What is their father doing? Crying. She has an image in her mind of him crying, of his remorse. She feels a pang and feels it blow out like a match in this wind. Then she feels the cold. She walks back to the car and sees the suggestion of him through the fogged-up glass. He appears to be smoking.
After she opens the door, she stands there for a minute. His hand draws out the ashtray and extinguishes his cigarette. By
the time she gets in, he is turned away, resting his head on his arm. She doesn’t believe he is asleep.
She switches off the heater and drives away without wiping the windshield. Guessing where the road is.
T
he next morning Norma looks back at who she’s been and winces at her prayers and appeals to their dead brother. No wonder Lou makes fun of her.
She feels rescued by the person she used to be, a person that for a long time has been waiting in the wings. Driving home from the country, she glanced at herself in the rearview mirror and saw strength. Not divine or physical strength. But her old common sense. And something more—a toughness. She knew two things for certain then. One was that she wasn’t their mother, she wasn’t going to cave in and have Lou and Sandy take over. The other was that her new strength would scald his hand.
She keeps him out of her line of vision. He’s a shadow with a foot that drags. To his face Lou accuses him of playing up his limp for sympathy.
“I may lose the leg,” he replies with dignity.
Norma deflects that plea. Since she doesn’t think of him, she doesn’t think of forgiving him.
She gets her driver’s licence, cuts her hair short and gives Sandy the red angora sweater again. She goes off her diet and gains twenty-five pounds in two months.
Her friends praise her for not trying to be somebody she isn’t. But they fret over her independence, calling it dangerous, whereas when she was slimmer, they called it snobbery.
“We’ve got to stick together,” they warn her. They say,“What did we tell you?” when she walks downs the halls by herself and is mooed at.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Norma says truthfully. All her former fears are gone. She undresses for Phys. Ed. with the other girls in her class and doesn’t care if they gawk. She writes her exams as coolly as if she were in a room by herself. She applies for and gets a summer job at the hardware store and is commended by the owner for her know-how and unflappability. On Sunday she cleans the house. In the evenings she walks to the ravine and waits under the trestle bridge for trains to pass over.
The basement is only half finished, but she doesn’t work on it. Except to do the laundry, she doesn’t go down there anymore.
Their father doesn’t go down to the basement, either. He’s stopped drinking, so he doesn’t make trips down to the fridge. He couldn’t manage the stairs anyway, on account of his bad foot.
In July he goes into the hospital, to have his leg amputated, he announces, but it’s only to have his foot put back together the way it should have been when he shot it years ago.
The operation is a failure, and the instant he learns this, his fury returns. While still in the hospital, he takes out a lawsuit against the place and against the doctors who did the bad job to begin with. He writes letters to the daily papers, calling for a government inquiry. “Give him a lobotomy,” is Lou’s advice to his doctor. What the doctors give him is a big cheque, settling the matter out of court. With part of the money he buys a new car from where he works. A white Oldsmobile. “A whore lure,” Lou calls it, although he doesn’t seem to be pining for a Lovergirl. He’s his old self—foul-tempered, laying down the law. But he doesn’t hit Lou or Norma, even at the peak of his most lunatic rages. It seems he’s gone off hitting.
Lou doesn’t believe the restraint will last. But it better, for his sake. After the last time he backhanded her, that day he took
Norma out for her first driving lesson, she told herself she’d kill him if he ever laid a finger on her again. When he was in the hospital, she went down to the bomb shelter, took his World War II gun off the wall and pointed it at where his head would be if he were sleeping on his bunk. She couldn’t actually imagine pulling the trigger, but it felt like a step forward that she at least had the nerve to aim.
Now that he’s out of the hospital, bawling her out every time he lays eyes on her, she thinks of aiming his gun and doesn’t lose control. Sometimes she ignores him, and that really drives him up the wall. She walks a fine line between insolence and the showdown.
With her sisters it’s another story. One day, partly to explain her behaviour since birth, partly to get the three of them talking again, she says,“This house is like a dangerous country that is ruled by a despot and founded on an historical calamity.”
