Family Night Read online

  Margaret walked into the kitchen and back through the bedroom. “Tracy, my brother has to drive a long way. All the way back to Wilmington.” She knew Tracy had the brass ornaments. For sex purposes or emotional ransom, for a practical joke. She didn’t really want to know the reason.

  “They could have rolled. Did you look everywhere?” Tracy said.

  “Where is everywhere?”

  “There—”

  Margaret saw the finials behind the stereo speaker. She nudged them out with her toe and handed them to Cam. They all walked outside to Cam’s truck. The men were grinning, looking straight ahead, the way she’d seen boys grit their teeth after a successful hazing. Cam got into his truck. Margaret said good-bye, but Cam didn’t answer. He gripped the side mirror, waggled it until it was adjusted right. Margaret told her brother that whatever he decided to do about his father would be his own doing.

  Tracy spent a great deal of time with his Sex Anonymous sponsor. He was helpless against his lust for fresh emotional swells and depths of feeling, but Margaret was never certain if Tracy’s private demons were a respectable threat or if perhaps they might be a sign of an extended, swooning adolescence. It might be an unwillingness to let rich feelings subside with age. She tried to contain her own disturbing impulses, but if she addressed a particular fear, it broke off into several splinter groups.

  After her divorce, Margaret went to one meeting of Emotions Anonymous when her phobias increased and she couldn’t ride the city buses. Each time the driver tugged a lever to check the hydraulic door, she hated the screak of the vinyl caulking. It was the same consideration that made her shy from elevators when the vertical seals squashed shut. Even public telephone booths used these rubber sweeps. She was told that she suffered panic reactions. Perhaps, after a bad marriage, a buildup of psychic toxins are released in a swarm. Emotions Anonymous was slow and gluey with saccharine phrases of encouragement. Tracy continued with Sex Anonymous.

  “Just how many kinds of anonymous groups are there?”

  Tracy said, “It’s a fad. It’s like clipping a deck of cards to the spokes of your bike. It’s fifty-two different cards, but they’re all clipped to one wheel turning the same way.”

  Margaret said, “Some people have real problems. You know, health risks and such. They don’t require anonymity at the YMCA Stroke Club.”

  “You’re talking about support groups. Look at the paper, there’s a list of them. Here’s one, ‘Stuttering Support,’ and ‘Chronic Pain’ meets at seven P.M. ‘Single Again,’ they’re having a cookout—”

  Tracy’s therapist had recommended Tracy attend some Sex Anonymous meetings when he thought he had located Tracy’s masochistic streak. The therapist said this streak was exacerbated by Tracy’s rather flagrant, self-possessed androgyny. Tracy was married, divorced; he had several serious seasons with different women. Then there was a year when he was knighted in the piss halls, escorted by a moody entourage to the gay bars, the Venetian Room, the Boulevard Room, the Back Room. Margaret noticed the names of these bars sounded much more intimate than places he might take her. Their favorite spot, the Penalty Box, displayed photos of hockey players and boxers.

  The therapist was certain that Tracy’s splintered orientation came from surgery trauma.

  “He says my operation gave me lifelong reverberations,” Tracy told her.

  “Your appendix?” she said. She knew he had his appendix out when he was seventeen. It was a routine operation which went awry when the cyclopropane tank malfunctioned, the gauge froze and stopped supplying the anesthetic. As the OR staff fumbled to administer a different drug, Tracy regained consciousness, waking to a sharp saucer of pain, rimmed and stinging. Then it was the sight of his belly clamped open, his penis taped against his thigh. It took a moment or two to sedate him again as he struggled to escape from the table. A nurse kept her palm cupped against the vent in his abdomen as he thrashed his legs. He saw her eyes above the green pleats of her mask; her eyes were pinched at the corners and looked quite merry. She couldn’t suppress her bliss when the ho-hum operation turned into a Keystone Kops sort of thing.

  During his weeks in the hospital, Tracy had dreams about the nurse in that mask. Sometimes the mask was not a mask but a bikini bottom pulled taut over his own mouth until he couldn’t breathe.

  “How does your therapist know?” Margaret said. “Do you tell him everything?”

