The Bobby-Soxer (12 page)

“No one ever mentions him. What was he like?”

I thought it was the wine that made her slow to reply.

“A good man—they said later. The way they say it when they mean—dull. He and I only spoke for ten minutes. It was at your father’s college graduation party.” She peered into the front hall, toward the long double parlor. “They cleared all the downstairs for it. Sprinkled rosin on the floor, for dancing. Banked the place with flowers. And after all that—had record-player music. Your grandmother had never heard of hiring a band. A Victrola—from the farm. But we loved it. We thought she meant it to be that way. None of us girls rightly knew your father, you see. In those days it was still mostly girls who gave the parties, and he didn’t know many girls. My school was only what they used to call a finishing school, more for marriage than for college, but we were near enough New Haven to know a lot of Yalies, our senior year. And one of them got a group of us to come. I was on my way back down home anyway.” She looked up almost shyly. “And I had my own new graduation dress.” She and I exchanged smiles. “Linen, it was. Starched to a fare-thee-well. So when the old gentleman gave a funny spurt of a sound, I thought it was my dress crackling, and almost giggled. Old men hold you tight.” She arched a pointed toe along the mirror-brown floor. “Your grandfather died while I was dancing with him.”

Someone was coming down the front stairs. A little old lady appeared, scuffing a package from step to step down the long flight, her fluffy white head bobbing above it. Taller than she, it was apparently light. Like a triangular sail, it bore her out the front door.

“Packages can be strange,” I said, in a deep weirdo voice.

We laughed until we were weak.

I felt better then about leaving her here alone, as I did day after day—even about leaving her for good, as I knew I was going to when I could. She could go down home, where laughter was easier; perhaps she should. Why do people ever leave what suits them so well?

“Why did grandmother and grandfather ever come here?”

Bringing everything with them except the farm machinery. And we’d have brought that—I had heard my father say—if there’d been a way to move it. Even so, the best things here came from the bankrupt. The house we left was the best thing we had.

I answered for her. “I know. They wanted to give father a good background.”

“So you heard,” she said. “Ah, you were born listening. Anyway, that’s how you came to be born. I don’t think your father would have married, except for that day.”

“Married you, you mean?”

“He and a friend were to have gone to be law partners, right in New Haven. That man never spoke to him again.”

She clasped her hands behind her head, swinging from side to side, defiantly. I had never seen her in that posture. “You see, I was sort of—made interesting by the event. They thought I handled things so well. It was just manners.”

I knew those manners—Greensboro’s. Sometimes you didn’t know why you had them, but you went on with it.

“It was thought proper for your father to escort me home. By train of course. They weren’t the flying kind. A long ride. And it was school breakup time for both of us. June. And after that—there was down home. We lived in the factor’s big house, then.”

And the furniture was theirs. And my father liked manners.

“And I’d brought him there.”

She’d dressed for something to happen, and it had. I don’t suppose men ever know that feeling. She was still pushing her toe along Watanabe’s shining floor. Of a sudden I felt mired in what women do, and choking to get out, even if a stage might make it worse.

“There were flowers here, everywhere,” she said. “The aunt who lived with them had an eye for it. Little pots of those pocket flowers, like pansies with the mumps, all down the side of the dance floor. When his father and I fell, people thought we’d stumbled over them.”

My grandmother could be heard now, coming down the two flights. She still had her decisive step. Whatever had upset her memory, it wasn’t mere age. Like many hardy, immovable elderly persons, she seemed less vulnerable to death than the middle-aged—and never spoke of the chance.

“You never told me, Mother. Why not?”

“Women are always exchanging their mistakes with each other. Men never do. You’ll notice that, one day. You do the same as them, hear?”

It was true she had no women friends. “Even with you?”

She put her arms up and around me. “You’re no mistake to me.

Over her head I saw the packages in the front hall. “Hey-y.”

Crossing a finger over my lips, I ran to them and pawed them over. Some felt like framed glass. I chose at random, a small one of those and a soft one, one of several about laundry-package size, and was able to hide them in the boots-and-rubbers closet under the stairs and stand at attention, before my grandmother hove into view. I moved well, the school said.

