What You Call Winter Page 12

“Vee, I don’t want her getting involved in all that —”

  “No, no. Of course not. Not involved.”

  Marian saw that Nicole’s face was tight with anger and indignation. She imagined how her daughter would protest if Vee were not in the room. “Go ahead, I’m sorry.”

  “Well, you know, the boys love Nicole—they really do, sweetheart — and since she’s usually the one who sits for them, I thought maybe she could just be available. I mean, if Gordon needs to run out for something. Or whatever it is he does with his time …” She rolled her eyes. “Anyway, the boys would be with someone I trust.”

  “Sure,” Nicole said quickly. She straightened up on her stool, eager for any adult commission. The makeup made sharp edges of her lips and eyes. “I can do that.”

  “Oh, Nicole, I don’t know …”

  “Mom! It’s only babysitting.”

  “But you won’t feel strange?” She thought of Gordon, hard-eyed, dragging his foot through the pile of the carpet. “No!”

  “Maybe Dad can go with you —”

  “Sure,” Vee said quickly. “That’s fine, sweetie. You might feel better—”

  “But I don’t need any help. What would Dad do? That would just make everything weird. Gordon would think Dad was checking up on him.”

  “She’s right.” Vee looked at Marian. “She’s absolutely right.”

  Marian smiled weakly. Her daughter was right. How had her daughter come to understand such things? She thought of herself at twelve, such a younger twelve than America permitted.

  Then Vee held up her hand. “But your mother’s right too, sweetheart. If you feel at all uncomfortable doing this —”

  “I don’t. I feel fine. It’s no big deal.”

  “And Gordon’s very fond of you, darling. If he calls, you just go and don’t get involved in any discussion of what’s happening. Understand?”

  Marian held up a warning finger.

  “I know, Mom.”

  “Of course she knows.” Vee put an arm around Nicole’s shoulder. “She’s growing up so fast, isn’t she?”

  Marian remembered a day when her daughter was four and found a sheet of adhesive bindis. Nicole stuck a constellation to her forehead and the rest on her dolls. A year later Nicole asked for blond hair for Christmas. Marian looked at her daughter—the lips glistening, the lashes thick and painted—and she did not know what to say that would not disappoint them all. So she shrugged and smiled, feeling she had surrendered more than she intended.

  When it was time to pick Vee up to go to the airport, Marian was still rushing through the house. Her tea mug was half filled on the counter, its contents cold—she swallowed it down on the way to the sink. Lights were on in the bedrooms, though sharp winter sunlight poured through the windows — she snapped them off, glancing at the state of the carpets, the unmade beds. She wished she’d had time to vacuum.

  “You’ll turn out the lights when you’re not using them? Tara! Don’t forget!”

  Daniel beeped the horn.

  “No wearing makeup while I’m gone,” Marian warned. Nicole’s face hardened.

  “You think your father won’t notice, but he’ll notice.”

  “I won’t. I told you already.”

  Marian hugged her, and for a moment it seemed as if Nicole’s body yielded in her arms. “Try to eat something decent every day, will you, darling? Don’t let Dad just bring you pizza. Tara, come and give me a kiss.”

  They stood in the doorway as she left. It was cold and Nicole hugged her arms to her chest. Tara was solemn and round-cheeked, baby-faced still. They looked lonely—two small figures on the wide front porch. Everything was wide in the Midwest, even in the suburbs. The yards, winter-yellow, and the smooth-paved roads. The sedans and station wagons. The flattened vowels and broad-backed casseroles. Only the wind had a narrow edge. Marian looked up at the sky, the tatters of clouds and the hard blue overhead. Tree branches scratched up at it, bare and ridiculous in all that space. She turned again to her children and felt a sudden pang of doubt.

  “We’ll be fine,” Daniel told her. “It’s only a few weeks.” He reversed out of the driveway and paused for a moment, lifting his hand to wave as if he were the one leaving.

  “Wait!” Marian could see Nicole was calling out to them. “Hang on. Roll down the window!” She leaned over Daniel to hear. “What is it, darling?”

  Her daughter had pushed her hands in the pockets of her jeans; her shoulders were hunched against the cold. “Tell Vee I said good-bye.”

