Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Undressed?” Isabel asked. Every facial expression she gave her mother indicated that any and all requests were, at that moment, preposterous. “You want me undressed, Mom? Like those nine-to-five people who are undressed? Who go to sleep?”

“Yes,” Isabel said. “Like those people.”

Isabel glanced up at her mother. Picking herself up, she stood next to the bed, then lowered her jeans. “See?” she said. “I can do this.” She swayed and laughed at herself. “Wanna see something?” She laughed again. “I’m a magician. I can do this amazing trick. Just watch. You’ve never seen this before in your life . I can make my panties stick to the ceiling.”

“What?” Estelle said.

After stomping her blue jeans to the floor, Isabel lowered her underwear and clumsily stepped free. She bent down and picked up her underpants — pink, Estelle noticed, her heart breaking — and then threw them up at the ceiling. They fluttered back down to the floor.

Isabel gazed upward and said wonderingly, “I thought it would work. I had such a good time.”

Estelle was staring, too. Her mind moved slowly. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, poor Mom,” Isabel said. “You’re so sheltered. Can’t you guess?”

“No.”

“Well,” Isabel said, putting her hand on her mother’s shoulder to keep herself from swaying, “I was with a boy tonight. And we … you know. And, Mommy, did you know that after you do it, I mean when you do it with a boy, it drains out of you? Later? Onto what you’re wearing? And it makes your clothes … sticky. And that’s why I thought my underwear would be up there on the ceiling!” she concluded, triumphantly. “Except it isn’t.”

Of course Isabel would become pregnant. There was no such thing as safe sex with Isabel. Of course she would have a baby and give it to her mother to raise after naming the baby Frederick (who came out of his mother brown, so his father must have been African-American, or something), and of course she would disappear quickly afterward, leaving no known address.

Poor crazy Isabel. Poor Freddie, her son. It wasn’t about individuals anymore; it was about the generations, and what they handed down. The courtrooms, the hospitals, the doctor’s offices, the classrooms, the jails where they had put Izzy overnight: sometimes, sitting on the back stoop with her coffee cup, Estelle felt all those places descending over her, as if another person had lived that part of her life and had not yet survived it but now was inhabiting her own body. Clouds would cross the sky, cumulus clouds puffy with their own complacency.

In the car, with Freddie explaining about his hero, Argo, and his descent into the underworld, Estelle turned toward Lake Calhoun. When she parked near the beach, Freddie sat up and said, “What’re we doing here?”

“I thought it would be nice to go outside,” Estelle said. “Just a stroll. It’s summer, Freddie. We’ve got a little time before dinner.”

“Of course it’s summer. I mean, what are we doing here?”

“Well, look at the swimmers.” Outside the car, she walked ahead of him in the midafternoon glare on a sidewalk that ran parallel to the beach. At some distance from them, young men and women were playing volleyball. Out on the lake she could see swimmers splashing each other, and, beyond them, hazed in the hot Impressionist light, the sailboats. The air smelled of suntan oil and lake vegetation. People were bicycling past on the bike paths, and everywhere men and women, children and dogs were enjoying themselves. Pop music floated on the air from some radio.

“I hate it here,” Freddie said, from behind her. Estelle could hear the shuffling of his shoes on the sidewalk. “I need to practice my Mr. Scary monologue.”

“We should have brought your swimming trunks.”

“I can’t swim.”

“You could learn.”

“Not if I don’t want to, I can’t,” he said. “I’d rather sleep with the fishes.”

“The fish. Not fishes. Fish . You shouldn’t be so negative,” Estelle told him.

“You mean I’m supposed to be happy ?” He inflected the word with scorn. “Happiness sucks.”

“Well, you could try,” his grandmother said, feeling a wingfeather of hopelessness. Just to her right, a boy about Freddie’s age, maybe a bit older, bronzed with the sun, a kid who obviously lived outdoors, was tossing a football to a friend. The wingfeather beat against Estelle as she watched him. Happiness came only to those who never asked for it.

“I’d rather be Mr. Scary,” Freddie said. One of the boys close to them threw his football unsteadily, and it landed near the sidewalk. Freddie stared at it before kicking it out of the way. One of the boys said, “Throw it here!” while Freddie continued on.

Estelle raised her head, closed her eyes, and breathed in. “You could have thrown that ball,” she said. “Couldn’t you?”

“No,” Freddie said. “It’s just a trick. They’re trying to mess with us.”

“Incidentally, I think,” Estelle said, “that Randall is organizing a softball game for after dinner. We’ll use your new bat!”

“Oh, that’s great. That’s just great.”

“Don’t you want to try it?”

He treated her to his silence.

Well, at least there was the Bakken Electrical Museum. After they had returned to the car, Estelle drove Freddie to his favorite place on the southwest side of the lake, the museum where they had a working Theremin installed. Freddie had been here half a dozen times, and each time he would push impatiently past the exhibits near the front door to the Theremin in the middle of the museum’s stairwell. He’d turn on the old instrument and raise his hands in the air between the two antennae.

Here, he was in his element. His hands raised like a conductor, with his fingers out, Freddie would tap and poke the air in front of him, and from the old Theremin came pitched noises that sounded like music but really weren’t music, Estelle thought, any more than screaming was like singing. According to the information on the explanatory wall plaque, other Theremins had been used for the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and the movie scores for Spellbound and The Day the Earth Stood Still . Freddie, when he played this thing, had a beatific smile on his face, as if he were summoning his monsters from the deep. Once he had played “Jingle Bells” for her on it, and Estelle thought she would jump out of her skin with revulsion. He had learned through trial and error where to poke the air for certain pitches. Apparently he had a musical ear. He was getting good at it. Soon he would be playing “My Funny Valentine” on this thing and scaring away everybody.

But you couldn’t take a kid down to the MacPhail Center for Music for Theremin lessons, and you couldn’t bring out your grandson in front of the guests to have him play his Theremin, causing the other grandmothers to applaud, because Freddie wasn’t really presentable , and neither was this music, which sounded like the groans of the dying, oscillating at sixty cycles per second.

Still, she watched him, poking and prodding the air and producing the hellish glissandos, with something like admiration. Her own sons were not like that. There was no other boy like him.

“There’s no one else like him,” Estelle said to Randall, who was bending over the grill, the left side for the hot dogs, the right side for hamburgers. He had put on his chef’s apron and was worrying the hamburger buns on the edge of the grill with a spatula. Freddie sat writing his story on a picnic bench, on the other side of the back deck. He was concentrating with fierce inward energy.