Crossroads (14 page)

My father hated going out of his way. He dreaded getting lost. Every Sunday we drove the thirty miles to see my grandparents, and when we drove home it was always dusk. He hated driving at dusk and he always took exactly the same stretch of road. Sometimes when we drove back from my grandparents', my mother would say, “I feel like something sweet. Why don't we take the kids for ice cream.”

“Ice cream?” he'd shout with cries as distant and piercing to me in the back seat as if he'd just driven off a cliff. “Ice cream!” he'd yell. “You must be out of your mind. I'm not driving fifty miles out of my way for ice cream. We've got ice cream at home. We've got a freezer full of ice cream. We've got ice cream nobody eats. You want me to get into all that traffic in Kenilworth? You want to take Sheridan when it's pitch black and they haven't got a goddamn light on the highway? You heard the weather report. You know it's going to pour. I'm not going to get trapped on Sheridan Road in a storm because you want ice cream.”

My mother would always move close to the window. “Sorry I asked,” she'd reply, and sometimes, “Pardon me for living.”

“Ice cream. It's practically winter and you want to get ice cream.”

And then we drove the rest of the way in silence. It took me twenty years to understand that my father wasn't angry about ice cream at all. He wasn't angry because we had a freezer full of ice cream. What he was angry at was some minor offense someone had committed in the course of the day, the kind of thing he could never get angry at. If he poured me a glass of orange juice and I didn't say thank you. If he asked Zap to play golf but Zap wanted to play tennis. If he'd gotten the car washed and nobody noticed. He was a man plagued with an inability to get angry at the thing that was really upsetting him.

My father never actually did anything with us. Instead he'd drive us to the movies, drive us to ride horses, drive us to a school play. And he'd either wait in the car for two hours until we were finished or he'd come back. But it was difficult to get him to come inside. And if he drove us somewhere and you forgot to say thank you, he waited until you made the fatal error of leaving on a closet light or forgetting to put the butter away. “Who do you think pays the goddamn bills around here? You have to be such a goddamn slob. Let me let you in on a secret. If you're lazy now, you'll be lazy all your life.” When she could, Mom would whisper to us, “Did you say thank you when he picked you up from swimming?”

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand the men in my life. And dusk seems the time of day when it is most difficult for me to understand. It is the time when the light seems most uncertain. And as I drove with Sean, silent beside me, intent on the road, I thought how it was the time of day when my father came home from work. There was always a blue-black sky behind him as he stood in the doorway, a little bewildered as if he'd come to the wrong house.

I am told I was the one who waited for him. I waited until he
stood in the doorway and then I rushed to get his slippers. I never said a word, but silently I untied his shoes and helped him into his slippers. My father was always exhausted when he came home. He'd take two ice cubes in a highball glass and pour himself a Scotch. Then he'd sit down with his paper and watch the news. Usually he fell asleep in the chair and I'd watch him. A kind of torment would come over his face, as if the news stories that had put him to sleep had entered his dreamy thoughts.

But my first memory of dusk isn't of my father coming home tired and falling asleep in a chair, his face contorted with the news of the day. It's from a time before he was so tired. He was looking out the window, hands thrust in his pockets, and suddenly he turned to us. “Come on,” he said. We were already in our pajamas, Renee, Zap, and myself. He grabbed the blankets, scooped us up, stuck us in the back seat of the car.

He drove as if he were escaping from the Gestapo. Renee was angry because she'd missed the end of “Uncle Johnnie Coons,” and Zap was already half-asleep, but I was wide awake as he pulled into a field somewhere and dragged us out of the car. “There,” he said, pointing to the sky. He lifted us up and put us on top of the car. “What do you think of that?” We didn't know what to think. We didn't know what we were supposed to be looking at. He folded his arms across his chest. “That's the finest sunset you're ever going to see . . .” The three of us gazed at the orange and scarlet horizon. “So remember it.”

 

When we walked in, Sandy kissed Sean on the lips for what seemed like a long time. Sean laughed nervously and pushed her away a little, pretending to be admiring the work they'd done on the house. “Hey, you exposed the beams.”

