Family Night (11 page)

When she and Cam were teenagers and the home situation became stiff or itchy, they drove down to the shore. The roads were flat, running straight through the tomato fields. Cam pressed the gas pedal to the floor and let go of the steering wheel. He locked his hands behind his head and shut his eyes until Margaret screamed at him. The landscape was lush, groomed and parted. Rows of beans and lopes. There were truck stands at every crossroad, melons stacked high in pyramids like shiny bomblets. Cam drove like a practiced madman. They would be ripping at eighty and ninety. It was a cleansing forward motion. A first refreshment before the refreshment of the sea. There might be someone standing beside the road, a farmer or a kid with a ball. They blistered past and dust ballooned over the road. When Margaret looked back she couldn’t see the figure. They might have killed somebody. When
they reached Rehoboth or Ocean City, they fell into the water. It was a fixation, brown and sudsy, clouds of sand churning in the breakers, the swells and suction of the sea that rinsed them of their little pains, anxieties. Rinsed them of home.

Tracy kept studying her.

“I was daydreaming,” she told him. “Shit. It will be good to see the boats. I haven’t been on a speedboat since you had the
Lucifer
,” she told Cam.

“
Lucifer?
” Tracy looked across at Cam. “You named your boat
Lucifer
? Did you have one of those novelty plates that say
BORN
TO
RAISE
HELL
?”

“It was better than naming a boat after your wife,” Cam said.

“Yeah, there’s too many of those cruisers with the wife’s nickname: Dottie, Evie, you just have to go along the docks and count them,” Margaret said.

Cam said, “I saw a boat once—it was called
Miss Take
. I liked that.”

Tracy said, “I need a little poetry in a ship’s name, like in Newport—that old sloop,
The Black Pearl
. Then there’s the one called
Soulsearcher
. You could go down with a ship if the name was right.”

“Sailboats always have those romantic tags, Latin ones even. A speedboat has to have a real jock name,” Margaret said.

“If I buy this one we’re going to see today,” Cam said, “Laurence gets the final say. It’s really going to be for him.”

“Then he should be coming along,” Tracy said.

“Look,” Cam said, “there’s no question he’ll be coming
with me every time.” The fields blurred as Cam’s foot moved down on the accelerator.

“Shit, slow down. This is scarier than I remember,” Margaret told him.

“Schoolteacher,” Cam said.

“Well, I’ve got a kid now. You’ve got Laurence.”

Tracy told them, “Make that three sprouts.” Cam was disgusted. He toed the accelerator, but it was a brief protest and he slowed the car. They didn’t talk for a moment, reined in by the thought of their children.

Cam started to tell them about Darcy. She was reluctant to trade cars for the day. “She knew what kind of fun we could have in the Duster,” Cam said.

“Jealous,” Tracy said.

Cam shook his head. “Not even that, just mean. I left mine there and took this one.”

Margaret told Cam he was asking for trouble.

“I just switched cars for the day. I left her the Bronco.”

“You might find a bucket of fish guts dumped on your front seat when you come back. I saw that once in Providence. You don’t think fish are so bloody, they seem so pure, straight
agua
pumping through their veins. Then you see some mackerel guts sinking into the upholstery,” Tracy said.

“Look, I gave her this car in the first place.” “That makes it a pretty self-conscious gesture. You’re making your point with the Duster.”

“Can you translate?” Cam asked Margaret. “No, don’t bother.”

Tracy said, “What’s the problem? What is it? English as a second language?”

Margaret pulled her chin in tight and let them shoot it back and forth.

“Go ahead,” Tracy said to Margaret, “be interpreter for us like you do for those poor souls in the joint.”

“No, thanks,” she said.

“Evaluate,” Tracy said.

“Is that what you do?” Cam said.

“I write reports. I write down the subjective, the objective, the assessment, and then the plan. The S.O.A.P.”

“The S.O.A.P.? You mean it’s that head-shrinking stuff?”

“It’s my job. We make assessments and then we make plans.”

Tracy said, “You know, it’s all that Behavior Mod, and then the moral lesson.”

Cam said, “That’s how you make a living?”

“You clean swimming pools, isn’t that right? Well, I’ve had jobs,” Margaret said. “Every kind of clerk. Then I was a chambermaid. Don’t get me started on that.”

