Expensive People (13 page)

Then we nearly broke through to the country, but it was an illusion—just a housing subdivision called Country Club Manor. As Nada raced by I glanced through the gate (not a real gate but just two pillars of red brick to match the red-brick colonials inside), and Nada said, “That awful Vemeer built this slum.” Her attitude cheered me.

On the other side of the highway, which had branched out now to a magnanimous eight lanes with snow-encrusted grass in the center, were more subdivisions, one after another: Fox Ridge, Lakeside Groves, Chevy Chase Heights, Bunker Hill Towne, Waterloo Acres, Arcadia Pass … Real-estate salesmen with no taste had driven us under the red-brick archways of some of these settlements, and Father had had to explain apologetically, “I'm afraid that… this sort of thing just won't
do.”
Our English teacher up at Johns Behemoth, catering to the prejudices of his well-bred young pupils, kept referring to the “Fox Ridge mentality,” which we were to understand was a conformity of deadly intensity, a mediocrity which stopped precisely at the clean white-and-black sign that proclaimed:
FERNWOOD VILLAGE LIMITS SPEED

LIMIT 45.

We sped past at sixty, and Nada said, more or less to me, “This is a lovely place to live.” Slowing reluctantly for a traffic light, she said again, “It's lovely here,” and after a few minutes muttered sideways to me, “Are you happy in Fernwood, Richard?”

“Some of my classmates aren't happy,” I said, deliberately choosing the word “classmates” because it sounded so natural. “That boy whose mother drinks—”

“But are you happy?”

“Some of the kids who worry about their parents, you know, their
parents fighting and maybe getting a divorce … well, they're pretty miserable, but not me.”

“That's good,” Nada said vaguely.

She swung off and into a parking lot, the one shared by the courthouse, the police station, and the library. All three buildings were constructed of the same red brick, with white shutters and trim and handsome broad chimneys.

“I want to check something,” Nada said.

We went into the library, which looked just like a pleasant, homey home, with windows divided into many small white-rimmed squares and the words
FERNWOOD PUBLIC LIBRARY
in fancy wrought-iron letters, painted white. Coming out the door was Mavis Grisell, who smiled her fake exotic but perfectly friendly smile, showed an expanse of gums, and said, “Why, hello, Nada and Richard! Isn't it a lovely day?” Nada managed to get away from her, sending me a sideways glance that thrilled my poor nervous, fluttering heart. When she looked at me that way, inviting me to share a secret with her, I could not believe that she would ever run away from me again.

She sent me off vaguely in the direction of the children's bookshelf, me with an IQJiigh enough to impress the jaded Johns Behemoth, but I was agreeable and stood leafing through a book of big print and smudged illustrations, dealing with flying saucers. My nose had begun to run and I hadn't any tissue but I was cheerful just the same. Weren't the two of us together? I peeked around and saw Nada browsing through the
Recent & Readable
section, and then over to
Literature & Classics,
then twisting back around and surprising me, coming up to the
Leafing Shelf
where a few Fernwood ladies stood leafing through magazines and whispering together. Nada hunted around and found a magazine and opened it eagerly. I fixed the colors of the cover in my mind, so that I could look it up another time and see what had drawn her to it.
^*

The library had a kind of front lounge area, with comfortable leather sofas and chairs. For Smokers, a sign said agreeably. Everything
in Fernwood was agreeable! The area was clearly modeled after an outdoor cafe or a cocktail lounge, and perhaps this accounted for the slightly confused, disoriented faces of the women and the two or three men who were sitting there, browsing and smoking. When I saw Nada head for the lounge I joined her there. She opened a magazine and let it lie on her lap. “Isn't this library nice?” she said. She spoke with a fierce whisper that was like a threat, a test: did she really hate it and wondered what I would say? What did she mean? On a sofa near the wall sat a man leafing idly through a magazine. I saw Nada's eyes move toward him several times, then she opened her purse and searched through it. “Richard, ask that man for a match,” she said.

“Maybe I can find them in there,” I said, reaching for her purse.

But she drew it onto her lap and let her gloved hands lie primly on it.

