Beyond Deserving (7 page)

There was no question Fish was easier to deal with absent, but to divorce him while he was helpless? It couldn't be right. Why now? Ursula thought. It wasn't like he had hurt anyone. He had already been dealt a lot more punishment than he deserved. He had taken a little ride in somebody's double-parked Porsche. They were all going into the Chinese restaurant to pick up Hum Bows on a Saturday night, and there was that damned car. Once around the block. The problem was, it wasn't Fish's first such lark. The law made a big deal of it, like Fish was a threat to the fabric of society. Maybe the judge sensed incipient anarchy. The cops were their most arrogant with little people.

For years and years it has been Ursula's job to make recommendations about the disposition of human lives. Remove this child from this bad mother's custody. Place this one in a foster home. Choose these adoptive parents over these. Prosecute this abuser, and not this one. She tries to think the best of people (or not to have expectations), tries to forget them as soon as she files a case. Some stay with you, but most do not. A judge should certainly have had simliar experience, but the one who sentenced Fish said, “We could grant some levity to the young person who lacks judgment, but a man in his forties constitutes a threat to his community when he ignores its basic rules of property and decency.” Property was the key word. They give suspended sentences for DUI manslaughter, for sodomy with children, but property! Ursula can still remember the helpless rage that poured through her. It was a scalding, inside. The judge hated Fish for having lived this long without buying in. He gave Katie a loathing look too; maybe he wished he could send her away with him. It was all no more and no less than Fish expected. He said that in Nam he had expected neither to live nor to die, and hadn't he been right about that?

Katie didn't ask Ursula's opinions at times she might have. She did not for example ask when she took her baby to Texas and gave her away. Ursula knows what she would have said. Give her to us. We're family. She has waked up many nights, grieving for that baby, as if it were dead, but she has never told Katie. She hasn't even told Michael. Well, Ursula has long ago forgiven Katie (knowing it isn't even her right to do so); Katie has no business with a child, and had the sense to know it. If only more young mothers made the same decision, early. Fewer infants would get underfed, left alone at night, fried in skillets, not that Katie would ever have done any of those things. There is still a tiny wedge between Katie and Ursula. Katie looking for approval. Ursula declining. Katie said this was the first time since she met Fish that he was gone and she wasn't looking at the door ten times a day to see if he would come back to her. It had cleared her head. There was peace in the certainty. But it was temporary. She had to decide.

And Katie has a new boyfriend, at her age.

Ursula doesn't think Fish knows. He has things to learn. He thinks the world in general is peopled by creeps, but he expects the best from his family. His wife. He has been living downstairs a couple of weeks, working most of that time. As soon as Ursula mentioned that he was home, her supervisor, Angela, said she was going to ask him to work on her house, a wonderful old Victorian above the boulevard. The idea made Ursula nervous. She did not want to end up with her supervisor angry at her brother-in-law. She warned Angela that although Fish's work was an artisan's, he was undependable. She recalled aloud the time he built them a fence but not the gate, and then didn't finish it for three years. (Michael wouldn't do it, either, it wasn't his project.) Angela, hearing all about the fence, didn't flinch. “Do you know what it's like, finding somebody you know will love your house because it is beautiful?” She gently chided Ursula. “I won't blame you, I promise. It's my decision. My gamble, if you will. I won't say a word to you.” It went well enough. Fish has started a new project now, unrelated to Ursula. She can relax.

Fish says Katie needs time to wind up whatever she was into while he was gone. He didn't expect her to sit around the whole while. Ursula thinks it all bravado, and she aches for him. Fish is in jeopardy. There is no good resolution in the offing. The elder Fisher marriage is no model, and the Ursula-Michael union Katie dismisses as good luck. She has no idea how strong some Fisher traits really are, how they worm their way into the soundest beam. Besides, Ursula knows Katie has never envied her Michael. If Fish is the darker brother, Katie has no taste for the light. Through all the years, Katie has grown taut, a little brittle; there are pocks in her existence about which she volunteers no feelings (a true Fisher, if only by marriage), and she invites no questions. She has always seemed, at even the worst moments, the right match for Fish. And no one can deny the depth of her loyalty. Didn't it cost her a child?