“You have no idea how difficult that was,” Earl said deadpan. Sandy swooped down on Sean again. She squeezed him as if testing to see if the fruit was ripe. Then she squeezed my arm.
Earl was somber and thin, yet a little flabby at the waist, like someone on the verge of deteriorating into middle age. When he smiled, the only thing that happened to his face was that his lips curled upward. “We're glad you made it,” Earl said, making me fairly certain he wasn't very glad.

“It's just impossible to pin you down.” Sandy was exuberant. “And you must be . . .” She squeezed my fingers, trying to remember my name.

“Debbie,” Sean said.

“Sean told us all about you on the phone. You're an architect, right?”

“I'm an urban planner.”

“You guys must be starving.”

“We ate on the road.” Sean was trying to be polite.

“Oh.” Sandy looked uncomfortably at Earl.

“But we can eat something,” I offered.

“She made a feast.” Earl could have been saying, “She has cancer.”

Everybody seemed to me incredibly awkward. Sandy kept squeezing us. Earl spoke in monotones. He walked across the kitchen as if being dragged by an invisible dog. First they gave us the tour of every nook and cranny of the house. The storage room, the wood-burning stove, the antique wallpaper, the bay window. “We bought it for five. The roof was burned off,” Earl informed us.

“Now it's worth at least forty,” Sandy broke in. “Thanks to all the work Earl put in.”

“We couldn't have afforded it otherwise.”

Sandy squeezed Sean's arm as we toured. She seemed to need to squeeze things, as if she were blind and had to make sure they were there. At one point the men disappeared somewhere into a closet to look at pipes. Sandy pulled me aside, her fingers digging into my arm. “He never brings women around. Must be serious this time,” she whispered into my ear.

Sean overheard. He rolled his eyes at Sandy. “Sandra, let's not get all dramatic. How about some drinks?”

In the middle of dinner, Sandy reached over and held Sean's hand. Earl grimaced. Then she threw her head back and laughed. “I'm just so glad you're here.”

That was when I knew Sean and Sandy had been lovers. The minute I figured it out, everything fell into place. Sandy's clutching at him, Earl's somber tolerance. After dinner we crawled into bed. We slept in an old brass bed in the carriage house under Earl's grandmother's crazy quilt, and Sean began making love to me with the wonderful precision I was growing used to. He probed and turned and dipped. He brought me up and down and he paused and made me wait until I couldn't wait any longer. The quilt was warm and we tossed it off. It was a hundred years old and belonged in the museum. And all I could think about was that Sean and Sandy had been lovers.

What did it matter what had happened with him and another woman, probably years ago? I tried to tell myself it didn't matter, but what mattered was that he hadn't said anything to me. I felt very close to him after we made love, so I asked, “Were you quiet in the car on the way up because you and Sandy used to be lovers and you were thinking maybe this visit wasn't such a good idea?”

Sean lifted his head off my chest, where he was resting. “Is it important?”

I explained that it wasn't important that they had been lovers. It was important that he hadn't told me and that he'd been moody in the car all the way up. “Why didn't you just say we were going to see an old girlfriend? At least I'd understand why Sandy is almost hysterical and Earl looks like he swallowed a frog.”

“Oh, they're always like that . . . But O.K., we were lovers five years ago for a couple of months. It wasn't much of a thing. I was back from Vietnam and was trying to get over someone
who'd dumped me while I was overseas.” He kissed me on the cheek. “Is that O.K.?”

I shook my head. “I think you should have told me.”

“I really didn't think it would matter. You're being oversensitive.”

The carriage house hadn't been winterized as yet and I was beginning to feel a chill. I reached for the crazy quilt. “Maybe I am, but I think you're wrong. You don't understand. I've been hurt by just that sort of thing.”

Sean sat up. “What sort of thing? It was a long time ago. You don't even care about me very much anyway.”

“I care about you,” I said, unsure of how I meant that.

Sean shrugged, “Well, I care about you, too, but I really didn't think something that happened years ago would make the slightest difference. And you know what else? A lot of people have been hurt. People get hurt all the time in ways you can't even imagine. I'm not Mark. I'd never hurt you the way he did. And be glad you aren't that woman, whatever her name is. Instead of being hurt you should be relieved.”

