Family Night

I
n April, Tracy moved in with Margaret. It was the same week he joined Sex Anonymous. The rain shifted and drilled the apartment windows. Margaret watched Tracy unload cartons from a taxi, then walk through a froth of litter to pay the driver. He carried his belongings into the building, halting on the stoop to look up at her face, but she had stepped back from the sill.

Margaret cleared drawers and left them extended so he would see, right off, that
she was ready. He crushed Margaret’s dresses to one side of the closet and hooked his heavy coats over the rail. He gave her a bundle of knotted sleeves, but it was a severe cinch and she couldn’t untangle it. She arranged his razor on the glass shelf over the tiny sink in the bathroom. The apartment windows were eye level with a billboard that had been left to fade since the national bicentennial two years before. It was the patriot Nathan Hale at the gallows. For months, Margaret had had to look at the doomed figure standing beside a large teardrop noose. If she turned away, she could still see the billboard in her vanity mirror. “A friendly reminder,” Tracy said, and he told her to keep the blinds open.

“If we leave them open, people might see me get undressed.”

“Do it for a condemned man, Margaret.” She didn’t know if he meant Nathan Hale or himself. She peeled her rayon blouse away from her shoulders and let it drift down her spine to the floor. Margaret was slender, high-waisted. Her hipbones presented opal knobs with corresponding hollows, left and right of her smooth belly. She stepped from her jeans, kicking the cuff free from her foot; the notch of her ankle was milk-white and delicate like the precise turning of Victorian balusters. She stood before Tracy. Her posture remained supple and expectant; she didn’t feel self-conscious unless he tried to get her talking. He praised her, listing museum masterpieces. “
The Story of Creation
,” he said, referring to the stained-glass panel. He said she was “the penumbra surrounding every modern sculpture.”
Her hips curved like “an antebellum staircase.” She was everything, every lost world, she was “Dixie!” She smiled and shut her eyes. His talk held her in its spell for as long as he wanted. Then, Tracy took a basting ribbon from her sewing box. He tightened the tape around her blond crown, lifting her hair off her neck and letting it fall back to her shoulders. He snapped the ribbon free and fluttered it across her bare skin. Margaret felt the coarse weave of the fabric lisping over her nipples. He took the ribbon and worked it between her lips, sawing her tongue, until the corners of her mouth were burning.

Margaret’s brother, Cam, rode up to New England to collect an antique wood stove for his mother, Elizabeth. On his way back to Wilmington, Cam stopped in Providence to see Margaret. It didn’t surprise Margaret when Tracy seized her brother’s obsession. For years, Cam had been trying to locate his estranged father, who was an ex-model for Arrow Collars. Tracy was always scouting, hoping to enrich his encyclopedic awareness of fixations. The Arrow Collar Man as missing patriarch was an appealing hybrid and Tracy recognized its element of glamour.

They still had some twilight, and Margaret and Tracy stood on the sidewalk beside her brother’s pickup truck. Margaret admired the stove. Cam said, “I disconnected it from some asbestos pipe without the proper mask. I hope Elizabeth is happy with her antique because I breathed poisonous fibers.” Tracy climbed into the back
of the truck to help Cam arrange the heavy stove, which had slipped off-center. The two men tried to shove the solid block of iron. It wasn’t coming. Tracy threw his weight against the stove, but its metal foot was snagged. Cam didn’t like to give Tracy instructions. “Wait a second,” Cam said. “Hold up.”

Tracy kept pushing.

Cam said, “We’re caught on something.”

Tracy stood up straight.

“Shit. We scratched the bedliner. I knew it,” Cam said.

Margaret liked to hear Cam complain about these things. The men switched sides until they had the right grip on it and carefully worked the stove against the back of the cab.

She invited Cam to stay for dinner, but he could come up to the apartment for only an hour. He unscrewed the solid brass finials from the stove and brought them upstairs so they wouldn’t be stolen. They sat down in the small living room. Margaret cupped the heavy brass globes, letting their weight ache her wrists.

Tracy started right in on the Arrow Collar business. “Truth is like the mother of vinegar, it keeps producing—”

“The mother of vinegar?” Cam said.

“Insight. It’s like madness at first—you think you can’t contain it. It keeps developing, spilling over. You have to find out about your father. We all have to find out.”

“We do?” Margaret said.

