28

Uncle Leo hums in the kitchen with stand-up-and-clap-your hands vigor. It’s the sound Sophie awakens to on Sunday morning. That and the steam of the coffee maker. The church bells. She’s getting used to him, but she can’t share the downstairs bathroom. He has brought with him from the priory the smell of rubber, like a hot water bottle cracking, about to disintegrate. And the smell of some ointment he rubs on his feet, wintergreen and eucalyptus. When will she re-claim her studio upstairs? When will she stop going up there to bury her face in Chanti’s T-shirts still in the clothes hamper? When will she give away his boots to a homeless person?

Uncle Leo pokes his head around the corner and says, “Coffee?” His T-shirt reads:                          

The Labor Movement

The Folks Who

Brought You the Weekend.

 

“I’m getting up,” Sophie says. And she rises, groggily. As soon as she gets her bearings, as soon as she pulls herself together and pours a glass of juice and opens the back kitchen door to the courtyard, the starlings screech-screeching, the sweltering July-ness, she feels images in her fingertips, images that beg to be released. She wants to draw. But that urge, that near allure, is marred by queasiness. She sips her coffee and waits for it to pass.

Toast pops up in the toaster. Uncle Leo butters it and sets it in front of her. She shakes her head apologetically.

He has on stout walking shoes and shorts, his bag – a striped purse from Central America – slung on a chair. He has to be the only man she knows who carries such a bag – points for him. He has carried it ever since he served in Honduras. She was ten years old when he came home from La Cieba with the woven bag. Then, his regular paraphernalia included Cherry Lifesavers and Chiclets and she’s tempted to ask if he still carries the sweets, but she does not want to be in her little-girl skin – it’s already hard having Uncle Leo there as a caretaker. The bag contains a handkerchief, money, and notes about this and that. The telephone numbers of people he meets, handbills with directions to demonstrations and vigils.

“You’re going out?” Sophie says.

“We’re holding a prayer vigil.”

His politics stick out all over, like wild hair in his ears, and it is as if he coaxes her to ask questions, display curiosity. She remembers Benny saying, “You come from a radical line. You should ask your Uncle Leo.” Warnings whip before her like the yellow flags at the beach when the water’s choppy.

 “In case you’re wondering, I can tell you,” he says, “in twenty-five words or less, what the whole Coca-Cola issue is about.” Uncle Leo leans across the table, pins her there. “Union people at Coca-Cola in Columbia have been killed for organizing.”

“You really think you can help by holding a vigil here?”

“It’s international. People are praying and fasting at Coca-Cola plants all over the world.” He peers at her over the rim of his bifocals. His nose is spidery with red veins, his cheeks whisker-rough; a loose sack of flesh hangs from beneath his chin. He rises and touches his toes. Almost.

How old is Uncle Leo? He is Joe’s uncle and Joe is sixty-five. He might be ninety. Sophie has lost track, having been wrapped up in her self for years. Chanti, her clothes, her dance lessons, her job, her art supplies, her work, her hair color, her toenails, her diet, her bikini tan lines, her muscles, her cell phone, her new shoes, her friendships – with Liberty, with Dulcy. Self-absorbed doesn’t quite cover it. When Magda says she has an old soul, Sophie recants – inside – you don’t know me.

To Uncle Leo, she says, “What about dinner? How does pasta sound?”

At the sink, blue skies out the window, he rinses the coffee carafe and sets it upside down in the dish rack. “You don’t have to cook for me.”

“I want to,” Sophie says, “It’ll give structure to my day.”

He pats her shoulder on his way out the back door. “Your mother called last night. While you were out.”

“It seems like I just talked to her.”

“She’d like to hear from you.”

Basie hops up on Sophie’s lap for love, a fine distraction. Still, Uncle Leo waits expectantly for an answer. She feels an inexplicable weight at the thought of returning Emma’s call. She will have to pretend something.

“And Magda. She called, too. She wants you to come for dinner.”

She imagines all the laughter that used to be, Chanti’s sisters in their bedroom. How could she sit there on the carpet in their bedroom, her skirt bunched up on her thighs, her squash blossom tattoo revealed, gossiping? Finally she says, “Now don’t get arrested.”

