Family Night (19 page)

That night she went drinking with Tracy but the whole Amelia Earhart softball team arrived at the same bar in bright uniforms, cheering victory slogans. Margaret recognized the woman who swabbed her vulva with Betadine, and there was the woman who, at the end of the procedure, removed the canister for inspection, searching for the purple wedge of placenta like a bit of blackened tripe.

The next day, she hoped to feel nothing, to forget it. Then, the radio announced a partial eclipse of the sun.

“Can you believe this?” she said to Tracy. She
knew
there was a connection. That afternoon, the sky greyed. It was unlike the warm half-darkness at dusk or the translucence at daybreak. Shadows evaporated, buildings were blotted dry of definition. She watched the sun until a red-brown disc, a mask of tissue, merged with the blinding circle. Did Tracy see it that way, that half-coagulated blur that moved over the sun? Why should she make him see it her way?

She closed her eyes and saw two steady torches. Then her eyes adjusted. Margaret had heard about Japanese women who were blinded by the harsh sights of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They didn’t become blind in the usual sense, they suffered no physical injury to their
eyes. After the A-bomb, the subconscious lowered a grey curtain. It was a
gift
, the women said. Physicians and psychiatrists were intrigued by this phenomenon; they tried, with varying success, to coax these women to see, but they were met with refusals.

Sometimes Margaret started laughing, a tearing laughter that snagged through a web of congestion in her lungs.

“It’s going to take a while,” Tracy told her, but he was over it.

Before they left Franklin’s house, Margaret telephoned her ex-husband, Phil, without mentioning to him that she was halfway to Chicago. She just wanted to talk to Celeste. Her ex-husband was in the middle of a game of Dungeons and Dragons. He refused to put Celeste on the telephone at this critical moment in the game.

“Excuse me?” Margaret said. “You can’t put my daughter on the telephone because you’re doing what?” Her husband had always used these commercialized fantasy worlds to evade her. During their marriage, he had arranged and catalogued increasing stacks of science fiction paperbacks at his bedside. From her pillow, she saw book covers depicting pocked moons, red-eyed snakes and reptiles, oversexed Amazon Venusians. At New Year’s, he reread the Hobbit trilogy and went to
the national convention. He tried to initiate Celeste; each blithe suburban ritual was concluded with a bedtime reading from one of his fantasy manuals. Phil’s taste for dwarfs and dragons seemed peculiar coupled with his ongoing homeowner’s odyssey.

Tracy said he understood the profile. “The American gentry live in a void. The climate is freeze-dried. Phil depends on these subterranean civilizations to fill an intellectual vacuum.” Yet, Tracy couldn’t find the right comment when last season Phil boasted to Margaret, saying that he had actually used his sci-fi collection to weatherproof his split-level against the New England winter. Phil had distributed his paperbacks on shelving against the north walls, floor-to-ceiling, adding a thermal resistance factor of R 11.

“I’m calling back in an hour,” she told her ex-husband. “Celeste better pick up.”

Then she called Elizabeth. Margaret told Elizabeth it was unavoidable. Cam was doing what he had to do. Elizabeth asked her why they were stirring things up, why didn’t they leave the past the past? Why didn’t they just try to accept it? Margaret cleared her throat and shifted her tone to enlist Elizabeth to her side. She said, “You know Cam—
you know Cam
, don’t you?” There was silence on the other end of the line, as if Elizabeth were considering all the years since she birthed her one boy.

“Yes, I guess I know him.” Elizabeth’s voice sounded frail one minute, sharp the next. It was often this way.

One time, Elizabeth was leaving the house to go to a banquet and Margaret noticed that her stepmother had forgotten to smooth her makeup. There was a smear
across her upper lip, a heavy stroke of beige foundation. Margaret saw the flawed makeup and wanted to take a handkerchief and dab at the smear until it was blended. She took Elizabeth by the sleeve and they looked eye to eye. There was something in Elizabeth’s face, a distance that could not be overtaken, some denial of their intimacy, their connection, and Margaret could not touch up the Max Factor or cleanse that helpless defiance from Elizabeth’s mouth.

