Something Happened (58 page)

People who go on voluntary extended sick leave for anything but surgery or serious accidents almost never try to come back. They don’t feel up to it. (Even people who’ve been out awhile with hepatitis or mononucleosis have a hard time making their way back. They lack pep.) (Long after they’ve left, somebody who enjoys keeping track of people (in the army, it was our public relations officer) drops by to tell us they’re dead (or suffered a “cerebral vascular accident,” and then we know they really are gone for good. Or bad, ha, ha).

“Did you hear about Red Parker? Or Andy Kagle? Or Jack Green?” someone like Ed Phelps will stop by to say, if Ed Phelps isn’t dead by then too. Ed Phelps will be dropping in often after he’s retired (like Horace White with his wheelchair and metal canes after he falls ill, or pushed into the office on
a stretcher on wheels, waving hello limply as he rolls past, by an inscrutable Black chauffeur in meticulous gray livery. How will I look when I’m eighty and toothless? I’ll have no teeth—periodontal work will not preserve my deteriorating jawbone forever—and my ankles and arches grow worse. My nose will be closed, and I’ll breathe through an open mouth. My fingers will roll pills. I’ve met me already in hospitals and photographs. How will I smell? I know how I will smell. I smell that smell now and don’t like it) because he will have no place else to go. It would not surprise me if Ed Phelps began showing up at my army reunions (in place of me. I’ve never gone) as another surplus survivor. (We really have no need for that many survivors anymore.) “I’m not sure what it was,” he’ll keep repeating about Red Parker. “I wonder who’ll take care of the children. How many did he have?”

No one will know or care. With everyone else at the company these days I try to maintain an artless and iridescent neutrality. Jane knows I’ve stopped flirting with her.

“What’s the matter, big boy?” I hear her on the verge of baiting me. “Get cold feet? Afraid your mean little wifey might find out? Or maybe you’re just afraid you can’t get it up often enough for a young girl.”

Jane is not a person to say anything like that, or even think it, but I witness the scene anyway and wonder how I can get out of it. Outside the office, I have begun training myself assiduously and realistically for the higher responsibilities that lie ahead: I am organizing speeches and I am playing golf. I am outlining the speeches I will need for the convention (mine and Kagle’s) and for the corridors at the company.

“Gee whiz,” goes one. “
You’re
surprised? How do you think
I
felt? You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

(I wrote that one in a minute.)

And I have got myself new golf clubs and clothes.

My daughter thinks I look good in my whites and pastels and in my peaked caps. (My daughter is most
pleased with me when I look handsome.) My wife is perplexed. She thinks I’ve gone back to golf because I want to flirt with college girls at the different clubs I’m invited to. I don’t know how to flirt with college girls anymore and wouldn’t want to if I did. They’re kids. (And none seem to be sending out signals to me or any other golfer my age. They send them out to good tennis players. I have decided not to flirt at parties or anywhere else if my wife is with me and might be embarrassed, and I wish
she
would stop flirting when drunk and stop embarrassing me.) I’ll give her more money. I take private lessons secretly on public courses weekends and accept invitations I get to private clubs. My wife won’t take up golf again because she knows she won’t excel at it, and she hates going to a club for lunch or dinner because of the people she finds there. All of them are divorcing. Everyone everywhere seems to be coming to an end. I’ll buy another house. My wife wants that. It will please my daughter, who is keenly sensitive to friends in families with more money and not mindful at all of those with less, like the college graduate on the land-fill truck who says he wants to get her into a car at night in order to give her driving lessons. (I know the kind of lessons he wants to give her. I’d like to kick him in his stomach and jaw with my knee. How dare he deal in dirty thoughts about my buxom sixteen-year-old? How can she know so many people and still be lonely?) We’ll have to buy a bigger house because the kitchen table in this one is too small.

“Golf?” says my boy, in squinting confusion.

“It’s a game.”

“He’s playing again,” my wife says.

My boy looks hurt, my wife is crabby. He isn’t used to seeing me all dolled up and raring to get away from home so early on a Sunday morning.

“If I wasn’t going,” I say to him, “is there anything you would want me to do with you?”