“Been there, done that.”

 

 

29

The smell of Uncle Mort still inhabits Joe’s bedroom, like used depleted potting soil or an old man’s sweat, sour amalgam of hair oil and beer yeast. Mort used moth balls and that pungency emanates from the closet if Joe leaves the door ajar. He can’t decide whether to keep the closet door closed or whether to leave it open and leave the windows open and air out the goddamned place. Emma would know what to do. One of the window screens needs patching: hissing wasps manage to trundle in through the hole. Joe beats them with a shoe rather than resort to spray poisons, which might not be good for Peggy Lee. In spite of her presence, sleeping ball of dark fur beside him, a conviction prickles Joe the moment he fully wakes up: his mood is rotten. At four he was still awake, fitfully pissed, and then he dozed, bereft at Emma’s absence, and he did not see sleep coming, it hit him like a hammer, and now it’s only seven, a day of dread. 

This moment is most invented, most a struggle for me to enter the skin of. I have almost always been cheerful in the morning, able to multi-task, inhabiting the bright side. My demons, when they tiptoe on the scene, arrive at night. In the gloom of post-debauchery hangovers. Anxiety and sleeplessness rub raw my skin. But mornings are glorious. I write in the morning before the sunrise, and if I’m at my desk at home, five miles from campus, I notice the neighbor’s barn lit up whitely, I hear the horses whinny, and I feel a kinship with those who labor. John Gardner said that writing a novel is a sustained psychological battle with your self.  Jane Smiley in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel makes it sound more light-hearted.  But only the beginning feels light-hearted to me. There are few things easier than writing fifty or one hundred pages.  You’re doodling, like kids playing in finger paints before they know there’s such a thing as a circle, a rectangle. You write without the words narrative trajectory etched in mind. After that, crossing the middle is like walking too far in the heat of summer, hip-ache burning, with sour water left in a Nalgene bottle.  According to Jane Smiley, the writer reveals herself in every detail chosen, every syntactical configuration or rumination.  Here I am – see the world as I do.  If you thought about that, really thought about it, you’d stop.  I think about my obsessions and how they must be prancing around before me like Day of the Dead skeletons whenever I’m in public. Women who let their need for men subvert their own truths; women who turn their backs on loved ones.  Siamese twins always picking at each other: women who are straight ladies; women ruled by Aphrodite. And the Big Unanswerable Question: does this suit the hermeneutic code: What is marriage for?  That’s like the question that can’t be answered in “Indian Camp.” Why did the husband kill himself? I think that I have always liked being married because it is a place where it’s safe for desire to run rampant. That’s driving Emma’s story; she doesn’t have a safe place for desire to run rampant anymore. Joe doesn’t know this about his wife.  He doesn’t know what burns in her; he might feel even more put-upon if he did.

Then there are the things you leave undone while writing a novel.  Vet appointments, re-caulking the kitchen sink, weeding, re-placing a headlight police have warned you about.  (So far I’ve avoided a ticket because they tend to leniency with women professors.) Richard Ford once wrote me a postcard that read, “I’ve finished the novel and now I can live my life as though it’s more than an afterthought.”  Something lost and something gained the day you finish.  A little like post-coital sadness.

People, excuse me while I have another cup of high-test coffee to do whatever it is that caffeine does to your brain: my New Yorker coffee mug has a cartoon on it, a guy whose head opens up like a tin can, and he’s grinning like an idiot savant, pouring coffee in.  Espresso, the last refuge of a substance abuser – isn’t it grand that it’s so accessible, so trendy? Jolt me, hit me, we used to say in the bad old days. We used to take black beauties and soar as if on paper wings.  We bought them over the counter in Mexico; we bought marijuana with the buds intact, forty dollars for a grocery bag. Times have changed. Now I sip a half-glass of wine and pay for it by midnight: headachy, irritable. It’s not worth it.

I have spent enough mornings with Benny to recognize depression. The slack-jaw. Sitting morosely on the edge of the bed, wiping the bottom of his foot with one hand for five minutes before he can commit to putting on socks. The stiff shoulder that says, “Don’t talk to me yet.”

Enough already! Enough director’s commentary.

