Acts of Love (5 page)

“Fine.”

“What did you do?”

“I worked, remember?”

“Of course. Anyone die on you?”

“You know, some people think what I do is important. Some people actually respect me for it.”

“I respect you.”

“Right.”

“When have I been anything less than supportive of you going back to work?”

She was suddenly too tired for this. “Let's just drop it, Ted.” The other night was nothing after all, just residue.

Ted saw this, the exhaustion and forfeiture in her eyes, his most implacable enemies, impossible to engage, and, frustrated, frightened, he looked skittishly about the room, stopping only when he came to the roses.

“Nice flowers. Where did you get them?”

“I bought them.”

“You bought yourself roses?”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing. I just can't remember you buying yourself roses before, that's all.”

“You keep telling me anyone can change. Doesn't that include me?”

Ted shrugged, his mouth twisting into a sarcastic half-moon that jabbed and poked her.

“If you must know,” she added sharply, “a man gave them to me.”

“Who?”

“Neal Frederickson.”

“And just who the hell is Neal Frederickson?”

“Head of neurosurgery.”

“Bully for him. How long has this been going on?”

“I'm not really sure that's any of your business.” Testing him, testing herself, her defiance still raw, its boundaries and its effect still unknown, so that, in its unfamiliarity, she went further than she had meant to.

 

A
LI STOOD BY THE COUCH
, still in her jacket, watching them, listening. They no longer knew she was there, no longer knew anything but themselves, didn't even notice when she walked right past them, right beneath them, away from them, scared of them, tired of them, walked right away from them into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and stood in the cool white light, perfectly still.

 

J
ULIA REGISTERED
A
LI'S EXIT
, but she remained rooted, even as she, too, knew that she no longer existed in this world of theirs. Ann's arms remained taut about her torso, while Ted flailed and floundered with increasing abandon, cutting the air with his hands, the right one gripping the nine-pound Winchester as if it were nothing.

“Damn it,” Ted yelled. “Damn right, it's my business.”

“I'm free now, remember?” Each word faster, easier than the last, a coil of words, all new, all brazen, and intoxicating. “Isn't that what you wanted?”

“You know damn well what I wanted, and that's not it.”

“I can do whatever I please,” Ann reminded him.

“Is that so? Well, for starters, I don't happen to think your running around is the best thing for our daughters.”

“Running around? Running around? I have dinner with a very nice man for the first time since you left and that's running around?”

Ted nodded. “You're just doing this to make me jealous. Okay. I can accept that.”

“Oh, God, why does everything have to do with you? Can't anything I do just have to do with me?”

“Who else is there?” he demanded.

“Don't be silly. No one. There's no one.” She stopped. Lowered her voice. “Can't we just stop this? What's the point? We weren't going to do this anymore, remember? Just listen to us.” She shook her head.

“I asked you a question,” he insisted, beyond her now, she had seen him like this countless times before, when nothing she said could bring him back. “Who else is there?”

“Ted, please. Stop. Just stop.”

But he couldn't. “Is that it? Is that what it comes down to? Your freedom? That's it, isn't it? Isn't it, Ann?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“What difference does it make what I want? You obviously couldn't care less what I want.”

“Ted, stop. You're not making any sense.”

“I'm just beginning to make sense. Yeah, I'm finally just beginning to make sense. I want you to tell me. Tell me, Ann. Is that it?”

“Yes, okay?” Yelling now, too. “Yes. Is that what you want to hear? Yes. I can't wait for those papers to come. I can't wait to sign them. God, I can't wait.”

His arms waved madly, cutting through her words, the steel choke of the rifle catching the light for just an instant. “Christ, am I an idiot. A fucking idiot. You want to know how stupid I am? Huh, Ann? I'm asking you a question. Do you want to know how incredibly stupid I am? I'll tell you. I thought there was a chance for us. I spent the entire weekend thinking about us. What a fucking idiot I am. I actually thought the other night meant something to you.”

“Ted.”

His eyes were glittery and hard. “Idiot. I believed you, Ann. I believed you when you said you were going to think about us, too. But you're out running around with some fucking doctor.”

