Hellgoing (3 page)

“It's not that,” says Ned. “He's just busy doing something. It has to be day after tomorrow.”

“Well, shit,” says Jane.

“Can't you get your ticket changed?”

Jane hasn't thought of that. It would have to be on her own dime. Then there's the extra night at the Delta.

“I guess I could,” she says. “It might be pricey. I may have to take you up on that offer to sleep on your couch.”

“Good-good,” says Ned.

She packs her bags, tucks away her laptop and bids a fond farewell to the hotel room, which she leaves a bedlam of newspapers and empty Evian bottles. She's been careful to dispose of her liquor empties when out and about, however, dropping them — wrapped up in plastic bags or newspapers — into the first garbage can she comes across on her way to get coffee. So the worst the chambermaids can say of Jane is that she hasn't caught the recycling bug.

They drink three bottles of wine over dinner before Ned starts rooting around under the sink for his harder stuff. This is the nicest time they've had together so far — it's because they're not in public, they can let their hair down and drink as much and as fast as they are inclined. They sit at the kitchen table all night, pouring and talking. They are kitchen-table drunks by nature, Jane realizes — the two of them, for all their combined bar-hopping. This is what they do. This here, as Ned would say.

The drunker Jane gets, the more she remembers the dream — floating out amongst the icebergs in the cool, clear water. She's fearless of a hangover, the dream fortifies and reassures her, tells her everything will be cool, clear sailing from here on out. Ice clinks into her glass and she touches it, imagines reaching out, wobbling to keep balance in Ned's brother's boat — she's been picturing a dory, which is probably ridiculous — hand stretching toward the monolith of ice. She fishes the ice cube from her drink, cups it in her palm, holds it to her face, then eyes. Against her eyes, it starts to melt in earnest.

Jean's problem? Jean Rhys? She expected such comfort from people, men.

Jane bursts out laughing, pops the lessened ice cube in her mouth.

“What's that?” asks Ned as if she's said something, smiling at her.

Jane shakes her head. She's embarrassed, ashamed, though she's always instructing herself never to feel this, about anything.
 

“The symbolism,” she laughs. “I just realized how obvious it is.”

Ned smiles and pats her hand like grandpa. It's that stage of drunkenness where you either accept that you understand nothing, or assume that you understand everything. He heads to the cupboard for a bag of
Cheetos
. Jane crunches more ice, something draining out of her. She feels panic at its going away. She's read that Freud treated people with recurring dreams — good and bad. He made them talk and talk about the dream until finally the patient understood precisely what was going on in his or her own head. The moment they did, the dream would depart. Freud drew back the curtain. He was like Toto, the yappy little rat who took the magic out of Oz.

Ned turns, sees her face. “No!” he says, putting the Cheetos aside. He goes to her, stands her up. “No!” he says again, her head between his big musician's hands.

THEY'LL SET OFF
after lunch. Meanwhile, he's said she will need clothes even warmer than what she wished she had put on for Signal Hill. The wind off the water and all that. Fortunately, they won't have to putt-putt too far out into the open ocean, as the twins are situated just at the lip of the narrows. Still, Ned said, it will be “cold enough.” And no doubt the wind will be good.

She rises early, Ned still asleep in his room. She insisted on the couch after the head-in-hands thing. Her mood is bereft. The day is blinding. She needs fresh air, cleansing wind. Coffee. Not to be in Ned's house, ashtrays on every surface.

More than anything, she wants to feel good, anticipatory
. Today's the day we go and see the icebergs.

The only place she knows to go for clothes is downtown, but the only stores she can find are meant for suckers from away, like her. One of the stores has a poster of the movie in its window, claims to have been the “out-fitter.” Nobody dresses like that, she remembers, and she thinks about Ned in his brown Doc Martens, the locals in their Gore-Tex. She's even passed a few goths on Duckworth Street. Still, some of the sweaters are gorgeous. One-­hundred percent virgin wool, and upwards of two hundred dollars. She wants one. She treats herself. This is to go and see the icebergs in.

