Criminals (26 page)

Angie's eyelids were sore and she let them droop. She was not going to offer explanations to Pat. And Cham wouldn't either, she felt sure.
There was Pat's Xanax, after all. The Xanax had to be absorbing something. Cham must know about that. Maybe Cham looked after Pat that way, kept things from her, mothered her. Even though Pat had a mother. It was her father who had gone staggering away from her with his arm hooked over Angie's shoulders. “We'll be back,” Angie had called to the neighbor, who hoisted the child up and made her wave. But Angie had come back alone.

The boy would still be in the house when Pat got home. That, Angie would let Erika account for. Erika would know what to leave out. She might not have any notion, anyway—if she had any memory of it—of what had possessed her to parade like that with her clothes off. Or maybe she would. Maybe Erika had worked out, already, that although it might appear otherwise, some things might never be hers. Or they might come to her not by any right but only by being gambled for up to her limit. More power to her, if she did. More power to her. Only don't give up, Angie thought. Don't give up. I saw you. And indeed, before she thought of a fall onto stone floor, or of pills, or that she was the one in charge of a granddaughter, all she had seen was a girl on a bridge, tall and naked and beautiful.

One night on the deck of the cruise ship, with Bill Diehl seasick below, she had felt a pause like that, at the wakeless speed the ship maintained in a narrow bay. She had been watching the sky turn a bold calm purple with the steep land outlined against it. She remembered the rail growing warm in her hands as the color in the sky deepened. Not for years had she been in this state, but she knew it right away. It wasn't weakness or age. It was something first made known to her at the timber carnival when she was a girl.

The thin new boy. The boy stubbed out his cigarette carefully to save it, and picked up his guitar, while she sat on cedar logs beside a bonfire and looked at him, suspended. And then . . . and then hardly any time later the doctor came in and told her the boy, now a man with caved-in cheeks, unconscious on a hospital bed, might or might not go on living.

She had been looking at Rudy's face, with its parched, invalid's beauty, all day. It was time to go to the neighbor's and pick up the
baby—they called their little girl the baby, though she was four years old—but Angie just sat there rocking back and forth in the chair. The last time Rudy's eyes had opened they had stuck open for several minutes. Fever had burned off their expression. Her feeling was not even happiness at the news that he might not die, he might live. It was pure rocking, like a kitten swung in a cat's teeth. It was not conditional. He didn't live. It was in this sensation, and her surrender when it came, she thought, watching Kirby Wells as he began to snore, that she knew the girl who had sat on the logs was herself. She knew the girl, and the girl knew her. The boy sat down. His guitar gave out a bass, private note as he propped it. The girl went on looking into the fire and into her life, the life on the way to her. Lives, she knew now. A relay of lives. But the one who caught up with her was herself, passing on the same heart every time.

the ivy field

I
t was Mary Catherine Ott. Below the woman's white bangs when she turned were the unmistakable eyes of the Otts. She was tall and wore a scarf around the padded shoulders of her coat, an expensive coat. “Mary Catherine?” I said. She put on a willing smile. Who was I? “It's Karen,” I said.

“Karen!” she sang back, in the only tone possible, but after a pause, “Karen Lund!”

We wondered at the thirty-some years. I had stayed in Seattle but she had lived all over the place. We each had two children. As for her brothers and sisters, all was well. Although there had been divorces. “James?” I said.

“Oh, no, not James, he's been married forever. He's in Spokane. He's a vet, he always loved dogs. He walks fine, he runs.” James had had polio. “His wife is a lawyer.” A lawyer. A woman in a suit, walking with James . . . this I pictured so vividly, down to the sandy hair on James's arms, that as I saw it I realized, as you sometimes do when you're surprised like this, that the men with whom I had involved myself and twice even married had all had sandy hair and calm saddish natures like James's and had deserved kindness and it was too late to repair what I had done.

“What about Annie?” I said. Annie was married and had four children. Clark too, Clark, the never-toilet-trained, had four children. Natalie and Owen had had some of the divorces.

Mary Catherine did not put herself on either list, nor did I. “The divorces were very hard on our mother,” she said. “You know how no one divorced in their day. But she got through it, and she's going strong. She still lives in the same house!”

Audrey. Audrey Ott. I heard my mother's voice say it. Sycamore tree and sagging screened porch flew up before me. And the ivy field. I did not say to her,
What about your father?