“When you get like this you never hear a word I say. Will you please calm down and listen?”

“What's there to listen to? You already told me everything I need to know. You lied to me, Ann.”

She flared. “I lied to you? What did you think, I was going to sit here like some nineteen-year-old imbecile waiting for you to want me back? It took me a while, but even I had to grow up eventually.”

 

A
LI REACHED BEHIND THE MILK
to get a bottle of orange juice and carefully poured herself a glass. She held it with both hands, her eyes wide open as she drank, swallowing slowly, her parents' voices filling the kitchen, clotting the air, filling her as she poured more juice, listening to them, only voices now, no longer her parents, just voices…

“From now on, I'll go out with whoever I please, whenever I please. And you can damn well call me for an appointment when you want to talk. Better yet, call my lawyer. How dare you come home like this? As a matter of fact, I'm going to call my lawyer first thing tomorrow morning and have him renegotiate your visitation rights.”

“You think I'm going to stand by and let you go out with half the town?”

The pulp had stuck to the sides of the glass. Ali wiped it with her forefinger, then brought it to her mouth and licked it off, looking at nothing at all.

“You don't have a choice.”

“This is my house.”

“
Was,
Ted,
was.
The second I get off the phone with my lawyer, I'm going to call a locksmith and have him change the locks.”

“And every time I walk down the street I'm going to run into one more bozo you're screwing? If you think I'm going to let that happen, you've got another thing coming. Never. Do you hear me? Never.”

And then Julia's voice. Julia's shriek. “Stop! Don't!”

A single explosion ripped through the house.

 

A
LI RAN TO THE EDGE
of the living room and saw Julia and Ted embraced, a tight bramble of arms and legs, the gun lost somewhere within, frozen. Slowly, slowly they began to untwine, pulling away a limb, a neck. They turned as one toward the base of the stairwell, where Ann lay slumped, her head on the first step, the opening of a deep red tunnel above her left eye.

Ted broke free and ran to her. “Oh my God. Oh, God. God.” His hand was wet, dripping with her, as he pressed his palm against the wound, trying to hold her in. “Ann?” Pushing the blood, the muscle, back in as it ran between his fingers and onto the carpet. “Call an ambulance,” he barked at Julia, still stuck, immobile. “Hurry up. Christ. Call an ambulance!” he screamed. He managed to get her head onto his thighs, brushing her hair away from the miasma of red. “Ann? Ann?” Julia and Ali watched, transfixed, until Ted yelled one last time, “Call a fucking ambulance!”

 

T
HEY COVERED HER FACE
with a white sheet before they strapped her down. The police arrived just as the ambulance workers were carrying out the stretcher.

“Okay, what happened here?” the first officer asked, taking his notepad from his jacket pocket, concentrating on flipping it open, clicking his pen, the professional tasks that shielded him from the horror he had seen when he lifted the sheet.

“My wife.” Ted looked pleadingly into the officer's eyes, for understanding, for help, for the words that would never come,
she's going to be okay.

“He did it.” Julia stepped forward, shaking, her eyes glazed. “He shot her.”

Ted swiveled to face her, shocked. “Julia? Tell them what happened.” Each word slow, precise. “It was an accident. Tell them. You lunged at me, didn't you? If you hadn't leapt at me that way, the gun would never have gone off. It was an accident.”

Julia looked back at the officer, his pen poised above his pad. “He shot her,” she exclaimed, her voice high and shrill and fast as it rose to the very edge of a cry. “He shot my mother.”

The pen pressed against the paper, leaving a tumor of black ink, while the officer stared at Julia. He turned, finally, to the father. “You're going to have to come with me.”

“This is crazy.” Ted's voice grew giddy with distress as the officer put his arm around him and led him firmly to the door, while his partner, who had been lurking in the doorway, picked up the rifle with two handkerchiefs. “I don't know why she's saying this. Tell them, Julia, just tell them the truth. Please. Tell them what really happened. It was an accident.”

But Julia remained silent until long after she heard the car, its siren wailing, lurch and fade away, silent when Ali began to whimper in an endless keening moan, silent when Sandy arrived, ashen, dazed, bumping into the remaining policeman on her way to them, still standing in the center of the room.

