The Bobby-Soxer (13 page)

The door of the shack now and then swung. One could see the table where we left the tips, flanked by the dumpster’s chair and woodstove, and on out through to the back, which was open and doorless. A car stood there, too decent to be the dumpster’s; now and then he made private deals with those who had more to leave here than could wait for the pickups he did for the town. Often there was even money on the table, a tithe that we kids never more than dared each other to take. The devil’s mark would have appeared on us if we had stolen it.

I had gone to grade school with a girl bearing such a mark, center of one cheek, who was supposed to have done that. Actually, her strawberry mark must have been with her since birth, yet at one time or another she would have been dared, as we all were, and the story must have got confused, as often happens to children who are marked. When I had been dared I had just laughed; perhaps she couldn’t afford to.

It was peaceful here, like maybe at the end of the world when the smoke would be clearing, or on one of those metallic, overcast Sundays when there was nothing else going. Far away, Watanabe appeared, making his way to us slowly, empty-handed at last.

“So it’s gone,” my grandmother said. “The last clutter in my house.”

In the town it was not unusual for a woman to straighten every drawer and cupboard in her house before she went for an operation, so that all might see her fine habits if anything went wrong. But my grandmother never went to doctors.

“You won’t die for years yet,” my mother said from the front seat without turning her head. “You have to wait for your debentures to come due.”

“That’s what they’re there for. To get me to a hundred—what else? Pays to have something to wait for.” A chuckle came from under the Knox hat. Money made her cheerful. “Whereas you’re not so lucky. Your ship has come in.”

“Not all of it,” my mother said.

Watanabe was slow in returning. As he neared, we could see he was taking the little sips of oriental meditation he sometimes did, to make us remember his nationality. Yet this impulse, to cock his head to a birdcall, or pause to pull a grass blade, was no less real and lyrical.

Externalize. All the beginning world of it was in my lap and at my eyes, pure and hard in its physical manifestation, only waiting to be sorted and skeined by me, and given back again. What I would be doing with my body and my voice would be a recognition of the world. The stage-to-be for me, even if it was not to be that Chinese box of a thousand linings, the theater, would surely arrive.

“God, isn’t it wonderful!” I cried out to it. “To be waiting.”

Dumps make an echo. No one else said anything. Watanabe came up to us, taking off the white handkerchief. Now he was Knobby again, offering my grandmother his arm. She hung her big cretonne knitting bag on it, and walking under his ardently hovering attention but not leaning on him, made for the shack.

She was going to pay, which for her was like taking communion and absolution both. Before leaving her check—never paying cash even here—she would have made private assessment of what merit she meant to acquire by such an act, and of how much that merit was worth to her. Here at the shack, according to Knobby, she always left something adequate. If money was the kind of emotion she could best transact, then in this particular exchange she was being very scrupulous.

I think now that an obligation which had been at the core of her life had finally brimmed into all the crevices of her being, as can happen in age, when one tries to tidy up these ragged tides which will roll on without us. Who can say whether she did this too belatedly? One judges an action by its effect—and there I was.

I got out of the car to stretch my legs. When I could afford a car of my own I would buy some old Thunderbird or other model which would accommodate them. A wind had come up. At the shack door the dumpster’s two geranium plants strove like dancers to meet it, but had to stay where they were. I could stretch freely, and in rivalry with those two poor tethered skimps I did so, from waist to shoulder to neck to arms, yawning at the sky. When my head came down again with happy expelled breath, I dropped to a squat, stomping from foot to foot, and shook myself like a wet puppy.

I still use this old muscle relaxer, taught us by the school’s dance expert. If it works, I hear only her seamy, Russian-doll voice. If it does not, I see into my mother’s face, straining against the windshield Knobby had polished almost to air, her big hat tremoring like a bell. The face is never shallow to me now.

Following its stare then, I saw what must be the crown of a man’s head bob up once, twice, along the bald rim of the big dune, and sink down again—the unknown trash-picker maybe, unaware he had company. Then the whole man stood up, complete.