She had not asked me about my own family—my parents or my sister Laura—but suddenly she said, “Did you ever learn to ride a bike?”

“Me?” I didn't think it was possible she had said that. “No, no. That was Laura. That wasn't me. It was Laura who couldn't ride a bike.”

“Oh, yes, right, Laura.”

“And the baby?” I said. “The baby who was born after we moved?”

“Paulette. So you moved away before that? How do you remember all this?” Did she, Mary Catherine, not remember?

“Does Paulette have four children, too?” Once I had said this I didn't like the tone, but it didn't seem to bother Mary Catherine.

“Oh, they've had no luck.” We were outside the store, saying good-bye. I thought of getting her phone number. On the phone I would have been able to find things out without asking. When did anyone have to ask Mary Catherine? But she was saying very little, really. She mostly smiled, and held her leather purse strap with that musing patience, as if she had always been this tall, solid woman, well-off and settled in her mind, and bore no relation to the little girl who had striven with all those sisters and brothers in the noise of that grimy dark house, the girl who had longed to live in ours instead.

Her lined face had not gone soft in middle age but had taken on breadth and tightness, under the big staining freckles of her mother Audrey. A face oddly reminiscent of both parents. But attractive. Even striking, with the white hair. Certain eyes will do that, carry everything. I wished I had brushed my hair to give it height, and put on some lipstick. I wished I could produce out of myself something
extra, some force of existence, to keep Mary Catherine from marveling on the way home,
To think! To think I admired Karen Lund, to think I yearned to be part of her family instead of mine! Yearned to be her!

After our good-byes it developed that our cars were parked in the same lot, so we walked on together for two blocks in the cold spring air. It was then she thought to ask about my parents. “They're both living,” I said. “Doing fine.”

“My father died ten years ago,” she said, and tears filled her eyes. That was when she looked at me for the first time as if she remembered me, knew me. She gave me a keen, prolonged look, as if she saw me think,
I bet he killed himself.
Little changes in the muscles of her face turned it almost mean. “His diabetes killed him,” she said.

All the way home I thought of my mother and her sadness. I thought of Susie, my father's wife, saying on their last visit, “Your mother could have married again!” And my father, shaking his head with authority but speaking a bit wearily as he does now that his wife's energy has come to surpass his own, saying, “Not her. She never could. Not Billie, no, she does a thing once.” He offers this comfort to his younger self. Still, Susie can see no obstacle to my mother's marrying, even now. “She's ageless,” she will say generously. “If she'd just smile,” she'll say, with her touching belief that it was losing my father that gave my mother the sober air we all know her to possess.

Susie is very like my father. She has nothing against my mother, having been married to him years longer than my mother was, and wishes her the happiness she wishes everyone.

S
oon after they moved in, Laura and I concluded in our pride that six Ott kids did not add up to any more than the two of us. You could climb the sycamore in our yard, crawl out over the driveway and look squarely into the bedroom where the boys slept and played and fought and were once in a great while—there were hardly any rules in their house to be broken—punished by being kept upstairs. On those nights the punished one, white face with the wide-set Ott
eyes, would blindly look out the window, seeming, if indeed he knew we might be there, not to see us in the branches.

The three girls were not punished. This was not such an unusual practice in families then, at the end of the fifties.

Laura and I hoped to see the boys undressing and sometimes we did. But it was disappointing: bony legs and loose underpants like the clothespin bag and nothing more. There were shoes and clothes and bedcovers all over the floor, with the dog scrambling in and out of them. We could not see into the girls' bedroom across the hall. But we didn't need to, Mary Catherine was always at our house, in our bedroom. It was taken for granted that we would play there. She even spied in the tree with us. Her fat little sister Annie, who was in Laura's grade but was going to have to take a test for dumbbells, according to Mary Catherine, was allowed upstairs with us at our mother's insistence. But Annie's contributions to our games, and her possessions in the dim no-closet room she shared with Mary Catherine, had no importance.

Our kitchen window looked out on a hummock of dirt that never grew grass, called by our father the termite mound, and the rusted screen of the Otts' back porch, their clothesline, their woodpile with chair legs in it. In her own family, our mother had been the one to keep things tidy for the drunken neglectful parents who were the old, unbathed grandparents fifty miles away. We never saw them, though our phone rang very early one morning while it was still dark, and my mother gave groans that woke us up, and soon we saw their coffins. At two
AM
, leaving the Stop Inn at closing time, they drove onto the highway and up under a semi. Tractor trailers, we called them then.

