Family Night Page 3

  “What’s with the hammer?” she said.

  “Oh Christ,” he said, “I hate to tell you this.”

  “Tell me what? What do you hate to tell me?”

  He stood up and walked over to her writing desk. He pointed to her favorite trinket, a smooth piece of petrified wood her father had given her. “I was just tapping it,” he told her.

  “What do you mean?” she said, but it was too late, the paperweight was halved; its small violet center glistened on the green blotter. She examined the stone, she tried to see that it might not be ruined, it might be more interesting now that it rested in two separate chunks.

  “It was an accident,” he said. He looked at her for a sign.

  She shrugged. “I see. You just had to hit something with a hammer?”

  He made a florid gesture, fanning his hands open, palms up, feigning contrition, but his face was dark.

  She stood very still. Perhaps they would laugh. Tracy could make her laugh, that deep, utterly unselfconscious laughter from low in the diaphragm. If she felt a little threat, it was small, hard to discern, like a thin layer of ice that forms on a pond before it melts off in the sun.

  Then it was the bedroom. Lying beside Tracy, Margaret could still see the high end of the gallows through the bedroom window. She didn’t consider it. Margaret followed her primary instinct, which was her greed for him, for his form and weight. She loved the feel of his breath, its rich, humid phrasings against her skin. She listened for the slight congestion building in his lungs as he fucked her, the way he cleared his throat. Her sheets, scented from cheap bluing, kept riding up at their corners.

  This was when Tracy’s daylong despair seemed to charge him; it condensed in a helpless eroticism. Tracy seemed to suggest that sex had no meaning beyond its one meaning, its physical manifestation, its act. This blank assurance excited her. If his attention shifted, focused on a remote particular, he was just showing the concentration and reserve of a jaded technician. She was impressed by his fatalism and mistook it for a levelheaded calm.

  “Don’t talk. Don’t think so much, Margaret,” he said. “We want total omniscience.” She didn’t believe Tracy was any different from other people. Sex was a transgression any way you looked at it. Everyone has some first terror that describes his role. Tracy’s orientation probably had nothing to do with “surgery trauma.” Margaret’s first erotic treasure was a book cover from a dime novel. On the cover, a girl is tethered to a post. The coarse yellow cord winds under her arms and crosses again at her hips, her bare feet are tangled in kindling briar where a rosy cloud has started. Her smock is torn at one shoulder, exposing part of her breast and half the nipple’s small medallion. The fire—the girl’s sex buzzing, snapping with the twigs’ ignition, the tiny filaments of ash stirred upward. The picture had a familiarity that common sense couldn’t explain; Margaret recognized a connection. She read about these trances later on in junior college. It was an idea that a person might have lived a previous life, perhaps as an Egyptian king or Joan of Arc. Somebody’s life. The dime novel gave her this notion and the martyred figure became Margaret’s first erotic vision.

  She tried not to think of her young daughter during sex, but she heard sneezing or the little cricket chirp of a bedspring. Celeste flickered on and off in the background like a strip of wavering neon. Years before, when Margaret had slept beside her husband, Celeste always fell from bed. Every night the child’s weight shook the ceiling. The light fixture rattled, a dusty moth’s wing drifted down. The fall was not steep and Celeste was never injured, but it was a harsh event for Margaret. Each muffled thud loosened plaster chips behind the wallpaper and Margaret heard these sifting specks, the house crumbling.

  With Tracy, Margaret managed their carnal struggle with the same free rein she gave to her maternal instinct. These impulses should remain in opposition, but more often they seemed inscrutably linked. Her daughter no longer fell in the night. Margaret was tucked against Tracy, trying to sleep. Yet, she got out of bed and went into the other room. Celeste was dreaming; she lifted the girl’s wrist and massaged her fingertips.

  Cam was in the worst period of his divorce: before court proceedings, far enough into it to have lost all the minor comforts of his previous life without gaining any new advantages. After Easter, Cam moved out of his house. His last chore for his wife, Darcy, was to take the spoiled colored eggs out to the trash. He didn’t place the eggs in the can. He hurled them one by one into the street, where they rolled under the parked cars.

