Far-Flung Read online

“Are you going to eat your pickle?” I asked Natalie. She didn’t answer. I could tell she was waiting to find out what song Mr. Trenti picked.

  In Darcy, where we lived, you were allowed to water your lawn if you had your own well. In Chippenewa, where Ogermeir’s Nursery was, it was against the law to water your lawn at all. You had to take showers at the high school; you could only flush your toilet once a day. When you drove out Route 91 to Chippenewa, you could tell when you crossed the boundary: It was like a tan line, only it was green and brown.

  Mr. Trenti decided to grow a garden in the backyard. He asked me to help him. We dug up a square area of grass and then went down to Woolworth’s and bought seeds. Mr. Trenti had a green pickup truck. There was a sticker on the bumper that said HIRE A VET. For a minute I thought animal doctor, then I remembered.

  “Were you in Vietnam?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” Mr. Trenti said. He held out his arm. “See,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It shakes,” he said. “I have a permanent tremor.”

  It was hard to tell if it was shaking, because we were driving and everything was shaking a little. But when we got to the checkout at Woolworth’s and Mr. Trenti looked through his wallet, I realized he was right: His arm did shake, like it needed to be tightened or something.

  Mr. Ogermeir called me up and told me he had some work for me, despite the drought. I rode my bicycle out Route 91, which was soft and bubbling. My bicycle left a snake-like trail across the tar patches. Mr. Ogermeir was waiting for me. He was wearing his bathrobe. We went through the greenhouse and out the back. There were fields of baby Christmas trees, all of them dead. They were about three feet high, bright orange, and when I touched one the needles dropped off in clumps. My job was to dig them up and burn them. I was paid by the tree: twenty-five cents for every tree.

  The next day I had to stay home because my arms were so badly scratched. I should have worn long sleeves. Mr. Ogermeir said I could come back when my skin healed.

  No more watering of lawns in Darcy. Mr. Trenti and I had to abandon our garden. We decided to study for our high school equivalency diploma tests together. We’d move to Alaska and become forest rangers. At night before he went to work we sat on the front porch and asked each other questions from a workbook Mr. Trenti got from the VA:

  Name the thirteen original States.

  What’s one-quarter times one-half?

  Who’s Elizabeth Cady Stanton?

  Spell chrysanthemum.

  Other things happened. Dewey stopped eating. Natalie and I took him to the vet. Dewey lay on the metal table, panting. White lather fell off his tongue. He eyed us all suspiciously.

  “That’s how dogs sweat,” the vet said. “They can only sweat through their tongues.”

  He looked in Dewey’s eyes and mouth; he took his temperature.

  “What’s the matter?” Natalie asked.

  “It’s just the heat,” the vet said. “It’s called heat fatigue. Dog days.” He laughed. “Make sure he has plenty of water,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  By the time my arms healed, Mr. Ogermeir had found somebody else to burn the Christmas trees. I got another job, painting fire hydrants. I walked from hydrant to hydrant, following a map I was given. When I ran out of red or silver paint, I used a citizen’s telephone to call Town Maintenance. They sent a truck with more paint.

  Some citizens were nice. They gave me drinks: beer or iced tea or lemonade. One lady gave me lunch, because the cheese sandwich I had brought with me melted to its plastic bag. One lady told me I could swim in her pool. As soon as I jumped in her dog jumped in, too.

  “He’s just trying to rescue you,” the woman said.

  The dog swam over to me and guided me, with its nose, to the side of the pool.

  It got so hot we couldn’t sleep. We didn’t even try. Natalie and I sat outside, near the abandoned garden. The sky was full of stars, but the heat made them look out of focus. We drank beer, nice and slow, so we wouldn’t get dizzy.

  About four o’clock Mr. Trenti came home. We heard his truck in the driveway, and were illuminated in his headlights. He kept them on, watching us. Then he came and sat on the ground beside Natalie.

  “It’s hot,” he said.