Cam pressed his thumb down on her kneecap and lifted it off.

Let’s forget our work
, he might be trying to say.

She would tell him,
Okay. Let’s ride the Duster out of the realm of toil and monetary needs
.

Tracy might say,
We’ll roll into the lowland of the senses
. Down to the seaside. When it was quiet for a minute, these dreams overwhelmed her.

…

Before she started working in the prison, she had a housekeeping job at the River Lodge. Even after she left the motel job, the idea of the
single hair
stayed with her. She told Cam, “I didn’t mind making the beds, tearing the dirty sheets loose and wadding them down into a hamper that was nailed to a trolley. The televisions were going in the rooms, soap operas, and the women told me who was cheating on who, but I couldn’t keep up.

“Then I had to hunt down these private hairs. One kinky hair left unattended would get my supervisor all worked up.”

“Just one hair?” Cam said.

“One of them. Maybe in the tub, or back in a corner, curled around the ceramic doorstop. She’d always find it.”

Tracy plucked a glossy hair from his belly and twirled it against Margaret’s cheek. “Will you stop?” she told him. He laid the hair against her bare knee. She brushed it away. “I wasn’t supposed to use water to clean the tub or sink. Water leaves spots. Washing hairs down the drain creates a clog, you know?”

“The implication being—that water itself, like the corkscrew hairs, is yet another kind of filth?” Tracy said.

“That’s right. So I quit,” Margaret said.

She had not yet met Tracy. When her savings ran out, she developed a new sense of reality. It all had to do with having no money. Cam said it must have been hard to scrub bathrooms after she had been used to a comfortable lifestyle with her husband.

“That breadstick? I’ll take my job at the prison,” she told Cam.

“Why can’t you teach regular school or do Avon?”

“Mary Kay,” Tracy said. “Mary Kay gives you a company car, a pink Caddie when you sell ten thousand powder puffs.”

Margaret said, “I don’t like to sell. I work for the state. The state isn’t run like a business and I don’t have someone breathing down my neck about making a profit.

“All I had to do was take the civil service examination at the state employment office. Next, I went for an interview for the position of corrections officer ‘with a possible emphasis in tutorial work as an English instructor.’ I showed them I could spell multisyllable words and they hired me.”

Tracy said, “I told her she didn’t have to go work in a prison. I make almost enough at the newspaper—”

“Almost enough? Almost enough isn’t
enough
,” Cam said.

Tracy turned in his seat. “We do fine. I host some high school dances with the disc jockey from WPRO. The kids like my column. I’m a fucking celebrity—”

“With the Cranston pubescent scene,” Margaret said.

“I get a couple hundred a week for these disco horror shows, but what does Miss Do-Gooder want? She wants to walk into a maximum-security setting and conjugate verbs with the foreign exchange students. Colombian, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Hmong Chinese. She teaches them how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ They get back on the street and do you think they remember Miss Manners? You should have seen Margaret the first day on the job—”

“What do you mean?” Margaret said. “I looked fine.” She told Cam, “I had a plain tan skirt and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Two-inch heels—”

“She looked like an airline stewardess,” Tracy told Cam. “What will it be, coffee, tea, or hootch? ‘What’s hootch?’ she asks me.”

Cam said, “There’s a lot to learn about law enforcement.” He was smiling at Margaret. “You need a dictionary of slang. What’s a screw?”

Margaret said, “For your information, a screw is a guard. The word comes from the idea of turning a key in a lock. Not what you’re thinking. Hootch is homemade brew; sometimes it’s made from raisins or even potatoes. They can make it in a wastebasket and hide it in a dropped ceiling. Do I pass?”

“Go straight to jail,” Tracy said.

She said, “If I
knew
what hootch was, that would say something about me, wouldn’t it?”

“Isn’t she pure? Like Ivory soap. She floats.”

Cam said, “It’s just a matter of time.”

“That’s right. She’s a hostage profile,” Tracy said.

“Oh really? This is a modern prison. All kinds of professionals work inside. What George Raft movie have you been watching?” She looked to see if her comment was shooting them down any, but she should have thought up a different actor.

“A movie?” Tracy said. “Baby, life is a movie. Your cunt is a little roll of celluloid, twenty-four frames a second, a sixteen-millimeter fuck show. Just remember that.”

