Nine

I sloshed a rag around the sink (my turn to do the dishes), thinking about the girl with the gold birds in her ears. It drove me crazy, but in a pleasant way. Cary Longstreet. Her name. Her phone number. I hadn’t tried to remember, the information had just stuck in my head. It was the same way with license plates. They stuck in my mind whether I wanted them there or not. Some nights when I had trouble falling asleep, license plates did a sheep-jumping-over-fence number in my mind. And there’d been plenty of mornings when I’d come awake mumbling a plate number I’d seen days before.

The house was quiet, too quiet. Gene was at the theater, auditioning for a part in a new production. The floors creaked, and every once in a while a squirrel ran across the roof, sounding like a whole cavalry corps. You didn’t think there was wildlife downtown? Think again. Not just squirrels and chipmunks and hordes of pigeons, starlings, and English sparrows, but raccoons and skunks, both of which have visited us. Once we even had a red fox streak through our backyard.

The phone rang. “Hello!” I should have given Cary my phone number. Call me anytime. “Is Jenny there?” a woman asked. “What number do you want?” “Oh, sorry, I must have the wrong number.” I hung up and waited. Wrong numbers always call twice. Sure enough, the phone rang again. “Is Jenny there? … Oh, sorry!”

After that, silence. Too much silence. When I’m alone in the house, which is fairly often, weird things sometimes happen in my head. I’m not scared, not in the sense of a little kid thinking the bogeyman is coming. But if I don’t watch it, don’t keep myself busy, I start working over stuff in my mind. Stuff. This and that, and here and now, and yes and no, and how come and why not and what if. Stuff. Stuff about my parents.

Tonight I’d been doing okay, lots of positive thoughts about Princess Cary, until the phone call broke the spell. I began to wonder if it had been an actual wrong number—or a message from Laura and Hal, a coded message that I had to unscramble.

That thought was like a bomb going off in my mind. After it came the fallout. It started with a single question, an old question, a familiar question. Where are Laura and Hal right now? What are they doing? Are they still out there somewhere? They’ve always managed to get letters out to me before …

So what? What do you know? Everything changes, the world can change in a moment, isn’t that the point of their work, we’re three minutes from doomsday, they’re crying out for people to wake up and take notice.… Yes, it could be happening now, nuclear missiles flying over the ocean … Now you’re standing here slurping ice cream out of the carton, and in another moment you could be nothing but a heap of radioactive ashes … And not just that, little things, everyday things, change too, you ought to know that better than anyone else … Don’t take anything for granted, ever … Today Drew is your friend, tomorrow he … No. Not Drew. He’s steady, solid … Are you sure? Yes. Really? Yes! So you don’t think he ever has second thoughts about you? You don’t think he and Deirdre ever talk about you?

That Pete, there’s something bloody weird about him, something not quite—right?

Oh, Pete’s all right, a real character …

I don’t know, Drew, it’s not just that he’s a character, did you ever think Pete has some kind of secret? Something he keeps from you? How come he never wants to talk about his parents?

Nuttiness. Craziness. Paranoia Pete. Nobody was talking about me. Were they? How did I know? How did I know anything? How did I know Laura and Hal were still alive? Two months since I’d had a letter … Maybe they’d been found … were being held prisoner … questioned, maybe even tortured. Held without trial? Tortured? In this country? You are weird. This is America … So? Bad things never happen here? It could happen, it could definitely happen …

A private organization … a vigilante group … What about those kids who were kidnapped and deprogrammed … held against their will? Anything can happen. Anytime. It was possible the last letters were fakes, forgeries, and … No, no, no, no, no.

Questions, answers, possibilities, comments, lectures, fantasies. On and on my mind raced. And in between all the mind-fire, I paced the rooms, glanced out each window, peered into the shadows, looking for them, the agents, the FBI, the ones who were looking for my parents. Are they out there? Are they watching the house?

When I lived with my parents, we knew they were always somewhere out there. They showed up at rallies, good-looking men in pressed suits, hanging back in the crowd, taking photos. They parked their cars and took notes and pictures when Laura and Hal passed out leaflets in shopping centers or in front of factories, and often they were simply there, parked across the street from the building where we lived.

We were on the third floor. I slept on a cot in the hall. We hadn’t much money—Laura and Hal were always losing their jobs, even though they were brilliant (I heard their friends say it), because they were so committed to their work for a better world, for peace on earth, the dream of Christ, who, Laura told me, was born a Jew like her; because that dream came before anything else. And when we climbed the dark little staircase to our apartment, we sang songs, sometimes just weary, end-of-the-day nonsense. Laura had a wonderful husky voice. It sent shivers through me. “And up we go and up we go and up we go,” she sang, “and boodle bo, boodle bo, boodeley doodeley boodle bo, just two more flights to go!”

