The music changed to a rhumba. Geraldine and George were still dancing close together, but now, instead of simply swaying, they were moving their hips together, bumping each other gently as if they were screwing. Sandra had just mumbled an answer to Martha’s question about her children when suddenly Tom leaped up so fast and hard that his chair fell over, strode across the floor and began to punch George. George put his hands up over his face. Everyone else leaped up. Carl and Simp tried to grab Tom’s arms. Samantha cried out, ‘Simp! Your teeth! Watch your teeth!’ She grabbed Tom’s jacket; Tom flailed out at Simp, who ducked, then Tom pulled at Simp’s arm and tore the sleeve right out of his jacket. The women crowded in, pummeling Tom and trying to push him away from George, who was now sitting on a barstool with his arms crossed over his crouched head. The bouncer came from behind the bar. He was smaller than Tom, but he was able to grab his arms and propel him toward the door. At the doorway, Tom turned, said something to the bouncer, who did not let go of him. Tom looked back at the table, at Sandra, who was standing paralysed and white.
‘Get your ass out here!’ he shouted. Sandra grabbed her bag and coat and scurried out.
‘He didn’t even pay for their fucking drinks,’ George said afterward in disgust.
10
Norm tightened his mouth, took Mira by the elbow so firmly it hurt, and said good night. She was grateful that the next day, when the phone rang for hours, he was out playing golf. That was it, he had said. He would no longer be involved with such a crude bunch. She argued that it was Tom who was crude and he was not one of their friends. He refused to argue. He would no longer go to parties, invite, or in any way associate with any of them. That was that.
‘They’re my friends, Norm!’ Mira protested.
He looked at her coldly. ‘That’s your problem. They’re not mine.’
‘I go to all your boring doctor dinners,’ she said almost in tears.
‘My friends are polite and proper. I don’t impose rowdiness and riot on you.’
‘If you won’t go to their parties, I’ll go alone,’ she insisted stubbornly.
‘You will not,’ he said in a low, grim voice.
She thought about Sandra’s face when Tom pulled her down, and thought she knew how the woman had felt. There was no way out from them. Just no way out. She would not, of course she would not. He would not permit her to. She was a full-grown woman of thirty-two, but needed permission to do something just as if she were a child. She sat smoldering, feeling helpless.
But the next day, when the phone rang, full of explanations, interpretations, and compared notes, she felt herself retreat from all of it. It was too gross.
Samantha bubbled on about it with glee and excitement. She had had only one thought, she admitted giggling: Simp’s new bridgework. He had had all his teeth capped in the past year, and it had cost them fifteen hundred dollars. She was shocked at George’s cowardice, she felt sorry for Martha. And wasn’t that Tom crazy!
Lily was full of sorrow for Sandra; imagine what her life was like, she said.
‘One night, me and her went to a Tupperware party. Oh, it was nothing, stupid, for the stupid housewives, you know, but it was a chance to get out, so I asked her if she wanted to go, and she worked on Tom and finally, she came. I picked her up and drove her to my friend Betty’s, and they had the party, and when it was over and everybody
else had gone home, Betty brought out a bottle and we had some drinks. Oh, we had so much fun! We talked and laughed. It felt so good. Anyway, we stayed sort of late; I guess it was around midnight when I took Sandra home. We walked in the house – we were having so much fun, we didn’t want to stop, so Sandra said I had to come in for coffee because I was too drunk to drive – and Tom is sitting there on the couch in front of the TV, and he takes one look at her and leaps up and smacks her across the face so hard he knocked her down. Then he started for me. I ran.’
‘He would have hit you?’ Mira was appalled.
‘Sure. He’d think he was doing Carl a favor.’
‘Lily!’
‘Oh, that’s how they are. You don’t know. The old ways, the old neighborhood.’
Mira told Lily what Harry had said to her. Lily was not surprised.
‘Yeah, poor Harry. He’s not a bad guy. We all come out of nothing, you know? Brutality was the way of life. Without it, the men felt like they were nothing, you know?’
She felt sorry for George, but had a little contempt for him.
‘When you’re dealing with people like that, you have to deal in their terms,’ she said with grim strength.