“Shit, Tracy. Aren’t you glad I’m getting the money?” she said. The state had arranged to place her paycheck
directly into her bank account. She wouldn’t have to wait in line for the teller.

Margaret’s first weeks in the prison, she worked in a small icy room in the tower. The tiny suite was called Master Control. A wall of video monitors showed the hallways, the intersections, and the external gates. The room was flanked by cabinets of gleaming weaponry: rifles, pistols, sawed-offs, stun guns, tear-gas grenades, hand and ankle cuffs, belly chains, flares and prodders. The air conditioning was up so high, she had to ask her training supervisor for his jacket. She knew this was a dangerous request, he might mistake it for flirtation or for physical weakness typical of the female. He told her the place was cold to keep the ammunition dry, and the cold would keep her on her toes.

Margaret wondered when she would be allowed to teach composition as she sat on a swivel chair before the large boards of blinking lights and video screens that controlled the system of electronic doors throughout the prison complex. Each doorway was comprised of two electronically operated glass panels, only one of which could be opened at a time. Margaret had to learn to work the electronic levers that operated the doors, maneuvering the first door closed before the next door could be opened.

Once or twice, Margaret accidentally closed the door on someone. She jostled a prominent psychiatrist, brushing his shoulder with one door, and by the next door she was out of synchrony and she struck the doctor
again as he angled out of the compartment. Tracy enjoyed hearing this story. “You squashed a shrink? It could have been anyone—the vending machine person, the laundry people. I love it. You’re incredible! You got the Mind Control guy without even trying.”

She started to have dreams about the prison. Her daughter was trapped inside the glass stall. Tracy told her she was starting to act funny in her sleep, her body jerking, sometimes rising up to a sitting position. “It must be a terrible job,” he said, but she disagreed, she told him she was managing. “I’ll be teaching composition soon,” she said.

Margaret started sleepwalking. She left her bed and went to the window. She threw up the sash and leaned out over the sidewalk two stories below until the cool, sooty air revived her. She sank back inside, terrified, suffering a vertigo intensified by her dream condition. A therapist told Tracy that it was not uncommon for people to sleepwalk during the first months of an employment situation that required hours of confinement. In a prison, or on submarines, on deep-sea oil rig platforms, there was a high incidence of somnambulism.

She began to tutor the men in the prison, and Margaret was pleased when an inmate showed her some song lyrics or a poem he had written. She felt more like a substitute teacher or a guidance counselor than a corrections officer. Some of the inmates called her “Teech,” and she liked the nickname. Others started to call her “Sidewinder,” because, no matter how hard she tried to adjust her gait, she couldn’t keep from moving
her hips when she walked down the halls. One kid showed her an apple tattooed on the inside of his wrist, a smudgy blue sphere. His name was Macintosh. He told her, “Teech, I’d give you this apple, but you wouldn’t want it. It’s got worms.”

“Worms don’t scare me,” she said. This was how she talked to them. It impressed some, but she could never convince everyone.

Cam was the only one in the family who had an interest in boats. Yet, Margaret remembered seeing an old photograph of Elizabeth sitting in the prow of a sailboat. Elizabeth looked beautiful, dressed in white slacks with the cuffs rolled up. She wore a tight sailor’s shirt, a tiny anchor print. The blouse was showcased in
Vogue
magazine, Elizabeth told her. The boat was small, a “catboat,” with an old-fashioned, spoon-shaped hull.

“Who took this picture of you?” Margaret asked.

“My first husband,” Elizabeth said.

“The Arrow Collar Man?”

“Who else? It’s Lake Michigan. In the winter the waves freeze on the shore. Big chunks, giant saucers, like broken crockery.”

“What?” Margaret didn’t think she heard correctly.

“The waves freeze on the shore.” Elizabeth walked out of the room. Margaret passed the snapshot beneath the lamp; its hot cone fell on her wrists as she cradled
the photo. Margaret was puzzled by Elizabeth’s non sequitur, “The waves freeze on the shore.” At other times, Elizabeth might speak in depth, describing her struggles with Lewis Goddard. Margaret believed she had learned more about him than Cam and his sisters ever had. Perhaps, because Margaret wasn’t her real daughter, Elizabeth was able to confide in her. Richard was different; he kept his cards close to his chest, and she learned about his private life from what he left out. These holes in the narrative explained a great deal.