Going Native (2 page)

She brings the half-drained glass down hard on the counter as if summoning a bartender. The television screen frantic with the saturated belligerence of afternoon cartoons. She slides open the back door and it's like stepping out into a greenhouse. Daph immediately begins stuffing something into the back pocket of her ridiculously tight jeans. The lawn damp and spongy from this afternoon's tropical downpour. It has been a wet and irritating month. The summer is ending badly.

"Mommy!" Dale comes lunging across the yard on strong bandy legs, literally hurling herself into Rho's arms. Her daughter has a special feel impossible to confuse even blindfolded with the equally unique touch of her twin brother. This is recognition of an old, old order. After sharing a good hug, Dale pulls back, all business now, to probe the serious deeps of her mother's eyes, a required ritual, in her present phase, following each separation, no matter how brief. Rho enjoys submitting to this kiddie security check, this reexamination of credentials that says, let me see where you've been, let me see where you are now. ID confirmed, Dale pushes herself away, races back to rejoin her brother in whom the parent-child separation process is already producing visible fermentation, he's busy conducting a rather involved and sandy funeral for G.I. Joe and several members of his team who got ambushed going for doughnuts in a bad area. His intrusive mother hugs him anyway.

"Hi, Mrs. Jones," chirps Daphne in her best I-can-sound-just-as-stupid-as-any-adult voice.

"Hello, Daph, how's it going?"

The girl shrugs. "Okay." Her eyes are gray and green and unnervingly clear.

"Any problems?"

"Nope."

"Any calls?"

"Nope."

There's an annoying wall of insulation defining this girl in all weather, transparent enough to recognize that she's hiding something, opaque enough to obscure precisely what that something might be. The family is the scandal of the neighborhood, the parents unreconstructed hippies who drive a loud (visually and aurally) truck, refuse to mow their "natural" lawn under threat of numerous court injunctions, and parade about in unfashionable rags and long ratted hair (both mother and father). The rude sound of hammers and saws emanates from their lighted basement at odd hours of the night. Rho cannot begin to guess what they do for money. Daphne's baby-sitting wages? She sincerely hopes that isn't a packet of drugs in Daphy's back pocket.

Rho settles onto the other swing, ventures a tiny movement or two. As a child she loved to soar as fast, as high as her pumping legs could propel her but she doubts her adult stomach could tolerate such action today; it's enough for now simply to dangle from a brace of parallel chains, enjoying the sun on her face, her children at play, her deformed shadow squirming about in the worn pocket of ground beneath her feet. She questions Daphne persistently until the resultant grunts and monosyllables -- none of this sullen really, she imagines Daph perceives herself as unfailingly polite and forthcoming -- cohere into a mutually acceptable version of the day's events. Then she and Daphne fall silent and just hang there side by side, sharing a space, not speaking, and no one too concerned about it. Daphne's one of these New Age adolescents neither intimidated nor impressed by the proximity or strangeness of grownups. As an only child, she understands the terrain from years of direct study. Rho is grateful for occasions like this, openings in the day when one can believe that the woods are riddled with paths, untold ways out, but she can't restrain for long her gnawing awareness of the other, larger space between Daphne and herself, the weighty accumulation of the unseen that's largely responsible for the quality of this very interval and the turning of the next, the inside stuff that burbles on in dark privacy, surfacing if at all in an unguarded run of words, the anxious set of a face, the careless gestures of the body. Rho starts, grips the chains tight to keep from falling. So. Spooked again. Life is a haunting, Wylie often claims, and she as often agrees, though never really sure what he means.

Up above the diverging row of identically shaped and tiled roofs a trace of shade is working its way into the clean texture of the sky as if the soft tip of a dull pencil were being rubbed lightly but repeatedly across the rampant blue. Some evenings she wished the night would come on in a full rush, evenings when protracted twilight, this gray nibbling away at things, this shadowed sameness, is just not acceptable. She should have quit her job.

"Mommy!" her daughter demands in a particularly penetrating kid voice. "Mommy! Do snails eat people?"

No, she assures her, a sidelong glance at the cool mask of Daphne's perfectly composed face. Snails are our friends. No, not like spiders. Snails do not bite.