The calamity is their mother, if Norma and Sandy care to ask. They don’t. Oh, Lou knows why not. All the abuse she’s handed out, especially to Norma. She’s not so bad these days, though. She controls herself. She keeps thinking that nobody loves her, and it worries her that she’s even concerned enough to have the thought. She helps Norma with the dishes, but Norma doesn’t exactly fall on her knees with gratitude. In fact, Norma doesn’t seem to realize that the last time Lou picked up a dishtowel was a year ago. Lou used to find Norma as easy to read and confide in as a diary. Now Norma, and Sandy, too, are both closed books. Or foreign books. Untranslatable.
Their father obviously finds their isolation threatening. At supper time he actually tries to stir up arguments between them: “Lou, if what Sandy just said bothers you, say so. Speak freely.” In his better moods he starts up singsongs and suggests family projects, such as collecting bottles for the church. “Where’s your get-up-and-go?” he bellows. Lou smirks at her sisters, who don’t look at her. Even in dashing their
father’s hopes, there’s no confederacy. Eventually, Lou loses heart. “Fuck them,” she tells herself with less conviction than she’d like. She begins to wish for a boyfriend. Someone to be madly in love with.
Sandy doesn’t miss Rob. Or his twin brother. Or any older men. She is afraid that after a few weeks she’ll start to, that she has an addiction. But while she sometimes aches with an indefinite longing, she has no longing for the old remedy. She is too aware now of the reasons why it isn’t a good idea: all the lying and sneaking around; the tightrope walking; their father’s sarcastic “Off to some sleazy motel?” because of her short skirts, because he has no idea that she’s really off to some sleazy motel; her friends’ suspicion about why she never goes out on dates anymore. One of her friends says,“I thought I should tell you. A rumour’s going around that you’ve turned into a lesbian.” Horrified, Sandy phones a guy she’s been out with a few times, a giant he-man, and asks him to take her bowling.
After she breaks up with Rob, she starts dating this guy regularly. His name is Dave. He’s two years older than her and twice as tall. A football player who failed grade nine or ten.
Anything you plug in, he knows how to fix. At his father’s appliance store, where he works after school, he’s the service department. Just like Sandy, he shines in a store, and when she learns this about him, she lets him undo her bra.
“Thanks,” he says.
She’s led him to believe that no guy has ever touched her bare breasts. “She’s not a lesbian, but she’s not a slut,” is the message she intends for him to broadcast. But as his huge hand cups her breast with devout gentleness, she realizes that this will be his message even if she sleeps with him.
Still, when he asks a few days later if he can please feel her “down there,” she says no.
“Okay,” he says. Polite, no hard feelings. She knows that she can’t hold him off forever, but she likes this new sensation of feeling loved without making love.
Dave insists on picking Sandy up at her house. He says it doesn’t sit right with him, parking down the street, or meeting in a restaurant (her next suggestion). “I know about your mother’s drinking problem,” he offers gallantly.
Maybe. But he doesn’t know about their father. For several months, on the evenings she and Dave have a date, she waits in the front hall and runs out as soon as his car pulls up in the driveway. Then one night he shows up half an hour early, while she’s still in her bedroom getting dressed, and before she can do anything about it, their father answers the door.
“What is it?” he asks threateningly.
“Good evening, sir,” Dave says. “I’m here for Sandy.”
“I see!” their father shouts.
Silence. Sandy pictures their father’s speechless surprise. All her life she has discouraged friends, girls and boys, from calling on her. It’s her surest instinct. She opens her bedroom door, about to call “I’ll meet you in the car!” when their father shouts,“Come in!”
“Thank you,” Dave says. “I’m afraid I’m early. Sorry about that.”
“I didn’t catch the name!” their father says, still shouting.
Dave shouts his name, bellows it, and Sandy thinks “Oh, my God,” but their father only shouts,“We have a Dave at work.” Sandy shuts her door and starts tearing the rollers out of her hair.
When she comes running down the hall, their father looks relieved and still surprised. “All set?” he shouts.
She sits on the bench to pull on her boots. There across from her is the hole in the wall where years ago their father hurled the vacuum cleaner right through. What will she tell Dave caused it? Their father trims the lawn with scissors, but he hasn’t fixed that hole yet.
“Okay,” she says, standing. “Bye.”
Their father slaps Dave on the shoulder. “Have fun at the orgy!” he says. Dave laughs.
“Stay away from the dope fiends!” their father jokes.
