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

The first raindrops, big and slow and widely dispersed, begin to thump at the shingles and there’s Sid, with his muscled arms and bald head, out on the deck, hustling the lid off the grill and flipping the steaks, the worn boards spotted all around him. Another blast of thunder. “Better hurry, Sid!” David calls and then it’s really coming down, the original deluge, and this is funny, deeply, infectiously funny, Sid flipping steaks and wet through in an instant, because there’s no harm, no harm at all, and if there’s a drop or two on the platter of meat, which he’s covering even now, what does it matter? They’ll have candles, they’ll eat, and the evening, with its rising fertile smell of grass and the earth at the edge of the woods, will settle in around them, as cool and sweet as if the whole neighborhood were air-conditioned.

[I see I’ve written myself into the scene after all, a refugee from my own fractured family, at peace in the moment. Fair enough. But peace neither lasts nor suffices, and the fact was that Lester and I pursued the available pharmacopoeia far more assiduously than Miriam could ever have imagined. We were stoned at that very moment, I’m sure of it, and not merely on anything so innocuous as marijuana — stoned, and feeling blessed. Feeling, in the midst of all that radiant love and the deepest well of tranquillity, that we were getting away with something.]

Time jumps and jumps again, the maples struck with color, the lake giving up a thin sheet of wrinkled ice along the shore, then there’s the paucity of winter with its skeletal trees and the dead fringe of reeds stuck like an old man’s beard in the gray jaws of the ice. Twice the car gets away from her on the slick streets, the passenger’s side door taking the brunt of it so she has to go through all sorts of gyrations to lean over the back seat and swing open the door there for Susan when she picks her up from ballet or violin lessons. It seems like it’s always raining. Or sleeting. And if there’s a sun up there in the sky, somebody ought to get out a camera and show her the evidence. She lives for summer, that’s what she tells Marsha on the phone and anybody else who’ll listen, because she’s got thin blood, and dark at four-thirty in the afternoon is no way to live. Yes. Sure. But it seems like the summer’s gone before it even begins and then it’s winter again and the winter after that, months spinning out until the pointer stops on a day in March, gray as death, Susan working against the chill in the unheated basement with the girls from the Explorers’ Club at school, building a canoe from a kit shipped in all the way from Minnesota while Miriam tiptoes around upstairs, arranging warm-from-the-oven oatmeal cookies on a platter and pouring hot cocoa from the thermos into six porcelain teacups, each with its own marshmallow afloat in the center like a white spongy island.

When she opens the basement door there’s an overpowering smell of epoxy and the distilled vinegar Sid got for cleanup, and she worries about that, about the fumes, but the girls seem oblivious. They cluster around her in a greedy jostling pack, hands snatching at the cookies and the too-hot cups, all except for Janet Donorio, a poised delicate girl with fade-away eyes who lifts the last cup from the tray as if she’s dining with the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace, and why can’t Susan be more like that? But Susan has no sense of herself — she already has three cookies clenched in her hand, privilege of the house, as she stabs her tongue at the marshmallow in her cup, a mustache of chocolate sketching itself in above her upper lip.

“Shouldn’t you girls have some ventilation in here?” she says, just to hear herself, but they’re fine, they assure her, and it’s going great, it really is.

The canoe, lying overturned on a pair of sawhorses, has been a long winter’s project, Sid doing the lion’s share of the work on weekends, though the girls have been fairly diligent about the hand-sanding, the cutting and fitting of the fiberglass cloth and the slow smoothing of the epoxy over it. It’s just that they’re at an age when gathering for any purpose outside of school is a lark and they can’t help frittering away their time gossiping, spinning records, dancing to the latest beat or craze or whatever it is, their thin arms flailing, hair in motion, legs going like pogo sticks. They make fast work of the cookies and chocolate. And now, sated, they watch her warily, wondering why she’s lingering when it’s clear her motherly duties have been dispensed with, and so she collects the cups, sets them on the tray and starts back up the stairs.

Thanks to Sid, who’s a father like no other despite the fact that he has to drag himself home every night after a stifling commute and the kind of hard physical labor on one jobsite after another that would prostrate a man half his age, the canoe is ready for its maiden voyage by the time the ice shrinks back from the shore and the sun makes its first evanescent return. Miriam sits stiffly on the bench by the playground, Marsha beside her — freezing, actually, because with the way the wind’s blowing down the length of the lake from the north a windbreaker just isn’t enough — while the girls divide themselves democratically into two groups of three, roll up their jeans in the icy shallows and see the first group off in a mad frantic windmilling of forearms and paddles. “Be careful now!” she calls, and she’s pleased to see that her daughter has been gracious or at least patient enough to wait her turn in the second group. As Susan leans forward to push the canoe off, her ankles chapped with the cold, her face long and grave and bursting with expectation, it’s too much for Miriam and she has to look away to where the paddles flash in the pale depleted sunlight and the canoe cuts back and forth across the black surface like the blade of her pinking shears.

Marsha, who’s come to lend moral support, lights a second cigarette off the end of her first and flicks the still-smoldering butt into the dun grass at their feet, exhaling with a long complicated sigh. “Too cute by half,” she says.

Miriam’s on her feet — she can’t help herself — listening to her own voice skitter over the water and ricochet back again: “Don’t get too far out! Girls! Girls?”

“I heard from Seldy last night,” Marsha’s saying as Miriam eases back down on the bench. Seldy’s at Stony Brook. A junior. On scholarship and majoring in math, she’s that smart.

“And how is she?”

A pause. The canoe, far out now — halfway to the other shore and its dense dead accumulation of shoulder-high weed — makes a wobbly, long-stemmed turn and starts back, the girls paddling in unison, finally getting it. “Terrible. Awful. Worse than”—Marsha’s voice, wadded with grief and anger, chokes in her throat—“I don’t know, anything. ”

“What? What is it? She isn’t—”

“She’s dropping out.”

Miriam is so surprised she can’t help repeating the phrase, twisting it with the inflection of disbelief—“She’s dropping out?” Caught up in the moment, with the girls on the lake, Susan and the others waiting their turn and the wind tugging a wedge of geese overhead, she doesn’t stop to consider that both her own sons dropped out in their time too.

“It’s that boy.”

“What boy?”

“You know, the one from high school that went to the community college for all of half a semester — Richie?”

For a moment Miriam’s confused, the name caught on her lips like an invocation— Richie, Richie? — and then suddenly she can picture him, tall and rangy in a swimsuit so tight you could see every crease and fold, the washboard stomach, hair that fell across his face like a raven’s wing, Richie, Richie Spano, the wiseguy, the joker, with his braying laugh and the look on his face when you caught him out that said, I am so far above this.