Moving On (70 page)

But the Ford was a small cross to bear. Once back home, Jeanette began to overflow with compliments—on the books that looked so interesting, the pictures that were so novel, Patsy’s new clothes, the matronly widow next door, the Whitneys’ well-kept back yard, the sandwich she was given for lunch, Patsy’s infinite skill in handling Miri, Juanita’s neatness, and the spotless state of the floors and the silverware; even the iced-tea glasses were worthy of compliment. Patsy became grim, very grim, and was extremely glad when Juanita came to draw off some of the compliments. She felt on the verge of blurting out that Miri was taking LSD and sleeping around interracially, in order to turn the compliments back to tears. In sorrow her mother seemed human, forgivable, lovable even; but when happy she seemed like someone who had been created entire by a second-rate advertising firm, someone whose chief function was to keep repeating testimonials to all products, no matter how dreary, and all approvable ideas, no matter how banal and empty. Even from the bedroom, as she was rocking Davey, she heard the drone of her mother’s compliments from the kitchen, the inflections rising and falling in a Southern rhythm, interrupted now and then by Juanita’s slow English.

Jeanette, after a little subtle prodding, had decided to leave that evening on a six o’clock plane. It seemed to Patsy that six more hours of compliments would be unendurable, particularly since Davey would be asleep for three of them. She rocked him, her cheek against his, wishing she could rock him all afternoon, but when she put him in bed and confronted her mother again she felt dry and nervous. Jeanette wanted to talk about Miri; she felt optimistic and wanted Patsy to tell her what to do to win back Miri’s confidence. She was dutifully prepared to try anything Patsy could suggest. Her optimism depressed Patsy so deeply that she could hardly think. It seemed to her that Miri was absolutely justified in everything she did, and that she ought to go on, pushing her rebellion with integrity, taking each new drug as it came out, and sleeping with black militants or perhaps Chinese if China loving became fashionable among the young.

The prospect of listening to Jeanette, much less advising her, suddenly became unendurable; she seized upon the flimsy excuse that she had forgotten to return a reserve book to the library and in five minutes was out the door. She knew if she didn’t move fast it would occur to Jeanette that she wanted to see Rice, and the thought of offering her mother a whole campus about which to be complimentary was too much. Once out into the hot one o’clock heat, with no voice in her ear and no grateful face across the table from her, she discovered that she felt fine. Hank was lying on his couch, reading a magazine. She came in briskly, kissed him, and saw that the magazine was
Sports Illustrated
.

“Why aren’t you reading the
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism?”
she said. “My husband reads it.”

“Are you sure?” He reached for her but missed. She got herself a drink of water and went briskly into the bedroom, swinging her purse.

“He read one issue of it,” she said. “Come on. I haven’t got time for the amenities today. I had to lie to get out at all.”

He came, but her approach took him aback slightly. He was not very sure of himself. It didn’t matter to Patsy, who had grown quite sure of herself.

“What made you like that?” he asked as she was dressing. She felt fine, but he spoke in his sulking tone, as if he were offended that she had been aggressive. He did not realize that his statement was ambiguous.

“You think the romance is wearing off, huh?” she asked, fastening her bra.

“I wasn’t talking about romance,” he said.

“You don’t talk at all,” she said. “Occasionally you venture a cryptic observation, usually inaccurate. I’m not in such an odd mood, I’m just in a hurry. I came here to be had and I was had. Thank you. I’ve stopped being a nice person and become a competent person, but there’s nothing strange about my mood particularly.”

He tried to get her back in bed—he wanted the control back—but she was cool to him; all she would do was sit for a minute. With one finger she traced the little line of hair that ran upward from his groin.

“You’ve got a blue spot on your leg,” Hank said, pointing it out.

Patsy sighed. It occurred to her that his conversation was as dull as any she had ever listened to. It was odd she should be sleeping with him. “Advancing age,” she said. “You’re not the sort who’ll love me when I’m old and flabby, are you? You’ll find someone young and nubile and leave me to spend my declining years in a snowdrift or somewhere.”

She got up and looked in the mirror to see if she looked chaste and scholarly, as befitted a girl returning from a library. “Damn it,” she said. “I look like I’ve been doing exactly what I’ve been doing. Maybe I better wear lipstick. Momma’s idea of a bohemian is someone who doesn’t. Actually I suppose if I were being had before her eyes she’d pretend it was a first-aid demonstration or something.”

