STEPHEN BLUSHED. A FAIR-SKINNED MAN, bald to the crown, he blushed clear pink. He hugged Ann with one arm as she kissed his cheek. “Good to see you, honey,” he said, freeing himself, glancing past her, and smiling rather desperately. “Ella just went out. Just ten minutes ago. She had to take some typing over to Bill Hoby. Stay around till she gets back, she’d be real sorry to miss you.”
“Sure,” Ann said. “Mother’s fine, she had this flu, but not as bad as some people. You all been OK?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. You want some coffee? Coke? Come on in.” He stood aside and followed her through the small living room crowded with blond furniture to the kitchen where yellow metal slat blinds directed sunlight in molten strips onto the counters.
“Hey, it’s hot,” Ann said.
“Want some coffee? There’s this cinnamon and mocha decaf that Ella and I drink a lot. It sure is. Glad it’s Saturday. It’s up here somewhere.”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Coke?” He closed the cupboard, opened the refrigerator.
“Oh, sure, OK. Diet if you’ve got it.”
She stood by the counter and watched him get the glass and the ice and the bottle, a plastic half-gallon of cola. She did not want to open doors in this kitchen as if prying, as if entitled, or to change the angle of the slat blinds, as she would have done at home, to shut the hot light out. He fixed her a tall red plastic glass of cola, and she drank off half of it. “Oh, yeah!” she said. “OK!”
“Come on outside.”
“No ball game?”
“Been doing some gardening. With Toddie.”
Ann had assumed that the boy was with his mother, or rather her imagination had linked him to his mother so that if Ella wasn’t here Toddie wasn’t here; now she felt betrayed.
Indicating where she should go but making her go first, as when he had brought her through the house, her father ushered her to the back-porch door, and stood aside and followed her as she went past the washer and dryer and the mop bucket and some brooms to the screen door and down the single cement step into the back yard.
He batted the screen door shut with one foot and stood beside her on a brick path, two bricklengths wide, that ran along dividing the flowerbeds under the house wall from the small, shrub-circled lawn. Two small iron chairs painted white, with rust stains where the paint had come off, faced each other across a matching table at one side of the grass plot. Beyond them Toddie crouched, turned away, near a big flowering abelia in the shade of the mirrorplant hedge that enclosed the garden.
Toddie was bigger than she had remembered, as broad-backed as a grown man.
“Hey, Toddie. Here’s ah, here’s Ann!” Stephen said. His fair, tanned face was still pink. Maybe he wasn’t blushing, maybe it was the heat. In the enclosed garden the sunlight glaring from the white house wall burned on the skin like an open fire. Had he been going to say, “your sister”? His voice was loud and jovial. Toddie did not respond in any way.
Ann looked around at the garden. It was an airless, grass-floored room with high green walls and a ceiling of brightness. Beautiful pale-colored poppies swayed by the hose rack, growing in clean, weeded dirt. She looked back at them, away from the stocky figure crouched in the shade across the lawn. She did not want to look at him, and her father had no right to make her be with him and look at him, even if it was superstitious, he should think of protecting the baby, but that was stupid, that was superstitious. “Those are really neat,” she said, touching the loose, soft petal of an open poppy. “Terrific colors. This is a nice garden, Daddy. You must have been working hard on it.”
“Haven’t you ever been out back here?”
She shook her head. She had never even been in the bedrooms. She had been three or four times to this house since Stephen and Ella married. Once for Sunday brunch. Ella had served on trays in the living room, and Toddie had watched TV the whole time. The first time she had been in the house was when Ella was one of Stephen’s salesgirls, not his wife. They had stopped by her house for her father to leave off some papers or something. Ann had been in high school, she had stood around in the living room while her father and Ella talked about shoe orders. Knowing that Ella had a retarded child, she had hoped that it wouldn’t come into the room but all the same had wanted to see it. When Ella’s husband died suddenly of something, Ann’s father had said solemnly at the dinner table, “Lucky thing they had that house of theirs paid off,” and Ann’s mother had said, “Poor thing, with that poor child of theirs, what is it, a mongoloid?” and then they had talked about how mongoloids usually died and it was a mercy. But here he was still alive and Stephen was living in his house.
“I need some shade,” Ann said, heading for the iron chairs. “Come and talk with me, Daddy.”
He followed her. While she sat down and slipped off her sandals to cool her bare feet in the grass, he stood there. She looked up at him. The curve of his bald forehead shone in the sunlight, open and noble as a high hill standing bare above a crowded subdivision. His face was suburban, crowded with features, chin and long lips and nostrils and fleshy nose and the small, clear, anxious blue eyes. Only the forehead that looked like a big California hill had room. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “how you been? ”
“Just fine. Just fine,” he said, half turned away from her. “The Walnut Creek store is going just great. Walking shoes.” He bent to uproot a small dandelion from the short, coarse grass. “Walking shoes outsell running shoes two to one at the Mall. So, you been job hunting? You ever talk to Krim?”
“Oh, yeah, couple weeks ago.” Ann yawned. The still heat and the smell of newly turned earth made her sleepy. Everything made her sleepy. Waking up made her sleepy. She yawned again. “Excuse me! He said, oh, he said something might would open up in May.”
“Good. Good. Good outfit,” Stephen said, looking around the garden, and moving a few steps away. “Good contacts.”
“But I’ll have to stop working in July because of the baby, so I don’t know if it’s worth it.”
“Get to know people, get started,” Stephen said indistinctly. He went to the edge of the lawn nearest the abelia and said in a cheerful, loud voice, “Hey, great work there, Toddie! Hey, look at that! That’s my boy. All right!”
A blurred, whitish face under dark hair turned up to him for a moment in shadow.
“Look at that. Diggin’ up a storm there. You’re a real farmer.” Stephen turned and spoke to Ann from shade across the white molten air to her strip of shade: “Toddie’s going to put in some more flowers here. Bulbs and stuff for fall.”
Ann drank her melted-ice water and got up from the dwarf chair that had already stained her white T-shirt with rust. She came over nearer her father and looked at the strip of upturned earth. The big boy crouched motionless, trowel in hand, head sunk.
“Look, why not sort of round off that corner, see,” Stephen said to him, going forward to point. “Dig to here, maybe. Think so?”
The boy nodded and began digging, slowly and forcefully. His hands were white and thick, with very short, wide nails rimmed with black dirt.
“What do you think, maybe dig it up clear over to that rose bush. Space out the bulbs better. Think it’d look good?”
Toddie looked up at him again. Ann looked at the blurred mouth, the dark-haired upper lip. “Yeah, uh-huh,” Toddie said, and bent to work again.
“Kind of curve it off there at the rose bush,” Stephen said. He glanced round at Ann. His face was relaxed, uncrowded. “This guy’s a natural farmer,” he said. “Get anything to grow. Teachin’ me. Isn’t that right, Toddie? Teachin’ me!”
“I guess,” the low voice said. The head stayed bowed, the thick fingers groped in earth.
Stephen smiled at Ann. “Teachin’ me,” he said.
“That’s neat,” she said. The sides of her mouth felt very stiff and her throat ached. “Listen, Daddy, I just looked in to say hi on the way to Permanente, I’m supposed to have a check-up. No, look, I’ll just leave this in the kitchen and go out the gate there. It’s real good to see you, Daddy.”
“Got to go already,” he said.
