Family Night (7 page)

Elizabeth refused to try hers. “I won’t wear it,” she said. “It’s silly and it will ink my hair.”

She was right to be cautious. Her hair was so porous from color treatments, its hollow red strands would have soaked up the print. The sun wobbled overhead, its heat radiating in parallel lines that jelled over the horizon, wavy, until it looked as if the field were tearing up in places.

After the fifth race, before Kelso made his farewell appearance, her father’s name was announced over the loudspeaker. He was called to the offices and put on the telephone. It was Father Cullen, Elizabeth’s priest. Cam was in his apartment with a gun. Darcy had told him she was leaving and he countered this news by pointing a gun to his head and releasing the safety. For eight hours after, Richard, the priest, and several others took turns sitting beside Cam on the sofa, but he never pulled the gun away from his temple except to rotate its chamber once or twice, begging for Darcy. She wouldn’t appear. At last, when she did come forth, it was at the request of her own parents. They might have preferred to leave it up to Cam, but they told Darcy, if anything happened, it was a mark on the family. Darcy told Cam she’d stay with him a while longer and just see.

After the suicide threat, Cam sometimes came over to the house. He must have been lonely in his own place, but he never again let on he was at a low point. He picked up a screwdriver from the kitchen drawer and tightened the metal plates over the wall switches, or he went outside and lifted the heavy whitewashed stones along the driveway and set them back straight.

He began to take Margaret out to eat.

“She’s not even cooking?” Margaret asked him.

“Poison.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I can’t sit across from her. She gives me these poison looks. Besides, it’s always macaroni and cheese from the freezer.”

“I like that stuff,” Margaret said.

Cam told her, “Do you want to go over there and eat macaroni? Go over there right now.”

She didn’t want to side with Darcy. “I just said, I like macaroni sometimes. I don’t want it now.”

As his marriage deteriorated, Cam tried to get Darcy involved in some recreational activities. She never learned to balance on the scooter he bought for her, so he purchased a speedboat and rented a space at a marina in Ocean City. One time Cam invited Margaret to go out in the boat with Darcy. Margaret wanted to see exactly what was happening with the two of them and she agreed to come along. Darcy sat in the back, stretched out on the padded boat cushions at the stern. She kept looking up at the sun from under the little awning of her hand as she dotted herself with Sea and Ski, smoothing the cream over her tight belly, over the ledge of her hip, dodging the taut nylon triangle and continuing down her legs. Cam watched Darcy stroke her legs, a few brief swipes. When she noticed him watching, she slowly fingered the instep of her foot with a last drop of lotion. Darcy wasn’t talking. Margaret sat in a swivel chair next to Cam, who stood at the helm, his hand on the throttle.

The boat was very fast; its bow rose slightly, then
leveled as they accelerated over the water. The hull knocked against the troughs until they sailed too fast to feel the dips and gullies of the waves. At top speed, the surf became a solid, aggressive surface. They crisscrossed and slammed through their own wakes. The sun fell upon her shoulders; it touched her scalp where her hair was parted. Because of the heat, they anchored for a swim in the deep water, and still the sun reached them. She stayed beneath the surface and looked up. The green notches of current created a wall of glass blocks, mortared with foam. She pulled her brother underwater. She gestured toward the surface—did he see this strange roof? It was beautiful, wasn’t it? He misunderstood her, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her up. He climbed back into the boat and turned to help her.

“Can’t we stay longer?” she asked him. She swam a few feet away from the boat and started treading water.

“Come on,” Cam said. “It’s time to go. Why do you give me this shit, Margaret? Why are you always being contrary? Always making a contrast?”

Why was it
she
who was making a contrast? Wasn’t it Darcy? Cam looked back and forth between the two schemers. He wasn’t in the mood for it. Margaret climbed back into the boat; she stood there dripping. Darcy was wrapped in a terry robe; the broad brim of a straw hat fluttered under her hand. Her silence was razor-y.

