The High Cost of Living (20 page)

“Oh, but I'll be tickled to be traveling in George's brand new Cordoba with an FM radio. We can pretend we're on a real trip.” Honor was bubbling again.

In the back seat Leslie felt guilty. They did not try hard enough to take Honor out of her house. They did not insist enough. The girl was overwhelmingly excited by a trip to a house in a subrub with a real fireplace, a visit to what would doubtless be an ordinary Chinese restaurant, the prospect of a Saturday morning drive in a new car out to a rural slum thirty miles south. They did not try hard enough. Honor was hungry for experience, yet they came to see her out of their lives without attempting to let her into theirs, without trying to free her. Leslie promised she would do better. She would begin immediately and seriously to free Honor from her mother's excessive protection. She would not take advantage of the situation for any gain to herself. She would not think of herself as the world that Honor needed to explore. She would not confuse her attraction to Honor with anything necessarily liberating. If after Honor was freer in her choices she chose Leslie, that might happen, it might well happen. She would be a good friend to another woman, and that woman would grow stronger.

Sometimes she thought Honor enjoyed lying to Mama, that it became an end in itself. She drove George's Cordoba to the Rogers' house first thing Saturday morning because Honor was supposed to be spending the day with her only, rather than with her and Bernie, because as Honor explained, Mama knew she had gone to the ballet with Bernie the night before and had insisted upon reacting to the event as if it were practically a date. Therefore on Saturday morning Honor decided it would be necessary to de-emphasize Bernie. Although it made more sense geographically to pick up Bernie first, she drove to Honor's without him.

When she rapped on the door, however, Mrs. Rogers let her in and Honor was nowhere visible. “Do have a cup of coffee,” Mama said, smiling faintly.

“Er … Honor isn't ready yet?”

“Honor forgot I had made a doctor's appointment for her this morning for a check-up. Her father has taken her.”

“Oh. Will she be back soon?”

“I don't know how she happened to forget. Wishful thinking, no doubt. Are you sure you won't have some coffee?”

“Perhaps I should come back later.” Bernie was going to be crushed with disappointment. Why hadn't Honor called?

“I did want to speak to you for a moment If you have the time?” A gentle irony tinged Mama's voice. She had a fine speaking voice actually, low, musical, but as capable as Honor's of taking on a cutting edge. Baby blue eyes fixed on her, waiting.

Leslie sat on the edge of a chair. She accepted coffee and waited, wondering where Cam was. Beyond an occasional rattle and clank of chains from the basement and a low mutter of growling, she heard no other sounds of living beings in the house. Dead, all dead. Mama had poisoned them all with her coffee. They lay each in their bedrooms in the awkward postures of strychnine seizure. Within seconds she too would be lying on the carpet turning blue and lashing her spine like a rattlesnake until she gave a final spasm and lay still. Mama would plant them all in the back yard in the sorry bulb bed that ran against the western side of the slot between neighboring slots, back to the tool and die shop. She would die with Valerie's name on her lips and be buried between Honor and Cam.

“I expect you think I'm a bit overprotective with my daughter?” Mama did not go on but waited and finally outwaited her.

“Well, you know, er …”

“That I'm overprotective?” Again she waited, smiling faintly. Her blonded hair was less curly this morning and her scalp shone pink where the morning sun turned her hair to insubstantial fluff. She sat well on the sagging couch, braced against the sag. Her shoulders did not give at all. She was a well-built woman still, wearing one of those cotton housedresses of the sort her mother used to wear. Middle-aged swaddling clothes. This one still had some crispness, pleasant blue and white flowers that reminded her a little of the chrysanthemums on George's new couch.

“Well, er, I suppose it's a question of what you're protecting her from, in a way, you know. Er, ah, I mean, some things we all want … her to be protected from … but, then, again …”

“What kind of things?”

“Lightning and grizzly bears, rapists, that kind of … But she has to meet people and learn to act independently too and take her place …” She could not quite croak out “in society” or “in the world”; the clichés simply dissolved in her mouth to a solid wad of glue and she was stuck.

