Beyond Deserving (6 page)

She gets up and sets the coffee cup on her dresser. A jumble of jewelry, used tissues, little folded notes, and lists clutter the top. Lately she has been feeling a keen longing for a more orderly existence, but after twenty years of lax housekeeping (her mother, on a visit, had to tell her what to do about the toilet bowl), how would she explain this to her family? Theirs is a live-and-let-live house. The downstairs gets wiped over once a week, the bathroom when she feels inspired, and the rest of the house maybe once a year. Michael keeps the yard. He putters and repairs and keep things running, and usually has some project going to improve the place. There is no real reason to complain. Besides, the clutter that is bothering her is her own. The children keep their doors shut. Michael's mess is in the basement and garage.

Impulsively, she lies back across the soft down comforter and pulls it around her, shroudlike, burying her face in it, dreaming of long-ago leisure days, of young adulthood and the stasis of contentment and no ambition. She was very happy for a long time in Portland. Moving there, for college, felt like coming home. Dropping out of Reed for PSU had been a matter of finding your own kind. Of course, people grew up (some died, some got divorces, built seniority), things did change. She loves life and embraces its surprises. She thinks she is good at evolving. She has a good attitude about certain inevitable encroachments: children fleeing, hips dimpling, Michael's ardor waning (not much, not yet). Actually she is already looking forward to “losing” Carter; going up a size had been cause for new clothes; and Michael does not threaten to fade away anytime soon. She feels better, counting her blessings.

She pulls on her ratty purple chenille wrapper and goes down to the kitchen. Michael is eating oatmeal, as he does most mornings.

“You're eating early.” The idea of that glutinous mass in his stomach turns hers. Yet there is a moment when she thinks how warm his body must be, through and through. The impulse to touch him is much like the one upstairs that sent her to the cloud of her bed for a moment's pleasure. Twenty-four years together, and it still happens like this now and then. (So why does she have to make a note of it every time?)

He says, without looking at her, “I'm not used to being watched.”

She pours herself coffee in a clean cup and sits across from him at the round oak table in the breakfast nook. She rubs her fingers in something sticky on the table.

“I watched tv with Carter a while last night,” he says. Their good television is in the basement with their lumpy old couch. “Fish brought a girl home. Young.”

“Oh,” Ursula says, feeling a knot come together in her chest. This is not the first time Fish and Katie have separated, nor the first time Fish has sought comfort with another woman, but Ursula feels a sorrow gathering in her, for Katie and Fish, for all the Fishers, for lovers estranged, and dreams lost.

Fish sleeping in their basement is a temporary arrangement, though familiar over the years. He was released six weeks early from prison, and his own house is rented until midsummer. Katie has taken tiny quarters downtown by the theatre, and she doesn't want to try to live there with Fish. “It's more like a dormitory than apartments,” she said of her building. Fish, in turn, said he was put off by fruity theatre people. Katie came for supper a few times. She and Fish have spent some hours together downstairs. She still has not stayed the night, as far as Ursula knows, though who would want to? Fish sleeps on a foam pad on a plywood bench over storage cabinets they all think of as his.

There is something about Fish in the basement that pleases Ursula, as though Fish were in place under her protection. All in all it is a thoroughly silly thought, as though no more bad things can happen.

“Is something wrong with Katie?” Ursula asks. “Is it Fish?” The urgency of Katie's call is diluted in that same moment by Ursula's sudden realization that she has not returned Mrs. Angstrom's call yesterday about Carter's English grade.
Urgent
the message said. Maybe Ursula doesn't want to hear about it! What if Carter doesn't graduate? A's in advanced placement Calculus and Chemistry, a semifinalist in the Merit Scholars competition, and he is fucking up in English! (She is sure he would have been a finalist in the tests if he could have been bothered to think about the language portion.)

“I don't keep track, Urs.” Michael sets his bowl on the floor by his chair, for the cat to lick. Ursula tries not to show her annoyance. He goes to the sink and fills the oatmeal pan with water to soak. They have had many petty quarrels about the pan, until Michael, a fair man, began the practice of washing it as soon as he comes in the door in the evening, so that Ursula will not have to do so before making dinner. Of course, she often does not make dinner. Did the contract change? It is his oatmeal.