She went home and was sweet and kind and talkative, reassuring about Miri, concerned about her father’s drinking, confiding about Jim’s plans. She got Jeanette a cab, allowed Davey to be showered with last minute kisses, and stood at the curb with him, waving one of his chubby fists until the cab was out of sight. Davey thought it was absurd and so did she. Then she got his carriage and took him for a long happy walk, feeling calm and thoughtful. The world had resumed its normal course.

10

T
HE NEXT DAY
the problem of Amarillo—complicated enough to begin with—became more complicated still. In the middle of the morning, as Patsy was meandering about in her gown, enjoying not having her mother there and looking for a section of the newspaper that she had managed to mislay, there was a knock at the door and in breezed Dixie, resplendent in a red and green outfit that hit her halfway up her nice plump thighs. She looked as fresh and firm as the apple Patsy had just washed for herself, and she had brought Davey a huge red, yellow, green, blue, and white truck, made out of plastic blocks that came apart. It was several months too old for him, but they put him on his blanket on a sunny spot on the rug and let him look at it. Dixie’s dress was even brighter than the blocks, so that Davey had trouble deciding where to look.

“You look great,” Patsy said. “Where’d you get that miniskirt?”

“Oh, a crazy shop. There were hippies around. There must be something wrong with me, you know. I kinda like hippies. I always was one for men with lots of hair. It’s too bad they’re all communists—we’ll probably have to put them in camps sooner or later. Jeanette called yesterday and told me how worried she was about Miri.”

“I might have known she’d call you,” Patsy said.

“Sure, you know how polite she is,” Dixie said. “It would never do for her not to call her husband’s sister, even if she can’t stand me. I didn’t care. I always liked Jeanette, anyway. Anybody who has to live with Garland deserves some sympathy.”

Patsy giggled but felt slightly on the hook nonetheless. She knew that Dixie was not as easily fooled as her mother.

“What’s Miri really been doing? Taking dope?”

“Yes,” Patsy said, thinking she had better yield that point. Dixie was not rational on the subject of race.

“You can’t expect a kid not to take dope these days,” Dixie said. “It would be like expecting me not to dance when I was that age. I just wouldn’t want her to marry a communist or anything. If she starts to do something like that maybe you and I can go out and stop her, okay?”

“Maybe,” Patsy said, not enthralled by the prospect.

“Just don’t let Garland and Jeanette get wind of it. If they were to try and stop her she’d marry old Khrushchev himself.”

The thought of Miri and Nikita Khrushchev made Patsy smile.

“Say, we can go to Amarillo together,” Dixie said. “Jeanette said you were going tomorrow and I’d been meaning to go, so I called Joe and I called Sonny and made them both invite me. I called them in the middle of the night, when they were too sleepy to think of any excuse for not inviting me. You’ll need some help with all that baby stuff, anyway.”

Patsy felt an immediate sinking feeling. She didn’t want to go to Amarillo; she wanted to stay where she was and do exactly what she was doing. She had been planing to call that morning and tell Jim that Davey had a minor illness and that they wouldn’t be coming. But she had been too sleepy and had neglected to call. Dixie’s words made her feel trapped. Dixie would certainly go, and there was Davey at her feet, healthy as a baby could be. She would have had no excuse except the truth, and she was not about to tell Dixie the truth. She couldn’t keep a confidence any longer than she could keep a hundred-dollar bill.

Dixie noticed that her niece looked unhappy, but attributed it to a natural reluctance to see her husband. “Perk up,” she said. “You’re looking great these days. Maybe there’ll be some fun movie stars around. I’ll call and make us reservations.”

Patsy’s hopes rose for a moment. It was possible all the planes would be full. But the reverse was true—they were all empty. Crowds were not flocking to Amarillo. Dixie breezed out as cheerfully as she had breezed in, leaving Patsy very down. A promising day had been spoiled, not to mention a promising weekend.

Her spirits spiraled slowly downward, and by the time she reached Hank’s that afternoon she felt hopeless. Her marriage was probably ruined, and no doubt her romance soon would be. It was exactly what she deserved, but, deserving of ruin as she felt, she could not help wishing it hadn’t come so soon.

