The Bride of Catastrophe (17 page)

“… that something wonderful was pouring out of
him into her!
” Pop said, and I thought how beautiful and right the phrase must have sounded, when she wrote it, and how it must cut Pop to the quick, though the more he repeated it the more ridiculous it rang. “This
boy!
I can't, I can't cope.”

Dolly sat beside him, her arm over his shoulders, her face a pale mask of disapproval. Born into the world we'd made, she'd had to grow to fit into the odd bits of space that were left to her; we'd have crowded her out of existence if she hadn't been so prickly. She refused to live, like the rest of us, according to Ma's caprice. Looking for an alternate canon, she tried every rule she saw. She would be consistent, grave, cautious, she would speak no evil, she would do unto others, she would honor her father and mother, somehow. She was right, we were wrong. Wrong, silly, and false, but she would love us in spite of ourselves. And admire us, in spite of herself—how we shimmered, in our silly falsity!

“Ma doesn't know what she's doing,” Dolly said grimly, and downstairs I heard her charge through a couple of weird chords toward the familiar refrain—that bloody torrent depicting a ghastly war. The worst consequence of war, of course, being the loss of safety, dignity, love. The wandering alone, longing to touch the stream of one's own life again where it flows through another being. It was impossible to listen without grieving.

Though there was no war, no cruel dictator, no great sweep of history at fault: we were hoist by our own petard. My mother was playing, for her husband, the music of her passionate lacklove, her anguished need. A need, like the leak in the roof that he had neglected until the door was jammed shut, the house beyond repair.

“My
children
,” Pop said, as if he was standing over our lifeless bodies. “To lose my children…”

“Listen, you two can work this out,” I said, feeling a dart from Dolly's direction.

“What would you do if you found a letter like this?” he asked. “A letter to another man?”

“He's hardly a
man
,” I started, but of course this was the wrong tack. “She didn't
send
it,” I tried. “If you found it, she couldn't have sent it.”

“She
felt
it, honey. I guess that's what's important. She felt it,” he said, with certainty as if he'd set his foot down on something solid and could catch his breath.

“She hurt his feelings,” Dolly said plaintively. She hadn't fallen in love yet—she couldn't know.

“That happens,” I said, and saw her mind snap shut. Everyone knew how coldhearted and ambitious
I
was. We heard a car coming down the dirt road, a sound so rare there that we used to dive behind the stone wall when we heard it, as if it might be the phantom of the world outside, come to steal us away.

Sylvie jumped up. “That's Butch,” she said, “I've gotta go.”

I followed as she ran down the stairs. Ma stopped playing and held her prayerfully for a minute, in a silence that felt like a fresh cold breeze, blowing the heavy music away. As soon as we walked out the door, she started again.

“You see what it's like,” Sylvie said. “I had to get out of there.” Butch was there in his little pickup, with a tough, defiant look on his face as if for him a smile was a sign of defeat. Or as if he was afraid I'd keep Sylvie from leaving. A little beige dog was sitting up front beside him like a good schoolgirl, and it leapt into Sylvie's arms as soon as she opened the door.

“Look,” she said laughing, “this is Springtime! We found her in a dumpster!” She slid in beside Butch, with the dog wrapped tight in her arms. She wanted me to see this tableau, to show me that she was safe, and loved. They drove away under the thick, flickering masses of the June maples, the beauty that belied everything in our hearts.

“She'd have slept with him anyway. This way she doesn't have to lie.” Ma missed a few beats explaining this, but turned the page and kept playing, so I couldn't point out to her that it's hell enough to struggle apart from a man when you're grown up and don't live with him, but when you're sixteen, and you don't have anywhere else to go …

As we got ready for bed, Dolly picked up my wheel of birth control pills and asked what they were. When I told her, she said: “So you'll never—you can't have a baby?” There was a shiver in her voice, a sense that I, having gone away, had betrayed them, had
become
the phantom of the world outside. She sat there with her Raggedy Ann doll on her lap as if it was her own child.

