Sweet Talk (16 page)

“Cheater,” says Barbie, rocking from side to side in her chair.

“Well, I’ll just have to move it back a space,” Marguerite says.

“Cheater, meater, feeter,” Barbie says.

“No, you lose your turn.”

“No, I don’t,” Marguerite says. “And you know why, sweetie? Because I’m the mother. I made a mistake, I miscounted, and now because I am the mother, I am moving back eleven spaces, although in a fair and friendly game, I would have to move back only one space.” Now the phone is ringing. “All right, I lose a turn.”

Francis tells her that Dean Brown’s wife has picked them up at the gas station and taken them both to the Browns’ house. The Browns have fed him a delicious pot roast (he says this loudly so that the Browns will hear his appreciation) and now they have offered him the sofa for the night, but of course they will drive him home if he really wants them to, but then how would he get to the garage in the morning.

“Weet, beet, keet,” Barbie is saying.

Pauline Brown takes the phone and says, “He won’t be any trouble, Marguerite.” The Browns do not have
any children. Marguerite has a momentary vision of their childless house—the high-tech gadgets, the expensive furniture, no dust.

“Teat, eat, sheet.”

“Barbie, stop that rocking!” she calls. Too late. The chair slips sideways as Marguerite lunges after it, but Barbie is already on the floor and taking the huge breath that precedes a scream.

“Marguerite?” says Francis from the dangling receiver.

Marguerite scoops Barbie up with one arm and picks up the phone with the other. “Listen, I’ll see you tomorrow.” Barbie screams. “I don’t think any of you should drive on a night like this.”

“Everything all right there?”

“Everything is all right. Just a little fall.”

Marguerite hangs up and sits on the chair, stroking Barbie’s elbow until she stops crying. John says, “You can move eleven spaces if you want to, Mom.”

The closet is deep and dark. Behind the clothes, under the shelves that hold shoes and stored linen, there is a niche just large enough for Marguerite and the feather tick. As she follows Barbie upstairs, past the bedroom where the closet is, she thinks of how pleasing it will be to take the satiny comforter from the foot of the double bed and curl up in the niche. The closet smells good. All the closets in the house smell of clove-stuck
oranges, the fragrance of her childhood—pomanders made the way her mother used to make them. Floating on the feather tick, she can evoke images of what it was like to be seven, in summer, and reading a book. Or she can be a single woman, in Tahiti, lying in the shade of a coconut palm, the sea breeze lifting the hem of her white dress like butterfly wings.

“No, no,” Barbie says. “I. Think. I. Can. Like that.” They are lying on Barbie’s bed again, against the pillows, while Marguerite reads
The Little Engine That Could
.

“I. Think. I. Can. I. Know. I. Can.” Marguerite makes her voice grind out the words slowly as she imitates the sound of a locomotive struggling uphill. Now that she has the rhythms right, she feels Barbie settle into the crook of her arm. “Ithink. Ican. Iknow. Ican.” The little engine gathers speed. It goes faster, and faster, and faster, uphill past childhood, youth, middle age, past alcoholism, divorce, the drug addictions of her children, old age on a fixed income, rising prices, drought, floods, blizzards, the cold wind that blows everything away.

“That’s enough for tonight,” she tells Barbie.

“You put a worm once in Daddy’s spaghetti,” John says. She has come down to watch the last ten minutes of a program with him. Now during the commercial break, while two hysterical housewives run headlong
across a kitchen floor, pushing mops soaked in competing cleansers, John is suggesting that she has no sense of humor. “Daddy thought it was funny,” he says. “He didn’t scream at you.”

“I wasn’t mad because you played a joke. I was mad because I thought Barbie was hurt.” Besides, there was paint on the carpet, there was paint on the wall. She thinks of Francis sitting down to a hand of hearts and a scotch on the rocks with the Browns. Dear Francis, since you are very far away, I will write you a letter. What I did today: I made pomanders for the closets. Also I went to the big closet twice and just sat there, hunched up, rubbing my shin bones. I hid from my own kids. Some mother, huh? “It
was
a pretty funny joke, John.” But John has already turned back to the TV and is laughing at a woman who has just dropped her evening bag into a soup tureen.