Sandra and Tom were never heard from again. Harry and Geraldine popped off rather cheerfully once George’s face had been cleaned off, and Lily and Carl continued to see them.
But Mira was deeply preoccupied by the response of her friends to the event. She mulled it over for weeks. Whatever their opinions, they felt the evening to have been high drama. Something had happened: something true. It was almost as if – she hated to give expression even to the thought – they envied Tom his directness. Their own lives were filled with subtleties: subtle power games, subtle punishments, subtle rewards. This Tom might be a barbarian, but there was something clean and clear about his way of proceeding.
Only Martha disagreed. Alone of the friends, Martha did not blame George. Geraldine had been coming on strong, George had taken her up on it. He wasn’t pressing her, wasn’t abusing her. That was all natural. So Tom has the hots for Geraldine and punches George in a puritanical projection of his own lust. What is George to do? Tom has seventy pounds and many thicknesses of body over him. He defended himself by protecting himself: the intelligent, the non-violent thing to do.
Mira hesitantly confessed her confusions to Martha, her sense that most of the women had enjoyed the scene, had found it revitalizing. ‘Why, do you suppose?’
Martha smiled grimly. ‘Well, you ought to know, Mira,’ she said with sweet acid.
Mira stared at her.
‘They see in the relation of Tom and Sandra the truth about their own, the concrete form of their relations with their husbands. Isn’t that what you see?’
Mira shook her head. That was ridiculous. Norm would never strike her, nor was she terrified of him. She went home from Martha’s feeling irritable. Norm was right. Her friends had no manners, no grace. Why couldn’t they be more … acceptable! She really felt Norm had a point. She would have to accept his decree. She decided she would see her friends only during the days. But she didn’t want to see Martha for a while. Martha was entirely too bitchy. She would see only Lily and Sam.
But even that became difficult.
By the age of six, Lily’s son Carlos was pure monster. He was alternately abusive and almost catatonically timid. When he went to school his timid side showed. He spoke rarely, did not do his work, and would not even answer the teacher when she spoke to him. But once out of school and back on his own block, he taunted the other children, he beat them up, he called names, threw rocks, rang doorbells, and ran away.
His behavior did not improve with age. By the time he was eight, he was known and labeled in the neighborhood. The children his own age, all of whom were smaller than he, ran away from him at sight. Over the years they had communicated their problem to their older brothers, if they had them. The older children began to retaliate. They would get him on the way to school, for he was always most timid then; they would gang up on him, hit him, throw him down, tear his clothes. He would run home crying; he refused to go to school. Lily, hysterical, ran to the school and asked them to do something about it. She cried to Carl to find a way to stop it. She took to driving Carlos to school and picking him up afterward.
But sometimes he had to be alone. One afternoon he walked by himself around the corner to a candy store to get an ice-cream cone. A gang of kids saw him and followed him, and when he came out, they surrounded him. Taunting and jeering, they forced him to walk some
distance from his house to an empty lot behind a deserted gas station. They smeared the ice cream on his face. They sent one of their number for rope. They waited, still taunting, jeering, threatening. Carlos was hysterical, but they were too many even for his fierce strength. When the rope arrived, they tied a noose around his neck and tried to hang him from the branch of a tree. They had trouble because he was so large and was fighting so hard. The tree branch proved too slender to hold his weight, and they were unable to climb to a higher one and drag him at the same time. They argued and talked in high angry voices that pierced the dusky light of the autumn afternoon.
They finally decided to use the edge of the sloping roof of the gas station building. They dragged him over to it, he screaming, punching, kicking. They put the noose around his neck and one of the children climbed up on the roof and fastened the rope around its chimney. He clambered down and they looked. They couldn’t figure out how to make him hang. All the movies they had seen on TV had horses. One decided to run off for a bicycle.
A woman who lived nearby heard the arguing and crying; she was used to it, glanced out from her front windows and saw only a bunch of kids, arguing as usual. But it kept up, which was not usual. She looked again and saw a child with a noose around his neck standing in front of the abandoned gas station. She called the police. They arrived like the cavalry; the children fled, except for Carlos, who stood there crying hysterically, the loose rope dangling on his body.