And she’d wait for me to take out my key and unlock the door. And then later if we had to go out to buy a quart of milk because Hal had forgotten, and Laura too, and the sweet boy (that was me) needed his milk, they’d be there in their car, and my mother would see them and wave. They scared me, but not her, and not my father. “Oh, them,” Hal would say, “they have to make a living too, don’t they? But isn’t it too bad, son, that they have to do it by following people like us who are only trying to make the world a better place? What a crime we’re committing,” he’d roar, laughing, and sweep me into his arms and hug me.

I looked out the window again. The street was empty. Empty. Empty. Dark and still, and the phone was still, and the house was still, and to stop my mind I had to do something sane and ordinary. Phone Drew, eat a pot of spaghetti, make fudge, read a book. Get back to basic strategy for avoiding paranoia when alone: Keep busy. Constructively busy. Which meant no more stuff. No more obsessing. And no sly, nutty pranks, like calculating down to the hour and the minute how long it had been since I’d seen Laura and Hal. But except for my foray into the Royal Peanut Kingdom, I hadn’t been feeling healthily constructive since my birthday.

A week of being low, itchy, antsy, a week of finding it hard to stop spinning, to sit still anywhere, anytime. Because when I did slow down, I sensed a kind of plummeting low in my gut, as if something were just about to go wrong. Only that morning I’d awakened sweating, dripping—not the good old, bad old White Terror, but close, close.

I told myself now to get moving in the right direction, turn off the mind, listen to music, do something normal and good for me. Instead, I went upstairs to my room, straight to the fat manila envelope hidden under my mattress. An absurd place to hide anything! Wouldn’t it be the first place they’d look? If they ever found me, they’d tear up this room. No, I had to move that envelope, but where? Weren’t my other hiding places just as absurd? The back of my closet behind the tennis racket and the box of outgrown clothes and toys. The space between the bottom drawer and the bottom of my bureau. And what about the old stone cistern in the cellar? That had nearly been a disaster because of the damp. I’d lost a few of the letters, dried out the rest (there were still smudgy illegible parts), and spent numerous Saturdays in the library making fresh copies of all the articles and stories. Of course, if they came they wouldn’t care about the library stuff. That was public record. It was the letters they’d scrutinize. Yet, although for one year I’d burned my parents’ letters, I couldn’t bring myself to do that again.

I emptied the manila envelope onto my desk, sorting and arranging the letters and articles. Phrases jumped out at me. “… picked up four people for questioning in connection with the bombing of Femmer Lab,” “allegedly members of the organization known as Air, Water, Earth” “who saw a woman enter the lab about noon said,” “This is the most difficult letter we have ever had to write,” “couple and son being sought,” “Jameson and Kin Udall, a graduate student who had been working with Dr. Jameson, were buried today,” “My dear son, your mother and I,” “getting off the elevator and saw the woman drop the package into a wastebasket,” “If there had been any other way than leaving you behind,”…

My parents had been newspaper copy for a lot longer than they’d been in hiding. Actually, the oldest newspaper story about them was nearly as old as I was.

It was a human interest story that had appeared when Laura and Hal were attending college in Connecticut. YOUNG COUPLE WITH CHILD ATTEND COLLEGE TOGETHER, SHARE EVERYTHING. Then a picture of them, side by side, in their married-student housing. Laura, slender, beautiful, serious, a thin freckled face, pushing her hair behind her ears; Hal, shorter, wider, his eyebrows a thick slash across his forehead, grinning straight at the camera, that wide grin I remembered above all else about him; and both of them barefoot in the little dark room. I was there, too, standing up in a playpen. “‘How do you manage to keep house, take care of a child, and study for your classes?’ ‘Not easy,’ the freckled redhead chuckled. ‘Does Hal help with the housework?’ ‘He’d better,’ the pert mother and student giggled.”

In the next article, no giggling, no chuckling. A picture of my parents in their graduation robes, Laura again with that I’m-looking-straight-into-your-eyes seriousness, and Hal hoisting me up to his shoulders, his mortarboard cocked over my eyes. GRADUATES PROTEST COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER. “‘We have become numb to the poisoning of our environment and the madness of nuclear war overshadowing our lives,’ honors graduate Laura Glazer Connors said today after she and several dozen other graduates, including her husband, Hal Connors, staged a walkout to protest General William H. Adderson’s appearance at their commencement. ‘The human race is in danger of destroying itself. Do we need more weapons? More generals? More nuclear bombs? When I look at my son, I find that I can no longer live with myself if I ignore these realities.’ With the Connors couple in the picture above is their three-year-old son, Pax.”