Tracy was driving and Cam rested in the backseat with his feet propped, surrounded by 1950s smut magazines. “I don’t want to hear Elizabeth’s opinion,” Cam said.

Margaret was holding one of Franklin’s velveteen boxes. She clicked the lid open and closed as she talked. “She’s kind of scared.”

“Sure she’s scared,” Cam said, “she’s worried I’ll find out the straight dope.”

“You’re so certain she’s guilty of something. Did you ever stop and think what it was like for her, Lewis running off like that?”

Cam said, “He jumped ship, that’s all.”

“Rats jump from ships.”

Tracy was smiling. He said, “Nice volley, keep it up.”

Margaret said, “Living with her folks all those years, the prime of her life.”

“Oh, she got out of the house. She was a Dancing Queen.”

“Maybe just to fill up the empty hours. She enrolled in a school and learned the fox-trot and the samba.”

Cam said, “You can bet she did the samba. On her back.”

“Elizabeth never fooled around. She told me.”

“She’s a liar.”

“I’m not finished, let me tell you. One time I asked her if she had some lovers after Lewis. Negative. None? I ask her. Elizabeth says, ‘I didn’t make love to them,
I let them make love to me
.’ I like that distinction,” Margaret said.

“You’re gullible,” Cam said.

“No, I believed her. She didn’t make love to them, she let them have a try. No one impressed her.”

“You’re simple, Margaret.”

She was getting mad. “Do you know what Elizabeth calls you? You were just an immaculate conception!” The phrase was easy to dramatize.

Tracy said, “
Just
an immaculate conception? Only a biological miracle?”

They ignored Tracy. It was between the two of them.

“What are you saying?” Cam asked Margaret.

“An immaculate conception. You’re the product of a farewell fuck. Lewis didn’t even know you were coming, maybe he doesn’t even know you’re alive now.”

“He was still with Elizabeth when I was born—”

Margaret said, “Sorry about that. She told me. She told me the truth. You were a regular, run-of-the-mill bastard.”

“A leftover bun in the cold oven,” Tracy said.

“You learn something every day,” Cam said. She looked back at him and his face was turned. He was staring out the window.

“Didn’t she ever explain anything to you?” Margaret said; she hated to let her voice soften, but Cam must be thinking how he was unwanted. Unwanted then, and now. Margaret knew a woman who openly displayed her ambiguous feelings toward her child. She was always letting the child play in dangerous areas, near open cisterns, climbing onto high diving boards, letting him roam too near his father’s table saw. Margaret wondered how long it could go on. When the child was born, they said he had the cord wrapped around his neck. The tight cord made him skinny and underdeveloped as if the mother had been trying to choke him all those months he was inside her.

Tracy started singing an old Bobby Darin tune, the one about the orphan:
“They found little Annie all covered with ice!”

Cam said, “Fuck you, Tracy.”

Tracy kept singing. He had a clean, dominant tenor and he held the notes with a sullen vibrato. Cam started pitching the collectors’ smut rags out the car window, one after the other, their brittle leaves tearing loose and fluttering over the interstate traffic.

T
he left front tire had a slow leak. They had to keep testing it, stopping at gas stations to give it a little air. Most of the time the air was free. Then Cam had to put a quarter in the air pump. That’s when Cam decided to get the tire fixed. He said he didn’t want it nickel-and-diming him. Margaret started thinking maybe Cam was stalling. They estimated eight hours and they’d be in Chicago, but Cam kept getting off the freeway. He got out of the car to scratch bugs off the front grille of the Duster.

“There’s just going to be more insects,” Margaret told him.

