Beyond Deserving (9 page)

“Mom called. She thinks Pop is ‘acting up.'”

Gully eats too much sugar, cuts too much wood, cultivates strange friends. He stays away too many afternoons. All that has to be balanced against the fact that he doesn't drink anymore, not a drop. Sometimes Ursula wonders if that isn't the problem for Geneva. Good Gully doesn't need so much taking care of.

She doesn't want to talk about Gully. He is seventy-three years old. “Never mind Gully, Michael. What about your son?”

“Carter?”

“The very one!”

Michael hops up and starts clearing things off the counter. He wipes up Carter's crumbs. He wipes the mouth of the peanut butter jar and puts the lid back on.

“Will you stop that?” she snaps. Michael always finds a way not to look at her when she wants to discuss Carter.
She
, not
they
. Michael knows Carter is just short of unbearable, but he can not bear to talk strategy. He likes for things to wind down in their own fashion. He is a great believer in the efficacy of waiting things out. Especially kids. However, social workers grow used to situations without that luxury.

“Put him in irons or let him be,” he says.

“Carter or Gully?”

Michael scratches his head and grins at her. “Your pleasure, Ursie.”

“My
pleasure
is to tell you that Carter's English term paper—the SENIOR PAPER—is totally unacceptable to Mrs. Angstrom, and he has the weekend—four days—to come up with something else. She told me that at first she thought he was kidding her. Seems he likes to joke at school. He told her he had been working on this paper for weeks. Daily, he said.” Carter shows up at home for a short while after school, to change and gel his hair. Sometimes he eats. Then he is gone for hours and hours. “She wants to know, do we supervise his studies? What century is this woman from? What does she know about eighteen-year-old boys?”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her he did his work late at night, and that most of it is over my head. She looked very superior. ‘Oh, I see.' That sort of look. Michael, this woman could keep him from graduating!”

“And then he'll die,” Michael says, as solemnly as though it were true.

“Goddammit, Michael, be serious. He'll have to go to summer school to graduate. This will of course fuck up his job at the produce market—”

“—the job you got him working for your friend Sharon—”

“—the job we are lucky he has, because we have to pay his expenses, with our two HUGE incomes.” Suddenly she is lost. What was she saying, and how did she get so excited?

Carter's graduation. “What would this do to his acceptance into the university's honors program? How did he GET into the honors program? Did those people TALK to anybody about Carter?”

“Has Mrs. Angstrom told Carter all this?”

“She says so. Of course.”

“Then why don't we let Carter figure it out? He has a word processor. He can write a paper in a weekend.”

“Exactly the point. He turned in a bunch of dot matrix crap. Did you know what his paper was about?”

“No. Did you?”

“I do now. He says that aliens—we are talking outer space here—aliens came to earth and built the pyramids. He cited the evidence: positioning, relationship to the sun and to one another. Those damned doodles in Peru. I don't know what else. I only skimmed it. But you can read it.”

“If it doesn't meet Bertie Angstrom's standards, why would I want to read it?”

“To find out if your son is trying to put his English teacher on, or if he is daffy.”

“Carter is interested in that sort of stuff, honey. He reads books about unexplained phenomena. He opens his window at night and says, take me.”

Michael reaches out and pats her hand. She jerks it away and picks up her purse from the floor. She takes out the folded term paper and thrusts it into Michael's hand. “I had to talk to her. At least you should read it.”

Michael takes the paper and gently lays it down by the breadbox. “Okay.”

“Oh Michael,” she whines. “This woman.” She hesitates. It is difficult to criticize educators, when you are married to one. It is like criticizing a Fisher.

Mrs. Angstrom looked at Ursula with her little ferret eyes and said, “I find that children of professors, social workers, and other teachers are often the worst cases. Parents either expect too much of them, or don't expect anything at all.” It was clear where she thought the Fishers stood. Shocked, Ursula awaited further explanation, but the teacher simply rose and handed her a piece of purple-printed paper—the classic “ditto”—and Carter's paper. “Here are the criteria,” she said. “I want his paper by Monday, or his F stands. And in this building, you don't pass Senior English if you don't pass Senior Paper.”
Ergo
, graduation.

