Family Night (15 page)

When they were driving again, Tracy kept looking over at Cam. Margaret watched Tracy’s impatience. He was pinching a crease in his jeans with his thumb and forefinger, running his fingers down the fabric, then smoothing it out with the heel of his hand.

She watched the dark. A streetlight showed an erratic cloud of June bugs, little cigar stubs circling the glare.

Cam said, “We made our decision. We pretty much decided.”

“
We
did? I hate that editorial
we
. I can never tell who’s talking. No one takes responsibility,” she said.

“We’re driving to Chicago,” Cam told her.

“Hail Mary,” Tracy said.

“Are you following me?” Cam asked her. “We’re doing it.”

“You’re driving to Chicago? In this Duster?”

“With the three of us, we can drive straight through.”

Margaret said, “Come on—I don’t have a change of clothes. I’m dressed for the beach.”

“You’re fine.”

“I only have these flip-flops.”

Tracy said, “No, your shoes are in back.”

“Those aren’t mine,” she said. “Those are Darcy’s.”

“Try ’em,” Tracy said.

“I won’t try them.”

“We’ll get something. I have a Sears card,” Cam said.

“Terrific.”

“She’s not impressed. It’s the Sears image—it could use some work,” Tracy said.

“Maybe she can come down a level,” Cam said.

“The Arrow Collar guy? He’s not my problem,” she said. Margaret pulled her fingers through her salty hair and would say no more. Tracy said that just because her mother was dead, squared away so to speak, she shouldn’t shirk her family obligations.

“
We
can shut up,” Margaret said.

“Your mother is—”

“Dead,” Cam said.

“This is harassment,” Margaret said.

“You’ve never owned up to it,” Tracy said.

“Trace, please—” Why did she plead? She never sliced off the last syllable of his name unless she was whining.

Tracy told her that if they went to Chicago they could visit her mother’s grave. It’s about time. They could look it up at the town hall and find the location.

“It’s not my quest—it’s Cam’s!” Margaret said.

Cam told Tracy to shut up. He was making it worse.

Tracy explained Teilhard de Chardin’s Theoretical Axes of Happiness to Cam. He was saying, “People fall into three groups: Number one, there’s
The Tired
. These are the pessimists, fearmongers like Margaret, but these are even worse than Margaret. Number two, we’ve got
Pleasure Seekers
, hedonists, people who mate incessantly until they’re numb, people who drink without drunken relief, they tip the bottle until the last dribble is extinguished.”

“He’s revving up,” Margaret said.

“Oh really? Number three,
The Enthusiasts
. These people are lords of the safari, soul searchers, always ready to explore life’s junkyard down to the last double-chromed bat-wing window from an extinct Sunbeam convertible. Eureka! That’s what we should try for. We’re scavengers. Cam’s our leader.”

“This has nothing to do with finding car parts in a scrap heap. Cam’s got a lifelong grudge.”

Cam punched the radio so the news was screaming. Then it was the baseball scores, and they listened to see how the Cubs were doing. The baseball idea embroidered the issue and the men gripped it. Cam started asking about the pitching lineup. He hadn’t been following
the Cubs. Tracy was chattering. He said he once had Harry Caray’s signature on a ball, right on the sweet spot where the stitches come together to frame his John Hancock. Maybe they could take in a game at Wrigley.

Margaret used to like to go to the ballparks with Cam. In Baltimore they sold miniature Oriole pennants attached to No. 2 pencils. At Phillies’ games, they purchased steaming soft pretzels—singles, or five in a paper sack. They sold a peppermint stick inserted in half of a lemon. She longed for the simple pleasure of that. Those two clean flavors, contrasting cool and sour.

“Well. I might go to Chicago so you can find Lewis, but I’m not taking any detours to cemeteries. That’s out of the question,” she told Tracy.

“Don’t slam any doors yet,” Tracy said. “Sandra’s weedy plot could use some sprucing up. Maybe we can get an azalea, do some transplanting.”

Margaret
did
sometimes picture Sandra’s grave. She had read a magazine article about an exhumation. The article stated that the atrophied uterus was typically the last and final organ of the human body to decompose. The muscular womb was tough and stringy; it condensed into a hard knot and could be found intact years after burial. Margaret imagined her mother’s bones, the ivory cradle of the pelvis, and centered there—a tiny amber fossil—the shrunken pocket in which she was started and from which she was expelled.