“Yeah, I just wanted to say hi since I was over this way. Say hi to Ella for me. I’m sorry I missed her.” She had slipped her sandals back on; she took her empty glass into the kitchen, set it in the sink and ran water into it, came out again to her father standing on the brick path, bald to the sun. She put one foot up on the cement step to refasten the sandal. “My ankles were all swelled up,” she said. “Dr. Schell took me off salt. I can’t put salt on anything, not even eggs.”
“Yeah, they say we should all cut down on salt,” Stephen said.
“Yeah, that’s right.” After a pause Ann said, “Only this is because of being pregnant, that I have high blood pressure and this edema stuff. Unless I’m careful.” She looked at her father. He was looking across the lawn.
“You know, Daddy, even if the baby doesn’t have a father it can have a grandfather,” she said. She laughed, and blushed, feeling the red heat mask her face and tingle in her scalp.
“Yeah, well, sure,” he said, “I guess, you know,” and if he finished the sentence she did not understand it. “We all got to take care,” he said.
“Sure. Well, you take care too, Daddy,” she said. She came to him to kiss his cheek. She tasted the faint salt of his sweat on her lips as she went along the brick path to the gate next to the trash cans, and let herself out onto the sidewalk under a purple jacaranda in full flower, and fastened the gate behind her.
“MY BACK ITCHES.”
Ann reached out the garden fork and lightly raked its clawed tines down her brother’s spine.
“Not there. There.” He wrapped an arm round himself trying to show her the spot, his thick fingers with dirt-caked nails scrabbling in the air.
She hitched forward and scratched his back vigorously with her own fingertips. “That got it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I want some lemonade.”
“Uh-huh,” Todd said as she got up, whacking dirt off her bare knees. She had to bend at the knees, not at the waist, to reach them.
The yellow kitchen was hot and close like the inside of a room in a beehive, a cell full of yellow light, smelling of sweet wax, airless. A grub would love it. Ann mixed up instant lemonade, poured it over ice in tall plastic glasses, and carried them out, kicking the screen door shut behind her.
“Here you go, Todd.”
He straightened up kneeling and took the glass in his left hand without putting down the trowel in his right. He drank off half the lemonade and then stooped to dig again, still holding the glass.
“Put it down there,” Ann said, “by the bush.”
He put the glass down carefully on the weedy dirt, and went on digging.
“Hey that’s good!” Ann said, sucking at her lemonade, her mouth squirting saliva like a lawn sprinkler. She sat down on the grass with her head in the shade and her legs in the sun, and chewed ice slowly.
“You aren’t digging,” Todd said after a while.
“Nope.”
After a while she told him, “Drink your lemonade. The ice is all melting.”
He put down the trowel and picked up the glass. After drinking the lemonade he put the empty glass where it had been before.
“Hey, Ann,” he said, not digging, but kneeling there with his bare, thick, pale back to her.
“Hey, Todd.”
“Is Daddy coming home at Christmas?”
She tried for a moment to figure this one out. She was too sleepy. “No,” she said. “He isn’t coming home at all. You know that.”
“I thought at Christmas,” her brother said, barely audible.
“At Christmas he’ll be with his new wife, with Marie. That’s where he lives now, that’s where his home is, in Riverside.”
“I thought he might visit. At Christmas.”
“No. He won’t do that.”
Todd was silent. He picked up the trowel and laid it down again. Ann knew he was unsatisfied but she could not figure out what his problem was and did not want any problems. She got her back against the trunk of the camphor tree and sat feeling the sun on her legs and the prickling grass under them and a sweat-drop trickle down between her breasts and the baby move once softly deep in and over on the left side of the universe.
“Maybe we could ask him to come at Christmas,” Todd said.
“Honey,” Ann said, “we can’t do that. He and Mama got divorced so he could marry Marie. Right? And he’ll have Christmas with her now. With Marie. And we’ll have our Christmas here like always. Right?” She waited for his nod. She was not sure she got one, but went on anyhow. “If you’re missing him a lot, Todd, we can write him and tell him that.”
“Maybe we could visit him.”
Oh, yeah, dandy. Hi Daddy, here’s your moron son and your unwed pregnant daughter on welfare, hi Marie! It struck her funny but not enough to laugh. “We can’t,” she said. “Hey, look. If you dig over to the end there, in front of the roses, we could put in those canna bulbs Mama got, too. They’d look real good there. They’ll be red, big red lilies.”
Todd picked up the trowel, and then laid it down again in the same place.
“After Christmas he has to come,” he said.
“What for? Why does he have to?”
“For the baby,” her brother said, very low and blurry.
“Oh,” Ann said. “Oh, shit. OK. Well. Listen, Toddie. Look. I’m having the baby, right?”
“After Christmas.”
“Right. And it will be mine. Ours. You and Mama are going to help me bring it up. Right? And that’s all I need. All I want. All the baby wants. Just you and Mama. All right?” She waited for his nod. “You’re going to help me with the baby. Tell me when it cries. Play with it. Like that little girl at school, Sandy, that you help with. OK, Toddie?”
“Yeah. Sure,” her brother said in the voice he had sometimes, masculine and matter-of-fact, as if a man spoke through him from somewhere else. He knelt erect, his hands splayed on his bluejeaned thighs, his face and torso in shadow illuminated by the glare of sunlight on the grass. “But he’s an older parent,” he said.
He’s an ex-parent, Ann stopped herself from saying. “Right. So what?”
“Older parents often have Down children.”
“Older mothers do. Right. So?”
She looked at Todd’s round, heavy face, the sparse mustache at the ends of the upper lip, the dark eyes. He looked away.
“So your baby could be a Down baby,” he said.
“Sure, it could. But I’m not an older parent, honey.”
“But Daddy is.”
“Oh,” Ann said, and after a pause, “Right.” She hitched herself heavily into the shade, with her bare feet in the fresh dirt Todd had been digging up. “OK, listen, Todd. Daddy is your father. And my father. But not the baby’s father. Right?” No nod. “The baby has a different father. You don’t know the baby’s father. He doesn’t live here. He lives in Davis, where I was. And Daddy is—Daddy isn’t anything. He isn’t interested. He has a new family. A new wife. Maybe they’ll have a baby. They can be older parents. But they can’t have this baby. I’m having this baby. It’s our baby. It doesn’t have any father. It doesn’t have any grandfather. It’s got me and Mama and you. Right? You’re going to be its uncle. Did you know that? Will you be the baby’s Uncle Todd?”
“Yeah,” Todd said unhappily. “Sure.”
A couple of months ago when she was crying all the time she would have cried, but now the universe inside her surrounded her with distance, through which all emotions travelled so far to reach her that they became quiet and smooth, deep and soft, like the big unbreaking waves out in mid-ocean. Instead of crying she thought about crying, the salty ache. She picked up the three-tined garden fork and reached over, trying to scratch Todd’s head with it. He had shifted out of reach.
“Hey, kids,” their mother said, the screen door banging behind her.
“Hey, Ella,” Ann said.
“Hi, Mama,” Todd said, turning away, bending to dig.
“Lemonade in the fridge,” Ann said.
“What are you doing? Planting those old bulbs? I dug them up I don’t know when, I bet they won’t grow now. The cannas ought to. Oh I’m so hot! It’s so hot downtown!” She came across the lawn in her high-heeled sandals, pantyhose, yellow cotton shirt dress, silk scarf, makeup, nail polish, sprayed set dyed hair, full secretarial uniform, complete armor. She bent over to kiss the top of her son’s head, and kicked the sole of Ann’s bare foot with the toe of her sandal. “Dirty children,” she said. “Oh! It’s so hot! I’m going to have a shower!” She went back across the lawn. The screen door banged. Ann imagined the soft folds released from under the girdle, the makeup sluiced away under warm spraying water running down over her first universe, that soft distance where she lived now, joined.
