Family Night (3 page)

Margaret had tried therapy off and on, but she knew it soon became something strange—a new arm of the illness from which she was seeking escape. She was not alarmed by Tracy’s sexual history; maybe he was making
too much of it. She listened to his confessions. “The flesh has a mind of its own,” she said.

Tracy attended group meetings and went out for coffees at all hours. “Too much therapy can actually cause mental fatigue,” she read from the newspaper. “Looking inward is strenuous.”

Tracy said, “That’s true. It’s tiring.” Then, Tracy saw a report of an airplane crash on the news. The plane went down because of something called “metal fatigue.”

“The wings can just peel back, come off like chocolate coating from an ice cream stick,” he told her. He liked the similarity of the terms
mental
fatigue and
metal
fatigue. These terms were reassuring; he no longer had to say he felt blue or he felt down.

In the beginning, Margaret asked the college girl upstairs to sit with Celeste, and she went along with Tracy to have coffee with members of Tracy’s group. They found a booth in a diner somewhere, sometimes moving from one diner to another. Margaret listened to their talk. If they addressed Margaret, she smiled and said she was just auditing. “Audit means listen,” she told them, making sure they understood she wasn’t going to yap. They talked about how hard it was at first to admit to themselves that they weren’t in control.

“When I got out of the driver’s seat, it was the happiest day of my life,” a man said.

Another fellow said, “Whenever I get
back
in the driver’s seat, I fuck it up, man, it’s the end. I can’t be in the driver’s seat. Never again!” Tracy discussed spiritual signposts, the lyric versus the clinical voice of the
I Ching
as Margaret watched her doughnut decay
on a saucer. Its white glaze turned clear in just an hour; in two hours the grease and sugar had merged with sodden granules of cake, making a circle of clotted amber.

After that evening, she stayed at home with her daughter. Tracy would return to her, no matter the hour. On bad nights, he rubbed his face with his hands as if trying to remove a gummy substance, his sadness jelled over his sharp features. She saw enough disturbed people, real madmen, at her job teaching grammar at the Adult Correctional Institution in Cranston. She handed out pencils and collected them at the end of each lesson. “A pencil can gouge out someone’s eye,” her supervisor said. Even the soap was shaved so they couldn’t put a heavy bar in a sock and swing it over their heads. Yet she recognized that Tracy’s sometimes arrogant, stylized remorse was more compelling, more miserable in its heightened forms than the cut-and-dried maniacal fits of the worst psychotic inmates.

Margaret first met Tracy at a Shriners’ Parade. When her divorce went through, she waffled back and forth between a feeling of stunned relief and several new and higher forms of anxiety. Cam often telephoned long distance; he was ending his marriage with Darcy, and they tried to cheer one another. He said these were the
dog days for them both. “Horse latitudes,” he said. She thought this was a silly idea, but she remembered how sailors looked for signs of land—the floating kelp, driftwood, the birds increasing.

To kill time one evening, she took her child to watch the Shriners’ Parade. Celeste was excited by the clowns, but it was Margaret herself who wished to be distracted. She was recovering from a bout of threadworms, a condition that her daughter had contracted at the school and then passed on to Margaret. It wasn’t a serious illness, but its symptoms were nightmarish. While lying in her bed, she believed she felt the worms churning through her lower bowel seeking their breeding place. She took medication with her daughter, but for weeks she imagined the worms coiled through her. She hardly ate and could not sleep.

Celeste was too small to see over people’s heads, and Margaret tried to lift her up once and again. A man was standing nearby. It was Tracy. He recognized something about Margaret. Her flickering smile, her clean slate. Then he talked to Margaret, shouting at her over the racket. It was a strange, appealing way to meet a man, to have him shout small talk, his voice booming. Now and again, he was forced to pause, to grin at her for long moments when the drums or cymbals were too loud. Soon Celeste was riding his shoulders.

Majorettes hurled batons into the twilight, the silver sticks froze high in the air before falling back. As the girls marched out of sight, Margaret studied their fringed white boots, the way the leather tassels shivered. Then, the floats arrived, towing crippled children and
children recovering from hideous burns. The crowd applauded the children. Margaret smiled at Tracy; she turned back to watch the parade at measured intervals. She didn’t want to appear anxious or hungry, but already she was feeling renewed; she thought of the tribes of worms inside her and doubted their existence. The sight of the maimed children seemed appallingly reassuring. Margaret looked at Tracy, who steadied Celeste at a comfortable height above the street. After the parade, Tracy called her. She was surprised to hear his full name; it was the same name as someone who wrote for the local newspaper.