My grandmother passed me without comment. Behind her, Watanabe carried her car rug, a fine affair of taupe plush. He loved these ceremonials, and often was asked by her to choose their route. In everything but money she was head of the house still.

Knobby brought tea. I always had a lot of it, with milk. That seemed to fascinate her. Her own people, both the huge Yorkshire farmers and the little nimble Irish like her own mother, had been great tea drinkers, with lashings of milk. Tea had brought the two sides together. I heard the story again, sleepily; would it never stop, that family essence ever steeping in one of our two brown luster pots, ever diluted by the hot water in the other?

“You’ve brought her along well,” she said to my mother, approving my skirt. I was not allowed to wear jeans or slacks to go out with her. “Though in my day we wore sleeves. And—underwear.” I supposed she couldn’t bring herself to say “bra.” If she knew the word. They must have had other names for them. “I hear she’s even—seeing a boy. Is she?”

My mother smiled at me, lounging in her chair. “Are you?”

I smiled back, seeing Bill Wetmore standing before me, red-organed, his eyes intent on that bushy part of me which wasn’t me as specifically. Men always look more specific, to us. “I suppose I am.”

My grandmother’s hands were trembling. Age was nibbling even her. “We didn’t know how to do that. How to bring a girl along.”

“Or a boy,” my mother murmured after her, watching her exit to the car, Knobby toting behind her the first load of castoffs to stow in the trunk.

My mother, putting her hat on, made a fright-face at herself in the mirror. “Nor did I.”

I missed my brother sometimes. Tim wrote every week that he and my father would soon visit. He seemed to believe this.

“I’d go visit them,” I said. “If they’d send me the money.” Tim was working these days, subbing as a teenage jockey at a track. But he would come back for college eventually. My father was the one who had put the family out of focus for me—leaving, yet not leaving. I couldn’t get past him until he became forgettable. I already had an idea that maybe my mother was, or one day would be. Maybe all of them. Tim said we all made him feel flanked in, like a horse in a crowded starting position—but that may have been due to his size. Though I rode well enough, of course I could never be a jockey. Yet big as I was, I felt flanked in by the horse who wasn’t there.

“I could advance you some of your money ahead.” The hat she had chosen drooped gently to her shoulders, framing her in its glossy dark bell.

“Not for that.” No, he would have to send me the money. Against all his pattern I knew so well, I had dreams of that.

“Aha. You’re weakening. What would you use it for?”

I shrugged, shaking my head. Bill Wetmore would use it, he said, if he were I. He claimed artists were excused from both the consequences of money and its sources.

Knobby came in again for his last load. He took his cap from the hall tree and sat it on his head at an angle. Until lately he had worn it straight, but as the time neared for his prospective wife to come, he was becoming more offhand American; even his food had changed. He was preparing to enlighten her.

Picking up the load, he nodded at my mother—“Somebody’s still at it. I checked.” And went out again.

Somebody’s still at what, I wondered. She would soon elucidate, as they said down home, and of course she did, toying at a last brown parcel with a gossipy foot. “Some nosy’s been picking over our dumped trash. Wraps and ties it up again. Does it on the dumpster’s day off. Leaves a donation for the dumpster. With a note nothing’s been taken.”

She and I exchanged what I now think of as the peccadillo smile. That familiar one which recognizes the accepted flaws of society, or of some member of it. I know now such smiles occur at every level, from the White House say, to the close-ups in the subtler movies, but in those days I thought them indigenous only to where I grew up, and even in the act of performing one, I felt mired again in all the rhythms taught me—for it was the smile of all our little social-lying selves.

The dumpster, for instance, so-called because to run the dump in all its phases was his official job, was also guardian and tender of the cemetery, each chore excusing his absence from another. We all knew that where he could be found soonest was at the pool hall, cueing for tips, but since his was that fringe life which makes other lives seem real, the town was proudest of him for his absences. We too always left a donation at the shack he kept his mock office in.

