“Sure,” she says, stiff under his hand, mortified by love.
On Sunday she rises at six o’clock, when she hears their mother turn on the t?, and does the dusting and two loads of wash so that she’ll be free the whole day to work with their
father. At seven-thirty she puts on the coffee for the aroma to wake him up.
He whistles “For Me and My Gal” in the shower. Norma pours out his Shreddies and orange juice. Feeling benevolent, she takes her plate of toast and jam to eat in the t? room and keep their mother company. A bearded minister is on, saying that everbody’s soul is in a constant and everlasting state of torment. Even when you believe yourself to be happy, the minister says, even when you are an innocent, gurgling baby, your soul is contorting in character-building pain. “This is good,” he declares. “This is one of life’s eternal verities.”
“You girls used to skip off to Sunday school holding hands,” their mother says wistfully. “That dance skip from
The Wizard of Oz.
I always hoped you’d turn out like the McGuire sisters.”
When Norma hears their father getting dressed, she goes back to the kitchen and pours out his coffee.
He is wearing his navy suit.
“I’m on my way,” he says, looking past her to the clock on the wall. “I’ve got to go into the office.”
“Today?”
“No rest for the weary.” He is already gone down the hall. Whistling “Easter Parade.”
It’s still early. Eight-fifteen. Norma eats his cereal, does the dishes, empties out the wastepaper baskets and refills her mother’s mug. She washes the kitchen floor. Now it’s nine-twenty.
She stands at the window, looking out at their little weeping willow tree that has no leaves left. Its bare branches hanging down make her think of the thin shocked arms of Vietnamese war children, and that makes her hungry. She has a piece of bread. Two pieces, three. Before she knows it, she’s devoured almost the whole loaf. She goes downstairs.
It’s like a light turning on inside herself to see the fluorescent lights flicker white, all working. She stands there reconsidering how she’ll proceed.
“He would have got on your nerves,” a voice inside her says. “He’d have taken over and bossed you around. Everything works out for the best.”
She holds her breath. She has never heard Jimmy speak to her when she isn’t standing in front of where his picture is. After several minutes, while she waits to hear if he has anything else to say, she goes into their father’s workroom and takes the photo from the accordion file.
Jimmy’s face seems to be straining to communicate an urgent message.
“What?” she asks aloud.
She hears the t? upstairs, the furnace comes on. She hears her own thoughts registering these events, and presently she is aware of the fact that the sound of her brother’s voice is the sound of herself thinking.
She stares at the picture, taken when he was three months away from going to heaven. She kisses it and puts it away. She is fraught with a sense of having encountered an eternal verity. Returning to the other room, she feels that her legs are heavier and more muscular. And her hand, gripping the hammer, is mighty, and afflicted with responsibility.
At noon she goes up to the kitchen to make lunch. Lou, who came in late last night from babysitting, has just got out of bed. She is still in her pyjamas, hunched at the table over a cup of black coffee, smoking their father’s cigarettes. Her long hair is tangled and greasy, and her skin is sallow. Seeing her through different eyes, Norma divines that Lou is on the road to becoming a bag lady. “You should give those up,” she says about the cigarettes.
“Fuck off” Lou says incredulously. She takes a deep drag. “I gather Giovanni Masturbati is out humping,” she says.
Giovanni Masturbati is one of Lou’s names for their father. It comes from a dirty song. Lou knows a slew of dirty songs, and lately she sings them as if they’re all about their father and Lovergirl. She has decided that one of the greatest things that has ever happened to them is their father having aifairs.
Norma spreads margarine on the bread that she didn’t polish off a couple of hours ago. “Has Mom had anything to eat?” she asks.
“I gave her a can of beans,” Lou says. “She’s on some memory lane trip about how cute we used to be going to church.”
“Reminiscing is a sign of old age,” Norma says sadly, struck by another divination that their mother will die before her time.
Sandy comes into the kitchen, pours herself a cup of coffee and sits across from Lou.
“You’ve got too much makeup on,” Lou says.
“Have I?” Sandy asks quickly, touching her face.
Norma turns from the counter. “Get a load of you,” she says.
“Do you think I’ve got too much on?” Sandy asks her. “Tell me the truth.”
