John Updike Rabbit Remembered

Chapter 1

JANICE HARRISON goes to the front door when the old bell scrapes the silence. Decades of rust have all but destroyed its voice, the thing will die entirely some day, the clapper freezing or the wires shorting out or whatever they do. Whenever she says she wants to call the electrician, Ronnie tells her it's on his list of home improvements, he'll get to it. He likes to do things himself. Harry was all for letting other people do them. A twinge in her hip slows her progress out from the sunny worn kitchen, through the dining room, whose shades are drawn to keep the Oriental rug from fading and the polished mahogany tabletop from drying out, into the front room, where the reproduction cobbler's bench in front of the gray cut-plush sofa causes a detour that has worn a pale path in the carpet. A big brown Zenith television, its top loaded with her mother's dusty knickknacks, blankly stares where her father's Barcalounger used to be. They don't sit out here and watch on the sofa like they used to. Ronnie likes the little Sony in the kitchen for the evening news, watching while he eats, and Nelson when he's stuck at home after work has the computer upstairs that he says is more fun than television because it's interactive. He wasn't so interactive with his wife that Teresa didn't move back to Ohio with the two children over a year ago. He and Roy, who is fourteen now, do a lot of e-mail, mostly rude jokes (one especially shocking joke this summer went Remember when the Kennedys used to drown only one woman at a time?), as if e-mail was as good as having a real father under the same roof. Often Janice doesn't hear the bell at all, even when she's in the house or the backyard garden. She finds pinched in the door these notices from deliverymen who had to go away or cards from salesmen who didn't get to make their pitch. She's grateful for that but still it makes her feel isolated; suppose somebody rang she was dying to see? She doesn't know who that would be, though. So many she cared about are dead. The heavy walnut door with its tall sidelights of frosted glass patterned in floral arabesques, the door that she has been going in and out of most of her life off and on, has been swollen and sticking all summer with a humidity that never produced rain. Now it swings open more easily, with a dry crack, fall crispness being in the air at last. The girl-woman, really, close to Nelson's age-who stands on the front porch looks vaguely familiar. She has a broad white face, her eyes wide-spaced with some milk in their blue and middle-aged crinkles at the corners beginning to develop. Taller than Janice by a bit, she fills her beige summer dress well, the cotton taut across her bosom and lap. She wears a navy-blue sweater draped over her shoulders like the young women at the Pearson and Schrack Realty office do, manning their glowing computers, giving a businesslike air. She asks, "Mrs. Angstrom?" Janice is taken aback. "I was," she allows. "My husband's name now is Harrison." The girl blushes. "I'm sorry, I did know that. I wasn't thinking." The girl's milky-blue eyes widen and Janice feels this stranger is actually trembling, her body aquiver in its careful quiet clothes, a creature somehow trapped on the welcome mat, in the rectangular shade of the brick-pillared porch. Behind her, cars swish by on Joseph Street with a fresh dry sound. A shiny-new, brick-red Lexus stands at the dappled curb, under the still-green maples. A cloud passes overhead and the shadow is almost chilling: that's how you feel the new season, the shadows are sharper and darker, and the crickets sing under everything. With the terrible drought this summer the leaves are turning early, those of the horse chestnuts curling brown at the edges, and the front yards where no one has watered have turned to flattened straw, a look Janice remembers from childhood, when you are closer to the ground and summer is endless. "My mother died two months ago," the girl begins again, taking a breath to steady her trembling, both her hands holding a small striped purse in front of her belly. "I'm sorry," Janice says. Nelson deals with crazy people at his work all the time and says they're not to be afraid of. She deals with people trying to buy or sell houses, the most money a lot of them will ever have to think about, and they can get high-strung and irrational, too. "I've never married, she was all the family I had." So, despite her respectable clothes, this is a beggar. "I'm sorry," Janice says again, in a harder tone, "but I don't believe I can help." Her hand moves to swing the heavy door shut. Nelson is off at the treatment center and Ronnie playing golf at the club with some other retirees so she is alone in the house. Not that the girl looks violent. But she is bigger than Janice, bigger-boned, with a dangerous fullness to her being there, as if defiantly arrived at the end of a long wavering, like a client taking the plunge of offering thirty thousand more than she can afford. Her eyes are set in squarish sockets showing the puffy look of sleeplessness and her hair, cut raggedly short the way they do it now, is mixed of lightbrown and darker-brown and gray strands. "I don't think you can either," she agrees. "But my mother thought you might." "Did I ever know your mother?" "No, you never met. You knew each other existed, though." Janice does wish Nelson were here. He could tell at a glance if this person were over the edge, and give it one of those names he had- bipolar, schizophrenic, paranoid, psychotic. Psychotic, you see and hear things, and can murder without meaning it, and then in court seem so innocent. The varnished grain of the door under her hand calls out as a potential shield and a slammed end to this encounter, but the something pleasant and kind and calm about the girl, who is these as well as troubled and trembling, holds the door open. The dry warm air of this early-fall day in southeastern Pennsylvania-children tucked back into school, the midmorning streets quiet, the vegetables in the backyard gardens harvested or gone to seed-lies on Janice's face as a breath from the past, her visitor having come from this same terrain. "I nursed her at the end, she didn't like hospitals, they made her feel penned up," the light, considerate, shaky voice goes on. "This is your mother," Janice says, in spite of herself entering in. "Yes, and of course being a nurse I could do that, administer the meds and see that she was kept turned in the bed and all that. Only it was strange, doing it for your mother. Her body had all these meanings for me. She didn't like being touched, as long as she had strength. Though she could come on free and easy with some people, she was really a freak about her privacy, even with me. She didn't like telling me anything, except then when she knew she was dying." The girl as her nervousness eased has skipped a stage of her story without being aware of it. "What did you say this had to do with me?" Janice asks. "Oh. I guess-I guess you were married to my father." A mail truck coasts by, one of those noseless vans they have now, white with a red and blue stripe. They used to be solid green, like military vehicles. Mailmen used to be men; now theirs is a mail-lady, a young woman with long sun-bleached hair and stocky tan legs in shorts who pushes her pouch on a three-wheeled cart ahead of her along the sidewalk. It is not time for her to go by yet, but across Joseph Street, another young woman comes out on the righthand porch of the semi-detached house opposite. For years and years that address was occupied by a couple that had seemed old and changeless to her. Then they went off to assisted living, and a young couple has moved in, with hanging plants on the porch they fuss at, and music that booms out over the neighborhood through the window screens, and two small children who go to pre-school. "Maybe you should come inside," Janice says, stepping back invitingly, though admitting to her home this piece of a shameful dead past disgusts as well as frightens her. Inside, the girl, her face and arms as white as if summer had never been, hangs in the dim-lit living-room clutter like one more piece of furniture that time's slow earthquake has jostled out of place. She seems, as Harry used to, a bit out of scale. Janice is used to her house with average-sized people in it, herself and Nelson and Ronnie, though Ronnie's Alex is big, when he visits from Virginia, and Judy and Roy when they lived here took up plenty of space with their music and games and sibling competition. Though with one a girl and the other a boy and over four years between them it wasn't as bad as it could have been. "Would you like any coffee?" Janice asks. "Or tea-that's what my husband drinks now, for his blood pressure, and now I've got the habit." "No, honestly-I couldn't take anything on my stomach right now. I've been thinking of what I'd say for so long, and then it came out all backward. My name is Annabelle Byer." Janice is used to hearing the word as "buyer." For every seller there is a buyer. "Like I said, I'm single. I'm going to be forty next year. I'm a practical nurse, at St. Joe's for thirteen years, and these last five I've been in home care, those that need an L. P. N., though the number that can afford it is going down, with the tightening up of what Medicare will pay for." "Do sit down at least," Janice says, to reduce the interloper's radiant, unsettling bulk. The girl sits on the sofa, where like everybody else she sinks down lower than she expects, her bare knees brightly upthrust. A few hasty tugs on her skirt reduce the amount of thigh that shows. Janice takes the green wing chair, with the matching arm doilies, folding her hands palm-up in her lap as her mother used to do, setting herself to listen, if the thudding of her heart lets her. Her heart is caught in a net of calculation as to how this innocently disgusting intrusion will affect her life and disturb her peace. With Ronnie being so steady compared to Harry, she has known peace. "My mother worried that I hadn't married," Annabelle tells her, from her relaxed voice already more at home than Janice thinks is quite seemly. "She wondered if it had been her fault, making me distrust men, or sex or something, out of her own experience. I would tell her, That's silly. Dad, as I called him, was a wonderful man. He died when I was sixteen, but still I grew up with this good masculine image. He would toss me all around, even when I was eleven or so, and taught me to ride the tractor and whatever all else a child can do to help run a farm-pick apples and strawberries and feed the chickens and whack back the bushes and poison ivy. We even did carpentry together and he taught me to shoot his gun. I had two brothers, Scott and Morris, I always got along good with-being country children, we did a lot together. And then I had boyfriends, normal enough, though I guess compared to city boys they were shy, but after high school I got a job as a nurse's aide in a nursing home called Sunnyside, out toward the old fairgrounds-?" She is checking to see if Janice is listening. Janice nods and says, "I've heard of it. Sunnyside." "And then I went for a year's degree and passed the boards and after I entered service at St. Joe's the boys weren't so shy, some of them were even married doctors, but some weren't, and it all seemed normal to me except, you know, lightning never struck, the question never got popped. Maybe I didn't want to hear it. I'd tell my mother, It's no big deal, if it happens it happens, you're still a person, but it worried her sick, somehow, that I stayed independent, as if she were preventing something, especially after she sold the farm and I asked her to move in with me, we could manage a larger place together, over on Eisenhower Avenue-" Janice's heart jumps. She once lived on Eisenhower Avenue, with Charlie Stavros, at number 1204, back in the Sixties, when everybody was going crazy. But it shouldn't surprise her; the stately street, fallen away from its heyday of one-family mansions staffed by black or Irish servants, was where the better, safer rentals were, for misfits like her and Charlie or then this girl and her mother. "-she would be so afraid of being in the way, she'd tell me she'd stay in her room if I brought back a man, but actually I had lived alone in Brewer enough to be wary of bringing men back, they can get rough, and I was in my thirties by then and the good men were married to somebody else. When she saw she was dying-by the time the tumors were detected, oat-cell carcinoma of the lung, the cancer had spread to the lymph system and the bones-she told me that I had more family than I knew. She told me that Dad hadn't been my real father, that he had loved her enough to take her with somebody else's baby. I wasn't a year old, my grandparents in West Brewer were taking care of me while she worked in this restaurant over toward Stogey's Quarry, where she met my-where she met Frank Byer. He moved fast-I guess his own mother had died not long before and a farm needs a woman. Not that he wasn't crazy about her-he was. He was in his forties and she in her twenties and I could see when I got to be, you know, observant that they still had a lot going between them. He kidded her about being fat but then he was fat himself." Janice hates hearing about these very common people. "Didn't you wonder," she asks impatiently, "how you were born before your parents married?" Through the semi-transparent curtain across the front-room picture window-glass curtains they call them, though they're just cloth-she can see that the woman across the street is still out on her porch, fussing idly with a longnosed watering can, as if she is listening. But at this distance she can't be. The girl's being here seems shameful to Janice. Shameful and shameless. "Well, they were vague," Annabelle tells her. "You know how it is to be a child, you assume everything around you is just naturally the way it is, you grow into it. Scott was only a year behind me in school; the cut-off date came in February and I was born in January and he in November of the next year. I was always the youngest in my grade, maybe that's one of the reasons I always felt, you know, so innocent. The other kids always seemed to know more than I did, and did things. I was always the good girl who went straight home when the school bus did." The girl is beginning to talk to Janice as if she's an aunt of sorts, if not her mother. Janice doesn't consider herself a great success as a mother and doesn't want to try it again. She asks, though, "Are you sure you wouldn't like to have any coffee? I must make myself a cup of tea, there are so many questions buzzing around in my head. This is quite some news you're bringing, if it's true." She stands up, but then so does Annabelle, and follows her into the kitchen, when Janice had hoped to put a little distance between them, to think in. It's like the Jehovah's Witnesses you let past the door, they seem such poor pasty souls, yet get you so entangled, one Bible quote after another, all these headlines that prove something in Revelations, you feel you'll never get free of them. She doesn't like being crowded in her own kitchen. She has never been very clever at household tasks, it used to make Harry sarcastic (not that his mother had been any Martha Stewart or that he was Mr. Handy himself, unlike Ronnie or that nice Webb Murkett they used to know), so for Janice it has been a relief to switch with Ronnie, after his doctor advised him, from coffee to tea. She never used to get the amount of grounds right, whereas with tea you put the bag in the mug and the mug in the microwave and that's all there is to it. She uses plain old Lipton, it used to sponsor some radio program she listened to as a girl, the drip-drip song, or was that Maxwell House? Doris Kaufmann and others keep urging her to try herbal tea, or jasmine or green tea that is now supposed to be so good for you, preventing everything from hiccups to colon cancer, but Janice can't see the point of a drink with no kick in it at all. It takes two minutes and twenty seconds to heat. Annabelle watches the electronic countdown for a while and then moves to the back windows, looking through the sunporch. "What a nice sunny back yard," she says. "The front of the house is so dark." "The maples. They keep growing. We've lost some trees over the years. There was a beautiful big copper beech shading the side that I miss. Are you sure you wouldn't like a drink of something?" Janice can't bring herself to use the girl's pretentious, storybook name. She is thinking that what she herself really wants, to cushion this shock, and get her through this strangeness, is a glass of dry sherry. "A glass of water would be lovely." "Just water? With ice?" "Oh no, not ice. You'd be amazed at the amount of microbes that live