Ursula clutched the papers wildly. She didn't want this woman to leave her with all this to do. “What topic should he write about?” she nearly shouted. The teacher smiled and said (sly ferret! Ursula thought), “Something that interests you, Mrs. Fisher, wouldn't you say that would be best?”

As Mrs. Angstrom strutted away, Ursula took mean comfort from the size of her bottom and the shiny state of her pants. The teacher was younger than Ursula, but she was a lot farther gone.

Ursula can't tell all this to Michael. She will end up talking about it in the coffee room at work someday soon. The other caseworkers will sympathize. They will have their own teacher tales to tell. But Michael. He is a wonderful, gentle teacher, and she doesn't want him to think she doubts him. She doesn't want to upset him. Not that he would be upset. He would probably be perfectly sanguine—on the outside. But on the inside, she is sure, Carter is eating away at his patience, and Michael is involved with his own problems at work, his obligations to Gully and Geneva, his unfulfilled dreams. She is worried that his failure to vent anger, frustration, or sorrow means that his vital organs are undergoing constant erosion. She is afraid that he will one day die, and when they open him up, looking for the cause of death, they will find that, inside, he is completely gone.

“I should have talked to Bertie,” Michael volunteers. He has had more than his turn at school conferences, dentist appointments, nights of flu misery. Now he leaves concerns to Ursula, or chides her to let the kids work things out for themselves, as though they have become autonomous adults, so early. He expects more of them than of his parents. “Bertie is as stiff as a starched wimple, because kids scare her to death. How would you like to look out and see boys with their hair bleached pink and mowed down the sides? Girls with dirty long-john bottoms sticking out from their tiny little polka-dotted skirts? Bertie can't see anything else. She's afraid of chaos, and face it, chaos rules high school. And then, there's the luck of the draw. Who you get.”

“And if you get Carter—”

“You've got yourself a smart-ass,” Michael admits. Something he has never been, and so admires? He moves to the refrigerator. “What's for supper?”

Ursula does not consider the discussion over, but she says, tentatively, “Spaghetti?” Once she was a constant user of her Julia Child and James Beard. On her shelf are cookbooks named for fashionable restaurants.

Spaghetti she can make by heart.

“Mmmgh,” Michael says, so that she doesn't know what he means. “Why not? There's more sauce.” He smiles at her over his shoulder. “But you knew that. I'll make a salad, how's that?”

Ursula feels better. She appreciates a joint effort.

“You go on and call Juliette,” Michael says. He is standing on the far side of the refrigerator door.

He says, “You talk to Carter.”

17

Ursula stomps up the stairs and into Carter's room. The smell of dirty socks and rotting fruit assaults her. She spies an apple core under the bed. Although Ursula occasionally puts a clean fitted sheet on Carter's bottom bunk mattress, in no time at all it comes loose and ends up elsewhere, a dirty brown ball. He sleeps wound up in an old polyester comforter, pillowless. For years Ursula has insisted that he clean his room once a week by gathering up his dirty clothes, making the bed, closing his drawers, and vacuuming. It has never ceased to be a struggle worse than its worth. She knows all the maxims: Be persistent and consistent. Remain calm. She has made such speeches herself, to parents with fewer resources than her own, with children in genuine trouble. Maybe Tough Love works on those isolated ranches where the delinquents have to get up every morning and shovel horse manure out of stalls before they get to eat their own breakfasts, but in this real life of theirs, Carter can outlast Ursula any week of the year. Like his father, he has learned the power of silence. Sometimes he loses his temper—which his father does not—but in general he is mild enough, if sometimes deliberately gross.
He
doesn't give a damn about his room.
She
does. Who owns this problem? her counselor-ghost demands. Now she washes his clothes if they are in the laundry. She insists that he keep his door shut, which he is happy to do. (One of his favorite teases is to stand at his door when he sees his mother upstairs, and open it a crack, then smell or cover his eyes, pretend to faint, and so on. Ursula usually tries to laugh, to make it stop.)