“Don't be silly,” I said. “Of course not. Just not right now.”

I'd been taking them since that day Ma sent me to the doctor and had nearly forgotten why. Now I supposed I could stop. Though Philippa took them, for the estrogen, she said. We'd stood grouchily at the sink together in the morning, swilling them down like a couple of cowboys in a saloon. Thinking of this, I felt how alone I was, suddenly—it was as if the wall beside me had fallen away.

We'd had canned mushroom soup for supper, because it was all we could find in the cupboard. Then Dolly had reached way in back and pulled out a jar of blackberry jam with a square of gingham over it.

“I remember the day we made that,” I said. It had been much too hot but we'd been happy for some reason, ready to undertake something. Teddy was maybe three, hands and face stained purple and scratched all over from bumbling into the thorns. He rode on Ma's hip as Ma stirred the jam. I sterilized the jars and now was melting paraffin in the battered old pot we used, and Dolly cut the gingham. It was the life my parents had intended; we were managing it here, for a minute distilling the essence of goodness together and preserving it against the sorrows to come.

“Do you think it's still good?” Dolly was a nervous eater, she even hated things with raisins because they made her think of bugs.

“Probably,” I said, but I didn't want to open it and be proven wrong. I wanted to save it so I could keep believing in it.

“I'll just have some yogurt, if there is any,” I'd said, and Ma and Dolly had turned to me with the same shadow of suspicion on their faces. Was I turning into a person who liked yogurt? Because Ma didn't, which meant that by eating it, I would defy her, step outside the circle of her magic, and become ordinary, Midwestern, Republican, Nazi—who knew where it would stop? Seeing how things were going, Ma (who
did not
care about possessions) had gone back to the piano, while Pop threw his things helter-skelter into the back of the truck. After the temporary custody hearing the next day, we had to be out of the house for good. Ma had rented another one in town—old Mrs. Shipman, the cat-lady's place. Pop was just planning to get in the truck and drive as far as he could. Neither of them had invited me.

*   *   *

ALL NIGHT
I listened to my parents berate each other in the next room, like a prisoner eavesdropping on a torture. The words were indistinct but the tones—of pleading, of the lash, and the cold hatred, sharp sobs and cruel silences—froze my blood. They couldn't pull apart without desecrating all the hopes and beliefs they'd used to share. Finally a barren silence fell and I could hear something running back and forth inside the walls. Only two weeks ago I'd been holding back the sweet viburnum branches so Philippa could stuff steel wool into the chinks of the foundations of her house, against mice. Then she'd settled back into her chair to read the Marquis de Sade.

*   *   *

IN THE
morning, my parents took Teddy and Dolly, both cars, and all the tension and misery in the house with them to the County Courthouse. Sylvie and I were to spend the day packing, and waiting for Butch to deliver her, I sat on the back steps with my coffee cup, closed my eyes, and almost felt my mother's presence as I had years ago. The sun sparkled on the brook and she was the person she wanted to be, gentle and content: if you spilled something she wiped it up without thinking and absently kissed the top of your head. She brushed the grass back and forth in hopes of finding the four-leafed clover that would save her, make her gentle and content always. Where was it? Where?

*   *   *

“
WHAT'S NUREMBERG?
” Dolly asked me that night.

“A city in Germany,” I told her. “Why?”

“The judge said we might have to have the next hearing there.”

“He did?”

Dolly nodded gravely, and I looked at my father, who shook his head.

“He told your mother that accusations such as she makes against me are generally tried in Nuremberg,” he explained. “Nice guy, the judge. Witty. In over his head.”

The judge had asked Dolly her preference, and she'd chosen Pop.

“Well, he had to have
some
body,” Dolly had said, setting her jaw. “Otherwise it's not fair.” Teddy was to stay with Ma, and Pop was to pay her a thousand a month.