Out in the kitchen, someone stirs. The kettle whistles, Mother Jones skitters across the linoleum. Joe needs to take a leak, but he doesn’t want to have to talk to anyone yet, not ready for face-time, as Liz calls it. He feels as if he’s slept in the closet and now he has to crawl out of it. Mornings are the worst time; as the day proceeds, he usually feels better. Some days he feels as if his bones are saturated with sunlight. And those are very good days.

Mother Jones noses his bedroom door open and wanders in, shaking creek water from her muddy coat. Next, there’s Tommy, in Spider Man pajamas two sizes too small. His hair sticks up on all sides. He needs a haircut and Joe thinks, That would be a manageable task. Maybe we’ll go for haircuts at the barbershop on the Blue Star Highway by the fruit stand.

Tommy says, “Don’t forget --”

“Forget what?” Joe punches a pillow, doubles it up under his head; he stares unblinking at the tent his knees make in the duvet.

 “That stuff Violet has. We’re going over to look at her stuff.”

Stuff: baseball stuff. It comes back to Joe. Their neighbor –Violet – has a stash of baseball memorabilia left to her by her father who died last Christmas.           

Mother Jones props her muzzle on the edge of Joe’s bed. Scratch my ears, she seems to say.  He obliges. Liz is next at the door, looking ghoulish in a black kimono, her feet bare, her hair not brushed.

 “Soph and Benny’ll be here around noon. Will you go to the grocery?”

 “Happy day.”

“Your enthusiasm is contagious.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Cleaning the porch.”

 A cell phone sounds, rat-a-tat-tat like a toy machine gun, and Liz pulls it out of her kimono pocket and answers.

 “Elizabeth Anne March. Dominatrix.”

 Why does she say that in front of Tommy? He’s kneeling by the bed, plucking burrs from the dog’s flank. Tommy is a complicated boy – cocky, vulnerable, smart. Liz says that boys suffer from hormone surges just like girls. Joe does not understand how Neil could bear to be away from him for so long.

“The more the merrier,” Liz says, dryly. And, “So what’s your ETA?”

When she folds the phone away, Tommy says, “Dad’s coming, isn’t he?”

Liz claps her hands and shoots Tommy with her index fingers. “You’re on the money. Oh, I can’t stand it,” she says. “Two of the most difficult people in the world are coming to visit.”

“Lizard,” Tommy says, “Sophie’s not.”

Joe’s phlegmatic inclination trickles away and he sits up and takes charge. Taking charge is an act he has nearly perfected. “Liz – honey – would you iron that shirt for me I left on the ironing board?”

And Liz is off to do his chore. He doesn’t think she minds. To Tommy, Joe says, “So your Dad’s coming.”

Tommy concentrates extra hard on a burr tangled in the belly fur. “He’ll want to take me home.”

 “You think so?”

“Duh. We’ve been here three weeks. I’m wearing clothes from the thrift store. He’ll feel irresponsible if I don’t go home with him.”

 “It’s not about wanting you to come home?”

  “No way.”

 “Well, I won’t let on.” Joe runs his hands through his hair, scratches just above his temples. “Where’s your mother, Tommy? You never mention your mother.”

“She’s in Oregon.”

“That’s a big state.”

“I forget the town. But she calls me. I have her phone number.”

“Where?”

Tommy taps his forehead. “Up here.”

“And grandparents. You must have those, too.”

“Dad’s mom lives in Sedona. She meditates a lot.” He scoops up the burrs in one hand and walks to the door with self-sufficient pride, Mother Jones moseying behind him. He turns and says, “I’ll miss you.”

 Joe feels a catch in his throat. “Now, we don’t know anything, not a goddamned thing. You get dressed. We have to check out that stuff Violet’s sitting on. I might need your opinion.”

He can’t stand to have that choked-up sensation hit him at odd moments. When Sammy Sosa put his hand over his heart in salute to Mark McGwire’s 62^nd home-run. When Sophie called to say that she went through a photo album with Uncle Leo. They found an old snapshot of him and his brother on the hood of the Skylark. “It must’ve been summer,” she said. “You’re wearing a tight white-T-shirt. Very James Dean-esque. He looks about fifteen.” Right before he died.

