The Bride of Catastrophe (42 page)

“All they really need is money,” she said. We were back at the apartment and she was looking around at all of Lee's furniture. “It's hard, with a baby—they're doing the best they can, Butch works and works, it's a hard life.”

“No,” I said. “It's not money that's lacking, it's
emotional
wherewithal,” I tried to explain. “They're totally at sea, how can they support each other? How can they make a good foundation for their child?”

She looked at me without comprehension. “I suppose the library hired you because of all the college?” she asked.

“I suppose that had something to do with it,” I said.

“Not everyone has to go to college, Beachy,” she said sharply. “Plenty of people do just fine without it. They learn a trade, they work their way up.”

Was she turning into my father? She'd failed to mold herself completely in Ma's image, and look what had happened. Dolly had to listen to him, all day, every day. She didn't know a single person west of the Mississippi, except Pop, and she was in danger of becoming lost in him, of knowing the exact labyrinth where his heart and mind came together, and not one other thing.

I'd escaped; Dolly had followed him into the fire. I wondered if I could pull her back somehow without falling in myself.

“Lots of people do fine without college,” I said, carefully. “It's absolutely true that there are all kinds of paths through life.”

“Pop never went to college,” she said, recognizing my wariness and resenting it.

“Indeed, Pop never went to college and look at all he's done,” I said.

“Right!” said Dolly, who was unaccustomed to irony. Her face relaxed. I felt her tension drain away. “I wish more people could understand that, Beatrice,” she said.

Lee came in with a folded towel and washcloth for her, in a very tasteful shade of eggplant—she'd bought them when we moved in, to complement the pink and gray tiles in the bathroom. I checked Dolly's face—yes, she was properly impressed, she had never seen towels like this. And she seemed slightly uncertain—wasn't it wrong somehow to have nice towels? I myself had always had a secret lust for towels, and thick rugs, and rose-printed curtains like the ones from my mother's girlhood, before she got lost in her jungle of rage.

“It's very nice of you to have me,” Dolly said to Lee. “I'm so glad to have the chance to get to know you.” She opened her bag and set her things on the dresser.

“You look beautiful, Dolly,” I said, because she did, in a very cool way, and because we always said this, out of love, to each other.

A ray of hope shone in her face but immediately vanished. “I can't look in the mirror, Beachy,” she said. “I know I look just like Pop.”

Like the exact sort of person her own mother despised. She got into bed and Lee and I moved around the kitchen, setting out the breakfast things. “So, I'll pick up juice at San Juan's tomorrow,” I said. “And you'll get the fish at Louie's?” We'd already planned this, but I wanted to feel like the head of household, whose child was settling down to sleep. It was an accomplishment, this calmness. It was worth the sacrifice.

“Good night, Dolly,” I said at her door, but she didn't answer, and I thought,
She's at home here.
I intended to keep her.

Lee always seemed anxious when she found me reading, as if I might find something in a novel that would turn me against her. She never said as much; in fact, she'd often bring me a cup of tea, or ask if my light was bright enough, but I could feel her discomfort. Once, when I was involved in a book and read right through breakfast instead of looking at the paper, she asked, “What's it about?” with a kind of irritated disbelief, and later used the phrase “the life of the mind” as code for “an affectation.” So I didn't read when we were at home together, and once we lived in the city and I began to feel really guilty toward her, I stopped reading at all—I was determined not to betray her. Now, though, I picked up my copy of
Middlemarch
, with all the notes I'd taken in Philippa's class, and brought it to bed with me. Lee was asleep. It was dark and quiet, and the bouquet of anemones I'd settled for hovered there in the vase. The étagère stood as serene as if it had been passed down to us through the generations, and I thought for a minute that there might be real possibility in my future, that my promise might be more than some fantasy my mother had cooked up. Stetson saw it too, after all. Falling asleep, I thought of him.