  “It’s his job to identify something and label it. A shrink has to label everything. They once called it a ‘sea change,’ it happens,” Tracy said.

  The term “sea change” was a little too romantic for what it really was—a small clutch of gay lovers, each of them jealous of one another. It was just Tracy researching his own capacities. One evening, a fellow wielded a Swingline industrial staplegun and Tracy broke off from that circle. Margaret tried to imagine how Tracy had allowed someone to sink staples all over him. The scars were tiny yet deep, rows of parallel flecks across his chest and belly.

  When she was fourteen years old and in love with a teen idol, she purchased magazines with centerfold posters of her favorite young singer. There were always staples interrupting the smooth shading of his skin, staples slashing his face, his hips. She liked to trace his sideburns, the planes and shadows of his lips and all the pores of his skin, the little squared dots of whisker coming in. Her stepmother was pleased that she loved something unreal. The radio called him an overnight sensation; Margaret believed it was just jealous ridicule on their part.

  “Did you ever love a magazine idol?” she asked Tracy.

  “Natalie Wood. Then and now.”

  Margaret looked at her feet as she ground the heel of her shoe back on. “Natalie Wood is really perfect for you,” she told him, trying not to sound stung. “Natalie looks like you. You could be related.” The actress made Margaret forget to ask Tracy about his sessions with the Swingline.

  But Tracy wanted her to make further admissions. “Where’s your centerfold now? He’s a wormy pinup, thin as an onionskin in some landfill. He’s a rotted cameo, a composted Adonis. He’s getting lots of necro—”

  “Okay,” she said. She never knew what to do when he talked like this. She remained sitting at the kitchen table as he stood over her. He weaved slightly, side to side. He was weighted, off-balance, sinking into misery. This was exaggerated by the fact that he was physically lanky. A man with this kind of build, svelte and eager, looks twice as gloomy. His hair fell across his eyes in paralyzed curls. His brow crinkled and looked like a heavy filigree, an ornate fresco about to topple from the crown of a building. Then he stood before the little mirror in the hall and raked his hair with his hand. He picked up a protractor and with its sharp point he made a part down the middle of his scalp. He didn’t wear a part in his hair. His hair was naturally wavy and lifted off his face, angling back in lovely drifts, but he had an odd habit of stopping now and then to part it. He tossed his head and the hair resumed its thickness.

  Margaret had tried therapy off and on, but she knew it soon became something strange—a new arm of the illness from which she was seeking escape. She was not alarmed by Tracy’s sexual history; maybe he was making too much of it. She listened to his confessions. “The flesh has a mind of its own,” she said.

  Tracy attended group meetings and went out for coffees at all hours. “Too much therapy can actually cause mental fatigue,” she read from the newspaper. “Looking inward is strenuous.”

  Tracy said, “That’s true. It’s tiring.” Then, Tracy saw a report of an airplane crash on the news. The plane went down because of something called “metal fatigue.”

  “The wings can just peel back, come off like chocolate coating from an ice cream stick,” he told her. He liked the similarity of the terms mental fatigue and metal fatigue. These terms were reassuring; he no longer had to say he felt blue or he felt down.

  In the beginning, Margaret asked the college girl upstairs to sit with Celeste, and she went along with Tracy to have coffee w
ith members of Tracy’s group. They found a booth in a diner somewhere, sometimes moving from one diner to another. Margaret listened to their talk. If they addressed Margaret, she smiled and said she was just auditing. “Audit means listen,” she told them, making sure they understood she wasn’t going to yap. They talked about how hard it was at first to admit to themselves that they weren’t in control.

  “When I got out of the driver’s seat, it was the happiest day of my life,” a man said.

  Another fellow said, “Whenever I get back in the driver’s seat, I fuck it up, man, it’s the end. I can’t be in the driver’s seat. Never again!” Tracy discussed spiritual signposts, the lyric versus the clinical voice of the I Ching as Margaret watched her doughnut decay on a saucer. Its white glaze turned clear in just an hour; in two hours the grease and sugar had merged with sodden granules of cake, making a circle of clotted amber.