But as Joe’s consciousness stands upright and creakily perambulates, he remembers that some small thing has changed.

All those memories of his brother, of how arrogant he’d been to him – they’re subdued, like a mean dog that doesn’t have it in him anymore.

And in the evening Liz rocks on the glider in the dusk (the scent of her like a girl, clean after a shower) and Damon Ray plays his concertina, some foolish Irish love song. Tommy and Mother Jones are out in the yard, considering fireflies. The near-metallic odor of tomatoes growing whiffles about the veranda. Benny and I were around for a few days: like family.  I’m back in Chicago, glued to my writing chair. Benny’s going out there again, delivering a TV and a DVD player. Joe misses the movies: if that’s the worst of what he feels in the evening, how can he complain? What a motley crew they are, but he feels right about them: each one is there out of want, not obligation. He wants to hang on to those evenings. Plus-feature of every day. Even if Damon Ray is pig-headed about politics. (Telling Joe: “History’s still happening, man. Anarchy means something now.” Of all times, Joe tells him, that’s not what we need. We need a government that protects us. With oversight, of course. Plenty of civilian oversight.)

Still, waking up is like a virus in his flesh. Time sluices through Joe’s life, too fast, too much a force he can’t control. And now Tommy, inching into his heart.

It’s hard to get out of bed.

 

 

            In the Skylark, on the way to Violet’s, Tommy makes his case for Home Plate becoming an e-business.

 “There are all these cool logo design sites. We could make a really cool logo. And the domain name – have you checked it out? Does anyone own the rights to Home Plate?”

“Whoa, Buddy.”

“Joe, you don’t realize the possibilities. You could put in a couple of hours a day out here. You wouldn’t even have to have a brick-and-mortar shop. You could post an e-zine to bring people back to your site over and over, you could give away stuff.  Promotional stuff.  I’d help you.”

 “What about credit cards and all that? That makes me nervous. I’ve never given my credit card number on-line.”

 “That’s how old people think.”

 “Hey, Buddy, do I treat you that way?”

 “Sorry.” Tommy looks chastised, truly sorry. He frowns and chews the inside of his bottom lip.

Joe can see that he’s hurt his feelings in return. Tommy can cry at the drop of a hat. But he doesn’t seem to feel bad about crying. Somewhere along the line Tommy has received the message that it’s all right for boys to cry. They are emotional time bombs, the two of them.

“Look,” Joe invites. “Tell me more. Go on.”

“That’s okay.”

“Come on.”

Tommy folds his arms and shakes his head.

“I really want to know.”

“You do?”

“Yeah.”

Tommy sighs big, as if he’s saved a sigh over his short lifetime for just this moment. He can’t look at Joe. But he says, without much enthusiasm, “There are security measures you can take.” And: “There are what’s called third party processors. They take a small percentage of each sale.”

“It sounds so complicated.”

 “It’s not. Trust me.”

 “I don’t even have a computer.”

 “No time like now to hop on the information highway.”

 “I’ll think about it.”

 “Joe --” 

“I said I’d think about it. Now. See that gal. She’s on the lookout for someone. You, I’ll betcha.”

Violet’s place is manicured. Joe envies that. They wind down the gravel lane, past flourishing blueberry shrubs, where U-pick families are scattered here and there with buckets, picking blueberries. The whitewashed shed, where Violet weighs the buckets and takes their money, is set on a slight rise, surrounded by long-needle pine trees. Her house is behind, with a screened-in porch and baskets of fuschias all in a row. On the front steps, Violet – in shorts and a baseball cap – tosses toast edges to the birds. A girl about twelve – her granddaughter, Lola Marie, they will learn – sits in a motel chair, her pink backpack on her lap, Barbie heads sticking out. What was it he read in the Sun-Times about smiling changing your mood? He smiles back at Violet, with self-conscious effort – it feels a bit like one of those rubber Halloween masks. Once a long time ago, he wore a Nixon mask to a Halloween party. And he wonders, Why don’t we – meaning he and Emma – do that sort of thing anymore? 

Tommy and Lola Marie wander off to play with her Game-Boy.

