The New Yorker Stories (48 page)

“What are you doing?” B.B. said.

“I took the dishes out of the dishwasher and it worked,” Bryce said. “I put them on the counter.”

“That was very nice of you. It looks like my craziness about the dishwasher has impressed every member of my family.”

“What was it that happened before?” Bryce said.

Bryce had circles under his eyes. B.B. had read once that that was a sign of kidney disease. If you bruised easily, leukemia. Or, of course, you could just take a wrong step and break a leg. The dishwasher had backed up, and all the filthy water had come pouring out in the morning when B.B. opened the door—dirtier water than the food-smeared dishes would account for.

“It was a mess,” B.B. said vaguely. “Is that a picture?”

It was part picture, part letter, B.B. realized when Bryce clamped his hands over his printing in the middle.

“You don’t have to show me.”

“How come?” Bryce said.

“I don’t read other people’s mail.”

“You did in Burlington,” Bryce said.

“Bryce—that was when your mother cut out on us. That was a letter for her sister. She’d set it up with her to come stay with us, but her sister’s as much a space cadet as Robin. Your mother was gone two days. The police were looking for her. What was I supposed to do when I found the letter?”

Robin’s letter to her sister said that she did not love B.B. Also, that she did not love Bryce, because he looked like his father. The way she expressed it was: “Let spitting images spit together.” She had gone off with the cook at the natural-food restaurant. The note to her sister—whom she had apparently called as well—was written on the back of one of the restaurant’s flyers, announcing the menu for the week the cook ran away. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he had stood in the spare bedroom—whatever had made him go in there?—and read the names of desserts: “Tofu-Peach Whip!” “Granola Raspberry Pie!” “Macadamia Bars!”

“It’s make-believe anyway,” his son said, and wadded up the piece of paper. B.B. saw a big sunflower turn in on itself. A fir tree go under.

“Oh,” he said, reaching out impulsively. He smoothed out the paper, making it as flat as he could. The ripply tree sprang up almost straight. Crinkled birds flew through the sky. B.B. read:

When I’m B.B.’s age I can be with you allways.

We can live in a house like the Vt. house only not in Vt. no sno.

We can get married and have a dog.

“Who is this to?” B.B. said, frowning at the piece of paper.

“Maddy,” Bryce said.

B.B. was conscious, for the first time, how cold the floorboards were underneath his feet. The air was cold, too. Last winter he had weather-stripped the windows, and this winter he hadn’t. Now he put a finger against a pane of glass in the dining-room window. It could have been an ice cube, his finger numbed so quickly.

“Maddy is your stepsister,” B.B. said. “You’re never going to be able to marry Maddy.”

His son stared at him.

“You understand?” B.B. said.

Bryce pushed his chair back. “Maddy’s not ever going to have her hair cut again,” he said. He was crying. “She’s going to be Madeline and I’m going to live with only her and have a hundred dogs.”

B.B. reached out to dry his son’s tears, or at least to touch them, but Bryce sprang up. She was wrong: Robin was so wrong. Bryce was the image of her, not him—the image of Robin saying, “Leave me alone.”

He went upstairs. Rather, he went to the stairs and started to climb, thinking of Rona lying in bed in the bedroom, and somewhere not halfway to the top, adrenaline surged through his body. Things began to go out of focus, then to pulsate. He reached for the railing just in time to steady himself. In a few seconds the first awful feeling passed, and he continued to climb, pretending, as he had all his life, that this rush was the same as desire.

Moving Water

M
y brother’s wife, Corky, is in the wicker chair in my bedroom tweezing her eyebrows, my magnifying mirror an inch from the tip of her nose. When I first met Corky, she was a student at Hunter; she wore long Indian dresses and high heels and had long hair. Now she wears running shoes and baggy slacks, has a sort of bowl haircut, and goes by her nickname instead of Charlotte. Plucking her eyebrows and being pregnant are two of her new self-improvement plans, along with taking driving lessons. She has come into the city from Morristown to spend the weekend, while Archie—new husband, my brother—is away on business. She is sitting by the telephone, waiting for her call to the obstetrician to be returned. Archie, on the phone last night, insisted that Corky check out whether it was all right for her to continue with her aerobic dance classes. Her end of the conversation was a long protest about his trying to make her into a neurotic now that she was pregnant. She gave me the phone and asked me to reason with him, but I stayed out of it. He and I discussed the progress of the wisteria. The wisteria in the back garden has leafed out and shot up four stories to my roof, where it cascades over the low brick railing and has worked its way through the skylight. In the morning, I find crumpled leaves and small purple flowers scattered over my sheet.

