Distortions (6 page)

“Where are we going?”

“We just started the ride. Try to enjoy it.”

Mary Anne must have heard Elsa tell him not to take the car; she doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself.

“What time is it?” Mary Anne asks.

“Three o’clock.”

“That’s what time school lets out.”

“What about it?” Michael asks.

He shouldn’t have snapped at her. She was just talking to talk. Since all talk is just a lot of garbage anyway, he shouldn’t have discouraged her. He reaches over and pats her knee. She doesn’t smile, as he hoped she would. She is sort of like her mother.

“Are you going to get a haircut, too?” she asks.

“Daddy doesn’t have to get a haircut, because he isn’t trying to get a job.”

Mary Anne looks out the window.

“Your great-grandma sends Daddy enough money for him to stay alive. Daddy doesn’t want to work.”

“Mommy has a job,” Mary Anne says. His wife is an apprentice bookbinder.

“And you don’t have to get your hair cut, either,” he says.

“I want it cut.”

He reaches over to pat her knee again. “Don’t you want long hair, like Daddy?”

“Yes,” she says.

“You just said you wanted it cut.”

Mary Anne looks out the window.

“Can you see all the plants through that window?” Michael says, pulling up in front of the house.

He is surprised when he opens the door to see Richard there.

“Richard! What are you doing here?”

“I’m so sick from the plane that I can’t talk, man. Sit down. Who’s this?”

“Did you and Prudence have a good time?”

“Prudence is still in Manila. She wouldn’t come back. I just had enough of Manila, you know? But I don’t know if the flight back was worth it. The flight back was really awful. Who’s this?”

“This is my daughter, Mary Anne. I’m back with my wife now. I’ve been coming to water the plants.”

“Jesus, am I sick,” Richard says. “Do you know why I’d feel sick after I’ve been off the plane for half a day?”

“I want to water the plants,” Mary Anne says.

“Go ahead, sweetheart,” Richard says. “Jesus—all those damn plants. Manila is a jungle, did you know that? That’s what she wants. She wants to be in the jungle. I don’t know. I’m too sick to think.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Is there any coffee?”

“I drank it all. I drank all your liquor, too.”

“That’s all right,” Richard says. “Prudence thought you’d do worse than that. She thought you’d sell the furniture or burn the place down. She’s crazy, over there in that rain jungle.”

“His girlfriend is in Manila,” Michael says to his daughter. “That’s far away.”

Mary Anne walks off to sniff a philodendron leaf.

Michael is watching a soap opera. A woman is weeping to another woman that when her gallbladder was taken out Tom was her doctor, and the nurse, who loved Tom, spread
rumors
, and …

Mary Anne and a friend are pouring water out of a teapot into little plastic cups. They sip delicately.

“Daddy,” Mary Anne says, “can’t you make us real tea?”

“Your mother would get mad at me.”

“She’s not here.”

“You’d tell her.”

“No, we wouldn’t.”

“O.K. I’ll make it if you promise not to drink it.”

Michael goes into the kitchen. The girls are squealing delightedly and the woman on television is weeping hysterically. “Tom was in line for chief of surgery once Dr. Stan retired, but
Rita
said that he …”

The phone rings. “Hello?” Michael says.

“Hi,” Carlos says. “Still mad?”

“Hi, Carlos,” Michael says.

“Still mad?” Carlos asks.

“No.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s what I figured. Interested in a job?”

“No.”

“You mean you’re just sitting around there all day?”

“At the moment, I’m giving a tea party.”

“Sure,” Carlos says. “Would you like to go out for a beer? I could come over after work.”

“I don’t care,” Michael says.

“You sound pretty depressed.”

“Why don’t you cast a spell and make things better?” Michael says. “There goes the water. Maybe I’ll see you later.”

“You’re not really drinking tea, are you?”

“Yes,” Michael says. “Good-bye.”

He takes the water into the living room and pours it into Mary Anne’s teapot.

“Don’t scald yourself,” he says, “or we’re both screwed.”

“Where’s the tea bag, Daddy?”

“Oh, yeah.” He gets a tea bag from the kitchen and drops it into the pot. “You’re young, you’re supposed to use your imagination,” he says. “But here it is.”

“We need something to go with our tea, Daddy.”

“You won’t eat your dinner.”

“Yes, I will.”

He goes to the kitchen and gets a bag of M&Ms. “Don’t eat too many of these,” he says.

“I’ve got to get out of this town,” the woman on television is saying. “You know I’ve got to go now, because of Tom’s dependency on Rita.”

Mary Anne carefully pours two tiny cups full of tea.

“We can drink this, can’t we, Daddy?”

“I guess so. If it doesn’t make you sick.”

Michael looks at his daughter and her friend enjoying their tea
party. He goes into the bathroom and takes his pipe off the window ledge, closes the door and opens the window, and lights it. He sits on the bathroom floor with his legs crossed, listening to the woman weeping on television. He notices Mary Anne’s bunny. Its eyebrows are raised with amazement at him. It is ridiculous to be sitting in the bathroom getting stoned while a tea party is going on and a woman shrieks in the background. “What else can I do?” he whispers to the bunny. He envies the bunny—the way it clutches the bar of soap to its chest When he hears Elsa come in, he leaves the bathroom and goes into the hall and puts his arms around her, thinking about the bunny and the soap. Mick Jagger sings to him: “All the dreams we held so close seemed to all go up in smoke …”

“Elsa,” he says, “what are your dreams?”

“That your dealer will die,” she says.

“He won’t. He’s only twenty years old.”

“Maybe Carlos will put a curse on him. Carlos killed his godfather, you know.”