14

“Katie, it's me,” Ursula says. “I was surprised to hear from you so early.”

“Sorry. I know morning isn't your best time. But Ursula, I've got myself in a mess—”

“What's wrong?”

“Fish. But you knew that.”

“Fish,” Ursula repeats. She would like to ask Katie if other things ever fail her. If everything does.

“I'm going through with it. For the first time in my adult life I feel like I'm getting it together. I don't think I can do it with Fish. I can't drag the weight any longer.”

“I haven't got much time, Katie. Could you call me tonight?” Ursula knows it is terrible to pull away, knows she ought to respond to the message in Katie's plaint, but she doesn't want to hear it. And she is pressed for time.

“No, listen. It's important. My lawyer has been pushing me. She says if I don't let them serve Fish the papers, she is washing her hands of me and I can kiss the four hundred I've paid her goodbye. She says it has to happen. Shit, Ursula, she thinks she's my fucking shrink. My mommy.”

“I didn't realize it was that far along.”

“Oh Ursula, I told you. You know I did.”

“Okay.”

“Only not today! I told them today was okay, I just wanted to get it over with, and I told them he's over there, and to get there early, before he goes off, but I forgot about Saturday.”

“Oh God.” The anniversary party in the River Cove Grange. Fish will be a terrific guest. His parents celebrate fifty years of contract, and he greets the end of his own. What was it, Ursula wonders fleetingly, that he and Katie agreed to do?

“He'll go crazy. It could wreck things. What was I thinking? I've got these little papers all over the place. Reminders. Get the starter looked at. Get the strap fixed on my sandal. Take Geneva to shop for napkins. Napkins. Ursula, could you get them? I don't want to drive. My car is acting up. And it's like only half my brain is in gear. Sometimes I wish Fish had—”

“What do I say? Katie? When they come?”

“Tell them to come back Monday. Say he's gone for the rest of the week. Monday is soon enough! Ursula. I still love him. That's not what this is about.”

“I'll get the napkins. I don't see why Geneva has to go at all. What about you? Are you going to be okay?”

Katie groaned. “I don't know. I won't know till it's over.”

Ursula goes upstairs to dress. A strange sound is coming from the bathroom. Not quite a groan. Something more petulant.

“Juliette, is that you?” Ursula taps at the door. When there is no answer, Ursula opens the door and sticks her head in. Juliette is standing in front of the mirror with her arms crossed over her breasts, her hands drooping off her shoulders. Seeing her mother in the mirror, she whirls and glares.

“I hate them!”

“What, baby? What is it?”

Juliette throws her arms out dramatically, baring the expanse of her white throat and the pink leotard she is wearing. She is a lovely girl. “They're getting BIGGER!” she says, horror in her voice.

It takes a moment for Ursula to realize that Juliette is speaking of her breasts. She has never progressed much beyond a pubescent pair of bumps, but now Ursula can see that she is right, they are filling, rounding, though you would hardly call them a bosom. Not on a girl who weighs a hundred pounds.

“Oh honey, they're nothing!” Ursula says, almost laughing. She remembers her girlhood chums weeping into their fists because they had little breasts instead of Ursula's full ones.

“If I turn out to have breasts like yours, I am going to have them cut off!” Juliette pushes past Ursula and out of the room.

Ursula washes her face and combs her tangled hair. She has no part. Her hair springs out in all directions. After an inch of growth, it begins to tighten at the ends, then to dry and break off. It is time for a cut. Juliette has inherited enough of Ursula's curly genes to have a mass of waves, and curls and wisps where she keeps pieces trimmed. Her color is better than Ursula's flat brown, with the russet tones of the Fishers.

In her room, Ursula puts on one of her nice-lady outfits, a jersey shirtwaist suitable for court or meetings. Michael is dressing with fastidious tedium, tugging and tucking to get his shirt set just so. He has his pants partway down his hips, the fly open, his hips thrust to one side to hold them up. She resists the urge to swat him. She eyes a pile of laundry in the corner, much of which will have to be ironed—a task she usually tackles during Sunday night's
Masterpiece Theatre
show. She sometimes wishes that Michael would wear polyester like other teachers, but it was she who taught him to love cotton. He could wear jeans these days, teaching, but he likes a certain quality twill.

