Uncertain Ground (16 page)

He reached for the whole bunch of sheets, but I wheeled away quickly and ran for the stairs. Behind the banister I shouted at him, “You’ve got an over-sexed imagination, Emmett. Why don’t you use it to dream Doris, or Jane, or some other girl is in bed with you every night?”

“How do you know I don’t?”

I laughed then, laughed so hard I nearly dropped the pillow and balled up sheets down the length of the stairway.

Peering over the banister with a puzzled look on his face, he hollered, “What’s so funny?”

“You are!” Still clutching my bundle, still laughing, I went on downstairs.

Earlier that morning Aunt Bertha had agreed to let me sleep on the living room couch. She’d gotten so accustomed to Mowrey’s snores, she confessed, she hadn’t even heard Emmett’s. Perhaps it would be better for Emmett to take the couch? He usually came in later, didn’t he?

I insisted I’d be better than Emmett at keeping the living room presentable.

Bertha smiled and said she supposed so since she knew Emmett didn’t know how to make a bed, much less to fold sheets.

I folded and hid the sheets behind my pillow on the couch in Aunt Bertha’s cluttered living room, my room now. From the first night I slept better there, even though in that old house with its wooden floors and walls, I could, on still nights, hear both the Mcleans and Emmett rumbling above.

C
elia, it’s your mother!”
Aunt Bertha hollered from the top of the stairs.

Mother’s voice on the phone sounded strained, “Honey, there was this boy asking for you at the door this morning. Tony … Tony Gregory. Isn’t he the one from Colorado? I had my hair in pin curls and cold cream all over my face.” She half-laughed. “And there he was on the front porch. I thought it was the yard man ringing the bell.”

I swallowed and waited. It was around one in the afternoon. Aunt Bertha was probably still awake upstairs, listening maybe.

“He wanted to know where you were. He looked awful. Said he’d been driving all night. I asked him if he wanted to sleep awhile here. No, he just wanted to know how much further it was to Galveston.”

I folded myself cross-legged on the floor next to the little table that held the phone. I’d been stretched out on the couch fascinated by an old book called
The Story of the Galveston Flood
written by a newspaper man in l900, who promised it would be
Complete, Graphic, Authentic.
I’d found it the day I’d been searching for the atlas. When the phone rang I was reading horrifying stories told by survivors, and hated having to put the book down. Now it lay splayed out on the marble-topped coffee table, the cover showing a man in a boat with a rope in his hands looking toward a lot of heads bobbing in the sea. In my chest I had a strange hollow feeling, in my head the same hollowness expanded. I couldn’t think. All I could do was stare in the direction of the front door and imagine Tony driving toward Galveston in the black convertible his parents had given him earlier in the summer when he promised to stay in law school. I blinked at the phone’s receiver.

“Celia!”

“Yes … yes, Mother.” What was he doing in Leon? I’d written him, told him I was in Galveston. “Mother, when was he—? What time did he—?”

“About eleven, just about two hours ago. I would have called you then, but I had to run out and stop the yardman. You know how he is. He was supposed to just trim the nandina. He’d nearly cut it to the ground and was moving on to the bridal wreath. I had to tie strings on things to show him where to stop. Then I needed to get lunch ready, so I called you as soon as possible afterward.”

It was about seven hours by car to Galveston from Leon. If Tony drove straight down, he’d be there by that evening. If he stopped to rest. … He’d driven hundreds of miles already.

“Was anybody with him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He really needed some sleep. I don’t know which one of us looked worse. He’s a good-looking boy, but he’s a wreck. I thought I should warn you he was coming your way.”

I thanked her, hung up the phone, and went back to the couch like a small dumb animal going back to a familiar spot. Emmett had already gone out prowling around somewhere. Aunt Bertha must have returned to her nap. She’d shouted down to ask if everyone was all right. By that she meant, if no one’s injured or dead, don’t wake me. Long distance calls, to the Chandlers, generally meant trouble.

Lying on my back, the book open on my chest as though I might weigh the hollowness down with it, I remained numb. For a while I stayed there, breathing normally, but feeling as inert as the carved wooden ladies holding the coffee table on their heads.