in ice." Harry had always made her feel impure, even when he was in the wrong. She hands the girl her tumbler of clear liquid. Fingerprints on fingerprints. Now they use DNA-not that O. J. didn't go free anyway. That long-legged prosecutor outsmarted herself, and that black lawyer was slick. The girl seems minded from the way she faces to go out the back door and sit on the sunporch with its view of the vegetable garden and the old swing set, but Janice firmly heads back to the living room, gloomy and little used. It's on the way out. She has the girl go first and lags behind her enough to snatch the Taylor sherry bottle from inside the dining-room sideboard and unscrew the cap and tip a little into her tea. The hearty, tawny tang of the liquor arises and erases the antiseptic scent the girl trails, a kind of cool mouthwash, from the back of her neck and her bare arms. "So I expect you've told me about all there is to know," she says when they have settled again, on the same furniture. Annabelle does not concede this. She resumes, "I was saying about my parents, as a child I never knew when they got married, and when I grew old enough to be curious, my mother allowed that maybe I had come before the wedding, since Dad's mother was still alive but ailing and a marriage might have hastened her death. This seemed to figure, it being back in 1960, before things got liberal." What got liberal? Janice asks herself. Abortion, she supposes. And young couples living together. But these things happened then too, only deeper in the dark. The year 1959 seems very close, as close as the beating of her heart, which beat then too, back in the tunnel of time, that same faithful muscle, in its darkness and blood. She doesn't want to prolong the discussion, though; she doesn't want to get involved, though there is a tug, back into the past's sad damp pit. The girl seems to read her mind. "Yes, my mother described it," she says, "the, whatever you could call it, affair. She and my-she and your husband, Mr. Angstrom, lived together I guess on Summer Street for three months. He never knew if she had gone ahead and had me or not. I knew him, you know. I met him a few times, without knowing who he was. I mean, his relation to me. He was once a patient when I was still at St. Joe's. An angioplasty, I think it was. He was a charmer. Full of jokes." "He died in Florida," Janice says accusingly, "not six months later. Of a heart attack. He was only fifty-six." As if these hard facts, so hard to her at the time, might force Harry and this girl apart. "He should have had a bypass, it sounds like. They weren't quite as standard then." "He didn't want it. He didn't want to have his body meddled with. He was afraid of it." Janice's voice startles her by cracking, and her eyes by burning near tears, as if accusing herself of not making Harry's life worth living. She hadn't called him down in Florida, when he had wanted her to. He had been begging for her forgiveness, and she hadn't given it. "And then before that," this girl insensitively is going on, "when I was still an aide at Sunnyside, a boy I knew back in Galilee called Jamie and I-we were living together, actually, in a little apartment on Youngquist Boulevard, the building went condo and that broke us up, but that's I guess another story-went to look at Toyotas over on Route 111. We bought one, eventually, though not that day, when Mr. Angstrom was there. He seemed so nice, I was struck. He paid attention to me, he didn't just talk to the man, or try to pressure us the way car salesmen like to." "It wasn't exactly his calling, selling," Janice volunteers. "He didn't really have a calling, after high school." But how beautiful he had been, Janice remembers, in those highschool halls-the height of him, the fine Viking hair slicked back in a ducktail but trailing off in lank sexy strands like Alan Ladd's across his forehead, the way he would flick it back with his big graceful white hands while kidding with the other seniors, like that tall girlfriend of his called Mary Ann, his lids at cocky sleepy halfmast, the world of those halls his, him paying no attention of course to her, a ninth-grader, a runt. They didn't begin with each other until they both worked at Kroll's in Brewer, she behind the nut and candy cases and he back from his two years in the Army, having been in Texas and never sent to die in Korea after all. He often mentioned Korea as if he had missed out on something by not going there to fight and coming back home to a peaceful life instead. Nobody wants war but men don't want only peace either. "Yes," Annabelle hisses, too eager to agree, not really understanding how simple we all were back then, "he was a wonderful athlete, I remember the clippings up in the showroom, and then my mother said. She had gone to another high school, that used to play his. She talked a lot about him, once she got started, before she... went. I know about you, and Nelson, and the time your house burnt down, my mother kept track of all that in the papers, I guess. She was interested. The way she spoke, at the end, she didn't have any grudge. It was the times, she said. He was caught, what else could he do? Anyway, I was no prize, she would tell me." Ruth and her views, beneath consideration these many years, have invaded the living room. "My goodness" is all Janice can think to say, as the sherry moves into her veins and begins to tint this nightmare a more agreeable color. What harm could what happened forty years ago do her now? "He visited her, you know," this young woman goes on, her gestures growing freer, her body bigger as she crosses and recrosses her white legs on the sofa, the beige cotton dress riding higher on her thighs. Her hair, too, seems too short, and bounces a bit too much as her head comes forward. There is some vanity, some push, in that hair-its many-colored thickness, its trendy trampy cut, long and short mixed up together. "The year he died, I guess. Somehow he had found our farm." "He did?" This is horrible. Harry's affair with Thelma she and Ronnie have together buried, never mentioning it once they were past the courtship stage of confessing everything. They had triumphed, they were the survivors, Harry and Thelma were shades, corpses, sinking deeper into bloodlessness in their buried coffins, their skins crumbling, drawing tight like that little sacrificed Peruvian girl they found on the mountaintop, unbearable to think about. But to hear now that at the same time he was seeing Thelma he was chasing that fat old slut all over Diamond County is as if Harry from beyond the grave is denying her peace just as he did when alive. He couldn't just be ordinary, respectable, dependable. He thought he was beyond that. This girl, both shy and sassy, pleasant yet with something not quite right about her, is his emissary from the grave. Janice wants nothing to do with it, with her. She asks, "Why would he do that?" The girl puts her knees together to lean forward for emphasis but her dress is so short the triangle of her panties shows anyway. "To find out about me, my mother said. She wouldn't tell him. She wanted to keep me pure from him. Then I guess when she saw she would be, you know, leaving me, she had second thoughts and wanted me to know." The girl's eyes are less milky now, here in the muted living-room light, and flash with importance, the importance her story gives her. "Why?" Janice cries, fighting back a pressure. "Why not let the past lie? Why stir up what can't be helped? Excuse me," she says. "I must refresh my tea." She doesn't even pretend to go into the kitchen, she pours some more dry sherry into the cup right there at the sideboard, where the girl could see if she turned sideways to look. But back in the front room Annabelle sits staring across at the heavy green glass egg, with a bubble inside, on top of the dead television with the other knickknacks Bessie Springer had collected as a sign of her prosperity as Daddy's car business took hold. Mother and her fur coat, Mother and her blue Chrysler-it was a simpler world back then, when your pride was satisfied with such things. The girl, with all that leg bared by sitting low on the sofa and her navy sweater fallen off her naked arms, has a sluttish way of putting forth her body that must be her own mother living in her. And there is a blandness, a fatherless blankness, her face in profile taking the light as mutely as the egg of green glass. She senses Janice's eye on her and turns her face and says, "It's so embarrassing, isn't it? My turning up like this. Embarrassing to me, embarrassing to you." She has a plump upper lip that gives her smile a childish, questioning quality. She looks easy to bruise. "Well," Janice pronounces, back in her wing chair with a fortified mug whose healing tang settles her more broadly in the pose of authority. She vowed years ago never to let herself run to fat like her mother did but she did admire the way in her last years, her husband gone, her generation dying off, Mother took charge of things, keeping a grip on the family pocketbook, standing up for her notions of decency and propriety. Living here in this house, Janice feels still surrounded by her-Bessie Springer's adamant unchanging furniture, her fixed sense of her own worth. Koerner mulishness, Mother would call it when being funny at her own expense. "Maybe that was your mother's idea, to embarrass everybody," Janice tells the girl. "What earthly good did she think telling you all this would do, at your age? Make mischief, is the sum of it. And who's to say it's true, any of it?" Though she feels it is-a whiff of Harry, a pale glow, an unsettling drift comes off this girl, this thirty-nine-year-old piece of evidence. "Oh, she wouldn't have made it up, it poured out of her. It wasn't her nature, to make things up. She used to say of these detective novels she was always reading, 'How do they make all this up? They must have a screw loose.' And she showed me my birth certificate, at a hospital in Pottstown. 'Father unknown,' it said." "Well, that's it, unknown," Janice presses on, like a lawyer urging a case she knows is bad. "You asked why," Annabelle says. "I think she thought"- suddenly tears reflect light in her eyes, the plump upper lip quivers out of control-"you people could help me, somehow." She laughs at her own tears, quickly swipes at her face with expert hands, hands used to giving-rubbing, holding, patting, seizing- a nurse's care. "I was so alone, she must have thought. I haven't had a serious relationship for years. And my brothers, Scott went to Seattle and Morris to Delaware-he was the angriest when she sold the farm and moved in with me in Brewer. He had thought he could work the place and live on it but it wouldn't have been fair for her to have left it all to him. Not that a farm that size could support anybody any more. Even my dad-even Frank-had to run the township school buses to make ends meet." "Is this about money, then?" Janice asks, alert now, the muddle showing its nub. Money is something she has a feel for; it's in her Springer veins. She acted as accountant for her father, and then for Nelson as best she could, until he had so much to hide. Ronnie has his own savings and pension but she handles her inheritance still, when the CDs come due and at what interest and how to keep capital-gains taxes from biting into the mutual funds: the managers of some run up gains just to make their annual reports look good. This girl won't get a penny from her. Janice sips from her mug and looks at the interloper levelly. Annabelle considers the question, rolling her eyes upward. "No-o, I don't think so. I clear twenty an hour from the agency and often work twelve-hour shifts. My mother left us a fair amount, even divided by three. The farm had only a tiny mortgage on it, in terms of today's money. And she held down a respectable job, the last fifteen years, with this investments advisory firm in the new glass building downtown. She used to laugh at herself, putting on heels and pantyhose every morning, after being such a country slob. She got her weight down to one fifty-five." "It's wonderful to work," Janice concedes. "Women of our generation came late to it." It disquiets her to link herself with Ruth, Ruth the unspeakable, holding her husband captive on the other side of Mt. Judge, Ruth the treacherous mucky underside of everything respectable. "No, it's not about money," Annabelle says, edging herself forward on the sofa preparatory to getting to her feet, readjusting the sweater about her shoulders, and regripping her little purse, striped yellow, black, and red. "It was about family, I guess. But never mind, Mrs. Harrison. I can see you'd rather not get involved, and that's no surprise, to be honest. It was my mother's idea, and she was half out of her head with the medications. Dying people aren't the most sensible, often, though you'd think they should be. I did this for her and not for me, because she asked me to." She stands, looking down on Janice. "Well now, wait." "You've been patient, actually. I know what a shock it must be." Those deft, solid hands fiddle with her hair, its artful tousle, as if it were she who had felt the shock. Janice says in her own defense, "You can't just show up and drop a thing like this on a body." "I didn't know how else to do it. It didn't seem the sort of thing to put in a letter or over the phone." Trained to move fast, she takes the few steps it needs to the door, and puts her hand on the doorknob, an old-fashioned one with a raised design worn shiny with the years, like brass lace. She tugs the sticky door open with a snap that leaves a little reverberation in the air, a cry that dies away. There is a poignance in this strong female body, the way it moves almost like a man's, like those women soccer players who beat China this summer. Janice keeps losing daughters: Becky, and then Teresa leaving Nelson after nearly twenty years, and Judy at nineteen secretive and surly, living entirely within her whispering Walkman headset, shutting out her grandmother. She begins, "Annabelle, I'm sorry if I seemed stupid-" "You did not seem stupid. I seemed stupid. You seemed suspicious, and why not? Thank you for the glass of water." "I need to think, and talk to Ronnie and Nelson." "Nelson. That's right. My brother. I think of him as a little boy. My mother said how, those months they were together, your husband was always talking about him, upset about him." Now the girl is out on the porch, standing on the coco-fiber welcome mat, thin late-morning traffic making its whisper behind her, the dusty tired nibbled maple leaves throwing sun-dotted shadow down on the new red Lexus parked by the curb. Bought with her inheritance, Janice guesses. The nosy young neighbor across the street was off her porch at last. "How can we reach you, if we need to?" Annabelle's feet, in low beige heels, drum on the porch boards, then stop. She turns to say, "I'm in the book. B-Y-E-R. I'm listed as 'A.,' the only one with just that letter. Don't call after nine at night, please. I get up at five-thirty." Her mother's toughness shows. "But you don't have to call at all." Then her bright round face is a child's again; she smiles the way children do, in sudden blurred forgiveness. "I won't expect it. It was nice to meet you. I had thought you'd be shorter." "When I was married to your father," Janice says, high enough on the sherry to attempt a joke, "I looked shorter." It feels then that she is sneaking through the rest of the day, flickering through the parched September brightness in her black Le Baron convertible, with gray cloth interior, a 1995, the last year they made this model. She wonders why Chrysler discontinued it. Janice loves this car, the way it handles, the way she imagines she looks in it, her head in a fluttering headscarf and her DKNY sunglasses. Buying the Le Baron five years ago was the most extravagant thing she ever did for herself, as a widow at least. Not that she was still a widow after she married Ronnie. She was a second wife and he her second husband. There is a kind of racy glamour in a second marriage, though it can never be like the first, so solemn, both of you so serious with the vows and the being together all night every night and nobody saying no, and all your parents still alive and watching if you make a mistake. She had made a mistake, a terrible one, and others besides, if you consider Charlie a mistake, which she never could, really. He freed her up and restored her sense of worth. And the strangest thing was he kept Harry's friendship and even on her mother's good side-he knew how to get around Bessie Springer. Dear Charlie died two or was it three years ago, living alone in an apartment in the southwest section of Brewer, the old Polish and Greek blocks before the Hispanics moved in, they found him on the sofa dead with an unfolded newspaper on his chest, just closed his eyes for a nap and slipped away. Charlie was like that, understated in everything, his poor weak heart that she was always worried about straining during lovemaking just coolly decided at last to stop. Like the death of your parents it leaves you with one less witness to your life when a man you loved dies. Looking back from this distance, she can't think any more that Harry was all to blame for their early troubles, he had been just trying life on too: life and sex and making babies and finding out who you are. Second marriages were lighter. You just expect a little companionship, a little fun that harms no one else. Nelson kids her about the convertible, calls it her Batmobile, but she knows it's just his disappointments talking, his own marriage such a sad fizzle, not even a real divorce. He says he can't afford it, and Teresa doesn't want it until Roy is eighteen. Or until, Janice thinks, the right man comes along, out there in Akron. Odd, after all those years of Daddy's Toyotas, she has gone back to American cars. Ronnie never left. Married to Thelma, he drove a succession of an insurance salesman's drab, safe cars, modest but adequate like the benefits your loved ones reap when you're out of the picture as they say, she can't remember the makes, Chevrolets or Fords. Just thinking about those years, Thelma having an affair with Harry almost right up to when she died, gives Janice a hollow sore feeling. Now Ronnie drives a new Taurus, a silvery gray like a Teflon skillet, with the 1999 styling turning everything into oval blobs-the taillights and headlights and recessed door handle shaped alike, and the back, where the trunk lifts up, a continuous blob across, like a mustache or a roll of pre-mixed cookie dough being squeezed in the middle. Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon. At noon she shows a house over in a new development south of Maiden Springs to a young couple who had hoped for something smaller. They don't build new houses small any more, Janice has to tell them, land is too expensive and people have too much money. And yet this same couple looks horrified at a perfectly nice and well-kept-up row house on the north side of Brewer, with a terraced front yard planted in English ivy and a third floor converted to an apartment (outside stairs) for some additional income until they need the space when their family expands. "Is it a," the young man asks, "a mixed neighborhood?" He may be in his mid-twenties but already looks overweight and soft, and fussy and potentially irritable as fat people are, being pinched by their clothes and strained by lugging their bodies around. So many young people now, even the girl this morning, have a sunless indoor look. Janice has always taken a good tan, one of the few things she could always like about herself. That, and her legs never being piano legs. She tells him cheerfully, "There may be a few upwardly mobile minorities living a block or so down, but it's basically upper-middle-income families, perfectly safe for you and your children when they come along. It's an area that has kept its corner groceries and little service shops, a lot of people now are moving back from the suburbs to enjoy the convenience of city life, the stimulation of it. They want the ethnic variety, for their children as well as themselves. Trendy restaurants are opening up around here, and some new boutiques coming into upper Weiser Street, where the buildings have been boarded up so long. Believe me, inner city is in now." "I can't imagine myself pregnant climbing all those steps," the female prospective buyer says, looking up the long terraced slope, with its concrete steps and pipe railing painted a swimming-pool greeny blue to match the gingerbread porch trim. As these blocks, with their industrial repetition of steps, retaining walls, porches, fanlighted doors, and shingled steep gables, passed from the ownership of the Pennsylvania-German working class to that of a more varied population, the trim and window frames and doors were painted more festively, in carnival colors-teal, canary yellow, purple, a pale aqua like some warm remembered sea. Generations have, Janice restrains herself from saying. The exercise would do you good, Miss Prissy-pants. "Some people build carports out back," she says. "You need a permit but it's legal. If you don't want even to walk up and look, let's see what new listings come in next week. The ones in your range get snapped up pretty quickly. It's hard to believe, considering all the hard times the region has known, but there's a bit of a realestate boom on in Diamond County. To be safe buyers offer over the asking price. People from Philadelphia retire here now. They say they love the slower pace, the friendliness." And yet, she does not add, Brewer all the years of her growing up was considered a fast, crummy town, a town run by gangsters and crooked cops and the enforcers for the steel and coal and textile companies, a town where children could buy numbers slips at the cigar store and so-called cathouses filled the half-streets around the railroad station. It queasily occurs to her that from where she is standing, here on the high side of Locust Boulevard with its big view of densely built blocks-bricks and asphalt shingles and treetops-falling away down to the curving river a mile away, a descending view pierced by the county courthouse with its boxlike glass annex and the other glass box across from where Kroll's used to be, she is only a few streets above Summer, where that girl this morning was conceived, if you can believe her story. The thought makes Janice feel sick yet at the same time exalted, as if she stands on the lip of a canyon that only she can see. She lives; those who had worked her humiliation in that far-off season are dead. She doesn't go back to Mt. Judge for lunch, where the mail-lady will have left bills and advertisements in the foyer, and the afternoon sun will be swinging around into the living room, inserting a wedge of golden dust motes behind the Zenith. She doesn't want to go back to the house, it's been spoiled by that girl's visit, the past rising up like that. Instead she has a tuna-salad sandwich and Diet Coke at the West Brewer Diner, which is open twenty-four hours a day. They used to come over here after dances in Mt. Judge, and the place has changed owners and generations of waitresses have come and gone, but the layout, the low booths along the windows on two sides and the long counter backed by quilted aluminum with the slot where the cooks serve the orders up and even the little individual jukeboxes with pages of pop and country classics, is unchanged. A slender dark-browed girl of startling beauty waits on Janice, such beauty among the middle-aged and pudgy pimpled teen-age other waitresses that Janice's eyes sting. Dark hair, dark eyes, straight nose, firm round chin, soft mouth. Greek, Italian, Armenian even: Janice being herself dark-complected responds to such looks. When the girl speaks, the county's comfortable dragged accent-"So, hon, what can I bring ya?"-tumbles out and with it a vision of her sad future: the marriage, the pregnancies, the heavy meals, the lost looks. The blazing beauty dwindled to a shrill spark, a needle of angry discontent lost in these streets lined with row houses and aluminum awnings and little front porches where the patient inhabitants sit and soak in the evening heat and wonder where it all went. The television slowly goes from selling you perfume and designer jeans to selling you Centrum and denture adhesive as used by aged movie stars. It is a mistake to be beautiful when young and Harry made that mistake but not Janice; she still has what Mother called room to grow, back when she thriftily used to buy her daughter's clothes two sizes too big. She leaves the waitress a dollar tip though the sandwich and Diet Coke came to less than five dollars, counting the quarter she put in the jukebox to hear Patsy Cline's "Crazy" one more time before she dies. Patsy Cline, dead young in a plane crash just like that poor Kennedy boy. And then it's not Patsy Cline's version but that of some young pop "diva," so that's a quarter wasted. West Brewer is on the way to bridge at Doris Kaufmann's in Penn Park, where the streets get curving and expensive, off the Brewer grid. Her name was Kaufmann when Janice first knew her and then Eberhardt, and a few years ago Eberhardt died and Doris managed to land Henry Dietrich, the grandson of the founder of Dietrich Hosiery, which didn't close its doors until after the war. To get there Janice has to drive on Weiser past Emberly Avenue, which would lead to Emberly Drive and then to Vista Crescent, where she and Harry and Nelson had lived until the house was burned down by racist neighbors because of what was going on inside. She could hardly blame them, it was terrible what Harry permitted to go on, for whatever selfish reason. How utterly selfish he was she had never realized before marrying Ronnie, who was so responsible and methodical. Some men don't think before they jump, and others do. And now this thirty-nine-year-old showing up, acting just like him, cocky and innocent. Janice likes bridge for the socializing and hearing what real estate is doing in Penn Park but today it gives her a slight headache at the back of her skull. First she overbids, and then in compensation underbids, stopping at three spades when they should have been, it turns out, in small slam. Doris, her partner in that round of Chicago, is not pleased, though with pointed good manners she tries not to show it. "With twelve points in your own hand," she says, shuffling with that ripping sound expert shufflers make, "after I opened, showing at least thirteen in mine, and with four spades including two honors, you might at least have gone to game." "Your shift to diamonds confused me. I had only two." "I was showing you a second suit incase. That's called communication," Doris says, slapping down the made deck and picking up a red-filtered Newport she left smoking in her ashtray. She is one of the last women Janice knows who still smoke, though she is close to seventy if not quite there yet; she won't say. Janice defends herself: "I thought it might be a convention I didn't know." If she has let Doris down in this hand, Doris has let her down lately by becoming old: wrinkled even in the flat of her cheeks like Clint Eastwood, her eyelids drooping down on her lashes, her long brown hands like two claws scrabbling at the cards. Doris's thick bejewelled rings, accumulated residue of her husbands, sit loose on her bony fingers; her bracelets clatter on her wrists. Janice used to admire her knowingness on all subjects but Doris has betrayed her by becoming an irritable, half-deaf know-it-all hag. Now she snaps, "I would scarcely be going to a weak two after opening one spade." The two other women at the table, which is set up in the Dietrichs' huge living room like a little life raft at sea, are Amy McNear, who also got into real estate after her husband passed on, and Norma Hammacher, whom Janice when she gets to know her better will ask if she's related to Linda Hammacher. It was Linda Hammacher, a girl she worked with at Kroll's, whose apartment and bed over in Brewer with a view of the gas tanks along the river she and Harry used to borrow when they were both at Kroll's and first going together. Things had happened to her since she was a silly freshman adoring him in the halls. She had let her boyfriend in junior year of high school, Jerry Nagle, feel her up and come against her stomach in his father's Packard, and then in senior year Warren Bixler used to French-kiss her and use her hand to jerk himself off after the movies, it was gross but really helped her understand what happened, and then the summer after graduation Daddy had rented for a month a Methodist camp-meeting cottage in Rehoboth, Delaware, where being in a bathing suit all day and taking a tan deep as a Polynesian's made her feel loose and free. She fell in that summer with a pack of Washington, D.C., kids raised wild in homes with their fathers off in the service or the diplomatic corps. They would cruise the boardwalk and Baltimore Avenue all day and at night head in cars up to Whiskey Beach, where a big pink house had been owned by a du Pont and slit-eyed tall towers stared out to sea as if still watching for submarines, and the college boys would make something called Purple Jesus with grape juice and vodka in galvanized garbage cans, it was the first time in her life she had drunk anything stronger than beer. She had decided as the weeks wore on that it was time and she let a wide-shouldered boy with a narrow ass from Chevy Chase do it to her, there in the dunes on a sandy blanket, the bonfire just over the shaggy profile of the next dune. She saw the gleam of light on the rubber of the Trojan he put on: that was prudent and considerate of him but probably made it hurt more than it would have with their natural lubrication, it hurt but it was done, she was a full woman as of August 1954, his first name was Grant, how horrible that she had forgotten his last name, but he had to go back with his family the next day, or the day after, and she wouldn't have let him do it to her again, she was too sore and scared at herself. "Janice. Your bid," Doris was saying. "Pass," she says, though there are some aces and kings peeping up from the fanned cards. She and Grant wrote for a while but she didn't like her own handwriting and thinking of things to say and let the correspondence die. Even then, woozy on Purple Jesus and embarrassed to think somebody from the bonfire party might come up over the dune to pee, she had liked being on her back, supporting the world in the form of this boy's hard-breathing body, knowing she was built to take it, his painful thrusts, his whimper as he came. Men are surprisingly touching when they come, so grateful for a minute. There had been a boyfriend or two after that, while she worked in the office of Daddy's used-car business, filing and keeping accounts, before he got the Toyota franchise and anybody had heard of a Japanese car, but away from the beach sun she seemed to lose something, what little glamour she had, which was why she had liked Florida eventually. To get away from her parents, she was turning twenty and nothing was happening, she took the job at Kroll's, behind the nut-and-candy counter, the white smock they gave her had "Jan" stitched on the pocket when her parents had always called her her full name "Janice," pronouncing it juicily, decisively, their only child, prized, protected. At Kroll's there turned out to be, working at the most menial job, in shipping and receiving, this tall beautiful guy she remembered from Mt. Judge High, where he had been the star of the basketball team when she had been a runty freshman with skinned-back hair bangs couldn't hide. He also ran the 440 and the mile relay for track but it was for basketball that people remembered him by then, those that did. He seemed lost and funny, apologetic almost, after his two years in the Army and a few dead-end jobs. It was with him for the first time, thinking about it all day behind the counter, that she knew, just as certain as falling asleep, as plain as taking a meal or inserting a Tampax, that she was going to make love, fuck and be fucked, instead of just letting it happen against her better judgment the way it usually was. With everybody else on the street doing everyday things, they would drive down Warren Avenue in Harry's old Nash toward Linda Hammacher's pipeframe bed, which squeaked and jerked back and forth so much they got to laughing sometimes and had to finish on the floor, her back pressed on the threadbare carpet and all the dust mice under the bed a few feet from her face, plus a single flesh-colored forgotten slipper. Harry was less methodical and steady a lover than Ronnie is, less big, not that it matters the way men think, but she was so excited by his shining torso naked above her and her memory of how heroic he had been on the court gleaming with sweat that she would come, pushing up shamelessly once he was rooted inside her. It helped to be down there in the floor grit. She was slow at some things but not at coming. Even now at the age of sixty-three she gets compliments from Ronnie. She smiles to herself at this secret of hers. Everybody passes. Doris glances around suspiciously and says, "There must have been some points out there. I had only three, a jack and a queen." While Norma redeals the cards Janice dares ask her, "Norma, are you by any chance a relation of a Linda Hammacher? She and I worked at Kroll's together, back in the Fifties." Norma pauses, the cards freezing in her hands. "I had a second cousin Linda." "Where is she now?" "She died." "Oh no! Well, I guess we're getting to that age." "It was years ago. She was young, relatively. It