The young cashier rings it up. Jane can see holes in her face from which jewellery has been removed.

“You're the lady from the magazine,” the hole-faced girl accuses, folding the massive sweater into an ungainly woolen lump.

Jane stares at her. “Yes.”

“Dad was saying you're looking to go out on the boat.”

“Dad?” says Jane, jaw to floor. “Ned?”

The kid laughs. “Oh, God help us, no. Ned's my uncle.”

“Oh!” says Jane, and they laugh together at the misunderstanding, though Jane doesn't know why.

“We hoped you would come out to supper,” remarks the girl. She's sixteen at the most, with an easy, middle-aged way to her, leaning on the counter like a seen-it-all waitress with varicose veins — for whom talking to strangers has long ago lost its sense of adventure.

“I'd be happy to come to supper,” says Jane. Native hospitality at last, and just in time to save the article.

The kid frowns a stagey sort of frown, poking out her lower lip. “Well, Ned said you couldn't. He said you were busy.”

Jane blinks. “I'm the farthest thing from busy.”

“Oh,” says the kid, sounding almost disappointed. “We were all set to give you shit. Say you want a last-minute boat ride and won't even come to supper.”

“But I want to come to supper,” Jane insists.

“When? I'll call mum.”

“Well, how about after the boat ride?
 
I know your dad is busy these next couple of days, so whenever is good for him.”

The kid straightens her back, turns from middle-aged waitress into impudent youngster with a twist of her mouth. “Dad's not busy,” she scoffs. “It's off-season.”

“Oh.” Jane pauses, the hangover-brain grinding to life. “What business is your father in?”

The kid gapes. Leans forward a little with her body. Enunciates word for word. “He gives people rides. In his boat.”

SHE DRIFTS INTO
the street, wanting sunglasses to fend off the bright of the sidewalk. Meanders to the end of the block and turns down toward Water Street as per the girl — Raylene's — instructions. The sign is big, hand-painted. An obtrusive sandwich-sign, meant to impede pedestrian traffic. “Dave's Charters.” Inside is Dave, sitting behind his counter, cap pushed back on his head, and idly surfing the internet. Raylene's father. Brother of Ned. As tall as Ned is burly, but with the same bunching eyebrows.

He jumps up at the sound of the door — someone has stationed a too-large set of wind-chimes above it. They jangle around like the sound of madness. “Hi,” Jane shouts above the chimes.

“Ah,” says Dave. “It's she-who-wouldn't-come-to-supper.” He stands, semi smiles. All Ned's family behave as if they've known her forever, and furthermore do not approve.
 

“I understand you're very busy,” apologizes Jane.

Dave squints, frowning the same puckered, stagey frown with which his daughter favoured her moments ago. “My dear,” says Dave. “I'm busy going broke.”

Dave has several photographs for sale. Shots of the tower, the batteries that dot the hill — guns toward the water — the icebergs, reprints of the old Marconi photos. Quality reproductions in deliberately rough, wooden frames. Overpriced. Jane pretends to study them, giving the hangover-mind time to catch up. What Ned told her versus what he told them. And why. And why? Eventually buying two of the things by way of apology, once the gears have clicked more firmly into place. To make up for cancellation of the boat ride, but also the fact that she — just remembered! — can't make dinner this evening after all. She's got a flight to catch. Also she must make up for the fact that she was, apparently, staying directly across the street from Dave and family the whole time she was here. Dave with the long “a” sound in his name, across the street from her hotel.

Because, no. No indeedy, Ned. I will not do this thing with you.

Yet kept insisting, apparently, she'd have no time for a visit. No time for anyone but Ned. Then all of a sudden demanding a ride in the boat! This, she's gathered from Dave's gruffness, is not how things are done. She selects a third print to take home, apologizing numbly all the while. It's cutting little salt with Dave. He'll be on the phone the moment she jangles her way out the door. Alerting local media.
West Coasters Big for Britches, As Suspected All Along.