When Bertha woke from her nap about two and came down, I went upstairs to reread Tony’s last letter, which I’d hidden in my suitcase. He didn’t give the slightest hint he’d come. School was still in session. There were no holidays I could think of in August. I remembered Alicia Dorman’s letter well enough. Tony was seeing his old girlfriend again, and I’d been sure he
was more interested in her availability than in my distance. How could I be responsible for luring him down to Texas? I’d been so unhappy that I hadn’t trusted myself to write him after tearing up my angry letter. Had he guessed someone had told me about Judy? I wasn’t sure I even wanted him to come. Why was everything so complicated?

I kept going over the hours, the simple mathematics of his arrival in my head. It was one when Mother called after lunch … if he’d left Leon when he’d checked by the house around eleven, by six or seven, depending on whether he stopped to eat or sleep and how fast he was driving, he would be in Galveston. There was no way, as much as I tried to guess, to know exactly when he’d be there. Knowing exactly, I was determined, would have helped some, an idea that kept circling around in my head.

Luis called about the movie we were supposed to see that night, a re-run of
Show Boat
that had just come to town. I made excuses. A friend had suddenly decided to drive down. I didn’t say whether my friend was male or female, the only dodge I was capable of inventing at the time. I certainly wasn’t going to invent a fake cousin.

Aunt Bertha had to be told. On my way to the kitchen I eyed the phone wishing I could talk to Alicia Dorman, but I couldn’t call her from the house. In a family where only death and disaster messages were delivered long distance, I couldn’t ask permission to phone a friend in Colorado just because I needed to talk, which was all I could admit to Aunt Bertha. I didn’t want her to hint to Emmett that Tony was particularly important. He was simply someone I’d known in Colorado who’d decided to come to the coast I said.

“He must have gotten some idea in his head. I didn’t ask him to come.”

Aunt Bertha gave me a knowing smile. “You’re sure you don’t want your friend to stay here, Celia? You could move back to that empty bed upstairs, and your friend could have the couch.”

The mere idea of going back upstairs to sleep by Emmett’s side again made me furious.

“No.” I blurted, then caught myself, and added, “No, Aunt Bertha. You’ve got enough company already. He can stay at a motel … the Jack Tar. That’s the nearest one, isn’t it?”

I edged toward the downstairs bath and jumped into my bathing suit while still talking about how comfortable Tony would be at the motel through the half-closed door. Then I moved out of the side door as fast as I could. I couldn’t stand the idea of Tony Gregory staying at the house, not with Emmett hanging around leering and asking rude questions, not with Uncle Mowrey and Aunt Bertha watching our every move. No matter what they might happen to think of him, they would be. … Oh, they would be forever there, too close to us in one room or another.

What right had he to turn up without any kind of notice? Why had he gone to Leon when I’d written him two letters from Galveston? Probably it was my fault, or he would say it was. I must have neglected to say how long we were staying. He could have called me in Leon, and Mother would have told him where I was. What kind of surprise did he think he was going to spring on me? Didn’t he realize she’d call? Questions swarmed in my head. I couldn’t understand why he acted as he did. I never had been able to.

Walking fast toward the Gulf, wearing a beach jacket over my suit, I was carrying only a towel and a few dollars in one pocket. Finally I found a pay phone in a drugstore two blocks from the seawall. It was hidden behind a pile of pink beach balls, the kind people bought for their children when they came down for a weekend, cheap ones they could afford to leave behind or let a sneaky wave steal.

I got some dollars changed and pushed coins in the phone with shaking fingers. In my hurry I dropped two quarters on the floor, so I stood on one while raking the other toward me with my foot. Repeating the number to the operator, I prayed that Alicia would answer. It wasn’t likely. There were about fifteen
girls living in the same house. I let the phone ring ten times before someone I didn’t know told me she was possibly in class. Whole minutes ticked away while I waited for the girl to look around.

“She isn’t upstairs,” the same voice with a midwestern accent said. “Could I have her call you?”

“Yes. … No! Tell her Celia Henderson called. I’ll … I’ll get in touch later.”

A clerk, a woman who had a heavy looking pile of dyed black hair spilling around her high pale forehead, the same one that changed dollars for me, asked as I slowly walked out, “You get your call through?”

