The Laments (29 page)

ON THE WAY TO SCHOOL
one morning, the twins spied a magazine stuffed between the bars of the wrought-iron cemetery fence. It was a
Playboy
—discarded, no doubt, by some guilty sinner. The boys studied the glossy pictures with slow steps and befuddled awe. At ten, they were too young to be aroused by what they saw, but they recognized the inherent power of these erotic pictures. Marcus wanted to toss the magazine out before they arrived at school, but Julius insisted on tucking it under his shirt, where it remained until he could stash it safely under his mattress. Every few weeks, Julius would secretly consult the magazine, until his dreams began to taunt his dormant libido with naked women absurdly clad in cowboy chaps, medieval armor, construction gear, astride horses, crocodiles, tigers, snakes, motorcycles, and missiles while cuddling power tools as if they were teddy bears.

Marcus’s dreams also went through a metamorphosis. But his fantasies were of having two perfect hands. With seamless grace, he swung from tree to tree in a vast jungle. He rowed across a mirror-still lake, his hands wrapped around oars, feeling the tremor of the current in all of his fingertips. He flew like Icarus up to the sun, and when his wings fell apart he dove into the Mediterranean with two perfectly formed hands piercing the azure waters, and down he plunged, into the welcoming arms of a mermaid with hair billowing like a thunderhead.

And then he would wake up.

Without looking at his hands, Marcus would open his eyes and pray that a miracle had occurred overnight. He would rise from bed, walk to the bathroom, and piss in the toilet. Finally, reaching for his penis to give it a shake, he would feel the rounded stub of his arm, and curse his imagination. Always the sentimental twin, Marcus clung to his faith in wishes. He had a drawer full of lucky rabbit feet and a Magic 8-Ball and a genuine gold ingot. None of them worked but he kept collecting, and dreaming.

Marcus had never felt as different from Julius as he did now. While his brother seemed to have a natural ability at school to assert himself, Marcus was timid, afraid of people’s reactions to his hand, and he kept his conversations short and his prosthesis hidden in his lap.

ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY
of their arrival in Queenstown, Howard was a thinner man, with graying temples. His anxious smile had settled into a permanent look of dismay. He slept late and went to bed early. He let his suits be devoured by moths and began wearing the clothes of his early years with Julia, happier times, when he was an ambitious young engineer—khaki slacks, a cricket jersey.

What did he do with his time? He cradled cups of tea, and paced the floorboards of the slumping, gray-clapboard structure with its long narrow porch overlooking Oak Street, the busiest street in town until a shopping center had opened on Route 99. Howard still applied for engineering jobs, but he appeared reluctant and distracted in his interviews. The fact was that his last two jobs had been solitary exercises—he had spent his workdays in the little office in Denham, the mahogany cell at Fay/Bernhardt—and solitude had begun to seem normal, even necessary. With the boys at school and Julia at work, he did exactly what he had done as a working man; he entertained grandiose ideas, but passed the time doing very little. And though Julia made a few sales that first year, they couldn’t have survived without their rapidly dwindling savings.

Sometimes Howard sat on the porch and surveyed the storefronts. An elderly barber occasionally waved to him from his shop across the street; one day he was carried out on a stretcher and the barbershop closed, though its empty leather chairs and marble sinks could still be seen through the darkened window. There was a drugstore with a busted neon sign, with wheelchairs, walkers, and crutches featured in its window; and a candy-and-newspaper store with a withered strip of flypaper dangling from the ceiling fan. To Howard’s eye, his house was a terminus on a dead-end street. Eliza Seward, good wife to John, might have ended her days in such a house; it was certainly old enough, with its dirt cellar, low doorways, and uneven floorboards. But Julia insisted on its virtues: it was cheap, distinctive, and solid, while the cookie-cutter houses of University Hills were all sinking in their foundations.

JULIA’S THURSDAY MEETINGS
tempered her anxiety about Howard, because even if he was in a slump, her marriage sounded so much healthier than those of her friends, all of which were under siege. Phyllis Minetti’s husband had revealed that he had a second wife living in San Diego, which explained his frequent flights to the coast and his peculiar habit of addressing Phyllis as Bunny during sex. Avé Brown had found Denny in bed with her mousy sister, a Jesus freak who ended every phone call with “I’m praying for you.” In the midst of these revelations, Frieda, who had become Julia’s closest friend in the group, remarked that forgiveness was a critical component of a strong marriage.

