“I’ve got it,” Kit said. “Cash.”
He glanced once more at the list on his desk. He needed to see the name. Mirinex, Inc.
Chapter 9
My baby—
Mysteries, God knows there are mysteries, and, well. This is one of them: this sitting in front of the glass grid again, sitting gnawing at my Apple again — it’s a mystery; indeed. It’s not at all a sensible place for a girl in my position; I shouldn’t even be back in Cambridge yet; it’s only Monday and, well. Certainly I acted like I needed more time …
Yet I’ve made a decision, don’t you know. My baby, I’ve come round to something; I’ve come round and round and round.
Kit was reeling himself. His ears and face burned, but he had to blink away splatters of cold rain. The wet streamed out of his hair. As soon as he’d come in the kitchen he’d discovered the printout, unseparated pages with feeder-strips still attached, a neat white stack in the middle of the curling pink memos that still littered the breakfast table. He’d found it and stormed first around the apartment, then back out onto the sidewalks. He’d jogged for blocks in either direction, over frost-buckled brick under freezing rain.
In high school, you know (do you know about high school, wherever you are?), the sweet sixteens scribble in their diaries, scribble scribble about the season’s infatuations — and then they show off what they’ve scribbled; they reveal their heart’s secrets (o, sigh) to whoever they think might whisper them, eventually, to the person they actually want to know … So I’ve heard, at least, my baby; I never went in for that sort of thing, playing Telephone, all that silliness; in my case the stakes were much too serious for that, in high school, much too serious. What I mean to say is, well. You aren’t simply another infatuation, my dear lost baby, and my sitting here doing “input” isn’t simply an adolescent game, a make-believe-mystery, in which Little Miss Giddy comes home where she might get caught — because she wants to get caught …
My baby, I don’t believe this is that; I don’t believe I’ve fallen prey to such silliness: catch me if you can. The stakes are much too serious; and the “office in the home” is the only office I have — a room of one’s own, my baby. So if my prince should come, my prince your stepfather, if he should catch a whiff of my Cutty Sark out in the stairwell and come a-running … well. I do know the man, my baby, I know your stepfather; and he should read this, really; he needs to see whatever design I’m about to carve out on my Apple as much as I do.
Then too, “Delete” is always only a single swift touch of the key away.
Kit needed a towel. He needed a slug of scotch himself, something to take the chill off. His brand, Johnny Walker. In the liquor cabinet he found Bette’s half-finished pint of Cutty, the clipper ship on the label, the proud old vessel gone sketchy at the edges. Somehow seeing it knocked the wind out of him. It left Kit slumped on the long-unwashed linoleum, so the clip in his pocket pinched him again.
She’d known he wouldn’t be home: I do know the man. And after a slow moment sitting there, as he began working the towel over his sopping head, Kit understood that Bette’s letter (or “letter,” as she’d have put it) stung him all the worse because it was a reminder of the note he himself had left for Leo. He’d lacked the strength to face the old man. It’d been hard enough keeping up a good front for Louie-Louie, assuring the brother that he’d take care of everything — the gun and everything. After that the best Kit could manage was typing up a brief explanation for Corinna and then finally jotting a note for Leo. A memo. Black on pink, like the clutter on his kitchen table. Kit had slipped it into the Mirinex box on his way out.
He found his feet, found his drink, warmed his gullet. Now what did Bette mean, calling him a stepfather?
But as for the weekend, my baby, my weekend of decision, well. Consider this mystery: I haven’t gone far, but I’ve visited an entirely different culture. Such are the demographics, in our packed and painful corner of the continent: in half a day’s drive you can move through three or four distinct cultures, each one in place for a good hundred and fifty years now at the least. Northward it’s Boston, Chelsea, Lynn, and Salem, which I would chart as first Brahmin, then blue-collar, then immigrant, and then finally history: the witches. Southward it’s Boston, Quincy, Brockton, New Bedford, which I would chart as first the ghettos, then the estates, then the factories, and then finally history: the whale ships. Westward it’s … well. Suffice to say that to my way of thinking, wherever you go it comes to history: there’s no stretch of the map I couldn’t chart — until I traveled all the way out to, for instance, Blue Earth County, Minnesota. Suffice to say that Sunday evening I headed west, more or less, to Providence, Rhode Island.
… honestly, was it only yesterday evening? not even twenty-four hours ago?
My baby, I bolted my oceanside hideaway — a Cottage, little ghost, a packed and painful corner indeed, though I must say I’m grateful for their Cutty Sark (do you know about blue laws, where you are? our Commonwealth’s Sunday laws?) — and I flew over scotch-brightened thruways to Providence, Rhode Island. In a hospital there I found someone who I think loved me once, or loved my family at least … and in that same Providence hospital I at last settled my business regarding, well — you.
A hospital? She settled her business? Kit had to fight off starkly imagined headlines, tabloids flashing ABORTION and ADULTERY. He took up the towel again. Clumsily he massaged his head, moaning now and then into the fuzzy gloom of the cloth. After a while, he recalled Asa Popkin. Come tomorrow morning, would he be talking to the lawyer about a divorce?
Though that last bit should be redone, don’t you know, that “someone who loved me”—that bit should give me a chance to exercise my Delete (maybe); because this was someone who loved someone else in my family, not me.
Indeed, Providence itself presented rather a mystery. God knows there are mysteries, and this was another, finding what I wanted in Providence, RI; I had to do rather some digging, some research. You might say that I lifted a page from your stepfather’s book. The person I was after, the person who I think used to love me — oh God, why can’t I simply say it: the one she loved was my father — at any event I’d heard she’d remained single, this person in Providence. And so I’d come to town believing the next step would be a simple one, my business with you would be over in a trice; but I at first I found myself calling strangers. In an entirely different culture …
O, I tapped my feet, on the unknown street — Delete; back in my seat, I cranked up the heat — Delete.
In this corner of the continent, don’t you know, every culture has its Women’s Crisis Center; it’s rather a new development on the local charts, and a good one too, I’d say: every culture its own Crisis Center, each with its own Service Directory, a book of one’s own. And, well, I am a woman, and I am having a crisis … “am,” yes am, present tense, my baby; the lacerations itch, they ooze (sometimes I believe I’ll never pull anything from this Apple except worms) …
And so I borrowed a page from your stepfather; he’s quite the prize muckraker, o yes; and I called a Women’s Crisis Center. After all it was a woman I’d come to Providence to find. It couldn’t very well have been a man, could it, this person who used to love my father.
She was an unusual woman, my father’s lover, though she was also, well. She was one of us — one of our kind — with the same lapsed-Episcopal pretensions as the rest of us: the jean skirts and the nic fits. She too had gone half-blind before the endless slides of Art History, and she too was forever stopping by the mailbox to see if there wasn’t another check from home; and our paths crossed occasionally, you see, our charts overlapped (though you should understand, my baby, that this was before the proliferation of Women’s etc., a significant absence)… Though you should understand, she was unusual; she was only a year older than me, a year “ahead” of me, but already this girl possessed — at least, among us lapsed Episcopalians — a rare sense of how she was going make her way: a rare, unsullen practicality about her likes and dislikes, and about their funding. And yet she was one of us: she met my father when they shared the same seat-row on the North Shore commuter train.