“Be serious. Tell me one real dream,” Michael says.

“I told you.”

Michael lets her go and walks into the living room. He looks out the window and sees Carlos’s car pull up in front of the walk. He goes out and gets into Carlos’s car. He stares down the street.

“Don’t feel like saying hello, I take it,” Carlos says.

Michael shakes his head.

“Hell,” Carlos says, “I don’t know what I keep coming around for you for.”

Michael’s mood is contagious. Carlos starts the car angrily and roars away, throwing a curse on a boxwood at the edge of the lawn.

“
I
’ve unlaced my boots and I’m standing barefoot on a beach with very brown sand, ocean in front of me and mountains in the distance, and trees making a pretty green haze around them.”

“Pretty,” David says.

“Where would that be?”

“Greece?”

When she wakes from a dream, David is already awake. Or perhaps he only wakes when she stirs, whispers to him. He doesn’t sound sleepy; he’s alert, serious, as though he’d been waiting for a question. She remembers last year, the week before Christmas, when she and David had gone out separately to shop. She got back to the house first, her keys lost—or locked in the car. Before she could look for them, headlights lit up the snowy path. David jumped out of his car, excited about his purchases, reaching around her to put the key in the door. Now she expects him to wake up when she does, that they will arrive home simultaneously. But David still surprises her—at the end of summer he told her he wouldn’t be working in the fall. He was going back to college to finish the work for his Ph.D.

He sits in a gray chair by the fireplace and reads; she brings coffee to the table by his chair, and he turns off the light and goes upstairs to bed when she is tired. By unspoken agreement, he has learned to like Roquefort dressing. He pokes the logs in the fireplace because the hot red coals frighten her.

“After I take orals in the spring we’ll go to Greece to celebrate.”

She wants to go to Spain. Couldn’t the beach have been in Spain? No more questions—she should let him sleep. She shakes the thought out of her head.

“No?” he says. “We will. We’ll go to Greece when I finish the orals.”

The leaves of the plant look like worn velvet. The tops are purple, a shiny, fuzzy purple, and the underside is dark green. Suddenly the plant has begun to grow, sending up a narrow shoot not strong enough to support itself, so that it falls forward precariously, has to be staked. They agree it’s strange that a plant should have such a spurt of growth in midwinter. David admires the
plant, puts it in a window that gets the morning light and moves it into a side room late in the afternoon. Now when he waters the plant a little plant food is mixed in with the water. David is enthusiastic; he’s started to feed the others to see if they’ll grow. She comes home and finds him stretched by the fireplace, looking through a book about plants. Their plant isn’t pictured, he tells her, but it may be mentioned in the text. She goes into the other room to look at the plant. The shoot appears to be taller. They bought the plant in a food store last winter—not very pretty then. It was in a small cracked pot, wrapped in plastic. They replanted it. In fact, David must have replanted it again.

She puts away the groceries and goes back to the living room. David is still on the rug reading the book. He’s engrossed. The coffee would probably get cold if she brought it. She has to work that night. She goes upstairs to take a nap and sets the alarm. She rests, but can’t fall asleep, listening to the quiet music downstairs. She pushes in the alarm button and goes back to the living room. David is in his chair, reading the book, drinking coffee.

“I spent the most terrible winter in my life in Berlin. I don’t know why, but birds don’t leave Berlin in the winter. They’re big, strong birds. They nest in the public buildings. I think the winter just comes too suddenly in Berlin, no plans can be made. The birds turn gray, like snowbirds. I think snowbirds are gray.”

The old man is looking out the window. He is her patient His daughter and son-in-law are away for a week, and his sister stays with him in the day. She has been hired to stay with him at night. He is not very ill, but old and unsteady.

She drinks tea with him, tired because she didn’t nap.

“I don’t sleep well,” he tells her. “I want to talk all the time. My daughter doesn’t sleep either. In the day we fight, or I worry her, but at night I think she’s glad to have someone to talk to.”

The snowplow is passing the house, slowly, the lights blinking against the newly plowed snowpiles. The lights illuminate a snowman on the next lawn—crudely made, or perhaps it’s just not lit up from the right angle. She remembers her first snowman; her mother broke off the broom handle to give her and helped push the handle through the snowman. Her mother was impetuous, always
letting her stay home from school to enjoy the snow, and her father had been surprised when he returned from work to see the broom head on the kitchen table. “Well, we couldn’t get out. How could we go out in the snow to get anything?” her mother had asked her father. The snowplow has passed. Except for the wind, it is very quiet outside. In the room, the man is talking to her. He wants to show her his postcards. She’s surprised; she hadn’t realized she was being spoken to.

“Oh, not that kind of postcard. I’m an old man. Just pretty postcards.”

He has opened a night-table drawer. Inside there is a box of tissues, a comb and brush, an alarm clock. He sits on the side of the bed, his feet not quite touching the floor, reaching into the drawer without looking. He finds what he wants: an envelope. He removes it and carefully pulls out the flap. He lets her look through the postcards. There is a bird’s nest full of cherubs, a picture of a lady elegantly dressed in a high, ruffled collar, curtseying beneath a flowering tree, and one that she looks at longer than the rest: a man in boots and a green jacket, carrying a rifle, is pictured walking down a path through the woods in the moonlight. Stars shine in the sky and illuminate a path in front of him. Tiny silver sparkles still adhere to the postcard. She holds it under the lamp on the night table: the lining of his jacket is silver, the edges of the rocks, a small area of the path. There is a caption: “Joseph Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle.” Beneath the caption is a message, ornately written: “Not yet but soon. Pa.”