*   *   *

“
IT'S SO
nice to have a sister who can take me places, like this,” Dolly said, as we got on the bus to go to the aquarium. I, who'd been planning it all month, was excited as a child, but she sounded mostly dutiful. It occurred to me that she was constantly pretending—to be excited and happy, to rely on Pop, to be fine without Ma … until the pretense took on its own life, protected her so she didn't have to see herself alone in a desert. She could tell I was happy to be the big sister, the guide, so she was playing the little sister for all it was worth. Well, I was going to show her a better way. There'd been a photograph in the paper of a tank full of billowing jellyfish, “moon jellies,” whose transparency held light so they seemed to glow in the dark. When Dolly saw this, she might know some of the things that were possible if you broke through the invisible barrier around our family.

I'd offered her yogurt for breakfast and she'd looked at me as if I must be out of my mind. She'd keep Ma alive in her absence by keeping to Ma's ways, and this meant despising yogurt and persons who liked yogurt, and other foods or habits or words. As we walked down the sidewalk to the bus stop, she stepped conscientiously over each crack.

“I've never been to an aquarium,” she said, with assiduous awe. If only I could act the parent, and she the child—well there was safety in that, for both of us. The bus ride might take us exactly where we wanted to go, and when we stood before the enormous tanks in the dim undersea light, watching the fish flash by, we'd become the children we were supposed to be, amazed and joyful as the world opened out before us.

“You're going to love it,” I said, thinking how damned inept our parents were, how
I'd
show Dolly the world.

I'd seen the aquarium from the bus before, at the intersection of Park and Vine, but there was a new subdivision going up along Vine Street, and where I remembered a little corner gas station set in a tangled woodland there was a landscape of sandy canyons now, with backhoes grinding over them on heavy treads. The light was green, and the other direction seemed to lead straight into the woods, so I pulled Dolly along westward.

“It's just the next block,” I told her. Vine Street had no sidewalks, just a wide drainage ditch with lengths of plastic pipe laid beside it. One or two houses had already been built—a little boy was trying to pedal a tricycle in a muddy driveway while his mother smoked a cigarette in her open door. I nodded to her and a shadow crossed her face—I felt as if she'd laugh at me if I asked her for directions, and if she laughed at me I'd probably disintegrate, leaving Dolly all alone. We walked on along the street, which had widened to four lanes and curved assuredly through the empty land—it must lead somewhere, and the aquarium seemed the likeliest place.

“It's kind of barren here,” Dolly said, “I mean, in a very nice way—because they're improving it.” We could hear the heavy equipment downshifting to climb the hills, which were several stories tall.

“Is it like Wyoming?” I asked.

“Oh, no!” she said. “You know, Wyoming's got the richest mineral stores in the whole country. There's no sand there at all—it's all rock and clay and if you dig down just a foot the earth is all red and gold and green.”

“I meant, is this a little like where you live—a development?”

“I guess,” she said, not wanting to contradict. “Maybe it will be, when it's done.” We rounded the corner with no sign of the aquarium. We seemed to be in the midst of a choppy sea of sand with no compass, and on the horizon a lowering sun. I picked up the pace, determined on the next curve. It was the middle of March and the pastel sky promised spring but the wind was from the north and right in our faces.

“Do you think maybe it's moved?” Dolly asked. (In our family it was considered very impolite to suggest someone had taken a wrong turn.)

“God, how would you move an aquarium?” I asked, though if they had moved it, this wouldn't be my mistake. “No, it's right around here, I've seen it,” I said. “Not much farther now.” The suspicion that I might be walking in the wrong direction only spurred me on: I could not, I would not, be the latest person to lead Dolly into the wilderness; she trusted me and it would be too awful to disappoint her. “Just another minute,” I said.

“It's nice to have a little walk,” Dolly said. “Stretch my legs.”

“I wish the wind would stop,” was the next thing she said to me. Besides its being cold, the wind was full of sand now, which meant that either it had switched direction or that we had. We'd come to the bend I'd pinned my hopes on, and could see down a long stretch to the light at a distant intersection. There were no longer any trucks or cranes working, and the land was churned up with the trees still rooted in it. We'd walked more than a mile.

