Distortions (23 page)

At dinner, May watches Wanda serving the chicken. Will she put the spoon in the dish? She is waving the spoon; she looks as if she is conducting. She drops the spoon on the table.

“Ladies first,” Wanda says.

Mrs. Wong takes over. She dishes up some chicken and hands the plate to May.

“Well,” Wanda says, “here you are happy to be gone from your husband, and here I am miserable because my husband is gone, and May’s mother is out chasing down her husband, who wants to run around the country taking pictures of hippies.”

Wanda accepts a plate of chicken. She picks up her fork and puts it in her chicken. “Did I tell you, Mrs. Wong, that my husband drowned?”

“Yes, you did,” Mrs. Wong says. “I’m very sorry.”

“What would a social worker say if some woman was unhappy because her husband drowned?”

“I really don’t know,” Mrs. Wong says.

“You might just say, ‘Buck up,’ or something.” Wanda takes a bite of the chicken. “Excuse me, Mrs. Wong,” she says with her mouth full. “I want you to enjoy your dinner.”

“It’s very good,” Mrs. Wong says. “Thank you for including me.”

“Hell,” Wanda says, “we’re all on the same sinking ship.”

“What are you thinking?” Wanda says to May when she is in bed. “You don’t talk much.”

“What do I think about what?”

“About your mother off after your father, and all. You don’t cry in here at night, do you?”

“No,” May says.

Wanda swirls the liquor in her glass. She gets up and goes to the window.

“Hello, coleus,” Wanda says. “Should I pinch you back?” She stares at the plant, picks up the glass from the windowsill, and returns to the bed.

“If you were sixteen, you could get a license,” Wanda says. “Then when your ma went after your father you could chase after the two of them. A regular caravan.”

Wanda lights another cigarette. “What do you know about your friend Mrs. Wong? She’s no more talkative than you, which isn’t saying much.”

“We just talk about things,” May says. “She’s rooting an avocado she’s going to give me. It’ll be a tree.”

“You talk about avocados? I thought that, being a social worker, she might do you some good.”

Wanda drops her match on the floor. “I wish if you had anything you wanted to talk about that you would,” she says.

“How come my mother hasn’t written? She’s been gone a week.”

Wanda shrugs. “Ask me something I can answer,” she says.

In the middle of the following week a letter comes. “Dear May,” it says, “I am hot as hell as I write this in a drugstore taking time out to have a Coke. Ray is nowhere to be found, so thank God you’ve still got me. I guess after another day of this I
am going to cash it in and get back to you. Don’t feel bad about this. After all, I did all the driving. Ha! Love, Mama.”

Sitting on the porch after dinner, May rereads the letter. Her mother’s letters are always brief. Her mother has signed “Mama” in big, block-printed letters to fill up the bottom of the page.

Mrs. Wong comes out of the house, prepared for rain. She has on jeans and a yellow rain parka. She is going back to the library to study, she says. She sits on the top step, next to May.

“See?” Mrs. Wong says. “I told you she’d write. My husband would have ripped up the letter.”

“Can’t you call your son?” May asks.

“He got the number changed.”

“Couldn’t you go over there?”

“I suppose. It depresses me. Dirty magazines all over the house. His father brings them back for them. Hamburger meat and filth.”

“Do you have a picture of him?” May asks.

Mrs. Wong takes out her wallet and removes a photo in a plastic case. There is a picture of a Chinese man sitting on a boat. Next to him is a brown-haired boy, smiling. The Chinese man is also smiling. One of his eyes has been poked out of the picture.

“My husband used to jump rope in the kitchen,” Mrs. Wong says. “I’m not kidding you. He said it was to tone his muscles. I’d be cooking breakfast and he’d be jumping and panting. Reverting to infancy.”

May laughs.

“Wait till you get married,” Mrs. Wong says.

Wanda opens the door and closes it again. She has been avoiding Mrs. Wong since their last discussion, two days ago. When Mrs. Wong was leaving for class, Wanda stood in front of the door and said, “Why go to school? They don’t have answers. What’s the answer to why my husband drowned himself in the ocean after a good dinner? There aren’t any answers. That’s what I’ve got against woman’s liberation. Nothing personal.”

Wanda had been drinking. She held the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other.

“Why do you identify me with the women’s movement, Mrs. Marshall?” Mrs. Wong had asked.

“You left a perfectly good husband and son, didn’t you?”

