Tiger Eyes (10 page)

I spin around, almost dropping the pitcher, and see him winding up a toy. It is a dancing bear. He places it on his bedside table and the bear dances around in a circle. “My son brought it to me … from California … he goes to school there.”

I laugh nervously, partly at the dancing bear, and partly at myself, for having been so suspicious.

“Does your father work at the Lab?” he asks.

“No, but my uncle does,” I tell him.

“I’m on the maintenance crew fifteen years.” He holds out his hand, to shake mine, and introduces himself. “Willie Ortiz.”

His hand is boney and fragile and when I shake it I can’t help noticing the difference between
mine and his. “I’m Davey Wexler,” I tell him.

He winds up the dancing bear again and this time my laugh is genuine. “That’s so cute.”

“You like it? It’s yours.” And he holds it out to me before it has wound down, so that the bear’s legs are still moving.

“Oh no,” I say, “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because …” I begin. “Because it’s yours.”

“Hijole! You’re a tough one. I tell you what. I’m not going to be here for long and when I’m gone I want you to have it. Okay?”

“Sure okay …”

“It’s cancer, you know … but I’m ready to die.”

He says it so easily I am sure I have misunderstood.

“For a long time,” he says. “Too long. In and out of the hospital. But this is the end.”

I turn away and look out the window. The sun is setting. I have never seen anything like a New Mexican sunset. The whole sky turns pink, then red, then purple. Why did he have to tell me he is dying?

“Don’t be sad,” he says.

I face him again, hoping he won’t see how close to tears I am.

“Well …” I say, “I’ll see you next week?”

“Sure. Next week.”

After work, I meet Jane outside. It is growing
cold and dark. I button my jacket and turn up the collar. I’m going to have to buy a hat and gloves.

“How did it go?” Jane asks.

“Okay.”

“Any trouble?”

“No. You?”

“Nothing.”

We begin to walk home.

“If you had your choice,” I say, “Would you rather die slowly, of cancer, or fast, like being shot?”

“I’m not sure,” Jane says. “With the cancer you’d have time to get ready. And you’d feel so sick you’d probably want it to be over. If you got shot, well, it’d be so sudden …”

I don’t wait for her to finish. I interrupt with, “You wouldn’t have time to say goodbye.”

NINETEEN

Bitsy is reading a book called
How to Feed Your Kids Right
. And now, every morning, Jason and I get a teaspoon of raw bran in our cereal. This will prevent hemorrhoids in later life, Bitsy assures us.

“What’s a hemorrhoid?” Jason asks.

“Never mind,” Bitsy says. “Just eat your cereal with bran and you’ll never have to know.”

“But if I don’t know what it is how do I know I don’t want it.”

“Believe me,” Bitsy says. “You don’t.”

Bitsy is taking us very seriously, as if we are her kids, as if we are her responsibility. But I figure we’ll be going home soon. Maybe before Christmas, because Mom has seen Miriam Olnick at the family counseling center four times in the past two weeks. She has joined Bitsy’s Jazzercise class and is looking healthier. She is still tense and apt to run off to her room when you least expect it, but she’s getting better. Although sometimes when I am trying to talk to her, like about Bitsy giving me an allowance, she spaces out and I know she’s not hearing a word I say.

“What do you and Miriam talk about?” I ask
one evening. I am sitting on the kitchen counter, nibbling a piece of celery and Mom is fixing her specialty, spinach pie. She has volunteered to make dinner tonight, to give Bitsy a break, but I don’t think Bitsy is overjoyed. She considers the kitchen her turf. This is the first time that Mom has cooked a meal since we got to Los Alamos.

“We talk about everything,” Mom says. “It’s easy to talk to her.”

“Do you talk about Dad?” I ask. “About that night?”

Mom hesitates, then says, “Yes.” She says it very quietly and she doesn’t look up.

How come she can talk about him to Miriam, but not to me?

When dinner is ready I help Mom serve it. Walter just picks at the spinach pie and I feel angry at him for making Mom think there is something wrong with it.