ELLA HAD ON HER YELLOW sleeveless dress with the black patent belt and black jet costume earrings. She had sprayed her hair. “Who’s coming?” Ann asked from the couch.
“I told you yesterday. Stephen Sandies.” Ella clipped past on her high wedge-heeled sandals like a circus pony on stilts, leaving a faint wake of hairspray smell and perfume.
“What are you wearing?”
“My yellow dress from the boteek.”
“I mean perfume, dummy.”
“I can’t pronounce it,” Ella called from the kitchen.
“Jardins de Bagatelle.”
“That’s it. The bagatelle part is OK. I used to play bagatelle. But I just pointed and said, ‘That one.’ I was trying testers at Krim’s. Do you like it?”
“Yes. I stole some last night.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Ann raised a leg languidly and looked up along it as if sighting. She spread out her toes fanwise to make sights, closed them together, spread them. “Exercises, exercises, always do your exercises,” she chanted, raising the other leg. “Zhardang, zhardang it all to bagatelle.”
“What?”
“Nothing, Ma!”
Ella clipped back into the living room with a vase of red cannas. “I see London, I see France,” she observed.
“I’m exercising. When Stephen Sandman comes I’ll lie here and do breathing exercises, ha-ah-ha-ah-ha-ah-ha-ah. Who is he?”
“Sandies. He’s in Accounting. I asked him to come in for a drink before we go out.”
“Go out where?”
“The new Vietnamese place. They only have a beer and wine license.”
“Is he nice? Stephen Sandpiper?”
“I don’t know him well,” Ella said primly. “That is, of course we’ve known each other at the office slightly for years. He and his wife were divorced a couple of years ago now.”
“Ha-ah-ha-ah-ha-ah,” Ann said.
Ella stood back from the arrangement of cannas. “Do they look all right?”
“Terrific. What do you want to do about me? Shall I lie here showing my underpants and doing puppy breathing?”
“We’ll sit out on the patio, I thought.”
“Then the cannas are just for the walk-through.”
“And you’re very welcome to join us, dear.”
“We could impress this guy,” Ann said, sitting up and assuming half-lotus position. “I could put on an apron and be the maid. Do we have an apron? One of those little white cap things. I could serve the canapés. Canapé, Mr. Sandpuppy? Canopee, Mr. Sandpoopoo?”
“Oh, hush,” her mother said. “You’re silly. I hope it’ll be warm enough on the patio.” She clipped back to the kitchen.
“If you really want to impress him,” Ann called, “you’d better hide me.”
Ella appeared instantly in the doorway, her mouth drawn in, her small blue eyes burning like the lights on airfields. “I will not listen to you talk that way, Ann!”
“I meant, I’m such a slob, my panties show, I haven’t washed my hair, and look at the bottoms of my feet, God.”
Ella continued to glare for a moment, then turned and went back into the kitchen. Ann hauled herself out of half-lotus and onto her feet. She came to the kitchen doorway.
“I just thought maybe you’d rather be alone. You know.”
“I would like him to meet my daughter,” Ella said, fiercely mashing cream cheese.
“I’ll get dressed. You smell terrific. He’ll die, you know.” Ann snuffled around the base of her mother’s neck, the creamy, slightly freckled skin in which two soft, round creases appeared when she turned her head, weakly crying, “Don’t, don’t, it tickles!”
“Vamp,” Ann whispered hotly behind her mother’s ear.
“Stop!”
Ann went off to the bathroom and showered. Enjoying the sound and the steam and the sluicing of the hot water, she took a long time about it. As she came naked out into the hallway she heard a man’s voice and leaped back into the bathroom, pulling the door shut, then reopening it slightly to listen. They had got about as far as the cannas. She slipped out of the bathroom and down the hall to her room. She pulled on bikinis and the T-shirt dress that slithered pleasantly on her skin and embraced her rounded belly in forgiving shapelessness. She blowdried her hair on hot while she teased it with her fingers, put on lipstick and wiped it off, checked in the long mirror, and went sedate and barefoot down the hall, past the cannas, out onto the little flagged terrace.
Stephen Sandies, wearing a cool grey canvas sports coat and white shirt without tie, stood up and gave her a firm handshake. His smile was white but not too. Dark hair greying nicely. Trim, tan, fit, around fifty, stern mouth but not pursy, everything under control. Cool, but not sweating to keep cool. Would do. Good going, Ma, pour on the Zhardang de Big Hotel! Ann winked at her mother, who recrossed her ankles and said, “I forgot the lemonade, dear, if that’s what you want? It’s in the icebox.” Ella was the last person in the Western Industrial Hegemony who said icebox, or canapé, or crossed her legs at the ankles. When Ann returned with a glass of lemonade, Stephen was talking. She sat down in a white webbed chair. Quietly, like a good girl. She sipped. They were on their second margaritas. Stephen’s voice was soft, with a kind of burring or slight huskiness in it, very sexy, a kind voice. Drink your lemonade now like a good girl and slope off. Slope off where? The belly telly in the bedroom? Shit. Forget it. Hang on, it’s been a nice day. Keep playing tag in Bagatelle Gardens. Can’t catch me. What was he saying about his son?
“Well,” he said, and fetched a sigh. Fetched it from deep inside, a long haul. He looked up at Ella with the wry, dry grin appropriate to the question, “Do you really want to hear all this?”
She’s supposed to say no?
“Yes,” Ella said.
“Well, it’s a long, dull story, really. Legal battles are dull. Not like Hollywood courtroom scenes. To put it as briefly as possible, when Marie and I separated I was so angry and so . . . bewildered, really, that I agreed to several arrangements too hastily. To put it briefly, I’ve been forced to the conclusion that she’s not fit to bring up my son. So we’re into the classic custody battle. I’d rather, frankly, that she didn’t even have visiting rights, but I’ll compromise if I have to. Judges favor the mother, of course. But I intend to win. And I will. My lawyers are very good. If only the process were faster. It’s very painful to me to wait through the delays and procedures. Every day he’s with her will have to be undone. It’s as if it were a disease for which there is a cure, and I have the cure. But they won’t let me have him to begin the cure.” Wow. So much conviction, and so quiet. So certain. Ann studied his face briefly sidelong. Handsome, stern, kind, sad, like God. Was he possibly very very very conceited? Was he possibly right?
“Is it—Is she drinking?” Ella hazarded, sounding weak, and setting down her glass.
“Not to the point of alcoholism,” Stephen replied in his gently measured way. He looked down into his margarita-slush. “You know, I don’t like to say these things. We were married for eleven years. There were good times.”
“Oh, yes,” Ella murmured pathetically, squirming with the pain his understatement concealed. But why didn’t he squirm?
“But,” he said. “Well. Far be it from me! God knows. No job, but a credit card—Where my child-support payments go I don’t know. Three schools for Todd in two years. Disorder, bohemianism—but if that were all—it isn’t that. It’s the exposure of my child to immorality.”
Ann was terrified. She had not expected this. Debt, dirt, disorder, OK, but immorality—her child would be exposed, exposed to immorality. Naked, soft, helpless, exposed. She would expose it by giving birth to it. By being its mother she would expose it to the dirt, the disorder, the immorality of a woman’s life, her life. Its father would come from Riverside with a court order on clean, white paper. It would be taken from her, taken into custody. She would never see it. No visiting rights. No birth rights. It would be stillborn, it would die of immorality even before she could expose it.