“Yes,” he told her, “I wrote that feature on plastic flowers. It was an entire warehouse of flowers, a synthetic Amazon jungle.”

Margaret said, “I’ve read your column, but I didn’t recognize you from the sketch next to your by-line—”

“That’s a mystery sketch. It’s yanked from the files. Who knows who
he
is.”

“It’s a sketch of someone else? Isn’t that crazy?”

“You read the column? That’s the important thing. My editor tones it down. It’s too bland. If I slam politicians, it’s usually just a bad haircut or a loud sport jacket. You know, Mayor Cianci wears those navy shirts and the white ties—”

“I like your writing.”

“You do? It’s nothing. I have this facility. I can’t stop myself. They print it, then I wad it up in a ball. It’s cleansing. In just twenty-four hours I write it and throw it away in the trash. Last night I went to seven discos to write my Energy Crisis report for ’78. I’m behind Carter
on this. They’ve got colored lights under the glass block floors in these places. A strobe takes more energy than a
constant-on
.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s just one of these details. Don’t give it a second thought. Did you see my story ‘Satin Connection’? About those lingerie emporiums on Thayer Street? After the story ran, they sent me some free camisoles, mostly Big Girl sizes they couldn’t unload. Interested?”

Without the marching band in the background, his voice was even and gentle. He waited for her to form her opinions, to answer his friendly proposals. She heard him take a breath and hold it, a silky tug against the receiver.

Cam learned about her lover, and he tried not to ask her any questions. “Just tell me one thing, Margaret, where does this leave
me
? You have your divorce, now I’m getting my divorce. You said it yourself, it was a tandem kind of thing. We were going to keep an eye out for one another. Cool our heels. Now you’re joining up with someone all over again?”

“Into the frying pan, I know,” Margaret said. “I’m crazy for punishment, I guess. I should have waited.”

“That was what we talked about,” Cam said.

“Tracy’s just like a friend, really. He’s nice to Celeste,” she told Cam. “I mean, isn’t that lucky?”

Tracy was good with Celeste because he pined for his own daughter, who lived four hundred miles away. Sometimes he took Celeste aside and made plans without
Margaret’s approval. One day during the winter, Tracy drove Celeste and Margaret into the country. It started snowing again, dusting the grey drifts with new white, and it was hard to see the shoulder of the road. Tracy stopped the car at a small amusement park, closed for the winter.

“I remember this place,” Celeste said as she jumped from the car and her legs disappeared through a crust of snow.

Margaret pulled her collar together and looked back over her shoulder at the car. “We can’t just leave the car there, can we?”

“Leave it,” Celeste said. “Isn’t this great? Everything’s buried.”

“There ought to be something in here,” Tracy said.

“It’s closed,” Margaret said.

“Not really,” he said.

“Aren’t we trespassing?” Margaret said, but she followed Tracy and Celeste through the big gate and into the center of the park. In one of the pavilions, bumper cars had been left in awkward arrangements when the power was shut off at the end of the season.

Celeste was amused by her echo in the high arcade. Tracy put Celeste in one of the cars and Margaret climbed into another. Margaret didn’t expect anything to happen, but Celeste sat alert in her seat, her hands gripping the wheel. Tracy pushed Margaret’s car forward until it rammed her daughter’s. Next, he went behind the girl’s car and she steered it at Margaret. They crashed. Celeste was laughing. For ten minutes Tracy shoved the cars; his hair was drenched.

Margaret watched his face become an exhausted mask, strained by some interior effort rather than by his physical exertion. She told him to stop but he edged her around and threw her car into the low wall. He rushed Celeste’s car into her. The collision caused Margaret to tumble onto the oily floor, but Celeste was unharmed. They walked back to the car. The sweat in Tracy’s hair started to ice and peel away from his temples.

Celeste’s father came to get her on Friday evenings to take her for the weekend. Tracy listened for the buzzer. When it rang, he held the girl’s coat by its collar, positioning the parka behind her back, guiding the sleeves on, tugging the tight elastic cuffs over her wrists. He looped the long muffler four times around her collar.