“This is not a bad life,” she continues. “We have a nice little house, and plenty to eat, and only as many debts as we think we are going to be able to pay. We are doing much better than most people living in the last quarter of the twentieth century.”

A deep and unusual silence has slipped into the house. She notices it the moment she flicks the kitchen light and stands near the darkness of the doorway. It is not just the stillness of sleeping children but a special quiet that she realizes has been there for some time, underneath her
footsteps as she moved about the house, stacking books and magazines, plumping up pillows. She goes to the back door and looks out. What she has been hearing for three days, without really hearing it, is the wind. The wind blowing swirls of snow down the slope of the back hill, throwing drifts across the driveway, making ridges of ice in the street, where the salted snow melted and refroze. The sound is gone now and there is only the deep silence of snow and of a small full moon high above the stand of trees at the top of the hill. She takes her coat, hat, and muffler from the hook by the door. Except to shovel the walk, she has not been outside for three days.

The snow has frozen over and her feet make soft noises as they break through the thin crust. She walks uphill toward what will be the backyards of four new houses. In the lives of her children the construction of these houses will mark time and change. Her breath rises in frosty puffs, like signals, as she turns to look downhill. There is something serene about the geometry of her neighborhood—the dark rectangle of houses, the snow-glazed roofs. There is no one to see her, although for a moment she imagines that she has been spotted from one of the darkened windows and that a stranger is preparing to send her coded messages, using the flash of a mirror in the moonlight. “Who’s there?” she cries in the theatrical voice she used to read Barbie “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” but the words slide away into the deepness of the snow and she is not certain that she has spoken.

She walks along the crest of the hill and stops. Behind her there is a curve of footsteps arching along the hill and back down to the house. In front of her there is a large stretch of virgin snow. She takes a leaping giant step forward and then sits down and leans back carefully into the snow, keeping her feet together and her arms by her sides, so that she is lying quite straight and looking up at the soft shadow that curls along the face of the full moon. She begins to move, pushing her arms out across the snow and bringing them up toward her head, then down to her sides. She moves her legs across the snow in a scissors motion—out, then back.

Marguerite, aged twenty-nine, mother of two, is making a snow angel.

In a moment she will be so cold that she will have to stand up and go home. She will have to scuffle around on top of the angel to obliterate the evidence of this whimsy. But now she lies deep in the snow and moves her arms and legs very slowly. She moves with the slow rhythm of the moon moving across the sky. She moves with the slow beat of the stars pulsating their light to stars in other galaxies. She has a pair of white wings and a white skirt. She has white moonlight and the clean white frost of her own breath, and now, alone on the hillside in the white universe, with the shadow of her own footsteps reaching back to the house like a lifeline, Marguerite feels the calm of a great and voluptuous sigh.

E
very so often that dead dog dreams me up again.

It’s twenty-five years later. I’m walking along 42nd Street in Manhattan, the sounds of the city crashing beside me—horns, gearshifts, insults—somebody’s chewing gum holding my foot to the pavement, when that dog wakes from his long sleep and imagines me.

I’m sweet again. I’m sweet-breathed and flat-limbed. Our family is stationed at Fort Niagara, and the dog swims his red heavy fur into the black Niagara River. Across the street from the officers’ quarters, down the steep shady bank, the river, even this far downstream, has been clocked at nine miles per hour. The dog swims after the stick I have thrown.

“Are you crazy?” my grandmother says, even though she is not fond of dog hair in the house, the way it sneaks into the refrigerator every time you open the door.
“There’s a current out there! It’ll take that dog all the way to Toronto!”