She might have stayed hopeless all afternoon had not Hank made her angry. “Well, it’s not such a tragedy,” he said when she told him why she was low.

He began to caress her even as he said it, and Patsy flared up and shoved his hand away.

“Get your hand off me,” she said. “Of course it’s no tragedy. I know that. You don’t really care, anyway. You could have kept me here if you’d tried.”

He looked surprised, as if it would never have occurred to him to keep her from going to see her husband, and Patsy smacked him. She had never resented a look so much. It had never occurred to him to stop her from going. She was bitterly disappointed and burst into tears. She felt very alone and confused, and while she was sobbing in confusion Hank managed to seduce her. The sport was all his, she was far away, but she didn’t resent it. Why shouldn’t he? She lay with her eyes half shut, listening to the rattle of the air conditioner and looking at the edges of brightness around the drawn shades. When she looked at Hank she saw, with no feeling of surprise, that he was scared of what she might do next. She surprised
him
by being very mild, both that evening and that night. Despite everything, she wanted to see him again. It was only just beginning, she didn’t know what it might become, and she was not going to have it cut off because of one unfortunate weekend.

Dixie came by for her in the morning and
was
a big help with the baby stuff. Davey was agog and it was all sorts of fun. She hadn’t gone anywhere in a long time, and Dixie’s spirits bubbled so that hers began to bubble too. She didn’t miss Hank until the plane was up, until it banked so that all Houston lay out the window to her left. She could see the trees of Southampton, where he was sleeping on the bed in the shadowed room, with the musty air conditioner creaking. Then something dropped straight down inside her and her aunt seemed a gauche stranger, the stewardess some kind of cardboard woman, the well-dressed passengers all foreigners, unreal. Even Davey, who was soon asleep in her lap, seemed a blur. A longing for the other place seized her, a longing for shadows and hands. All the way to Dallas it was all she could do not to cry, and during the hour and a half spent in Dallas waiting for a flight to Amarillo she had to chatter and chatter, from the very lightest level of herself, to keep the longing from welling up too high, to a point where she would have to yield to it and somehow get herself back to Albans Road.

11

T
HE MOTEL HAD NO BABY BEDS
, or rather, none that were workable. It had not occurred to Jim that one would be needed and he had neglected to put in a request. The management seemed amazed that Patsy would want to bring a baby into a motel full of movie people. The manager scratched his head and the elderly blue-haired dotty lady who seemed to be alternately cashier, room clerk, and telephone operator called Patsy honey in the worst twang she had ever endured, and took on over Davey in the same twang. He was irritable, and Patsy wanted to brain the old lady with a potted cactus. Finally a baby bed was located and a sweaty Mexican was taken off grounds duty and ordered to set it up, a task to which he proved unequal, though he tried for dear might for more than thirty minutes. Jim stood by trying to help, Patsy stood by feeling frantic, and Davey wailed and wanted to be fed.

“Thees bed is not going up right,” the poor man said repeatedly, trying it another way. The trouble was the springs, which obviously belonged to another baby bed. They could only be made to stay in if they were slanted. When they tried cramming the mattress down on them and put Davey on it he immediately slid into the railings.

“The hell of it is thees springs and thees bed,” the man said. For a time the springs would not come out either, but finally, with a desperate wrench, he freed them. “They are not going together,” he said, flashing the wailing Davey a look of exasperation.

Finally, to Jim’s annoyance, Patsy tipped the man two dollars and sent him away, and they got a room with two giant double beds; and on those beds, at eleven that evening, the reunited family was concluding one of its grimmer days. Only Davey was at ease. He was sleeping on one of the beds, inside a little pen that had been constructed of suitcases, diaper bags, and pillows. Patsy was on the other bed in her slip, hugging her knees. She had been crying for thirty minutes and though she would have liked to stop, she couldn’t seem to. Jim was slouched in a chair, looking disgusted. He was disgusted. Both of them were tremendously disappointed with the evening. They had been apart six weeks and had supposed they would at least have a friendly reunion, and it had turned out that nothing was any better between them, or even any different. It always boiled down to her crying and his looking disgusted, as if they had been cast by fate in those roles when they were together.