  After that evening, she stayed at home with her daughter. Tracy would return to her, no matter the hour. On bad nights, he rubbed his face with his hands as if trying to remove a gummy substance, his sadness jelled over his sharp features. She saw enough disturbed people, real madmen, at her job teaching grammar at the Adult Correctional Institution in Cranston. She handed out pencils and collected them at the end of each lesson. “A pencil can gouge out someone’s eye,” her supervisor said. Even the soap was shaved so they couldn’t put a heavy bar in a sock and swing it over their heads. Yet she recognized that Tracy’s sometimes arrogant, stylized remorse was more compelling, more miserable in its heightened forms than the cut-and-dried maniacal fits of the worst psychotic inmates.

  II

  Margaret first met Tracy at a Shriners’ Parade. When her divorce went through, she waffled back and forth between a feeling of stunned relief and several new and higher forms of anxiety. Cam often telephoned long distance; he was ending his marriage with Darcy, and they tried to cheer one another. He said these were the dog days for them both. “Horse latitudes,” he said. She thought this was a silly idea, but she remembered how sailors looked for signs of land—the floating kelp, driftwood, the birds increasing.

  To kill time one evening, she took her child to watch the Shriners’ Parade. Celeste was excited by the clowns, but it was Margaret herself who wished to be distracted. She was recovering from a bout of threadworms, a condition that her daughter had contracted at the school and then passed on to Margaret. It wasn’t a serious illness, but its symptoms were nightmarish. While lying in her bed, she believed she felt the worms churning through her lower bowel seeking their breeding place. She took medication with her daughter, but for weeks she imagined the worms coiled through her. She hardly ate and could not sleep.

  Celeste was too small to see over people’s heads, and Margaret tried to lift her up once and again. A man was standing nearby. It was Tracy. He recognized something about Margaret. Her flickering smile, her clean slate. Then he talked to Margaret, shouting at her over the racket. It was a strange, appealing way to meet a man, to have him shout small talk, his voice booming. Now and again, he was forced to pause, to grin at her for long moments when the drums or cymbals were too loud. Soon Celeste was riding his shoulders.

  Majorettes hurled batons into the twilight, the silver sticks froze high in the air before falling back. As the girls marched out of sight, Margaret studied their fringed white boots, the way the leather tassels shivered. Then, the floats arrived, towing crippled children and children recovering from hideous burns. The crowd applauded the children. Margaret smiled at Tracy; she turned back to watch the parade at measured intervals. She didn’t want to appear anxious or hungry, but already she was feeling renewed; she thought of the tribes of worms inside her and doubted their existence. The sight of the maimed children seemed appallingly reassuring. Margaret looked at Tracy, who steadied Celeste at a comfortable height above the street. After the parade, Tracy called her. She was surprised to hear his full name; it was the same name as someone who wrote for the local newspaper.

  “Yes,” he told her, “I wrote that feature on plastic flowers. It was an entire warehouse of flowers, a synthetic Amazon jungle.”

  Margaret said, “I’ve read your column, but I didn’t recognize you from the sketch next to your by-line—”

  “That’s a mystery sketch. It’s yanked from the files. Who knows who he is.”

  “It’s a sketch of someone else? Isn’t that crazy?”

  “You read the column? That’s the important thing. My editor tones it down. It’s too bland. If I slam politicians, it’s usually just a bad haircut or a loud sport jacket. You know, Mayor Cianci wears those navy shirts and the white ties—”

  “I like your writing.”

  “You do? It’s nothing. I have this facility. I can’t stop myself. They print it, then I wad it up in a ball. It’s cleansing. In just twenty-four hours I write it and throw it away in the trash. Last night I went to seven discos to write my Energy Crisis report for ’78. I’m behind Carter on this. They’ve got colored lights under the glass block floors in these places. A strobe takes more energy than a constant-on.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s just one of these details. Don’t give it a second thought. Did you see my story ‘Satin Connection’? About those lingerie emporiums on Thayer Street? After the story ran, they sent me some free camisoles, mostly Big Girl sizes they couldn’t unload. Interested?”

