I Cannot Get You Close Enough (3 page)

“I want to go to the library and get some books out,” I said. “I want to have something to read this weekend.”

“Let's go then.” He took my arm. Strange, it is here now, the touch of his hand upon my arm, those clear black eyes, that lovely perfect nose. Crystal has that nose, his sister in New Orleans. That nose alone would get a family a long way if they didn't breed it out with Mexican whores.

We walked down across the yard toward the basketball hoop where Daniel was still shooting baskets. He was shooting free throws now, overhand. Phelan stopped beside Sheila's yard chair and said something. He ran his hand across her bare shoulder.

“Don't do that,” she said. “Please don't touch me.”

“Forgive me. Your Royal Highness. Please forgive.”

“I won't,” she answered, and Daniel stopped shooting free throws and came and stood beside her.

“Leave her alone, Phelan,” he said. “Don't tease her. She just got back from the hospital yesterday.”

“I wasn't teasing her. I wanted to see if she was real.”

“That isn't funny, Phelan. Apologize.” Daniel was trembling. He was really getting mad and Phelan outweighed him by twenty pounds. Sheila didn't change the expression on her face. That bored, impenetrable look. Her legs were in pale cream stockings. I had not noticed them. If there were bandages or scars, no one would ever see them.

“Come on, Phelan,” I said. “Don't start a fight. Momma'll punish me if Daniel starts fighting.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'm sorry, Sheila. It's just that you looked so cool.” He patted the high white wicker back of the yard chair. “See you around,” he added. Sheila turned her head away. Daniel bounced the ball very hard against the driveway. Hit, hit, hit. Where is that from?

We got into Phelan's grandmother's car, a dusty blue Buick, and drove off down Sherman Street. We had just had the typical encounter, interchange, unforgettable moment, with Sheila when she was growing up. What happened, we might well be asking ourselves at such a moment. Was that our fault?

The next fall they did the very last operation. She was as tall as they expected her to be now, five-four, as Daniel kept saying when he talked about it. So they took her to Chapel Hill to a great ankle man and he turned her foot the last quarter of an inch and tucked it away inside the cast for the winter, and she was, at last, perfect.

2

There was a photograph of her in the Chapel Hill newspaper the day she was released. She was sitting in a hospital wheelchair in a soft green-and-white flowered dress. The doctor stood above her with his hands holding the back of the chair. A great triumphant pleased smile was on his face. Her second husband was a surgeon. First there was Daniel, to conquer us, then a surgeon, to conquer medicine, then a Rothschild to conquer Europe. In between, the theater, to conquer the common man. Why would I take pleasure in the end of that, be happy to find her clothes in a dumpy musty flat in London? I am the one who is diseased to take such pleasure in the end of her triumphs. God knows, I had my own. Is one kind of ambition really that much different from another? All trying to stick our heads up above the crowd and keep them there and our children standing on our shoulders and theirs on their shoulders. Who am I kidding? If I take pleasure in Sheila's fall then I am as bad as she is and the prevailing emotion she arouses in me is not fear after all, but jealousy. Maybe I wanted to live in the white brick house and be the only child and have the piano teacher come to the house instead of walking six blocks carrying my sheet music every Saturday. Maybe I wanted to look like that, that weak and defenseless, and have men in my power instead of always fighting with me. Leaving me. Her men didn't leave her, didn't die or go back to their wives. Maybe life imitates art and Sheila is the stuff art is about, the absolute self-created, self-encircling thing. I am an observer. Nothing escapes me. Watch, watch, watch, bitch, bitch, bitch.

I want to meditate on that photograph, my memory of it. Sheila sitting there with that satisfied look on her face and the surgeon satisfied too. No, he may be satisfied but she is not quite pleased, one hand over the other hand, a shadow on her face, something petulant and not quite pleased. That's the effect she had on men. She brought out something in them that made them want to prove their mettle, made them feel off-balance somehow, as if only in her eyes would victory seem sweet. I am getting lost. I must resist the urge to go off on tangents. But she is so impossible to understand. The tangential data may be more useful than the plot. I want to see the core, the atomic number, be able to map her.

