Crossroads (5 page)

“Oh, he's fine, I guess.”

“Oh,” she said, trying not to sound surprised. “You aren't in touch with him?”

“He's somewhere in Europe. Sweden, I think. The last I heard he was in Sweden.”

“What's he doing in Sweden?”

I'm not sure why I felt that Jennie was asking questions as if she knew the answers already, but it just seemed as if she was. “He's writing his memoirs and living with a woman. God knows.” I brought Jennie up to date on my brother's recent history. How he'd done a year of veterinary school but then couldn't take it. How he'd managed to switch into Illinois med. “His teachers think he's some kind of a diagnostic whizz. For some reason when he asked for a year's leave they gave it to him. Who knows if he'll ever go back now.”

Jennie slammed the freezer shut and I got goosebumps on
my arms from the chill. “I'm sure he'll go back. You know Zap. He's just rebellious.”

She spoke as if she had some private source of information about my brother. I was sure he'd go back to medical school as well. I also knew that he hadn't been that rebellious until ten years before, when the woman he loved, Jennie Watson, went ahead and married Tom Rainwater.

Shouts came from the den when we got back upstairs. Jennie understood that someone was on third and she could probably start the vegetables. She patted butter on the mashed potatoes and plunged a fork into the chicken like a picador. Sean came into the kitchen. “Want some help? It's the bottom of the ninth, four to two.”

Because I didn't like him very much, I looked away. My eyes landed on the bulletin board over the kitchen table. There were numbers in case of emergency, lists of things to do, and lottery tickets. I wondered if Jennie wanted to win a lottery. There was a faded picture of her parents, good Midwestern Republicans who wanted everything done in its proper way, the way Jennie did it all in her proper way. They were smiling in front of their summer house in Door County, Wisconsin. They'd never liked dissenters, premarital sex, interracial marriages, or members of the lower classes.

Jennie wasn't Jewish, which my parents didn't mind, but hers merely tolerated my presence in the Protestant household. They never explicitly said they didn't like me, but they never laid out the welcome mat either. Jennie's family fascinated me. The difference between our two houses was the difference of class, of race, of history. Her family lined up for everything—for the phone, for the bathroom, for meals. Mine pushed and shoved as if we were always waiting to see a rock star. In her house everyone did his or her own dishes, hung up his or her own clothes, the way I imagined they did on the
Mayflower
, while we spread our belongings out farther and farther, until Dad had to build additions to our house and soon
these were filled to the brim, for my ancestors were ghetto people, then refugees, always on the go, escaping, who'd come on filthy ships and who'd never have enough room.

Whatever Jennie's parents thought of me, they couldn't tolerate Zap. They wouldn't put up with a Jew coming to look for their daughter, taking her off to play chess or see a French film. They wanted a guy who'd take her skiing and find his life's work side by side with the other male Watsons at Watson Electronics.

Tom hadn't fared much better when he started seeing Jennie. He was a coal miner's son and her parents forbade her to see him. When Jennie told her parents she was going to marry the boy they'd chased off their property two years before, they told her she could never see him again. She stopped eating. Her father had made his fortune in transistors and it seemed as if she wanted to become as pea-size as his inventions. Eventually Tom and Jennie eloped and were married in a meadow, where I was their maid of honor. They wrote for themselves one of those simple ceremonies in 1969: they promised to be faithful as long as they wanted to be faithful, and if they didn't want to be faithful anymore, they said, they'd talk about it.

When I called Zap to say Jennie was getting married, he said, “Give them my best.” He sent some crystal goblets as a present, large and misshapen, the kind Dracula might serve, and proceeded to go crazy. He joined a motorcycle gang called the Unspeakables and left school. When he flunked his army physical because he was color blind, he threw a fit. “Go back to school,” I offered as sisterly advice. “There're a lot of women in the world.” Years later, when Mark left me after seven years of marriage, I'd see how stupid those words must have sounded to my brother.

I'm not sure when I first noticed that something was wrong between Tom and Jennie, but I think it was after they returned to the dinner table following the phone call.