“We’re all getting too much sun,” Cam said.

“We’re having too much
fun?
” Margaret said. Yet, Cam was right. Her skin had burned, and after swimming
she felt exhausted, dizzy. She sat down near Darcy. The small wedge of cushion wasn’t enough.

That night, in her bed, she could still feel the movement of the boat. She felt the waves slap the hull and send her back. It was a biological phenomenon having to do with the inner ear, common after sailing small craft in choppy water, but she couldn’t sleep upon those uneven swells. She thought of Darcy, who had not spoken all afternoon. Was she lying beside her brother, Cam, right now, in the same sickening echo of the sea?

Margaret never advised Cam about Darcy; she never offered sympathy because sympathy infuriated Cam. She listened, letting her eyebrows rise up and down, and this alone, her face shifting through several stages of comprehension, seemed to comfort him. Then, when Margaret became serious about a man, five years her senior, who ran a marijuana trading post, Cam couldn’t keep out of it. He forced her to accompany him to the Penny Hill Police Station. She was impatient with his interference, since she was beginning to see for herself that something was funny. The drug trafficking didn’t alarm her, but she was disturbed when her boyfriend started calling his dick Winston. Her boyfriend had read a book somewhere, perhaps long before his fancy for her, which discussed how men should go about introducing the phallus to virgins. The book said that sometimes it was comforting to the young initiate if the man gave a name to the penis, a tender nickname of some kind. The names suggested in the book were Poky, Slim, Duke, and other Western cattle-punching tags. Her
boyfriend named his cock Winston, sometimes reciting the cigarette slogan, “Winston tastes good like a …,” inserting the other word. Of course, she laughed. The book said laughter was good, but hysterical laughter was to be avoided; it only caused the hymen to clench. She started to realize that he must have been calling his penis Winston for years before she met him.

She was getting the picture. Cam didn’t have to butt in. They stood at a desk in a private office at the precinct station where an officer arranged a sheaf of documents. The officer told her that these papers were preliminary reports concerning her friend.

“Where should we begin?” The policeman smiled.

She didn’t say anything.

“Honey, it’s going to happen soon. We don’t want you involved.”

Cam said, “Be practical, Margaret.”

Practical. Nothing to do with desire and longing is practical. So, her boyfriend was a selfish jerk on his way to the slammer, but what could she do about it? She tried to imagine someone else, other pet names. She couldn’t see anyone but Cam, who stood to one side, his hands in his back pockets. He was pissing her off. He stood on the wrong side of the desk, abreast of the policeman. He was letting the policeman assume his authority, but he wasn’t giving up his hold on Margaret. She looked at him; his full mouth looked unnaturally blank as he tried to remain neutral. He should know. It’s hard enough without having to deal with the cops.

“Look,” she said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

When they left the police station, she told Cam, “It’s
my business what I do. Besides, this guy’s not the last person I fuck. I’m going to fuck a thousand more, and you better keep your nose out of it.”

“Just use your common sense,” Cam said. He didn’t seem to believe she was going to fuck all those people, and this made her angry.

She shadowed him all the way to the car and waited by the passenger door. He stood across from her, smiling.

“Oh shut up and let me in the car,” she told him. A cruiser pulled out onto the street. Its siren and light pulsed once, hesitated, and started up for real.

“They’re probably going to get your boyfriend right now,” Cam said, as he opened the car door and she slouched down in the seat beside him.

“I’m not destroyed,” she said. “I’ll live. I’ll be living the good life while you go around snitching. You should be on the payroll. They take good care of their own in the golden years.”

Cam roared out of the parking lot and tagged up with the cruiser at the light. “Everyone’s going to the party,” he said.

“I doubt it. These fellows are heading out for some doughnuts.”

Cam smiled at her. “Are you saying you’re hungry? Do you want to get a half dozen, Margaret?”

She wasn’t going to accept sweets from him. “Maybe Darcy wants some doughnuts,” she said.