was rather mysterious." "How so?" Janice asks. "Some said of AIDS, though the paper said just of a long illness. Her family didn't like to talk about it. She had been married and divorced." "Oh dear," Janice says, truly shocked; a piece of remembered happiness has been poisoned. "It was very tragic," Norma pronounces. "Damn. Count your cards. I should have the last one, and I don't." As if to comfort Janice for having distracted the dealer, Amy during the next deal fills her in on the latest twist in the saga of a great parcel of land in the east of Diamond County, six thousand acres once held by Bethlehem Steel for its low-grade iron content and now sold to a Canadian developer who, tired of battling his farmer neighbors on every proposed development, had, all legally, turned this bit of William Penn's woods into a borough, with forty voting citizens, all but three of them company employees. Already they had voted in a managed landfill that would take four hundred tons a day of Philadelphia's garbage, trucked up the Turnpike in caravans of garbage trucks, and a water park involving a pool the size of a football field and a hundred-fifty-foot-high rubber-raft ride and an illuminated par-three golf course. "Now they're talking of a ten-story retirement-home complex and a half-mile racetrack for these little miniature racing cars that apparently are all the rage in Maryland," Amy says. "Well," Janice says, "I guess it's the future." Doris didn't quite hear and crabbily says, "Are you talking about the Y2K bug? Deet says it's all been overblown, to whip up more income for the computer companies." Norma says, "Two clubs. At least I think that's what I'm supposed to say when I have a powerhouse." Janice from her hand sees she will not have to bid, no matter what Doris bids, and in quiet celebration eats a few sugar-toasted peanuts from the pale-green porcelain bowl Doris and Deet had bought in China when they took a tour there last fall, set on a round-topped carved table they also bought there-the Chinese love to ship, even stone lions weighing as much as a boulder, in fact they will even ship boulders, they see a lot of beauty in boulders, Doris has told them-and which matches another carved table at the corner opposite for the other two players, to hold Waterford crystal water glasses and these bowls and Doris's ashtray (you can't complain since she's the hostess, blowing smoke into all of their lungs), while she thinks of how Harry used to love nibbly things, to the point where it killed him, and of how women like Doris are so fanatic about keeping a home up, a place for everything and everything in its place. She could never be like that, making a false religion out of your furniture. Even her mother hadn't been like that, though she liked nice things once Daddy began to make money at the lot. It's a kind of bullying, all these expensive shipped souvenirs of their expensive foreign trips on display, stacking up like the jewelry on Doris's hands from her previous marriages, cleaning ladies coming in to dust them like museum attendants. For the last two rounds Doris offers them vermouth in little glasses with rose-tinted stems from Venice, and by the time she is at the door saying goodbye and see you in a week Janice wonders how she could ever have been so down on dear old Doris, who has had her to her lovely home so often and gave her so much good advice during those harrowing years with Harry. Harry, Harry, he was the problem, Janice decides, that girl showing up claiming to be his daughter, no wonder she couldn't concentrate on the bridge, losing a dollar seventy cents and going down two on a three-no-trump bid Doris explained to her she could have made easily if only she had kept her diamond stopper. He made these messes but never cleaned up after himself, even now, dead ten years, leaving it up to the living.

Brewer pours by her in her Le Baron, a river of bricks and signage. People use that word in planning-board hearings as to whether or not there is too much of it; realestate values shoot up when a community cuts down on signage and buries its electric wires. Janice halts at stoplights and then the flow resumes, a stream of sights deepened by a lifetime's familiarity. She crosses the Weiser Street Bridge, with its cast-iron light stanchions and its plaque naming some dead mayor whose name never took. As a girl she always wondered why the bridge didn't arch up in the air like the Running Horse Bridge a half-mile to the south did, or slant down to the Brewer side like the Youngquist Boulevard Overpass to the north did. The river was shallowest here. A ford in this spot started the settlement in Indian days. In her girlhood the river was solid black with dunes of coal silt. They cleaned that up decades back so that now motorboats use the water and some people swim and even the fish are back. Nineteenth-century industrial cities, she remembers sad-looking Mr. Lister telling them in the realty class on Property and Development Law, made a big mistake by turning their backs on their waterfronts. Now soon it will be another century yet, with its own mistakes, no doubt. She drives straight up Weiser past the white brick sprawl of the Schoenbaum Funeral Directors, it used to be a single small office, with gloomy conical evergreens out front. She wonders how much longer she can stay out of their clutches, with Mother's long-lived Koerner genes fighting Daddy's shorter-lived ones. On the west side of Weiser Square the new four-story shopping center with its glass-enclosed atrium for concerts and civic affairs still hasn't attracted the shops and eateries the planners promised. Along the east side the buildings are much as she remembers them from girlhood; though the façades have been changed over the years and a number have their plate glass boarded up or whited out from the inside, she can recognize the broad windows of what had been Schaechner's Furniture and the narrowing shape of the entrance to Arnold's Footgear, where her mother would take her for patent-leather party shoes and where at a machine you could see the bones of your feet move in a ghostly green light that it turns out gave you cancer. These buildings, two whole blocks of them, above the first floor have windows with decorative brick frames and arches and elaborate overhangs at the top, like castles of a kind. The biggest, Kroll's main rival as a downtown department store, still has its name enduring in painted script a story high on the side that shows: Fineman's, where the cool basement restaurant was such an attraction for weary shoppers and the teen clothing on the fourth floor was a little more "New York" than in Kroll's, a little sharper and more frisky-tight angora sweaters in ice-cream shades, broad cinch belts in shiny fake leather, slinky nylon blouses, wool skirts that came down almost to your socks and tugged on your hips with their swaying weight, making you feel more feminine. "New York" was a way of saying "Jewish" but even Mother with all her prejudices admitted the cut and fabric of the dresses at Fineman's was better, and she could never resist the butterscotch sundaes in the basement restaurant. As a child Janice was enchanted by the open-scrollwork elevators and the vibrating wire tracks sending money and receipts rattling around on the ceiling. All that, all that fragrant luxury of appetizing goods, gone, just a fading name on an empty building, Fineman's. Across Weiser Square a little up from Fineman's still stand the four great pillars of Brewer Trust, now absorbed into something called MellPenn, a great green sign lit from within blocking out the old name carved in granite. She and Harry were so lucky that time, the bottom fell out of gold and silver a month or so later. Above the Square, between Sixth and the railroad tracks, where the downtown movie theatres had been, a row of palaces you could escape into, mirrors in the long lobbies and paper icicles hanging from the marquees, there is just nothing-an asphalt parking lot on one side and a great dirt hole on the other, where some developer of an inner-city mixed-residence housing complex, shining towers on the billboarded architect's projection, has run out of other people's money. There had been a pet store here, and a music store run by Ollie Fosnacht, Chords 'n' Records. Janice can scarcely believe so much is gone and she is still here to remember it. Daylight drains from this dry September day. The street is half in shadow. Above Mt. Judge some high thin clouds are fanned like a hand of cards. The car clock says five-twenty. The homeward traffic north on Weiser and along Cityview Drive makes as much of a rush as you ever get, now that the stores and the middle class have deserted the downtown. Just the poor are left, white old ladies and young male Hispanics spending pennies at the Rexall's and the McCrory's, the last surviving five and ten. Nelson deals with these people, the less fortunate, at the adult treatment center, they call it Fresh Start, a few blocks west of where she is now, this side of the old coughdrop factory. Strange, how cheerful working with these hopeless people makes him. It's his family that depresses him. She hopes he gets home after she has had a chance to tell Ronnie about the girl. Nelson will get too involved. The man on the car radio is excited about some multiple killing in Camden, a man shooting his estranged wife and the three small children, the oldest having made it as far as the back yard but gunned down there against the wire fence. How can he be so excited? It happens all the time now. Cornered by police a mile away, the man shot himself in the head. The suspect was white, the announcer feels obliged to say, since around here with violence you think of blacks first. For months there have been mass murders on television, the schoolchildren in Colorado and then the man beheading women in Yosemite Park and the man in Georgia who had lost a hundred thousand dollars at day trading on the Internet and blamed everybody but himself. He left a long pious note asking God to take his dear wife and little ones whereas the teen-age killers in Colorado mocked and killed the girl who said she believed in God. Either way, you killed them dead, sending them straight to Heaven or to nowhere, to an emptiness like that big orange hole in the middle of Brewer. It makes you wonder about belief, if just a little isn't enough, too much makes you a killer, handing out tickets to Heaven like that terrible man Jones in the South American jungle. Janice has never not believed in a God of some sort but on the other hand never made a thing of it like Mother or in his weird way Harry. They felt something out there, reflecting back from their own good sense of themselves. Exalted. Eternal. The yellowing memorial plaques along the wall at St. John's, the stained-glass Jesus above the altar, His hands out in a gesture of embrace or despair. You need something. Harry could joke about religion himself but didn't like others to, it had been a grief between him and Nelson. Nelson had learned to scoff to get Harry's goat. And then he became a do-gooder laying his life down for others as they say. Another slap at his parents. The whole late summer was soured for Janice, even the two weeks in August at the Pocono place with Judy and Roy visiting their father from Ohio, by the Kennedy boy's having fallen from the sky with his poor wife and sister-in-law, they must have been screaming, screaming, hitting the water like a black wall. The news analysts said it took just seconds but what seconds they must have been, how can you keep believing in a God that would let that happen, it took you back to his father's being shot, so young and leader of the free world even if it was true he had prostitutes brought into the White House, it took her back to the baby's drowning, little Becky, such an innocent, well who isn't an innocent God might argue. All those Turks in the earthquake, tens of thousands sleeping in their beds at three in the morning. Even these men waiting on Death Row are mostly schizophrenics, Nelson claims, and all child abusers were themselves abused, so they're just passing it on, honoring their father and mother. She is up past the park now, getting free of the city, rounding the mountain. The viaduct is off to her right, its arches and the houses scattered in the valley at its feet sharp in the low afternoon light, shingles and shrubs, and in the distance blue hills whose name she will never know. Halfway to Mt. Judge, part of a mall that never really took off and now is a failing antique, the four-screen cineplex advertises BLUE EYES BLAIR WITCH SIXTH SENSE CROWN AFFAIR. She leaves 422 and turns off, at the brownstone Baptist church, into her town, going up Jackson Street and after three blocks right on Joseph. She navigates without thinking under the Norway maples that she can remember half the size they are now, small enough a child could reach the lowest branches with a jump. She climbed into one once that had a hornet's nest, and couldn't climb down fast enough to avoid getting stung. Now the maples are grown so big the sidewalks in some sections of town are buckling. Joseph Street used to be sunnier, in her memory-more open above the telephone wires and streetlamps, which used to be yellow and not blue in tinge. The houses were full of staid older people instead of these young families that hang these meaningless banners from the porches, as if every day was a holiday. She slides the Le Baron to a stop along the curb, too worn-out and worried by her day to drive around to the garage in the alley and come up through the back yard. That awful couple who wouldn't even look at the row house on Locust Boulevard. So snobby, without any basis. If no woman was willing to climb steps pregnant the human race would have died out ages ago. She gets out and stretches muscles stiff from too much sitting. The big stucco house at 89 Joseph has not looked quite right to her eyes since the big copper beech came down. Harry used to say the place reminded him of an overblown icecream stand. And there was a bareness, without the tree. It seems an age since this morning and that girl-like a dream except it wasn't one. She lets herself in between the two frosted sidelights- a little clutter of delivered mail scrapes under the door-and inhales the living room's still air, the air of her life, apparently unchanged. Poor Ronnie, he is so good. He still has some clients from the old days, people who wouldn't buy insurance or take investment advice from anybody else, who want to up their property coverage as values rise or to rejuggle their Keogh-plan nest egg to include a bigger slice of the stock market the way it has been going up and up, but basically since Schuylkill Mutual took Ronnie's cubicle and phone and company car from him he has little to do, and almost never complains. He has set up a tidy office for himself with computer and fax machine and filing cabinets in that little front room overlooking the street that Mother used to sew in and that then they had a single bed in for a time, when Nelson began to bring his girlfriends home from college in Ohio. After pecking and squinting and fumbling away for an hour or so's business in this crammed little room, and checking stock quotations and the weather on the Internet, Ronnie goes off in his blobby silver Taurus as if there is work for him out there somewhere, somebody to sell to. All summer he plays golf at the Flying Eagle three or four times a week even though he never had the passion for it Harry did -he is too realistic, and his knee hurts. He has stayed active in that low-class church he and Thelma belonged to. And, what Harry never had the patience or focus for, though he did have a little vegetable garden out back for a time, Ronnie makes projects for himself around the house, painting the exterior trim and puttying windowpanes that have been sunbaked and putting all new galvanized mesh on the sunporch screening. Despite his bad knee, from an injury in high-school football, he gets up at full extension on that aluminum double ladder Harry always hated to lift and cleans out the old galvanized gutters. He talks about tackling the chimneys, repainting the bricks, next. It is a cause for conflict. When she says she's afraid he will fall and kill himself he tells her the house is her main asset and has been sorely neglected until he came onto the scene. Her former husband was a cop-out as a householder, he says, and her son was and is no better. Didn't they know they should be protecting their investment in this place? Ronnie has a workshop in the cellar that sends the whine and rasp of power tools up through the floor and sometimes so much fine sawdust that it coats the cups and saucers in the kitchen cupboards. When he put up drywall partitions in that storage room off the kitchen, the plaster dust got into everything, into