Moving On (83 page)

Now, it seemed, even that was being taken away. Emma pushed back her chair and got up. She didn’t like the look on Flap’s face. It was the look of a man who was about to go wallop a child, and she didn’t want Tommy spanked, not just then. She didn’t want any spankings, any tears, any scenes. Maybe she could clear the picture, somehow.

But the picture, when she got there, was hopelessly dim and snowy. Tommy stood by the set with his stick horse in his hand, tears of fury on his cheeks. Teddy sat on the floor directly in front of the set, too appalled even to cry. He was very fish-oriented and
Flipper
was the high point of his week.

“Me TV broken,” he said pathetically, looking at his mother.

“I’ll see,” Emma said. “Maybe I can make it come back on.” But she had little heart. Apparently a tube was going. When it got snowy it had to be turned off and left to refresh itself in some mysterious way.

“Fiddle with it,” Tommy said frantically. “Fiddle with it. We’re missing something. I know we are. We’re missing a dangerous part.”

“I’m fiddling,” Emma said, wanting to cry. The best she could get was a blur in which the moving figures were just discernible as moving figures. That was awful. She liked it better completely blank, but the boys didn’t. They clung to hope that the blurs would turn back into the people they had been watching.

“I can’t get it, honey,” she said finally. “We’ve just got to get it fixed, that’s all there is to it.”

“But you said you would,” Tommy said. “You said you would the morning we missed the cartoons, remember? That was a long time ago. Why haven’t you got it fixed yet?”

“I just haven’t,” she said, feeling criminal. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, we’re missing
minutes
of it,” Tommy said, jumping up and down. “Maybe if I hit it just once,
real
hard.”

“You do and I’ll hit your spanker real hard,” Flap said from the doorway. His look bespoke severe exasperation.

“But
you
hit it and it came on,” Tommy said. “Remember?”

“I guess that was luck,” Flap said. “Anyway, I hit it with my hand, not with a stick horse.”

Teddy wandered over to his father, thinking that perhaps it was a matter that took masculine attending to. “Me TV broken,” he said, looking at Flap.

“Well, I can’t help it,” Flap said.

“Why don’t you try hitting it?” Tommy said. “We’re missing minutes.”

“You might as well,” Emma said. “It did work once.”

Flap went over and hit the TV set five or six times with the heel of his hand. Only the Sunday before, during a pro football game, he had made it come on that way. But it didn’t work a second time. The snow changed to waves while he was hitting it, then to wrinkles, then back to snow. He hit the turn-off button and the set went dark. “No soap,” he said.

“Now we’ll miss it all,” Tommy said. “It might have come back on.”

The boys took it in their different ways. Teddy began to cry loudly, standing where he was. Emma reached over and grabbed him and pulled him into her lap. He fought for a bit and then sat there crying. Tommy flung himself on the couch and began to kick it. His face gathered, as if he would cry, but his angers were deeper and colder than his brother’s, and though his mouth trembled he didn’t cry.

“I won’t watch it next Saturday night,” he said. “I’ll never watch it again.”

“Sure you’ll watch it again,” Flap said.

“I won’t ever watch TV again,” Tommy said, cold and sure. “I won’t watch cartoons either.”

“Tommy,” Emma said, “don’t be that way. It was my fault for not getting the set fixed. That’s like saying you wouldn’t ever eat candy again if I didn’t give you a piece just when you wanted it.”

“Well,” Tommy said, “if I really wanted it and you wouldn’t give it to me I would never eat candy again.”

“Don’t argue with him when he’s sulking,” Flap said.

“Well, he has a right to sulk. Nobody likes to miss their favorite things.”

Tommy suddenly jumped up and without a word ran out of the room, his face pinched and furious. Emma looked at Flap helplessly, bereft of all spirit. Sometimes she could take Tommy’s angers calmly and sometimes they broke her up. She could feel herself breaking up. He had taken, when hurt, to running into the small pantry and crawling onto the lowest shelf, making a place for himself amid whatever canned goods were there. Once there, he was apt to stay an hour. Emma could never cajole him out; he did not want her to come into the pantry. Flap could drag him out, but he was loath to do it and she was loath to make him. Once Teddy tried to climb up in the same shelf and got a kick in the mouth; so when Tommy went to the pantry everybody left him alone, uneasily. Flap tried to make light of it. It was obviously a normal thing for a sensitive boy to do. But nothing he ever said made Emma feel less worried or less wretched. She did not think she could stand an hour of Tommy in the pantry, not just then.

“Please see if you can make him come out,” she said. “And don’t beat him or anything.”