He makes things even worse by saying, “It’s good, Gwen. It’s just that I had a big lunch.”

“It’s outstanding,” Bitsy says. “I haven’t had spinach pie for years. Walter doesn’t like …” She stops abruptly and covers her mouth with her hand, realizing her mistake.

“I guess you could say I’m strictly a meat and potatoes man,” Walter explains.

“It’s all right,” Mom says. “I should have asked before I made it.”

I am hoping that Mom doesn’t break down
and cry over this. She sounds as if she is on the brink. I wish we could just laugh it off, but there is too much tension at the table for laughing. I can’t help remembering that we had spinach pie on the night that my father died …

W
e’d been walking on the beach—all four of us—singing
This Old Man
at the top of our lungs. Mom and Dad had their arms around each other and were in one of their touchy-feely moods. I was thinking about later, about going out with Hugh, when Jason came up from behind and dumped a pail of water over my head. With his Dracula cape flying behind him, he ran away yelling, “Can’t catch me … can’t catch me …” And then we went home for supper. Spinach pie, a green salad and sourdough bread …

I
wonder if Jason remembers that, too. I look over at him. He is shoveling in his food.

“So what’s new in school, Jase?” I ask.

“My teacher’s so tall she can open the windows without a pole.”

“Wow … that tall, huh?”

“And smart too,” Jason says. “She knows everything.”

“She sounds great,” I tell him.

“I told you we had excellent schools here,” Bitsy says.

T
he next night, I am lying on the living room floor, playing Monopoly with Jason. Jason lands on Virginia Avenue and even though I already own St. Charles Place and State Street, he buys it. He never misses a chance to buy Virginia Avenue because that’s where we live in Atlantic City. Playing Monopoly reminds me of home.

Walter and Bitsy are taking Mom to a party tonight. Mom comes downstairs wearing her long skirt and a black sweater. She looks nice and I tell her so.

“Thanks, honey,” she says.

“And you smell good, too,” Jason says, as she kisses him goodnight.

“It’s Chanel Number Five. I bought it today.”

I roll the dice, move my man eight spaces and land on
Go to Jail
.

“Too bad!” Jason says, holding up his
Get Out of Jail Free
card.

Walter helps Bitsy, and then Mom, into their coats. Mom says, “The police and fire department numbers are on the bulletin board in the kitchen. And so is the number at the Grants’, where we’re going. If there’s any trouble just call us there.”

“Hey, Mom …” I say, “I used to babysit all the time in Atlantic City … remember? I know what to do.”

Mom looks doubtful and turns to Bitsy. “I don’t know … maybe I should stay home tonight. I’m not really feeling up to a party.”

“Nonsense,” Walter says. “It will do you good.”

“Don’t let anyone in,” Mom says to me. “I don’t care who they say it is … I don’t care if they say it’s the police … don’t open the door for anyone.”

“It’s all right, Gwen,” Bitsy says. “There’s no place safer than The Hill, believe me.”

I realize suddenly what this is all about. Tonight is the first time Mom is leaving us alone at night. The first time since my father was killed.

I hear the front door close.

“Okay,” Jason says, “I’m building a hotel on Boardwalk and another one on Park Place, and two houses on …”

“Have you been stealing from the bank, you little creep?”

Jason has trouble keeping a straight face. “Who, me?”

I know that he has. That while I was talking with Mom, he was helping himself to five-hundred-dollar bills.

I let out a whoop and Jason takes off, racing through the house. I chase him and we both laugh our heads off. When I finally catch him, I pin him down and begin to tickle him.

“No … please … stop … stop …” Jason screams.

I stop, but I don’t let him up.

We are both out of breath and panting.

After a while I say, “Jason … do you miss Daddy?”

Jason turns his head to the side.

“Do you?”

He mashes his lips together and doesn’t answer me.

“I know you do, Jason, so why don’t you ever say it? And why don’t you ever cry?”

“Crying is for babies,” he mumbles.

“No,” I tell him, “it’s for everyone. When you feel sad it’s okay to cry.”