Ella’s mouth was drawn in, her eyes cast down. Stephen had just said a word to her that explained all. And Ann had not been listening. Had the word been “woman”?
“You see why I can’t leave the boy there,” Stephen said, and though not squirming he was in pain, no doubt of it, his hand tight on the arm of the chair.
Ella shook her head in agreement.
“And this—woman’s friends. All—the same kind. Flaunting it.”
Ann saw the monstrous regiment.
Stephen’s head moved in tiny, rigid spasms as he spoke. “And the boy alone, in that. With them. Eight years old. A good kid. Straight as an arrow. I can’t. I can’t stand. To think of him. With them. Learning. That.”
Each staccato burst hit Ann like machine-gun fire. She set down her lemonade glass on the flagstone, got carefully to her feet, and slipped away from Margaritaville with a vague smile, bleeding, bleeding evil monthly blood, nine months’ worth bleeding from the holes he had shot in her. Behind her, her mother’s voice said something consolatory to the man and then was raised, thin and weak, to cry, “Ann?”
“Back in a minute, Mama.”
Passing the cannas flaming in twilight, she heard Ella say, “Ann is taking a year off from college. She’s five months pregnant.” She spoke in a strange tone, warning, boastful. Flaunting.
Ann went on to the bathroom. She had left her old underpants and shorts and T-shirt all over the bathroom when she showered, and he would have come to pee before they left and seen them and then her mother would have too and died. She picked things up. The bullet holes had been closed by her mother’s voice. The blood had sublimated and etherealised into tears. She snivelled as she dropped dirty clothes and wet towels into the dirty-clothes hamper, she cried gratefully, she washed her face and opened the bottle of Jardins de Bagatelle, the perfume of the mother tiger, and put it on her hands and on her face where she could smell it.
DUFFY SLUNG ON HER KNAPSACK and went out, saying over her shoulder, “Back around seven.”
Her motorcycle revving and roaring off left silence behind. The Sunday paper was all over the living room. Nobody had got up till after noon.
“God, you know,” Ella said, dropping the comics, “we get our periods exactly the same time now, within a day?”
“Hey, yeah? I’ve heard of that. That’s kind of neat.”
“Yeah, only I was beginning to stop having periods most of the time. Oh well. Tit for tat, as they say.” Ella snorted. “I want some more coffee.” She got up and shuffled off to the kitchen. “You want some?” she called.
“Not now.”
Ella shuffled back in. She wore pink feather mules with low heels that flopped off if she lifted her foot.
“Those are really frivolous, El. I mean seriously frivolous.”
“Duffy ordered them for me from some mail order catalogue.” Ella sat down on the couch again, set her coffee cup on the table, and lifted one leg to look at the slipper. “She thought they’d suit me. Actually it’s kind of like the things Stephen used to buy me sometimes. Mistakes.”
“Like the stuff you make at school and then your parents have to use them.”
“Like women buying men ties, it really is true. I love paisley and Stephen hated it, he thought paisley looked like bugs, those curvy sort of shapes, you know, and I didn’t realise it and I always bought him these beautiful paisley ties.”
“Isn’t it weird how . . .”
“How what?”
“I don’t know, how we don’t get through to each other, you know, only we sort of do, only not where we thought we were. I mean, like you’re wearing those. Well, and like both of us thinking the other one would like disapprove, and all that stuff you went through psyching yourself up to call me about selling Mother’s house. Everything backwards. But it works. Sometimes.”
“Yeah,” Ella said. “Sometimes.” She had put both pink-feathered feet up on the edge of the coffee table, and gazed at them, her small, bright, light-blue eyes stern, judgmental. Her half-sister Ann, a much larger woman fifteen years younger, sat on the floor amidst the comics and classifieds and coffee cups, wearing purple sweatpants and a red sweatshirt with an expressionless yellow circle-face on it labelled, “Have A Day.”
“Mom used that chicken ashtray I made in fourth grade till she died,” Ella said.
“Even after she quit smoking. El, did you like my dad?”
Ella gazed at her feet. “Yeah,” she said. “I liked him. You know, I didn’t ever remember a whole lot about my own father. I was only six when he got killed and he’d been overseas a year. I don’t think I even cried except because Mom cried. So I wasn’t comparing, or anything. I guess what I didn’t like when Mom and Bill married was I missed her and me being together. Like this, you know, slopping around. Women slopping around. That’s partly why I like it with Duffy. Only Duffy’s more, well, it has to do with sex, not gender, I guess. With Duffy it’s not so easy, you have to watch it. With Mom it was so easy. With you it’s easy.”
“Too easy, sort of?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I like it, though. Anyhow. I wasn’t ever jealous of Bill or anything. He was a sweet guy. I guess in fact I had a crush on him for a while. Trying to compete with Mom. Practicing . . .”
Ella’s smile, which was infrequent, curved her long, thin lips into a charming half-circle.
“I got a crush on everybody. My math teacher. The bus driver. The paper boy. God, I used to get up in the dark and wait at the window to see the paper boy.”
“Always men?”
Ella nodded. “They hadn’t invented women yet, then,” she said.
Ann stretched out flat on the floor and raised first one purple leg, pointing her toes at the ceiling, then the other.
“What were you when you got married? Nineteen?” she asked.
“Nineteen. Young. Younger than, Christ, fresh eggs. But you know, I wasn’t really dumb. I mean Stephen was a really good guy, I mean a prince. You probably only remember him after he was drinking.”
“I remember your wedding.”
“Oh Christ yes, when you were flower girl.”
“And that little fart son of Aunt Marie’s was ring bearer, and we got into a fight.”
“Oh God yes, and Marie started crying and saying she never thought to have people in the family who were minorities, and Mom got mad and said why not call Bill a spick straight out then, and Marie did, she started yelling, ‘A spick then! A spick then!’ And she had hysterics, and Bill’s brother the vet got her squiffed in the vestry. No wonder things went wrong with a start like that. But I did want to say about Steve, he was a really, really bright, lovely guy. See, I can’t say that to Duffy. It would just hurt her for no reason. She isn’t very secure. But sometimes I need to say it, to be fair to him, and to myself. Because it was so unfair what being alcoholic did to him. And you know, I had to finally just get out and run. And for me that was OK, it’s worked out fine. But I think of how he started out and how he ended up, and it, I don’t know, it isn’t fair.”
“You ever hear from him any more?”
Ella shook her head. “I’ve been thinking the last year or so he’s probably dead,” she said in the same quiet voice. “He was down so far. But I won’t ever know.”
“Was he the only guy you went with seriously?”
Ella nodded one nod.
After a while, looking at her pink-feathered feet, she said, “Sex with a drunk is not the biggest turn-on. I don’t guess anybody but Duffy could of got through to me, maybe.” She blushed, a delicate but vivid pink appearing suddenly in her rather sallow cheeks and fading slowly. “Duffy’s a very kind person,” she said.
“I like her,” Ann said.
Ella sighed. She slid her feet out of the feathered mules, letting them drop to the floor, and curled herself up on the couch. “What is this, true confession time?” she said. “I was wanting to ask you how come you didn’t want to stay with the baby’s father, was he a jerk or something.”
“Oh God.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No. It’s just embarrassing to say. Todd’s seventeen. Eighteen by now, I guess. One of my Computer Programming students.” Ann sat up and bowed her head down to her knees, stretching tension out of her back and hiding her face, then sat up straight; she was smiling.
