Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“I wish I could learn to do that.”

“Well, you will. The girls won’t listen to you, and Ginger’ll grow weary of hearing you say what nobody needs to hear, and you’ll become a quiet man. Surprise. People will talk about how quiet you’ve become.”

“You know,” Charlie said, “nothing’s wrong . I’m loving how they’re growing up. Ginger and I are fine. There isn’t anything really wrong .”

Her father, who had more hair on top of his head than Charlie did, smoothed it over, pushed it into place, and folded his hands in his lap. The lap disappears, too, Charlie noticed: you become a stick figure drawn by a kid. Her father said, “Don’t worry about it, Charlie. I’m making you nervous. Old people seem to have that effect, sometimes.”

“ No ,” Charlie said. He shook his head. He imitated the hair-pat gesture, but rubbed only fuzz and scalp. He said, and he heard the conviction in his voice as he said it, “No.”

They ate a cold poached fish, and Ginger and Charlie drank Sancerre, while her parents drank only water. It was a lovely wine, and Charlie drank a lot of it — almost enough to make him smack his lips and comment on the generosity of a man who, unable to drink because of his health, would provide a first-class wine for those who could enjoy it. Instead, Charlie held his glass up and beamed at the wine. His father-in-law nodded and grinned. Charlie watched Ginger’s mother’s face twist during the meal. Her lips almost curled. It came and went, as the voice breaking into the rock and roll breaking into the Haydn had come and gone. For dessert they ate fresh fruit. Ginger cracked nuts for everybody. She had done this, always, as a young girl, her father pointed out. Eating none, she distributed nutmeat to all. Charlie decided suddenly that her mother was suffering physically because of thoughts that danced like electrical charges through her. Her daughter, whose presence she sought, was reminding her of what she had lost and had to lose. When they spoke of the girls away for the summer, or of Ginger’s going off to school so many years before, or of Ginger’s second, and very difficult, pregnancy, the language set the impulse off, and a mother lost her child to time, and therefore herself, and the fact shot from her memory and hummed beneath her white hair like the insects at the porch.

There was no change of subject possible. They spoke of absent daughters, absent friends, the ailments of Presidents, and policies of nations. Ginger cracked nuts, as if she were the little child of these seventy-six-year-olds, surrounded by the house that they once had run but that now, with its demands for paint and new plumbing, its dampness in the basement, squirrels in the eaves, was running them. Around them, the grass rose to challenge their tenure, and the moths, as darkness came on, beat with big wings at the screens on the kitchen windows. Charlie watched the face of his wife’s mother as it was assaulted by what he hadn’t thought to possess any longer, much less to brandish: youth.

Inside, television reception was very poor. The Carol Burnett rerun broke into dots and a now familiar hissing. Public Broadcasting was a purple haze that sounded like a waterfall. They went back out to the porch. Ginger’s mother reported on dead associates and distant relatives, a local sewage-tax scandal, and residential-zoning conflicts. Her father commented on Saudi Arabians who had purchased large parcels of land nearby.

They sat for a while, and then Ginger’s mother said, “I hate this house.”

“You love it,” her father said. “You’re angry because I forgot to open the cellar doors and windows this summer to air the damp out.”

“I’m angry because that means I have to remember it.”

Charlie said, “There’s always something to take care of.”

“Unless you live in a — in one of those old places,” Ginger’s mother said.

“No,” Charlie said. “No. I wasn’t saying that.”

“You know how many perfectly rational, intelligent people get dumped into those places?” her mother said.

Ginger’s father said, “Don’t worry so much. I promise. As long as I can drawl and drool and mutter, I’ll remind you that the cellar needs its airing out.”

Her mother limped into the house and they sat in the memory of her tension. Ginger sighed. Then she said, “Oh, look at that moon !” It was full and threw a startling light, which appeared to go no distance but to burn in place. Ginger’s father called for his wife to return. “The moon,” he called. “Come look at the moon.”

They waited, like children who had built a version of the sky, for the disgruntled elder who would come and maybe approve. She did come, with decaffeinated coffee, an offering.

Ginger’s mother said, “What planets are those alongside it? Or are they stars?”

Ginger said, “Isn’t one of them red? Wouldn’t that be Mars?”

“It might be,” her mother said. “But it might be a star.”

Ginger’s father said, “There are two more — I can’t name them. I didn’t know they clustered like that, all together.”

“It’s probably rare,” Ginger said.

Ginger’s mother said, “Probably very infrequent. Yes. I never heard of it before. I can’t imagine how long it might take for them to shine together again.”

Charlie said, “It probably happens once a week.”

Nobody laughed. The reddish star or planet was above the moon, and they could see a larger, brighter body glowing orange-white above whatever it was that shone like rust, or terra-cotta. Something else — surely it was a planet, Charlie thought, naming it Jupiter, knowing that he would think, right or wrong, of Jupiter when he thought of tonight — seemed a great white balloon.

“Imagine,” Ginger said. Charlie knew that she would say it — how would one not? — and he regretted it for her. “Sue Ellen and Aida can see this.” Charlie squeezed at the bridge of his nose, hoping to shut off her speech. “And when we talk to them,” she said, waving at the terra-cotta planet or star, the blue-white, brilliant maybe-Jupiter, “we can say they saw — we all saw it together. What nobody might see again for who knows how long.”

Ginger looked up to see her mother glancing down. No one needed to say who would not be on the surface of the earth to look at the sky so many years from tonight. But no one seemed capable of saying anything diversionary. So they sat for what seemed a very long while as the darkness deepened, and as the stars and planets in their slow but fugitive formation rose in the blue-black sky.

Then Ginger’s father rumbled, deep and happy, from the chaise on which her mother sat. He was still sitting on his chair, at the other side of the porch, but his voice rolled out from a bulky cassette recorder with which her mother was fiddling. He spoke of negotiating with a Taiwan national, and of how the man had outwitted him, and his voice was cheery and possessive: he clearly knew that he was being recorded, and he seemed to enjoy letting someone preserve what only he could tell.

“I’ve been making little tapes of some of Dad’s stories,” Ginger’s mother said. Ginger sighed a long and shaken breath. Her mother said, “Don’t worry. I won’t take down anything you say, dear.”

Ginger said, “I don’t mind.”

Her mother said, “When children grow up, they sound different. The most they can do is talk about what it was like when they were young. But they don’t sound the same.”

Ginger said, “No.”

“That was a hell of a story,” Charlie said.

“He robbed us blind,” her father said, “because he was out-and-out smarter than I was. He did his job better. I couldn’t help admiring him.”