Marry or Burn (15 page)

After the funeral, filled with horror, grief, and a remorse that overpowered her feelings for her lover at first, she asked for six months to go away alone. When she came back, her lover had married someone else.

Those were the elements. All of it happened in the space of those few years around the age of twenty, when one is barely out of childhood. All three, the wife Annette, the husband Alonzo, and the lover, still had parents helping them with checks and advice, parents who had come through a world war themselves and carefully planned that the children born after it would live unscathed and happy. The three, themselves wanting to be happy, went through these events while another world war was raging.

In time Annette married again, and the three children she had with this husband would find bits and pieces of these old events in themselves, like tea leaves.

The first child, Michele, inherited her mother's looks, olive skin with pale eyes and pronounced dark eyebrows, round placid cheeks in a narrow face, lips full and crinkled like sunned grapes, her father said, lying back with her, his first baby, on his chest.

He was forty years old, a surgeon. He had been a poor boy and now he had plenty of money—though never as much as Annette's first husband Alonzo would have come into—but he didn't care for money, he cared only for the wife and the child who dogged his steps, learning the fruits and plants, minerals and sea creatures and geographical formations that gave their names to parts of the body.

The child was impatient with books, though she liked to turn the pages of his surgical atlas with him and let him show her the cherries and mulberries and bulbs, islets and pillars and spindles. The body is old, older than the mind, he told her, and she got ready for a boring fairy tale. Because the body is
volume, it is stubborn, he said. Its rules are those of water. Most of medicine is keeping water in or out. And for the most part the body, in its ancient way—here the child began rolling her eyes and banging her heels on the chair rungs—goes about its own business disguised from the mind and without consulting it. She gave a haughty laugh and ran away from him, out of the house.

But waiting for her in high school was a certain boy. He was a boy with a grudge: as a small child he had had polio. Although he recovered, and suffered very few of what her father called “the sequelae,” he had a limp, and having been one of the last to get the disease, just at the time the vaccine appeared and saved so many others, he was bitter. When he got well he was wild, ahead of the boys his age instead of behind, known in the high school for his outbursts in the classroom, his stormy liaisons with older girls, even women, clerks or waitresses in their twenties, in places where the high school kids hung out.

 

MICHELE WAS SUNBATHING with her parents. Her little brothers played in the coppery foam of low tide while the three of them lay talking about her mother's marriage. Her first marriage.

Michele said, “It's funny, when you first told me about Alonzo, I remembered him!” Indeed she could remember the conversation, the slowly arriving, affronted surprise, at first, of the discovery that her mother had had another husband, and then a funny feeling coming over her, a recognition of the man they were talking about, as if he had come around a corner into view. “I remembered him!”

“You did?” her mother said musingly. She rarely contradicted her children or imposed an attitude on them that might be from another era, her own era.

“I know I couldn't have,” Michele said, sitting up and leaning on
her mother's legs. Her mother lay back, slightly overflowing the top of her bathing suit with the straps down, in her low beach chair. She had lost the narrow, bony shape that was her daughter's, except in the face. She was one of those women who keep a thin face. Men who passed glanced at her, the breasts, the plump tanned legs, tight-skinned and gleaming with oil. Michele looked down the legs to her mother's long, reaching toes; elegant and indefinably pitiful they seemed to her, the very keys of her mother's self. She leaned across and moved the pliant middle ones back and forth.

Michele was on the towel; her father had a hammock that separated him from the sand by just a few inches. He lay on his stomach on a yellow towel, idly running his fingers along the sand. They were all obliged to cover themselves and each other heavily in oil every hour because he feared skin cancer. He brought oranges to the beach to protect them from dehydration. He would cut them in half with his Swiss army knife and expertly squeeze the halves into his mouth and theirs, from above, the way people drink from a wineskin. Then he would eat the pulp, because it was good for you, and urge them to do the same. Once he had it on his hands, the bags and towels and sandwiches, even the skin of their own arms and shoulders, had the smell of oranges.

“So tell me what he looked like,” Michele said. “Alonzo. Didn't he have thick brown hair?”

“She told you that.” Her father's voice was muffled against the towel.

All of this was talked about in the family, not hidden.

“Did you tell me?”

“Oh, I probably did, Mish.”

“Well, before you told me I knew. I knew what he looked like.”

“Pictures,” growled her father, consenting to appear jealous.

“I never saw one, did I, Mommy?” All her life she called her mother that.

“I don't know that you have,” her mother said. “Eddie, has she seen pictures of Alonzo?”

“Bound to have.”

“I have not!”

“Well, they're in the desk with everything else.”

“Why was he named
Alonzo
? And did you know him, Daddy?”

“It was a name in his family,” her mother said.

“The rich dream up names like that,” her father said. They all knew he was proud to have been poor, himself, to have worked his way through college and sent money home to his mother. Yet he respected Alonzo, that was apparent to Michele. It was not Alonzo, it was the lover her father looked down on, the one who came on the scene and did all the harm. The man who had married somebody else after causing Alonzo's death. That man had no name.

“Anyway I knew he had brown hair, Alonzo,” Michele said, “thick and standing up, and growing down in a point in the middle of his forehead, right? Right?” she cried, excited, as her mother dreamily, frowningly watched the boys drag a tree branch to a deep hole they had dug in the sand, their trap. Her father sat up. “Somebody's going to fall into that,” he said to nobody in particular.

“Did he? Did he or not?” Michele arched her foot and flipped sand onto her mother's legs.

“He did.”

“Like mine.”

Her father said, “Annette, you don't suppose—she's his daughter by celestial insemination?”