I know now that my mother took care of her parents through this long decay, and even made excuses to them for not bringing us when she came. My father did not want us to see the chain smoking and staggering or hear the cusswords or smell the smells that we caught in my mother's clothes and hair now and then when we came home from school, that stood for our grandparents' house, their life.

From the sinking ship of that family he had rescued my mother, thrown a magic ring around her, the life her orderliness required. She
did not impose her need for order on us, she was secretive about it, and didn't laugh if my father caught her setting books to right when she passed them, an inch forward or back, or stroking magazines into square piles. After dinner she pushed the chairs up to the table, not quite touching; she ironed sheets and stacked them with the folds forward, even though we had no linen closet then but only a shelf above her dresses.

Over the kitchen window were three prints in a row, of flying ducks. I don't know what happened to them, not that I would want them. If I see a duck print in an antique store a wave of sullenness comes over me, though my father defended these pictures of his, that had been in the law office of his father. One had a greenish-brown overcast sky. “There's something in that one,” my mother said. “Some . . . oh, I don't look at it.”

“She looks out upon the land of the Otts,” my father chuckled.

“I do,” she said.

James, Owen, and Clark. Mary Catherine, Annie, and Natalie. In the first of the three years we knew them, Natalie, whom my father called Natalie Wood, was a baby with heavy, wet diapers, Annie a first grader who could never quite understand or settle into a game. Mary Catherine was then eight, my age, the pretty one. She was the favorite of her mother, who would tell our mother, “I give in to that one, I know I do, because look at her.” No one over there even whined about that, and if the Otts did not know there are no favorites in families, it might be, Laura and I thought, that they did not know anything at all.

Mrs. Ott was in the habit of coming over when the men were at work. Audrey Ott. My mother had only two friends, one of them in another state, but she gave them surnames when speaking of them to my father. It seemed to put a lid on them and then she served them. “Audrey Ott stopped by today.” “Oh, I owe Audrey Ott a dollar ten for the milkman. Don't let me forget.”

In the kitchen, and in the yard hanging up the wash before we got our dryer, she spent hours with Audrey Ott, who always arrived breathless and sticking the hair back into her ponytail as if she had swum over. She would say, “Billie! Let's quit for the day and go out
on the town.” She would lean on the counter where the stew vegetables were laid out and watch my mother chop them with her little black-handled knife. People didn't use the big knives they use today. My mother cut vegetables so rapidly, in pieces all the same size, that I always expected Audrey to stop talking and comment on her skill. Being her daughter I thought I knew how she did it. It was a surprise to me that if I cut things up they came out any old shape.

Audrey Ott alternated the same two Orlon sweaters, a green and a brown, and snapped a thick rubber band around her hair when she thought of it, without washing it, in our opinion, and had a wide face of runny freckles and a wide rump that jutted out below her thin top like a holder she had been set in. Mr. Ott was tall and bulky, big in the rear like Audrey, with big dark cup-lidded eyes, set low and so wide apart that it looked as if something might have been erased from between them. But he was supposed to be smart. He worked at Boeing where our father worked.

Every child in the family had his big heavy eyeballs. I used to watch Mary Catherine's from the side, as they roved to and fro over the things in our room. It was true she was pretty, but being pretty, in her, came close to being funny-looking, and then somehow overshot it. This did not happen with Annie or Natalie, though my mother said when they got older they would look like Mary Catherine.

Mr. Ott did not instruct or tease or in any way lead his family, or, seemingly, take them anywhere, including the church for which the others set off every Sunday before breakfast, bedraggled and hurrying. You almost never heard his voice in the house. When you did it was unexpectedly high, with a fretful sound in it. “Audrey? Audrey?”

He couldn't help his nature. So Audrey Ott said to my mother, who repeated it, though ordinarily she did not seem to find the things Audrey told her in the afternoon worth passing on, even if my father took up the subject of the Otts at dinner.

Moping was what my father called it, but Mr. Ott was not a listless or a sighing man. Something interested him in an intense way. Whatever it was it knotted his jaw muscles and made his glance, if it fell on you, go straight down like a bird in a dive.