He shakes his head pensively. “You can go. Swimming, maybe.”

“It won’t be hot enough. Mommy can drive you to the beach club.”

“I don’t like it there.”

“Do you have anything else to do?”

“Watch television. I saw some golf on television.”

“You hit a ball in a hole.”

“Like pool?” he ventures hopefully.

“Pocket pool,” I joke.

“Don’t start,” warns my wife.

“What’s pocket pool?”

“Not on Sunday. Not at breakfast.”

“The Lord’s day,” my daughter intones in mocking solemnity.

“I’ll tell you Monday.”

“I know,” my daughter brags.

“I’ll bet you do.”

“Are you getting angry?” she asks me with surprise.

“Of course not,” I answer, dissembling a bit. It doesn’t please me that she knows. (And I remember again that I saw her the night before riding around town in the back of a car with boys. I’m just not able to talk to her long these days without wanting to say something stinging. There is latent animosity between us always. I don’t know why.)

“I’ll leave the table if you are.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I am,” my wife declares.

“I’ve made my date. I can’t help you today. I’ll go to church with you next week.”

“We’re away next week.”

“Do you like it?” my boy asks.

“Church?”

“Golf.”

“No.”

“He hates it,” my daughter tells him.

“You got it,” I praise her. “I even hate the people I play with.”

“Why do you go?” His face furrows with puzzlement.

“It’s good for me.”

“For your health?”

“For his business,” my daughter guesses correctly, mimicking me with comical accuracy.

“You got it again, daughter,” I praise her again. “It gets me better jobs. It helps me make money, for all of you honeys.”

“Will you buy me my own car, since you’re making so much money?”

“When I lower my handicap. This table’s too small. I don’t see why we can’t eat in the dining room.”

“I didn’t know we’d all get here at the same time. Usually I have to eat breakfast alone, along with everything else.”

“You sound bitchy.”

“I don’t see why you have to play on Sunday morning.”

“It’s when I’m invited.”

“You go for lessons.”

“It’s when I can. Go alone, can’t you?”

“I don’t want to go alone. I have a family, haven’t I?”

“You’re going with God, remember?”

“Don’t make jokes about it.”

“Go with them.”

“They won’t go either unless you go. You influence them.”

“You’ll go with her, won’t you?”

“Don’t make them.”

“Don’t be a hypocrite, Dad.”

“We’ll all go on Mother’s Day.”

“And that will make it Father’s Day.”

“We hate the people we have to pray with,” my daughter wisecracks brightly, and my boy giggles.

“That’s good,” I compliment her, laughing also, “I’m proud of you for that.”

“I love it,” my wife says, “when the three of you find me so funny. They get that from you. They think they can be funny about anything.”

“They can.” (She is starting to ruin my whole day.) It’s been close to a very delightful family meal for everyone but my wife, and I wish I were through with it and out of there. “You know, I don’t get any of this at the office.”

“I don’t get it at the beauty parlor.”

“Good.”

“You aren’t married to people at the office.”

“I got it the first time. Why must you repeat everything?”

“You really do stink.”

“We’re only kidding, kids. You do this every week.”

“Have some eggs,” she answers in a low voice.

“You’re ruining my whole day.”

“You’re ruining mine.”

“I’ll have some juice. You do this every week, don’t you? Every time I have a day off.”

It isn’t true, but she doesn’t answer. Her face is set in lines of stubborn silence. Her hand is quivering on the handle of the large glass pitcher. We’ll have fresh orange juice when I take the trouble to make it, from a cold glass pitcher instead of the lighter gummy plastic one she and the maid find easier to use. The children sit as still as replicas in a store, hiding inside their own faces as they wait to see what will happen. And my day had begun so auspiciously: I had made love to her at night when I’d wanted to and had avoided doing so in the morning when I didn’t by scooting downstairs and starting to prepare breakfast while she was in the bathroom. (She had given me signals I didn’t want.) I will find it difficult to forgive her for spoiling my morning. Even fresh oranges taste fraudulent today. Oranges aren’t good anymore. It may be something in the soap we use to clean glasses or something in the water. Soda fountains serve ice cream sodas now in paper cups or clouded plastic glasses that don’t get cold and don’t give back flavor. Nothing stands up. London Bridge is falling down and was shipped to Arizona as a tourist attraction. I make better eggs and bacon than anyone because I take more trouble than anyone else does. I make garlic toast the way my mother used to, and it’s just as good. That’s easy. Everyone likes it. Nothing’s pure anymore. Not even people. I decide to use jokes.