Beyond her daughter's head, two doors down, she notices, coming into fleeting view a fraction above the height of the chain link fences separating the yards, the bulb of a snout, a pair of black olive eyes, then a pause, then the eyes reappear, and on and on. This is Elmer, the Clampetts' jumping dog, who's only eager for a clear view of the fun. And half a block down, the solidarity of open chain link is broken by a twelve-foot wall of impenetrable redwood. The peculiar McKimson property. He, an Action News television producer; she, an ill-tempered recluse. Wylie pictures them sunbathing in the nude, fucking in the moonlight among croquet wickets. This, she realizes wistfully, is the first thought of sex (even several bodies removed) that she's had in weeks. Well, she's tired, she's distracted, there's always someone looking at her, in this case a supremely bored Daphne, who's studying her face with anthropological interest. Rho hopes she isn't about to lapse into one of her "episodes" out here in the unprotected pseudoprivacy of God knows how many prying eyes. In the suburbs the back yard is a stage. And sometimes so's the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom.

She sneaks a glance at her watch, a ladies' Rolex acquired at cost through the agency of a former friend, but a Rolex nonetheless, and is amazed yet again by the tempo and elusiveness of time (a recent obsession she intends to bone up on as soon as she's not so busy). She hops off the swing, instructs Daphne on tonight's feeding and bedding schedule. She kisses each child on the cheek, her lips coming away powdered with sand.

She is marinating the organic beef and contemplating a second drink when the door chimes erupt into an off-key but recognizable rendering of the first four notes of the old
Dragnet
TV theme, an idiosyncrasy of the previous owner they haven't gotten around to replacing because by now she and Wylie don't even "hear" it. She hurries to answer the door. Though she's known the Hannas longer than her own children, she can't quite suppress, when standing before them again, a modest sense of bewilderment at the enduring nature of their relationship; she's receiving signals without being able to locate source or meaning; it's not any obvious incongruity in physical appearance or behavior, but something deeper, under the skin, ripplings, fluctuations, magnetic disturbances in the charged fields of personality. But she has to admit she's never seen or heard a hint of serious argument.

"Hi hi," she cries in the silly singsong she lapses into whenever she's nervous.

"Nice hair," comments Tommy.

Gerri leans in for a kiss. "I just love these absolutely gorgeous walls," she raves, waving her plastic fingernails about. "I always feel in this room like a bug in a lab." She looks directly into Rho's eyes. "A very special bug."

Tommy flashes a grin that could be favorably interpreted by either woman. He is merely marking time at his present copywriting job while stoically awaiting the arrival of his real career. What that is exactly he isn't sure but claims he'll know it when he sees it. His mustache, a thick oversized brush, comes and goes so frequently Rho is often nonplussed by his appearance without understanding why. This capricious facial hair is related to Tommy's insecurity about his nose (he thinks it's too big), which he keeps threatening to have surgically corrected. Tonight he is clean-shaven.

Gerri is a real estate agent and a co-owner of Just For You Catering and a professional fundraiser and a member of the community board and she's taken college night courses every semester for years and years. No degree. She's on her third major, Oriental philosophy. Once over a lubricated lunch she tried to explain "emptiness" to Rho and the ensuing hilarity was so unrestrained Rho lost a contact. She and Gerri met working together at the mall duplicating center until Gerri discovered she was pregnant and quit. She lost the baby five weeks later and has since been informed by glum representatives of modern medicine she can't have another. This is no problem. She tells everyone, this is no problem. Her eyebrows tend to slant upward toward an imaginary intersection at the center of her forehead, giving her a perpetually bemused look she employs to her benefit, coaxing empathy and contract signatures from wavering clients. When she laughs, her face comes apart and she no longer resembles herself. She is wearing a silver lobster pin on her lapel. She has a ring on her thumb. She and Tommy must be doing well. You never hear the least complaint about money.

Apologizing for Wylie's tardiness, Rho ushers her guests through the house and onto the deck, where they settle into the new patio furniture and the first round of cold daiquiris. They look at the kids. They look at Daphne, who won't look back. They look at the blank windows of the neighboring homes. Tommy notices the patch of dead grass out by the garage. Rho doesn't have to turn around, that awful bleached spot is burned onto the inside of her head. Serious chemicals Wylie dumped there one strange night. He said it was gasoline. She thinks the ground itself has been totaled, as fertile now as a hole on the moon.