“The dog knows where the backwater ends and the current begins,” I say, because it is true. He comes down to the river all the time with my father, my brother MacArthur, or me. You never have to yell the dog away from the place where the river water moves like a whip.

Sparky Smith and I had a game we played called knockout. It involved a certain way of breathing and standing up fast that caused the blood to leave the brain as if a plug had been jerked from the skull. You came to again just as soon as you were on the ground, the blood sloshing back, but it always seemed as if you had left the planet, had a vacation on Mars, and maybe stopped back at Fort Niagara half a lifetime later.

There weren’t many kids my age on the post, because it was a small command. Most of its real work went on at the missile batteries flung like shale along the American-Canadian border. Sparky Smith and I hadn’t been at Lewiston-Porter Central School long enough to get to know many people, so we entertained ourselves by meeting in a hollow of trees and shrubs at the far edge of the parade ground and telling each other seventh-grade sex jokes that usually had to do with keyholes and doorknobs, hot dogs and hot-dog buns, nuns, priests, preachers, schoolteachers, and people in blindfolds.

When we ran out of sex jokes, we went to knockout and took turns catching each other as we fell like a cut tree toward the ground. Whenever I knocked out, I came to on the grass with the dog barking, yelping, crouching, crying for help. “Wake up! Wake up!” he seemed to say. “Do you know your name? Do you know your name? My name is Duke! My name is Duke!” I’d wake to the sky with the urgent call of the dog in the air, and I’d think, Well, here I am, back in my life again.

Sparky Smith and I spent our school time smiling too much and running for office. We wore mittens instead of gloves, because everyone else did. We made our mothers buy us ugly knit caps with balls on top—caps that in our previous schools would have identified us as weird but were part of the winter uniform in upstate New York. We wobbled onto the ice of the post rink, practicing in secret, banged our knees, scraped the palms of our hands, so that we would be invited to skating parties by civilian children.

“You skate?” With each other we practiced the cool look.

“Oh, yeah. I mean, like, I do it some—I’m not a racer or anything.”

Every morning we boarded the Army-green bus—the slime-green, dead-swamp-algae-green bus—and rode it to the post gate, past the concrete island where the MPs stood in their bulletproof booth. Across from
the gate, we got off at a street corner and waited with the other Army kids, the junior-high and high-school kids, for the real bus, the yellow one with the civilian kids on it. Just as we began to board, the civilian kids—there were only six of them but eighteen of us—would begin to sing the Artillery song with obscene variations one of them had invented. Instead of “Over hill, over dale,” they sang things like “Over boob, over tit.” For a few weeks, we sat in silence watching the heavy oak trees of the town give way to apple orchards and potato farms, and we pretended not to hear. Then one day Sparky Smith began to sing the real Artillery song, the booming song with caissons rolling along in it, and we all joined in and took over the bus with our voices.

When we ran out of verses, one of the civilian kids, a football player in high school, yelled, “Sparky is a
dog’s
name. Here Sparky, Sparky, Sparky.” Sparky rose from his seat with a wounded look, then dropped to the aisle on his hands and knees and bit the football player in the calf. We all laughed, even the football player, and Sparky returned to his seat.

“That guy’s just lucky I didn’t pee on his leg,” Sparky said.

Somehow Sparky got himself elected homeroom president and me homeroom vice president in January. He liked to say, “In actual percentages—I mean in actual per capita terms—we are doing much better than the civilian kids.” He kept track of how many athletes
we had, how many band members, who among the older girls might become a cheerleader. Listening to him even then, I couldn’t figure out how he got anyone to vote for us. When he was campaigning, he sounded dull and serious, and anyway he had a large head and looked funny in a knit cap. He put up a homemade sign in the lunchroom, went from table to table to find students from 7-B to shake hands with, and said to me repeatedly, as I walked along a step behind and nodded, “Just don’t tell them that you’re leaving in March. Under no circumstances let them know that you will not be able to finish out your term.”