the dining-room cupboard with Mother's hand-painted Stiegel tumblers and genuine Chester whiteware. The dust even got into the refrigerator, making the food all taste like the calcium pills Janice takes to fend off osteoporosis. She is still getting used, after eight years, to a husband who is so unambiguously here, on the premises, and not always tugging to be out, running in his mind toward the horizon. As she hopes, he comes home before Nelson, so they can develop a position, which Nelson is bound to oppose. "I won three bucks and only hit two duck hooks off the tee. On the seventeenth I sank a putt you wouldn't believe," he says, having come in through the back door to put his golf clubs and clothes in the tidy golf closet he made with all that plaster dust. The space smells, now, of him, of his sweat on the club handles, in the spikeless shoes, even the sour inside of the hats he wears. Each hat hangs on its own hook, and there is one where the glove hangs like a bat drying out, upside down. She likes Ronnie's neatness, but on the other hand feels scolded by it, the same as with her mother. He moves with a certain sluggish pained quality, limping back into the kitchen. "How was bridge?" he asks politely. Maybe there is usually in second marriages a little stiffness, a certain considerate wariness. "I kept wondering why I was playing," Janice tells him. "I did something that irritated Doris terribly, I forget exactly what. She's getting old and crabby. Deet spoils her." "What's for dinner? Did you remember to defrost anything?" Ronnie has learned what questions to ask. Thelma was a clever cook and a zealous housekeeper, along with all else she did, teaching school and raising three boys. Janice at first had tried to give Ronnie real meals, but something always dried out or was underdone, and her attempts at seasoning, though she thought she followed the recipe exactly, miscarried into a funny suspicious taste. With the yuppifying of greater Brewer, all these vague industries coming in that didn't make anything you could handle or drive or put in a box really-"the information industry," they said-there were more and more pleasant and not very expensive restaurants to eat out at; you didn't have to go downtown any more as Daddy and Mother used to for a little celebration, usually in one of the two big hotels downtown, the Conrad Weiser or the Thad Stevens. And otherwise the supermarkets sold wonderful frozen meals and sealed salads. "Well, I forgot, if truth be known," Janice confesses. "I just got back five minutes ago. I've been doing so much else, and this morning, what a shock, Ronnie, this girl shows up at the door-" Ronnie is not listening, he is opening the refrigerator door and peering in. "There's still some chicken salad from two nights ago, I don't suppose it's turned yet. And those Japanese noodles Nelson likes. Oh, yeah, and way back behind the wilted lettuce a container of three-bean salad we never got to-should it have that cloudy look? I guess we can make do. They say eating less is better for you." He moves to the counter to turn on the Sony. "Lemme just catch the news, for the weather. The radio wants rain tomorrow, I'll believe it when I see it. La Niña has screwed up the jet stream so it thinks we're the Sahara." "Ronnie, please don't turn on TV. Pay attention, this is serious. This girl-'woman' I should say, Nelson's age more or less-rang the doorbell, which still needs fixing by the way, and said she was Harry's daughter. Her mother died this summer and told her before she died. Ruth sicced her on us." Now she does have Ronnie's attention. He has lost thirty pounds since Janice first knew him, and he has that deflated, slumped look of people you remember as fatter. His hair, which was kinky and brass-colored, is almost all gone, even over his ears, so they stick out as rubbery red flesh. His pale eyelashes are almost invisible now, which makes his eyelids look pink and rubbed. Like Doris Kaufmann's, his face has become pruny, but the wrinkles aren't as deep as in her leathery skin. Ronnie, though Harry always spoke of him as a crude plug-ugly, in fact has thin babyish skin that makes physical contact with him a little silky surprise, which is something Harry couldn't have known. Now the man fastens on what to Janice had been the least interesting of the morning's revelations. "So Ruth Leonard is dead," he says. Janice remembers that Ronnie knew this Ruth back in the period when Harry did, that he had fucked her in fact, which Harry always resented, which seemed strange to Janice since in this period a lot of people evidently had. Janice had never met Ruth but there had been this slutty kind of girl in high school, their names got written on lavatory Walls, SUSIE PETROCELLI SUCKED MY BOYFRIEND'S COCK, and CAROLE STICHTER IS A MORON WHORE, from bad families on the lower side of town usually; no special looks, overweight and quiet in class, they had existed even under Eisenhower when everybody was supposed to be so pure. She cannot believe a forty-year-old fuck could mean much to Ronnie but from the stunned, slumped way he stands there in his sweated-up knit polo shirt and plaid golf pants it does. "On that farm of hers," he says. "The drought killed her." He is trying to joke away that trance men get into trying to remember what it was like entering a certain woman's space. Now that space is nowhere on earth and he will never get back into it. "Wake up, honey. According to the girl she hadn't lived on the farm for years, she lived in Brewer with this daughter and worked for some shady investments outfit in that glass building across from where Kroll's used to be. Anyway, why do you care?" "I don't, much. It was Rabbit that got stuck on her. To me she was just a hooer. What proof did this girl have that she was his kid?" "None-just some confusing facts only she would know, about how her mother lied to her about when she and this man Byer were married so it would seem he was the father instead of somebody earlier. There's more of that went on than we think, back before abortions were easy." "They're too easy, if you ask me. These black and Hispanic kids have one like an annual check-up. Nobody cares." "Ronnie, that's not the point! We need to discuss this girl before Nelson comes home!" Harry always thought Ronnie was terribly obtuse-called him an enforcer, a deliberate-foul artist-but Janice doesn't find him obtuse so much as on occasion having a quality of being in the way, of not letting anything just glide past if he doesn't absolutely agree with every detail. He has sat in too many living rooms refusing to leave until the man of the house sees the necessity of buying insurance, it's that blunt thereness he has. Harry was fascinated by Ronnie's big prick and it is big, flat along the top as if you could rest a wineglass on it at half-mast, but what struck Janice the first time was the relatively little difference between it erect and not. Whereas with Harry it was like night and day, between being curled asleep like a baby and being wide-eyed and six feet tall and up and at it. "O. K.," Ronnie says in his plodding, relentless voice, "the point is Ruth did a lot of screwing back then-who's to say it was Hotshot that knocked her up? Did the girl look like him?" She tries to be honest. "It's awful to say this, but I've forgotten exactly what Harry looked like. There was something about her, a kind of, I don't know, pale glow, and a way she couldn't quite sit still, that rang a bell, I thought." "You thought. You'll have to do better than that before you owe her anything." "She didn't say I did owe her anything. What she did say was her mother told her to come see us because she'd be alone in the world." "We're all alone in the world, it turns out," he says. Janice doesn't know quite what he means but it hurts. Harry may have felt it but he would never have said that to her. She wonders sometimes if Ronnie married her just to score somehow on Harry. His lashless, pink-lidded eyes shift in embarrassment past her face, which she knows looks shocked, toward the clock on the microwave, worried about dinner or Nelson arriving home. He tells her, "There'll be money in it at the end, believe me, if you have anything more to do with this bimbo." "She works as a nurse, and her mother must have left her something, there was all that money from selling the farm." "I bet. How'd you leave it in the end?" "We'd get in touch with her. She won't with us." "Good. Don't. To me, it smells like a scam." "But I was here. When you were a child, did your parents ever tell you the stranger at the door might be an angel in disguise?" "No," he says. "They never said that. They said the person at the door probably wants to pull a fast one. Suppose you concede that old Fuckbunny was her dad, she may figure she can sue us for hundreds of thousands in back child support." Janice takes a step forward to touch his shoulder and to offer herself to be touched. "Ronnie, honey, why are you so rude about Harry? He's dead. He can't bother us now." "He bothers me. He screwed my wife. Twice he screwed my wife," he adds, meaning Thelma then and her now, as a softening joke, and she rests her body against his, its comforting blocky golfsweaty hereness. His hands find their habitual places on her. She would never have believed in her teens what an innocent homely comfort it could be, after sixty, to have your bottom groped. He weighs her two buttocks as if they are precious. It occurs to her they should do more in bed, while they're still alive. But at their age there is so much to do, all these errands going nowhere, all these little commitments. Footsteps sound on the back porch, the screened sunporch. Nelson must have parked his car, a '94 ivory-white Corolla he traded Janice's Camry in on-she had given it to him when she married Ronnie and wanted to rid herself of her last link with the Toyota franchise-out back in the garage, seeing his mother's Le Baron out front. Guiltily she and Ronnie break apart in the kitchen. Nelson sees that something has been up, his stepfather has been pawing his mother. To cover her embarrassment she tells him, Ronnie interrupting to correct where she tells it differently the second time, about the strange girl's-woman's-visit this morning. Nelson's deep-socketed, distrustful eyes dart back and forth as he listens. Listening is part of what he does for a living, and he lets them talk while he fishes a Coors from the refrigerator. He is forty-two. He has put on weight, but nothing like Harry did; Nelson learned the lesson there. His thinning hair, dark but with his father's fineness-Harry's blond hair would just lift off his head when it dried from being combed-is cut so short his skull and face are naked in their angles, like a convict's. He wears a kind of social worker's uniform-khaki pants and a white shirt with necktie but no jacket. A jacket would overstate the distance between him and the clients at the Fresh Start Adult Day Treatment Center at Elm and Eighth Streets. The clean shirt and tie establish his authority, as one of those who guard the gates of Medicare and Medicaid, which compensate the day-treatment centers that have arisen to replace the Gothic institutions that used to house what were called the insane. His title is mental-health counsellor; his salary comes to twenty-seven thousand a year. His qualifications are a bachelor's degree (major: geography) awarded by Kent State in Ohio and a counsellor's certificate earned ten years later in a year's (1990-91) course of study at the Hubert F. Johnson Community College, in new buildings along the river in South Brewer, while living, he and his three dependents, at 89 Joseph Street courtesy of the new widow. Still here, he sits with his mother and stepfather at the round kitchen table with their makeshift meal and their beverages. Nelson has the Coors, Ronnie a Miller Lite in deference to his weight and blood pressure, and Janice a continuation in an orange-juice glass of the New York State sherry she nipped on returning home, to wash away the sour aftertaste of the bridge with its realization that Doris was a failing friend, a haughty old half-deaf crab. Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth. Nelson asks, "Mom, did you think she was conning you?" Ronnie in concluding the story had given his opinion that this was the case. Nelson generally avoids conflict with his stepfather, though when Janice first announced she might be marrying him he sounded just like Harry, putting Ronnie down. "Well, I wasn't sure," she says. "She seemed sincere, but then it was kind of brazen, you could say." "Con artists can be sincere," Ronnie says. "That's what makes them good con artists. They fool even themselves." "What's worth conning about us?" Nelson asks with his professional mildness, making a question of everything. "We're just scraping by, in a house too big for us, that we ought to be selling. You're retired from the insurance con game and Mom and I work at shit jobs, for not much." His eyelashes, always long for a boy's, flutter in his deep sockets. His haircut makes him look like a Marine or monk. Ronnie's thin-skinned face flushes. He says, "For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games." Janice intervenes, "As I told Ronnie, she seemed to have enough money. Her clothes were good quality." "What kind of car did she drive?" Ronnie asks. "You know, I was so rattled I forgot to look. No, wait." She tries to remember the morning-the maple shadows on the street, the mail truck passing.... "A Lexus," she announces. "A lipstick-red Lexus, brand new." Nelson flicks a triumphant glare at Ronnie. "A step up from a Taurus," he says. To his mother he urges, "I think it's great that she had the guts to come around at all. Not that anything that happened back then was her fault exactly. Did she look like Dad?" "Oh Nelson, I keep being asked that. It seemed to me so, in a way, but then I was looking for it. You know how these resemblances are, something you can't put your finger on. She had a round pale face and solid long legs." Ronnie says, "That could fit anybody, for Chrissake." "Her eyes-they were pale blue and had a little droop toward the outside corner, like Harry's." Nelson's eyes, brown like hers, widen with interest. It pleases his mother to see him engaged. He must be like this at work. He comes home drained and irritable and untalkative. "I think we should have her here," he says. Ronnie is firm. "That's a mistake. Give her an in, you'll never get rid of her. Why should we all get our lives disrupted because"-he gropes for a non-insulting name-"Nelson's dad screwed this dead cow back in the dark ages?" "I thought you went with her, too," Janice says, herself quicker than usual, alert. "Was she such a cow then?" "She was a big Brewer broad," he states, after blinking, "who would put out for anybody." "Not those three months," she says. "As I remember, Harry moved in. It was a kind of honeymoon. Me pregnant with poor little Becky, and my husband was on his honeymoon." Putting it like that makes her furious, almost to tears. Ronnie is right, of course. The girl is an alien invader, to be repelled. "I forbid", Ronnie says, putting down his fork and forgetting the amount of chicken salad in his mouth, "anybody getting in touch with this twat." "Ronnie." Nelson almost never uses his stepfather's name, and says it now softly. "This twat may be my sister. Dad used to hint sometimes there might be a sister. Here she is, come to us, putting herself at our mercy." "But what does she want, Nelson?" Janice asks. She feels better, clearer in her mind, finding herself now on her husband's side. "She wants money," Ronnie insists. "Why, she wants," Nelson says, getting wild-eyed and high-voiced, defensive and, to his mother, touching, "she wants what everybody wants. She wants love." Ronnie turns to Janice conspiratorially. "He's as off the rails as his old man. Remember how Rabbit took that Black Panther and doped-up hippie in?" "Love does seem a bit much," Janice allows. "I'll go look her up myself, then," Nelson threatens. "A. Byer. You say she's the only one in the phone book." "Nelson, believe me," Ronnie says, trying to act the father, "there's nothing in it for you but heartbreak. You've been a victim of Harry Angstrom since you were two, why look for more agony?" "It wasn't only agony," Nelson argues. "There were positive elements in the relationship." Janice chimes in, "Harry loved Nelson, it frustrated him that he could never express it properly." "Oh come on, you bleeding hearts," says Ronnie, in an exasperated voice strong and angry enough to end the conversation. "I knew Rabbit longer than either of you. I knew him since we were kids in knickers snitching penny candy off the counter at Lennert's Variety Store. That conceited showboat never loved a soul outside his own thick skin. His mother had spoiled him rotten."

