Hob Broun - Inner Tube

Steamy drizzle outside, puzzlingly overcast inside — the house was large enough to have its own weather. Long and heavy silences were forces to be overcome by the intrepid party. Of course, there were the usual trifles, things learned to be forgotten, like card tricks or the script to a Bozo the Clown record the twins refused to tire of. But there were more lasting, more indistinct things as well: a flimsy feeling in the stagily cluttered rooms, the curiously intense behavior of the adults, conversing in pressured whispers behind half-closed doors. Most of all, there was stout, sighing, distant Cordelia with her childish braids and clumsy motion, the side-to-side uncertainty of someone on a pitching deck as here she came with more cocoa, another plate of pineapple rings. Small things required great effort from her. Sighing, she alluded to her exhausting responsibilities. What? There was a woman from the Virgin Islands to do her cleaning, a man in a pith helmet who mowed and pruned and raked, even hosed down all the white statuary. Well, something was bullying her, threatening any minute to leave her in a clumsy heap on the terrazzo floors. Was it grief? Five years — nearly half my life — had passed since the day Mr. Bontempi attempted to prime his Evinrude and fragmented into the sea.

Carla shrugged. “She drinks too much. So what?”

I went to my mother to confirm this observation, smelled the gin in her grapefruit juice before I’d asked anything. Her face was slack, her eyes seemed very old, and it scared me. Not as much as my sister’s developments, but enough. It was ten o’clock in the morning on the third day of rain.

By that evening the air had cleared, though a few drops still fell. I’d spent the afternoon in random observation, moving from room to room, a junior Sherlock, opening drawers and closets, reading things that were none of my business. Descending the stairs thoughtfully now, my head jammed with clues, I was confronted by a strange tableau: my mother snoring into the sofa, the twins inert among crayons, Carla, open-mouthed and held tightly in her own arms, fast asleep under an oil portrait of Mr. Bontempi, pensive in dark tweeds. Dire tactics! I suspected gas.

“The prodigal returns,” Cordelia said, clumping toward me in her scarlet muumuu. “Seems we’re the only ones left to enjoy the stars.”

That was it. Cordelia had drugged the cocoa. But too late; she’d already grasped me ferociously by the hand, was tugging me onto the patio. We stood in the soft mist, on the wet bricks, and looked up. My hand grew numb in hers.

“Winking lights.” She pulled me against her hip. “But don’t let anyone tell you that your life is written out up there. That’s rubbish, you hear?”

Yes yes, all right. Why was she shouting?

“My hand…”

“Misery may have your name on it, but you’ll be the one to put it there. You and nobody else.”

She let go of me to gesture bitterly at her looming home, and I took off. There wasn’t any way of locking the door to my room, so I braced a chair under the doorknob as I’d seen people on television do. Sleep would have to wait. I stood at the window and looked out over statues glowing thinly in the dark.

Next day we visited a chimpanzee attraction down the coast, where someone let the air out of our tires. Cordelia, dutiful hostess, left her Fleetwood in the parking lot and took us home in a cab. This necessitated borrowing her gardener’s car the following morning so she could take Dan in to have his stitches removed.

Not until our last full day did we make our first visit to the beach, a private beach, part of some club Cordelia belonged to. Waiters came with cork-lined trays when you got thirsty and the glasses, half-filled with ice, were drippy and slick. The members looked well-dressed in nothing but swimwear; they glistened and smelled of cocoa butter. My mother wore khaki pants and shirt, sunglasses, and a canvas hat that appeared to be melting — a redundant costume in the shade of a wide green umbrella, but, like the headache and the absorbing German novel, it went with her sulk. She dreaded returning to New York and was making no secret of it. With all this, though, as was so often the case, she gained a cool serenity. She was indifferent to the complaints of her children, as she should more often have been.

I think it was out of frustration at this that Carla put on lipstick, slipped off her robe, and placed herself, hands on narrow hips, at the edge of the water. Her suit was as red as the lipstick and her skin was as white as the clouds.

“What a picture,” Cordelia said rather sadly.

“Hmmm?” My mother peered momentarily over the top of her book.

Carla pulled the barrettes from her hair, corkscrewed her toes in wet sand. The screaming of children and the screaming of gulls combined with canned music that drifted out of the snack bar. I didn’t know what I felt as I watched her, but whatever it was called was pulling me tight.

The boy who spoke to her was slightly older and much taller. He had a deep scar on his leg and a Dodgers jacket which he kept zipping and unzipping.

“She’s fine,” my mother said when I reported that they’d walked off out of sight.

“A protective brother,” Cordelia sighed. “I wish I’d had one.”

What was with these two? They huddled in the shade, one staring at a book, the other at her bulbous freckled knees, both of them dully immune behind their plastic lenses to the shiny pleasure all around. I saw women sprawled in white chairs, women oiling themselves and being oiled, tugging at their bikini tops and laughing hard enough to spill their drinks, but my sister was nowhere among them. I remembered reading in her diary on my rainy Sherlock expedition.

“What bothers me most,” she had written in her jagged cursive hand, “is that all this being afraid will keep on and get bigger.”

When Carla got back, spraying sand as she pounced into our shade, she was wearing the Dodgers jacket. Her mother reached over without looking away from the heavy book and lightly stroked her face. Cordelia began to pack away the unused towels and tanning creams. I poked my sister in the stomach, looked hard at her. She just laughed and wiped the lipstick off on the cuff of her new jacket.

I had one more observation to make. It came later on that day, during a lull brought on by humidity and imminent departure, and like almost any observation, it was avoidable.

“Go see what your sister is up to.”

I slowly climbed the stairs, my hand slippery on the banister. Silence was thick as the air and a strip of fading sunlight lay like a gangplank on the hallway floor. Carla wasn’t in her room, but a smudge of red registered in the corner of my eye as I passed the entrance to the skylighted bedroom where our mother had been sleeping. Carla, in her bathing suit, took on poses before a cheval glass. She balanced on one leg like a ballerina, bent down like a shortstop. I began to applaud her but managed to brake my hands. She was peeling the suit down to her waist and, with a soft, investigatory expression, touching her little breasts.

“Leave her alone,” my mother said, pulling me across the aisle of the plane and away from her daughter’s knitting, which I had been attempting to pull apart. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing, Ma.”

Into me for sure, pulling me tight. And horribly now, I had a pretty good idea of what it was called. I could have told her.

IT WAS AUGUST AND the girls were barefoot, awkward and uncertain in their shorts and sleeveless tops. I was ten years old and peering out at them from an upstairs window. Though a breeze stirred the curtains, which crackled pleasantly against my face, the room was stuffy and hot. I itched inside my clothes. Their laughter was sharp and their faces were pink with excitement. I wanted to barrage them with water bombs, but didn’t.