T
HE TWO GIRLS USED TO TRY
to guess their mother's mood by her transient hair color, guess whether it was a good time, when she would bustle about the house humming fragments of pop songs from her youth, Sinatra, Basie, especially Nat King Cole, smiling to herself and grabbing whoever came near to do a little two-step, which ended in rapid-fire open-mouthed wet kisses like a round of ammunition, or whether she would shut herself up in the back bedroom for days on end, calling out in a soft, sad voice to Ann, sometimes to Sandy, to come listen to a story, a piece of wisdom, or a dream, which they would then carry back to their own room to analyze. Estelle (she insisted that they call her that, as if any variation of “Mom” was too weighted, too fraught with expectation and reproach), Estelle in bed filled the house with an inescapable pall, the rooms darkened, sounds muffled; somber, nervous days, clouded and unhappy. All this they would try to predict from her hair color, sometimes as orange as the showiest sunset, and sometimes veering down into the glossy purple of an overripe eggplant. Usually it settled someplace in between, in the red of a fire truck passing at dusk.

Their father, Jonathon, though outwardly less mercurial, also commanded close attention. With his black hair and his black eyes and his dense black beard, he looked nothing like the other, clean-shaven Hardison fathers, who exuded such capability with each modulated step. Jonathon Leder taught music to their children, private lessons in guitar and piano that mothers still held stock in. It was just close enough to art that they were willing to be lenient about his beard, his sardonic eyes. Still, they did not like their children going to his house, so he sat in their dens and their shag-carpeted rec rooms with his folding metal music stand and a briefcase full of scores. With the guitar, he usually divided the lesson in half, first classical, then folk. But if the child had a particularly horrendous voice (which he would humorlessly imitate later over dinner), he concentrated on classical music. “It is where your best hopes lie,” he would tell them, and they were never certain if that was a compliment or not. He didn't care whether they practiced. It was all the same to him, one child or another, one instrument or another. He had the disconcerting habit of forgetting his pupils' names, even the ones he had taught for years, and though he tried to hide this from their mothers, it added to their vague discomfort with him. They left the door open while he taught.

He used to write whole symphonies in his head. But somehow, they always got muddled in translation, bloodied beyond recognition in the birthing. There was nevertheless always the hope that one day, a symphony would spring forth fully formed, clean. That was what Estelle believed, anyway, with an unswerving faith that years of disappointments did nothing to temper. “Your father is a genius,” she told the girls, and at least for a little while they believed her. Later, they were never quite sure if Estelle believed as firmly as she professed or if she said it because it was what women, wives, said. Regardless, the house was permeated with this sense of waiting, of anticipation, and even long after Ann had realized that the symphony would not come to fruition, there remained fragile bubbles of hope that emerged unbidden from time to time: well, maybe; what if. She was so roundly chastised by Sandy when she spoke of this, though, that she learned to keep it to herself.

The girls never invited anyone to their house. Despite Ann's continuing efforts (Sandy had given up in one sharp and stubborn moment) to establish some order in the home, she was always defeated. The only substantial change was accumulation, and more accumulation. The living room was filled with waist-high piles of books, musical scores, old magazines, torn cardboard boxes stuffed with scraps of fabric, scratched records, rusty tools, broken lamps with soiled paper shades falling like berets. They literally had to walk sideways through the mounds. Some nights, while Jonathon and Estelle were sleeping, Ann would fill garbage bags with clutter and sneak them to the trash, but more often than not, Jonathon found them there in the morning and brought them back. Everything must be saved; anything could be fixed.

The kitchen was awash with coupons, unopened fliers, dirty dishes on the countertops and in the refrigerator. Ann washed the dishes each morning, but somehow by the time she came home from school, piles had once more gathered. She was not even sure that her parents noticed her scouring. “Don't help them,” Sandy admonished. “It just encourages them.” But despite her disdain, Ann occasionally caught Sandy folding towels, picking up crumpled papers, though she scowled and pretended to be unaware of what she was doing if she was discovered. Neither approach seemed to make the slightest difference to Jonathon and Estelle; the only thing they ever truly noticed was each other.