I nodded. It made no difference whether I had or not. What good would it have done to talk to Alicia? Some. Maybe she could have told me what Tony had been doing lately, if he was still going out with Judy, if he’d said anything about taking off for Texas. What if she didn’t know the answers to any of those questions? Talking to her would still have helped; she could have, at least, commiserated. I would have loved talking to Alicia.

I tried to think of Tony as only a boy driving in my direction, a boy who had somehow decided he had to see me. We had agreed he might come down to Texas at Thanksgiving, but that was four months in the future, and the whole trip was totally conditional, based on how one or both of us might feel in November. I’d planned to see him—if he came—on home territory in Leon. Instead he was coming to Galveston which, for me, was uncertain ground at best. Emmett would be hanging around. Aunt Bertha might resume worrying and watching as she did when we first came, and Luis— Where would Luis be in all this?

I walked on down to the Gulf, and without wading around on the long shallow slope, and swam deliberately out to water just above my head. Moving parallel to shore, out of reach of the low tide’s waves, I could swim as much and as hard as I wanted and what I wanted was to swim beyond thinking, to
be so physically strained my tumbling questions would stop. Unfortunately I found I couldn’t swim that hard. The more I decided not to think about Tony showing up, the more I thought about it. By suppertime I couldn’t eat.

Emmett noticed; so did Aunt Bertha. Uncle Mowrey either didn’t see the plate of food cooling in front of me or tried not to. I was getting ready to leave the table when the front doorbell began ringing.

When I opened it I could see Tony was practically leaning on the bell. I usually got a good deal of pleasure just looking at Tony Gregory. He was tall and fair, and he moved surely, aware of himself but not posturing. His face was generally animated. He smiled easily. Tonight his features were drawn, his forehead flushed with heat, and his chin, lightly stubbled. Fatigue had worn such shadows under his blue eyes that his face looked bruised.

When he saw me he slumped against the doorframe, reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “Found you.”

Unable to say a word, I waited before him, almost paralyzed by conflicting emotions. I’d wanted so much to see him while I’d been so sure I should forget him. I wanted to trust him, but he wasn’t trustworthy. Now here he was. I held my right arm out toward him like a child frozen in one of the strange positions we used to assume when we played statues. Impulsively I moved toward him.

Before I could touch him, Aunt Bertha’s voice rose behind me. “The poor boy. Bring him in, Celia,” she insisted as if she thought I should try to carry him in the house.

I swung the door wide and let Tony step into the hall. Quickly I introduced him to Bertha who was still clucking in the background. “You look exhausted. Come in. Come on in. There’s plenty of supper.”

He swore he was too worn out to eat. After he made his excuses, I drove him over to the Jack Tar. Its sailing ship sign, placed above the building, blinked on and off making the ship look like it was rocking across neon waves.

“God! Make it quit!” Tony said.

I led him to his room. We didn’t say much. He was too weary, and I was still half-numb. Promising to return when he called the next morning, I drove the car back to the Mcleans’ house. The black convertible, impractical for traveling, still smelled new even though it had been driven through most of Colorado, the Oklahoma Panhandle and the entire length of droughty dusty Texas.

In the morning Tony was still a little groggy when we met for breakfast, but he was able to tell me before he’d had coffee that he’d quit law school. The course in procedure was more than he could bear. I couldn’t tell whether it was the course or his own willingness to quit which decided him. Some of both, I guessed. His parents didn’t know yet. He hadn’t said anything to them; he just got in his car and drove to Texas to tell me.

We were eating in the same diner Luis had taken me to the night I ran away from the Balinese. Somehow its shabby tidiness was comforting; the row of revolving stools covered with slightly peeling light green plastic, the chrome napkin holders all polished and shining in each booth and, just beyond the last seat at the counter, the pie display—two glass shelves of precise triangles of chocolate meringue, lemon meringue, and cherry with a lattice crust on top—all appeared to promise that someone was in charge, and the day would continue in an ordinary fashion. Tony had already complained that his eggs were too hard, a familiar fault of cooks in Texas as well as those in Colorado. He was lamenting fry cooks in general when a big broad-chested man who might have been a truck driver or a wharf worker came in. Obviously a regular, he said “Morning,” to the waitress who immediately placed a cup of coffee in front of him. Surrounded by calm, I grew calmer.