“Excuse me?” bristled Avé Brown, her topknot quivering with fury. “How dare you come in here talking that crap when your husband rearranges your face every week with his fists!”

Nobody had dared address Frieda’s bruises before.

Frieda’s hand flew to her cheek. “I—I walked into a door.”

“Oh God, Frieda,” said Julia. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. If he’s beating you, you
must
leave!”

Dawn Snedecker

Will’s loneliness, and his accent, put him at a distance from his new classmates at Queenstown High School. He made no new friends, and the drawings in his notebooks became fabulous and bizarre. The margins were filled with sketches of unnatural Boschian creatures, spoons with shapely legs and tails, cups and saucers with mournful eyes and gnarled fingers and feet.

Unlike his parents, Will indulged in reminiscence. The grief of losing Marina was like the lingering ache of a lost tooth. It tantalized, it aroused, and it couldn’t be left alone; the wealth of these feelings was better than their absence. He could still feel Marina’s open lips in the fiddlehead ferns, the tart-apple taste of her tongue, that burred sweater, and the way she pinched him when his fingers strayed. But one day he forgot the sound of Marina’s voice.

Dawn Snedecker was as different from Marina as apples from oranges.

Oh, Dawn. What a sweet, wonderful name. She had moved there from San Rafael, California. She had a gentle smile; she wore peasant blouses, painter’s pants, moccasins, and wire-framed glasses. Her hair was a spray of gold, woven into braids that wound about her head like a halo. She always wore a pin on her shirt:
FREE THE CHICAGO SEVEN
, or
BOYCOTT GRAPES
. Though she smiled easily in those first days, she didn’t talk much. She ate alone and healthfully: a container of yogurt, a banana, and a thermos of orange juice. If only he could muster the courage to speak to her.

After a week, he summoned the nerve during lunch. She was cradling a book.

“Reading something good?” he asked.

She marked her page with her pinkie and blinked at him.

“Oh, yesh,” she said.

“What is it called?”

“The Autobiography of Malcom Xsh.”

“Ah,” he said. “Been meaning to read that.”

“It’sh really good.”

He nodded. And nodded again. “See you,” he said finally, beating a reluctant retreat behind an elm tree so that his heart could slow down. God, she was sweet. And her way of speaking—unique. Will suddenly wished he had a speech impediment. A complementary one, like Elmer Fudd’s.
Wabbits are weawwy dewicious!
Oh yesch!
Between them, they could screw up the entire language.

During English class she gave him a smile and peered at the little drawings in his notebook.

“You’re quite artishtic,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“Have you taken art clashesh?”

“No. I just scribble when I’m bored.”

Dawn cocked her head, listening to him.

“Tha’sh a foreign acshent. Are you British?”

“Not exactly; I’m from Africa.”

“What part?”

“Southern Africa—Rhodesia.”

“Oh,” said Dawn, narrowing her eyes. “You lived in a shegregated shoshiety?”

“What?”

“
A shegregated shoshiety
. A white shupremashisht regime.”

“I suppose so,” said Will. “But I’m not a white supremacist.”

Dawn’s tone became skeptical. “Did you have a cook or a gardener?”

Will paused. “I was eight.”

“You were still benefiting from the shuffering of blacksh!”

Will was startled. Nobody had ever accused him of this before. It was a double shock to hear it from the sweet lips of Dawn Snedecker.

“
ARE WE WHITE SUPREMACISTS?
”

“What on earth are you talking about?” asked Julia at the laundromat that evening. The new house had no washing machine, so they washed their clothes at a laundromat three blocks away. Julius insisted on picking out his clothes with his teeth while Marcus stacked underwear on his head.

“Julius! Marcus! Stop acting like savages!” she cried.

“A girl at school said I was a white supremacist. So
am
I?” Will asked, rescuing a sheet before Julius dragged it across the dirty linoleum floor.

“Will, do
you
believe that whites are superior?”

