Ordinary People (28 page)

“No,” Conrad says. “That’s right. You were right. You ought to do that more often.”

He gives a short laugh. “Oh, yeah?”

“No, really. Haul my ass a little, tell me to shape up.” A slight pause; a key change: “The way you used to do with him.”

He looks up in surprise. “He needed it. You didn’t. You were always so hard on yourself, I never had the heart. Besides,” he says, “you were the good kid. The easy one to raise.”

“Ah, Dad, don’t.”

“It’s the truth. You were the one I never worried about. That was the problem. I should have been worrying. I wasn’t even listening.”

The ground is wet, and smells of smoke; it feels soft and spongy to his touch.

“I don’t think I was putting out many signals, then,” Conrad says carefully. “You couldn’t have done anything.”

“Maybe not.” He gets up and walks to the edge of the patio, hands in his pockets.

Behind him, Conrad sighs. “Well, so much for what I know,” he says. “I thought that things were getting better. I thought they seemed great.”

“They haven’t been great,” he says, “for some time.”

“What happened, Dad? How did everything fall apart like this? Was it Buck?” And, another change of key: “Was it me? Dad, is it me, now?”

“No,” he says wearily. “It’s nobody. It’s nobody’s fault.” Over and over this same lesson to be learned; it is the way things are.

“Listen,” Conrad says, “it’s not—it isn’t something like—somebody else?”

“No,” he says. “Nothing like that.” And he comes back; sits beside him on the steps again. “I told you the truth,” he says. “She wanted to go away for a while. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

It seems to him that she is like a child who cries for the moon; she wants things to be the way they used to be, only she will not say it, and he cannot. So whose fault is it? And what difference would it make, if they could each voice their dreads, their suspicions?

Beside him, Conrad says, “You know, I used to figure you for a handle on everything. You knew it all, even though you grew up alone, with nobody looking after you—”

“I was looked after,” he says. “Where’d you get that idea?”

“Yeah, but nobody was responsible,” he insists. “Nobody helped you with the decisions—I’ve thought a lot about that. I really admired you for it. I still do.”

“Well, don’t admire people too much,” he says, tossing the remains of his coffee into the bushes. “They disappoint you sometimes.”

“I’m not disappointed,” Conrad says. “I love you, man.”

He winces, and his throat is tight, his eyes filled with sudden tears.

“I love you, too.”

It is awkward, having all this between them; it bumps clumsily against the sentences, pushing them out of meaning, out of order. Painful, the problem he has with these particular words; they threaten to overpower him, cut off his breathing. He hooks an arm around his son’s neck and is at once caught in a fierce embrace. He smooths the dark head wedged against his shoulder, brushes the hair aside at the back of his neck to touch bare skin.

Conrad pulls away, straightening himself, arms on his knees, head down. “You think she’ll be back soon?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“You think she’s coming back at all?”

“Yeah, of course!” Of course she is.
At all, God!
That is not a thought he needs to handle today. And he will not, that’s that.

“She’d better,” Conrad says. He wipes his hand swiftly over his eyes. “I’m a lousy cook.”

No need for any more words. The sun is warm on his back. He could fall asleep here, maybe he will, waiting for whatever comes next.

The house looks the same to him; the red maple, tinged from a late-August frost, its branches extending across the drive, is the same size as he remembered it. Somehow, he has expected change. He parks underneath the tree and gets out of the car. Nervous. Now that he is here. He said his good-byes to Berger today; maybe this is too much of a good thing.

Berger had raised his arms in the familiar gesture of confusion and benediction: “Listen, you’re my prize pupil, you know that? How about if I use you in one of my ads?”

“Hey, don’t start depending on me,” he warned.

Berger just laughed. “If I ever go to mange, you be sure to get me to a good dermatologist, you hear?” His sweater bagging and flapping about his hips; his hair floating. He has never known what to expect of the guy.

He had tried, then, to thank him properly. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I revised my original opinion, and gave you a nine.”

“My lucky day,” Berger said. “Remember the rip-off man? The guy who messed up my office? I heard from him, too. He gave me a seven.”