  “She adores you, you know.”

  Vee was staring out the window. In Frankfurt, the plane had filled with Indian families. A meal had been served, a movie shown, the lights dimmed. Around them, sleep crumbled to coughs and restless movements. The engines droned in the plane’s haunches, a thrumming Marian felt in her back and legs.

  “She really does, she adores you,” Marian said. She did not say the rest of it, that there were things about Vee she did not want her daughter to adore. They had never exchanged such truths before; this was not the terrain of their friendship. But in the semidarkness of aisle lights and lavatory signs it seemed possible that they had left even that behind them. Outside was darkness, and below was darkness that might have been land or sea. Time waited for them in one place or another—her mother’s alarm clock, her father’s bed pulled to the balcony, her children, running or reading or sleeping — but for now, the plane had slipped loose of such moorings. The moon was rounded but not full, the heel of a foot turned elsewhere. “Sometimes it worries me.”

  “Oh, she’s in a stage. You know, you remember what that’s like. She’ll grow out of it.” Then, sadly, seriously. “I love her too, Marian.”

  “I know. I know you do.” What could Marian say? Whatever else was between them would remain unsaid, a dark stretch of earth the plane passed over. She could not even name what it was. She thought of the day Vee called her— “I’ve thrown my wedding band down the drain,” she’d announced. “But now I’m scared to run the disposal. Remember that day when Mickey set the microwave on fire?” Mickey, nine years old and alone in the house, heating up his pizza in foil while Vee spent three hours at the hairdresser’s. But what was the point of saying such things? Soon they would land.

  “You’re good with her, Vee.”

  “Well.” She paused. “I should have had a girl.” It sounded like an apology. She turned to face Marian. “You’re her mother,” she said.

  That day, the day Vee’s wedding band lodged in the drain, Marian and Daniel came over to take apart the disposal. He set the blades on a sheet of newspaper; they were dark-stained and cruelly curved.

  “Cool,” said Mickey, a boy generally fascinated by how things came apart. He had been permitted to save the microwave he had melted.

  Daniel rolled up his shirtsleeve and gingerly reached down the pipe, head cocked to one side.

  “What will I do with it, anyway?” Vee giggled. “Throw it in the river? Run over it with the car?”

  “Put it on the railroad tracks,” suggested Mickey. He had also been the one to put the fire out, with an extinguisher he found in the garage. “We do that with pennies. They flatten out, splat.”

  “Do they, angel?”

  Marian glanced at Mickey nervously; she didn’t consider this a healthy conversation for a nine-year-old. He kept the misshapen microwave in his room, near a large green fish tank. But despite his attachment to his father, Mickey seemed to take a cheerful interest in the fate of his mother’s wedding band.

  “I should give it to Nicole,” Vee said loudly. “A warning. A—what do you call it? Talisman.”

  “Don’t be silly, Vee,” Marian said quickly.

  “Oh, I’m only kidding!” She snatched up Cody and covered his face with kisses; the little boy squirmed in pleasure. “Your mama’s only kidding, right?”

  The next week Gordon would arrive at the house with his brother. Marian would sit in her idling car until they had gone inside. The dini
ng chairs would be distributed.

  “Got it!” Daniel dropped the ring onto the newspaper with the blades of the disposal, and Mickey leaned close to see. “Watch out for those, buddy.”

  But Mickey picked up the ring between two fingers and examined it carefully. “Do you think it would melt?” he wondered.

  Within a year Mickey will begin to set fires. Small Boy Scout experiments at first, twigs crosshatched into a kind of housing with paper in its center. An abandoned birds’ nest; his gym clothes doused in turpentine; Cody’s old crib. He will rip down the rotting walls of the tree house his father built him, leaving the floor as a lookout platform. He will wait for a dry night and burn those too. He will return to the house and carefully bathe, and even then his hair and fingertips will smell of thick black smoke.

  Vee will meet a man in Florida, an older man who announces he wants to take care of her. He will not mind the idea of Mickey and Cody (until Mickey ignites a slick of oil in the swimming pool). When she talks about Del, she will laugh at nearly anything, her voice high and brittle. She will move the boys to a house outside Orlando that Marian and Daniel will never see. “He likes me to tell him if I’m going out,” she says, laughing. “He likes to know who I’m calling. He’s so attentive.” One day, years later, Marian will pick up the phone and hear Vee’s voice.

