. “She said call her before you leave for work.” And he is gone, probably to check on his oatmeal. Or to feed the cat, which follows him down the stairs. Or both.

Ursula savors the coffee. Michael's little rituals. One of them is fresh beans. She seldom gets to share the benefit of his grinding. Usually she gulps down a fast cup of tea (three dunks of the bag, two spoons of sugar) standing up, while everyone else is still upstairs. Juliette eats nothing before noon, a fact that nettles Ursula, though Juliette is the strongest of them all, with her incredible long legs and her 15 percent body fat, as tested in P.E. (P.E.! she shrieked. P.E., when she dances fifteen hours a week.) Carter buys donuts at the stand by the bus stop and relies on his speedy metabolism to keep him looking good. Only Michael has a proper breakfast, prepared and eaten, like most things he does, with great absorption. He does nothing quickly. There have been times when this drives Ursula mad for a moment, but it is a quality she mostly admires. That self-care. It might even be what she married Michael for: the sense that time does indeed pass, with something in each moment, much of it under your control or, at the very least, your fairly careful observation.