  He was living in his office at the Bringhurst Apartments, where he managed the units, cleaned the swimming pool, and kept the parking spaces reserved for the tenants. Margaret knew he had other duties, but Cam didn’t like to mention plunging the toilets, running a snake down the drains, or spraying chlordane to kill the cockroaches. He told her that his boss gave him extra jobs, “personal errands,” such as taking suits to the cleaners or picking up liquor for parties Cam wasn’t invited to. Cam kept asking her to visit. He called her every day, and when the telephone rang, Margaret lifted it off the hook before Tracy could get to it.

  “I don’t have anyone. Why don’t you come back to Wilmington?”

  “Is it my fault you still live in Wilmington?” she told him.

  “It’s our hometown,” Cam said.

  “I’m never going back there. Don’t you understand?” Her voice shifted to a high level, her throat closing tight on her words. She hung up the telephone.

  Tracy was standing behind her. “Listen to yourself, the hysteria in your voice—”

  “Cam makes me crazy with these ideas!” Margaret said.

  Tracy said he wouldn’t mind a change. “The Delmarva area. That’s okay. Anywhere above the Mason-Dixon is fine with me. I could try to get a job writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer.”

  “Shut up,” she told him.

  “Wilmington has a lot of growth going on.”

  “Out of the question. Who cares if it’s growing?”

  Wilmington, the Chemical Capital of the World. She recalled Du Pont’s billboards, BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY. Then, during the fuss about napalm and chemical weapons, the motto was changed to BETTER THINGS FOR BETTER LIVING. Tracy said he could probably get a job writing copy just like that for Du Pont brochures, label instructions, manuals, for more money than he made at the paper. She just looked at him.

  Cam once took a part-time position at Du Pont, afternoons after high school. His job was in a basement film library where Du Pont’s educational and sales films were sorted and rewound, sometimes spliced, before going back out. Only a few of the films addressed ethical questions: Man in the Twentieth Century and Chemicals—For or Against Mankind? Cam brought Margaret back to the tiny office. It was a small, hot room with projectors and stacks of empty film cans. She stood next to Cam in the dim light as the celluloid accelerated, lisped, and fluttered on the reels.

  It seemed like everyone in Wilmington worked for the company, and Margaret was always pleased her father had his own business. Cam reminded Margaret that Richard was just as dependent, since he distributed industrial equipment to all the Du Pont plant sites.

  Margaret disagreed. “He sells everywhere. He sells to Atlas and Hercules too, he sells to Doeskin Paper,” she said. She liked the mural on the side of the Doeskin Paper plant, a baby deer, his tail lifted like the large, oversized puff that came with her Avon Bath Powder.

  Cam shook his head. He said she was ignorant. She didn’t understand these big monopolies. They could call it the chemical industry, but it was a dynasty. To prove it, he drove Margaret up the Brandywine Valley to see Grenogue, the Du Pont family’s seventy-room mansion, French style, which overlooked the Brandywine River. The house crowned a great hill; steep pastures spiraled down in shades of deepening green until the fields touched the river. Several stone silos dotted the pastures and reminded Margaret of Rapunzel’s tower. Driving past on the county road, Margaret looked up at the castle. She counted eight chimneys, and
in the middle of the slate roof a giant cupola, big as a walk-through gazebo. At the very bottom of the hill were the servants’ bungalows. Right there, eye level, laundrywomen were hanging sheets on fresh plastic wires. The contrast excited her.

  Cam was letting the car idle, gunning the engine at the entrance to the private drive. The drive was complex, winding through many switchbacks bordered by rose hedges. Margaret thought of the winter and all the rock salt it would take.

  “Industrial pimps!” he was saying, as they looked up at the mansion.

  “Sssh,” she told him.

  “It’s like the story of Rumpelstiltskin.”

  “You mean Rapunzel,” Margaret told him. “Rapunzel’s tower.”

  “No, the other one. You know, it’s where they spin the nylon into gold.”

