The Amateur Marriage (16 page)

George must have shrugged. “Ah, well,” their mother said. Karen twisted in her seat to see George’s expression, but he was gazing serenely out the side window, his hands relaxed on his knees. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth! “Go ask Lindy if she’s coming with us,” their mother had told him before they set off, and he had returned a moment later and said, “Nah. She’s going to stay home.” If it occurred to him that he was as guilty now as Karen—that Lindy might be running out of oxygen at any second—he didn’t seem concerned.

“I don’t believe he’s antireligious so much as he’s antisocial,” their mother said. Evidently she was back on the subject of their father. “I mean, the man has no friends, have you noticed? Not counting his customers in the grocery store, or the neighbors whose parties I drag him to, he doesn’t know a soul! Whereas I, on the other hand . . . Why, I can’t think what I’d do without friends! I just need to share my feelings with people. Sometimes I don’t even
know
what I’m feeling till I’ve said it out loud to Mimi or Dot. Oh, excusez-moi, monsieur, I didn’t realize we were supposed to exceed the speed limit here.”

In fact she had slowed to a crawl—something she often did while talking—but now she accelerated just as the car that had honked behind her was veering left to overtake her. The other car dropped back again. She said, “You know what I mean, Karen. When you and Maureen get together, gabbing to each other . . . And George, you’re pretty social too, considering you’re a boy. But Lindy is more like your father. A person can’t guess what might be on her mind! She’s got me totally baffled.”

Karen had a sudden idea. Maybe George really had talked to Lindy. If Lindy had crept to her room unnoticed—which of course she would try to do, wanting to avoid a scene—and slipped between the covers, because naturally she’d be sleepy . . . Then George had stuck his head in and said, “Lin? You coming to church?”

“Go away,” she’d have told him, muffled. “No. Leave me alone.”

And he had said “Okay” and closed her door.

Karen should have considered that possibility before. She sat back in her seat, feeling much better. They passed a fish pond carpeted over with red and yellow leaves. This was such a beautiful fall day.

But when she checked Lindy’s room again after they got home from church, the old man’s overcoat still lay in the bed like a log. (Now she wondered how she could have imagined it would fool anyone.) The pillow was still bunched where Lindy’s head should be. Karen closed the door again and returned to the kitchen. She was feeling faintly sick. The smell of Sunday dinner—something “gourmet” involving curry powder—itched the inside of her nose.

“Whose turn is it to set the table?” her mother asked. “Is it Lindy’s? Go wake her up! There’s a limit to how long a person should sleep.”

Karen could probably have evaded a while longer, but all at once a kind of tiredness swept over her. “She’s not there,” she told her mother.

“Not there?”

Karen kept her face expressionless.

“What do you mean, she’s not there?”

“She isn’t in her bed. I just looked.”

“But where is she, then?”

“I don’t know.”

Her mother turned to George, who was niching bits of icing off a devil’s-food cake on the counter. “Have
you
seen her?” she asked.

He said, “Nope.” His voice was as flat as Karen’s had been. He may have felt equally tired.

“Well, she didn’t just vanish into thin air! Both of you saw her earlier; how far could she have gone?”

George and Karen said nothing.

“This kind of thing’s got to stop,” their mother said. “Where’s your father? Michael!” And she slammed her spatula into the skillet and went out into the hall. “Michael!” she called. They heard her opening Lindy’s door, stepping into the room for a moment before she continued toward the stairs. Presumably she was going down to the TV room, where their father spent his Sunday mornings working on the household accounts. But whatever they said to each other couldn’t be heard from the kitchen.

At dinner, all their mother wanted to talk about was Lindy’s disappearance. “She made her bed up so it looks as if she’s in it,” she said. “This was premeditated! Something’s going on.”

Their father, on the other hand, was more interested in reviewing the budget. “Every month,” he said, “I assume a certain amount will be spent on a certain category. I’ve told you this before, Pauline.”

“How can you think of money when your daughter’s missing?” she asked.