Cam rubbed the powdery stove black from his jeans.
He was making the stains worse. Margaret saw it smearing the settee. Her brother tried to follow what Tracy was saying. He was telling Cam that he had made a public commitment to always seek the truth, both his own and others’. He took a group oath. “This model of yours is a mesmerizing figure, don’t you think?” Tracy said.

Her brother said, “You could say that.”

Margaret said, “Mesmerism requires two equal parties.”

“Since when do you tell everyone our family matters?” Cam said.

“I don’t,” she told him. “It’s Tracy. He asks about our childhood.”

Tracy said, “It was the Family Unit from Hell—”

“Will you shut up,” she told Tracy.

Tracy said, “Snapping family portraits at your house was like squinting into a rifle scope in which the cross hairs never match up on a moving target.”

“Do you shoot?” Cam said. “No? Never tried? Then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Tracy said, “I’m not talking about guns. I’m saying that it’s difficult to document a dysfunctional circle of kith and kin. It’s impossible to see ancestral outlines. You’ve got a warped silhouette—the background keeps shifting.”

Tracy knew what he was talking about. Margaret was the youngest in an awkward ensemble of stepbrothers and stepsisters, absent mothers and fathers, separate tribes coming together after the first territories were plundered. Cam’s two older sisters were not interested
in their real father, the model, and called him “a cad for all seasons.” Cam didn’t try to enlist them to his side. His mother, Elizabeth, gave him little explanation for his father’s absence. It was a routine desertion, but his departure was tormenting in its methodical precision. He was like an equilibrist ascending a tightrope, dipping forward and back, pivoting, inching farther out. “I shut my eyes,” Elizabeth said.

Margaret’s own mother, Sandra, was deceased and Margaret was not related by blood to any sibling. She was indexed only to her father, Richard Rice. Even he seemed hesitant, perhaps unsure of his feelings because Margaret grew in the shade of a previous love. Cam reminded her that they shared a similar chronology: They both lost parents when they were just babies. What could she learn about her mother’s death? Wasn’t Margaret herself the first and last particle of evidence? She didn’t share Cam’s compulsion to keep backtracking.

They were reaching their thirties and were regularly employed. They had their recent divorces, or divorces-in-progress, and were still fighting over the children. Margaret said, “It’s a crazy project to chase down a total stranger. Do we have that kind of time on our hands?”

“I guess not. That’s the problem.”

Tracy said, “No problem. Time is our medium. We can shape it. It stretches; it’s whatever we want. It conforms
to us
.”

Margaret watched Cam’s eyes dilate slightly and contract.

“Maybe Tracy is right. I should just set aside the time—”

“Don’t even dream about it,” Margaret said. “Tracy always has these brainstorms, these bare-your-soul schemes; he wants everyone to choose the mystery door. I’ve seen people who go on TV after they locate their biological parents. It never works out.”

Her brother wasn’t listening to her.

Margaret said, “Tracy’s been in a straitjacket, did you know that? In that jacket for days.” Her voice was flat, like a clerk’s.

“Is that the truth?” Cam said.

“I was a kid. Too much belladonna,” Tracy said.

“A religious thing? The Madonna? My friend had some trouble like that. He had moles on the palms of his hands and on the insteps of his feet, like the stigmata. He decided to have the moles removed, but then he had the scars. It was a mistake; the scars were even more like the stigmata.”

“No, nothing like that,” Tracy said, “it was
belladonna
, you know, deadly nightshade. We used it to get high. We tried everything.”

“Glue,” Margaret said.

Cam looked at her. “You did glue?”

Tracy said, “That explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

It was hard to watch Tracy and Cam shrugging their shoulders in synchronic timing. They looked like two fellows in an old monochrome movie scene, a Hollywood treatment of escalating male camaraderie. She tried to keep from laughing. Cam worked hard to maintain a blind, barreling-ahead naïveté; he was expert at whitewashing. Tracy envied the fact that what haunted Cam wasn’t self-imposed, when he was certain that his own
anxieties were fed by internal springs. “I’m a victim of my subconscious,” Tracy complained.

Margaret said, “Don’t listen to Tracy—he’s intrigued by our family tragedy because it can’t touch him. He doesn’t have any claim. Tracy likes to rubberneck. He likes to watch condemned buildings being demolished, did you know this? He drives hours just so he can stand behind some yellow sawhorses.”