It was Craig Towle, dark-vested against the sky, chin up like the world’s figurehead. That’s the way he looks when alone. You may begin to ask how I know.

In the same moment that he bent his head and saw our car, my mother stepped out of it, closing its door slowly by leaning backward against it. She stayed that way for a minute, pressed there like a second figurehead. Then she walked forward, in that rocking way women take on when they confront, and stood there, one hand on the car’s hood. My grandmother emerged from the shack.

With any luck, my grandmother might have been spared the sight of him. The dumpster’s tin doorsill was stuck high in the sand, and Watanabe, who will never reveal what or how much he sees or saw, was suddenly disentangling her skirt from one of the geraniums, and shielding her close. My mother and I would have been her natural points of reference. Who bothers to scrutinize a dump, especially when done with it?

But just then, Craig Towle moved. Or some small, crinkling avalanche occurred in the dune itself; its sides were blanched with them. My grandmother raised her head.

I try to see us as he must have seen us, three women angled up at him in an acute triangle, my mother at the apex. One old woman known, one woman better known, one unknown. Did he move on purpose? If so, to which?

I know his hands were locked behind him—and do not unlock without reason. I know my grandmother tried to scream, because I learned right then that great age or sadness may not have the breath to—and have since heard a renowned stage presence give that same rasping whisper, which the last row of the audience could however hear. I know that the package he must have been holding behind him fell and skittered from him, to slip down and disappear between a pile of old roofing and a mangle, and that the package resembled the flat, laundry-size bundles seen an hour ago.

My grandmother cried out—“Are live ones not enough for you? Must you have my dead girl too?” But even while it was happening I was unsure of the sequence of it. For, all that time my mother was standing burning-still.

Knobby, holding my grandmother like a relative, whispered in her ear. He would be asking if he should retrieve the package. She shook her head. “Leave it to the law. Leave him. Look at him up there. On an ash heap. Where he belongs.”

Craig Towle opened his mouth. But she turned her back on him and got into the car, summoning Knobby after her.

Then my mother moved, without a word. But all the gestures came to her. First a signal to Craig Towle to return to the car behind the shack, which I saw now was the same Volks in which the bobby-soxer and I had gone to that bar. Then the signal that we were not to wait for her. She knew the right gestures, or they came to her. From where all the gestures come from.

As we backed up in order to wheel around, Watanabe, who handled that car as one stroked a cat, let the motor die. From my seat in the rear I saw him stare straight ahead, his narrow eyelids almost closed, his cheek wet.

Outside, my mother was walking up the dune, her high heels sinking in the ash and glut, so that she seemed to make no progress but continued toiling on between two streams of rubble, one on either side. Above, Craig Towle was looking down like a diver, at the stratum of found objects and destroyed ones which separated them. I saw him make the dip a man makes entering the jungle, to push the matted stuff aside. I saw him draw back, and try again. In my mind, she and he never meet.

In the car, now moving, I took my grandmother’s wrists in my hands. If she shivered, she let them be. This was an enormous advance for both of us, for as far as I knew we had never touched. I couldn’t have done this a year ago. Being with Bill Wetmore again hadn’t made me any tenderer than I would ever be—a level which is not mine to judge. But it had taught me the non-exclusiveness of flesh. Or of human flesh. We are too unique in the world not to touch when we can.

My grandmother’s pulse was steady. Below my ear I heard her respiration, faster than the rest of us, from that incredible engine her heart, carried so long. Her card case lay on the floor. As I picked it up, she disengaged her wrists. “I don’t get strokes.” But I was beginning to understand her.

When we came out of the road from the dump and onto the highway and paused there, she rapped the back of the driver’s seat. Knobby had on his cap again and sat like a chauffeur.

“We’ve had our visits. Drive home.”

It took time to get across that highway, which had replaced so much farmland. The cars kept streaming by.

“Grandmother—” I cried “—why don’t we go to the farm!”

She turned her whole upper body. That is unusual for those so old. They tend to be immovable, except in the appendages. The whites of her eyes had dulled, but the brown pupils in their almost purplish rim had not. “Because we came from it.”

