Bliss and Other Short Stories Part 8

"Just call me Chicken Little."

"Carl? Hon?" my mother said.

"Old Yeller," I said.

"Absolutely not," my father said. "You're being hard on yourself for no reason. What you're going through is by no means uncom mon."

"I'm not one of your psycho patients, Dad."

"Carl." My mother's incantation was a whisper.

"No, clearly not." My father stood up. "You're my son. Do what you have to do."

I stood up, too, but I didn't know where either of us was going.

My mother remained seated. Her red flowery wrap with its deep, extravagantly cuffed sleeves gave her the appearance of a mandarin.

She seemed about to pa.s.s sentence.

"The studio is off limits," she said.

"Okay."

"It's mine," she added. "Not yours, not ours. Mine."

"Fine."

"Just so you understand," she said, and rose from her chair. She began to pile the breakfast dishes deliberately and loudly into the sink, and my father and I went our separate ways. *

As I exited Bauman's Outfitters that afternoon, I swerved to avoid running into Carolyn Wilson, who was entering.

"We meet again," she said. "Going camping?"

"Hi. Yes. Well, sort of."

She grinned and gestured widely with her dripping umbrella.

"You've got the perfect day for it."

I s.h.i.+fted the bulky package containing my new tent to my other arm. An escaping pair of metal-tipped tent poles made a swipe at Carolyn and missed, then clattered onto the sidewalk. I bent to re trieve them, and several more fell out. Then they all fell out.

"Whoops," she said.

I gathered the poles together and stood up, dizzy with embarra.s.s ment, crus.h.i.+ng the wet and disintegrating bag to my chest.

"Not really camping," I said. "Just-"

Carolyn was waiting, looking at me out of hazel eyes. Her eye brows were brushed, like her hair, with red. Her smile was going to go, any minute now. She would vanish.

"My name is Carl," I said.

"I know. Carolyn," she said, putting out her hand and laughing.

We shook hands.

"Would you like to go out sometime?"

"Sure. When?"

"I don't know." I really didn't know, but I had to keep talking. "I don't know," I said again, brilliantly. "But I'll call you."

"Great! I'm in the book."

I walked home slowly. The rain fell steadily, mildly, and I put my face into the sky and let it run into my eyes. I thought about noth ing at all except how she had held her umbrella over both our heads the whole time we were talking. *

I had used my tent only twice when my parents told me I had to begin sleeping indoors again. My father offered to pay for the tent, which I had bought out of my savings, and I refused the money.

"Carl," my mother said, "listen to me. Once you sleep indoors one night, just one night, you'll see, I'm certain, that nothing's go ing to happen. Nothing."

"No," I said. "This house is going to fall down and I'm not going to be inside it when it does."

My father whipped off his gla.s.ses-a spectacular effect, one that I had seen before, though not often. He stared at me with myopic intensity.

"Good Christ," he said. "Aren't there enough real problems in the world without adding to them? Your sleeping outdoors simply isn't tenable anymore. Now make up your mind to it and let's have an end to this."

"Oh, it's real," I said.

"It isn't real," my mother said. "You've been scared and we want to help you. But you've got to meet us halfway."

"I'll sleep in the car."

"You will n o t sleep in the car," my father thundered. "You will sleep in the G.o.dd.a.m.ned house beginning tonight."

That night I slept in the closet. I positioned myself so that my head and shoulders were within the shelter of the door frame. In order to accomplish this I kept the door open and slept on my side, con tracting my body into a fetal position in the cramped s.p.a.ce. I woke up feeling bruised and sore to find my mother standing over me.

"Oh, Carl, Carl," she said. "Breakfast is ready."

The following night I turned down my bed to discover that my mother had bought me new sheets: crisp, fresh-smelling, blue- striped cotton. Matching pillowcases.

I sat gingerly, reluctant to disturb the hotel-perfect fit. Doing so, I felt, would be an admission of some sort, a physical declaration of my intention to spend the night there. But it would force me, too, to face another fact: that I was no longer so afraid. I was now merely-and for some reason, shamefully-worried.

I rolled into bed fully dressed. Switching off the light, I closed my eyes for several minutes. When I opened them again my room's familiar features stood out in dim but ordinary relief. There, the win-dow. There, the dresser. Up there, the crack.

