Jernigan (6 page)

Clarissa’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac off Maple Avenue. You went down into a little hollow and there it sat among a lot of trees, with only one other house in sight. Fake Tudor, two-story, stucco, which meant probably ’30s or ’40s. It had obviously been the only house on the street for years. Most stuff around here was built after 1960; Heritage Circle went up in I think ’64. At the time I was born, this house must have been sitting here alone in its little dell like Snow White’s cottage. Sort of. The gray paint was peeling now, the stucco was cracked, the picket fence was missing pickets the way cartoon hillbillies are missing teeth. But at least this house had something to it. Though maybe I mean
therefore
instead of
but
. That a house with character could produce a little girl as bombed-out as any kid from a split-level shitbox like mine made you wonder if you could ever make anything right.

I parked next to a faded mustard-colored VW bus, if you can imagine, and in front of a blue Reliant, doing my best to get so I couldn’t be blocked, and Danny led me across the crumbling blacktop, through the gate in the picket fence, around the house and into the back. He was right about this being no big deal. I counted six people, three and three, my age pretty much. Two women in shorts and t-shirts, one in shorts and halter top; two men in jeans and t-shirts, one in cutoff jeans and t-shirt. Then a couple more men and another woman came out of the house laughing about something. The women were still looking okay; the men had begun their bellies. Two of them had beards, which of course didn’t tell you anything anymore. A net was stretched between a maple tree and a clothesline pulley attached to the frame of the kitchen window; a volleyball sat in the grass, which needed cutting. In a galvanized washtub, cans of beer and Diet Pepsi; the necks of screwtop wine jugs sticking up out of the icewater. Taco chips in a wooden bowl, guacamole in an earthenware bowl. Two
stereo speakers, each on a metal folding chair, the wires leading back into the house through another window. “My Guy” by Mary Wells bravely playing out of them. My kind of scene all right.

“She’s probably inside,” said Danny.

He led me into a kitchen, then into a living room. Funky in a way you wouldn’t mind sitting around in. Big oatmeal sofa, bottom sagging. A Morris chair, for Christ’s sake. The tv covered up by a white tablecloth with a pattern of red cherries. Even an old woodstove, which looked as if it got used. A woman in shorts was down on her knees, bare heels denting her buttocks. She was flipping through a red plastic milk crate full of LPs, going at it with both hands like a dog digging. Strong arms, strong legs, maybe a little overweight. But not unpleasingly. Her t-shirt had shrunk, or she had bulged, so you could see below the shoulder the—what would you call it?—that arc of skin, that ridge beyond which lies the armpit. I wanted to see what she was like in the face, now there’s a crude way of putting it. “Mrs. Peretsky?” Danny said, touching her shoulder. “This is my dad.”

She turned her head. Wide, pretty face. Eyes farther apart than I liked. She got to her feet and came toward me, tugging down one side of her shorts.

“Peter Jernigan,” I said.

“Martha Peretsky,” she said. Hands went out. As I do with women, I clasped firmly but did not shake. (With men I pump up and down.)

“Clarissa’s in her room,” she said to Danny, and he started upstairs. It hurt me that this house was so obviously familiar to him. “I think my daughter is part vampire,” said Martha Peretsky. “It’s like if sunlight touches her …” Cracking rubber letters on her t-shirt read
DAMN I’M GOOD
.

From upstairs came a quick blast of rackety music that was not “My Guy” by Mary Wells, then a door slammed and you heard “My Guy” by Mary Wells again. Martha Peretsky shrugged. “I don’t even want to
know
what they do up there. At least they’re not glued to the tv. Clarissa and I are at a little impasse these days—I won’t buy a color tv and she won’t watch black-and-white.”

“What
do
they do up there?” I said.

“Oh,” she said. She seemed to remember that I was an interested party. “Not drugs or anything, I don’t think. Danny’s been very good
for Clarissa in that respect. You knew that she—I mean, we both did, but Clarissa in particular went through a very hard time when her father left.” First I’d heard, of course, about any of this.

“Now when was that?” I said. I meant it to sound like a keep-it-rolling kind of thing. I could hear that I sounded like a cop grilling somebody. (That cop. Grilling
me
. One year ago today.)