Her voice sounded surprised that I had had to be told.

We crossed the highway.

“I’ll phone your father this evening. That man must be stopped.”

We passed through Cobble Row, those chunky, deep-rooted houses. They had not been stopped. He would not be.

We passed along our own street of fantailed windows and gables gawked high enough to satisfy the tallest. I wasn’t that sure of us.

Her garage had once been the carriage shed, openable back and front by wide crescent doors. Knobby parked inside and went out the back. She always required a cup of tea “to rest me from the drive,” which was served her in the car, and we were not asked to share. We bore her no resentment. A taste for luxury of that order must be admired, my mother had said.

We always left my grandmother to it, often not seeing her again until our next drive.

This time, I stayed. Quiet wood was stacked against the walls here, in pew shapes I had never seen disturbed. Yard-long lengths of narrow moldings were bunched together and upended in their corner, maybe since the beginning of the house. Opposite these, in its own metal-walled corner, the sturdy kiln my brother and I had once vainly asked to reactivate was surrounded by rows of the red clay pots that were its product, and were still hosed down whenever Knobby washed the car. Yes, it was restful here. It had never been bogeyland. Curious how in that high-varnished house, ugly but energetically functioning, no place ever came to be that, even then.

She wasn’t staring at me now. I wanted her to. “Grandmother—who lived upstairs before you did?”

In the moment I asked, of course I knew, as you already may. But watch us work it out in our own way.

“It can’t be cleared away,” I cried. “It can never. Why should it be?”

I was wrong. Or half wrong. A life can be cleared away in a whip’s crack. But those opaque old eyes finally saw me. What’s more, the green-knotted hands laid hold of me, took charge of me, in what was going to be a connection. I might not want it, but it would be one.

“Hush—” she said. “Shut your mouth. Your mother says a person learning an art is very sensitive. So you should know when to.” She pointed to the kiln as to a grave. The painted china she now ate on had come from it too. My brother and I had always been told that both china and kiln had been the bankrupt’s. We had always suspected they were not. “Hush, girl. Girl—tell me about your boy.”

When
you
tell
me.
I didn’t have to say it—only to put my hand on the kiln from which all that china had come, my foot against all the red clay pots there was never a plant in the house for now—and stand tall, arching my neck.

I didn’t speak. She couldn’t. In her face I saw why. I was her bogey.

It can’t be cleared away—that I ran.

That night, when I went down to Watanabe’s quarters, he was somber. Quirky as he could be over our national differences, caustic on how all here in his adopted country had an unnatural friendliness but no deeper code, our own family ups and downs always affected him, making him unsurer of where he was. I was sad too, at the sight of how in our serene egoism we had made a servant of him in spite of himself, no matter how he balked.

As provisional dowry for the new wife, my grandmother had offered to give him a few of the goods he had cared for—some beds, chairs, and tables, but only to lend a fine desk and sideboard he himself had repaired. Instead, he himself had made all his and Etsuko’s furniture-to-be, whose yellow-gray wood and simple lines my mother said were like a rebuke to ours. One oak prie-dieu he had accepted—“Since you worship otherwise”—hanging some scrolls above it and placing some mats before it, to make a kind of shrine. All Japanese houses had them, he said, even the most modern.

But did these also have a setup for a game called Pachinko, in his youth very popular in Tokyo? If his wife-to-be turned out to prefer Ping-Pong, he said, they could substitute, in much the same space. As the time drew near, he had begun to realize how much of daily life he and she had failed to discuss, in favor of certain dreams and pretensions. Now it would be too dangerous. In consequence, the old cottage piano he sometimes played had been pushed over to our side of the basement and covered with tarpaulins; he wanted his wife to see him not as the music student he had been, but as he now was. All his hi-fi equipment was prominently displayed.

When I dared to ask the reason for this afternoon’s tears, he was proud. “Respect,” he said. “To the moment that makes you see.”

When I asked, was that like a leaf viewing, he did not respond.