A cool wind fluttered the curtains and I pulled the bedspread over me. My mind, strangely peaceful, ticked off my concerns in stately slow-motion as I turned over my worries: I would never see my grandparents in Chicago again.

Carolyn, who seemed to like me, would suddenly cease to care.

My father would become chronically dissatisfied with his work and move us again and again.

I would be buried in an earthquake and die anonymously, need-lessly, along with thousands of others who had gone on believing that everything was all right.

My mother, whom I loved, would also die.

I became aware of the silence in my room and of the noises dark-ly hidden within the silence: the shush of blood in my ears, the rhythmic thump of my heart when I placed my hands, one over the other, on my chest. Exhaustion and worry fell like twin pen-nies on my eyelids.

I dreamed that I was walking on a strange continent whose obe-lisk-shaped buildings poked their tiny upper stories through the clouds. I knew the buildings were empty because of the numbers of people walking over the gra.s.s in the oppressive, sunless heat. Ev-eryone seemed to be talking at once and I couldn't make out indi-vidual words. But a needle of news threaded the heavy air, giving shape to a stifling rumor: I understood that an impending earth-quake had sent everyone outdoors, and it further became clear that everyone's wish now was to escape the open areas that would fill with rubble when the skysc.r.a.pers collapsed. With a rising sense of confusion and panic, I fled into another dream: I was on a road in a village at twilight. Bougainvillea vines climbed the walls of the adjacent houses; bunches of their blood-red, vo-luptuous leaves nearly overshadowed the road. At the end of the road stood a house with a single high, brightly lit window, and at the center of the window a woman stood framed. I ran toward the house with relief, shouting and waving, certain that the woman was my mother. But when I reached the house, I saw that the figure in the window was an angel-my mother's angel from the Saint Mat thew painting-and that her eyes were brilliantly blue, and blind.

She raised her hand in greeting or negation, then slowly drew the hand across her face. *

I woke up before dawn and made my bed while light materialized in the room. My father looked in.

"You're up," he said with surprise. I finished dressing and followed him out to the kitchen.

"Coffee's ready. Marian's sleeping in." He sat down heavily, as if tired out by the effort of making these announcements.

"What's wrong?" I said.

Something wasn't right. He wasn't ready for work. He sat very still, his hands lying on the table like a pair of gardener's gloves.

"Did you sleep well," he said.

"Fine." I waited. "I'm going to sleep in my bed from now on. And I'm sorry for what I said, Dad, about your patients being psychos. I was out of line with that s.h.i.+t."

He nodded so slowly that I couldn't tell if he'd heard what I said.

He seemed to be entranced. Then his hands came back to life and he waved one of them as if to clear the air.

"That's good," he said. "I know it was hard for you, Carl."

Heaving himself up, he went to the counter and poured a cup of coffee for me, then set it down on the counter and simply stared out the window.

"So, what's going on?" I said-and was suddenly afraid. "Dad, you didn't quit?"

"What?" He looked at me blankly. "Quit what? Oh. Quit my job."

He began to laugh, one big explosion setting off the next, until he was leaning over the sink, shaking, his arms wrapped around his middle. Then, stopping as suddenly as he had begun, he ran the tap and washed his face. He lifted a fresh dishtowel from the drawer and wiped his face dry. His voice, when he spoke, was hoa.r.s.e.

"That boy, the marine I told you about? The one who jumped from a window? He's dead. He killed himself in the hospital last night. Got into the dispensary and drank something-took some thing."

He folded the dishtowel into thirds as he spoke, smoothing it with the flat of his hand. "He had a second opportunity, and took it."

"G.o.d, Dad. I'm sorry."

He nodded. "So am I. Sorrier than I can say. I've been trying to figure out what I could have done." He brought his hands togeth er, leaving a s.p.a.ce between them that a face might have filled, or slipped through. "To prevent this. Eighteen," he said. "Good Christ."

He dropped his hands and turned from the counter. "Your mother will probably sleep for a while. We were up so late. I have to leave in a minute." He rubbed his cheeks. "I'm unshaven, Carl. I forgot to shave."

I went to my father and put my arms around him, and his heavy arms fell over my shoulders like a landslide. *

After Dad drove off, I walked out through the early morning cool ness of the backyard, let myself into my mother's studio, and stepped up to her painting. At first I could see nothing different. Then I ob served the changes she had made since the last time I looked.