“Does he know?”
“Nope.”
“Did you think about an abortion at all?”
“Oh, yeah. But see. It was me that was careless. So I wondered, why was I careless? And I wanted to quit teaching anyhow. And get out of Riverside. I want to stay around the Bay here and get work. Temping to start with, till I find what I want. I can always find a job, that’s no problem for me. I want to get into programming eventually, and maybe consulting. I can have the baby and then go back part time. And I want to live alone with the baby and kind of take my time. Because I kept sort of rushing into everything, you know? But what I think is I’m a maternal type, actually, more than a wife type or a lover type.”
“Could take some finding out,” Ella said.
“Well, that’s why I want to sort of slow down. But I’ll tell you my long-range plans. I’ll find this executive, fifty, fifty up, maybe sixty up, and marry him. Mommy marries Daddy, see?” She bowed her head to her knees again and came up smiling.
“Dumb, dumb, dumb,” Ella said. “Dumb shit sister. You can leave the baby here on your honeymoon.”
“With Auntie Ella.”
“And Uncle Duffy. Christ. I haven’t seen Duffy with a baby.”
“Is Duffy her real name?”
“She’d kill me if she knew I told you. Marie.”
“Cross my heart.”
They unfolded and refolded various sections of the paper, leafed slowly. Ann looked at pictures of resorts in the Northern Coast Range, read advertisements from travel agencies, fly to Hawaii, cruise Alaska.
“What ever happened to that little fart son of Aunt Marie’s, anyhow?”
“Wayne. He got some degree in Business Administration at UCLA.”
“It figures.”
“What are you? Pisces?”
“I think so.”
“It says this is a good day for you to make long-range plans, and look out for an important Scorpio. That’s your sugar daddy, I guess.”
“No, what’s November, is that Scorpio?”
“Yeah. Till the twenty-fourth, it says.”
“OK, that’s this long-range plan in here. I’ll look out for it. . . .”
After a pause Ella, reading, said, “Seventeen.”
“All right,” Ann said, reading.
THE LOWER EDGE OF THE lawn above the riverbank was planted in red cannas. Beyond that intense color the river was gunbarrel blue. Both the red line and the blue reflected in Stephen’s mirror-finish sunglasses, moving up and down across the surface and seeming to change the expression of his face incomprehensibly. Todd looked away from this display with an irritable turn of the head. Stephen asked at once, “What’s wrong?”
“I wish you didn’t wear mirror shades.”
“See yourself reflected in them?” Smiling, Stephen slowly took the glasses off. “Is that so bad?”
“What I see is all these colors running across your face like some robot in the movies. Mirror shades are like aggressive, you know? Black dudes coming on cool. Hank Williams Junior.”
“If you’re behind them, they’re defensive. Soft-bodied animal hiding. Protective mimicry. I bought them for this trip.” Stephen’s face without the glasses did look soft, not doughy or rubbery but soft-finished like stone or wood long used, worn down to fineness. All the lines that etched his face were fine, and the cut of lip and nostril and eyelid was delicate but blurred by that softening, that abrasion of years. Todd looked down at his own big, smooth hands and knees and thighs with a sense of self-consciousness that sharpened to discomfort. He looked back at Stephen’s hands holding the sunglasses.
“No, you’re right,” Stephen said, “they’re aggressive.” He was holding them so that the curved, insectile planes reflected his own face and behind it the white facade of the hotel against the dark mountain. “I see you—you don’t see me. . . . But I want to look at you all the time. And with these on, I can do just that. And you don’t have to see as much of me.”
“I like seeing you,” Todd said, but Stephen was fitting the glasses back across his face.
“Now I can be contemplating the river, for all they know, while all the time inside here I’m actually staring, staring, staring at you, trying to get my fill. . . . I don’t believe you. I can’t believe you. That you came. That you wanted to come. That you wanted to give me this incredible gift. I have to wear these when I look at you. You are nineteen years old. I could go blind. You don’t have to say anything. Letting me say these things is your gift to me. Part of your gift to me.” When he wore the mirroring glasses his voice was smoother, softer, deflecting answers.
Todd said doggedly, “The giving goes the other way too. Mostly, in fact.”
“No, no, no,” Stephen murmured. “Nothing. Nothing.”
“All this?” Todd looked around at the red cannas, the white hotel, the dark ridges, the river.
“All this,” Stephen repeated. “Plus Miz Gertrude and Miz Alice B. My God, those women follow us like reflections in a funnyhouse. Don’t look!”
Todd was already looking over his shoulder to see the two women coming up the path between the lawns from the river. The old one was in the lead and the young one a good ways behind her, carrying fishing poles. Seeing him turn, the old one held up a couple of good-sized trout and called out something ending with “breakfast!”
Todd nodded and made a V for Victory sign.
“They catch fish,” Stephen murmured. “They beach whales. They play five-card stud. They fell giant sequoias. They deploy missiles. They gut bears. Only please God let them stay busy and leave us alone! A fish-waving bull dyke is more than I can cope with just now. Tell me that they’re going away.”
“They’re going away.”
“Good. Good.” The curved black surfaces turned again, canna-red flashing across them. “They’ll have vacated the rowboat we were hoping for, presumably. Shall we go on the river?”
“Sure.” Todd stood up.
“Do you want to, Tadziu?”
Todd nodded.
“You do whatever I ask or suggest. You should do what you like. Your pleasure is my pleasure.”
“Let’s go.”
“Let’s go,” Stephen repeated, smiling, standing up.
On the lazy water of the lake above the dam, Todd shipped the oars and slid down to lie with his back against the seat.
Behind him Stephen’s husky voice sang in a whisper, “Dans les jardins de mon père . . .” and then, after a silence, spoke softly aloud:
“Ame, te souvient-il, au fond du paradis,
De la gare d’Auteuil, et des trains de jadis?”
“No assignments on spring break,” Todd said.
“No one could translate it in any case.”
Todd felt Stephen’s finger like a feather caress the outer rim of his left ear, once.
It was completely silent on the water. On his lips Todd tasted the salt of his sweat from rowing. Behind him Stephen sitting in the prow made no sound, said nothing.
“One of them left a fly box under the seat here,” Todd said, looking down at it.
“Under no circumstances take it to them. I’ll turn it in at the hotel desk. Or drop it overboard. It’s the excuse they’ve been waiting for. It’s a plant. Oh how kind of you we’ve just been dying to talk to you and your father and I’m Alice B and this is Gertie and isn’t this place just bully for all us boys? It’s called the dyke bursting.”
Todd laughed. Again the feather touch went round his ear, and he laughed again, repressing a shudder of pleasure.
All he could see as he half lay in the boat was colorless sky and one long sunlit ridge.
“You know,” he said, “I think actually you’ve got them wrong. The girl was talking last night to that girl Marie that cooks, you know? On the terrace, when I went out to smoke a joint, last night late, you know. And she was telling her she came here with her mother, because her brother died, and her mother had been nursing him, or something, like he was sick for a long time or like brain damaged or something. So when he died she wanted to bring her mother up here for a rest and like a change. So actually they’d be mother and daughter. I looked in the registration book when I came in and it said Ella Sanderson and Ann Sanderson.”
The silence behind him continued. He tipped his head back and back till he could see Stephen’s face upside down, the black sunglasses mirroring the sky.
“Does it matter?” Stephen’s voice said, terribly melancholy.
“No.”