 

O
N THE
F
RIDAY OF HER GRADUATION
from junior high school, Sandy rose early, washed her hair and set it on empty juice cans to smooth the curls, and put on a new frosted-mocha lipstick with a treacly scent, the first lipstick she had ever bought. At fourteen, she was used to the probability of frustration whenever Jonathon and Estelle promised to be anywhere at a certain time. Still, they sounded so committed, so excited this time. “We wouldn't miss it for anything in the world, sugar bum,” Estelle had effused the night before. Sandy had nodded noncommittally.

After Sandy left, Ann made coffee, waiting for Estelle to appear. But the back bedroom remained dark, soundless. Ann poured a cup of coffee and slipped into the room. Estelle, in a floral dress, nylons, and pumps, lay on the sheetless bed amid drifts of last week's newspapers and drying portions of snacks. Her eyes were closed, her breathing labored. Ann stood above her and stared at her face, crinkled gray with sleep, free of her usual barrage of makeup. For an instant, she imagined taking a hammer and chisel to it and chipping it all away. Like a sculptor with a block of marble, chipping and chipping until she discovered the beauty and form lurking within, Ann would chip off, bit by bit, the fears and the crazed convictions and the sadnesses that she never quite knew the cause of, and find—what?

She sat down on the bed and drank the coffee herself. Once, Estelle lifted her head, opened her puffy eyes, and said softly, “It's not that I don't want to move, but little angels are sitting on my legs and they seem so heavy.” Her head fell back against the pillow. “Silly, isn't it?” She gave Ann's hand a small squeeze. “Don't you worry, though. I'll be fine. Even angels get tired of sitting so still and so long in one place. Soon they'll go find someone else.”

They never made it, any of them, to Sandy's graduation.

 

S
ANDY CAME HOME LATE THAT NIGHT
, her lipstick smeared, a boy's silver ID bracelet loose around her wrist, and walked purposefully into the small bedroom she shared with Ann. She took off the bracelet, let it fall link by link to the desk, and kicked off her shoes.

“I'm sorry,” Ann said quietly.

Sandy took off her dress, her padded bra.

“I tried.”

Sandy swung to face her. “Why don't you do us all a favor and stop trying, okay? Just stop trying.”

“It wasn't her fault. She wanted to go, I know she did. She wasn't feeling well.”

“You don't really believe that, do you?”

“Yes.”

Sandy shook her head. “You really are incredible. Aren't you ever going to stop making excuses for them?”

“I know she's sorry.”

“She's always sorry. Look, let's just drop it. I'm glad they didn't come. They only would have found some way to embarrass me.”

Ann leaned forward, brushing her hair from her eyes. “Don't you love them at all?”

Sandy turned away, picked up her brush, and began stroking her hair, harder and harder. “That's not the point,” she said, and though Ann couldn't see it, there was a grim, victorious smile on her face, for each sister had, for as long as either could remember, been amassing evidence and bringing each piece back to this room, sharpening it and polishing it and thrusting it at the other.

 

W
HEN
A
NN MET
T
ED
during her last semester of high school, she kept him a secret. From the moment she climbed into the green Oldsmobile with him, she knew that she had found the first thing in her life that was hers and hers alone. Outside of them. And it was this outsideness that Ted was drawn to, for it echoed his own.

He had transferred from another school, another state. Although he was only a year older than she was, he seemed an adult. Independent, unbound. He had left his home in eastern Pennsylvania when he was sixteen and moved in with a second cousin in Hardison. He would not talk of his past (at eighteen, he was conscious of having a past, and that in itself was impressive), but he did allude to a stepfather and half brothers with a stark, scalding hatred. “I'd like to see him dead,” he once said. “I know it wouldn't solve anything, but it would just make me feel better.” The very thought of all this fluidity in a family, dead fathers, new fathers, partial siblings, was almost unimaginable to Ann, with the four of them so tight in the humidor of their gray house that there was not even room for friends or relatives.