  “I got your letter, honey. I’ve been crying and crying. But you know I’ll come. Del will understand if it’s serious. He can spare me for a couple of days if the doctors say it’s really serious. Just tell me when you have the surgery. It must be soon, right? Very soon. They’ll want to take care of that tumor right away. You just tell me and Ill come.”

  “Next week,” Marian says cautiously. She is in perfect health; all the letters she sent in the first few years were sent back, unopened, and she has long since stopped writing. Rumors twist through parents’ groups and dinner parties; some of Vee’s old friends think Del has ties to the Klan. Marian motions to Daniel to listen on the other extension. “Vee, if you want to come, you can stay here —”

  “I’m coming. I’ll be there. I wouldn’t let you go through this alone. You don’t have to worry about asking me to come.”

  “Thanks.” Marian’s voice is shaking. “Please come, then, okay? How are you? How are the boys?”

  “Oh, they’re fine, fine.” She laughs, a sound almost like crying. “I can’t wait to see you. You know it’s hard for me to get away. You know, right? But I’ll be there, I will. I promise.”

  “Vee—”

  “I have to go now. I can’t talk long …”

  “What’s your number, Vee? I’ll call you. I’ll call you back—”

  “No, no, I’ll call you. I’ll call tomorrow.”

  A week goes by, another, another. A month, a year. The phone doesn’t ring. Cody, a teenager by now. The last they heard of Mickey, a special school. There is nothing she and Daniel can think to do.

  Nicole will not miss Vee as much as Marian worries she will. She will do as she promised and babysit for Mickey and Cody while Vee is in Bombay. Gordon will come to the door, sleepy, disheveled, rubbing his stubbled jaw. It seems longer than three months since she’s seen him. “I’ve missed you, squirt.” He grins, a familiar grin. “Go on up, Mickey’s waiting.” A few minutes later he calls upstairs. “I ordered a pizza, okay? Money’s on the table.” She hears him leave. Cody falls asleep with an old baseball hat in his hand, and she and Mickey watch an R-rated movie on the VCR.

  “Are you sure we’re allowed?”

  Mickey laughs but not unkindly. He has a round, merry face and laughter seems its natural function. “I do it all the time. C’mon.”

  They stretch out on the top of his parents’ bed—Vee’s bed. Nicole has seen R-rated movies before, whenever she babysits in houses with HBO. But she feels strange with Mickey beside her. He lies on his belly, feet in the air, and seems to find nothing unusual in the naked woman draping herself over the naked man. Nicole watches carefully, as though someone might be watching her watching. She is very still and keeps her face set. When it is over they play cards, War.

  “Come over tomorrow,” he offers when they hear his father at the door. “If you want.”

  Gordon drives her home in his convertible. The top is down although it’s January.

  “Cold?” he calls. He is wearing loafers with no socks, she notices. He has a leather jacket.

  She pulls her parka closer around her. “No.”

  “It’s great, isn’t it?”

  The wind cuts into her face, making her cry. She has put on lipstick and a touch of mascara, and worries that tears will smudge her makeup. Gordon is taking the long way home, driving fast, faster. He pulls to the curb at the house where he and Vee used to live, two blocks from Nicole’s house, before they moved to the rich part of town.

  “Remember this place?” He runs a hand through his wind-stiffened hair.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think? Maybe we should have stayed in this place.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it would have made a difference.”

  “I don’t know …”

  “You’re cold, squirt. Come here.” He puts an arm around her and pulls her close, rubbing the sleeve of her coat. He smells like medicine, she thinks. His breath bitter as the taste of pennies. His voice thick and slow when he tells her how pretty she looks. His hands cold.