Violet leads him through the house to the basement stairs, where she switches on lights before they descend. Her basement is dry, chalky, and smells like fabric softener and un-definable oils, varnishes. There are three chambers. Her baseball stuff is junk. He can tell that at a glance.

“Is that all you have?”

Violet purses her lips and plucks off her baseball cap. A child’s red bow-shaped barrette controls her cloud-white hair. He’s not sure how he knows, but she looks like a woman who has never used hair spray. She’s short. A cone of light shines on her and picks up the cherries embroidered on her blouse. Reminiscent somehow of curtains. Cheerful. Joe finds her cheerful.

“There might be more,” she says, shoving aside with one foot an empty cardboard box. “I need to get down here and clean house.” She wanders into the next chamber and pulls a metal chain to shed more light. The next room is piled high with what he immediately recognizes as abandoned hobby gear. Leftovers from someone’s short-lived obsessions. His kind of place. There’s an electric putting green and two sets of golf clubs in tattered bags. An exercise bicycle, loops of Christmas lights stored on the handlebars. A canoe.  A gun case of rifles and ornamented pistols you might see in a museum. A small silver key has been left in the lock. Gun-nut, Joe thinks. A growing-familiar revulsion buckles his mid-section. He keeps coming up against it: that dusty empty spot behind the Casey Stengel shadowbox.

“This stuff,” Violet says, “it’s hard for me to get rid of it.” She shrugs. “I don’t really notice it, but I think I’d notice if it were gone. It was Tom’s. My husband.” She crouches and grunts, pulling another box of baseball memorabilia from the kneehole of a scratched up desk.

Joe lifts the box and begins searching through it, but the thought of the Diamondback revolver and its whereabouts tips him on edge, his knees weak. He wipes his face with a clean white handkerchief. It doesn’t matter, is what he tells himself. It would only make more trouble.

Violet sits at a potter’s wheel, her hands on her bare brown knees. The wheel is coated in dry clay, tinged the color of a chocolate shake. On a shelf behind her are plastic jars of ceramic supplies. Glazes and slip.

“Once in a while,” she says, “when I come down here to do the laundry, I sit here. Like he sat here.”

Joe takes a deep breath. He says, “Would you sell that?”

Taken aback, Violet shakes her head no, and that hair of hers swirls. “I don’t think so. The baseball stuff wasn’t Tom’s. It was Dad’s. I’m not ready. I might never be.”

Back upstairs, she doesn’t mind leaving the blueberry shed to the honor system now and again; they sit in the cool of the porch. He’s of two minds. To shut down his secret, for want of something to say, he offers, “Emma would like to meet you. You’d like her.” And he launches into a pitch – Emma, her teaching, her Dream Trip. He speaks as if Emma will return and become a member in good standing of their menagerie. It’s more than he’s said about Emma in three weeks. Once Violet says, “I’m not much of a traveler.” And a few minutes later, “You must miss her.”

Violet has an unusual voice – nasally, Midwestern, but not unpleasant; sweet-and-sour, but genuine. She coaxes more of his story out of him. The shop he’s left behind, Uncle Mort. And once he’s finished a muffin and there appears nowhere else to go with conversation, Joe says, “I feel like this place is good for me. I haven’t been feeling so good.”

 “Oh?” Violet inquires, leaning ever so slightly toward him from her wicker chair. Her face is free of makeup. So far as he can tell.

Joe catches himself. He glances around, as if assessing the wind. “I lost my train of thought,” he deflects. “It’s a short train.”

 She leans back, her head cocked inquisitively. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

He could ‘fess up. He’s not sure exactly what he would tell.  Or what good it would do. Joe slaps his knees, a despicable old man gesture – thank God Emma wasn’t here for that – and he says, “Violet. My younger daughter’s coming out today. I’m assigned to go to the grocery. Better get a move on.”

Violet says, “Please call me Vi. Everyone does. And if you ever want to come over and watch a Cubs game, let me know. Mort used to come over and watch the games.”

He says he’ll swing by in half an hour to pick up Tommy. Violet walks out the lane partway, and then, when Joe glances in the rearview mirror, she’s standing there shading her eyes with one hand, that cloud of hair gleaming in the sunlight. As if she wonders something about him. You’re dreaming, he tells himself. You old fart.