“She takes all that stuff off once she gets in the car,” Margaret told him.

“No, she won’t.”

Margaret’s ex-husband took Celeste, saying he had to hurry home to a queerly suburban activity, such as smoking two-inch pork chops in his new backyard contraption.

“It’s just a year-round barbecue at your place?” Tracy said.

“A smoker doesn’t grill, it
cures
meat. Any time of the year,” Celeste’s father told Tracy.

Margaret watched Tracy’s eyes narrowing in wariness. “Don’t worry about her,” she told Tracy when her ex-husband had gone.

“The influences she gets there, shit,” Tracy said.

“It’s just that suburban stuff, it’s harmless. Unless Celeste really grows to like it,” Margaret said. “We influence her, too, you know. Maybe we should think about that.”

“What can we do to her, make her too human?” Tracy said.

“Yes, I think someone can be too human, too unhappy that way. You, of all people, should know that.”

He didn’t look pleased with her remark, so she poked him. She said she was referring to his work as a journalist. “I mean you write about the human condition for the paper, don’t you?”

“I write
against
the human condition. It’s a subtle distinction, maybe you have been missing the point?”

She didn’t argue.

Margaret came home from work one Monday and found Tracy scratching notes for a story. On his knee, she saw the little ball peen hammer they sometimes used to crack shellfish.

“What’s with the hammer?” she said.

“Oh Christ,” he said, “I hate to tell you this.”

“Tell me what? What do you hate to tell me?”

He stood up and walked over to her writing desk. He pointed to her favorite trinket, a smooth piece of petrified wood her father had given her. “I was just tapping it,” he told her.

“What do you mean?” she said, but it was too late, the paperweight was halved; its small violet center glistened on the green blotter. She examined the stone,
she tried to see that it might not be ruined, it might be more interesting now that it rested in two separate chunks.

“It was an accident,” he said. He looked at her for a sign.

She shrugged. “I see. You just had to hit something with a hammer?”

He made a florid gesture, fanning his hands open, palms up, feigning contrition, but his face was dark.

She stood very still. Perhaps they would laugh. Tracy could make her laugh, that deep, utterly unselfconscious laughter from low in the diaphragm. If she felt a little threat, it was small, hard to discern, like a thin layer of ice that forms on a pond before it melts off in the sun.

Then it was the bedroom. Lying beside Tracy, Margaret could still see the high end of the gallows through the bedroom window. She didn’t consider it. Margaret followed her primary instinct, which was her greed for him, for his form and weight. She loved the feel of his breath, its rich, humid phrasings against her skin. She listened for the slight congestion building in his lungs as he fucked her, the way he cleared his throat. Her sheets, scented from cheap bluing, kept riding up at their corners.

This was when Tracy’s daylong despair seemed to charge him; it condensed in a helpless eroticism. Tracy seemed to suggest that sex had no meaning beyond its one meaning, its physical manifestation, its act. This blank assurance excited her. If his attention shifted, focused on a remote particular, he was just showing the concentration and reserve of a jaded technician. She
was impressed by his fatalism and mistook it for a levelheaded calm.

“Don’t talk. Don’t think so much, Margaret,” he said. “We want total omniscience.” She didn’t believe Tracy was any different from other people. Sex was a transgression any way you looked at it. Everyone has some first terror that describes his role. Tracy’s orientation probably had nothing to do with “surgery trauma.” Margaret’s first erotic treasure was a book cover from a dime novel. On the cover, a girl is tethered to a post. The coarse yellow cord winds under her arms and crosses again at her hips, her bare feet are tangled in kindling briar where a rosy cloud has started. Her smock is torn at one shoulder, exposing part of her breast and half the nipple’s small medallion. The fire—the girl’s sex buzzing, snapping with the twigs’ ignition, the tiny filaments of ash stirred upward. The picture had a familiarity that common sense couldn’t explain; Margaret recognized a connection. She read about these trances later on in junior college. It was an idea that a person might have lived a previous life, perhaps as an Egyptian king or Joan of Arc. Somebody’s life. The dime novel gave her this notion and the martyred figure became Margaret’s first erotic vision.