I approached the man shyly and whispered, “May my mother borrow a match?” The man did not glance up. I edged a little closer and said, “Mister”—and my voice gave a sudden croak so that the man jerked his head up and stared at me—”may my mother borrow a match?”

He looked past my insignificant head and took in Nada and said, “Sure.” His hair was close-cropped, blond maybe, shading into gray, but he wasn't very old. He had startling blue eyes. The matchbook he gave me was from the Whispering Dunes Motel, in Pleasure Dells of another state. I came dutifully back to Nada with this prize, and she lit her cigarette, and after a minute or so the man came, long-legged and casual, over to join us.

“Is that
Fortune
there?” he said, indicating something on a table.

“I don't know,” Nada said.

He sat down anyway and leafed through some discarded magazines. “Huh,” he said flatly coming across a headline on the yellow banner of the
Reader's Digest
that struck him, “not that again.” With one tobacco-stained finger he moved the magazine so that Nada could see the title, and she showed her fine teeth in a smile of pleasant sarcasm, and the two strangers exchanged sideways looks rather like the one Nada had given me over Mavis Grisell. My nose began to run alarmingly.

“There is this boy at school, whose parents live in Boston, who's so miserable and mean,” I told Father the next time he appeared at home. “His mother's an alcoholic and she fights a lot with his father, and he worries about them—”

“Look, you ask that kid over for dinner,” Father said sternly. “You hear? The poor little bastard!”

And he hurried upstairs, his scuffed shoes thumping heel-first on the carpeted stairs. He was in a rush: he'd just flown back from Ecuador and had to dress for a wedding reception out at the Vastvalley.

I'm sorry that the Vastvalley Country Club doesn't figure much in my memoir, because some people are interested in country clubs. Actually, my parents took me out there only once, for an expensive dinner in the presence of Mavis Grisell, the Spoons, a quiet, mousy, fawning couple named Hodge who had a fat boy my age, and an extremely charming man with a tiny mustache who later scandalized all of Fern-wood by publishing, in the
Post,
an inside story on the fortune he had made by bugging homes for jealous husbands/wives, and the pseudonyms he used to disguise his rich clients were impudently transparent.

Vastvalley is not the oldest or quite the best country club, if I am to believe the kids at Johns Behemoth and not Nada, who was much too defensive about the whole matter. I think she felt that she had leaped too quickly at the Vastvalley, and might well have held off for the Fernwood Heights. But anyway the Vastvalley was expensive enough to be reasonable, and rather hideously constructed. Imagine a very long building tugged in at each end to form a kind of semicircle, everything built of aged red brick and trimmed with black wrought iron in Englishy style. Imagine many gas lamps, and uniformed Negroes in quiet, efficient attendance, and the Ladies Lounge (again no apostrophe!) so thick with scarlet carpet that I could see, from outside, how Nada's high heels made a track in it, crossing and crisscrossing the
tracks of other fair ladies. Imagine a pointlessly long hall, not quite straight (remember the construction of the building), and raw-looking but really quite finished wooden benches, redolent of English manors and primitive hunting halls now vanished from the earth, and wrought-iron lanterns dangling from the walls on spear-like devices. An odor of cleanser, perfume, and tobacco. In the lounge a pleasant odor of alcohol. Voices muffled by the thick rugs everywhere, and from distant rooms the sounds of billiard balls clicking, ice cubes clicking, cards being thrown on invisible tables with a clicking noise.

It was a dizzying trip for me, following all the adults and the one waddling fat boy along corridors, up and down short meaningless flights of steps, until we emerged into a great gold-ceilinged dining room that was not very crowded, out of which white-coated waiters moved hesitantly toward us like ghosts welcoming us to a graveyard. It was all very velvety, very nineteenth century, overdone with chandeliers and too many dusty plants in the corners, not quite far enough away for one to believe they were real. This was my dinner at the Vast-valley on one lucky Sunday of my miserable life. It was just as bad for the fat boy, who had been promised (as I had) a “new friend” but who (like myself) was too shy or too stubborn to make the first gestures of friendship. After dessert he broke out into hives. While the adults had coffee and smoked luxuriously around the big table the fat boy reverently fingered his blotches and I sat waiting to leave, distracted from Nada's animated face by a furtive movement back in a corner—a shy cockroach trying to ascend the gold-papered wall.