Margaret watched Cam shake a box of chlorine crystals into the pool, tapping the bottom of the box so it wouldn’t come too fast. “This stuff will turn your hair green, but the kids are always pissing in the water.”

“Don’t tell me you never did when you were a kid?”

“Look, I’ve seen everything in Asia. Piss in a swimming pool is a minor infraction,” he said. He didn’t always mention his time in the service. He felt funny about his luck. He could have seen action in Vietnam at any time, but he was sent home. He was too “yellow.” Literally. They laughed about this.

Again, he asked Margaret how she handled her divorce. Wasn’t there any question about custody of Celeste? She told him that she requested physical possession of Celeste and her request wasn’t challenged.

“Maybe because Phil trusted you would share her,” Cam said.

“I don’t share her! I permit her to
visit
him, I kind of relinquish her, temporarily. It’s very separate. It’s not something we share, it never was.”

This kind of talk wasn’t helping Cam.

He said, “Phil gets her on Christmas, right?”

“Yeah, I give in. His family has this really big, traditional Christmas with all the uncles and aunts; it’s disgustingly merry. It’s better than what I can do.”

“You never have her for Christmas?”

“Come to think of it, it was Christmas when I decided to jump ship.”

“Holidays do that,” Cam said. “Murders, marriage proposals, desertions—all those sudden decisions people make when the world is busy following some kind of mindless ritual,” Cam said.

“That’s right,” she said, smiling at Cam. Margaret liked seeing Cam’s harder side.

The last weeks she spent with her husband were right before the New Year. She agreed to visit his big family, thinking in secret that she would never have to do it again. Her in-laws had always treated her with a distilled interest; they showed polite tolerance, but it was always a bit too formal. When Margaret stayed with them, she felt as if she were visiting an embassy of a country she couldn’t imagine existed outside its official residence and gardens.

She couldn’t bear the festivities and she left her seat beside the fireplace to avoid having to sit for long periods beside her husband. She walked into the kitchen. On the Formica counter, stationed near the breadbox, someone had set a mouse trap with a square of cheese placed carefully at center. Attached to the metal bar was a taut wire leading to a big Nikon fastened to a tripod. The shiny components reflected the twinkle lights from the next room. Margaret looked at the trap, the tripod, the cheese.

She took a wooden spoon from a drawer and tripped the wire. The bar snapped through the soft cheese, the flash went off, the shutter clicked, all in the same breath. The engineering of it seemed impressive. She knew that
her husband would come in and reset it and they would get their photograph no matter how she might try to interfere.

Later that afternoon, when she was upstairs with her husband, dressing for dinner, she found a louse. It was gripping the lace edge of her panties and she had trouble picking it off.

She told Cam, “My last holiday with Phil and he gives me crabs.”

“There’s a first time for everyone,” Cam said.

She remembered feeling very calm, the way someone relaxes on a jetliner that’s ascended and leveled off at a certain height in its flight pattern. She liked the sensation, as if everything were holding still while she alone plunged forward. “I told Phil to get something to kill the bugs or I wouldn’t come down to dinner. He drove off and came back with two bottles. One for me. One for him. He admitted that he might be a source of the problem.”

“Nice,” Cam said.

“Oh, well. At that stage blame was unimportant. It’s wasteful to feel blame. It steals your power. You should remember that yourself.

“Jesus, I could smell the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding while I lathered with that noxious gel. It was like something used to clean carburetors,” she told Cam.

Cam said, “Yes, I’ve once or twice had the pleasure.”

“You too?”

Cam was smiling. “So, that was that? Parasites that broke the camel’s back?”

“I told Phil I would always remember our last Christmas.
Christmas lice.” In fact, she had started to forget everything, minute by minute. She took her razor and shaved the small, dark triangle. Her skin was stinging from the harsh soap, but she no longer thought of her marriage, its first young sentiment. She hurled open the glass door and adjusted the showerhead to a tight needle spray.