We had just sat down to dinner when the phone rang, and
they both rushed in opposite directions to answer it. The call was from the children and once I heard Tom say, “Do you think you could let me get a word in?” Sean sat across the table from me, watching me with his blue eyes and looking bored. He didn't even bother making polite conversation while they were gone.

When they returned to the dining room, they glanced at one another with resentment they couldn't hide. I'd seen them give that same admonishing frown to one another at the cocktail party, when Jennie had said you could go crazy in the country. I hadn't thought much of it then. But I did now. “Just the kids.” Jennie fluttered nervously. “Please, keep eating.”

“Looks like your mother has everything under control.” Tom spoke flatly and no one seemed sure if he intended that as a compliment or an insult.

Jennie sat at the head of the table, arms folded on the table edge as if she were about to conduct a symphony. “They asked if you're going to be in any more cowboy movies,” she said, turning to Sean.

“Pass the chicken,” Tom said.

“We'll go somewhere tonight.” Jennie seemed to be thinking out loud. She hadn't waited for Sean's reply. “Tom, let's go out. Of course, there isn't much to do. We can go to a film at the mall but they only show gangster films.” She repeated that there wasn't much to do in Thrace. Gangster films, bowling, a few Princeton bars forty minutes away, three taverns.

“Let's hit the Tall Grass,” Tom put in.

“It's a dive,” Jennie said. “I hate that place.”

“No one says you have to go,” he said, “if you don't want to.”

 

We pulled into the parking lot beside some pickups, a few jeeps, old Fords, and one or two nice sports cars with dealers' stickers in the back windows. A blue neon sign flickered on and off and the name “The Tall Grass” illuminated the parking lot. It was, in fact, your conventional dive. We entered a smoke
filled room, lit only by several red light bulbs that hung naked from the ceiling. Dice were being tossed. Most of the men were fat, bellies swollen by beer. The women had puffy hairdos and wore short dresses. A few college kids played pool in the back; the sports cars in the parking lot probably belonged to them.

Above the bar was a picture of a mermaid, sadly out of place, far from the sea. She swam entrapped in tall grass, little green fishes gazing at her. Beside the mermaid was an old Playmate of the month, reminiscent of those calendars in my father's office, and she was impaled on a pair of deer antlers. A Budweiser lamp with a team of Clydesdales lit the bar. A poster next to the antlers read “1944: Rutgers 28, Princeton 0.”

Jennie ignored us and pushed through the crowd toward a table in the back. We followed, first Tom, then I, then Sean. The juke box played something from the fifties by Danny and the Juniors. Then it switched to Freddy Fender singing “Rancho Grande.” Jennie tapped her fingers on the table and held Tom's hand with her free hand.

“Martinis, right?” Tom said.

Sean ordered beer and I ordered white wine, but Tom and Jennie started drinking martinis. They drank two apiece quickly and started laughing. Everything seemed very funny to them. The red lights, Joe, the bartender, Sean's bad moods. Tom patted my hand. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I'm an Indian.”

“You don't look like an Indian.”

He ribbed Sean. “Tell her.”

Sean waved his arms at Tom. “You're not an Indian. A wild Indian, maybe, but that's about it.”

“I am too. Aren't I, Jen.” Jennie shrugged. Her face was a little red. “Your parents think I'm an Indian, remember. They thought I looked like I had some other racial origins in my blood. They wanted an aristocrat in the family.”

Jennie frowned and said Tom's family was French. His
mother claimed someone had married an Indian, which explained the name. But it was generations ago. Otherwise he was pure French. Tom ordered another drink but Jennie told the waitress to forget it. “You're getting drunk,” she said to him.

When Jennie got up to go to the bathroom, someone stopped at our table and asked Sean if he hadn't seen him in a film he wasn't in. “Aren't you an actor?” the man asked. “They told me at the bar you were an actor.”

“You're thinking of Robert De Niro. He was in that movie.”

“Well, you sure look like him.”

While I looked at Sean to decide if he looked like Robert De Niro (it was difficult to tell, with his beard), someone squeezed my hand under the table. I looked up and saw that it was Tom. I pulled my hand away and stared into his eyes to see if it was just a friendly squeeze, but his eyes were ambiguous, and I moved closer to Sean. The juke box was playing Johnny Mathis when Jennie returned to the table. Then it skipped twenty years to the BeeGees.

