T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

When she next opens her eyes it’s to the quick cold shock of Susan, her youngest, snuggling in beside her, everything wet suddenly as if a whole basket of fish has been upended in her lap. She feels the cold bunched knees poking at her, the shuddering ribcage and chattering teeth, hears her own voice jump up: “Get off, honey, you’re all wet!” And Susan, freckled, stick-limbed, ten years old, snuggling tighter. “I’m cold, Mommy.” She reaches behind her for the beach bag and the towel she’s brought for herself, never bothering to ask where her daughter’s own towel is because she knows it’ll turn up at the edge of the ball field or draped over the welded frame of the monkey bars, as soaked through as a dishrag. And then she’s wrapping her and holding her close till the shivering stops and her daughter springs loose to chase half a dozen other kids to the concession stand. For Coke, winter in a bottle, and the wiener snug in its bun. With chopped onion and sweet pickle relish and plenty of mustard. She lifts her sunglasses for a moment to watch after her and here are the Sollovays, the Greens, the Goldsteins, settling in around her in a wash of greeting and banter and sheer high spirits. Marsha Goldstein, her legs silken and her lips fluttering around her smile, offers a cigarette, but she prefers her own and they both light up and let the tobacco lift them, until in unison, as if they’ve rehearsed it, they throw back their heads and exhale in long twin plumes of blue. “What time did you want us tonight?” Marsha asks. “Fiveish?”

“Yes,” she says, “yes, that’ll be perfect,” and she glances over her shoulder, past the courts and the chain-link fence and the screen of trees to where her house sits tranquilly on its own little rise — the only house, of all the two hundred and more in the community, that looks directly onto the lake, a fact of which she tries not to be too sinfully proud. There’s the Buick, last year’s model, at rest in the drive like a picture out of a magazine, and the swing set they put up for Susan and her friends, though you could throw a stone and hit the big metal-framed one in the playground at the lake. The Japanese maple she planted when her daughter was born stands out in relief against the near wall of the house, throwing a delicate patterned shade over the flagstone path up to the kitchen door, its leaves the color of the claret Sid likes to sip after dinner. She lets her eyes linger there a moment before lifting them to the house itself. And it’s funny, because with the way the light comes off the lake and the big picture window stands in shadow, she can see into her own kitchen and the table there, already set for dinner, the clock on the yellow wall, time ticking by, and it’s almost as if she’s in two places at once.

[Forgive me for stepping in here but I do want to get this right — the fact is, I may have been there that day, the threads of the past so snarled now that thirty-five years on I’ve lost the ability to separate them with any clarity. But if I was there, I would have been on the paddleball court, playing in a fiercely competitive and very physical foursome with Miriam’s husband Sid and her two sons — Alan, who was twenty-six, and Lester, my best friend, who was then twenty-two, like me. And I would have entered the next scene too, the dinner scene, preceded by cocktails and the long unwinding of a muggy Saturday afternoon, fresh from the lake and the shower, the corded muscles of my legs gone limp in the afterglow of exercise and the long slow seep of alcohol.]

She’s got both fans going, the one at the kitchen window and the big lazy ceiling fan revolving in a slow slippage of optical illusion over the table, and yet still she’s dripping. Marsha’s with her, their drinks perspiring on the counter while they stand elbow to elbow at the cutting board, slicing long squared-off strips of carrot and wafer-thin slivers of Vidalia onion for the salad, dicing cucumbers and halving cherry tomatoes still warm from the garden, Marsha, who’d been maid of honor at her wedding to Sid just as she’d been Marsha’s maid of honor when she married David in a time when there were only the four of them. Now the boys are in their twenties, Susan’s ten and Marsha’s daughter Seldy is sixteen, or no, seventeen.

“I don’t know,” she’s saying, in reference to the two young couples, summer people, who’ve become fixtures at the beach, “if you’ve got it, flaunt it, though seeing the one girl in her two-piece suit makes me feel like I put on a hundred pounds — yesterday. And another hundred this morning.”

“No, no, I agree, but the shorter one, what’s her name—?”

“Barbara, isn’t it? Or is that the other one?”

“The other one’s Rachel, and she’s really very sweet, though you wouldn’t know it from the look on her face, which to me, I don’t know, is so forbidding —but what I was saying is to walk around in a two-piece when you’re eight months’ pregnant is just—”

“Too much.”

“Right,” she says, and then they’re both laughing. “Way too much.”

From the living room comes the sound of the men, their voices rich and pleased, as they call down the questions of the day, revile Nixon, trade quips with the boys. Les has begun to wear his hair long and dress in bell-bottoms and spangled shirts, in confraternity with his friend T., who looks so satisfied he could be flying across the room on his own magic carpet ride. And she’s had her moments of worry — or not worry, really, just concern — over whether the boys have been experimenting with tea or grass or whatever they call it these days, but she’s never said anything. And won’t. She doesn’t want to harp. Let them do what they’re going to do because no one, not even a mother, can legislate for them. Once they’re grown, that is, and her boys, with the shoulders and arms they inherited from Sid, are definitely grown.

They’re just sitting down to dinner — to the artichokes, one per plate, the grill out on the deck sending up smoke under the steaks — when Seldy, in a yellow sundress that shows off the figure she’s been growing into over the past year, drifts into the room, late as usual. Her mother says, “It’s about time,” and her father makes a quip about how she must’ve gotten lost on the long grueling four-minute drive from the house, but Sid and the three boys are dumbstruck for one thunderous instant. This is the face of beauty, and though they’re all family here, though Seldy’s like a daughter to Sid and a sister to the boys, Miriam’s boys anyway, none of that matters. Sid’s the first to break the spell, his voice rising to emphasize the joke: “Well, Jesus Christ, we thought we were going to wilt away and starve waiting for you.” And then the boys are falling all over themselves to wave and grin and ante up the wit (“Yeah, and think how starved the first caveman must’ve been to discover you could eat one of these things”), and Seldy, flushing, slides into the empty seat between Alan and Les, letting the steam from the artichoke rise gently about her face and the long trailing ends of her hair slip from her shoulders to sway gracefully over her plate.

It is then, just as Sid rises to check on the steaks (nobody here wants anything but rare and rarer and he’d be offended if they did), that the first eruption of thunder rolls across the lake to shake the house and rattle the ice cubes in the drinks Miriam has just freshened all the way around. The sky goes instantly dark and it’s just as if a shade has been drawn over the day. She’s wondering if she should go out to the kitchen and rummage through the drawer for the candles left over from Hanukkah when the storm chases a cool breeze through the screens and Marsha waves her napkin in front of her face, letting out a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” she says. “Oh, yes, bring it on.”