Now he was getting all the tires changed. New ones all around. They left the Duster at the Firestone Tire Center and walked a few blocks into the town. Margaret put on Darcy’s shoes since she couldn’t walk far in her flip-flops. Her feet were the same size as Darcy’s, but the shoes were unfamiliar ballet pumps with garish leather blossoms at the toes. They went into a drugstore and Margaret found some mentholated witch hazel and some pocket handkerchiefs. The store sold sneakers and canvas pumps. She tried on the pumps; they were stiff and slipped up at the heel, so she kept wearing Darcy’s. Then she went into a church thrift store and bought a skirt for herself. It was what they used to call a wraparound, three panels of fabric sewed together at an angle. The skirt swirled and flounced if she turned around sharp. The fabric was light and airy and the print was busy with Irish setters running nose-to-tail. It really was something corny, something to cheer everybody up. Franklin would have liked it. After she came out of the thrift shop, Tracy pointed to a sign up ahead. The sign said
ELITE
CHICKS
in mint-green neon.

“It’s a strip joint, I guess,” Tracy said.

“Well, I don’t particularly want to see strippers at this hour,” Margaret said.

“Would you like to see them tonight, after dark? We could stick around.” Cam was smiling.

“Ohio girls,” Tracy was saying. “Interesting. Some Buckeye gals. Tell me, just exactly, what is a buckeye?”

“I’m curious,” Cam said. “We could inquire while I have myself a beer.”

“It’s the Midwest and it’s called a ‘draw.’ We’ll ask for a couple of draws,” Tracy said.

Margaret didn’t care one way or another. When they reached the tavern, they stopped at the plate-glass window.

“What in the hell is this?” Tracy said.

Margaret said, “This is great.”

In the storefront window they saw undulating waves of yellow pollen, a thousand hatchlings, baby chicks, balls of fluff on tiny rice feet. The big stainless-steel incubators were polished and gave off a reflection of the three of them. “This place sells chickens!” Cam said.

“They’re so cute,” Margaret said, leaning into the glass. “What are they for?”

The men looked at one another. Tracy said, “Easter, they must be for Easter.”

“Sure, for next Easter,” Cam said.

Margaret said, “I’d like to have them just like this, five in a row on a skewer!” She hated it when they condescended to her. She walked ahead of them. She could squash a baby chicken, rotate the toe of Darcy’s shoe on its little beak if they wanted to make something of it.

“You wouldn’t really eat chickens in a row like that.” Tracy was smiling.

They went back to get the car. It had four new tires on it, steel belted, with narrow white walls. The white walls were glazed with blue soap. It was a pretty sight, Margaret thought. These tires would assure her safe
return to Celeste. The sooner the better. Cam went into the office to pay for the tires. Several minutes passed and he came back out.

“They won’t take my Visa. They won’t take any of my cards. She’s blocked them.”

“What?”

“Darcy’s put a hold on all my cards. She’s reported the cards stolen,” Cam said.

Tracy was shaking his head, but he looked impressed. He was pleased by the turn of events, he was admiring the mind of the girl behind this. All these miles and Darcy was able to swoop down, rain on their parade, right where they were standing in Ohio.

Margaret said, “Call the bank and tell them it’s not stolen. They’ll take the freeze off.”

“Not if she says her cards are stolen, it’s the same number. They’ll just issue new cards and tell us we have to wait for that,” Cam said. “Look at this place. It’s a one-horse shit hole. Nowheresville.”

There it was again, Tracy’s diction invading Cam’s.

“Jesus Christ,” Margaret said. She wanted Cam to know she was feeling worse about it than Tracy.

“She’s trying to shut me down,” Cam said.

“I’ve got a card, you can get the tires,” Tracy said.

“I don’t think so,” Cam said, “that’s not the point here.” He opened the car door and got behind the wheel; he touched the keys dangling from the steering column. He swatted them like a cat so that they jangled. “Get in,” Cam told them.

Margaret got in beside Cam. Tracy came around and leaned in the passenger door until he was level with
Cam. “You aren’t going to buy the tires? Is that what you’re saying?” Tracy said.

“Correct,” Cam said.

Tracy got into the car beside Margaret. He yanked open the glove compartment and shuffled the velveteen boxes around. Then he shut the glove compartment. He was thinking it over. “You’re test-driving the tires?” Tracy said.