“Yes, I know you do think I'm overprotective. But what you don't understand is that Honor is more delicate than she appears.” Mama's eyes grew large and watery with sadness. Her lips parted slightly and she looked earnestly into Leslie's eyes. Her head was tilted to one side, her plump hands caught each other in her lap.

Would she be surprised if I kissed her? Actually the problem was that she was responding to Mama as a woman rather than as the prop, Honor's mother. That was inappropriate both from Honor's point of view and Mama's. But she could not fend off a pang of empathy for the woman there, married to a preoccupied gray ghost, with one daughter off in Ohio being privately and distantly unhappy, Cam about to leave home as soon as she could finance it, and the swan's-neck daughter stealthily preparing to snip the threads of coercion. Mama was still attractive, although she put no effort into it. All the effort, the energy, the fantasy were sucked from her own life into Honor. What did Mama think of what she had settled for? Was it fun to be a floor supervisor for the phone company? Did she worry about being laid off? What would she do after Honor too fled the house? Did Mama look forward to a pension? Did she ever lie in bed and want to die rather than to get out of bed one more day?

“Honor had rheumatic fever when she was eight, you see, and it left her with a weak heart. She may appear robust, she may appear normal, but she's not. She has to avoid violent exercise and too violent emotional upheavals. You know she doesn't take part in the more demanding parts of physical education at school? She's excused for medical reasons. Because of her heart. I imagine in fact you didn't know. Honor doesn't like to talk about it. I think she's secretly ashamed of not being normal, of having to take care of herself in a way that few children her age must. But it requires a certain amount of restraint on the part of everyone around her. Not to allow her to overdo. Not to overstimulate her. I think yesterday was very exciting for Honor, and no one is happier than I when I see stars in her eyes. But when she wanted to skip her doctor's appointment this morning to go running around some more, I had to put my foot down. You must agree to help me protect her also, to be a true friend to Honor. Because her heart could give way. She's not able to do all those things a normal teenager could.”

“I don't believe a word she said,” she told Bernie. “I'm going to ask Honor.”

“But if it's true, she might be furious.”

“If it's true, I want to know. And I want to know what doctors she's seen and what their opinions are and what can be done about it. I can't believe she has to go through life with a label invalid around her neck.”

“It is a bit pat. Mama reveals all. Fucks up my day as if incidentally.”

She was driving and Bernie was navigating. An early overcast had moved off east and the day was warm, suddenly, by eleven. “It must be seventy!”

“Why couldn't she come? But thank you anyhow for carrying me on my sentimental journey.”

They were driving down West Jefferson, the old bricks showing through the asphalt. The river was always beyond the factories, beyond the rotting empty green grounds of deserted Fort Wayne, beyond the mills of Great Lakes Steel. On their right ran a row of old bars, unbroken fringe to the decaying ethnic neighborhoods beyond. They were headed downriver. “Why am I always thinking that we're playing at being adults? I just had the feeling vividly. That here we are in George's car, playing. Is it because we waited so long to grow up that we don't feel grown ever?” she asked him.

“To be grown up in America, it's to buy a car like this one. The poor never grow up. George is Daddy. Besides, you and I will never be Daddy or Mommy, so how can we grow up anyhow? What do you want to be when you grow up, my son? I want to be an old fag, Daddy.”

“Is that why I always think that I'm playing whenever I find myself feeling good? Because the way I feel good I'm not supposed to be feeling? Right now we look like we're supposed to. A couple out on a Saturday drive,” Leslie said.

“But we aren't doing it right. We ought to be on I-Seventy-five in this car, not clumping along between the mills and the bars. It makes me think of my old man, that's why I dig it. We're sneaking south.”

“Besides, we won't be poor. We're both wiggling upward, Bernie, we've shed our class. We've flayed ourselves bare and plastered over our bleeding flesh with accents and books and classes and everything we weren't and wanted to be.”

“Do you like yourself?” He had a southeastern Michigan map open on the lap of his jeans. He had shrugged off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. One arm rode on the rolled-down window, the other on the back of the seat.

“I guess not. Not yet. I'm an unfinished project and I show too many signs of haste and wretched planning.” She laughed shortly, more of a cough.