  Natalie got him a beer. “It was hot once this way when I was little,” she said. “People went crazy. At night my father took his gun out in the backyard and shot it up into the sky. Everyone was doing it. To relieve tension. Heat makes you tense.”

  “Don’t let’s talk about guns,” Mr. Trenti said. “Or heat.”

  In the darkness I could see that Mr. Trenti had put his hand on top of Natalie’s. She lifted her fingers and coiled them around Mr. Trenti’s. They both kept staring straight ahead, as if it were their hands that were falling in love, not them. I got up and walked around front.

  That afternoon I got a postcard from my mother. She was on her honeymoon in a place called Canyon Springs. She had learned to play badminton; things were going well. She said she hadn’t mentioned me but she would. She was just waiting for the right moment. Sometime in the near future. The near future means soon. I wanted her to ask me to move to Texas so I could say no. I wanted to tell her I was moving to Alaska. Alaska is the biggest state now.

  I crossed the street and walked behind the dry cleaner’s. I stood in the middle of the gravel parking lot, throwing stones at the dark window, each throw harder, till the window broke. When the sound of it breaking was finished everything seemed especially quiet. I thought something might happen then, but it didn’t.

  After a while I heard a frog chirping down in the culvert, but when I walked toward it, it stopped. I stopped, too. Neither of us wanted to be the one to do something next.

  THE MIDDLE OF EVERYTHING

  THREE DAYS BEFORE HIS show opened, Jack arrived at his hotel in New York to find a telegram from his grandmother. He was not alarmed. His grandmother believed telegrams were the most civilized form of communication. This telegram, like all of hers, was succinct. It read: “Welcome New York. Awaiting your call.” It was signed Mrs. Enid Winns Carter.

  In his hotel room Jack was overcome with the paralysis he always felt upon arriving in New York. Lately he had made his home in Mexico, and occasionally, Los Angeles. He hadn’t lived in New York City for nearly four years. He never knew where to begin in New York. He always felt as if he were coming in at the middle of everything.

  He decided to begin by calling his grandmother. The phone barely rang once before she answered it. “Hello Grandma,” Jack said.

  “Hello,” she said. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “A little jet-lagged.”

  “Who is this?” she asked. Mrs. Carter liked to act confused on the telephone. It was her least favorite form of communication.

  “This is Jack,” Jack said. Since he was her only grandchild, there could be little doubt as to his identity.

  “Jack?”

  “John,” he said. “Your grandson.”

  “Oh, John!” she exclaimed. “It doesn’t sound like you. Did you get my telegram?”

  “Yes,” he said. “How did you know where I’m staying?”

  “Because you always stay at the same hotel. That horrible place downtown.” He was staying at the Chelsea. A couple of years ago his grandmother had come into town to have lunch with him and had taken a taxi to the hotel. She refused to get out because she claimed Twenty-third Street looked like a circus. She took the taxi back up to the Sherry-Netherland, where she summoned him for a “civilized” lunch. Now Mrs. Carter avoided the city entirely.

  “Can I expect you for dinner?” she continued.

  “I should really check in at the gallery,” he said.

  “Couldn’t you do that tomorrow?”

  “I suppose,” Jack said, who was none too eager to confront his paintings. They always looked inexplicably different and invariably worse in New York. “What time are the trains?” he asked. His grandmother lived i
n Bedford.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t taken a train in ages. I suggest you call the train people. That’s what they are for.”

  “I see you insist on looking like a field hand,” Mrs. Enid Winns Carter said by way of a greeting. She was standing in the front hall, supported by a cane.

  “You can’t help getting at least a little tan when you live in Mexico,” Jack said.

  “Yes, but you could help living in Mexico.” Mrs. Carter disapproved of North Americans living in foreign parts. She believed everyone should live where he was born. She had lived in the same house in Bedford since the 1920s. It was a large brick house with many rooms and much furniture. She led Jack, rather slowly, into the living room.

  “Where is Aunt Helen?” he asked. His Aunt Helen, who was really his grandmother’s cousin, had lived with his grandmother for the last three years.