  Without the marching band in the background, his voice was even and gentle. He waited for her to form her opinions, to answer his friendly proposals. She heard him take a breath and hold it, a silky tug against the receiver.

  Cam learned about her lover, and he tried not to ask her any questions. “Just tell me one thing, Margaret, where does this leave me? You have your divorce, now I’m getting my divorce. You said it yourself, it was a tandem kind of thing. We were going to keep an eye out for one another. Cool our heels. Now you’re joining up with someone all over again?”

  “Into the frying pan, I know,” Margaret said. “I’m crazy for punishment, I guess. I should have waited.”

  “That was what we talked about,” Cam said.

  “Tracy’s just like a friend, really. He’s nice to Celeste,” she told Cam. “I mean, isn’t that lucky?”

  Tracy was good with Celeste because he pined for his own daughter, who lived four hundred miles away. Sometimes he took Celeste aside and made plans without Margaret’s approval. One day during the winter, Tracy drove Celeste and Margaret into the country. It started snowing again, dusting the grey drifts with new white, and it was hard to see the shoulder of the road. Tracy stopped the car at a small amusement park, closed for the winter.

  “I remember this place,” Celeste said as she jumped from the car and her legs disappeared through a crust of snow.

  Margaret pulled her collar together and looked back over her shoulder at the car. “We can’t just leave the car there, can we?”

  “Leave it,” Celeste said. “Isn’t this great? Everything’s buried.”

  “There ought to be something in here,” Tracy said.

  “It’s closed,” Margaret said.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Aren’t we trespassing?” Margaret said, but she followed Tracy and Celeste through the big gate and into the center of the park. In one of the pavilions, bumper cars had been left in awkward arrangements when the power was shut off at the end of the season.

  Celeste was amused by her echo in the high arcade. Tracy put Celeste in one of the cars and Margaret climbed into another. Margaret didn’t expect anything to happen, but Celeste sat alert in her seat, her hands gripping the wheel. Tracy pushed Margaret’s car forward until it rammed her daughter’s. Next, he went behind the girl’s car and she steered it at Margaret. They crashed. Celeste was laughing. For ten minutes Tracy shoved the cars; his hair was drenched.

  Margaret watched his face become an exhausted mask, strained by some interior effort rather than by his physical exertion. She told him to stop
but he edged her around and threw her car into the low wall. He rushed Celeste’s car into her. The collision caused Margaret to tumble onto the oily floor, but Celeste was unharmed. They walked back to the car. The sweat in Tracy’s hair started to ice and peel away from his temples.

  Celeste’s father came to get her on Friday evenings to take her for the weekend. Tracy listened for the buzzer. When it rang, he held the girl’s coat by its collar, positioning the parka behind her back, guiding the sleeves on, tugging the tight elastic cuffs over her wrists. He looped the long muffler four times around her collar.

  “She takes all that stuff off once she gets in the car,” Margaret told him.

  “No, she won’t.”

  Margaret’s ex-husband took Celeste, saying he had to hurry home to a queerly suburban activity, such as smoking two-inch pork chops in his new backyard contraption.

  “It’s just a year-round barbecue at your place?” Tracy said.

  “A smoker doesn’t grill, it cures meat. Any time of the year,” Celeste’s father told Tracy.

  Margaret watched Tracy’s eyes narrowing in wariness. “Don’t worry about her,” she told Tracy when her ex-husband had gone.

  “The influences she gets there, shit,” Tracy said.

  “It’s just that suburban stuff, it’s harmless. Unless Celeste really grows to like it,” Margaret said. “We influence her, too, you know. Maybe we should think about that.”

  “What can we do to her, make her too human?” Tracy said.

  “Yes, I think someone can be too human, too unhappy that way. You, of all people, should know that.”

  He didn’t look pleased with her remark, so she poked him. She said she was referring to his work as a journalist. “I mean you write about the human condition for the paper, don’t you?”

  “I write against the human condition. It’s a subtle distinction, maybe you have been missing the point?”

  She didn’t argue.

  Margaret came home from work one Monday and found Tracy scratching notes for a story. On his knee, she saw the little ball peen hammer they sometimes used to crack shellfish.