She admires his flat ass. A Fisher trait. Carter has inherited her roundness and short waist. Though he is a good-looking boy, he won't wear so well as his dad.

“Shove that all down the laundry chute,” she says. “I'll go down and put a load in to wash.”

The door to the basement snaps behind her with a loud crack, like a gunshot. She insisted Michael install a spring-door because nobody ever closes the damned door, but sometimes it surprises her, it works so well.

In the basement she picks clothes up from the area below the chute, and hurriedly sorts them into piles of dark and light. She stuffs the light clothes into the washer, adds detergent, and hesitates for a moment. If Fish is asleep, he won't be when she starts this machine. She punches ON. There doesn't seem to be any sign of life, no sounds from behind the curtain that separates Fish's sleeping area from the rest of the basement.

Someone flushes the toilet in the corner and turns on the shower. Well, tough on that score, too, because the washer will pull off the water pressure, but she doesn't feel bad enough about it to turn the machine off. Besides, Fish knows about the water. And he has more time than she does.

She notices that the door to the outside is slightly ajar. Damn him! she thinks. She has a thing about doors, granted, but is it really too much to ask Fish to close the door when he comes in at night? They have been robbed; it is not just a theoretical threat. Once in Portland someone came in while they were gone during the day, and took their stereo, the only thing they owned of value, and a box of mushrooms. Then, here, the first year Carter was in high school, someone came in the unlocked front door early in the morning, and drove her Toyota away, while they were all upstairs, dressing.

She goes up the two steps to the door and slams it shut and locks it.

She is wiping off the breakfast table when she hears Juliette shriek. By the time she gets to her daughter's room, Michael is already there. Juliette's windows overlook the street on one side, and a row of wisteria on the other.

“He was peeing on our bushes!” Juliette says furiously. “Without a stitch on!”

Michael looks over his shoulder at Ursula. “Who else?” he says calmly.

“I thought he was in the shower.” Ursula remembers she locked the basement door.

A car comes to a screeching stop at the curb. Michael sticks his head out Juliette's window and yells, “Better get your butt indoors, Fish!”

“Oh no!” Ursula yells. Suddenly she realizes that it was Fish's girlfriend in the shower, so Fish went outside rather than come upstairs to the bathroom. Before she locked the door.

Ursula races down the stairs to intercept the process server at the door, but as he reaches the steps, so does Fish, stark naked. Ursula throws open the door and cries, “You've got the wrong address!”

The process server, who knows a loser when he sees one, thrusts the summons into Fish's hand. “Looks like she's already got everything you had,” he says, slapping his thigh and laughing.

Fish, bewildered, stands on the porch with his behind exposed for all the world to see. “Come ON,” Ursula tells him. He darts past her, dropping the summons on the floor as he flees. Ursula picks it up slowly, as though it weighs a lot.

I'll tell Katie they delivered it while I was on the phone, she thinks. I won't say what happened.

But she will. Telling stories is one way to talk without too much intrusion. It's a way of creating and remembering their lives even as they live them. Sometimes, though, it is white noise.

She turns and finds Michael behind her. He puts his arms around her and pulls her close. “Poor guy,” he murmurs. “Lucky us.”

Ursula's heart flutters. Ahh, she thinks, like a heroine in a bodice-ripper. She can hear time ticking by; they are standing by an antique grandfather clock that runs but doesn't chime. “I've got to go,” she whispers reluctantly. She runs and grabs her sweater off the back of a chair at the dining table, her purse from the kitchen counter. She yells goodbye to Michael from the front door. “See you tonight!” she calls.

In the car she begins to sing, only “La la la,” tunelessly. Even Carter would not be able to ruin a lyrical line from Michael.

She drives off down the street, glad to get the day begun. Her work is filled with pathos, and sometimes tragedy, peopled with victims and villains, pitiful actors all, and still she goes at it, day after day, with enthusiasm. It is important not to stand too close. You can't help if you are a burn-out. People are mostly predictable, and you second-guess them. Sometimes you are shocked, and you collect those times into a repertoire. You bear occasional anguish as a wave so far from sea. You work quickly, without haste. You make good decisions and document them well. You do a lot, really.