Tracy knew when her thoughts veered, and he
pushed her shoulder until she was settled against him. They were driving into Wilmington and argued about the Duster.

“Isn’t it risky going around the city in this car?” Margaret said.

“I’ve got to pick up some cash at the office,” Cam said.

“What cash are you talking about?”

“Who are you, Officer Krupke?” Cam said.

Tracy said, “Petty cash at the apartments?”

“Bingo.”

“That’s crazy,” Margaret said. “I’ve got money at the house.”

“I’m not dealing with Elizabeth at this point in time.”

Cam parked the Duster in the tenants’ parking lot and went into the office. Margaret got out of the car and sat on the hood, but it was too hot. Tracy saw the swimming pool and started over.

He was peeling his pants down, and then she saw his white shirt on the cement beside his jeans. He stepped down the ladder and lowered himself into the water without disturbing the surface. He disappeared. She waited beside the Duster, listening to the hood contract as the engine cooled. When she didn’t hear any splashing, she wondered if maybe Tracy hit his head on something. When she walked over, he was floating on his back, pretty as you please. He looked quite evocative, his whole trunk exposed to the air, naked.

“Get out,” she said. She hated standing there in the same spot where Cam had confessed his worries to her.

Tracy told her the water was perfect.

She saw the tilt of his hips, how his pelvis rose on the swell of water as he drifted supine. His body absorbed and reflected her thoughts. She wriggled out of her tank top and held it by the spaghetti straps; she was having second thoughts. Then she pushed her shorts down. She tested the water, brushing her foot back and forth. She climbed down and stayed by the gutter as he swam up behind her. She gripped the tile ledge. “Don’t get my hair wet,” she said.

“Jesus.”

“It’s too deep here,” she said.

“I’ve got you,” he said.

“I’m sinking,” she said.

“No, I have you, shut up. For once, shut up.”

She felt a strong jet from the filter vent, a velvety pressure against her legs. Tracy buoyed her, nipped the bony pebbles at the base of her neck, and she felt her cunt pulse and contract. He moved her the way he wanted and finding her profuse silk, he praised her.

“This is ridiculous,” she said. “Why do you always do this?”

“Only when you’re around,” he told her.

Margaret noticed the slow pull of a searchlight over the city. Perhaps it was a new car dealership or another discount drugstore opening. The funnel turned and fell, then rolled around again. She liked its regularity; it grounded her in her weightlessness, helped to trigger her orgasm. Then Tracy held her shoulders and pushed her under. He leaned all his weight upon her and she sank. Her descent was smooth, dreamlike, and at first she didn’t question which direction Tracy had steered
her. When her feet touched the cement bottom, she twisted and pumped her legs, but he kept her down. She shook her head side to side. Huge bubbles escaped from her mouth, blurred pillows of air shooting upward, then two lines of tiny silver BBs. When Tracy let her rise, she was choking; the purified water burned her throat and sinuses.

Cam stepped forward to the pool’s edge. How long he had been waiting, she didn’t know. “Nice,” he said. “People can look out their windows and see everything.”

“He was trying to drown me!” She was coughing.

Cam looked directly into Margaret’s eyes, avoiding Tracy altogether. He seemed more curious about her immodesty than her complaint against Tracy. Maybe Cam could have used a swim. It might have been good if they could reach some equal ground. Nudity can do that. Margaret started up the chrome ladder. Her nose was running, stinging from the chlorine.

“Wait a minute,” Cam told her. He walked back to the office and came back with a towel. He handed it to Margaret.

She pulled herself out of the water and pinched the towel under her arms, leaving her back to the air. She felt her brother’s eyes move over her hips. She finished with the towel and handed it to Tracy. Tracy wadded the towel and buffed his arms and legs. He didn’t try to cover himself up.

“Why don’t you just lead a parade,” Cam said. He didn’t look away as they pulled their clothes on. Cam took them into the small office. There was a vinyl sofa with some blankets folded at one end. A pillow with a dirty slip was crammed on a bookshelf.

“Is this where you’re sleeping these days?” she asked him.

“That’s right,” Cam told her, “home sweet home.”

Margaret saw his name embossed on a brass plate that was glued to a wedge of wood. This was something Darcy ordered for him. It looked stupid. “Is this where you work,” Margaret asked him, “
and
sleep?”

“I’m never in here, I’m down at the new condos or running around somewhere. I don’t
sit
here.”

“You’re not taking that money, are you?”

“It’s just a loan.”