It may be simple. The absolute simplicity of the Oedipus complex. A little girl loves her father. Whatever happens there is all that can ever happen. We are doomed to repeat that first terrible encounter. Sheila comes into the world one morning and her foot is bent. Outside in the hall her father hears the doctors talking. “Should we tell her first and then him?” “No, tell him and let him tell her.” “Get them together in a room. Neither one of them looks like they will take it very well.” “It isn't that bad. Only the smallest deformity.” “Unless she can't walk.”

 

Later, the operations would be successful and he would be free to love her. But Ed MacNiece wasn't into love. Besides, by the time of the operations his mind was busy elsewhere. He owned the television station and the land beside the reservoir. He had plenty of things to give Sheila that he thought were more valuable than love.

I woke this morning thinking of the year the Pear Blossom Festival was ruined by snow. Five days before the debutantes put on their white dresses and walked around the municipal auditorium on their father's arms. Between the banked arrangements of pear blossoms. The high point of Charlotte social life. The one day of her life when Sheila might have expected to have her father to herself, if not all day, then certainly from the time the march began until he turned her over to society and she made her much-rehearsed deep gorgeous bow. This was when we still had the debutante ball in the auditorium before someone decided it was a public building and we had to move the ball out to the driving club. Had to build a recreation room big enough to hold it.

After the walk there would be the dance, that would be another three or four or five minutes when Sheila would have Big Ed all to herself. Then disaster struck. A week before the ball the pear blossoms of North Carolina were buried underneath two feet of the latest recorded snowfall in our history. A thick wet blanket that began falling before dawn one morning and continued falling until late the next day. Two days of snow in the last week of March. Omens and signs, Armageddon. We are deep in Bible country here no matter how much Hume and maybe even Leibniz or Spinoza a few of us might read.

So there we were with snow on the pear blossoms, an avalanche. I was home and Sheila came over to Mother's at noon to help cut out things for a luncheon Helen was having for some of the debs. Daniel was walking around worrying about the snow ruining things for Sheila. I guess it was spring break because Niall was there. And it must have been Saturday because Daddy was there. He was making poached eggs for whoever had been sleeping late and lecturing to us about helping in the kitchen. “Alice and Daytime can't do everything. You won't have servants when you grow up. We are living in a socialistic country and the government is ruining all the Negroes. Get up and help with the toast, Sister.”

“It will be the ugliest coming-out they ever had,” Sheila said. “It will be terrible.”

“I'll make you some flowers,” Daniel put in. “They can make them out of paper. Who cares? No one cares about the flowers.”

“The flowers have to be there. It's the tradition. Without pear blossoms it could be anywhere. I could be making my debut in New Orleans like Doulin Lancaster. It will ruin everything.”

“Well, this snow won't stick long,” Daddy said. “Let me make you a poached egg, Sheila. You're too thin. Skin and bones. I never saw such a bunch of scrawny spoiled kids in my life. Bring me that plate over here, Anna. Let's put that in the dishwasher so Alice won't have to do it.” Sheila got up and handed the dirty plate to him. Carried it very gingerly over to him and handed it to him to rinse. Then she looked at me with that look that said, It's your fault, Anna. This is your fault and there are too many people in this room and that's your fault too. She walked back over to her place at the table and picked up the half-finished glass of milk and handed it to me and then she left. Left the room and then the house and got into her car and drove away. Drove down the snow-covered driveway with Daniel standing at the living-room window watching her leave.

“She doesn't know how to drive in snow,” I said. “She's crazy to go out on those streets.”

“She doesn't have anyplace else to go,” he answered. “She doesn't have much to do.” He looked at me, very solemn. He pities her, I thought. He's taking care of her, that's it. We all take care of him but there is no one left over for him to care for. So he has Sheila, in her endless casts, waiting to be pitied and cared for and loved. I crossed the room to him and put my arm around his waist. Already he towered over me, darling Daniel, the youngest of us and the sweetest. He inherited our grandfather's way with animals. They came to him. Horses, dogs, birds, cats. He had owned a parrot once that would sit on his shoulder and kiss him on the nose. It was Sheila's fault that the parrot got away. But that was before the unseasonable snow of 1964 ruined the Pear Blossom Ball. That was when they were fourteen.