The policemen crouched down, they pulled the rope off him, they tried to calm him and to ask him who he was and where he lived and who had done this to him. But Carlos only cried. They tried to get him into the police car and he kicked them and called them bastards and broke loose and ran. The policemen leaped into their car and followed him. They went up to the house nearest to the yard he had darted into and rang the doorbell. Lily answered it, Andrea standing behind her. Yes, she had a son with blond hair and blue eyes, yes, he was home, yes, he’d just come in – she tried to follow what they were saying. They insisted on coming in to see if he was all right. She led them to Carlos’ room; he looked up when they entered, staring, defiant, outraged. One of the policemen crouched beside the bed on which the child was lying and spoke gently to him. The policeman examined his neck, asked him calmly who the other children were, asked if they had hurt him, if he was all right. Carlos would not open his blue lips.
Lily was confused. Carlos had come flying in the back door, she
had turned to him with a smile, saying, ‘Hello,’ and he screamed, ‘Bitch! Useless bitch!’ at her and flew to his room and slammed the door. She had been about to go to his room when the doorbell rang, and now here were these policemen, and they were talking to him and he was not answering. What had he done? Her large eyes deepened in her skull. The dark circles around them absorbed them until her eyeholes looked like the sockets in a fleshless skull. The police left. She turned to Andrea. ‘What? What was it?’
Eleven-year-old Andrea explained what had happened. She explained it over and over again, as Lily asked, ‘Yes, what was it? What did he do?’ Finally Lily understood. Some boys had tried to hang her child. Hang him. Literally. Kill him. Lily began to mutter.
By the time Carl came home from work, Lily was pacing the house, talking wildly, crying, thrusting her fists at the air, screaming at some invisible enemy who seemed to live in the ceiling. She would stop walking suddenly, raise her face and fist and scream at him. Whoever he was, he was a bastard, he was a fucker, he was a shit. Carl tried to find out what was the matter, but he couldn’t understand what she was saying. Andrea watched, said nothing until he turned to her.
‘What the hell is going on?’
She did not understand either, but she told him what she knew. Carl tried to steer Lily to a chair.
‘It’s okay, Lily, it’ll be all right. Come on, sit down. Come on.’
She sat, but she raved. Carl went to check on Carlos, who was still lying on his bed. He would not speak to his father, but he did not vilify him. He never vilified his father. Carl assured himself that Carlos was all right, and returned to Lily.
‘Listen, Lily, it’s nothing. I did the same thing when I was a kid. Me and the kids in the neighborhood tried to hang some pansy on the block. It was all right. No harm done. Just kids. That’s the way kids are.’
His voice was soothing, smoothing, shrugging. It was nothing. Lily got wilder.
He shrugged. ‘Kids are rotten, Lily, people are rotten, nothing you can do about that. He’s okay.’
Lily quietened a bit. She would not look at him, she was still staring out at some malevolent being, but she quieted. As her noise diminished, Carlos perked up his ears. He got off the bed and opened the door.
‘Come on now, Lily, I’ll get you a drink,’ Carl was saying.
Carlos slipped down the hall and the steps, and sat on a step just
out of sight of the living room. His father brought his mother a drink. She sipped it. He sipped his. She was no longer gasping or crying; she was quiet.
‘But listen, Lily,’ Carl began again, ‘why did you let him go to the store alone? You know you should have gone with him. And when he didn’t come back right away, how come you didn’t go out looking for him?’
Lily began to breathe deeply again. Carlos moved down two steps. His large feeling eyes, eyes like his mother’s, watched. Carl’s voice, as smooth as ever, shifted from comfort to complaint. ‘You know the kid has troubles. So how come you let him go out alone?’
She started to answer. She sat up straight and said, ‘My God, Carl, he’s eight years old, he can walk to the corner store and get an ice cream, he has to, what will he do if he’s never allowed to be free …’ and then her voice rose again and she was off, crying, screaming, tearing at her hair. Carl rose, disgusted.
‘For God’s sake, Lily,’ he protested, but it was useless. Her clamor filled the house. Carlos came down to the bottom of the stairs and watched. He felt satisfied. He had known it was all his mother’s fault.
11