The prints of Marconi are the same images she saw at the tower for the most part. Different vantages of the same scenario; the photographer must have circled him, hoisting his heavy tripod around, ducking his head beneath a black shroud. The serene fanatic seated in his desolate, wind-blasted room at the top of the hill, wire-mess of his obsession on the table in front of him. A scribble of potential — connection unconnected. Oh, this? This is nothing.

HELLGOING

O
nce she got back Theresa told her friends about how her father said she was overweight not even an hour into the visit. Just — boom,
you're fat
, he lays this on her. “Not, you know,” said Theresa, “you look well, or you look healthy or, you know, maybe: however you might look, it's good to see you.” Her friends held their faces and smiled in pain, the same way her brother had when he was sitting across the kitchen table from her with their father hunched and slurping tea between them.

Her brother had been her enemy once. Even though it was just the two of them, and only a year's difference in their age, they had never been the kind of siblings who were each other's greatest ally and defender. They weren't really each other's greatest enemy either — just petty rivals, but the rivalry was immediate and ongoing. The longer Theresa had been away as an adult, however, the nicer and better-adjusted Ricky seemed to get.

She had expected the worst when he decided to move in with their father after their mother's death and Ricky's divorce. She had expected the two men, who were so alike already, to simply merge into one horrific masculine amalgam. And end up one of those bachelor pairs of fathers and sons that she knew so well from back home, finishing each other's sentences, eating the same thing every day — cereal, cheddar, toast, bologna with ketchup — pissing in the kitchen sink because the bathroom was too far away, wiping their hands on the arms of their chairs after finishing up a meal of cereal and cheese. Served on a TV tray. A TV tray never folded and put away, never scrubbed free of solidified ketchup puddles, never not stationed in front of the chair.

But Ricky got better instead of worse — he'd refused to merge into the two-headed, tea-slurping father-thing that haunted Theresa. Maybe it had haunted Ricky too, that bogeyman — perhaps he'd steeled himself against it. He had taken to wearing ironed, button-front shirts, for example, clean ones, even around the house, instead of T-shirts and sweats. He didn't wear a ball cap anymore, which was astounding because Theresa had never seen him out of one since seventh grade — he'd spent adolescent eternities in front of the hallway mirror attempting to get the curve of the brim just right.

Theresa arrived in their childhood home to find things neat, dust-free and zero TV trays in sight. Their father was expected to come to the table when his tea was ready — he didn't get it brought to him, like their mother would have done. “I'm not here to wait on ya, buddy,” Ricky would call into the living room. “Get your arse to the table.” He somehow had made it a new ritual from what it was when their mother was alive — something tougher, less domestic. Just a couple of dudes drinking tea. As if coming to the table was now a minor challenge thrown down from son to father, like their dad would be sort of a pussy if he didn't rise to the occasion. She wanted to applaud at that first sight of the old man heaving himself to his feet without so much as an irritated grunt. She wanted to take her brother aside and congratulate him on it.

She told a potted version of all this to her girlfriends as they sat around drinking vodka gimlets — they were on a gimlet kick — in Dana's living room. To set them up for the climax of the story, the big outrage:
Put on a few pounds, didn't ya?
She used the pissing in the sink line to make them smile, but also to ensure they had a solid sense of where Theresa and her father stood. Ruth's father, by way of contrast, was a provincial supreme court justice, long divorced, and he and Ruth went on cruises together to a different part of the world every year, where they had pictures taken of themselves holding hands.

Theresa had packed off her girls to their dad's house and flown home for the Thanksgiving long weekend. It was a long way to come for three days, but Ricky called her and asked her.

“Jeez, Ricky,” she'd said on the phone, “I'd love to, but we're into mid-terms now. I'd planned on spending the whole time marking.”

“With Mom gone,” Ricky interrupted — it didn't feel like an interruption so much as an ambush, a bludgeoning. He silenced her by breaking the rules of their brother–sister interactions as she'd understood them up to this point. Theresa had been busy making her breezy, half-assed excuse and out of nowhere Ricky hits her with the grotesque reality of
with Mom gone.