  A woman came out of a servant’s cottage. The woman wore a starched uniform with a Peter Pan collar, which looked unnaturally brilliant against her deep skin. Cam pushed Margaret out. She stood holding the car door, but he locked it. Margaret turned around and looked at the woman in the white uniform. She smiled back at Margaret, a gentle smile showing small teeth with neat spaces between them.

  Cam rolled his window down. “Ask her if Rumpelstiltskin is home.”

  The woman stared at Margaret and Cam, shrugged, and pointed to her lips, her ears.

  “Me-no-spicka-no-English?” Cam said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. The woman recognized this phrase and her eyes narrowed.

  Margaret reached in and unlocked her door, then she got in next to Cam. He drove the car away. “You asshole,” she told him.

  Margaret explained the story to Tracy. “You see? That’s what the Du Ponts can do, they bring out the worst in somebody. I never heard Cam say such a mean thing. You wouldn’t want to work for the company,” she told Tracy.

  Tracy said he might look into it. “Mansions don’t scare me,” he said. He told her the good thing about being a writer was that he could write anything. “Somebody is always looking to explain something, convince somebody. Sell, sell, sell.”

  Margaret was working full-time at the prison. If she didn’t want to visit Cam, she could say her job kept her. All summer, she had followed Cam’s troubles, but she refused his invitations. In August, she decided to go down and see him. “I guess I have to nudge him all the way through to his final decree,” she told Tracy. Tracy believed that Margaret and Cam’s love couldn’t be just familial. There was no true blood boundary between them.

  “He’s my brother,” Margaret said. “Why don’t you worry about the milkman?”

  “The milkman is extinct. That’s not a good example.”

  “All right,” she said, but she didn’t give him a better one. Tracy was finishing two stories for the paper, two big, puffy features that would keep him occupied. Every morning for a week he went exploring at the new indoor mall in Warwick. He liked walking from one end to the other, talking with the heart patients who exercised there. He named the heart patients’ routine “Mall Medicine.” The other article was about the 20th Century Diner in Pawtucket, so she knew he would be eating out there a few times. The diner had some good specials.

  Tracy started giving her advice the day before she left. If she found herself in a difficult discussion with Cam and her folks, if she was cornered, she should look out the window and say, “Look at that bird! I didn’t know you had bluebirds here.”

  Margaret told him he was crazy. “Bluebirds?” she said.

  “It doesn’t have to be bluebirds, it could be some kind of woodpecker, or even a dog, but make sure it’s a white dog, a whippet or a greyhound, something exotic, something to transform the moment.”

  “Is this what they teach you in therapy? To lie?”

  “It’s not lying, it’s when you have to change the subject, dispel a bad mood. A little fib can be alluring, it can heighten the moment just when you’re bottoming out.”

  “Look, let’s not talk about it. I hate to go there anyway, and you’re making me a nervous wreck. I just want to see my brother.”

  “He’ll live. Everyone has to be divorced at least once. It’s a rite of passage.”

  “He’s different, he takes it personally,” she said. They laughed, then they tried to stop laughing.

  Celeste was going on a small trip with her father. He took her for a week every summer to his parents’ house on the Chesapeake Bay. It was a peculiar life, Margaret thought, to always pack suitcases for her child. Each time it was difficult to let go of Celeste. She folded the little T-shirts, rolled the socks, shook out the ruffled bathing suit to see it, a velvety hot pink. Her daughter looked lovely in it, sweet, like ribbon candy. She packed the suitcase with Celeste’s favorite things—her velour beach towel, her sockmonkey doll, and two new girl-detective mystery books that Celeste had asked for.

  Tracy needed the car to drive back and forth between the mall and the 20th Century Diner, so Margaret was taking the train to Wilmington. The morning of her trip she woke to find the kitchen floor covered with grit. The windows were open a few inches and ash from the nearby power plant had collected on the sill, sifting out across the floor. It was soot from the stack at Narragansett Electric, much worse since the plant had switched back to coal during the oil crisis. The soot crackled when she walked over it, bursting into dark blots on the linoleum. She couldn’t just leave it there. She wet a dish towel at the sink. She pushed the cloth over the floor, but it left dark smears.