“It's just up at the light,” I said. It was right near a stoplight, I remembered.

“Do you think they'll have a water fountain?” Dolly asked. I looked over at her—her cheeks were flushed and she was beginning to limp a little—her shoe had worn through the heel of her sock.

“Oh, they have a whole cafeteria,” I said. “We'll sit down and have toast and tea!”

She smiled in the deepest way—toast and tea was a phrase from our childhood, or really from my mother's childhood, during which there had been, she told us, department store lunchrooms where tea was served with cream cakes and fresh strawberries. She spoke of it with such longing that we'd longed for it too.

“I don't know why Pop wants to live way out West,” she confessed suddenly. “It's not like there's anything for him to do, really, just sit by the phone and watch the news. I don't really understand.” She worked at understanding, for a second, but in the end, the idea didn't appeal. “We're together, that's the important thing,” she reminded herself.

We'd reached the intersection, and it was just that—eight stoplights strung up across two four-lane thoroughfares, surrounded by more raw land, with nothing else in sight except one of those impregnable telephone company structures that confound the romantic by being at once so mysterious and so dull.

“I don't know, Dolly, I can't find it,” I said. I could hear the disappointed, querulous note in my voice and I stopped talking instantly because I was afraid I was going to cry and I knew there was nothing worse than having the person you rely on fall apart that way.

“It's okay, Beachy,” she said. “I don't have to see the aquarium.”

She was so sweet—I wanted to smack her. How wrong, how perverse of her to keep renouncing and renouncing, first for my father's sake, now for mine. I had promised her something I couldn't give her, pulling her along the side of a sewage gully to bring her nowhere, and still she refused to be angry, or even disappointed. I sat down on the bank of the ditch and rested my head on my knees. The great flood of cars that had been dammed up at the light gave way suddenly and roared past us.

“I've screwed up,” I said then, trying to sound lighthearted. “It must have been the other way. We'll have to turn around,” I said. “I don't know what else to do.”

She nodded. “It really doesn't matter, Beachy,” she said. “It's just nice to get to spend some time with you.”

She meant to mean it, I knew. I stood up and dusted myself and we started back. We'd come much farther than I'd guessed—miles. I'd dragged her along, walking and walking as if no map were available and no one else would know the way, searching for an aquarium as if it was a single flower in a twenty-acre field. How long had it been since we got off the bus? It seemed to be rush hour already.

“Let's hitch!” I said, and we stuck out our thumbs the way they do in the movies, but no one even slowed. They didn't see us, or maybe we looked so pathetic no one dared to stop, lest they find themselves saddled with a pair of foundlings. I began to run, backward, with my thumb out, and to edge into the road as if I might throw myself in front of somebody's car. Now they swerved in wide arcs around us, eyes still averted.

As we came back to the bus stop, I saw the sign for the aquarium over the trees, about half a block away—it hadn't been visible from the other angle. Neither of us cared about it anymore, but we did want a drink. As we went up the steps, parched and covered with dust from the excavation, a young woman came out with a ring of keys.

“We close at five,” she said, looking at us sadly. She could see something about us that we could have kept hidden if we hadn't been running through a dust bowl for hours. She pointed to the clock inside, which showed the time as 5:02. Beneath it was a tank the size of a small room, filled with fish in shades of azure and silver-green. I thought of smashing down the door.

“It's okay, Beachy,” Dolly said. “We'll come another day.” She sat down on the step and wiped her face with her sleeve.

“It's
not
okay,” I said angrily.

She blinked, and looked at me in wounded surprise—how could it be, when she had done everything just as I'd asked her, and really, she was as good as gold, polite to Lee even while our being Lithuanian was so strange and unnerving to her—rushing to wash the dishes after dinner—she had even insisted on paying my bus fare. How could I answer her so sharply?