  “Mrs. Whitcomb is drying out,” his grandmother said. She always referred to Helen as Mrs. Whitcomb.

  “Drying out?”

  “She’s at that clinic where you have to make your own bed. In California.” She pronounced California with five syllables.

  “I didn’t know she had a drinking problem,” Jack said.

  “Of course she has,” his grandmother said. “What do you think she has been devoted to all these years?”

  “Nothing, I suppose,” he said.

  “Wrong,” Mrs. Carter said. “She has been devoted to the bottle. And I don’t understand this sudden urge to hop on the wagon. It seems a little late in the game.”

  “Better late than never,” Jack said.

  His grandmother snorted.

  “How long will Helen be away?” Jack asked. He was worried about his grandmother living alone. She was eighty-six.

  Mrs. Carter waved her hand. “Enough of Mrs. Whitcomb,” she said. “I want to hear about you. Tell me about your show. Are the paintings big and ugly?”

  “They’re somewhat smaller this year,” he said.

  “But just as ugly?”

  “You would think so,” Jack said.

  She smiled. “I still hope that before I die, you will paint me a nice picture. Would you begrudge me that?”

  “I gave you the pick of the last show.”

  “No. I’m not interested in ugly paintings. I want a painting of something. I know that makes me hopelessly old-fashioned, but so be it. You know what I would most like? A painting of the house at Benders Bay. Surely you could paint that for me? After all your education and training, which I hasten to remind you I financed.”

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “Pay me with a painting of Benders Bay.” Benders Bay was the house his grandmother once owned on Fishers Island. “I have a photograph of it, if you have forgotten what it looks like.”

  “I don’t paint from photographs,” Jack said.

  “Then you could go out there and paint it. Although I wonder if it’s still there. Perhaps it’s been torn down.”

  “I doubt it,” said Jack.

  “Yet it’s somebody else’s now,” his grandmother said. “Anyway,” she continued, “I would like you to paint me something before I die.”

  “I’ll go up to Fishers next week and paint you the house,” he said.

  “That makes me very happy,” she said. “You have no idea.”

  Jack’s grandfather had built Benders Bay as a wedding present for his wife. They had gone there every summer from 1923 to 1970, the year his grandfather died. Jack spent the summers at Benders with them. His father worked in the city, and his mother, a beautiful and not untalented actress, was usually in a show. She worked very steadily on Broadway during the ’40s and the ’50s. When Jack was fifteen she killed herself.

  The summer weeks at Benders Bay always followed the same pattern: On Sunday, after the matinee, Jack’s parents would arrive. His mother would bring an entourage—people from the cast, or other friends—and the house would be filled with exotic glamorous adults, with noise and music and cigarette smoke, with dancing and charades, with men and women running down to the water in the middle of the night, and reappearing, fully clothed, sopping wet, to dance some more. Then on Tuesday afternoon they’d pack everything up and depart in a caravan of honking cars for Manhattan, and an 8:30 curtain, leaving the elder Carters and Jack behind.

  When his grandfather died it was revealed that he had several large debts, and his grandmother sold Benders to pay them. She never returned to Fishers Island.

  “I am thinking of selling my accessories,” Mrs. Carter said, as they ate dinner.

  “What accessories?” Jack asked.

  “Accessories,” she said. “My gloves, and hats and jewels.”

  “Why are you going to sell them?”

  “Why not?” his grandmother said. “Why keep them? Since you have disowned my great-grandchildren, there is no family to inherit them. And I am told there is an appreciative market for vintage accessories. I have spoken with several dealers.”

  “I haven’t disowned the twins,” Jack said. “I just don’t have custody. There’s a difference.” Jack was the father of twin girls, Sigourney and Yvette. Shortly after they were born, he and his wife were divorced; Barbara immediately remarried, and his bitterness somehow poisoned his paternal love. Jack knew this was wrong, he knew that his feelings for these children should be separate from his feelings for their mother, but somehow they were all inextricably tangled, threads with many sharp needles, and he cast the whole net off and moved away.