“Was it
two
years ago?” she asked herself. “I was—Clarissa was twelve. So it’ll be three years in October.”

“This coming October,” I said, getting it absolutely nailed down. I mean, who
gave
a shit.

“Right,” she said. “Time flies when you’re having fun. Listen, would you like a beer? Soda?”

“Beer’d be good,” I said.

She smiled, a nice combination of open and sly. “Follow me,” she said, and kitchy-kooed with her index finger. I didn’t mind. I wondered what her breasts would look like. I mean, decent-sized, obviously. But specifically. Except for one throwaway fuck about two months after Judith died—a woman client I’d gotten drunk with; I never called her afterwards and the sale never went through—I’d seen no breasts in a year.

Back outside, I plunged my hand into the icewater and came up with a can of Old Milwaukee. Made my hand ache to hold it. I ripped open the top and was brought over and introduced to the friends. There was a Jerry with a
j
and a
y;
another, unattached to him, was a Gerri with a
g
and an
i
. Much merriment over this. Also a Dave and a David: the two beards. And a Tim who didn’t look timid, with rimless glasses. So it was Rimless Tim. See, I’m bad at names; shit like that is how I try to keep them straight. This Tim had the Gerri and another woman laughing and laughing. He was one of those men with a pointed nose and a wolfish grin. So you could think of a timber wolf. I sat down in a lawn chair whose seat and back were made of crosshatched wire about the gauge of a coathanger. I’d seen these chairs on sale at Caldor’s; this Martha Peretsky had actually bought them.

She went over and said something to the Tim person. He said something back, and they both laughed. Then she came and sat on the grass beside my chair, gave her knees a hug and looked up. “You
really
are
nice,” she said. Based on what? On my saying that a beer would be good? “Danny said you would be. We’ve become great friends, Danny and I.”

“Well,” I said, “always nice to hear. That your kids, you know, think you’re nice.”

“God, I always say the wrong thing,” she said. “Say what you
mean
, Martha. What I mean is, I am a nice person too, and I think the nice people in this world should stick together. Because
bro-ther.”

“To the nice people,” I said, raising my beer can from collarbone level to chin level. But not actually drinking. To have taken a belt right then would have been crude, wouldn’t it? Suggesting this world was so awful that we should all immediately get drunk. So I just raised the beer can and lowered it, as if crossing myself. Then, after a couple of seconds, I went ahead and took a belt, as if someone had changed the subject.

But we were still on the subject, apparently.

“Actually, Danny didn’t
need
to tell me you were nice,” said Martha Peretsky. “He’s so nice himself, I knew that he had to have been raised by—” and here she hesitated, for reasons she must have hoped weren’t obvious. “I mean, a boy that nice, his father had to be nice too.”

To the human intellect
, I felt like saying.
And its capacity to reason shit out
. “Yeah, I’m proud of Danny,” I said, looking over to make sure I could see my car from here. I was slow today, boy: how could it have taken me this long to see that she was absolutely shitfaced and trying to keep it together?

“That’s what I mean,” she said.

“To meaning,” I said, and took another good belt. So why not get shitfaced myself?

She narrowed her eyes. “You’re very bright,” she said. “I am not doing a very good job of establishing that I’m bright too.”

I tried to think what to say. Finally I went with, “Is that important?”

“If we’re going to be
friends
, yes, I think so,” she said. “I would like very much to be friends with you. Oh
God
am I losing it. Martha
ma chère
, why don’t you just
taisez-vous
for a change,
n’est-ce pas?”
She shook her head; her straight blond bangs, in accordance with some principle of physics, wagged in the opposite direction from the way
her head was going. I got interested in the way that looked. To avoid, I suppose, having to pay attention to the chatter.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry sorry sorry. See, I have to tell you. Or else you are going to think the absolute worst of me. Clarissa gave me this pill. Because I was getting nervous? With people coming over? And she warned me not to drink on top of it and I’m like give me a break here. What is a fourteen-year-old going to give you that you couldn’t have a beer with?” She shook her head. “Whew.”

“How long ago did you take it?”