“Let me up,” he says.

“Not until you say it. Not until you say you miss Daddy.”

“No!” He struggles to get away from me.

“Okay,” I tell him, “then I’ll say it for you. I miss Daddy. I miss him a lot.” I move aside then and Jason gets up and runs away from me.

“Jason …” I call, “don’t you want to finish our game?”

But he is already upstairs. “Finish it yourself,” he calls back, and he is crying.

I don’t know why I did that. I don’t know why I spoiled our game, our evening together. It’s just that I have this need to talk about my father, with someone who knew him and loved him the way I did.

TWENTY

Jane phones and invites me to sleep over on Saturday night. “Come early,” she says, “so we can spend the afternoon together.”

Bitsy is impressed when she hears that I am going to spend the night at the Albertsons’ house. “You know that Bud Albertson is a division leader and a very important part of the policy making group at the Lab. There are those who say that Bud has more clout than the director.”

“I didn’t know,” I say. I do not add that I don’t care.

“And Brenda is in my Thursday night group.”

Bitsy’s Thursday night group reads and discusses current books. This week it is a biography of Georgia O’Keefe.

I pack a small bag and walk over to Jane’s house. It is my first visit to Bathtub Row. When I get there her brother-in-law, Howard, is in the driveway, waxing a pair of skis. I have never seen Howard but Jane has described her whole family to me. Howard is tall and thin and trying to grow a beard. Jane’s sister is the first person he ever had sex with, and that was after they were married.
I know a lot about Jane’s family. I know that her parents make love once a week, on Saturday nights.

“Hello,” Howard says to me. “You must be Davey.”

“Yes.”

“Jane’s inside.”

The house looks like a log cabin. It is set back from the road and surrounded by piñon pine and blue spruce trees. I knock on the front door and Jane lets me in.

“Hi,” she says. “Come and meet my mom.”

Inside, the house looks like a regular house, except for the logs showing through on one of the living room walls, giving it a rustic look.

I follow Jane to the kitchen where she introduces me to her mother, Brenda, who is chubby and dimpled, with a face like Jane’s. She is baking cookies. Bitsy does a lot of baking too. Jason has become her apprentice. Together they bake chocolate chips, lemon-iced, sugar coated, oatmeal, applesauce, pinwheel—you name it, they bake it. I have this fantasy that Jason will get so good at baking cookies that when we go back to Atlantic City we’ll open a cookie shop on the boardwalk. A really classy place. And we’ll call it
Jason Wexler, Cookie Specialist
, or something like that. I’ll do the publicity and Mom will take care of the business side of things. We’ll make a fortune. All the big hotels will have branches of our shop. And we’ll ship all over the
world, just like James’ Saltwater Taffy shops. We’ll live in a penthouse apartment in one of the new hotels, with a view of the ocean from every room.

“Hello, dear,” Jane’s mother says. “I’m so glad to meet you.”

There is a fat, beautiful baby crawling around on the kitchen floor. Jane scoops him up and plants a juicy kiss on his face. “And this is my nephew, Robby. Isn’t he adorable?”

Jane passes him to me and he grabs a fistful of my hair and tries to chew on it. We all laugh as he babbles to us in baby talk.

Robby belongs to Howard, who was in the driveway, and to Linda, Jane’s sister. She is the one who was once a finalist in the Miss New Mexico contest.

Jane’s other sister, Taffy, is in business school in Albuquerque. She comes home every other weekend.

“Where’s your father?” I ask Jane, as we walk through the house.

“In his study,” Jane whispers, pointing to a closed door. “He’s thinking. He always thinks on Saturdays. But you’ll meet him later. He usually comes out to dinner. Come on upstairs … my room is a mess … I’m in the middle of cleaning out my closet.”

I follow Jane up the stairs, admiring the polished wooden banister which feels cool and sleek under my hand.

“My mother is president of the Women’s Hiking Association,” Jane says, over her shoulder. “She knows the name of every wildflower in the Southwest.”