“Of course not.” Will frowned. “But she said that because we had a cook and a gardener, and we lived in Rhodesia . . .”

“Who said this?”

“Nobody,” he assured her. “Nobody important.”

“Look,” said Julia, “some people actually believe whites are a superior race, and they believe that white domination is justified for that reason. We do not believe that. Therefore, we are not white supremacists.”

Will seemed relieved.

“However,” continued Julia, “America is a country with a double standard. Its laws may be liberal, but I come across plenty of neighborhoods where people don’t want to sell houses to black families. There’s a racist in America for every racist South African; they just don’t have the law on their side, or the separate toilets.”

WHEN DAWN NOTICED HIM
sitting at the far end of her lunch table, she made her feelings clear.

“I cannot shit at a table with you.” The pin on her collar read
FREE ANGELA DAVIS
.

“What?”

“I won’t share my table with a white shupremashisht.”

“But I told you, I’m not.”

“Yesh you are.”

Will had no other friends. There was no one to defend his character.

In the following weeks, Dawn attracted a small circle of disciples who shared her politics. They would sit cross-legged in a circle in the outdoor lunch area, singing Dylan songs and weaving macramé belts.

Once again, Will desperately wanted to belong. It was Calvin Tibbs who answered his wish.

CALVIN TIBBS HAD NO CHIN
. His bulbous head diminished as it neared his neck, like a pear perched upside down on a lollipop stick. Calvin sat behind Will and asked questions during Mr. Steuben’s German class. His breath was bitter and smoky. His T-shirt smelled of sweat and engine oil, and his utility boots kept a steady drumbeat on the floor. Calvin Tibbs knew where Rhodesia was.

“Rhodesia’s near South Africa, right?”

“Right,” said Will.

“Your people know how to deal with niggers, don’t they?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you got the whites-only buses and drinking fountains, just like they had in the South.”

Will was bewildered by Calvin’s admiration, but he didn’t argue with him. Calvin was muscular; he shoved kids aside in the halls. So Will kept silent until he got home.

“Yes,” Julia admitted, “there are plenty of bigots in this town, too, darling.”

“Why did we come here, then?”

“Because at least America has laws against racism. It’s a step in the right direction. America is South Africa’s future.”

“Is there a place that’s America’s future,” asked Will, “where people just get along?”

Julia smiled faintly. “People have never just gotten along.”

Calvin sounded off about niggers every day, and Will observed the complicit smiles of the other white boys. How many more Calvins were there? Will wondered. Did they proliferate like the latex Nixons on Mischief Night? Perhaps South Africa could trade its oppressed blacks for America’s bigoted whites; he imagined an impossibly tidy exchange, a load of Calvins on the
Windsor Castle
sailing east to Africa in their oil-stained T-shirts, tapping their utility boots on the railings, sprawled on deck chairs, playing bridge, and having herrings dropped down their pants by the great god Poseidon. At some midpoint they’d spy the blacks on
their
ship, going in the opposite direction. There’d be a pause as each group saw the other; the ships would issue a deafening blast from their horns, and they’d wave good riddance to each other.

In gym, Will was Calvin’s fourth pick to play on his baseball team.

“I want
Mr. Rhoh-desi
a
! Mr. Rhoh-desia is with us!” Calvin said with his idle smirk, and most of the other boys seemed to understand what this meant, though it obviously had nothing to do with baseball.

THAT EVENING WILL CAME HOME
to find Howard and Julia grimly inspecting the front of the house.

“Falling apart, see?” said Howard. “A few more years and it’ll all collapse into a pile of junk.”

“What are you proposing, Howard?” asked Julia. She saw the shabby façade with its cracked wooden eaves and peeling paintwork as charming, part of the house’s character.

“The pillars have rotted through because rain is leaking down from the porch roof. The whole thing must be replaced soon, or we’ll have a disaster on our hands.”

Julia cast a glance at the boys, and chose her words carefully.

“Darling, our finances won’t permit a renovation.”

But Julius’s ears seemed to prick up at this comment; he had remembered his mother’s assurance that they weren’t broke when they left University Hills.

“I thought you said we had plenty of money!” he cried.

“We do, darling,” replied Julia.