  “Call it what you will,” Mrs. Carter said. “I never see them.”

  “Maybe I’m interested in your accessories.”

  “Why would you be interested in them?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll remarry. There’s no need to sell them. You don’t need the money.”

  “Are you contemplating remarriage?”

  “No,” he said.

  “There is no one in your life?”

  A vision of Langley, his lover, drying her hair with a white towel beside the aqua swimming pool, presented itself to him. He smiled. Why did he not want to tell his grandmother about Langley? It was probably her age—an unacceptable twenty-three—but he liked the fact that Langley was a secret, that she was unofficial, that she existed only in the palmy air of, as his grandmother would say, Californeea. “No one,” he said, but the vision lingered.

  “That is too bad. I wish you were in love. You are always a nicer person when you are in love.”

  “Isn’t everyone?” he asked.

  “No,” said Mrs. Carter. “Love makes some of us villains. Come upstairs. I will show you my treasures. Whatever you want, you can take. The rest I will sell.”

  He followed his grandmother out of the dining room and into the front hall. Mrs. Carter had had an elevator chair installed along the banister, which was long and curved. She sat down and buckled a seat belt. “It won’t go unless this is fastened,” she explained. “Stupid thing.” She pressed a button and the chair began to rise. Jack climbed the stairs next to her, one step at a time, trying to match her slow ascent. “For heaven’s sake, walk normally,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the top.”

  On the second-floor landing he looked down and watched his grandmother rise. She was facing away from him, traveling backward, her hands clasped in her lap, her head bowed. That afternoon when he had driven her into town to buy groceries, she had sat the same way. Her loss of mobility was, in her eyes, a loss of dignity. The chair curved around and arrived at the top of the stairs; she unbuckled the belt and the chair tilted forward, depositing her next to him.

  “This way,” she said, all business in an attempt to transcend her humiliation. Jack followed her down the hall into her bedroom, then into her dressing room. She approached a large armoire that was made of either ash or pecan: some golden wood that was so highly polished they were both reflected in its veneer. It was dusk, and an imported, antique light filled the room. “Damn it,” she said. “I forgot the keys. They’re down
stairs.”

  “Where are they? I’ll get them.”

  “They’re in my bag, in the front hall, on the credenza.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  When he returned with the ring of keys his grandmother was sitting in an easy chair by the window. She held out her hand.

  “Why do you keep it locked?” Jack asked.

  “I keep everything locked,” Mrs. Carter said. She flipped through the keys and found the one for the armoire. “Voilà,” she said, handing it to Jack.

  He opened the armoire. On the inner side of its doors were beveled mirrors mottled with green moss-like fog. One half of the space was a closet of dresses sheathed in dress bags. Sequins glinted, iridescent as crows’ wings, in the darkness. The other half contained drawers of varying sizes. Jack opened one and found a stash of scarves, an unmade bed of glossy silk and lace. He felt his grandmother watching his back. The next drawer contained a jumble of gloves, an orgy of hands, gloves of every length and color, gloves with gauntlets, gloves with pearls and flowers and monograms embroidered on them. “Where did you get all this stuff?” he asked.

  She snorted. “There was a time when people bought fine things and kept them.”

  He slid open a thin drawer. On a field of crimson velvet an army of brooches and earrings were pinned, all of them set with stones glittering in unembarrassed colors. “Are these real?” he asked.

  Mrs. Carter didn’t answer. She sat with a blank look on her face.

  Jack closed the drawer. “Are you tired?” he asked.

  She shook her head no. “I am thinking about your daughters,” she said, looking out the window at the sun’s disappearance.

  “Oh,” Jack said.

  “Do they know they have a great-grandmother?”

  “I don’t think they remember you,” he said.

  “Of course they don’t remember me. They haven’t seen me since they were babies. My question was, do they know of me?”

  “I think I’ve mentioned you,” he said.

  “Mentioned me? How generous of you.”

  “They are not a part of my life,” Jack said.

  “So you have disowned them.” Mrs. Carter looked at him.