“She may be,” said her mother thoughtfully. “But actually I think she's got your nice lips.” Though they all said her lips were her mother's.

“Really?” Her father lay down again on his back and pressed his moustache up with his fingers. “These?”

Her mother leaned over and kissed him. “Oh, you're burned. Your shoulders right at the neck,” she said, kissing him there.

“Where's the oil?” he cried, sitting up. “And the boys—! Tommy! Eddie! Come up here! Michele, where—?”

“It's in your bag, Dad. It's right there. And he had one of those chins . . .”

“I couldn't say,” said her mother, becoming aloof as she poured oil into her palms.

“My phantom father,” Michele said.

Her father got to his feet, shook himself, and ran down to the water's edge to oil the boys' shoulders, fair like his own, not olive and immune to sunburn like Michele's.

Michele thought she did not just pity the stricken young husband with the rare, sad name Alonzo, but knew him as kin. Now she was only six years younger than he had been when he walked out of his family's summer cottage in the early morning, got in the car, opened the windows, and drove to the end of the boat ramp where the bank fell off sharply into a cave of water that sent up a slow obscuring cloud of mud. No one had ever said precisely this; she had imagined it for herself.

She felt she was like him, proud but easily defeated. She was more like him than she was like her own father, who had real power and could not be defeated. She would have to be very careful that she did not love too single-mindedly (and that doing so she did not, as her mother had, destroy anybody) and that the life she might have to lead because of the intensity, the
near uncontrollability of her feelings did not overwhelm her. She would have to be careful, and already she had not been careful.

Just down the beach from the pit her brothers had been digging, a group of hippies lay on the beach. In a year or two Michele would be on a beach in Europe with just such a group, but at the time she was suspicious of them. They had stuck two poles in the sand and tied on a banner that kept coming loose, with a peace symbol on it.

The war in Vietnam had worked its way into everything, lifting many of the restrictions on what people wore and how they talked, even bringing a draft resister up onto the stage of her high school to disrupt the assembly. The girls had their bathing suit tops off and the boys were stretched out on the sand without towels, letting the girls rub lotion onto their backs. One of the girls waved broadly at Michele's father when he was loping down the beach, her dark-tipped breasts spreading apart and then flowing in the direction of her arm. He waved back with the same broad, lazy motion, and Michele could see that the girl had dropped her teasing face and was smiling as he got to the boys and scooped them up with their thin legs dangling. They clamored to show him their digging, so he put them down and fell to his knees in the sand.

Michele oiled her own legs. She shook her mother, whose eyes were shut and whose forehead would tan unevenly if she kept it soberly wrinkled the way it was. “I don't know why but I'm not interested in the other guy,” Michele went on. “Your
lovah
. I'm interested in Alonzo. I mean you were married to him. He seems like part of the family.”

“And the other one?”

“He seems like the other one.”

“And so he was,” said her mother. “If you think you might be pregnant we should go to the doctor rather than wait.”

Michele lay back on her towel, slowly. “I don't think so.”

“But you love him. You say you've been sleeping with him.”

“I love him. I love him. I love him.” She didn't want her mother to have to picture the car, the friends' cars, the logistics, so she said, “Just a few times.”

“And so you'll want to have the baby,” her mother said decisively.

“I don't think I'm pregnant. I'm thin.”

“There's something about you that makes me think you might be. My first pregnancy . . .”

“With
me
! Or, no, I mean . . . no.”

“No,” her mother said. No, the first pregnancy had been the miscarriage that set in motion all they had been recalling.

“Here comes Daddy.”

When her father had thrown his reddened body down again her mother began to speak thoughtfully with her eyes closed. “I was unfortunate. By that I mean I brought misfortune.”

“Are we on that again?” Michele's father muttered.

“I learned my lesson very early, though I can't say what it was exactly. You'll find that. You can't say what you've learned, exactly, and whoever does—well, don't trust it absolutely. I learned too late for him, for Alonzo. It wasn't ‘don't play around,' or anything like that,” she said, with dignity. “I wish I could tell you what it was.”

“I'll tell you what it was,” her father said. “It was, ‘Don't play around.'An ironbound rule. If you're married to a surgeon, especially. Because we are much more likely to do evil things to another than to ourselves.”

Her mother said pensively, uninsistently, “It had something to do with life.”

“Life is better than death, was that it?” her father said.

Michele said, “Aha, you're making Daddy jealous!”

“He's not jealous.”

“I am too.”

Her father had taken her mother's ripped-apart life and sewn it back into a piece. Her father was able to do that, Michele always said when she told the story, because in the 1940s and '50s men had the power to alter everything for women, or were thought to, and because life was better than death.

Michele had a baby and gave it up for adoption because that was what happened then, in her own era, even though her parents were more free-thinking than most; they had lived in Europe, and her mother, in particular, thought anything could be accommodated within the family, any number of people and memories of people.

Years later Michele would find herself telling her friends about the way her mother had suffered over the giving up of the baby, the son Michele had had at sixteen.

On the day Michele “relinquished,” when she had gotten up out of the bed where they kept you for days at that time, and dressed herself in the clothes she had worn into the hospital, and they were signing her out, her mother had taken hold of the counter at the nurses' station and then, almost gracefully, let go and folded onto the floor. She had fainted.

When she came to, she got up clumsily, with all of them to help her, but she didn't say she was sorry; she withdrew herself from any talk about it. The nurse who took her blood pressure while she was lying on the polished floor gave her face a little stroke. Then the nurse hugged Michele, who had not been able to kneel all the way down because she was sore, and she gave Michele the baby's hospital bracelet.