They laughed, and Conrad issued the invitation: “The house is only six or seven blocks from here. You ought to stop. I mean, if you do that.”

“What, visit friends? Yeah, I do it occasionally. Hey, you can do the same, you know.”

And right then he had gotten grabbed, missing him already. He had taken off fast, before he acted like some goddamn six-year-old who just fell off his bike or something.

Now, standing on Lazenby’s front porch, he has that same, funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. He half-hopes he won’t be home. He probably won’t. It has been so long, he has no idea what Lazenby is doing with himself these days.

A tall, blond girl answers his ring. Here is change, at last; Lazenby’s sister, Katy, all grown up. “Yes?” she asks. Then, “Connie! Oh my gosh, Ma! Guess who’s here?”

They beam at him, Katy and her mother, and he is suddenly overcome with shyness.

“joe around?”

“He’s out in back, I think,” Mrs. Lazenby says. “At least he was a few minutes ago.”

“I’ll go see.”

He moves off of the porch and around the house to the back yard. Lazenby is practicing chip shots into a tree hole.

“Forward press,” Conrad advises.

Lazenby looks up. Then he lowers his head, steadying himself, dropping the shot neatly into the hole.

“How’s it goin’?” Conrad asks.

“Okay. Fine.” He leans the nine-iron against a tree. “How about you?”

“Good.”

“I heard from Jen that you moved.”

“Yeah. To Evanston.”

“You like it?”

“It’s different. You lock your bike in your bedroom with you at night.” Then, he laughs. “No, I’m kidding. I like it fine. We’ve got a house over near the big U. In case you want to drop by sometime.”

“Yeah, maybe I will.” He scratches an arm contem platively. “So where will you go to school this fall?”

“Evanston Township. I took some courses this summer. I’ll be through in January.”

“That’s good.”

They look at each other.

Conrad says, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Good.” Lazenby nods approval.

“I’m thinking I’d like to beat your ass again at golf.”

“That’s interesting,” Lazenby says, “considering you haven’t beaten it yet. What makes you think you can?”

“That swing I just saw.”

Lazenby laughs. There is a sudden, awkward silence.

“So,” Conrad says. “How about it? You want to play?”

“I don’t know,” Lazenby says. “Ma’s got a pile of things lined up for me to do today.”

“Okay.” He backs off at once. “Next week, maybe. Call me. Or I can call you.”

“You don’t want me to try and get out of ’em, huh? I mean, shit, it’s worth asking.”

He grins. “Yeah, ask.”

He waits in the back yard, while Lazenby goes inside. He studies the shades of green in the back yard, light and shadow that edge the lawn; those sharp, precise measurements, signifying order. And other things that make him feel good: the clean flight of the ball on a good drive, the graceful blue-and-orange swallows that dip and swerve across the fairways. Gestures. He is learning to interpret them now. In a letter that she wrote to his grandmother she said, “The Aegean is bluer than the Atlantic, and rough and bumpy. It looks just the way the boys drew it on those funny school maps.” For she had saved them all—the maps and papers and a construction-paper valentine trimmed with Kleenex-lace that he had made for her—and packed them away in a box he had found in the basement, when they had moved out. Do you save stuff like that if it means nothing to you?

Last year. Another time dimension. He had often punished her, in his mind.
They tortured us, you know, just for being there. Mostly at night with boiling water from the ceiling. I always slept with the covers over my
head. Casual and deliberate lies, to ease his own hurt.

A window opens behind him, and Lazenby says, “Ma says it’s okay. She says first you got to come in, have some peanut-butter toast. She wants to rap to you.”

He looks up at the window, as Lazenby rolls his eyes: Mothers.

He grins. “Be right there.”

He will see her when she comes home, maybe drive over to his grandmother’s house some morning, and say hello. Just hello, nothing important. No point in it anyway, because she knows it all, knows just as he does that it is love, imperfect and unordered, that keeps them apart, even as it holds them somehow together; knows also that there was no boiling water; no rats, either.

He follows the sound of Lazenby’s voice: “Hey, anybody seen my golf hat? Katy, you seen my golf hat, damn it?” He picks up the nine-iron, swinging it lightly through the grass as he walks toward the house.

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