I’m stretched out on the bed, printing a letter to my grandmother. My grandmother can’t read my writing, but she is insulted when I type. She calls my typed letters “business letters.” I have a piece of lined paper underneath my writing paper so that I will remember to print large enough. As my letters go on, they tend to look as if they’d been put through a funnel. I reread my last sentence: “
AS SOON AS THE WISTERIA GROWS, THOUSANDS OF TINY ANTS CLIMB UP AND COME IN THROUGH THE SCREENS
.” It seems not just distressing but alarming, put in such large, blocky letters.

The phone rings, and Corky pounces on it.

“I feel so silly asking this, but my husband . . . Oh, the nurse . . . But I don’t have any bleeding! . . . Is this because you think I’m
old
?”

I ink out my last line and print instead, “
ISN’T IT AMAZING THAT A HUGE WISTERIA VINE IS THRIVING RIGHT HERE IN NEW YORK CITY
?”

I go into the living room. The view out of the tall windows is of the projects the next street over. Below me, in the back, are gardens, with high walls dividing them. Next door, two actors stand at opposite ends of their garden, each reading aloud from an identical book.

“ ‘What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, or to the dreadful summit of the cliff . . . ’ ”

“Again!” the actor from the far end of the garden hollers.

“ ‘What if it tempt you . . . ’ ”

“Oh, yeah. ‘It waves me still. Go on, I’ll follow thee.’ ”

As I’m watching, trying to block out Corky’s mounting hysteria, I see a kid of about ten, who has hauled himself up so that he can see over the fence of the adjacent garden. He throws something—a stone or a bottle cap—and screams, “Get back where you belong, faggots!,” drops to the ground, and runs toward his back door. Then I hear the ice-cream truck come down the street, playing its carrousel music. As my grandmother recently wrote me (with a fountain pen, flawlessly executing the Palmer method), “Sandy darling, everyone in New York’s always worked up.”

“All right, I’ll do it your way,” Corky is saying, as I go back to the bedroom and sit on the bed. She sounds like some brave actress in a nineteen-forties movie. This notion is reinforced by her bottom lip, quivering.

Two o’clock in the morning, and Corky and I are the last people in the restaurant except for Wyatt, my longtime friend. He’s just shaken some vegetables around in a pan and brought them to the table, along with a bottle of pepper vodka. A truck rattles by. Corky and I share the last slice of lemon meringue pie. Wyatt’s key ring is on the table: four keys to the restaurant, so he can set the alarms before he leaves.

“This place is pretty crazy,” he says, picking up a snow pea. “I thought that nothing could be worse than teaching fifth-grade grammar. But knowing all the rhymes on the jukebox is probably worse than teaching grammar.” He takes a joint out of his shirt pocket. “You know what happened tonight? My father’s accountant came in here with a guy. They had on T-shirts with swirls of pink and blue and green—it would have been good protective coloration in a basket of Easter eggs. The accountant almost died when he saw me. Then, Tuesday night, my old Hackensack heartthrob, Dorie Vesco, came in. I saw her sitting at the bar. She was all tied up. She had on one of those blouses that lace up the front and those shoes with strings that you wrap around your ankles. The guy she was with was a real jerk. Dorie Vesco and I recognized each other at the same instant, and when I hugged her the guy said, ‘This some kind of a setup?’ ” He laughs. “Wyatt and the cat,” he says, rubbing his foot over an orange cat that has just darted under the table. “She’s been around here longer’n me. Longer than anybody. Cat can’t set alarms, Wyatt can.”

We are in what used to be Jason’s favorite restaurant. I used to live with Jason; now we’re apart. After Wyatt took a job as a waiter here, though, Jason stopped coming. “Honey, it’s just too odd,” Jason said to me one night. “I don’t feel comfortable being waited on by the same person I always call when I have a question about the correct use of apostrophes.”