Sandy laughs at this one. She can’t believe how nice their father is being. Maybe it’s because Dave also has a brush cut. She gives their father a look. She thinks, this is how he must have been—funny, friendly—when their mother met him, during the war.
Lou dreams she is standing at the edge of what somebody has informed her are the White Cliffs of Dover. She is with a boy who has an English accent and rings on every finger. It’s a half sleeping, half waking dream. The rings are how she knows she’s drifted off. She supposes that the boy is Tom and that she’s mixed him up with Ringo Starr instead of with John Lennon.
Tom is the new boy at school. Tom Fenton. Thomas. T. F. Tom and Lou. T. F. and L. F. Lou writes variations everywhere, on all her notebooks, on the soles of her running shoes, backwards on her eraser to make a stamp. On her wrist with a needle: T. F. in dots of blood, and one night, in a frenzy of ardour, a i, on her stomach in two razor lines. Of all the girls who think they love him, she believes that she is the only one who sees beyond his John Lennon face, wire-rimmed glasses and British accent. What she sees, what thrills her, is the cold look in his eye. She has that look, too, she thinks.
He’s in her English class. He calls Robert Frost, whom the teacher reveres, a third-rate poet. He says that “Acquainted with the Night” is not about man’s inhumanity to man but about the void in man. In the corridors he strides alone and scowling, usually reading a library book.
“Ten bucks says he’s a homo,” is Sherry’s reaction when Lou
tells her he hasn’t asked any girl out. Sherry has quit school, lied about her age and got a job as a cocktail waitress at The Nineteenth Hole, the golf-and-country-club restaurant. Sherry says that English guys are either completely homo or half and half. “Take it from me,” she says.
For once Lou doesn’t want to hear the sordid proof. “Not Tom,” she says. She has the idea that homosexuals are flamboyant and happy. Also rare.
Sherry makes a circle with her thumb and forefinger and pokes her other forefinger in and out. “There’s only one way to know for sure,” she says.
“Give me time,” Lou says.
She tries to impress him by faking his interests. All the advice (she lowers herself to seeking it in Sandy’s fashion magazines, and she’s influenced by what Jean Peters did to catch Louis Jourdan in
Three Coins in the Fountain)
seems to boil down to Fake His Interests. She takes out of the library the books she sees him carrying:
Siddhartha, The Fountainhead, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.
She reads them walking. She buys wire-rimmed glasses. After seeing him smoking a cigarette on his way home from school, she smokes right out in the corridors.
She clings to two straws. One, that he doesn’t seem to be noticing any of her competitors either. Two, that none of her competitors is as smart and reckless as she is. She will do anything to win him. Anything.
Stella for star, as everyone who has seen
A Streetcar Named Desire
(and Norma has seen it three times) knows.
Did Stella’s parents name her after the girl in the movie, or was she born dazzling? Norma wonders and daydreams. Stella is her dream girl. Probably she’s the dream girl of half the boys at school, too, but no boy has the nerve to ask her out. Stella is
over six feet tall and has white-blond waist-long hair and a face as sweet as a baby’s. You can understand why her parents didn’t press their luck. (Stella is an only child.) Her parents adore her. They take her to the Caribbean on holidays. Everything there is to know about Stella from a distance, Norma knows.
The first day after the Thanksgiving holiday Norma manages to stand behind Stella in the cafeteria line. This is all the heaven Norma feels she wants and deserves. Although she daydreams, she never hopes.
Stella has been away for a week, to Jamaica, and she has a bad sunburn. Her long hand reaching for a carton of milk is blistered, and when Norma sees this, she gasps, which makes Stella turn around and look at her.
Norma feels herself blush. She hasn’t blushed in months; she thought she’d outgrown it. “You should put calamine lotion on your hand,” she murmurs.
“Pardon me?” Stella says. She tosses her hair back.
“Calamine lotion.”
Stella waits.
“It takes away the burn and stops some of the peeling,” Norma says. She shrugs, mortified now. “It’s just a suggestion.”
But Stella is supremely interested. Inclining her head, she asks if you can buy calamine lotion with a prescription. She asks how much it costs. Then she says,“Gee, thanks a lot,” and offers Norma such a sweet, gorgeous smile that Norma feels an old stirring of sadness connected with her desire to serve a paragon, and she offers to bring Stella a bottle of calamine lotion from home.