On the way there I usually sat up front with Knobby. That day, my mother sat there. Broad though the old Lincoln was—it too had been the bankrupt’s, it could not accommodate both my grandmother’s hat and my mother’s with the separation each wearer required. I sat with my grandmother, in the back seat. Not so long ago that might have frightened me, but today I could sit pleasurably ensconced in a jelly of my own feelings, a broad band of which, paling from dark rose to nude as it left me, seemed to outline and protect me, as a violin case does a violin. Only with Bill Wetmore was I ever bare of this strip of—what was it, mapped receptivity?—belonging only to me. Even then—he would say—he had to wear me down; getting to me was like walking through a bead curtain, until at last we were together, in the foreplay of sex. He himself had never felt a feeling-band, although at adolescence he had been all quills. He drew a picture of us so—“you in your aura of snatch, me in my porcupine karate belt”—which he clearly wanted me to save, as women do, but I did not. What I felt wasn’t all snatch.

In the end, gesture, not sex, would be what would release me. The studying of it, the learning of it, the watching for it, helped me break out of my pupa case, if that it was, by means of those body starts and facial moves which were now seeming to me to underlie all human drive—as in class we were taught how the phalanx underlay so much of Greek art. Meanwhile, such practice became a focus apart from him. This I didn’t tell him, and scarcely acknowledged to myself. It would be a long time before I had gestures of my own.

I could tell my grandmother was nervous, fiddling in her lap with the collection of calling cards she always used as we went along, to locate and list where old houses and acquaintances had been, or still were, though she never stopped to visit. Before our family arrived the town had never heard of such usages as cards, nor had she. According to my father, she took certain customs from old novels and etiquette manuals found on the shelves of her new residence, not noticing their dates. “And bang, instant aristocracy,” he said, though the town had balked at fingerbowls. “It’s the women who have charge of daily life,” he wrote me once. “I had to hunt my way out of that.” I wondered who had charge of his dailiness now.

I studied her hands, noting how the corrugated veins of an old person were rather greener than the accepted blue. How the earlobes also became prominent. How in fact her good Knox hat of tan felt, that staple for those of her years and social standing, made her look like some old soldier from an as yet unidentified garrison.

I had forgotten that she too was staring.

When we got there, the dumpster as usual was away. The dump itself always reminded me of some harsh engraving; it was mercilessly clear to the smallest details of its accretion, while its greater outline rose in those pure, swarthy dunes that in religious tracts depicted either heaven or hell. At the bottom, an ashy substance had formed out of the once natural clay mixed with all detritus, strewn with shell and shards of crockery whose blues or flower bits one might even recognize. Next rose the enormous inventory of appliances, baby carriages to cookstoves, mattresses yawing their cottons, enamel bedpans and three-legged chairs upended, all under a constant fluttering of newspapers, flopping rolls of vinyl, and the hushed whirr of whatever other substance took the wind. At intervals during the year a caterpillar tractor ground all this down. At the very top, the cone rose to be bald earth again, and finally, weed. Going down the other side, one would pass these layers in reverse. No one was supposed to climb here except the dumpster himself, in his hipboots. Far to the right, where the main pile sloped out, his cart reared tongue upward, like a plow. Overall there was the smell of burning, in itself a heavy river to cross.

We parked the big black car to the left of the shack. There was a side road which led to an area marked for current disposal but we never drove up there; instead, Knobby would unload from the car trunk and trundle off for the first of many trips, stepping delicately. He never wore boots. A white kerchief tied around his face made him look like a victim rather than a bandit; I had given up puzzling why. The sun, always lurid through haze here, had a special stasis, because we never seemed to hit rain. Take it or leave it, a dump was always some sort of parable. There could be no other reason why I could be so bored in this cul-de-sac and yet hear behind it the blind plashing of a greater life.

While we sat waiting for Knobby to return, my grandmother took out her scent bottle, offering it to my mother, who took out her own, then to me, which I refused, though I hadn’t bathed since yesterday. On weekends, when Bill Wetmore was in Cobble Row with the old nurse, I never saw him. It was a comfortable charm to keep his spermy odor between my thighs.