Chapter 2

"Hello?" "Yes?" Wary. Single women have to be, the world full of phone creeps. "Is this Annabelle Byer?" "Yes." Slightly reassured to be named. "This is Nelson Angstrom." "Oh! Nelson! How nice! "A pause; he had thought from her enthusiasm she might go on a little more. He says, "My mother described your visit." "Did she? I wasn't sure it went very well." "Oh, yeah. She liked you. She just isn't sure what to make of the general situation. It took her by surprise." "Me, too. I mean, I was surprised at first, when my mother told me. It shouldn't matter, my being a grown woman and all." "Oh, but it has to matter." He feels more secure, as the conversation tips toward the therapeutic. "How do you feel about it?" she asks. "I feel good," he says. "Why not? The more the merrier, isn't that what they say? Listen. I was wondering if we could have lunch some time. Just to look each other over." That was one sentence too many, but then he might as well get the curiosity issue on the table. She hesitates. Why would she hesitate, when it was she who had come out of the woodwork? "I think I'd like that." "Tomorrow? Next day? What's your schedule?" he says. "I work at Eighth and Elm, there's a little restaurant opened up in the block on Elm toward Weiser, it's called The Greenery, but don't be put off, it's decent enough, soups and sandwiches and salads, kind of neo-New Age, but they have booths for a little privacy." "Sounds cute," she says. That slightly puts him off. This may be an airhead, sister or not. After all, what does she have for genes? Nothing that promising. She asks, "Would you mind not until next Thursday? Until then I'm on day duty, it's an Alzheimer's patient who needs round-the-clock." "Great," he says. "Thursday the sixteenth. Twelve-thirty O. K.? I'll be waiting outside. Medium height, short haircut these days." "I'm," she began to say, then giggled, not knowing how to describe herself. "I'll be in fat white shoes." Wouldn't you know, they have picked the one day in September when a hurricane called Floyd is supposed to hit. All sorts of wind damage and heavy flooding in North Carolina, and then predicted to come right up the Chesapeake into southeastern Pennsylvania. But these forecasters are paid to whip everybody up, and though the wind kept him awake last night, rattling the window sashes Ronnie had painted last summer and swishing sheets of rain across the asphalt-shingle roof that supposedly ought to be replaced if they want to keep their equity in the house, the morning isn't so bad that cars aren't moving on Joseph Street, slowing down to go around a medium-size maple branch that broke and crashed last night in his sleep. He didn't hear the noise; he slept better than he thought. The branch lies in the center of the asphalt like a big piece of road kill, its leaves' pale undersides up and already wilting. Nelson thinks of phoning Annabelle to cancel but he doesn't want Mom and Ronnie to know he has this planned. Instead he phones his boss, Esther Bloom, who lives in Brewer, and she tells him the Center will be open at least until noon. "These people have nowhere else to go, Nelson. A weather event like this brings up survival issues they may need to process." On the way into town he sees two highway crews, with flashing lights and cops in orange slickers directing traffic, cleaning up fallen trees with chain saws-an old willow that had sunk its roots in the roadside ditch by the failing mall with the four-screen cineplex and, on the other side of the viaduct, where 422 enters Brewer and becomes Cityview Drive, a gorgeous big tulip poplar at the edge of the park. The park has always struck Nelson as sinister, slightly. Tough minority kids hang out among the trees, and there is a dim association with the time his father had left home and lived not far from here in the city, on Summer Street. The World War II tank near the tennis courts has been recently taken away, and a pretty little white-and-green bandstand built, as part of downtown renewal, though it serves mostly to collect graffiti and to shelter thugs from the weather and has never held a concert that Nelson can remember. The car radio is full of this gunman, one more straight-shooting psychotic, who killed seven and then himself in some Texas Baptist church, and terrorist blasts in Moscow killing dozens, and an interesting item which he doesn't quite catch about cocaine addiction linked to a build-up of certain proteins in the brain-it hadn't been his fault, it was brain chemistry-and then another medical item, which interests him less, about how hot tubs may help diabetics. The Phillies beat Houston eight to six in ten innings, but they still aren't going anywhere, not in the middle of September. As he drives across the park's most open stretch, wind shakes his car so hard that he tightens both hands on the steering wheel. In Brewer around Eighth and Elm the buildings cut down on the wind somewhat. It's an older area, where commercial meets residential. A former hat factory stands empty but for one little photocopy-and-offset-printing establishment named PRINTSMART in a lower corner. The treatment center occupies the basement floor of what used to be a three-story elementary school, grades K through six. The parking lot consists of a strip of diagonal places at the side of the building where the neighborhood residents stick their rusty heaps at night, right across two spaces, neglecting to wake up in time to take them away. The neighborhood is shabby but not dangerous, like most of the clients. As Nelson gets out of his Corolla he sees a sky darkly bruised in patches above the brick cornices, the clouds layered and shredding as they slide swiftly sideways, but the rain appears to be stopping and the air brightens as if to clear. People on the sidewalks, especially the young women who work in the glass courthouse annex a block away, hugging themselves in short sleeves and not even carrying umbrellas, don't appear to know they're almost in a hurricane. Across Eighth Street a cheap big orange façade saying DISCOUNT OFFICE SUPPLIES has been attached above the doorway to an old stationery store that Nelson remembers still smelling of gum erasers and ink eradicator before everything was bubble-wrapped and packaged for bulk sales; the sign makes a shivery noise as a spatter of bright raindrops sweeps by. Farther down Eighth an old-timey, routed, gold-lettered Tavern sign swings back and forth. Maybe he should have suggested that as the place to eat-a little racier and more cavelike, with a liquor license -but he obscurely wanted to keep his meeting with his sister sober and pure: a solemn occasion. The radio said Governor Ridge was considering declaring an emergency and sending all state and local workers home, but inside the Center the staff has shown up, all but Andrea the art therapist, who lives beyond Pottstown, almost on the Main Line. She commutes up to Brewer because funds for art therapists are drying up nationwide and the job she had in Philly was eliminated. To snotty, pouty, twice-divorced Andrea, a henna-tinged brunette with big rings she makes herself on nearly every finger, Brewer is a hick town with too many religious cranks and dumb Dutchmen. As the morning wears on, the rain with renewed vigor whips at the basement windows so hard that water begins to dribble across the wooden sills. Years ago, before Nelson was hired, the floor was gutted and partitioned into suitable spaces-tiny offices for the staff, larger group rooms for the clients, a reception space, a kitchen where the clients make their lunch and a dining area, with six round tables, adjacent to the sofas and upholstered chairs of the milieu. In the milieu the clients not doing a group or having a consultation can read, knit, play games, and hopefully interact. When this was a kindergarten the five-year-olds learned to tie their shoelaces and fit pegs into holes but social interaction, socialization, sitting in a circle and learning to share, was the main lesson; for these dysfunctional adults it still is. There are thirty of them, theoretically present from nine to four, and a staff of eight, headed by Esther, a doctor of psychology. Nelson has resisted suggestions that he go after an advanced license or degree; he doesn't want a private practice or, after the mess he made running the Toyota agency, any administrative responsibility. He learned his limits. Some clients straggle in, drenched and exhilarated about a hardship they are sharing with all the residents of Brewer, and others have chosen to stay at home with their delusions, anxieties, and television sets. Because of low attendance Nelson's three-times-a-week group on Relationships is absorbed into Katie Shirk's group on Goals and Priorities. Nelson uses his downtime to catch up on paperwork-progress notes, intake forms-and goes around mopping up windowsills with paper towels. Left wet, the paint peels. The rain has intensified again. The DiLorenzos show up, though, all three of them, hurricane or not, at eleven sharp. They are desperate. Their world has come crashing down because of a few misfiring neurons. In the waiting area they give off a powerful damp odor of bafflement-graying patriarch, swag-bellied but still powerful in the arms and shoulders; mother, a touch of peasant drab still in her plain dark suit though money talks in her shoes and the silk scarf at her throat; and son, twenty, slim and good-looking, with an almost feminine delicacy, bright-eyed, wavy-haired, but going soft and pasty with inactivity, and the fear of his own strangeness giving his dark eyes an anxious bulge. His eyes fascinate Nelson with their helpless beauty-dark but not black, paler than his thick brows, an ale color, or like the dark jelly bees feed to their queen, freckled with light, life in them like a squirt of poison. He decides to take the boy first, and asks the parents to wait. "Well, Michael. How are you feeling?" he asks when the door is closed and he is settled at his desk. His desk is of minimum size and with a fake-wood-grain top. The young man folds himself into the one-piece molded-plastic chair, orange in color, opposite. He wants to slouch to show how lightly he takes all this but the chair in its flimsy, scientifically determined form does not permit much of a slouch. "O. K. Good. The same." "Voices quiet?" Michael licks his lips as if abruptly aware of a dryness. "Yes." He is lying, Nelson knows, but he keeps his eyes down on the young man's folder, opened six months ago. "Taking your Trilafon consistently?" "Absolutely, sir." This is another lie, Nelson can tell from a certain retraction in the young voice, a telltale flattening, but Michael wants to believe it, he wants to be cured, of an illness that seems to be nothing less than himself, a rot of his most intimate ego, that voice within, where it was nestled supposedly safe in his skull. "Any side effects from the Trilafon you want to take up with Dr. Wu?" Howard Wu is the Center's M. D., here three half-days a week. Golden in color, stocky in form, he is much beloved, for his hearty Chinese pragmatism and large convex teeth. He is their jolly Buddha. The boy readjusts his position, perching on the chair's edge and jerking forward. "I feel plugged up. At both ends. It's like a cold in my nose all the time. I feel sleepy all day, and then I can't sleep at night. I feel shitty," he says, and titters, as if to disown his feeling. A fission, a scatter, in his young face makes him hard for Nelson to look at. "Do you want me to write down, 'No voices'? If I do that, Dr. Wu will see no reason to adjust the medication." Nelson's deliberate gaze elicits from Michael a flutter of avoidance, a batting of lashes under the shapely black brows, which have that touch of a built-in frown Italian men have, a thickening toward the bridge of the nose. He must have cut a tidy swath at Brewer High, not to mention summers cruising among his peers in the convertible his parents had bought him, proud they could afford it. He peaked too early, like Dad in a way. There is still a little bravado, mannerly but dangerous, in the boy's smile, and in the slick way his bouncy black hair was tamed by the comb. The grooming is a positive sign. Or did his mother comb his hair for him today, for this appointment, and see to it that he shaved? "There weresome voices," he admits, huskily, then smirks as if to dare the world to make much of it. "What did they say, do you remember?" No answer. "What did the voices say?" "Nasty stuff." Nelson waits. "They tell me what a miserable fuck-up I am. They tell me to kill myself. Or maybe I think of that myself, to shut them up. It might be worth it." "Michael," Nelson said, loud and urgent enough to make the boy, whose eyes sidle and flutter, look at him. "If you ever, for a moment, think you might follow through on these impulses, you must do what?" A long pause. "I don't know." "You must get in touch with the Center. At any hour." "Yeah, well, shit, I'm not apt to be calling any center at four in the morning." "The recording gives the number for Emergency Services. Call it. Here's the number in case." He writes it out on a Fresh Start memo pad and rips the sheet off. A renewed surge of rain slashes against the window at Nelson's back. He pictures the leaks venturing, trembling, lengthening, out onto the windowsills of this old school, the paint flaky from previous soakings. "Do the voices say anything else?" Nelson can hardly hear the answer against the noise of the rain. "They tell me to kill my parents." This is delivered with a mumbled huskiness and yet with some defiance, a twitch of teen-age swagger and a smirk that hangs on his face forgotten. "How does that make you feel?" Nelson asks. Michael surprises him with a surge of affect: "Horrible. I love my parents. They've been great to me, giving me everything I've ever wanted and not putting any pressure on about entering the, you know, fucking dry-cleaning business." His voice is hurrying, to keep up with his brain. "They sent me to college when a lot of parents would have had me go straight into the business. My dad's getting older and hasn't been strong for a while. They sent me to Penn, the finest university in the state. So what did I do? Hey, I fucked it up." "You didn't, Michael, you got sick. We're trying to make you better. You're better now. You dress yourself, you're no longer violent-" "I can be violent at home." He begins to brag, to someone imaginary sitting where Nelson sits. "My mother, what a naggy bitch, honest to God. She says to stop watching the old movies on TV, get up, get out, do this, do that. I don't see the use." "The use is what we call normal psychosocial functioning. It doesn't come without effort. Let's look at your graph. You have not been in to the Center for a week, and then only twice the week before. That's why I've asked your parents to come in with you. They, and Dr. Birkits, and all of us want your attendance to improve." Birkits was the Brewer psychiatrist the DiLorenzos had taken him to on the advice of the Penn psych service after his break. Birkits, one of these demoralized post-talking-cure shrinks, referred this hot potato to Fresh Start. They don't get many clients with an intact