“Early as it is, couldn't you wash the pan?” she says, unable to stop herself. She realizes as soon as the words come out that she sounds nasty, and she knows it is really Carter who inspires her tone. She wonders where she put the note with the teacher's message. Ursula will have to catch her during her prep period. She thinks it funny when Michael refers to his “prep-period,” as though teachers were surgeons requiring a harsh scrub. Ah, Carter. Mostly, she overlooks his adolescent eccentricities. She has had a lot of experience with strung-out, enraged teenagers, and she knows there is nothing basically wrong with her son that time will not cure. Failing to graduate, though, is not an option.

Michael comes back to the table and stands behind Ursula, bending over, putting one hand down into her gown. The warmth, so sudden and unexpected on her breast, sends a chill the length of her body. She reaches up to touch his arm. So what if he will not open up to her? There is this, and it isn't really rare. Sometimes it makes her a little indignant that he touches her so easily—she thinks him evasive, trying to distract her when she asks the wrong question, say—but she never throws him off.

She will not repeat the error of the refused coffee elsewhere in this marriage. Besides, to hurt Michael, she would be the loser.

Michael's parents have been married fifty years. A half-century of disappointment, guilt, suppressed anger, and—more recently—fiercely deliberate loyalty. Ursula wonders if Gully ever touched Geneva in this way, so easily. She has seen pictures of them, young, standing by one another, Gully's arm across Geneva's shoulders. Yet closeness between them seems inconceivable. Still, this is the couple who, newly married, drove to Mexico City in a 1932 Ford, and then traveled to Guatemala by train and bus. There must have been passion to spur such a brave endeavor.

“You know, that same thought occurred to me,” Michael says, sliding away. She has forgotten what “thought” came before. He speaks in a faintly wry tone, one their friends think charmingly characteristic, never having been forced to weigh the burden of alternative interpretations. He pads in his sloppy sheepskin slippers to the stairs.

The pan. That was the referent. She is embarrassed.

Then Michael says, before he begins his ascent, “It's sure to do with Fish. What other topic is so dependable?”

Ursula feels her nipples grow pert under the flannel of her gown. “Michael?”

He stops, one foot suspended above the next step. She remembers, for no reason except the sight of his foot, a girl who was her client many years ago. The girl was very ill. She would stand in just such a pose for hours, rigid, as though she would never grow tired. In the end she walked out of her parents' home straight into traffic, and was killed. All the while, Ursula had been trying to get her institutionalized, and had failed. They weren't doing that anymore, she was told.

“Oh Michael,” she says, back in the moment.

“Yo.” He makes her laugh, but it isn't what she was looking for just then.

Michael's parents sleep in separate beds at opposite ends of their mobile home. Her own parents divorced when she was fifteen, Juliette's age. Do separations start like this, with snoring, or some other dreadful little tic? Or do people blow apart after an ignominious spectacle? Will the furniture one day shift in her house? Are they happy?

She knows that Michael will never leave her. The thought would never be a serious one for him, whatever turn their marriage takes. It is up to her to keep the marriage alive, because even if it were dead, Michael would not be bothered to bury it.

“I wish we had a little more time,” she says.

13

She drinks her coffee slowly. She doesn't want to talk to her sister-in-law this morning. Life was calm with Fish in jail. The only personal crises, and small ones they were, have been with her children, who have a reasonable claim to her sympathy and occasional intervention. But it did not seem possible that Fish would survive a year in prison. They might have been locking him up in a trunk, for the panic she felt at his sentencing. He refused his brother's offer of bail. “You know I'm going to get it in the ass this time,” he said. “I might as well get started on jail time.”

At the moment of arrest—so stupid!—he looked amazed. Later he looked beaten and listless. He wouldn't see Katie until after the trial, and then he told her he didn't want her to visit him. He wouldn't write letters. Katie moved in with Michael and Ursula for a while. She couldn't stand the house out of town, with all its half-finished projects, its overgrown yard, its gloominess in winter. She couldn't sleep. She cried a lot. Ursula realized Katie had nothing to do with Fish gone. She told her to go find a job, something besides waiting tables. She knew idleness only worked for Katie when it was with Fish. Together they had amassed years of doing nothing.