“It’s not like I beat him every day,” Flap said morosely and went to see what he could do. After a while Emma heard his voice. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the tones that came from the kitchen were patient and she felt grateful and wiped her eyes on her apron. Teddy had forgotten about the disaster with the TV and, glad to have his brother out of the room, came over to Emma rather shyly and with a big grin held out a pack of cards. It was his favorite game and he almost never got to play it just as he liked to play it, which was with his mother and no one else. Tommy was an aggressive card player and knew rules that involved Teddy having to give up every card he really wanted. Emma, on the other hand, knew no rules; when she and Teddy played, all was merry. They dealt each other hands with great formality and examined them with great secrecy, and despite Emma’s elaborate precautions Teddy invariably managed to get all the kings and queens and jacks, the cards he liked best. With him so happy it was hard to be too downcast, but Emma kept seeing, from time to time, Tommy curled on the pantry shelf, and kept listening for a change in Flap’s voice, half expecting it to rise into anger. But it didn’t, and after twenty minutes Tommy marched in looking cheerful and took command of the card game. Teddy turned sullen immediately and clutched such cards as he had in a death grip.

“We really do need new cards,” Tommy observed. “These are a little sticky. It’s Teddy’s fault. He drools on them.”

Teddy got up and took his hand across the room. When Tommy got up to go after him he flung them down indifferently, as if cards had lost all appeal.

“Pick ’em up, Ted,” Flap said. He sat down on the couch, looking a little drained.

“Gosh, you’re a genius,” Emma said. “Thank you. How’d you do it?”

“I guess we’re going to the planetarium tomorrow. Pick those cards up, Ted. We don’t throw cards on the floor.”

Teddy put his foot on a card and scooted it back and forth, a calm reflective look on his face as he considered his father’s command. “Me throw ’em down,” he said, looking up cheerfully, as if it should be obvious that he could not pick up what he had thrown down.

“Please pick them up,” Emma said.

“Me throw ’em
down,”
Teddy insisted, still cheerful. He grinned slyly, picked up one card, came and dropped it in Emma’s lap and moved rapidly off in the direction of his fire engine. Emma rolled her eyes in despair and Flap stood up, swooped Teddy up and dangled him horizontally a few inches above the cards until he grew red in the face from laughing. When he was set down he casually picked up the rest of the cards.

“He hasn’t learned very many manners,” Tommy said. “Not near as many as I know.”

“I agree,” Emma said. “Could you go run your bath?”

Later, the boys asleep, she emerged from the bathroom in her nightgown and surprised Flap in a strange state. He was watching the late news, the TV set having refreshed itself in the interim. As she came into the room barefooted, he turned and saw her and quickly brushed his hand across his eyes as if to wipe away tears. She pretended not to notice and went to the kitchen and fixed some coffee, but she felt scared. There had been a time just after his father died when Flap had been prone to depressions and occasional tears, but that had been three years before and it had been understandable. He and his father had been very close—they sailed a lot in a sailboat that Flap had had to sell when his father passed away. She went in with the coffee and saw that she had been right. His face looked hollow.

“What’s the matter with you?” she said, alarmed. “Are you mad at me?”

“No. Why should I be? You’re bringing me coffee, just like you’re supposed to.”

“Quit joking,” she said. “Tell me why you’re sad. I don’t like you being forlorn. It scares me.”

“I’m not very forlorn,” he said. “Maybe it’s the goddamn TV. I hate scenes like the one with Tommy. I don’t like a child of mine getting wrought up over a porpoise.”

“It’s not just a porpoise,” she said. “For god’s sake. Come out of your ivory tower. Didn’t you get wrought up over Lassie?”

“I guess,” he said. “You needn’t get mad.”

“I always get mad when I’m scared,” she said. “Why were you crying? Is it me or is it prelims?”

“Quit acting neurotic,” he said, grinning a little. “Fat girls are not supposed to be neurotic.

“It wasn’t you,” he added. “I was just thinking about Daddy and the boys—never getting to know one another, I mean. They would have liked one another so well.” And despite himself his eyes filled at the thought.

“Why didn’t you say so?” Emma said. “Poor man. At least he got to see Tommy.”

“Tommy was too little to remember him, though.”

Emma sat down by the couch and put her head on his knee; Flap rubbed her neck meditatively. “Tommy is a lot more like him than Teddy is,” she said.

“Oh, sure. Teddy has no recognizable progenitors.”

“He does too. He has us. We progenited him right in this room.”

“How do I know that?” Flap asked lightly. “He’s not serious or demented enough to be my son. You might have begot him with a passing stranger.”