“My husband stayed out all night, and my son didn’t care if I was there or not.”

“He didn’t
care?
What’s happening to men? They’re all turning queer, from the politicians down to the delivery boy. I was ashamed to have the delivery boy in my house today. What’s gone wrong?”

Wanda’s conversations usually end by her asking a question and then just walking away. That was something that always annoyed May’s father. Almost everything about Wanda annoyed him. May wishes she could like Wanda more, but she agrees with her father. Wanda is nice, but she isn’t very exciting.

Now Wanda comes out and sits on the porch. She picks up the
National Enquirer
. “Another doctor, another cure,” Wanda says, and she sighs.

May is not listening to Wanda. She is watching a black Cadillac with a white top coming up the street. The black Cadillac looks just like the one that belongs to her father’s friends Gus and Sugar. There is a woman in the passenger seat. The car comes by slowly, but then speeds up. May sits forward in her rocking chair to look. The woman did not look like Sugar. May sits back.

“Men on the moon, no cure for cancer,” Wanda says. “Men on the moon, and they do something to the ground beef now so it won’t cook. You saw me put that meat in the pan tonight. It just wouldn’t cook, would it?”

They rock in silence. In a few minutes, the car coasts by again. The window is down, and music is playing loudly. The car stops in front of Wanda’s. May’s father gets out It’s her father, in a pair of shorts. A camera bounces against his chest.

“What the hell is this?” Wanda hollers as May runs toward her father.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Wanda yells again.

May’s father is smiling. He has a beer can in one hand, but he hugs May to him, even though he can’t pick her up. Looking past his arm, May sees that the woman in the car is Sugar.

“You’re not taking her
anywhere!”
Wanda says. “You’ve got no right to put me in this position.”

“Aw, Wanda, you know the world always dumps on you,” Ray says. “You know I’ve got the right to put you in this position.”

“You’re drunk,” Wanda says. “What’s going on? Who’s that in the ear?”

“It’s awful, Wanda,” Ray says. “Here I am, and I’m drunk, and I’m taking May away.”

“Daddy—were you in Colorado?” May says. “Is that where you were?”

“Colorado? I don’t have the money to go West, sweetheart. I was out at Gus and Sugar’s beach place, except that Gus has split, and Sugar is here with me to pick you up.”

“She’s not going with you,” Wanda says. Wanda looks mean.

“Oh, Wanda, are we going to have a big fight? Am I going to have to grab her and run?”

He grabs May, and before Wanda can move they are at the car. The music is louder, the door is open, and May is in the car, crushing Sugar.

“Move over, Sugar,” Ray says. “Lock the door. Lock the door!”

Sugar slides over behind the wheel. The door slams shut, the windows are rolled up, and as Wanda gets to the car May’s father locks the door and makes a face at her.

“Poor Wanda!” he shouts through the glass. “Isn’t this awful, Wanda?”

“Let her out! Give her to me!” Wanda shouts.

“Wanda,” he says, “I’ll give you this.” He puckers his lips and blows a kiss, and Sugar, laughing, pulls away.

“Honey,” Ray says to May, turning down the radio, “I don’t know why I didn’t have this idea sooner. I’m really sorry. I was talking to Sugar tonight, and I realized, My God, I can just go and get her. There’s nothing Wanda can do.”

“What about Mom, though?” May says. “I got a letter, and she’s coming back from Colorado. She went to Denver.”

“She didn’t!”

“She did. She went looking for you.”

“But I’m here,” Ray says. “I’m right here with my Sugar and my May. Honey, we’ve made our own peanut butter, and we’re going to have peanut butter and apple butter, and a beer, too, if
you want it, and go walking in the surf. We’ve got boots—you can have my boots—and at night we can walk through the surf.”

May looks at Sugar. Sugar’s face is set in a wide smile. Her hair is white. She has dyed her hair white. She is smiling.

Ray hugs May. “I want to know every single thing that’s happened,” he says.

“I’ve just been, I’ve just been sitting around Wanda’s.”

“I
figured
that’s where you were. At first I assumed you were with your mother, but I remembered the other time, and then it hit me that you had to be there. I told Sugar that—didn’t I, Sugar?”

Sugar nods. Her hair has blown across her face, almost obscuring her vision. The traffic light in front of them changes from yellow to red, and May falls back against her father as the car speeds up.

Sugar says that she wants to be called by her real name. Her name is Martha Joanna Leigh, but Martha is fine with her. Ray always calls her all three names, or else just Sugar. He loves to tease.