During the annual Big Clean, she and Michael scrub Carter's room ceiling to floor, clean out the closet, throw away mounds of garbage, and argue for two straight days about his character. Then Carter moves back in and starts over.

She wonders if he smokes marijuana. She isn't sure anymore just how it smells. She thinks he might, with Fish, in the basement. She would kill them both if she found out. The most trouble Carter has ever been in—and it was serious—was New Year's Eve, 1986. He got drunk with a lot of other kids at one of the kids' houses (while his parents were at another party), and somebody got pushed through a plate glass window. Everybody ended up in court. It was an embarrassing and instructive experience for Ursula. She had assumed the host parents would be home. They had assumed their child was at another party.

Carter is emotionally immature, maybe morally retarded. In recent years, since he has begun to return the longstanding interest of girls (who have been calling him since fifth grade), she has watched him from a distance, fearful that he will treat girls cavalierly. She can imagine the hysterical scene: parents again, this time with a pregnant daughter. She has been watching the girls, who come like patients at a clinic, for short visits to his room (how could they tolerate any more time in there?). It seems there have been dozens of them in the past year, though that surely exaggerates his attractiveness. The girls are all quite fetching. Sometimes they come in bunches, stomping on the stairs and jostling one another. She does not see how it could be possible for Carter to have
done anything
with any of them. She urged Michael to talk to him. They are modern parents. Both of them work with kids for a living, but Michael balked, even in the face of Ursula's blatant bullying. In the end she went to Planned Parenthood, took every pamphlet in sight, and laid them on Carter's desk, pushing aside clothes, books, Coke bottles, Big Hunk wrappers, magazines, and tapes, to make space for the literature. Month after month the booklets lay there, soon covered with more detritus, and month by month Ursula's need to mother her son (control? pry? Michael's silence accused) has bruised her until she feels pain under her skin, just thinking about him. To this day she has not managed to bring up the subject of sex with either of her children. She feels a great resentment toward Michael over this issue. She thinks he is cowardly. (She tells herself Juliette isn't ready for talk about sex yet; she still thinks boys are bogus.) Michael has wiped up spit and shit and vomit throughout the children's young years. He has repaired bicycles, rented skis, returned library books; yet he will not talk to his son about a “private matter.”

Ursula argues that the children need guidance. Michael counters, “indoctrination.” She says children have needs for intimacy. “With us?” asks Michael. “Well damn it,” she cries, “they need advice
whether they know it or not
.”

“We've had our chance,” Michael says. “Aren't you the one who made that sophisticated little speech at Nancy's Christmas buffet last year, saying you have your influence on kids until they are nine or ten years old and then it's up to the peers?” She cannot argue. He is right. She even believes what she has said, but she doesn't want it to be true. “Besides,” Michael adds, “they get sex education at school, for the particulars.”

Ursula can't sit still for that. “Oh yes. Umbilical cords and Fallopian tubes. Monthly cycles and swirling sperm.” She cannot ruffle Michael.

“What's really bothering you,” he says, “is that you want Carter to be
nice
, you're worried about his
relationships
, you want him to give for what he gets. Hell, Ursula, don't you think he's already drawn a lot of conclusions for himself, watching the parade of people through our home? Hasn't he learned about tolerance and affection and forgiveness? Hasn't he learned about intimacy, if you think about it? If you are willing to admit the intimacy implicit in friendships with people we care about, people who live with us and go away and come back, throw up in our rhododendrons, and bring us presents from Mexico and England and Vietnam?”

Michael said all these things in a single evening. She can remember just how he sat, his back curved in a way that was terrible for his posture. He was in the yellow velour chair, and Pajamas was on his lap. How he surprised her with such a long speech! She leaned toward him, eager to get every detail, not to miss any of the meaning, because she knew that once he had said what he had to say, he wouldn't repeat a word of it, or explain what he had meant, or—above all—argue.