Although the angel still sat on his lap, Saint Matthew was now weeping. He continued to look astonished in spite of his troubled tears. And his angel, the original dare still alive in her expression, no longer touched his lips but instead reached a little higher with her outstretched finger-drawing out his tears in an effort, perhaps, to teach him a more fundamental language than he had bargained for.

It was still too early to go to school, so I wandered down to the ocean. Walking out onto the broad beach I pulled my jacket tighter around my shoulders, feeling the wind beat down on me in short, hard gusts.

There was no one else in sight. Only an occasional gull-screech cut through the steady roaring of the waves. The packed sand bare-ly moved under the pounding of the surf, but as I walked farther out it loosened, melting as the retreating water slurred and sucked around my shoes.

The world was in constant, sometimes secret motion: I was mov-ing-I hoped-toward Carolyn. My father was behind the wheel, freshly shaven, heading north. My mother, still asleep, traveled to-ward morning in a dream.

I stood in the surf until my shoes nearly disappeared, the heels digging in first, the toes tipping skyward. This was how I wanted to go: a little at a time in a slow rush, not all at once, not missing any-thing. Stumbling backward, I regained my balance and ran back up the beach with the wind beating around my head like giant wings.

Mountains of the Moon.

About three-quarters of the way up the mountain, Mike began to fall behind. This was inevitable. Not only was he unused to hik ing, or to any strenuous exercise, but he was outdistanced by the strength of his wife's desire. She had more than enough of that; she'd reach the top first. And Frank was right behind her. His van was parked where the dirt road ended, a thousand feet below them.

With half a mile to go, Mike stopped, leaned his weight against a tree, and watched their backpacks disappear into the leaves along the trail above him. *

Mike and Katy met at a race seven years earlier-a fundraiser at the school where Katy taught fifth grade. She was warming up, stretch ing her tanned athlete's legs, when Mike walked up to her and struck up a conversation. Katy asked him if he ran. "Only if someone's chasing me," he replied.

When the race was over, Mike caught up with Katy in the park ing lot. He had seen her win-he'd seen her flash of determination at the finish-and now he asked her out. She thought for a moment.

A strand of hair which had escaped her ponytail lay smoothed with sweat along the length of her nose. She lifted the strand, exam ined it, cross-eyed, then plastered it across her forehead and said, "Yeah, okay."

"Okay, then," Mike said. "Terrific. I'll call you."

They went out twice that week. Then Katy came along when Mike took his nephew trick-or-treating. Mike and Katy stood hold ing hands in the damp leaves at the curb as the boy, draped sadly in a sheet, carried his bag from one porch to the next. Jack-o-lanterns, yellow-eyed, grinned at them in the dark.

On their fifth date, Katy asked him to spend the night. He nev-er really went home. Three months later, Katy became pregnant, and six months before their daughter, Alison, was born, they were married.

"It's not a big mountain," Frank had a.s.sured him over lunch the day before. "Not too big, but a good hour's climb. Steep, too." "How steep is steep?" "It's a mountain. It gets vertical. You'll love it." Mike stepped into the clearing at the top of the mountain and reflected that, so far, he had not loved any of it. His swollen feet felt steamed, as if the sweat that had poured out of him on the climb had drained into his shoes. But his upper body felt light; he seemed to have shed excess weight as well as water. He stripped off his back-pack, settling it on its lopsided bulge of a six-pack, sandwiches, and chips, and lit a cigarette.

Mike and Katy had known Frank once upon a time-he'd come into their lives in a crisis, when they'd needed him, or someone like him-and now here he was again. Frank had been a priest, and then, within a year, he'd quit the priesthood and turned up in Mike's of-fice, looking for work. What can you do? Mike had asked. He was at a loss as to what to do with a guy who had spent the greater part of his life praying. A guy who had sat in his living room and watched him cry. I can learn, Frank had replied. And he had.

Then Katy had gotten interested in climbing, and it turned out that Frank, the Northeast's answer to Saint Francis, had been tramp-ing around the woods for years, and their friends.h.i.+p opened up, and Mike was left behind the door that had opened. All the outdoorsy types Katy met were gregarious and st.u.r.dy. Katy's circle of friends widened. Mike had no friends except for Katy.

"I need to mix with other people, now," she told Mike one night after they'd lain awake very late, unable to make love or to sleep. "I need that like you wouldn't believe."

"So, mix," Mike said.