Todd lifted his head and looked across the colorless water at the colorless sky beyond where the ridges narrowed in the dam.
“It doesn’t matter at all,” he said.
“I could sink the boat now,” the sorrowful, tender voice behind him said. “Like a stone.”
“OK.”
“You understand . . . ?”
“Sure. This is the center. Like which is water and which is sky. So sinking’s flying. It doesn’t matter. At the center. Go on.”
After a long time Todd sat back up on the seat, reset the oars, and began rowing in long, quiet strokes away from the lip of the dam. He did not look around.
ANN’S FATHER HAD RECENTLY MADE a pond from a spring below the ranch house, and after lunch they walked down to see it. Horses grazed on the high, bare, golden hill on the far side of the water. From the rainy-season highwater line the banks were bare and muddy down to the summer level, making a reddish rim. A rowboat, looking oversized, was pulled up beside the tiny dock. They sat on the dock, in bathing suits, dangling their feet in the tepid water. They were too full of food and wine to want to swim yet. Although the baby did not yet crawl and was sound asleep anyhow, the knowledge that he was sleeping with water a foot or two away on either side of him was a dim unease in Ann’s mind, making her look round at him quite frequently and keep one hand touching the flannel blanket he lay on. To hide her overprotectiveness or to excuse it from herself, each time she looked round at the baby she readjusted the cotton shirt which she had taken off and tented up over him to protect his head from the sun.
“Now,” said her father, “I want to know about your life. The place you live. The woman you live with. Start there.”
“Ground floor of an old house in San Pablo. Two bedrooms, and a walk-in closet for Toddie’s room. Old Japanese couple have the upstairs. The neighborhood’s a little rough but there’s a lot of nice people, and our block is OK. OK? Then Marie. She’s gay, but we’re not living together. It’s actually Toddie she was interested in.”
“Jesus!”
“I mean, she wanted to help parent a baby.” Ann broke into a laugh that was both genuine and nervous. “She does computer programming and counselling, so she works at home a lot. It works out really well for care-sharing. The way it works out with her and me, we each have a wife.”
“Great,” Stephen said.
“I mean, you know, a person you can count on to sort of take over if you can’t. And do the shitwork, and you know.”
“Not my experience of wives,” her father said. “So you’ve given up on men, then.”
“No. Like I said, Marie and I aren’t together. She has lesbian friends, a lot of my friends are straight, but just now, I don’t know, I’m just not into that a whole lot. I will again, you know. It’s not like I’m bitter or anything. I wanted to have the baby. I just want to be with him mainly at this point. The job’s weird hours, but that means when I’m out Marie’s there, and mostly when he’s awake, I’m there. So it’s real good now. And later it’ll change. . . .”
As she spoke she felt in her father, sitting a foot or two from her, a physical resistance, a great impatience; she felt it physically as a high, hard, slanting blade, like the blade of a bulldozer. The owner of the land had the right to clear it, to clear out this underbrush of odd jobs, half-couplings, rented closets, hiding places, makeshifts. The blade advanced.
“Since Penny and I divorced I’ve done a lot of stock-taking. Sitting right here. Or riding Dolly over there around the ranch.” Her father was looking across the pond at the high hill as he spoke, watching the grazing mare and colt and the white gelding. “Thinking about both my marriages. Especially about the first one, strangely enough. I began to see that I didn’t ever work through the whole thing before I married Penny. I never really handled the pain your mother caused me. I denied it. Macho, tough guy—real men don’t feel pain. You can keep up that crap for years. But it finally catches up with you. And then you realise all you’ve done is save your shit to drown in. So I’ve been doing the work I should have done ten, twelve years ago. And some of it’s almost too late. I have to face the fact that I wasted a lot of those years, wasted a marriage. Started it and ended it in all the unfinished business from the first marriage. Well, OK. Win one, lose one. What I’m doing now is establishing priorities. What’s important. What comes first. And doing that, I’ve been able to see what my mistake, my one real mistake, was. You know what it was?”
He looked at her so keenly with his clear, light-blue eyes that she flinched. He waited, smiling slightly, alert.
“Divorcing Mama, I guess,” she said, looking down and swallowing the words because she knew they were wrong. He did not speak, and she looked back at him. He was still smiling, and she thought what a handsome man he was, looking like a Roman general now with his short-cropped hair and silver-blue eyes, long lips and eagle nose, but wearing a Plains Indian beaded talisman on a rawhide cord about his neck. He was very deeply tanned. On his ranch in summer he wore nothing but shorts and thong sandals, or went naked.
“That was no mistake,” he said. “That was one of the right things I did. And buying this place. I had to move on. And Ella isn’t willing, isn’t able to go on, to act, move, develop. Her strength is in staying put. God, what strength! But it’s all in that. So the shit piles up around her, and she never clears it away. Hell, she builds walls of it! Fecal fortifications. Defending her from, God forbid, change. From, God forbid, freedom . . . I had to break out of her fortress. I was suffocating. Buried alive. I tried to take her with me. She wouldn’t come. Wouldn’t move. Ella never had any use for freedom, her own or anybody else’s. And I was so desperate for it by then that I’d take it on any terms. So that’s where I made my mistake.”
She felt remiss at still not understanding what his mistake had been, but he said nothing, and she was obliged to admit it: “I guess I don’t know what mistake,” she said, feeling as she said it that it must have something to do with her, and oppressed by the feeling. She glanced over her shoulder at the sleeping baby.
“Leaving you,” her father said quietly. “Not putting up a fight for custody.”
She knew that this was very important to him and ought to be so to her, but all she felt was that she was being crowded, pushed along by the slanting, uprooting blade, and she looked back again at the baby and moved the shirttail unnecessarily to shade his legs.
“A little late to think about that, she thinks,” her father’s voice said gently.
“Oh, I don’t know. Anyhow we got to see each other every summer,” she said, blushing red.
The blade moved forward, levelling and making clear. “I needed freedom in order to go on living, and I saw you as part of the jail. Part of Ella. I literally didn’t separate you from her—you see? She didn’t allow that possibility even as an idea. You were her, you were her motherhood, and she was the Great Mother. She had you built right into the walls. And I bought that. Maybe if you’d been a boy I’d have seen what was going on sooner. I’d have felt my part in you, my claim—my right to get you out of the shitfort, the earthworks. My right to assert your right to freedom. You see? But I didn’t see it. I didn’t look. I just got loose and left you as hostage. It’s taken me twelve years to be able to admit that. I want you to know that I do admit it now.”
Ann picked a foxtail from the corner of the baby’s blanket by her hip. “Yeah, well,” she said. “I guess it worked out OK, anyhow, you know, Mom and me, and anyhow Penny didn’t want some teenage stepdaughter around all the time.”
“If I’d fought for you and won custody—and if I’d fought I’d have won—what Penny wanted or didn’t want would have been a matter of supreme indifference. I probably wouldn’t have married her. One mistake leads to the next one. You’d have lived here. All your summers here. Gone to a good school. And a four-year college, maybe an Eastern school, Smith or Vassar. And you wouldn’t be living with a lesbian in San Pablo, working nights for a phone company. I’m not blaming you, I’m blaming myself. I can’t believe how true to form Ella is, how unchangingly unchanging—how she dug you in, walled you into the same dirt, the same futureless trap. What kind of future does your life spell for your kid, Ann?”
But I was really lucky to get the job, Ann thought, but what’s neat is that for a while things aren’t changing all the time, but you haven’t even seen Mom for ten years so how do you know? All these thoughts were mere shadows and underbrush, among which her mind hopped like a rabbit.