“
I
give
her
money?” he asked. “She's the one who has a teaching certificate. Anyway, she can live on the wonderful thing that pours out of his eyes.” He—he and Dolly—were going west, where people laughed at things like child-support laws. He'd built a fire in the fireplace and was pulling out sheaves of old papers—the kind you save because you can't quite throw them away, though you can't quite bear to look at them again either—to burn. Ma, of course, was at the piano, and the music was aimed at Dolly now.

When the phone rang she kept on playing.

“It's not for me,” Pop said, staying by the fire. Dolly looked from one to the other, and drew herself up, above their childishness, and went to answer it.

“It's for you,” she said to my mother.

Ma turned a cold, blind gaze on her and kept playing. Dolly's existence had become too painful for her to acknowledge. It reminded me of what had happened after Forsythia died—I'd done something that tore through Ma's warmth into the black emptiness beneath, and she couldn't look at me anymore. I expected Dolly to crumple, though I remembered that I'd refused to. I'd drawn myself in and kept stonily apart, watching for the moment when I could get away. Dolly held the phone out stubbornly, two red circles blazing up in her cheeks, repeating: “It's for you.”

“Ma,” I said, over my shoulder. “Answer the phone.”

She got up and went over to take it, saying “Hello?” and then an immediate soft “Hi. Oh, hi.” One syllable. We knew then who it was. Pop stared into the fire, mesmerizing himself, and we all listened, as we used to listen from our beds for the sound of her voice in the morning.

“I can't…” she said. “… No, I … no … no … yes of course but … well … maybe … I can try, but …
you know I can't talk now
.” She listened a minute and her tone changed, the authority sifted out of it and she sounded jealous and wary. “Who's that?” Then calmer … “Oh, oh, I see … I'm sorry, all right…” To hear the longing in her voice, the anxious wish to please him, was like coming over a rise in the road and seeing the house in flames.

My father's globe still stood on the piano. It was fragile and he intended to take it in the front of the truck with him when he left. The world it showed no longer existed, of course, but the thing itself was handsome and solid, and I closed my eyes, touched it, and spun it around, feeling Ceylon and Abyssinia and Saint Petersburg pass smoothly by. Elephants, parapets, cinnamon, silk! Of course the minute television got inside them, they turned out to be Sri Lanka and Ethiopia and Leningrad, full of famine and pestilence and war. When I opened my eyes, I saw my finger was resting on—entirely covering—the New England states, and considered that I must be fated to stay close to home.

“No, it's
not
that,” Ma said into the phone, “it's
not that at all
.” She was trying to tell him something without letting us know, something that was going to change the course of our lives. I couldn't help thinking that this Larry had a place to live, even if it was only a wretched converted garage, and he had a motorcycle, and parents, and now our mother too.

“I will, I'll try,” she said, hanging up.

“A student,” she explained to us and sat back at the piano without playing. All that time I'd been wishing she'd stop, I hadn't realized that the music was like a wild sea swirling over a terrible arid expanse. Now I shuddered at the silence.

“Go ahead, Ma, you can play,” I said, but she stood up suddenly, stepped over the heave in the floor, and went toward the kitchen as if she meant to go out the back door. Then came back and sat down again.

Then up, saying: “I'm going out,” defiant as a teenager, so that I felt like a mean, straitlaced mother for wanting to restrain her.

“Can I come?” Teddy asked.

“No!”

“I never get to go with you, it's not fair,” he said. “Pop wouldn't take me to the dump yesterday, he wouldn't take me for a ride in the truck, and it's not even a school night…” He looked around at us—he knew we weren't taking him with us into the heart of the story.

“Hey, they took you to court today and
I
had to stay home,” I teased, and reached to swing him up onto my lap, but he twisted away.

“They didn't take me in with the judge! I had to go with the lady!” he cried, stamping his feet, but glancing over at me in fear and bewilderment to see if he was wrong. I looked back at him with a guilty bewilderment of my own. I'd joined the adults and betrayed him, acting as if the custody hearing was a family outing, as if his intuitions were all wrong. He peered into my face, weighing what I'd said against his own feeling.

“It's a terrible day, honey,” I admitted. “I know it. We just have to bear it, and work hard to keep calm.”