  Later she will lie in bed with her parka on top of her pajamas. She will stare out the window of her bedroom at the same sight that she has stared at since she was a little girl, a pine tree rising above the roofline of a house down the street. She will mentally shave a single protruding branch down to size over and over. She will remember Kurt Hollander at Peggy Newman’s pool party the summer before, the way he ducked his head swiftly to hers right in front of Janey Price. She will tell herself fiercely, This is not the first kiss, this is not the first kiss. Later there will be other fierce thoughts, one after the other, stubble and whiskey and wind. Hands. For the rest of her life, parts of her will be too fierce and others parts too soft. She will hold them away, dark craters and fine colorless dust.

  This is not the first kiss—the only thought she permits. She misses her mother. She is cold, still cold, and wears her parka to bed. This is not the first kiss.

  That is her half of a story, the half Marian never knows.

  They have landed in Bombay. Vee is rumpled, nervous. The air settles on them, heavy as sea water. Vee unpins her hair, brushes it, and repins it as they wait to disembark. “It’s so hot!”

  “This is nothing. It’s the middle of the night. Wait until the sun is out.”

  “Will your brother be here?”

  “He’ll be right outside customs. No one’s allowed to come inside.”

  They move through immigration and enter the large hall for baggage claim. “What’s that?”

  Vee points to the observation deck, an overhang encased in plastic where people meeting flights are permitted to catch a first glimpse of their families. Marian scans the wall of faces pressed against the Plexiglas.

  “Look! There’s Jude!”

  “Where?”

  “That one, there!”

  Vee waves, a huge extravagant wave. “Jude! Hi, Jude!”

  Other families have turned to look at Vee, laughing.

  “He can’t hear you. It’s soundproof!”

  “Oh, who cares? Hey, Jude! We made it!”

  Marian was sure that Jude would be embarrassed by this display, but he is laughing in a way Marian recognizes from late nights of old jokes, after the kids are asleep and sometimes even her parents, when they are free to remember just what they like. Suddenly, through her exhaustion, Marian is buoyant. She thinks of her father, pretending he has not fallen asleep, rising from his vigil to clap his hands in welcome. She can imagine them all unpacking the suitcases together when they reach home, drinking tea at two in the morning, unearthing the food, the phone, the radio, passing around t
he photographs. She sees now how the ritual will expand to include Vee—Vee and her chocolates, her water filter, the silk robe that Marian’s mother will try on at once, the sweater her father will pull on over his pajamas. The report cards and art projects, the pictures Vee has brought of Mickey and Cody and an old one she has unearthed of herself in a sari, standing with Marian.

  Jude remains on the observation deck until the first bags emerge through the flaps of the luggage belt. Then he catches Marian’s eye and points; he will meet them in the wash of smoky air outside the door. Vee has found a cart and is asking questions about customs.

  Marian is thinking of the letter Nicole has written to her parents. She would like to read it. She knows that nothing of real importance will be revealed beneath those long seams of tape, but she would like to see the handwriting, the words her daughter chose.

  Home for a Short Time

  Toby came home from work to find his father alone in Their flat.

  “Back already?” His father looked up from his reading, clearly surprised to find the sun was setting. “Oh, I see. What’s the time?”

  “Just past seven.” Toby shuffled through some mail without picking it up. “Where’s Michael?”

  “At Regina’s for a drink. Someone’s come by there, I’ve forgotten. He says he’ll be back to eat.”

  “He’s left all this out?”

  The dining table was covered with loose pictures and old cracked albums. “The walls are so bare,” Michael had complained the night he arrived from America for a three-week visit. “What about hanging a few photos at least?”

  “He hasn’t finished,” his father said mildly. “He wants your help with it, actually. Just past seven … then I’ve got another hour before dinner, yes?” He returned to his book.

  Toby did not ask what assistance his brother required. Whatever it was could wait. Instead he passed into the empty kitchen and poured a beer into a glass. He glanced out the back window to find Neelam, their servant, down in the compound doing her washing.

  The flat was dusky. A single lamp shone at his father’s desk, but Toby didn’t bother with lights. He switched on the ceiling fan in his bedroom, stood at the window, and drank deeply. His throat felt rough, his skin gritty. It was nearing March and even the evenings were hot. The train had been crowded and air from the open doors stank of exhaust, factory smoke, dried fish, sewage. He had spent forty minutes pressed into the backs and shoulders of other men, smelling their breath and hair oil.