Occasionally, in their first days, Ann would ask Ted, “Did you ever see that TV show? Do you remember that song from a couple of years ago?” and he would dismiss her impatiently. “I didn't have time for all that. I was too busy surviving.” She would picture him out on the street, scavenging through garbage at all hours of the night, though she knew it was never quite that dire. Still, getting out took all his time. This, too, was seductive to Ann, whose own house was so filled with time, time trapped, time stagnant, time rotting, that she feared she was infected with it and would never be able to escape.

It was easy to keep her secret from Jonathon and Estelle, who she suspected had only the haziest notion of whether she actually went to school, had friends, or whether she disintegrated the moment she left their house, became, away from their direct vision and reach, literally immaterial. Sandy, of course, knew that Ann sneaked out after doing the dinner dishes, coming back at two, three in the morning, thick with him, logy with him, and she was heartened by the development. She hoped it was a portent that Ann might just get out after all, that she would not become more and more inculcated with them, until escape was no longer imaginable. Nevertheless, she didn't question Ann about her boyfriend, worried that the relationship didn't yet have enough solidity to withstand scrutiny. And Ann didn't volunteer. Sandy, who always chased boys down hallways, down streets, would think that it was like that with Ted, and it wasn't.

Ann fell in love with Ted because he knew how to fix things. At least that was a good part of why she fell in love with him. He fixed the car they rode in, taking it apart, throwing away the useless pieces, rebuilding others, clutch plates, brake pads, pistons, things Ann had never heard of. He fixed radios, televisions, fans. He had complete confidence in his own ability to make things work, and if at times it took longer because he vehemently refused to ask for help, the results were always successful. “No one ever gave me anything,” he told her. “I had to learn how to take care of myself.” He never admitted a problem, never complained, never confessed.

Ann didn't worry about Sandy; Sandy, with her multiple scenarios for defection, would always find a way out. But she needed Ted and his certainty that he could fix the future.

 

H
E WAS NOT A CURIOUS MAN
. He never asked questions about her past, her family, what she had done the day before. When she commented on this, he said, “I figure if you have something you want me to know, you'll tell me.” “But I need to know you're interested enough to ask,” she protested. It was the closest they had come yet to an argument, and they both retreated. She accepted his self-containment as a natural outgrowth of his independence and was relieved by his lack of neediness. The rest, she assumed, would come. Thus, it was not unusual that he didn't ask her why he had never met her family, why she made him drop her off a block away from her house, even during the day. It simply didn't occur to him that this was a conscious omission. Homes, families, were something to be left behind, to be gotten past. They were unimportant, easily severed. This suited Ann.

After high school, she began to study nursing. She didn't wait until the fall; she started two weeks after graduation. While other nursing students lived in houses or apartments in twos and threes and fours, their bathrooms perpetually hung with white nylons like strips of bridal veils, Ann stayed home. Each morning before she left for class at the community college, she put breakfast out for her parents. Often when she got home it was still there, caked and crusted, though they had clearly been in the kitchen, eaten other things, left their soiled dishes behind. Sandy, still in high school, was almost never home. Ann couldn't quite figure out where she went. She was with boys, of course. But where?

Ted had taken a job downstate with a construction firm that specialized in the newly popular multidwelling developments that were beginning to spring up on the rims of suburbs. Though he was not impressed with the end results, there was still nothing he found quite so appealing as their naked frames along the road, lines and angles of fresh pale wood, equations in the air. He spoke little on the job, but kept a keen eye on those who had been there longer and quickly learned their methods. At night, he took classes in bookkeeping, design, and architecture. Though he didn't regret his decision to forgo college, he secretly acquired the syllabuses of many of the liberal arts classes that the night school offered and worked his way through them. He could not remember a single book ever having visited his parents' home, and he was unprepared for the kinetic space that suddenly opened before and about and within him, the space that books alone could offer. He discovered a particular love of Emerson and Thoreau, finding in them affirmation of his essential natural solitude and his belief in perfectibility. He hid this new passion for reading, fearful that turning it into chatter would lessen its import, and it grew in the dark. On the one weekend when Ann came to visit, he stashed the books, now numbering over twenty, in the back closet. Generally, he preferred to drive up to Hardison, where they stayed in his cousin's house, or sometimes at the E-Z Rest Motel on Route 87.