The truth, Norma thinks reverently. She looks Sandy over. Hair tied back in a blue ribbon. Tight yellow shell sweater that Sandy knit herself and that makes her breasts appear artificially high and round. Short, hip-hugging, blue-and-yellow-striped skirt. Yellow tights. Blue high heels. All blue and yellow to match her eyes and hair. And blue shadow on her eyelids. And false eyelashes? Norma asks.
“Do they look false?” Sandy asks nervously.
“Yes,” Norma says. “Yes, I think they do. I don’t think you should wear them.”
“What’s with the opinions all of a sudden?” Lou says. Then she lifts her chin, alert. “Is that in our driveway?”
Sandy stands to see out the window. “Oh, no. Dad’s home.” She holds up a hand as if he could tell from out there that she’s wearing makeup.
“He won’t care,” Norma says to her.
“I can’t take any chances,” Sandy says. She runs out to the front hall, runs in again carrying her coat and runs out the back door.
“What the fuck is he doing home?” Lou mutters, getting up to empty the ashtray, waving her hands at the cigarette smoke.
Norma goes to the window. “Something’s the matter,” she says.
“If he and Lovergirl have split up already, I’ll slash my wrists.”
“I think he’s had a heart attack or something,” Norma says.
“What?” Lou flies over beside Norma. He’s still in the car, his forehead dropped on the steering wheel. “Shit,” Lou whispers. They watch him for a couple of minutes, and he doesn’t move. “He’s dead,” Lou whispers.
He sits up straight.
“Oh, thank heavens,” Norma breathes.
“What’s he trying to pull?” Lou says angrily.
The car door opens, and he climbs out and stands there surveying the house. His eyes skim past them at the window. His tie is loose, his mouth hanging open.
“God damn it!” Lou says, stamping her bare foot. “They’ve split up. God fucking damn it!” And then she runs and gets her coat and boots, and heads for the back door, pulling the coat over her pyjamas.
“You’re going out like
that?”
Norma says.
“I’m sure as hell not hanging around
here
another minute.”
One door slams, the other opens. Norma puts her plate in the sink and tiptoes down to the basement. She hears the hangers clink in the hall closet, him walk into the kitchen, the fridge open, the cutlery drawer open, and even—she is so still and vibrant—the release of gas as the beer cap clicks off.
He scrapes back a chair. She’s afraid to resume hammering in case he storms down and decides he’s mad after all that she
started refinishing the basement. Wreck what she’s done. Anything is possible—likely—if he’s split up with Lovergirl.
But after a minute the sun comes out and through the window in front of her, striking her smack in the face, and she immediately understands that this is a sign from the source of grace that was Jimmy’s. A sign to go ahead, to fear not.
She ties on the tool pouch, draws out the hammer and pounds in a nail, and she hears him stand, but it’s to get another beer out of the fridge.
A few minutes later he gets a third. Is he going on a binge? Once before, after the breakup with his first Lovergirl, he went on binges for a week or so, on and off between getting into uproars. The binges were as bad as the uproars because he was like a moron when he was plastered, crying, slurring his words, tripping over his feet, like a clown drunk. Even their mother was driven to say that he didn’t know his limit.
Another beer. Four. Norma keeps track, her worry rising every time he does. She knows his limit: a six pack. And yet it’s also happening that as she imagines him up there growing weaker, she is turning into a tower of strength. The sensation is much more vivid than it was in the morning. She is sure that she’s taller and that her shirt is suddenly tight around her upper arms. She flexes. Her bicep seems enormous. Hard as a rock. She runs into the laundry room, where on the wall above the sink there is a mirror—a relic from the days that their mother did the wash—and looks at her face. She takes off her glasses, going closer, to see her eyes.
“God,” she says, because her eyes aren’t shining, huge and glorious, as she imagines Jimmy’s eyes would be by now. Her eyes are their father’s eyes. Has she always had his eyes, or has this just happened? She puts her glasses back on and goes into the other room, troubled by what having their father’s eyes will turn her into. Upstairs he’s taking the last beer out of the fridge. She knows how many there are up there. If he wants
any more, he’ll have to get them out of the old fridge down here.
A few minutes pass, then,
bang
—the empty beer bottle slammed on the table. The search in the fridge for another. The descent, thunderous with his limp and intoxication combined. Her new strength being spiritual as well as physical, she is calm.