“With Mom gone,” said Ricky, “I feel like we all have to make an extra effort here.”

For years, she and Ricky were not in touch. They weren't estranged, it just never occurred to them to call each other. They sent Christmas cards, some Christmases. It took Ricky forever to get the hang of email, but once he was on email, they emailed. Ricky “wasn't much for typing,” though. So they didn't email very often. Point being, Theresa knew what Ricky was saying in evoking their lack of mother — he was acknowledging that they had for years depended on their mother to give a shit on everybody else's behalf. Their mother giving a shit was the only thing that kept the family together. It was their mother who, at Christmas, made sure everyone had a present for everyone else. It was their mother who always passed the phone to Ricky when Theresa called on Christmas Eve. Their mother gave Theresa Ricky's news throughout the year (the divorce, the knee operation) and gave Ricky Theresa's (the divorce, tenure).

“The women of our mothers' generation,” Theresa said to her friends. “That's what they do, right? That's their job — to give a shit so the rest of us don't have to bother —”

Jenn was sprawled on the loveseat shaking her head tightly as she spat an olive pit into her palm. “I get so mad, I get so mad,” she interrupted. “My mom hauling out the address book every year and writing Christmas cards to everyone she's ever met in her life. I mean it takes her
days
. Then she carries them all over to Dad's chair for him to sign. It just — it infuriates me! Like he's had to put any effort into it whatsoever. Gavin — he doesn't get why it pisses me off so much when I'm sending a present to his mom or someone. He always goes, Hey, can we go in on that together? And I'm like, No, we fucking can't! I went
shopping
for your
mother
. I put actual
thought
into it. It took me an
afternoon
of my own
free time
!
And I bought her a
card
and I
wrapped
the present and I'm going to drop it off at the
post office
. Do you know why
you
didn't do any of that? Because it's a pain in the ass! It's
effort
! But now you wanna get in on it? No! Go and get your mother a present
yourself
if you want to send her a present.”

Everybody laughed. Jenn was playing up her anger for effect, because who among them hadn't tried to get in on someone else's present, piggybacking on another, better person's kindness? Her friends were being angry in solidarity with Theresa, dredging up their own slights and outrages and laying them neatly down like place settings — napkins, knives and forks.

“So what happens when women stop giving a shit?” asked Ruth then, trying to turn things into a seminar all of a sudden. You could always hear the ‘y' when Ruth said “women” —
womyn
. Just like she wrote it. They all loved Ruth, but she never “punched the clock,” as Dana liked to say. Her students all adored her, because she was like them — what her friends referred to, in private, as a “true believer.”

Theresa spoke next in order to shut Ruth down — to avoid the classroom discussion her question was meant to provoke and get back to her story. “The real question is,” she said, “what happens when they all die off, our mothers?”

It was not the nicest way to get things back on track. Everyone else's mother but Theresa's was still alive, so every brow but her own was pinched in existential dread. But at least the attention was back on Theresa. This was her particular gift, she knew, after years of running seminars and sitting on panels. She knew how to manipulate the attention of others — to get it where she needed it to be. She knew how to be ruthless when she had to and she knew this was a trait she had inherited.

“What happens, I guess,” said Theresa, “sometimes at least, is that people, sons, step up, the way Ricky has.”

Ricky saw what a motherless future might hold and, by God, he took the helm. Yes, he moved in with a parent, but at least he didn't wear a ball cap anymore. (He must have looked in the mirror one day and thought: This is ridiculous. The hair is gone and everyone knows it.) And he hired a housekeeper to come in once a week — a masterstroke. And the housekeeper, she laundered the flowered armchair covers Theresa's mother had sewn years ago precisely in response to her husband's habit of wiping his food-smeared hands on the arms of the chair. It all meant that clean, orderly adulthood continued apace on Ricky's watch, with or without a mother on hand. Theresa had been fully braced for everything in her childhood home, including the dregs of her family (because what was her mother if not the best of their family, the cream, and what were Ricky, her father and Theresa herself if not the grounds at the bottom of the cup), to have gone completely to hell. But things had not gone to hell.