“How come you didn't go home this vacation? It can't be more than an hour or two further on the bus from Grand Rapids to Ludington.”

“I'm disowned.” She laughed, again with no mirth. “Sounds melodramatic, like disinherited. You'll never see a dime from my purse again, that is if I ever have one.”

“Ah. They wouldn't join the supportive parents of gays associated.”

She snorted. “Yeah, that did it.”

“Why did you tell them?”

“Don't you have to finally? I mean, sometime? It made me feel so … weird when I came home. All the questions about boyfriends and when are you going to get married and don't you want to meet a nice boy. I wanted my mother to understand.”

“So one Christmas morning you said, Guess what?” He made a gesture of opening a raincoat to expose himself.

“Actually I brought Val home with me for Thanksgiving. After all, I was twenty-one. We'd been together for two years. Yeah, I had a fantasy. I wanted something from my mother, some sign, some approval.” She took her hand off the wheel to scratch her head roughly. “I can't go home now. For real. They won't have me. You wouldn't think it would bother me, but it kind of does. People murder and their family sticks by them. It makes me mad, really.”

“It makes you feel rotten, really, you goose.”

“Should I pretend it doesn't?”

“To me, no. Orphans together.”

“I wanted to tell my mother. I wanted her blessing. I wanted to say to her, Look, here's Valerie. I love her and I live with her, see?” She made a face so fierce it stretched her cheek muscles. “To hell with all that. It stinks. I'm a theoretical lesbian nowadays. The rest of my life is just as unreal to them—grad school, George, quantitative history.”

“My home fell apart. It started when Ann-Marie died. Then my mother. She was still young, she never got fat like other mothers. She was thin as a girl. People would think she was our sister. She had TB on and off but she died from breast cancer. She didn't even know she had anything wrong. She had so much trouble with her lungs, the other thing came out of the blue. The doctor who found the lump wasn't even that kind of doctor, he hit it by accident when she came in for the TB test. They said she had cancer, she went in the hospital and they cut her breast off. She came home and she cried a lot, she was so embarrassed, and then they took her back in. They said it was all through her body. She died in the hospital.”

“But your father, wasn't he still alive? Had he left you?”

“No. He was the quiet kind of alcoholic who goes along for years and once in a while he has a stupid accident and gets fired, but mostly he manages. He wasn't a noisy drunk, he didn't beat anybody up. He was just quietly drunk almost all the time. He liked to be oblivious, that was how he coped. But he couldn't cope with four kids. The school started complaining because we were missing a lot and the social workers descended like flies. We were managing. I mean, we were used to managing. We made our own meals. We used to put a lot of jam in the oatmeal and cook it up that way for breakfast—two cups water, one cup oatmeal and one cup jam. We had hot dogs and TV dinners and fish sticks. Gourmet cooks we weren't, Les.” He put his hand on her knee, demanding her attention. “We'd wash the silverware and put it all in a pile on the table in the middle and everybody'd take what they wanted. We each got one sheet to roll up in. Things like that bothered the social worker pests. That we didn't make the beds. Everybody got a sheet and a blanket and we slept in our rolls. We were into cowboys. We called it our bedroll. Even the little kids could manage to roll up their bedroll and unroll it at night.”

They were pursuing Jefferson along the river in Wyandotte, past the North Works of old Wyandotte Chemical (now BASF), past the trim rows of the turn of the century houses, dark-stained brick-red, past the new condominiums on the river, past the South Works, where the air began to be painted with stench, where the old houses were wooden and run down and closer together, downriver. They rolled up the windows. Politely she pried his hand off her knee. “That's the foot that works the accelerator, Bernie.”

“See, we took care of the old man, instead of him taking care of us. We were dirty and shabby but we got ourselves fed and dressed and pretty much we managed to attend school. When we got colds or flu, we took care of each other. Every night we made some kind of supper and in the morning breakfast, and we ate everything on the floor by the TV set. Every few days when we ran out of plates we did the dishes. Once a week we'd put all the garbage out. The neighbors were bugged by us too.… I think basically all the adults around were freaked out that we were obviously managing. I think they really hated that we didn't need them. It made us outlaws.”