“Be honest now, honey,” I begin to cajole her.

“They’ll go if you go.” she breaks in curtly.

My boy shakes his head.

“I won’t,” announces my daughter.

“You told me not to make them.”

“I feel all alone in the whole world.”

“Will I have to?” complains my boy.

“Be honest, honey,” I begin again, touching her
arm. (I’ll have to leave her, if only for making me do that.) “Would you rather be poor and go to heaven, or rich and go to hell?”

“That isn’t the question,” my wife argues.

“It’s my question.”

“How poor?” my daughter quips tentatively.

“I don’t care as much about money as you think I do.”

“I do,” croons my daughter. “I like to have all I can get.”

“You want a new house, don’t you?”

“What’s criminal about that?”

“Nothing. Would you rather be poor and go to heaven or rich and—go to hell.”

She smiles resignedly. “Go to hell,” she tells me, picking up my cue.

And I sense that the storm has passed and I might yet succeed in sailing away from them all unscathed. I feel like celebrating.

“That’s my girl,” I exclaim affectionately to my wife.

“I’m tired anyway,” she admits without a grudge.

“Go alone.”

“I don’t like to. I’ll stay in bed and read the papers. I’ll watch Gilbert and Sullivan. Sounds exciting. Doesn’t it?”

“I love money,” my daughter declares in a manner of robust cheer. “I think I really do.”

“Do all poor people,” my boy asks seriously, “go to heaven?”

“Do you believe in heaven?”

“No.”

“Then how can they go there?”

“Very funny,” he observes wryly, frowning. “If I did believe in heaven, would all poor people go there?”

“They haven’t a chance.”

“No. Really.”

“They haven’t a chance in hell. What kind of place would heaven be if all those poor people were around?”

“Are we poor?” he wants to know.

“No.”

“Then why can’t you buy her a car?”

“That’s the boy.”

“I can. Let her learn how to drive.”

“I’m almost sixteen.”

“Then we’ll talk about it. I’ve got the money. So don’t worry about being poor. And I’ll soon have more.”

“I think I love money,” my daughter brags daringly, “more than anything else in the world. I love it more than ice cream.”

“Someone, my daughter, might think that ungracious.”

“I don’t care. I love it like the last spoon of ice cream on a plate.”

“Money really talks, young lady, doesn’t it?”

“It sure does.”

“How come?”

“Because money, young man, is everything.”

“What about health?” says my wife.

“It won’t buy money. And that’s why you shouldn’t give your dimes and nickels away.”

“I don’t anymore.”

“I would never give it away,” my daughter asserts self-righteously.

“I don’t think, daughter dear, that you ever have, heh-heh. Money makes the world go round, young man, and money makes history too.”

“How come?”

“You take history, don’t you?”

“It’s called social studies.”

“Money makes social studies. Without money there would be no social studies.”

“How come?”

“What Dad means,” explains my daughter, “is that the love of money and the quest for gold and riches in the past is what caused most of the events we read about today in all our history books. Right, Dad?”

“Right indeed, my darling daughter. You got it again. I’m glad to see you’re learning something more in school than pocket pool and rolling drugs, and how to walk around the house without any clothes on.”

I am more startled than she is when I see her gasp and turn white. (I don’t know why I said that then. I swear to Christ I don’t know where those words came from. I know they didn’t come from me.) Her voice is a whispered plea.

“Did you have to say that?”

I murmur no. “I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did,” she charges. “You always do, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You always spoil things. You ruin things for everybody. Doesn’t he?”

My wife looks like she’s going to cry.

“You knew I was kidding.”

“Should I go?”

“No. We both were. But I’ve told you before not to walk around the house without a robe on.”

“May I please leave the table?”