“Ahem,” said Ricky, as they walked together down the dirt road to check the mailbox. “You don't have to sound, you know, quite so astounded.”

She didn't tell this part to her friends — what she did to Ricky after what her father did to her. They walked down the road together, Theresa still vibrating. She'd been mugged, once, in Miami while taking a smoke break outside the hotel where her conference was being held, and she'd vibrated like this, exactly like this, after having her bag wrenched out of her hands by a scabbed meth-head who'd called her
cunt box
. “Cunt box?” Theresa had repeated in disbelief, trying to catch the meth-head's eye as they struggled — and that's when she lost her bag, because she'd been more focused on trying to prompt the scabbed man to elaborate than on maintaining her grip.

She was forty-four.
I am forty-four!
she'd sputtered at her father. She had had babies.
I have had babies! Put on some pounds? I've put on some pounds?

Theresa had jumped out of her chair so fast it fell over. Goosed by insult — the shock of the insult, the unexpectedness of the attack. Her father sat there looking affrontedly at the overturned chair as Ricky ran a hand over his bristled head, maybe wishing for his ball cap, wishing for a brim with which to fiddle. The truth is, Theresa wanted to run across the yard into the wall of pines at the edge of her father's property, there to hide and cry.

She was the Assistant Chair of her department. She had a paper coming out in
Hypatia
. She was flying to Innsbruck, Austria, in the spring to deliver that very paper. There would be another conference in Santa Cruz a few months later where she was the keynote motherfucking speaker. She was being flown down there.
I am being flown down
, she'd hacked, asphyxiating on the rest of the sentence.

“However,” Theresa narrated to her friends, “who gives a shit about any of that, right? The important thing I need to know is I'm a fat piece of crap.”

“Don't say that,” pleaded Ruth. “Don't say ‘I'm fat,' because then it's like you're agreeing with him, you're affirming it on some level.”

Dana leaned forward. “Did you have an eating disorder when you were a kid?”

“
Of course
I had an eating disorder,” yelled Theresa. “Who didn't have an eating disorder?”

“They push our buttons,” said Jenn. “The buttons are installed at puberty and they can push them whenever they want.”

“I didn't think I had the buttons anymore,” said Theresa.

“We always have the buttons,” said Dana.

“
They fuck you up, your mom and dad
,” quoted Jenn.

It was an obvious quote, there was no other quote in the world more appropriate to quote at that moment, but Ruth jerked around, frowning. Disappointed at Jenn, because feminists weren't supposed to quote the likes of Philip
Larkin
. Theresa and Dana fired a secret
true-believer
grin at each other. Theresa was finally feeling like herself again.

She didn't tell her friends about anything else — the climax of the story had been told:
Put on a few pounds, didn't ya
? Ba dum
bump
. Punchline! She didn't tell them how she tried to offload her feelings onto Ricky as they walked the dirt road. He was only trying to make her feel better with the walk. But she kept jawing on about how great the house looked, how well their father seemed (“Same old Dad!”), how monumental it was that Ricky made him get up from in front of the TV and come to the table. And hiring a housekeeper — how had he known where to look? Then it just seemed natural that she move on to Ricky himself — he was looking great! He'd stopped smoking, she noticed. He seemed so fit, so together. She was getting personal now. Was he running? Going to the gym? He was dressing better, wasn't he — had that been, like, a conscious decision at some point? When had he ditched the ball cap — she had to be honest, that was a good call. Just shave the head, rock the bald-guy thing. Everyone was doing it these days. He was looking, she told him — forty-four-year-old divorcee sister to forty-three-year-old divorcee brother — very grown up.

Which was when he told her she did not have to sound quite so astounded by it all.

She used to do this to her mother, she remembered abruptly. Because she didn't have the nerve to retaliate against her father, she would torment her mother instead. Ricky had never done that, she was sure. He protected their mother. He absorbed things like a sponge, whereas Theresa had always needed someone to pay.