“I’ve got some money at the house.”

“We’re not going back to the house,” Cam said.

Margaret said, “But whose money is that?”

“It’s petty cash, money for plumbers or electricians, if something went out in the middle of the night and I had to get it taken care of.”

“Oh, emergency money,” Tracy said. He smiled.

“That’s right,” Cam said. The men seemed to understand one another.

“We might have an emergency,” Tracy said.

“Correct. Like Tracy here, he had a clog and got his pipes flushed, right? How much is that? A couple hundred?” He unfolded some bills and pushed the cash at Margaret.

Margaret made a face, rolled her eyes. It was an involuntary reaction; she hated to roll her eyes. Hated the way it felt.

“Look,” she said, “do you even know where this guy lives when we get to Chicago?”

Cam told her the address, the apartment number, the zip code. He recited the telephone number.

“You’ve talked to him on the phone?”

“No. I’ve dialed it. He picks it up like he expects to hear from the president. Then I terminate the call. Slip it back in the cradle, nice and easy.”

“You just hang up?” Margaret said.

“He answers the same every time—like he’s taking reservations.”

“Maybe he just has telephone manners,” Margaret said.

“What are you going to say to him; what do you
want
to say?” Tracy asked.

“I don’t have to say shit. I’m in a position of power.” He tapped the cash against the desk so the bills were even, and he put the money in his wallet. They walked back toward the car. Margaret saw a blue light twirling toward them on the street, but it was just a tow truck. It was a tow truck pulling another tow truck. The sight was strangely compelling, as if it mirrored some aspect of their situation.

They started off without a change of clothes, without anything. Cam said he’d get toothbrushes for everyone. Margaret passed her tongue over her front teeth. She said, “A toothbrush is the least of my problems. I’m freezing. My clothes are damp.”

“You’re hair’s wet,” Tracy told her.

“Forty-eight hours, that’s all,” Cam told her. “We can buy something tomorrow. You can go to Marshall Field’s and get Levi’s.”

“I can’t wear jeans until I wash them a couple times,” she said. “They’ll be too stiff and I hate the smell of the sizing.”

“What’s wrong with your shorts?” Tracy said, smiling.

She tried to shush him.

“Do you want some Kleenex?” Tracy said.

Cam said to Tracy, “You’re some lewd son of a bitch, you know that?”

“I’m just relaxed about it, the erotic impulse. It’s human,” Tracy said. “I’d say you’re wearing your strap a bit tight. Do you always give movie ratings to every routine situation?”

Margaret tried to imagine riding a thousand miles wedged in between the two men. It was crazy, but she didn’t decline to go on their journey. If two worlds converged, making one perverse expansion, what was her responsibility? Was she central? Its magnet? The feeling was heady. The Duster hardly gripped the pavement, skating forward in airy surges. The car seemed to cruise with the globe as it plunged in rotation, rolling into the dark.

They were riding up the Philadelphia Pike, a narrow antique four-lane that connected Wilmington with Chester, Pennsylvania.

“I used to come up here with Richard,” Margaret said. “He took me on sales trips, into Philadelphia, to U.S. Steel, to the refineries at Marcus Hook and to the
Scott paper plant. I watched them cut giant tubes of toilet paper into four-inch rolls—”

“No kidding? Toilet tissue?” Tracy said. “Welcome to the world of Freud.”

“Why must you take my simple memories and dice them up into some kind of psycho salad. Will you let me alone!” Margaret said. She tried to remember the names of the drinking establishments as they passed the roadside bars, the familiar saloons displaying tipped neon cocktail glasses over their doors, one after the other. Coming home from the plants, her father had usually stopped for a drink somewhere. He might try to buy her a Shirley Temple, but the cherry repelled her.

At the White Horse Tavern, Richard argued with the bartender. Margaret loved the ornaments she saw, and Richard wanted to buy the heavy china horse heads, the handles on the taps. The bartender got the manager and the manager declined Richard’s offer. Nothing could go. Not even at that price. “The decorations are fixtures, as essential as the refrigeration,” the man said. Her father saw something else. He reached up to the well-stocked shelf and pulled a trinket from the neck of a brand of scotch; it was a small plastic horse on a loop of string. Richard handed this to Margaret. Margaret started to tell Cam about the souvenir, it might add a gram weight to the scales, on Richard’s behalf, but Tracy could twist the detail. Tracy might say it was another example of Margaret’s “equine obsession,” so she kept quiet.