  “I need this filth. I really need it!” she told Tracy when he came through. He walked over to her with a broom. Tracy swept the broom over Margaret’s hips, pushing her skirt high. He pulled the broom down her thighs, and returned to her waist. He toed her firmly with his shoe, tipped her off-balance until she lay curved on her side against the linoleum. He kept his foot weighted on her hip and stroked the broom over her.

  “Will you stop this?” she said.

  “I can’t,” Tracy said.

  “You can. You can if you want. Do you want to stop?”

  Tracy was sweeping her underwear down. He was kneeling behind her. He pressed the heel of his hand against her spine and fucked her. She began to doubt if she had lived a previous life. The girl at the stake was probably just a commercial artist’s rendition of a popular theme: a girl’s innocence going up in smoke.

  “Let me go. I’ll miss the train,” she told him.

  “Just don’t think of it. Jesus, don’t think of it now.”

  “I’m late—” Her voice sounded small, out of range. In a moment, he let her stand up. She tugged her panties up over her knees, adjusted the waistband of her skirt, and smoothed her hips. Her clothes were spotted with soot. “Shit, Tracy.”

  Tracy said, “I’ll be in Wilmington tomorrow.”

  “Oh no, you don’t. Cam needs to talk,” she told him.

  “Talk all you want. Give it a big chew. You have twenty-four hours, that’s plenty of time. Isn’t that plenty of time?”

  She couldn’t answer him. Her words would be deflected no matter what she said. “It doesn’t matter,” she told him. She took her case and went down to the street. He trailed her out of the building.

  “You and Cam talk all you want,” he said. “Just rest assured, Margaret, I’ll be cutting in on your bull session.”

  II

  When the train reached New Jersey, she decided that Tracy’s behavior that morning was just childish jealousy. She was approaching her home turf and, feeling its threat, she missed Tracy’s company. Then her tailbone hurt from sitting so long and she left her seat to walk through the cars. She straddled the aisle and welcomed the effort of concentration, the little box step she performed in order to keep balanced when the train rocked over a crossing. She made small talk with a woman as she swayed beside her seat.

  “Wilmington,” she said when the woman asked where she would get off the train. Did the word sound as evocative, as chilling to the woman as it did to Margaret?

  “My brother lives there,” she told the w
oman, “and my folks.” She shrugged, a tiny, uncontrolled spasm.

  The train followed the Delaware River and she looked down at the impermeable lead-colored water. She saw the stacks at Edgemoor, the razor-wire partitions at the plant where they made toxic white pigments, and across the river, the mysterious Chambersworks. The Delaware Bridge is not something to admire; it rises above the sulfurous mist and sinks into it once more. Yet the bridge was the logo on her father’s Econoline vans. The trucks showed a bright cartoon drawing of the bridge with the words RICE INDUSTRIAL SUPPLY COMPANY printed in a grand arch. To advertise, he had ordered hundreds of Zippo lighters decorated with a map of Delaware, the bridge, and a minuscule rhinestone to signify the Diamond State. Ballpoints and pocketknives displayed the company’s name, her name, and a picture of the bridge. She liked best the decks of cards with the bridge superimposed upon the suits and, on the back side of each card, a variety of industrial products: winches, hoists, heat-shrinkable tubing, hydraulic jacks, carbide drill bits, belt sanders, compressors, pulleys, nylon fan belts, and links of chain.

  Margaret would get off at Claymont Station. It was the same platform where she had been reunited with her sister Jane, after Jane had been missing for two years.

  Jane disappeared when Margaret was in high school and Cam was on tour in Korea. Cam was only sixteen, but he had a letter from Wilmington Family Court and the signatures of both parents. It was several years after the war, but the American forces were doing the policing and some cleanup.

  Jane had returned from the family doctor and was holding a prescription behind her back that said the words Marbles, three times a day. She had been crying; Margaret could see it right off because Jane had the kind of eyelashes that kept the tears in place long after there was any cause. Even so, Jane could always smile, an odd, drifting line. Margaret was waiting for the explanation, but it didn’t look like it was coming soon, and she said, “That’s three times a day, isn’t that right?”