She shook her head again. “Before everybody show up. Show-da up. Couple hours ago?”

“Well look,” I said, “just don’t have anything more to drink and I’m sure it’ll wear off pretty soon.” As if I had any idea what the hell her kid had given her. “You like to go for a walk?” I said. “Walk it off a little?”

“Feel like lying down,” she said. “So maybe I should walk. Boy oh boy oh boy.” I stood up, she raised her hand like a student who has the answer, and I pulled her to her feet and we walked. The way we worked it out about the hands made me think there were possibilities: each kept holding the other’s hand for longer than necessary, then each let go as if we’d counted one two three. This Martha Peretsky must be very wise in the body, I thought, if she could manage this while drunk and stoned on what was obviously some powerful downer. I felt a jolt of heat to the penis. Machine that I was.

We went through the gate and up the street, avoiding potholes as if they were puddles. Which of course they must be when it rained. “I wonder are there any frogs,” I said, which couldn’t have made much sense to her.

“Mmm,” she said.

We got as far as her nearest neighbor’s house, a gabled box, probably early ’60s, with windows wider than they were tall. Like mine. “Ugly,” I said. I was criticizing her neighborhood.

“Ugly people live there,” she said. Then she said, “I’m deserting my guests.”

“Not your
favorite
guest,” I said, old smoothie. I sort of remembered now how you did this.

“You,” she said. She smiled a pacific smile and took my arm. I considered considering where this was all heading, but found I didn’t feel like considering. On one beer? I must have wanted not to feel like considering.

“This is a little crazy,” she said. “What are we doing?”

“Taking you for a walk,” I said. “Ostensibly. But I don’t see that anything beyond the ostensible would necessarily”—smoother and smoother, boy—“be so crazy. I mean, okay: we have our kids in there doing whatever they’re in there doing. Which does
not
mean—”

I tried to think how to say what it didn’t mean.

“But there isn’t any
music,”
she said.

I dislodged my arm, assuming this was her trite way of saying she was having second thoughts.

“Better get back there put some music on,” she said. “You can’t give a party and then neglect it. Any more than you neglect your own
child.”
She seemed much in earnest about this.

“Are you in any shape to deal with your party right now?” I said.

“Dealing with my party,” she said, “will get me in shape to deal with my party.” She took my hand and pulled. “But you have to come help.”

It was the first husbandly duty laid on me in a year. In exactly a year. To the fucking hour. Give or take. And clearly I was the first husbandly help this Martha Peretsky had had for a while too. I thought about her kneeling by that crate of records. Trying, unadvised, to come up with the song that would get things going.

5

Martha Peretsky’s bedroom was unrecognizable by morning light. It was full of all this detail, whereas the night before it had been, I don’t know, whatever. A long-legged old dresser, painted glossy black, with an oval mirror. A flower decal on each drawer, centered between the many-faceted glass knobs. On top of the dresser, jars and jewel boxes
and hairbrushes. A wicker laundry basket with a pantyhose foot dangling from under the lid, as if someone were being swallowed. On the wall, in a too-ornate silver-painted frame, an old chromo of a hula girl with ukulele. Our clothes here and there on the floor. Outside, birds sang and a faraway lawnmower was going.

Martha Peretsky was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, face down. Shoulders swelling and subsiding. I got out of bed, found the jockey shorts where they’d ended up—I remembered now her taking them down and my not caring what became of them—and crept to the door. Then I remembered the girl, Clarissa, and went back and put on trousers. Glanced at stomach. Put on shirt.

In the hallway I met Danny, in just his jockey shorts, coming out of the bathroom. He gave me thumbs-up, and a grin I would never have given
my
father, no matter how much of an old bohemian he was. But what was the point of trying to be on your dignity when you were getting up from doing the same thing he was getting up from doing? I decided fuck it, and gave him thumbs-up back, the canny old veteran who could still come off the bench and move the runner along with a perfect bunt. Greeting the rookie who’d raise his average fifty points and still hit almost as many home runs if he’d just cut down on his swing. Then he went into what I gathered was Clarissa’s room and closed the door behind him, back to whatever moody pleasures she gave him, and I went into the bathroom. Should I really be countenancing this?