He squints, assailed by the new lights. When he can see, he says,“Hey,” and plants his hands on his hips. “Alrighty,” he says. “Where are we?”
He isn’t loaded yet. But his eyes are her eyes gone to hell. They break her heart. “Well,” she says. “I’ve measured most of the wood for that wall, so it just has to be sawn and then it can go up.”
“Alrighty.” He takes off his jacket and tie. “Give me the saw.”
She does, gladly. She lifts a piece of wood onto the table.
“Hold it,” he orders, and she grasps the wood close to where she’s drawn a line. She exults at the risk to her fingers, the demonstration of her fearlessness and faith. But despite all the beers, he follows the line. He saws steadily and without talking, except to say “Next,” one piece of wood after another. All the wood she has measured.
He suggests a break. He gets a beer from the fridge, and his cigarettes and lighter from his jacket pocket, and they sit across from each other on pieces of insulation. Now, smoking, the alcohol shows. His face collapses. He stares off. Out of the blue he begins telling her how he and their mother met, a story Norma already knows. It was during the war. He was a soldier, their mother was a dancer with The Light Fantastics. He was knocked out by her aristocratic ankles and how easily she did the splits. He bribed his way backstage and gave her his kidney stone that he carried everywhere for luck. On their first date they became engaged, the stone serving as a ring until he could afford the real thing.
“She talked her head off,” he says. “All the time. Couldn’t shut her up. Never drank. Never touched the stuff.”
Norma pictures her. A young, blond, sober chatterbox in those tap shoes she still has, clicking them as she walks, wearing the feather hat from the newspaper picture.
“You’d have thought that’s when she’d have started,” their father says.
“Started what?”
He raises his beer, meaning started drinking. “Both brothers dying within a week.”
“In battle,” Norma says, to prompt him to tell her more. All she knows about her uncles is that they were older than their mother and that one was named Jim, the same as their father, and one was named Archie. When the second one, Jim, died, their mother’s father, who was named James Archibald and who won a medal in the First World War, went out to his barn and shot a sow, then wouldn’t let anybody butcher it for meat. This story Norma has heard before from their father. Their mother won’t talk about her brothers dying.
“Think I’ll call it quits,” their father says, pulling himself up. He goes to the fridge for as many beers as he can carry, and takes them upstairs.
Which means he’ll conk out before dinner, probably until the morning. Which means he won’t get into an uproar, not tonight at least.
Sandy is half an hour early. A black car is parked in a corner, but it isn’t Reg’s. Reg drives a red Mustang. Friday evening when she arrived at the store, there was an envelope stamped “Confidential,” and with her name on it, next to the cash register. The note inside was typed on Sherman “Sher-fit” Shoes letterhead. “Doll,” it said. “Re Sunday. One p.m. Glenn Mills High parking lot. Red mustang. See you there! Reg.”
She woke up Friday morning thinking no way could she date a man who was only eight years younger than their father, but the note changed her mind because of the trouble he’d gone to … typing it, using his good office paper. Also she was taken with “Doll.”
She knows what’s going to happen. In her body she knows. Shivers pour through her. At work she went weak in the knees when one of the salesgirls said you should never throw water on mating dogs, because the male dog’s thing makes a hook inside the female, and the female is torn if the male pulls out before his thing goes down.
A red car roars into the lot and accelerates. For a second, before the brakes squeal, she’s sure it’s going to run her down.
Reg leans across the seat and opens the passenger door. Music blares. Frank Sinatra singing “That’s Life.” When she gets in, he turns it down a bit. He’s wearing black leather driving gloves, new-looking blue jeans and a black leather jacket. “A puppet, a poet, a pauper, a pirate, a pawn and a king,” he sings to her. His eyes zigzag over her face, making the cross-stitch. She asks where they’re going.
“Anywhere but here,” he says, turning the radio back up.
Sandy hates Frank Sinatra because their father has all his albums, and she associates him with their father’s secret life—ladies who are tramps, cigarette smoke, drinks and laughs. She wishes Reg would change the station or at least turn the volume back down. Call her “Doll,” make her glad she’s come. He drives fast and mouths the words hugely over at her: “I just-uh pick myself up and get-uh back in the race.”