When we got home Father said to me, eyebrows raised, as one man to another, “Buster, you certainly didn't contribute much to the conversation.”

Nada said at once, “This child is ten years old!”

“Almost eleven.”

“He's ten years old and extremely sensitive. What on earth do you mean by attacking him like that?”

“Tashya, I didn't attack him. I only said—”

“He hardly had his muffler off and you attacked him. Why should a child of ten, as intelligent as our son, bother with the drivel that went on around that table today? God! And that pimply-faced fat boy—”

“I only said …”

I took off my muffler miserably and hung it in the closet. Behind my back they were probably making signals to each other, to delay the argument for my “sake,” and when I turned, Nada was brushing her angry hair back from her face and Father was smiling the way he smiled when guests were pouring in our front door.

“Guess I'll go up and do my math,” I said.

I went upstairs, and Nada said gently, “Richard, you should stand straighten” I was no sooner out of sight when I heard Father say, “That's the fourth time today you've told him that! Do you want him to …”

Upstairs I made my feet trudge along the familiar path to my room, and once I reasoned that they had moved to another room I kicked off my shoes and went back into the hall. I hope you won't think I was one of those round-foreheaded, pipsqueak, smart-aleck little brats if I tell you that I was certainly a genius—the devices I had for spying! And none of them suspicious, none of them likely to call attention to itself. In the kitchen, which was my parents' favorite refuge for serious talks, I had long ago known enough to leave the laundry-chute door slightly ajar. The door was painted green, like the wall, so it was very subtly camouflaged, my spying—standing up in the hall, with my head stuck inside the laundry chute, I could hear everything they said …

The fight over a stained silk cushion on a Queen Anne chair, on our first day in the house.

The fight over Father's Negro jokes at a party.

The fight over Father's “baggy trousers.”

The fight over Father's shirts, which were all dirty.

The fight over Nada's correction of Father's pronunciation of “incognito.”

The fight over Nada's na'ive admiration for the local and interna tionally famous HF, whom Father renounced with middle- class gusto, along with his wife.

The fight following from this, when Father called Nada a
parvenu.

The shrieking fight over the mildew in the front lawn, which was gray-blue and deadly.

The hysterical fight over my eyeglasses. (“Whose eyes did he inherit, whose? He'll have glasses like the bottoms of Coke bottles …”)

The fight over the canned goods in the basement storeroom, whose labels had all peeled off mysteriously.

The fight over the warped piano key—I believe it was G two octaves above middle C.

The fight over …

And, a week ago, another fight over—I believe it was over Jean-Paul Sartre, whom Father rejected as a “Communist writer.”

And…

And all the other fights that were about nothing.

They always began like comic-strip fights, Father and Nada talking wildly and accusing each other of anything that came to mind. “Well, you looked at me as if I were dirt,” Nada would cry, and Father would say, panting, “Well, you turned your back on me!” And I could almost smile with the familiarity of it all though I was sick of the game they were playing. Would it strain your patience if I were to suggest that they weren't really this stupid? My mother wasn't stupid but for some reason I will never know she acted stupid most of the time. She was deliberately, spitefully, stubbornly, passionately stupid. Father bellowed and blustered and stammered, but really, he had made a marvelous career in business, somehow, don't ask me how. He wasn't stupid either. He was stupider than she, but when they fought their famous fights it was almost a draw. The accusations, the stuttered insults, the invisible blows of abuse and torment that rose up the laundry chute to my tingling, jangling ear!

“Oh, you stupid man, you revolting vulgar bastard!” Nada cried. “How much longer can I take this? What are you doing to me? Why did you marry me if you hate me so much?”

“Me? What? Jesus Christ, you always switch things around—”

“You aren't even material for a good novel, you and those ignorant fools! It's just caricature, it's slop, I can't take it seriously and I'm losing my mind here—”