I made the turn out of the parking lot and we were on our way back to town. “Well, they get together, you know, and it’s obvious they’re having an affair and their spouses are furious, but they don’t care, they’re happy. They deserve each other. She cuts his toenails in bed.”
“What?”
“They meet in a hotel room and she loves him so much she says she wants to trim his toenails.”
“Boy-oh-boy.”
“What?”
“So French.” The traffic was getting sluggish, it was four o’clock already, the start of rush hour. “Could you turn up AC, Niece?”
I fumbled around the dashboard. “It’s already cranked up to high. Are you sure you’re okay? I’ll take you to the emergency room. Or we can stop somewhere and I can phone your doctor.”
“I tell you, Niece, I’m fine now. And don’t mention to your aunt, you hear me?”
“Uncle Richard, she’s worried about you.”
“Yeah, yeah, you just see, she die before me, she kill herself with worry.”
I flicked on the radio. Warmer tomorrow, less humidity, and then some news about a guy who had set his girlfriend on fire and stuffed her charred body into the trunk of his car. He was being arraigned on charges of first-degree murder. I turned the radio off and we drove in silence. I thought my uncle had fallen asleep when he suddenly said: “It’s funny, Niece, how you two, you and your sister, both turn out to be artistic type. Everyone always think one of you be a scientist, like your father.”
“I know.”
“You hear what they tried to do in PRC,” Uncle Richard continued. “Remember the Four Modernizations! Everyone in the country is gonna be scientist at the turn of the century. Or businessman.”
“Well, that’s kind of sad. What about the artists and intellectuals?”
“You know your ma-ma always say you’re made to be a surgeon. Because of your hands.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Whatever it was, we knew you were gonna be something special.” My uncle cleared his throat and then he said, “You want to know about your father. I tell you this: if his luck is better he’d be very famous. You should be proud of an ancestor like that. You should live up to inheritance.”
“Uncle Richard, I don’t even like science.”
“That’s not what I mean. You have good genes. Brilliance of your father, tough character of your mother. No reason in the world to waste.”
“Last chance,” I said. We were passing the hospital with the palm trees.
My uncle ignored me. “I waste my life. You see me? I end up in Florida, who knows where this is, live on pension and disability, gamble away my money. But you, you could do anything. What an education you have. What connection. All this American stuff.”
“Okay, okay.”
We drove in silence for a while and then Uncle Richard sighed. “You are a good girl. Your aunt always tells me this, what a good girl you are. No more old-uncle lectures.”
When we got back to the house I realized that there was no point in even trying out our movie story. We hadn’t fooled Aunty Mabel at all. “Ding-ah!” she said, and gave me, what was for her, a dirty look. She made him go to bed immediately. There was already a pot of medicine bubbling on the stove.
19
Dear Fran:
Yep, this is the year we hit twenty-eight, two years till the big three-oh. Thanks for the birthday card. Still vegging away in the sun but I am drawing a little. My uncle has to go for some tests, but they think he’s going to be okay. Talk to you when I get back.
Love, Sally
While Aunty Mabel took Uncle Richard over to the hospital every day for a week, I ran what errands I could for her on foot: grocery shopping, bank, dry cleaning—kind of like I’d planned to do for Ma in New Haven before I got sicker. Suburban therapy. I trimmed the hedges in front of the house using giant power clippers borrowed from the pastel lady next door. Lally Escobar would have been proud. But my piece de resistance was the garage. I covered it with a fresh coat of Antique Blue and even did a little scallop design on the eaves in off-white.
Aunty Mabel was impressed. “Like professional!” She’d finally forgiven me for the greyhound expedition.
I contemplated quitting New York City and becoming a house painter. It wouldn’t be the worst of fates. I’d be a nice dumb girl with muscles.
Mornings, before the humidity got too mind-numbing, I went out into the backyard with my sketch pad, like I had on Woodside Drive as a teenager. Only now I was doing automatic drawing, something I’d learned way back at RISD and never appreciated until recently. A trick to plumb the depths, like stream-of-consciousness writing. I’d started keeping the pad on my nightstand in the hospital, and more mornings than not, as soon as I’d wake up I’d start to scribble. These drawings were completely abstract, full of floaty pieces and jagged, broken-off lines. I had no idea what they were about.
Later in the day I drew from life. The vegetation in Florida had a wildness to it, things would grow rampant the minute you turned your back.
In the house I drew my uncle asleep on the sofa under the violet and kelly green afghan, the black cat a ragged splotch at his feet, his wire-framed half glasses splayed on the teeming coffee table before him. I drew my aunt, a tall thin shadow with no features, standing out on the patio shading her eyes and gazing out onto the back lawn, which was already beginning to look unruly again.
One lazy afternoon after lunch I was out on the patio, having given up on the St. Pete Times and wondering what was up with Mel, since I hadn’t heard from him. My uncle’s tests were finally over and I could hear him in the house on the phone to his bookie while my aunt was out grocery shopping. A few minutes later the sliding doors scraped open.
“Hey, Niece!” Uncle Richard was carrying a tray. He had made us iced tea in plastic glasses with watermelons on them, and there were plum candies in a cereal bowl. “I know your aunt uses special dish, but I can’t find.” He set the tray down on the frosted glass tabletop and pulled up the second chaise alongside mine. “Look at us, the two invalids! Not such a bad life, eh?”
I plucked a candy and undid the waxy wrapping. Most of my American friends hated these. Who wanted salt and a hint of bitter when they expected sweet?
“I’ve only gained about ten pounds since I’ve been here,” I said.
“Good, good! Men don’t like too skinny, you know.”
“I’m not looking for a man, Uncle Richard.”
“Sometimes you don’t look, you find.” He sipped his tea and smacked his lips. “Lipton’s mix. You don’t tell your aunt. So what’s wrong with that husband of yours? Why you get divorce?”
“It was time, Uncle Richard. We both changed too much.”
Uncle Richard frowned. He knew this was bullshit.
The truth was, I’d run away.
Safety was what I was looking for, and safety was what I thought I’d found. Carey Acheson. The name had the comforting resonance of old money. Bourbon money, I found out later. We met at a lounge party at Brown when I was a freshman, dragged up the hill by a RISD roommate. My father had just died, I was listless in my classes, dreaming of I don’t know what. Carey was a junior, a gangly slow-talking molecular biologist from Cincinnati, prep school all the way. That he was even attracted to me was amazing, given my own boarding school experience, although that summer on the Cape Fran and I had perfected our slumming in local bars, flashing the IDs that proclaimed that we were newly eighteen and of drinking age. That was back when eighteen was the drinking age.
The first time we made love Carey whispered in my ear: “I want to be where you’ve been.” Goat’s Head Soup was blasting to cover up the noise from his apartment mate’s room next door, to cover up what we were about to do. I thought of Marty and Schuyler.