Now I was sitting up. “I think about that woman a lot. I still want to get back at her.”

“So why don't you call her up and tell her to go to hell? But don't concoct that I'm going to do the same thing to you. I should have told you that I'd been with Sandy five years ago, and I thought about telling you, but then I thought it wouldn't matter very much.”

“You think I should call Lila up and tell her to go to hell?”

“I think you should get it off your chest.”

“I can't tell you how much I despise her . . .”

“Deborah, you know what? Everyone has a past too. Even me. Lots of people have had things happen to them.”

We both sat cross-legged on the bed. “What's happened to you?”

“Oh, not much. My mother took off when I was three and
came back when I was ten. That might not have been so terrible if my father hadn't told us she was dead. Anyway, I flunked out of Yale . . . I'm skipping a few years. I went overseas and wrote to this girl back home. I was ready to marry her. She was sleeping with a friend of mine the whole time but writing me these terrific letters. She didn't tell me until I got home that she was going to marry the guy. Anything else you want to know?”

I shook my head. I wasn't in love with him, so what should it matter what had happened with him and another woman years ago? He was right. It didn't matter, but something mattered as I rolled over and went to sleep. I dreamed of Mark. I dreamed of him as graphically, as poignantly, as I had since our parting. He is naked, in the dream, and erect by a riverbank and he is calling to me. Oh, God, Deborah, I've been such a jerk. I didn't know what I was doing. Come to me, please. I can't stand being without you anymore. I am naked as I make my way toward him. I cross the river and he is there, waiting for me, lying down beside railroad tracks that go nowhere. Gently I lower myself down on top of him.

I woke up, surprised and perplexed to find myself with Sean. “Can a woman have a wet dream?” I asked him. Taking this as encouragement, Sean made love to me again. Afterward, he reached down and pulled Earl's grandmother's quilt over us. I studied the pattern of the patchwork. The patches of the crazy quilt were in all colors, sizes, and shapes. An endless piecing together of mismatched scraps, and I thought what vision you need to be able to do that.

“Bet you guys needed your long johns last night,” Earl greeted us in the morning. He wore striped pajamas and was grinding coffee by hand.

“Oh, Sean wouldn't let her freeze.” Sandy smiled, squeezing Sean's arm. Then she squeezed me.

The next afternoon, as we were getting ready to leave, I
helped Sandy cook a batch of chocolate chip cookies. “You know,” she said, “he really likes you. I can tell. I know him well and I know he likes you.”

I was beginning to like her; there was something sympathetic about her frenzy. “Anything I should know about him?”

“Oh . . .” She took cookies off the sheets with a spatula. “There is one thing. He goes away when he's hurt.”

I committed that to memory. When we were ready to leave, Sandy gave us the entire batch of cookies. She kissed me good-bye and I found myself squeezing her. In the car home I fell asleep and Sean ate all the cookies but two, which he saved for me. “How could you eat all those cookies?” I asked him when I woke up. We weren't far from my apartment. When we got there, both of us noticed the light on right away. “Did you leave a light on?” Sean asked me. I shook my head, and when I put my key in the door I knew it wasn't locked. Sean and I looked at each other, perplexed, as Zap opened the door.

I
WAS SURPRISED
to find Zap there, but I was even more surprised to find Jennie. My brother always shows up when you least expect him, but Jennie has always been very predictable.

Zap trembled as he opened the door. “I used the key,” he began with apologies. “I hope that's O.K. I tried to phone. I didn't scare you, did I?”

I shook my head. “What's up?”

He shook hands with Sean. “Nothing. How you doing?”

“Fine,” Sean said, “just fine.”

Neither of us knew Jennie was there until we heard a toilet flush and turned around as she walked out of the bathroom. There was an incandescence about her as she came down the corridor. It was as if she had an aura, like Sean's plastic shift, only this was a kind of white Day Glo, the type that radiates from Halloween skeletons. I knew that I'd seen her radiate that way years ago, when I walked into a steamy drafting room in my father's office and saw Jennie with Zap; Jennie's body seemed to invent the light.