Our cousins were visiting for someone's graduation or wedding. Phelan and Crystal Manning were here. Crystal and Sheila hated each other. They were as different as they could be. And yet, if you looked at them in those years, you might think they were sisters, the same hair, the same eyes, the same meticulous attention to detail, their perfect clothes and nails and polished shoes and arch dramatic poses. I have always thought Daniel had a secret crush on Crystal too. Anyway, we were on the second floor and LeLe Arnold was lounging around on my bed saying goddamn and fuck to shock Sheila and the McLaurin boys were in Daniel's room with Niall. Then Daniel came walking out into the hallway that was the stair landing. Ours was an old Victorian house built in 1885. The rooms went off in angles from large central halls. The second floor had five bedrooms that we children shared. There were extra beds everywhere for company and two sleeping porches for the hot months. One porch was off my room and one off Mall's. Daniel came walking out onto the second-floor hall with the parrot, Milliken, on his shoulder and Sheila left my room where she was trying not to make LeLe mad. If you made LeLe mad you really had to hear some cussing. So Daniel came to rescue Sheila with Milliken on his shoulder and he walked all around the hall talking to the bird.

“Say ‘Sheila,' Milliken,” he said. “Say ‘Daniel loves you.'” The bird made some of its arrogant incoherent threatening sounds and everyone backed away from him. Even LeLe backed away. Phelan was sitting on the back of the hall sofa eating it up. Phelan loved to see anyone doing something grand. No wonder he grew up to run around with the crowned heads of Europe.

So Daniel had Phelan to show off for as well as trying to make Sheila forget that LeLe was saying fuck every other word. Sheila might leave at any minute if she didn't like what was going on. That was another thing that must have intrigued Daniel. There he would be, trying to protect her and bring her into the warm circle of humanity, and at the slightest provocation she would bolt and run. Go off cold and alone to wherever she nested in that white brick house. The piano bench or the gold velvet-upholstered seat she sat on to apply makeup in the pristine white and gold and green dressing room that opened out onto the leaf-strewn unused pool. Who would go over there to go swimming? LeLe once said. Those people are a thousand years old.

“Let's take Milliken outside,” Phelan said. “It's spring and he needs a breath of fresh air.”

“We could take him on the porch,” Niall put in. Poor little Niall, he worshipped Phelan. He would lick his boots, clean his shoes, say anything Phelan wanted him to say. Anything he could imagine Phelan might want to hear, Niall would say it. Later Phelan would take him lion hunting in South Africa and bring him home with a blood disease it took years to cure, but I guess Niall thought a tropical disease was a small price to pay for flying to Africa with Phelan.

So, with Niall leading the way, Daniel walked through my room and out onto the sleeping porch with Milliken on his shoulder cawing and making his ugly parrot talk. Phelan was still sitting on the wooden back of that frail Victorian sofa. The sofa was beside the stairs, with a phone on a table beside it. From there you could see through an octagonal room out onto the sleeping porch and the oak trees that sheltered it. They were the oldest oak trees in town. Our house was on the site of the first settlement in Charlotte when Charlotte was only a trading post and a Confederate magazine. So Daniel kept on walking through the doors and out onto the porch. During the spring an oak branch had broken out a whole section of rusty screen. A section ten feet long and five feet wide was gone and Milliken lifted off from Daniel's shoulder and flew up into the oak tree.

It was spring and Milliken was free for the first time in many years. Daniel had owned him for four years and he was already a full-grown parrot when he came home from the pet store already talking indecipherable English and demanding crackers.

Now he sat in the oak tree and preened his feathers. “Let's get him,” Phelan said, and began to climb out on the oak limb. Daniel grabbed his shoulder. “Don't go out there. Don't scare him. He'll come back if everyone is quiet.” We were all on the porch now. Sheila, LeLe, our neighbors Hoyt and Davis McLaurin, Niall, Helen, Little Louise. In a minute Momma came up the stairs with Alice right beside her and then the porch was full.