"Curious," observes Tommy. "It's practically a perfect circle."

Gerri remarks she's sick of hearing about chemicals. One day it's the air, next day it's the water, day after that it's California broccoli or. . . or chewing gum. You'd think we were nothing more than diseased sponges soaking up poison day and night.

"Well?" asks Tommy.

"I don't want to hear about it."

Rho is remembering how Mother kept every uncovered dish in the living room stocked to the brim with Brach's bridge mix no one ate until the chocolate coating bloomed and turned white. She excuses herself and returns to the kitchen to heat up the cheese for nachos. She is not supposed to have bad thoughts.

Daphne brings the kids in through the side door, tired, hungry, loud, attempting with some success to scratch one another on the forearms. Rho knows the game, she refuses to be drawn in. "Mommy will be up later to kiss both of you good night," she announces calmly. She strokes their flushed heads.

"Can I have Hi-C?" shrieks Dale suddenly. "Can I? Can I?" She hops about on comically angry feet.

"Yes, of course you can."

Then in a quieter, slyer voice,
"All
the Hi-C?"

"Go with Daphne now. Please, Mommy's busy." She's close to the place where the black stuff lives, nearer than she wants to be to slapping her daughter hard across the face. She's ready to consign both of them to Fisher-Price hell when she catches another interior glance of Mother dressed in rags thin and rotten as loose strands of mummy wrapping and seated like a Shakespearean king in a chair fashioned from stripped tree limbs and suspended in a blazing cylinder of blue-white light. On her head either a set of antlers or a TV antenna. She raises up her wizened body, she's about to speak. . . The vision is too terrible to sustain. Rho turns on both faucets and allows the water to rush over her hands.

When she returns to her company, awkwardly sliding back the door without spilling the loaded tray, conversation abruptly stops. She reads the story on Gerri's face. All right, she wants to blurt out, I have children. So what. She passes the corn chips. Tommy asks who Daphne is. Gerri studies the chalk marks and eraser smears left behind on the blueboard as the laggard sun wanders home after class. Rho rattles the dice in her drink, stares sadly down into the glass. "I think these daiquiris are too sweet."

"Oh no," Gerri objects, "they're fine. Perfectly."

"Gerri loves sugar," says Tommy. "It makes her high."

"Gloriously so." Tilting back her head, she demonstrates with a long dramatic swallow.

Rho is contemplating Gerri with the overly attentive expression of someone who's not really listening. Seized by a spasm of envy, she imagines appropriating this other woman's beauty and its attendant powers, she imagines walking around in her armor for a day, a week, a dreamtime of savory revenge. She imagines the situation at work. New and improved. She imagines her life. Her life would be changed. Utterly.

"Mmmmmm." Tommy has crunched into a dripping nacho chip, hand cupped under his chin. "Is this fake cheese?"

Rho doesn't know what to say.

"You have to use fake exclusively making these things," he explains. "Real never tastes as good."

"I honestly don't know," she replies. "Something in a jar you microwave."

"Fake," he declares, approvingly. "Real great." Tommy helps himself to another bite, leans back in his chair so as to bring into view the maximum exposure of Rhoda's legs. He was thinking about those legs driving over and believes he can meditate upon them with profit for an extended time to come.

"Tommy will eat anything," Gerri declares, "as long as it's tied down."

"Well," Rho says quickly, "maybe I should have made the sauce from scratch, but frankly, I didn't have the time."

"Oh no, I didn't mean. . . I'm sorry, Rho, no, that isn't what I meant. These are actually quite good. It's the kind we eat at home." She pops a sample between her teeth and chews approvingly.

"Pay no attention to the lady behind the stammer," says Tommy. "She's next in line for a new brain."

"All right, honey pie, rein it in."

Tommy salutes his wife with the wet glass. Under the table, legs shift and stretch. In the silence the volume on the background noise becomes noticeably elevated, distant guitars and drums howl and thump at close range.