“What job are you thinking of, Mother?” he says.
“Oh—painting wicker white, or something. Painting the walls yellow. If you’d had amniocentesis, you could paint them blue or pink.”
“We’re leaving up the wallpaper,” Oliver says. “Why would a thirty-year-old woman have amniocentesis?”
“I hate wicker,” I say. “Wicker is for Easter baskets.”
Barbara stretches. “Notice the way it goes?” she says. “I ask a simple question, he answers for you, as if you’re helpless now that you’re pregnant, and that gives you time to think and zing back some snappy reply.”
“I think you’re the Queen of Snappiness,” Oliver says to her.
“Like the Emperor of Ice Cream?” She puts down her Dutch detective novel. “I never did understand Wallace Stevens,” she says. “Do any of you?”
Sven has come back with his camera and is focusing. The cat has walked away, but he wasn’t focusing on the cat anyway; it’s a group shot: Barbara in her tiny white bikini, Oliver in cut-off jeans, with the white raggedy strings trailing down his tan legs, and me in my shorts and baggy embroidered top that my huge stomach bulges hard against.
“Smile,” Sven says. “Do I really have to say smile?”
This is the weekend of Barbara’s sixtieth birthday, and Oliver’s half brother Craig has also come for the occasion. He has given her an early present: a pink T-shirt that says “60.” Oliver and I brought Godivas and a hair comb with a silk lily glued to it. Sven will give her a card and some orchids, flown in from some unimaginably far- off place, and a check. She will express shock at the check and not show anyone the amount, though she will pass around his birthday card. At dinner, the orchids will be in a vase, and Sven will tell some anecdote about a shoot he once went on in some faraway country.
Craig has brought two women with him, unexpectedly. They are tall, blond, silent, and look like twins but are not. Their clothes are permeated with marijuana. When they were introduced, one was wearing a Sony Walkman and the other had a tortoiseshell hair ornament in the shape of a turtle.
Now it is getting dark and we are all having spritzers. I have had too many spritzers. I feel that everyone is looking at everyone else’s naked feet. The twins who are not twins have baby toes that curl under, so you can see the plum-colored polish on only four toes. Craig has square toenails and calluses on his heels which come from playing tennis. Oliver’s long, tan feet are rubbing my legs. The dryness of his soles feels wonderful as he rubs his feet up and down the sticky sweat that has dried on my calves. Barbara has long toenails, painted bronze. Sven’s big toes are oblong and shapeless, the way balloons look when you first begin to blow them up. My toenails aren’t polished, because I can hardly bend over. I look at Oliver’s feet and mine and try to imagine a composite baby foot. As Sven pours, it is the first time I realize that my drink is gone and I have been crunching ice.
In our bedroom, Oliver cups his hands around my hard stomach as I lie on my side facing away from him and kisses my hair from underneath, slowly moving down my spine to where his lips rest on one hipbone.
“My glass of ice water just made a ring on the night table,” he says. He takes a sip of water. I hear him sigh and put the glass back on the table.
“I want to get married,” I mumble into the pillow. “I don’t want to end up bitter, like Barbara.”
He snorts. “She’s bitter because she kept getting married, and when the last one died he left almost everything to Craig. She’s bored with Sven, now that his pictures aren’t selling anymore.”
“Oliver,” I say, and am surprised at how helpless I sound. “You sounded like your mother just then. At least talk sense to me.”
Oliver slides his cheek to my buttock. “Remember the first time you rubbed my back and it felt so good that I started laughing?” Oliver says. “And you didn’t know why I was doing it and you got insulted? And the time you got drunk and sang along with Eddie Fisher on ‘Wish You Were Here’ and you were so good I laughed until I got the hiccups?” He rolls over. “We’re married,” he says. He slides his cheek to the hollow of my back. “Let me tell you what happened on the crosstown bus last week,” he goes on. “A messenger got on. Twenty or so. Carrying a pile of envelopes. Started talking CB chatter to the baby on the lap of a woman sitting next to him. The woman and the baby got off at Madison, and between there and Third he started addressing the bus in general. He said, ‘Everybody’s heard of pie in the sky. They say Smokey in the Sky. Smokey the Bear’s what they call the cops. But you know what I say? I say Bear in the Air. It’s like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—LSD. LSD is acid.’ He had on running shoes and jeans and a white button-down shirt with a tie hanging around his neck.”
“Why did you tell me that story?” I say.
“
“It’s so late,” I say. “It must be after midnight. I’m exhausted from sitting all day, drinking and doing nothing.”
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he whispers. “I can’t stand to hear Barbara and Sven making love.”
I listen, wondering if he’s putting me on. “That’s mice running through the walls,” I say.
Sunday afternoon, and Barbara and I are walking the beach, a little tipsy after our picnic lunch. I wonder what she’d think if I told her that her son and I are not married. She gives the impression that what she hasn’t lived through she has imagined. And much of what she says comes true. She said the pool would crack; she warned Craig that the girls weren’t to be trusted, and, sure enough, this morning they were gone, taking with them the huge silver bowl she keeps lemons and limes in, a silver meat platter with coiled-serpent handles, and four silver ladles—almost as if they’d planned some bizarre tea party for themselves. He’d met them, he said, at Odeon, in the city. That was his explanation. Craig is the only person I know who gets up in the morning, brushes his teeth, and takes a Valium blue. Now we have left him playing a game called Public Assistance with Sven, at the side of the pool. Oliver was still upstairs sleeping when I came down at eleven. “I’ll marry you,” he said sleepily as I climbed out of bed. “I had a dream that I didn’t and we were always unhappy.”
I am in the middle of rambling on to Barbara, telling her that Oliver’s dreams amaze me. They seem to be about states of feeling; they don’t have any symbols in them, or even moments. He wakes up and his dreams have summarized things. I want to blurt out, “We lied to you, years ago. We said we got married, and we didn’t. We had a fight and a flat tire and it rained, and we checked into an inn and just never got married.”