Without the Connors couple in the room before you is their sixteen-year-old son, Pete. All at once I knocked everything to the floor, letters, articles, and pictures. I ran down the back stairs into the kitchen and stood in front of the open refrigerator, stuffing in hunks of cold barbecued chicken.

The phone rang. “Shut up!” It rang again. I yanked the receiver off its cradle. “Hello!”

“Pete?” Martha said.

“Oh. Hi, Martha.”

“You okay?”

“Oh—sure—”

“Is Gene around?”

“He’s at the theater for the auditions.”

“The auditions? Darn! I was going to show up and it totally slipped my mind. So he’s out? Phooey! I’m feeling sort of down in the dumps. I was hoping Gene could talk me out of it.”

I sat down on the floor. “That makes two of us.”

“You’re blue?” she said, as if my being depressed was one of the seven wonders of the world. “What have you got to be blue about?”

“Sixteen is the best time of life, right, Martha?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Think again.”

“Maybe you don’t know it now, but basically you’ve got it made. Let me tell you how things look from the outside. Give you a little perspective, Pete. To begin with, your uncle Gene’s a real special person. The two of you live in a great house—do you know how many people would give their eyeteeth to live in a house like yours? You’ve got no worries about school, you’re a smart guy, you’ll go to college for sure, you don’t have money worries, you’re cute, too. So, what’s the beef? Okay, your parents are dead. Sure, that’s not easy, I would never suggest it is, but you have to admit it’s years behind you and you’ve gone through it all, you’ve adjusted, am I right?”

“Right.”

“So what’s got you down?”

“What’s got you down, Martha? As far as I can see, you’ve got it made. You’re an artist, you’re independent, you are doing what you love. Also, you’re cute. Okay, I know you don’t make much money, I don’t want to sound like not being able to pay your bills is Little League, but you’ve gone through it for years and you’re well-adjusted about it, am I right?”

“Pete—!”

“What’s the matter, Martha, you can give it, but you can’t take it?”

“You can be a definite pain in the ass.”

“I thought I was your ideal teenage boy. You said that last week.”

“I never.”

“Your very words.”

“I take it all back.”

“You said you really adored me and that I was sweet.”

“I must have been stoned.”

“Excuses, excuses.” I walked into the dining room, pulling the long red phone cord after me.

“You know what I did today, Pete—Do you have homework to do? Am I keeping you from something?”

I thought of the letters and clippings all over my floor. “I’d rather talk to you.”

“Today a man with a face exactly like a white potato asked me to do his portrait. I hated doing it, Pete! It wasn’t even a warty, interesting potato face. It was just one of those blah faces. I know that’s unfair. It’s not his fault his face is totally without merit—but all I could think was, Damn! I’m never going to be any good as an artist. I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this crummy little corner painting potato faces, and I’ll never be Eakins or Sargent or Rosa Bonheur or anyone.”

“I guess not.”

“Thanks.”

“I was just agreeing with you, Martha.”

“Learn a little tact, sweetie! It’ll go a long way in your relations with women.”

“What relations?”

“Oooh, is that it? Well, look, Pete, it’s going to happen. I know you think I’m doing a number on you when I tell you these are your best years, but I’m not that insensitive. I know it can be hard sometimes in the teens, but I’m here to tell you it does not get easier as you get older. In some ways, yes, things are better, you get some stuff sorted out. But in other ways, look—avenues get closed off. I’m thirty and here I am—I don’t know if you can really understand what I’m saying. There’s such a huge difference in our ages. Fifteen years. That’s a whole lifetime.”

“Fourteen years. And I’m not that young. And you’re not that old.”

“Hey! You just learned tact. Also, you’ve just made my favorite teenage boy list again.”

Later, upstairs in my room, I got everything back into the manila envelope and put it under the mattress. Out of sight, out of mind. A fine old cliché that didn’t work. I pulled the envelope out again and shook out one of the letters from my mother.

Years ago when I received this letter, I had carried it around with me and read it over and over. I knew it nearly by heart. Now I read part of it, then I just didn’t want to go on with it. I put my head on the desk. Maybe I fell asleep … The house floated around me, cut off from the warm breathing world, a box in dark space and I, a frozen pebble, rattling at its center.