“Well,” she said, “things are really OK the way they worked out,” and, unable to control her increasing anxiety about Toddie, she turned away from her father and knelt above the sleeping baby, pretending that he had waked up. “All right then! Up you come! Hey, baby bunny boy. Hey, you sleepy bunny.” The baby’s head wobbled, his eyes looked in different directions, and as soon as she settled him on her lap he fell fast asleep again. His small, warm, neat weight gave her substance. She stirred the lake with her toes and said, “You shouldn’t worry about it, Daddy. I’m really happy. I just wish you were, if you aren’t.”
“You’re happy,” he said, with one glance of his light eyes, the almost scornfully accurate touch she remembered, that reversed the poles.
“Yes, I am,” she said. “But there’s one thing I wanted to tell you about.”
While she summoned up words, Stephen said, with satisfaction in his acuteness, “I thought so. The father’s back in the picture.”
“No,” Ann said vaguely, not heeding. “Well, see, they think at the clinic that Toddie had some brain damage, probably at birth. That’s why he’s slow developing in some ways. We noticed it pretty soon. They can’t tell how much yet, and they think it isn’t real severe. But they know there’s some impairment.” She drew her fingertip very lightly around the tiny pink curve of the baby’s ear. “So. That’s taken some, you know, thinking. Getting used to. It’s not as big a deal as I thought. But it is, in some ways.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“There isn’t anything to do. Now. Sort of wait and see. And watch. He’s only five months. They noticed a—”
“What are you doing about correcting it?”
“There isn’t anything like that to do.”
“You’re just going to take this?”
She was silent.
“Ann, this is my grandson.”
She nodded.
“Don’t cut me out. You may be angry at the father, but don’t take it out on men, don’t join the castraters, for God’s sake! Let me help. Let me get some competent doctors, let’s get some light on this. Don’t dig down into a hole with all these fears and old wives’ tales, and smother the kid with them. I don’t accept this. Not on the word of some midwife at this women’s clinic that botched the kid’s birth! My God, Ann! You can’t take this out on him! There are things that can be done!”
“I’ve taken him to Permanente,” Ann said.
“Shit! Permanente! You need first-class doctors, specialists, neurologists—Bill can give us some recommendations. I’ll get onto it when we go back to the house. I’ll call him. My God. This is what I meant! This is it. This is what I left you in—the mud—My God! how could you sit here all day with him and me and not tell me? ”
“It isn’t your fault, Daddy.”
“Yes,” he said, “it is. Exactly. If I—”
She interrupted. “It’s the way he is. And there’s a best way for him to be, like anybody. And that’s what we can do, is find that. So please don’t talk shit about ‘correcting.’ Look, I’d like to have a swim now, I think. Will you hold him?”
She saw that he was startled, even frightened, but he said nothing. She carefully transferred the rosy, sweaty, silky baby onto his thin thighs covered with sparse sun-bleached hairs. She saw his large, fine hand cup the small head. She got up then and went three steps to the end of the little dock and stood on the weather-gnawed grey planks. The water was shallow, and she did not dive but splashed down in, her feet tangling for a moment in slimy weeds. She swam. Ten or fifteen yards out she turned, floated awhile, trod water to look back at the dock. Stephen sat motionless in the flood of sunlight, his head bowed over the baby, whom she could not even see in the shadow of her father’s body.
AS SHE WAS SCRUBBING OUT the kitchen sink, where she had let bleaching powder stand to whiten the old rust stains, Ella saw that the girl from the complex was talking with Stephen. She rinsed out the sink, got her dark glasses from the kitchen oddments drawer, polished them a bit with the dishtowel, put them on, and went out into the back yard.
Stephen was weeding the vegetable plot by the fence, and the girl was standing on the other side of the fence, just her head and shoulders showing. She had her baby in one of those kangaroo things that mashed it up against its mother’s front. It was asleep, nothing visible but the tiny sleek head like a kitten’s back. Stephen was working, his head bent down as usual, and didn’t seem to be paying attention to the girl, but just as she came out, before the screen door banged, Ella heard him say, “Green beans.”
The girl looked up and said, “Oh, hi, Mrs. Hoby!” in a bright voice. Stephen kept his head bent down at his weeding.
Ella came over to the laundry roundabout and felt the clothes she had hung out earlier in the afternoon. Stephen’s T-shirts and her yellow wash dress were dry already, but Stephen’s jeans were still damp, as she had expected; feeling them was nothing but an excuse for coming out.
“You sure have a nice garden,” the girl said.
The complex of eight apartments they had built next door ten years ago had nothing but cement and garages behind it where the Pannis’s garden with the big jacaranda had been. There was no place for a child to play there. But before the baby was old enough the girl would have moved on, the welfare-and-food-stamp people never stayed, the men with no jobs and the girls with no husbands, playing their big radio-tape machines loud and smoking dope at night in those hot little apartments.
“Stephen and I know each other from the store,” the girl said. “He carried my groceries home for me last week. That was a nice thing to do. I had the baby, and my arms were just about falling off.”
Stephen laughed his “huh-huh,” not looking up.
“Have you lived here for a long time?” the girl asked. Ella was rehanging the jeans, for something to do. She answered after she had got the seams matched. “My brother has lived here all his life. This is his house.”
“It is? That’s neat,” the girl said. “All his life? That’s amazing! How old are you, Stephen?”
Ella thought he would not answer, and it might serve the girl right, but after a considerable pause he said, “Four. Forty-four.”
“Forty-four years right here? That’s wonderful. It’s a nice house, too.”
“It was,” Ella said. “It was all single-family houses when we were children here.” She spoke dryly, but she had to admit that the girl did not mean to patronise, and was pleasant, the way she talked right to Stephen instead of across him the way most people did, or else they shouted at him as if he were deaf, which he was only slightly, in the right ear.
Stephen stood up, dusted off his knees carefully, and went across the grass and into the house, hooking the screen door shut behind him with his foot.
Ella had sat down on the small cement base of the laundry round-about to pull at a dandelion clump in the grass. It had been there for years, always coming back. You had to get every single piece of root of a dandelion, and the roots went under the cement.
“Did I hurt his feelings?” the girl asked, shifting the baby in its carrier.
“No,” Ella said. “He’s probably getting a photograph to show you. Of the house.”
“I really like him,” the girl said. Her voice was low and a little husky, with a break in it, like some children’s voices. What they used to call a whiskey voice, only childlike. The poor thing was not much more than a child. Babies having babies, they had said on the television.
“Have you always lived here too, Mrs. Hoby?”
Ella worked at the dandelion root, loosening it, then took off her sunglasses and looked round at the girl. “My husband and I ran a resort hotel,” she said. “Up in the redwood country, on a river. A very old place, built in the eighteen eighties, quite well known. We owned it for twenty-seven years. When my husband passed away I ran it for two more years. Then when my mother passed away and left the house to Stephen, I decided to retire and come live here with him. He has never lived with strangers. He’s fifty-four, not forty-four. Numbers confuse him sometimes.”
The girl listened intently. “Did you have to sell the resort? Do you still own it?”
“I sold it,” Ella said.
“What was it like?”