“Damn him for being fucking crazy,” Katie wept. “Damn him looking so goddamned
guilty
. He scuttled off like a—a sick
crab
.”

Ursula was on the phone day and night, trying to find out what was happening, what Fish was doing, where they had taken him, when Michael could see him. Michael said, “Really, ladies, where do you think he's going to get away to?” In fact, it wasn't long before the authorities moved him to a forest camp to plant trees. Prison was prison, even outdoors, but at least he wasn't in a little cell.

He wrote them once, a card. He said there was an Indian kid in the camp who went off where he wasn't supposed to go and got in trouble. Ursula wrote back to ask if that meant the Indian went back to Salem, but Fish didn't answer.

Freed, Fish appeared exactly as Ursula knew he would, out of the blue without warning, looking sheepish and sober, as if he had been caught with his trousers down. He didn't have Katie's street address—his one card had come to Michael's—and it was very late. Michael ushered him downstairs, carrying blankets and sheets and a pillow. Fish had slept down there enough times before. Michael had rented out Fish's house for the year, and moved his stuff for safekeeping to the basement, except for his guns, which were out at his dad's.

When Ursula saw Fish, she blurted, “But you're home early!” She thought he looked rather good, his eyes less bruised. All those months without booze, drugs, sex—had they been good for him? She wanted to wrap him in her arms and press against him, to bring some life back into his expression, but of course that was for Katie to do. Ursula said she would call her.

“Aw, don't bother her,” Fish said of his wife. Michael went out and bought a half-gallon of tokay, and sat up and watched Fish get drunk and pass out content. Michael got mildly drunk himself. He came upstairs red-eyed, with a forlorn air. “Is he really okay?” Ursula asked sleepily. “Are you?” In the morning Katie asked the same thing, when Michael called her. Michael, tense and quiet, was, as usual, unable to say anything when it mattered.

Fish told them more stories about the Indian kid, who could whistle like thirty birds, and call deer and elk. He said there was an old prospector-type, too, who could speak four languages, including Athabascan. He told about the deer someone shot out of season, that ran up right into the compound and lay down on a bunkhouse porch and died. When Fish is in a good mood he talks very fast, rat-a-tat, like somebody on speed. It sounded like he was ready to quit talking prison stories—he was winding down—when he said bitterly, “I really asked for it, didn't I?” He recovered quickly. “It could have been worse.”

He looked at Katie, as if Michael and Ursula weren't there. “It wasn't like that inside, baby,” he said, “not for me.” He took a long swig of his bottle. “I'm too old. Not pretty anymore.”

“What did that mean!” Ursula asked Michael as soon as they were alone.

“If you want to know, ask Fish, or Katie,” Michael said. “I'd ask Fish, since he said it. Didn't he used to talk to you?”

Ursula blushed scarlet, surprising herself. She wasn't at all sure what Michael meant. She and Michael had never talked about her with Fish, anymore than if it was someone they never saw again. She never had said how lucky she felt, that Fish went off to Reno and threw his money away and enlisted, and she moved all her stuff downstairs to Michael's three weeks after. It was all blind luck, to have quick, silly choices yield good decisions. She had considered moving in with a graduate student named Delmore, but he was on a macrobiotic diet and she didn't think she could conform.

Days later Ursula realized Fish had to have meant sex. Everyone knew about rape in jail, she just hadn't let herself think of it. It made her sick to think of it, but Fish said it didn't happen to him.

Katie brought up the subject of divorce again, six months into Fish's term. “I guess I couldn't do it while he's there,” she said. She was thinner, she didn't come over often. She said she was working long hours. Ursula wanted to ask her about her feelings, about the years with Fish, but she sensed there were things she wouldn't want to know. And she sensed a cooler Katie, as though the opportunities for intimacy might have passed. Had Ursula been looking the other way? Had she failed Katie as friend and family, to quiet her fears about her husband's brother?