“I’m too fat and unneurotic for passing strangers,” she said. “My father wasn’t as interesting as yours.”

“He was in his way,” Flap said, though only to be nice. He and her father had had no rapport. Her father had considered his daughter thrown away on a bum like Flap. He had made a small fortune but had not expected to die when he did; most of his estate went in inheritance taxes. Emma’s mother still kept the large family house in River Oaks, a house she could ill afford. She had grown extremely tight with her money and spent most of her time talking about whether she should sell the house and take an apartment. She and Flap got on indifferently but were not actively hostile to each other.

“I wish we had the Carpenters’ money,” Flap said. “Then we could afford sitters and could go out on Saturday night and have more fun than anybody. Instead we sit home with our broken TV. Do you suppose Teddy will ever learn to say ‘my’ instead of ‘me’?”

“Don’t rush him. I have to have a baby.”

“Sure, but there’s no point in retarding Teddy. You can have a real baby.”

“I don’t want to yet. Not until we get moved and see if we like it.”

Flap sighed and was silent. “Quit that,” Emma said. “You can’t possibly fail. Besides, I don’t like you envying Jim and Patsy. I bet they’re sitting home squabbling, just like we are.”

“I bet their TV works, at least,” he said. “I don’t think about
them
particularly. I just envy them their money. Are they really going to buy the Duffin house?”

“Patsy can’t make up her mind. She’s so strange these days. Jim’s being an invalid is having a bad effect on her. I don’t think they’re getting on too well.”

“They never have,” Flap said. “Why should they start now?”

“They have too. They just argue a lot. We argue, don’t we?”

“You snipe at me. I bear it with dignity. We don’t argue like they argue.”

“Jim changes his mind too often,” Emma said. “If he’d ever decided what to be, Patsy would be okay.”

“Let’s go to bed. I hate to sit and look at a blank TV on Saturday night.”

He went and brushed his teeth and they lay in bed reading for more than an hour. Flap was poring morosely over a large red history of English literature, written by Baugh, Brooke, Chew, Malone, and Sherburn. He had been poring over it for six months and Emma had come to hate it. Each page contained thirty dates and thirty titles, and there were eleven hundred pages, or so Flap said, making something like sixty-six thousand facts he might be asked. Emma was reading
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
. She was very fond of Muriel Spark and fancied that if she ever took up writing she would write like her. From time to time she rubbed Flap’s stomach, hoping he would finish with Baugh, Brooke, Chew, Malone, and Sherburn and talk to her. It was not the best Muriel Spark, she didn’t think.

“How you coming on facts?” she asked.

“I’m coming. It’s theories and interpretations that are beginning to worry me now.”

“How many of those are there?”

“Roughly sixty-six thousand,” he said. “Approximately one for every fact.”

“Are you planning to make a pass at me? I’m sleepy.”

“It’s an idea,” Flap said. “I’ve got a malaise tonight.”

“I know,” she said, closing her book. “I wish your dad had met Teddy, even if they aren’t alike.”

“Me too,” Flap said quietly. He put the book on the floor with a heavy thump, went to the bathroom, and came back and turned out the light.

“Check on Teddy, please, while you’re up,” Emma said. “Unwad his blanket from around his neck. He has a compulsion to smother himself and it’s muggy tonight.” Flap turned the light back on and went to the boys’ room and Emma remembered that she had let Tommy go to bed with a heavy undershirt on and got up herself to see if he was too hot.

“Look at him,” Flap said, indicating Teddy, who was sprawled on his back. “He’s soaked.”

Emma went over briefly and touched her son, and indeed Teddy’s chest and neck were slick with sweat where he had had his blanket wound. But it didn’t worry her. “Oh, he gets that way every night,” she said. “He’ll cool. I think I’ll take Tommy’s nightshirt off.” She began to, tugging it up, but it was very difficult to get one of Tommy’s elbows out of the armhole and he half awoke and frowned in protest and then his face softened into sleep again immediately when she got the nightshirt off. She took the nightshirt and put it on the boys’ bureau and turned in surprise at a strange sound from Flap. He was standing with his elbows on the rail of Teddy’s baby bed, looking at Teddy and sniffing back tears. Emma was not disquieted, as she had been earlier. She folded the nightshirt and went over and stood by him, her arm around his waist. Teddy, luxurious in his sleep, lay on his back, one knee drawn up slightly, one bare foot curled slightly in, his mouth open, sleeping as if all peace and all security were his. So sweet, Emma thought, reaching in to straighten his plastic pants where they had been tucked under his diaper uncomfortably.