“A big country hotel, up north. Twenty-six rooms. High ceilings. A terraced dining room over the river. We had to modernise the kitchens and the plumbing entirely when we bought it. There used to be places like that. Elegant. Before the motels. People came for a week, or a month. Some people, families and single people, came every summer or fall for years. They made their reservation for the next year before they left. We offered fishing, good trout fishing, and horseback riding, and mountain walks. It was called The Old River Inn. It’s mentioned in several books. The present owners call it a ‘bed and breakfast.’ ” Ella dug her fingers in under the dandelion root, sinewy there in its dirt darkness, and pried. It broke. She should have got the weeder or the garden fork.
“What an amazing kind of thing to do,” the girl said, “running a place like that.” Ella could have told her that they had never had a vacation themselves for a quarter of a century and that the hotel had worn her out and finally killed Bill and eaten up their lives for nothing, mortgaged and remortgaged and the payments from the bed and breakfast people not even enough to live on here, but because there was a break or a catch in the girl’s voice that sounded as if she saw the forest ridges and the Inn on its lawns above the river as Ella saw it, as the old, noble, beautiful, remote thing, she said only, “It was hard work,” but smiled a little as she said it.
Stephen came out of the house and straight across the grass, glancing up once at the girl and then down again at the picture he held. It was the framed photograph of Mama and Papa on the porch of the house, the year they bought it, and Ella in her pinafore dress sitting on the top front step, and Baby Stephen sitting in the pram. The girl took it and looked at it for quite a time.
“That’s Mama. That’s Papa. That’s Ella. That’s me, the baby,” he said, and laughed quietly, “huh-huh!”
The girl laughed too and sniffled and wiped her nose and her eyes quite openly. “Look how little all the trees are!” she said. “You’ve been doing a lot of gardening since they took that picture, I guess.” She handed it carefully back across the fence to Stephen. “Thank you for showing it to me,” she said, and her little whiskey voice was so sad that Ella turned her head away and scraped her nails in the dirt trying to seize the broken root, in vain, till the girl had gone, because there was nothing to say to her but what she knew already.
ANN SAT ERECT IN THE white-painted iron chair on the little flagged terrace behind the house. She wore white, and was barefoot. The old abelia bushes behind her, above the terrace, were in full flower. Her child sat among scattered plastic toys on the edge of the terrace where it met the lawn, near her. Ella looked at them from the kitchen window, through the yellow metal blinds that were slanted to send the hot afternoon light upward to the ceiling, making the low room glow like the wax of a lighted beeswax candle. Todd moved the toys about, but she could not see a pattern in the way he moved or placed them; they did not seem to relate to each other. He did not talk when he picked up one or another. There was no story being told. He dropped an animal figure and picked up a broken-off dandelion flower, dropped it. Only from time to time he made a humming or droning noise, loud enough that Ella could hear it pretty clearly, a rhythmic, nasal sound, “Anh-hanh, anh-hanh, hanh . . .”When he was making this music of his he swayed or rocked a little and his face, half hidden by thick glasses, brightened and relaxed. He was a pretty child.
His mother, Ann, was very beautiful there in the sunlight, her pale skin shining with sweat, her dark hair loose and bright against the shadow and the small, pale, creamy flowers of the abelia. Had she given promise of such beauty? Ella had thought her rather plain as a child, but then she had held herself back from the child, not looking for her beauty, knowing that if she found it all it meant was losing it, since Stephen and Marie came West so seldom, and after the divorce Marie never wanted to send the child alone. Three or four years would pass when she never saw Ann. And a grandchild’s life goes by so fast, faster than a child’s.
Stephen had been a pretty child, now! People had stopped her to admire him in his little blue and white suit in the pram, or when he was walking and held her hand and walked with her down to the old Cash and Carry Market. His blue eyes were so bright and clear, and his fair hair curled all over his head. And that innocent look some little boys have, that trusting look, he had kept that so long, right into his teens, really. And how Stephen had told stories when he was this child’s age! From morning till night there had been some tale going, till it drove her crazy sometimes, Stephen babbling softly away at table, anywhere, telling his unending saga about the Wood Dog and what was it?—the Puncha. The Puncha, and other characters he had made up out of his head. They didn’t have the TV then, or the bright plastic toys, soldiers and tanks and monsters. While they lived up on the ranch, Stephen had had no playmates at all, unless Shirley brought her girls over for the day. So he told his endless adventures, which Ella could never understand, playing with a toy car or two and bits of mill ends for blocks, or an old spool, wooden the way spools were, and wooden clothespins, and the little husky monotone voice: “So they went up there rrrrrm, rrrrrm, rrrrrm, and they were waiting there, so they went along there, rrrrrm, rrrrrm, so then the road stopped and they fell off, they fell down, down, down, help help where’s Puncha?” And so on and on like that, even in his bed at night.
“Stephen?”
“Yes, Mama!”
“Hush now and go to sleep!”
“I am asleep, Mama!” Virtuous indignation. She hid her laugh. She tiptoed to the door, and in a minute the little voice would begin to whisper again: “So then they said Let’s go to the, to the lake. So there was this boat on the lake and so then Wood Dog started sinking, crash, splash, help help where’s Puncha? Here I am Wood Dog. . . .” Then at last a small yawn. Then silence.
Where did all that go? What happened to it? The funny little boy making everything in the world into his story, he never would have understood any story about a telephone company executive recently married for the third time whose only child by his first marriage was sitting now in the white chair watching her only child by no marriage rock back and forth restlessly and endlessly, droning his music of one nasal syllable.
“Ann,” Ella said, lifting the slatted blind, “diet cola or lemonade?”
“Lemonade, Grandmother.”
What became of it? she asked again, getting the ice out of the refrigerator, getting the glasses down from the cupboard. Why didn’t the story make sense? Such hope she had had for Stephen, so sure he would do something noble. Not a word people used, and of course it was silly to expect a happy ending. Would it have been better to be like poor young Ann, who had no hope or pride beyond the most austere realism—“He won’t be fully self-sufficient, but his dependence level can be reduced a good deal. . . .” Was it better, more honest, to tell only very short stories, like that? Were all the others mere lies, romances?
She put the two tall tumblers and the plastic cup on a tray, filled them with ice and lemonade, then clicked her tongue at herself in disgust, took the ice out of Todd’s cup, and refilled it with plain lemonade. She put four animal crackers in a row on the tray and carried it out, batting the screen door shut behind her with her foot. Ann stood up and took the tray from her and set it down on the wobbly iron table, its curlicues clogged solid with years of repainting with white enamel, but still rusting through in spots.
“Can someone have the cookies?” Ella inquired softly.
“Oh, yes,” Ann said. “Oh, very much yes. Todd. Look what’s here. Look what Grandmother brought you!”
The thick little glasses peered round. The child got up and came to the table.
“Grandmother will give you a cookie, Todd,” the young mother said, clear and serious.
The child stood still.
Ella picked up an animal cracker. “Here you are, sweetie,” she said. “It’s a tiger, I do believe. Here comes the tiger, walking to you.” She walked the cracker across the tray, hopped it over the edge of the tray, and walked it onto the table’s edge. She was not sure the four-year-old was watching.
“Take it, Todd,” the mother said.
Slowly the child raised his open hand towards the table.
“Hop!” Ella said, hopping the tiger into the hand.
Todd looked at the tiger and then at his mother.
“Eat it, Todd. It’s very good.”
The child stood still, the cracker lying on his palm. He looked at it again. “Hop,” he said.
“That’s right! It went Hop! right to Toddie!” Ella said. Tears came into her eyes. She walked the next cracker across the tray. “This one is a pig. It can go Hop! too, Toddie. Do you want it to go Hop?”
“Hop!” the child said.
It was better than no story at all.