It did seem hardhearted of him, till Karen remembered that as far as their parents knew, Lindy had been missing no more than an hour or so. Then their mother looked ridiculous, with her eyebrows knitted so anxiously and her fists clenched on either side of her plate. When she was upset, she used fancier words. “Unconscionable,” she said, and “fathom.” “I cannot fathom why a girl in Lindy’s circumstances, from a loving and caring home—”

“We’ll have to have a talk with her,” their father said. “Now, charitable donations, for instance. Charitable donations are no different from any other expense. It’s true they benefit someone else, but still we need to budget for them. We can’t just give to all and sundry any time the whim overtakes us.”

Oh, great, he was back on the Orphans’ Fund. Their mother sat up straighter and asked, “Haven’t we
had
this discussion?”

“Yes, but now I see you also wrote a check to the—”

“Michael! Your oldest daughter’s in some undisclosed location with a bunch of shiftless deadbeats in black turtlenecks, and all you can think of is—”

“Well, for God’s sake, Pauline, you’re the girl’s mother! Why don’t you put your foot down?”

They faced each other from opposite ends of the table, their eyes hard and narrowly focused. At such moments, Karen always felt that the children in this family might as well not exist. Her parents were such a
couple!
So self-centered! She fixed her mind on her plate; she tried to fork up her rice without including any of the yellow stuff on top. George, however, was eating everything item by item, plowing through his string beans first and then his rice-and-yellow-stuff and then his Waldorf salad. He had one elbow on the table and his free hand was supporting his head, but nobody bothered correcting him.

Across from Karen, Lindy’s glass of milk stood untouched, growing warmer by the minute. There was nothing more disgusting than room-temperature milk. Just thinking about it made Karen’s stomach turn over.

Their father went into the city to check on the store and their mother didn’t object, although ordinarily she would have. (The store wasn’t even open on Sundays. Sometimes it seemed he just got the fidgets any time he was home too long.) Instead she seized her chance to telephone each of her sisters and consult with them about Lindy. “I mean,
you
never had this happen, did you?” she asked one of them. (Sherry? Megan?) “The child is completely beyond our control! I don’t know who we think we’re kidding, here.”

George was working on his history project—a diorama of the First Continental Congress—and he shooed Karen out of his room when she tried to talk to him. She decided she might as well assemble her costume for Halloween. She was planning to go as Castro; already she had a cigar borrowed from Maureen’s father. The beard would be a problem, though. She wanted actual texture, not something drawn on with eyebrow pencil. In the end, she found a ball of black yarn in her mother’s sewing cabinet and took it back to her room to experiment with.

“I just can’t read her. I can’t understand her,” their mother said into the phone. “And yet I know that in some ways, she does still care about us. Or have some need of us, at least. She reminds me of this cat I once had—this very unfriendly black torn who flinched if you tried to pat him. But go to another part of the house and sooner or later you’d find him there too, strolling in like by accident to the very room you had just settled in.”

She couldn’t be talking to her sisters anymore, if she had to explain which cat she meant. She must have moved on to one of her girlfriends, Joan or Dot or Mimi, or Wanda from the old neighborhood.

Karen cut the yarn into inch-long pieces, collecting them in a pile on top of her dresser. She was trying to add up the hours that Lindy had been gone. What time had they eaten supper last night? Six, or maybe six-thirty. And Lindy hadn’t stayed through dessert. “Sit!” their mother had said. “You haven’t been excused yet, miss. The rest of us aren’t finished.” For a while after that, Lindy had more or less percolated in place—you could practically hear the springs coiled inside her, like in a jack-in-the-box—and then, “Mom!” she had said. “I promised! I’m late!” And their mother had said “Well-1-1,” on a sigh, and Lindy had exploded from her seat and left the room. That must have been at seven or so. Seven last night till seven this morning was twelve hours, and five more hours till noon made seventeen, and now it was past three p.m. and Lindy had been missing almost one full day.