It’s a little scary at Sugar’s house. For one thing, the seabirds don’t always see that the front wall is glass, and sometimes a bird flies right into it. Sugar’s two cats creep around the house, and at night they jump onto May’s bed or get into fights. May has been here for three days. She and Ray and Sugar swim every day, and at night they play Scrabble or walk on the beach or take a drive. Sugar is a vegetarian. Everything she cooks is called “three”-some-thing. Tonight, they had three-bean loaf; the night before, they had mushrooms with three-green stuffing. Dinner is usually at ten o’clock, which is when May used to go to bed at Wanda’s.

Tonight, Ray is playing Gus’s zither. It sounds like the music they play in horror movies. Ray has taken a lot of photographs of Sugar, and they are tacked up all over the house—Sugar cooking, Sugar getting out of the shower, Sugar asleep, Sugar waving at the camera, Sugar angry about so many pictures being taken. “And if Gus comes back, loook out,” Ray says, strumming the zither.

“What if he does come back?” Sugar says.

“Listen to this,” Ray says. “I’ve written a song that’s about something I really feel. John Lennon couldn’t have been more honest. Listen, Sugar.”

“Martha,” Sugar says.

“Coors beer,” Ray sings, “there’s none here. You have to go West to drink the best—Coooors beeeer.”

May and Sugar laugh. May is holding a ball of yarn that Sugar is winding into smaller balls. One of the cats, which is going to have kittens, is licking its paws, with its head against the pillow Sugar is sitting on. Sugar has a box of rags in the kitchen closet. Every day she shows the box to the cat. She has to hold the cat’s head straight to make it look at the box. The cat has always had kittens on the rug in the bathroom.

“And tub-night Johnny’s guests are …” Ray is imitating Ed McMahon again. All day he has been announcing Johnny Carson, or talking about Johnny’s guests. “Ed McMahon,” he says, shaking his head. “Out there in Burbank, Califoria, Ed has probably got a refrigerator full of Coors beer, and I’ve got to make do with Schlitz.” Ray runs his fingers across the strings. “The hell with you, Ed. The hell with you.” Ray closes the window above his head. “Wasn’t there a talking horse named Ed?” He stretches out on the floor and crosses his feet, his arms behind his head. “What do you want to do?” he says.

“I’m fine,” Sugar says. “You bored?”

“Yeah. I want Gus to show up and create a little action.”

“He just might,” Sugar says.

“Old Gus never can get it together. He’s visiting his old mama way down in Macon, Georgia. He’ll just be a rockin’ and a talkin’ with his poor old mother, and he won’t be home for days and days.”

“You’re not making any sense, Ray.”

“I’m Ed McMahon,” Ray says, sitting up. “I’m standing out there with a mike in my hand, looking out on all those faces, and suddenly it looks like they’re
sliding down on me
. Help!” Ray jumps up and waves his arms. “And I say to myself, ‘Ed, what are you
doing
here, Ed?’”

“Let’s go for a walk,” Sugar says. “Do you want to take a walk?”

“I want to watch the damned Johnny Carson show. How come you don’t have a television?”

Sugar pats the last ball of wool, drops it into the knitting basket. She looks at May. “We didn’t have much for dinner. How about some cashew butter on toast, or some guacamole?”

“O.K.,” May says. Sugar is very nice to her. It would be nice to have Sugar for a mother.

“Fix me some of that stuff, too,” Ray says. He flips through a pile of records and picks one up, carefully removes it, his thumb in the center, another finger on the edge. He puts it on the record player and slowly lowers the needle to Rod Stewart, hoarsely singing “Mandolin Wind.” “The way he sings ‘No, no,’” Ray says, shaking his head.

In the kitchen, May takes a piece of toast out of the toaster, then takes out the other piece and puts it on her father’s plate. Sugar pours each of them a glass of cranberry juice.

“You just love me, don’t you, Sugar?” Ray says, and bites into his toast. “Because living with Gus is like living with a mummy-right?”

Sugar shrugs. She is smoking a cigarillo and drinking cranberry juice.

“I’m your Marvin Gardens,” Ray says. “I’m your God-damned
Park Place.”

Sugar exhales, looks at some fixed point on the wall across from her.

“Oh,
metaphor,”
Ray says, and cups his hand, as though he can catch something. “Everything is like everything else. Ray is like Gus. Sugar’s getting tired of Ray.”