“Maddy is your stepsister,” B.B. said. “You’re never going to be able to marry Maddy.”
His son stared at him.
“You understand?” B.B. said.
Bryce pushed his chair back. “Maddy’s not ever going to have her hair cut again,” he said. He was crying. “She’s going to be Madeline and I’m going to live with only her and have a hundred dogs.”
B.B. reached out to dry his son’s tears, or at least to touch them, but Bryce sprang up. She was wrong: Robin was so wrong. Bryce was the image of her, not him—the image of Robin saying, “Leave me alone.”
He went upstairs. Rather, he went to the stairs and started to climb, thinking of Rona lying in bed in the bedroom, and somewhere not halfway to the top, adrenaline surged through his body. Things began to go out of focus, then to pulsate. He reached for the railing just in time to steady himself. In a few seconds the first awful feeling passed, and he continued to climb, pretending, as he had all his life, that this rush was the same as desire.
Moving Water
My brother’s wife, Corky, is in the wicker chair in my bedroom tweezing her eyebrows, my magnifying mirror an inch from the tip of her nose. When I first met Corky, she was a student at Hunter; she wore long Indian dresses and high heels and had long hair. Now she wears running shoes and baggy slacks, has a sort of bowl haircut, and goes by her nickname instead of Charlotte. Plucking her eyebrows and being pregnant are two of her new self-improvement plans, along with taking driving lessons. She has come into the city from Morristown to spend the weekend, while Archie—new husband, my brother—is away on business. She is sitting by the telephone, waiting for her call to the obstetrician to be returned. Archie, on the phone last night, insisted that Corky check out whether it was all right for her to continue with her aerobic dance classes. Her end of the conversation was a long protest about his trying to make her into a neurotic now that she was pregnant. She gave me the phone and asked me to reason with him, but I stayed out of it. He and I discussed the progress of the wisteria. The wisteria in the back garden has leafed out and shot up four stories to my roof, where it cascades over the low brick railing and has worked its way through the skylight. In the morning, I find crumpled leaves and small purple flowers scattered over my sheet.
I’m stretched out on the bed, printing a letter to my grandmother. My grandmother can’t read my writing, but she is insulted when I type. She calls my typed letters “business letters.” I have a piece of lined paper underneath my writing paper so that I will remember to print large enough. As my letters go on, they tend to look as if they’d been put through a funnel. I reread my last sentence: “AS SOON AS THE WISTERIA GROWS, THOUSANDS OF TINY ANTS CLIMB UP AND COME IN THROUGH THE SCREENS.” It seems not just distressing but alarming, put in such large, blocky letters.
The phone rings, and Corky pounces on it.
“I feel so silly asking this, but my husband . . . Oh, the nurse . . . But I don’t have any bleeding! . . . Is this because you think I’m
I ink out my last line and print instead, “ISN’T IT AMAZING THAT A HUGE WISTERIA VINE IS THRIVING RIGHT HERE IN NEW YORK CITY?”
I go into the living room. The view out of the tall windows is of the projects the next street over. Below me, in the back, are gardens, with high walls dividing them. Next door, two actors stand at opposite ends of their garden, each reading aloud from an identical book.
“ ‘What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, or to the dreadful summit of the cliff . . . ’ ”
“Again!” the actor from the far end of the garden hollers.
“ ‘What if it tempt you . . . ’ ”
“Oh, yeah. ‘It waves me still. Go on, I’ll follow thee.’ ”
As I’m watching, trying to block out Corky’s mounting hysteria, I see a kid of about ten, who has hauled himself up so that he can see over the fence of the adjacent garden. He throws something—a stone or a bottle cap—and screams, “Get back where you belong, faggots!,” drops to the ground, and runs toward his back door. Then I hear the ice-cream truck come down the street, playing its carrousel music. As my grandmother recently wrote me (with a fountain pen, flawlessly executing the Palmer method), “Sandy darling, everyone in New York’s always worked up.”
“All right, I’ll do it your way,” Corky is saying, as I go back to the bedroom and sit on the bed. She sounds like some brave actress in a nineteen-forties movie. This notion is reinforced by her bottom lip, quivering.
Two o’clock in the morning, and Corky and I are the last people in the restaurant except for Wyatt, my longtime friend. He’s just shaken some vegetables around in a pan and brought them to the table, along with a bottle of pepper vodka. A truck rattles by. Corky and I share the last slice of lemon meringue pie. Wyatt’s key ring is on the table: four keys to the restaurant, so he can set the alarms before he leaves.
“This place is pretty crazy,” he says, picking up a snow pea. “I thought that nothing could be worse than teaching fifth-grade grammar. But knowing all the rhymes on the jukebox is probably worse than teaching grammar.” He takes a joint out of his shirt pocket. “You know what happened tonight? My father’s accountant came in here with a guy. They had on T-shirts with swirls of pink and blue and green—it would have been good protective coloration in a basket of Easter eggs. The accountant almost died when he saw me. Then, Tuesday night, my old Hackensack heartthrob, Dorie Vesco, came in. I saw her sitting at the bar. She was all tied up. She had on one of those blouses that lace up the front and those shoes with strings that you wrap around your ankles. The guy she was with was a real jerk. Dorie Vesco and I recognized each other at the same instant, and when I hugged her the guy said, ‘This some kind of a setup?’ ” He laughs. “Wyatt and the cat,” he says, rubbing his foot over an orange cat that has just darted under the table. “She’s been around here longer’n me. Longer than anybody. Cat can’t set alarms, Wyatt can.”
We are in what used to be Jason’s favorite restaurant. I used to live with Jason; now we’re apart. After Wyatt took a job as a waiter here, though, Jason stopped coming. “Honey, it’s just too odd,” Jason said to me one night. “I don’t feel comfortable being waited on by the same person I always call when I have a question about the correct use of apostrophes.”
When we go out, Wyatt hands Corky the keys to the car. I open the back door, muttering about what a bad idea this is, because she has only had three driving lessons so far. She no more than pulls away from the curb than a cop car comes up alongside us and stops for the red light. I catch one cop’s eye and look away. Our car is angled strangely through two lanes. No cars are in back of us or around us. Next, one of the cops catches Corky’s eye. “You know what?” he calls over. “If you were a red Toyota with six guys inside, we’d have found what we’re looking for.” Then the cop in the driver’s seat leans forward and hollers, “Now he’ll tell you that if you twinkled you’d be the North Star, and we could follow you so we don’t get lost.”