When we go out, Wyatt hands Corky the keys to the car. I open the back door, muttering about what a bad idea this is, because she has only had three driving lessons so far. She no more than pulls away from the curb than a cop car comes up alongside us and stops for the red light. I catch one cop’s eye and look away. Our car is angled strangely through two lanes. No cars are in back of us or around us. Next, one of the cops catches Corky’s eye. “You know what?” he calls over. “If you were a red Toyota with six guys inside, we’d have found what we’re looking for.” Then the cop in the driver’s seat leans forward and hollers, “Now he’ll tell you that if you twinkled you’d be the North Star, and we could follow you so we don’t get lost.”

The light changes and the cop car takes off, no siren, at about sixty miles an hour.

“Still nothing behind us,” Wyatt says, patting Corky’s leg. “First rule of driving: Many other dangerous people are driving at the same time you are, and you must drive defensively.”

“Did you think you’d marry Jason?” Corky says.

I never lived in a dorm when I was in college, but Corky did. Lights-out is still a signal to her to start talking.

“We almost got married,” I say. “I told you about that. The summer he bought the house in Garrison. We were as stupid as everybody else who’s breaking up. We kept finding something to do that interested us, so we could pretend that we were interested in each other.”

“What about you and Wyatt?”

“I’ve always thought that he loved somebody else. We had quite a talk about that years ago, and he said I was wrong. Then again, he never mentioned Dorie Vesco until tonight.”

“Archie told me a week before our wedding that he’d been engaged twice before.” She lights a cigarette. “Which was the one who flushed his credit card down the toilet?”

“Sally.”

“And Sondra’s the one who swallowed the ring?”

“A citrine with diamonds. Our grandmother’s. When Archie took her to the emergency room and she filled out the form, she said that she’d swallowed a bone.”

“She had to be nuts not to level with the people in the emergency room,” Corky says.

I roll over to see Corky’s face in the half-dark. She has unrolled the futon sofa into a mat on the bedroom floor, where she will sleep tonight.

“You know the rest of that story, don’t you?” I say. “The next day, he got a book about training puppies. He took it home and showed her the part where they say not to worry if your dog swallows a rock unless it chokes. A joke, but when they went to couples therapy she kept bringing up the dog book.”

Looking back, I can see how Jason liked to manipulate me. He relied on being a Southern boy when he wanted something. He talked about the house he wanted to buy as our opportunity to “live life on the plantation.” Even before we went to look at the property in Garrison, he was planning the afternoon croquet games we were going to play there; we’d play croquet and drink mint juleps, he announced. When Jason really wanted something, he began by making it into some kind of fantasy—the more exaggerated and ridiculous the better. He said that made it easier to cope with whatever problems came up later. We had lived together in the city for more than a year, and he was restless and wanted a place in the country. So he bought the big yellow house up the Hudson in Garrison and he took a leave of absence from his job and spent a month that autumn painting it white. I glazed windows and helped him sand the floors, and by the time the house started to shape up I loved it more than Jason did. In the mornings, I had coffee and watched the sparrows and the squirrel fighting over the birdseed in the hanging feeder outside the kitchen. I began to wait, in the late afternoon, for the sky to get pale and the sun to set. Jason took to sleeping late and reading magazines and watching the evening news. When he went back to the law firm where he worked in New York, I stayed on. Wyatt visited. Jason called and said that he couldn’t come up for a couple of weekends because he had so much paperwork. The next weekend, Corky and my brother drove up, and just before they left she took me by the arm in the driveway and walked me around to the back of their car. “I’d say that if you want to keep Jason you ought to get back to the city,” she said. But by then I wanted to believe what Jason said he believed when he bought the house: that New York City was a battle, that it was important to escape to a place where you didn’t always have to be on guard, that it was important to remember that it was a green world. Late in November, when I did leave the house at last and took the train back to New York, I walked into our apartment and felt like a stranger. He was still at the office. I wandered around, a little surprised that my things were still there—a pair of my sandals under the chair in the bedroom where I always kicked them. Walking around the bedroom verified what I hadn’t been able to admit in Garrison: that it really was over between us. Seeing my things there didn’t make me feel at home; it made me realize that it had always been Jason’s apartment. He had hung up the Audubon prints his parents had given us for Christmas; I’d never liked them—they were like prints on the walls of some country inn—and here they were, out in plain view. They were on the north wall, which he had always insisted be left empty because pictures would spoil the beauty of the bricks. When Jason came home from work, we made drinks and went up to the roof and talked. It was clear that we wouldn’t stay together, but he seemed to take it as a foregone conclusion. When I walked over to where he stood by the railing, it surprised me to see that he had tears in his eyes.