“Let's dance,” Jennie said, running her finger up and down Tom's thigh.

“What's this thing about an Indian?” I asked Sean after they got up.

“Tom feels oppressed. Jennie's folks never could stand him. I think he got rich just to show them. The farmland alone must be worth a quarter of a million. He made good investments. But he'd never sell it. He loves it.”

“And Jennie?”

Sean shrugged. “She's your friend. Why don't you ask her? I'm not around that much anyway.”

“She seems happy. Isn't she?”

“I think she'd like to be in the city.” Sean spun his glass in his hands and stared at the glass in the light. “It gets a little quiet around here.”

Tom pulled me by the arm and was trying to get me to stand up. “Dance with me,” he said. I didn't want to dance with
anyone, and I certainly didn't want to dance with Tom. Jennie stood alone, bewildered, on the dance floor.

“We were just getting up to dance,” Sean said, taking me by the arm.

“I asked first,” Tom said.

“No, we were just getting up. Dance with Jennie.” Sean looked in the direction where she stood. He took me by the elbow and I understood I was to dance with him for Jennie's sake. He maneuvered me over to where Jennie was standing. “Tom wanted us to join you,” Sean said.

The band played “Michelle” and Sean wrapped his arms around me and pressed me tightly to his chest. I pulled away slightly. “You really should learn to relax,” he said to me.

“I'm relaxed.”

“I'd hate to see you when you're tense then.” But he seemed pretty tense himself as he pulled me close and guided me in small steps across the floor, burrowing a passageway between couples. I didn't want to dance. Men lead in dancing, and I didn't want to be led.

Sean's body was different from Mark's body. Mark was shorter and his shoulders weren't so broad. He was small and compact like a tank; I fitted perfectly into that place along his shoulder, that slightly dented space where the arm joined the chest. I'd spent years curling into that space and going to sleep. Sean was bigger and beside him I felt smaller. His arms were longer than Mark's; they wrapped all the way around me. Sean stepped on my toe, grazed it, and I thought of Mark. We always danced well together and there weren't any mistakes.

We did other things well together. We loved to be in the kitchen, chopping vegetables side by side. We liked to walk with our feet in unison, imagining hypothetical futures for ourselves: a country we wanted to live in someday, a little business we wanted to open. It had all seemed so smooth and easy once, and now as I danced with a man whose feet grazed mine, I cursed Mark for going away.

I
T WAS
six in the morning, miles from where I thought anyone knew where I was, so when I opened Jennie's front door, I was stunned to see Zap standing there. He grinned at me, knapsack at his feet, through his dark mustache, resembling the person whose name he bore, the Mexican rebel. “What're you doing here?” were the first words out of my mouth.

A blond woman, the kind he always managed to find on his travels and who was always disposed to go with him, leaned against the porch railing and nodded at me. Zap scooped me up, and as I grabbed for my thin robe, he grabbed for me. “Boy, have I missed you,” he said. He said it a dozen times until I believed him.

I'm the one who named my brother Zapata, though it was our mother who brought him a fake mustache from a giveaway twenty years before. Mom couldn't resist a bargain, an opening, a free sample. We had drawers full of little bars of new soap, marmalade in plastic boxes, first edition tampons.

She decided my brother, then Bernie, would make a great bandito, so for years I dragged him around with me on Halloween with his scratchy mustache, shoulder holster, and sombrero. He looked ridiculous and he hated being a bandito, because he was always in enough trouble without the costume. But then I saw Marlon Brando on TV and started calling Bernie Zapata. Bernie liked being a hero. The name stuck, later abbreviated to Zap.

His traveling companion was Anna, and he'd met her in a bowling alley in Stockholm. She offered me a rather sweaty, limp hand and I tried to imagine this fishlike body keeping my brother warm through the long Swedish winter. She was built like a weeping willow, with sturdy legs, wispy arms, and long, stringy yellow hair. She nodded in agreement to everything I said. Anna was the kind of person you have to strain to think of something to say, even if it's just “Hello” or “How was the trip?” I asked her how she was and she nodded and smiled at me. I wasn't even sure she could speak English.