If Karen told their mother now, with their father not around to keep things on an even keel, their mother was sure to panic. (She was always so ready to leap ahead to the direst possibility—the corpse by the side of the road, the gauze-wrapped mummy in the hospital bed.) But if she waited until their father came home, he would ask some uncomfortable questions. Why had she said yes, Lindy was in her room this morning? Why had George claimed that Lindy had told him she wasn’t going to church? Their father was so upright. So honest. As their mother had said, more than once, “We’re talking about a man who insists on putting money in the parking meter even when he finds that someone else has left enough minutes on it.” It was better to tell their mother alone. You could rely on her to understand if you did something a little bit wrong now and then. She was more willing to see the other person’s side.

Karen squirted a drop of Elmer’s glue onto her index finger and then dabbed it on her chin. She had her mother’s chin, small and definite. In the mirror it shone white with glue; she may have used too much. She wiped her finger on a tissue and then picked up a cluster of yarn bits and pressed them against the glued place. They stuck out every which way; some clung to her finger even though she’d wiped it, and some fell off when she lowered her hand. Now the person in the mirror had three or four wild black hairs sprouting from a single spot, and her eyes were dark with worry, almost not blue anymore, tensed in a way that made them seem rectangular.

George pushed open her door, which was nearly all the way shut. He could have knocked. He said, “What’s that on your
face?
”

“I’m supposed to be Castro,” she told him.

“Why don’t you go as a witch with a wart on her chin?”

“Everyone goes as a witch.”

“Everyone goes as Castro,” he said.

“They do not.”

“Do so.”

She gave up and wiped the yarn off her chin with another tissue. “Listen,” she said. “I think we ought to tell Mom.”

He didn’t ask what she was talking about. He stepped further into her room and closed the door behind him. “Yeah, well, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe by and by, if Lindy’s not back soon.”

“She’s been gone for over twenty hours! She’s never been this late!”

“Aw, she’s just off with those friends of hers. And remember, she’s got Grandma watching over her.”

“I don’t think Grandma’s enough,” Karen said.

He shrugged. He was fiddling with the yarn bits now, gathering them up and aligning them into a tidy sheaf between his fingers.

“I don’t think Grandma knows about all the bad things that can happen nowadays,” Karen told him. “I don’t think even Mom and Dad know, maybe.”

“Oh, those kids are okay,” George said. He must mean the kids in black. “They’re just a little freaky, is all.”

“It’s not them, so much; it’s the . . . what they get into,” Karen said.

Although she wasn’t sure, herself, what exactly they got into. It just seemed to her that Lindy was different after she’d been with them. She looked different, smelled different, spoke in a different, lofty tone of voice. Instead of raging at her parents she acted coolly amused by them, which somehow seemed much worse. She baited their father with questions about Eustace—he was pretty hardworking for a colored man, wasn’t he? almost like a member of the family, wouldn’t you say?—and their father was too dense to catch it. She complimented their mother on her inventive use of canned pineapple rings—”The Dole people ought to put your picture in a magazine ad!”—and her world-famous Pu Pu Sauce (enunciating the name too distinctly, while George and Karen tried not to laugh), and their mother, who was smarter than their father, took on a faintly uncertain expression before she said, “Why . . . thank you.” At such moments Karen felt that her parents were so innocent it was scary. How could they be relied on, even? How could they be trusted to raise three children to adulthood?

“Here’s the thing,” she told George. “We’ll go to Mom and say we both all at once remembered we didn’t actually hear Lindy speak when we peeked into her room. We just
assumed
she spoke. So we realize she might have been gone since yesterday evening.”

“Why don’t we wait for Dad,” George said.

“Yes, but Dad will think we weren’t being truthful or something.”

“But you know how Mom can get sometimes.”

“I say we tell her,” Karen said.

“
You
do it, then, if you don’t mind all that screeching.”

They faced each other, both with their jaws set. On the phone their mother was saying, “Oh, yes! Men. Nothing they do would surprise me.” To Karen, this was reassuring. Somebody—someone or other—must be spinning out some long-winded grievance of her own. Their mother wasn’t so unusual after all; she had lots of company in her . . . well, not craziness, maybe, but . . .

If they told her about Lindy, it could be she’d act perfectly reasonable.