home, and who can afford a private psychiatrist. "I bet you all do," Michael sneers. "We do, Michael. We want to improve your functioning, and we offer here at Fresh Start a safe environment for you to practice in, with the groups, the activities, the counselling. But you must attend." "Hey. Sir. O. K. Can I be frank?" "Of course." "I can't stand these people. They're fat. They're queer. They're ugly. They're not my type." "What is your type?" Nelson asks, and instantly regrets the hostility he hears in the question, which popped out reflexively. "Loser," Michael responds, and laughs, a barking abrupt noise that doesn't belong to his frightened face. "Loser is my type." "Not so. You or anyone here. We're human, which isn't always easy. The other clients are kind people, here to help each other. They care about you, if you let them." "They wouldn't if they knew what's inside my head." He jerks forward in the straight chair. His complexion looks a little clammy, moist at the hairline. The poisoned eyes swarm with shame and yet with an excitement that something transformingly strange is happening to him. "The voices whisper to me about girls I see on the street. This one and that one. They tell me to picture her shitting." "Shitting?" Nelson has been betrayed into confessing surprise. Perhaps Michael intended this. He wonders how much of an enemy the boy sees him as. Does he sense, within his mentalhealth counsellor, some ethnic enmity, with envy of his easy slender build and dago good looks? When Nelson tries to picture what a schizophrenic sees he remembers Howie Wu telling him, Their sense of distance has broken down. Things up close look far away, is how Nelson has framed this-there is no clear depth in which to locate yourself. The gears that notch us one into another fail to mesh, maddeningly, meltingly. Trying to think his way into Michael's head plants a sliding knife inside Nelson, a flat cold queasy sensation below his ribs. "They show me her squatting down. I want to rub her face in it. I want her to eat it. Does that shock you?" "No," Nelson lies. "Well, it does me." Michael slumps back as far as the chair allows him. His affect is flattening; his eyes narrow as he recalls, "Thirty thousand bucks a year, think of it, plus extras and my own car. Pussy everywhere. Hot-shit professors. A bunch of frats rushing me. And I fucked up. I couldn't hack it. I didn't even know what courses I was supposed to be taking. I hid in my room with the shades down until my roommate complained to the dean and they got the psych service on me. They tell me I told the dean or somebody he was the Whore of Babylon. I never heard of her." He snickers a little, testing the face opposite his. "Michael," Nelson says in firm conclusion. The boy was bragging now, bullying. When you feel uncomfortable, Howie has told him, trust your gut. Get off the horse. "I can't emphasize enough how important it is that you are faithful with your medications. I've made a note here to Dr. Wu to reconsider the Trilafon dosage." "I drank beer and tequila at Penn," Michael tells him, uncertainly standing, sensing he is dismissed and being relieved yet not, unsatisfied, uncured. "My parents didn't know it, but I would get fucking blasted. I think that's what screwed up my brain." "I don't think so. The human brain can take a lot of beer. Michael, this is not your fault," Nelson says, coming around his desk so that in the tiny office the boy-tall when he stands up, his girlish mouth sagging, his face glimmering in the rainy light, begging to be understood-has nowhere to go but out, to the waiting room, where his parents are eager to come in. "Such a gorgeous child," says Mr. DiLorenzo, when a second chair has been pulled up for his wife in front of Nelson's desk. "Bright, good, A miracle boy. To have this boy after his three sisters and Maria over forty, it seemed to us a miracle." He speaks carefully, with dignity, as one who remembers when he spoke English less well, the child of immigrants who spoke it hardly at all. His hair, brushed straight back, is going white but his bushy eyebrows are still black. The wife speaks up: "Even as a little boy, though, he stood apart a little. He would play with others, but then wander away and come inside. I'd say, 'What's wrong?' He'd say, 'Nothing.' As if he didn't see the point of people. He was quiet. He never had a tantrum." "My wife imagines things in hindsight," Mr. DiLorenzo says, sitting back erect, his eyes enlarged by thick spectacles, eyes frayed to death from closely inspecting fabric. "He was a perfectly normal boy. Got top marks, too, all the way up through senior year. Gave the salutatorian speech about how we should help Russia keep democracy and capitalism. Never any trouble to anybody- teachers, me, nobody." "A little trouble would have been more normal," his wife says. "At the time I wondered if having all those older sisters hadn't taken something out of him. My daughters and me, we had too good a time, always laughing, always busy at the house, always telling each other things. Michael was like a little prince, detached." "Don't listen to her, Mr.-" "Angstrom. Nelson if you'd rather." "Don't listen to her, Nelson. He was fine. He played sports, got the good marks, ran for student council. Said no to drugs, booze. An altar boy, too, until he was fifteen, and we didn't push that. In America religion becomes your own business. Likewise I told him, 'Michael, listen, you want to forget the dry-cleaning business, be some kind of professional-a doctor, lawyer, whatever, sit behind a desk using your smarts-that's O. K. with me, and Mamma too. Whatever makes you happy. This is America.' But no, he wanted to learn dry-cleaning, summers, after school, it was what he loved. From me there was absolutely no pressure." "There was pressure," Mrs. DiLorenzo tells Nelson. "Joe needed him to carry on and he knew it. That he didn't come out and say it made it worse. The girls, they married and got out of here. They'd had enough of it, the chemicals, the presses, the hours until seven, eight. Only one of them even stayed in the state, and she's way out near Pittsburgh, a nice suburb up along the Allegheny. Their husbands, what do they care about dry-cleaning? It was all on Michael, and he knew it. He snapped. Men don't want their whole lives mapped out for them. They want adventure. Isn't that right, Mr. Nelson?" "She's crazy," Mr. DiLorenzo confides. "He didn't want adventure. He wasn't like these young hoodlums these days, their heads full of, what do they call it, hip-hop, grabbing guns and going off to shoot their classmates to make the evening news. Shooting their parents, no respect for anything under the sun. He wanted to carry on the family business. There was no pressure. At Penn he was taking chemistry to be on top of the best, the newest solvents, the most environmentally sensitive as we say now. Disposal of used cleaners is the number-one headache in this business; a single cancer lawsuit can wipe you out-defending against it, even if you win. I love America, but not its justice system." "Joe, there was pressure." To Nelson Mrs. DiLorenzo explains, "My husband, he slaved to build up Perfect. He began by doing dirty work for this old Jew in South Brewer, just a basement in a row of houses, a little dark slot, his equipment crowded into the back, a shed built illegally, fifty cents an hour if he got that, Joe was always being chiselled. When the Jew died Joe borrowed to buy the business from the widow and named it Perfect Cleaners himself." "It's prettier in Italian, perfetto," Mr. DiLorenzo said, drawing out the word, "but this is America. Things want to be perfect here. Don't mind Maria-Jake was good to me, he taught me the trade. Had me out on the vats first, breathing in carbon tetrachloride before the switch to petroleum solvents, then had me as a finisher, on the steam presses, and then a spotter, that takes skill-you can ruin a silk blouse, a fine wool suit. After a while it was going so good I opened a branch in West Brewer, and then one up in Hamburg, and two years ago this industrial acreage came up for sale in Hemmigtown. For a long time I'd been wanting to build a bigger plant, with summer fur storage and equipment to take anything, to take even old lace tablecloths, they get yellow with age, very fragile, and big velvet curtains where you could choke on their dust, some of these mansions in Penn Park and up along Youngquist, the owners never-" Nelson has heard enough about dry-cleaning. "And you were counting on Michael to take all this over someday." "Someday, not now. Maybe ten years, maybe less. We have a little place in Florida, the winters here aren't so good for Maria-" "Don't blame me if you want to go to Florida and stick the poor boy with all these plants, all these employees and their benefits-" DiLorenzo takes this up enthusiastically, telling Nelson, "It's socialism without being called that. It's putting everybody smaller than Perfect out of business-the benefits, the insurance. There used to be a cleaner every other block. I shouldn't complain, it's good for the bigger outfits that can absorb it, but still you hate to see it. Setting out the way I did back then, with no assets to speak of, I couldn't do it now." "He slaves" his wife says, "and he wants to lay it all on Michael. He wants to go to Florida and look at the girls on the beach and make himself dark as a black." "The boy was eager, I mean it, with no pressure from me." "Joe, the boy felt pressure. Even his senior year, he was drifting away, into his own world. He was bringing home B's." Nelson intervenes, to stop their love feast. They love each other, and the child of their hearts is Perfect. "Michael is very angry with himself," he tells them, "for what he calls letting his family down. But, I keep trying to tell him, it's not his fault. It's not your fault either. It's no one's fault." "What is it then?" Mr. DiLorenzo asks simply, of this invisible invader, his son's destroyer. Good question. "It's a," Nelson says, "it's a disorder of the nervous system, having to do with dopamine flow, with the chemical control of the synapses' firing." "I often wondered about that," Michael's mother breaks in. "When he was so young, thirteen, fourteen, working with his father summers, inhaling all those poisons." "Get sensible, Maria," her husband says, hoarse from his talking. "Look at me, inhaling all my life." "It's not that kind of chemistry," Nelson says. "I'm no doctor, I don't really understand it, brain chemistry is very complex, very subtle. That's why we don't like to assign a diagnosis of schizophrenia without six months of following the client and observing his symptoms continuously. What we do know about the disease-the disorder-is that it quite commonly comes on in young men in their late teens and early twenties, who have been apparently healthy and functional up to then. Michael does fit this profile. A breakdown early in college is pretty typical." He looks down at the yellow pencil still in his hand. On the upper edge of his vision, the faces of the parents before him, it seems to Nelson in a little hallucination of his own, rise like balloons whose strings have been released, but without getting any higher. "What can we do?" Mrs. asks, her voice fainter than he has heard it before. "Is there no hope?" Mr. asks, heavier, the chair under him creaking with the accession of weight, hopelessness's weight. "Of course there is," Nelson says firmly, as if reading from a card held in front of him. "These neuroleptic medications do work, and they're coming out with new ones all the time. Michael's hallucinations have diminished, and his behavior has regularized. Now-where you can help-he must learn to take advantage of our resources here, and to assume responsibility for his own medications, the prescribed daily dosages." "He says they make him feel not like himself," his mother says. "He doesn't like who he is with the medicines." "That's a frequent complaint," Nelson admits. "But, without nagging, without seeming to apply pressure, remind him of what he was like without them. Does he want to go back to that?" "Mr. Angstrom, I know you don't like to make predictions," the father says, manly, ready to strike a deal, "but will these medications ever get his head so right he can go back to work- keep a schedule, pass his courses?" Another good question. Too good. "Cases vary widely," Nelson says. "With strong family and environmental support, clients with quite severe psychotic episodes can return to nearly normal functioning." "How near is nearly?" the father asks. "Near enough," Nelson says carefully, "to resume independent living arrangements and perform work under supervision." To have a room in a group home and bag groceries at a supermarket that has an aggressive hire-the-handicapped policy. Maybe. "Keep in mind, though, that many tasks and daily operations that are obvious and easy for you and me are very difficult for Michael at this point. He not only hears things, he sees and smells and even touches things that get between him and reality. Yet it's not oblivious psychosis-he knows his thoughts aren't right, and knowing this torments him." The two wearily try to take this in. Their appointment is winding down. They hear the rain lash at the loose-fitting elementary-school windows in a tantrum, in a world unhinged. "It's a heartbreaker," says Mr. DiLorenzo. "All those years since the boy was born, I thought I was building it up for him. Building up Perfect." "Don't look at it so selfishly," his wife says, not uncompanionably. "Think of Michael. Suddenly, where did his life go? Down the drain into craziness." "No, no," Nelson urges, almost losing his therapeutic poise. "He's still the child you raised, the child you love. He's still Michael. He's just fallen ill, and needs you more than most young men need their parents." "Need," Mrs. DiLorenzo says, the one word left hanging in air. She pushes herself up, holding on so her black-beaded purse doesn't slip from her lap. "What we need," her husband amplifies, rising with her, sighing through his nose, "is peace. And a vacation. And it doesn't look as though we're going to get any. Ever." Like jellyfish changing shimmering shape in the water, their faces have gone from fear for their son to fear of him, of the toll he will take. Nelson doesn't argue. The interview has shaken him but he thinks it was healthy that some of these facts were faced. Schizophrenics don't get wholly better. That movie starring the Australian as a pianist who keeps playing because some dear good loving woman has taken him on: a sentimental crock, mostly. They don't relate. They don't follow up. They can't hold it together. It makes you marvel that most people hold it together as well as they do: what a massive feat of neuron coordination just getting through the dullest day involves. These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is. They don't bother him as normal people do. There are boundaries. There are forms to fill out, reports to write and file, a healing order. Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others. Disorganization takes its toll: a flopped marriage and two fatherless children in Ohio, Judy at nineteen defiant and estranged and Roy at fourteen trying to keep in touch via e-mail and Pru up to who knows what, the bitch has shut him out, him still living with Mom and Ronnie like some agoraphobic mental cripple himself. Here at the treatment center, he has his role to play. The clients respect him. They sense in this short, neat forty-two-year-old in his striped tie and clean white shirt a pain that has been subdued, sins that have been surmounted, absorbed, brought into line. When he has a free moment, as he does today after the DiLorenzos leave, he joins the clients in the milieu-he partakes of their society. This central gathering space, with its sagging upholstery and skinny-legged card tables and rickety floor lamps that yet give off light, smells of coffee and cough drops and unfresh bodies and of the meal-baked beans and ham, with Dutch-fried potatoes, from the odors-being cooked in the kitchen a room away. At one of the card tables Shirley, a fifty-year-old morbidly obese depressive, is playing dominoes with Glenn, a suicidal, substance-abusing homosexual of about thirty-five. Glenn is flagrant. He wears fake diamond studs in his earlobes and another above his nostril wing; he blues his eyelids with a vivid grease and rouges beneath his eyes like a geisha girl. His pigtail always looks freshly braided. Nelson doubts that anyone who takes such pains with his appearance would be truly suicidal; Glenn just knows that the surest way to get official attention, with benefits, is to claim suicidal impulses. This pseudo-Christian society will knock itself out to keep you going, whatever the taxpayer cost. Esther Bloom disagrees. Gays are gay but they are also men, she says. Women flirt; they make emotional noise. When men get serious about suicide, they doit, not just futz around with inadequate doses of barbiturates or showy but shallow slashes on the wrist. The most successful group of suicidals, statistics show, are men who have suffered business reversals. Next best are men who feel dead already. But Glenn is alive now, and in a good mood. He and Shirley- whose massive body, bales of dough-colored flesh, emits from its unwashed creases an odor that seems terrible until it surrounds you completely-clack down the white-dotted black tiles with a vigor that punctures the milieu as if with gunshots. A few other clients have gathered to watch. Nelson stands there puzzling at the patterns being made. If he ever played dominoes, he's forgotten it. At the Mt. Judge playground, the pavilion sheltered checkers and Chinese checkers, and he and Billy Fosnacht used to play marbles in a circle in the dirt, in that year or two before Billy's estranged parents got him a minibike and the boyhood phase of innocently modest consumption ended. Nelson feels forlorn, watching Shirley and Glenn cackle and stymie each other, extending and halting the speckled snake that winds its angular way across the metal card table. "Back to the boneyard, sap!" Shirley cries, her mirth sending sympathetic eddies through the onlookers, an idle ring transfixed within the orbit of her familiar BO. "I'll boneyard you, you little sweetheart!" Glenn says. "Take that!" He slaps a double five crossways at one end of the domino snake. "What does that mean?" Nelson asks. "Putting the double sideways?" Glenn squints up askance, one blued lid half lowered, his nostrilstud catching on one facet the fluorescent light overhead. "Didn't you ever play dominoes, Nels?" he asks. For all his gay makeup, he has a rough voice, a Brewer street voice, deeper than you expect, and pugnacious. His tone suggests that Nelson is having a boundary problem. Maybe so. The other clients are listening, alert as children with nothing else to do. But he has been trained to be frank, direct, and fearless, within the therapeutic persona. "Well, if I did, I've forgotten. The objective is what?" "To kill time," Glenn says. "You poor baby," says Shirley to Nelson. "Were you an only child?" Nelson hesitates. Watch those boundaries. "I had a sister. She died as a baby." This shocks them, as he knew it would. They have their own problems, that's what they're all here for, not to hear his. Shirley offers, "We'll teach you, dearie, when this game is over." Her vast face holds a trace, a delicate imprint like a fern in shale, of the face she had as a young woman. There is a small straight nose and a pointy chin-a triangular bit of bone in the fat. "Morons can play it," Glenn says in rough encouragement. One of the likable things about dysfunctionals is that they don't hold grudges. They don't stand on any imagined dignity, they are focused on the minute or two of life in front of them. As he sits there for twenty minutes taking domino lessons from a mountain of a woman in a stained muu-muu, and being coached by a rouged pervert with three glass studs in his face-a fourth, brass, sits on the upper edge of Glenn's plucked eyebrow-Nelson feels his inner snarls loosening, including the knot of apprehension about his lunch date, crazily enough, with a girl out of nowhere who claims to be his sister. Outside the Center, the rain still comes down but is thinner; it is swirled and rarefied by the wind into a kind of white sunshine. There is no point in putting up an umbrella, it would be popped inside out. Instead, he runs, slowing whenever he feels his shirt getting sweaty inside his raincoat, staying close to the brick buildings, and the facades redone in Permastone, on the south side of Elm Street. Plastic store signs bang and shudder overhead, tin mailboxes swing by one screw beside the front doors of four-story town houses turned into apartments, empty aluminum Mountain Dew cans rattle along in the gutter, leaves swish overhead as gusts plow them like keels through upside-down waves. The elms lining this street died long ago; the Bradford pears the city replaced them with have grown big enough to need cutting back from the electric wires. There are fewer people out on the sidewalk than usual but those that are are oddly blithe. A black couple in yellow slickers stands in a doorway smooching. A skinny Latina clicks along in high square heels and blue jeans and a pink short-sleeved jersey, chatting into a cell phone. Is this a hurricane or not? The weather is being snubbed. People are in rebellion at having it hyped on TV so relentlessly, to bring up ratings. He runs past one of those few surviving front-parlor barbershops, where two old guys are waiting their turn while a third sits under the sheet to his neck, all three thin on top, and the barber makes four. Dad didn't want to wait around and become an old guy. He didn't have the patience. The wind traces oval loops through sheets of rain. The clouds above the roofs and chimneys trail tails like ink in water. The odds are less than fifty-fifty, he figures, that his date will show up on such a wild day. He hopes she doesn't; it will get him off the hook. But there she is, waiting outside The Greenery (Salads, Soups, and Sandwiches) under a sky-blue umbrella, wearing not fat white shoes as she promised but penny loafers with little clear plastic booties snapped over them, like bubble-wrapped toys. "Hi. I'm Nelson," he says, more gruffly than he intended, perhaps because he is panting from running. "You shouldn't have waited outside, you'll get soaked," he goes on in his nervousness, starting their acquaintance on an accusatory note. She doesn't seem to mind. Her mild eyes, their blue deepened by the blue of the umbrella, take him in as she defends herself: "But it's so exciting out. Feel the electricity in the air? I heard on the radio driving here the eye is over Wilmington." "I bet it's soon downgraded to just a tropical storm. North Carolina is where it really hit. Pennsylvania never gets the real disasters." "Well, that's good, isn't it?" Annabelle asks. Their heads are at the same level. He is short for a man and she is slightly above average for a woman. He wonders if a Passerby would spot them as siblings. "Come on, let's go in" he says, still breathless. There are six or so other customers, and the last of three booths is free. The interior has that cloakroom scent from long ago of wet clothes and childish secrets. The tidy, self-reliant way Annabelle takes off her white raincoat and red scarf and hangs them up on the peg-hooks by the unmarked door to the restrooms touches Nelson; she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is. The waitress, too middle-aged for her short green uniform, comes over from behind the counter and hands them menus prettily printed with leafy borders but already smudged and tattered by many hands. "Also," she tells them, "we've added hamburgers and hot dogs." Nelson says, "I thought those were against your principles." She is lumpy and sallow but not above being amused. "They were, but people kept asking for them. We still won't do pizzas and French fries." "Way out," Nelson says. Laconic responses have become, these eight years, his professional habit, but this occasion will demand more: he will have to give, to lead. To be a provider. "I love healthy food," says Annabelle Byer. "Do you know already?" the waitress asks. "Or would you like a few minutes?" Nelson has been coming here once or twice a week since the place opened last spring, but she is showing him new deference now that he has appeared with a companion. Annabelle is a little round-faced and bland compared with the narrow-hipped Latina in high heels and jeans, but she is not an embarrassment as a date; she could be a colleague at the Center, like Katie Shirk. "I know," he tells the waitress. "A cup of that broccoli soup you make-" "It's not a cream soup," the waitress interrupts. "It's a clear soup, some of the customers call it watery." "I want it," Nelson insists, "and then the spinach salad, with raspberry vinaigrette, and don't go easy on the bacon bits." "That's just what I want," Annabelle says, more gleefully than Nelson thinks she needs to. The waitress is writing. "You said do go easy on the bacon bits, or don't?" "Don't," Nelson and Annabelle answer in unison. Nelson adds, "And, to drink, in view of the horrible weather, a cup of hot tea. Not herbal, caffeine. Lipton's if you have it." "Me, too," his sister says. He is beginning to see the downside of having one. "Don't you have any ideas of your own?" he asks her. "Almost nothing but. If you'd have let me order first, as you should have, you'd be seeming to copy me." "I'd have thought of something different. Their lo-cal Caesar withstrips of range-fed chicken can be terrific." "I love healthy food." "You said that." "Well, I'm nervous. This is strange, meeting your brother at last, and it was your idea." "Yeah, and showing up giving my mother the scare of her life was your idea. Sorry about your mother, by the way." "Thank you. She didn't seem scared, yours. Almost feisty, you could say. She thought I was after her money." "Well, what else? Not that she has that much. "He feels, what he had not expected, at ease enough with this person to be combative, as if they had rehearsed their competition years ago. "You and I met, by the way, " he says. "Twenty or so years ago, at a party in an apartment along Locust Boulevard. The hosts were a couple called Jason and Pam and a fag they lived with called Slim." He wouldn't say "fag" at work-he has worked with a number of gays, on both sides of the client-caregiver divide, and has no problem with it, once he outgrew the fantasy that they were going to grab his crotch -but being with this girl brings out an older, less p. c. self. "I was with my wife. She was very pregnant, and got drunk and fell down the stairs." The memory still shames him: he had given Pru the bump that sent her off-balance, and the image of her skidding down the metal-edged stairs, with the legs of the orange tights she had on splayed wide like a sexual invitation on the edge of disaster, has stayed with him as a turning point in his life. I must do better than this, he had thought at the time. "I don't remember any of that," Annabelle says with her annoying, faintly defiant blandness. "I remember you" he accuses, "and thinking how nice you were. I admired your ear. You were going with a boy called Jamie and worked at some old people's place out around the old the fairgrounds." "Sunnyside," she says. "My ear?" she asks. Self-consciously she touches her right ear, exposed by the fluffy short-cut hair there. Her hair, a touch damp from waiting in the rain, is brown, with auburn highlights that seem natural and a fair amount of gray sprinkled in. Time is pressing on her though her face pretends not to feel it. "It hadn't been pierced." He doesn't say it reminded him of his own. He had also liked the way she bulged toward him in certain places, her plump upper lip and the fronts of her thighs when she stood. Some would say she is heavy now but in this county the men are accustomed to that. How had she avoided getting married? "My mother wouldn't let me," Annabelle was saying. "I guess it was superstitious of her, she said she liked me natural, the way I had been born. Boy, I wonder what she would say with some of the girls now. Even the young nurses, the body piercing, navel, nipple, you name it. I ask them, how can it be sanitary, and they say their boyfriends like it. One more thing to play with, I guess." She blushes and lowers her eyes. The soup comes, the flowery thin soup The Greenery cooks up with broccoli florets and frothy bean sprouts and slices of water chestnut so thin as to be transparent. Nelson and Annabelle bow their faces into the heat of the soups and realize that their time together is being consumed. "I'm sorry," she says, "I don't remember that party better. Maybe I was stoned." "No, no, it was me who was stoned. Stoned or wired, that's what I usually was back then. After my father died I got religion, more or less, and earned the certificate to be a mental-health counsellor. Don't you think it's strange, by the way, how both you and I are caregivers?" "Not if we're related," she says. "I believe in genetics. And health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much." "Yeah, you wonder if it's worth all the effort. I mean, you're keeping these Alzheimer's wrecks going when they don't even know enough to thank you, and I knock myself out to keep a bunch of depressive loonies from killing themselves, when if they did it it would save the government a fair amount of money." She looks at him, her mouth prim until she swallows the spoonful of soup, and says, "Nelson. You don't mean that. In the abstract, you can feel that way, but not when you're face to face with the patient. I go on these teams Hospice sends around. Even at the very end, there's something in there, a soul or whatever, you have to love." "Especially when you're being paid to love it," he says, wondering if one of the water-chestnut slices has gone bad. A specialty place like this, you don't get the turnover to keep the produce fresh; they give it one more day than they should. The other customers here when they entered are one by one leaving, though a small cluster hangs this side of the door, waiting for a sudden sideways squall of rain to let up. The ceiling lights glow as if evening is coming on, though it's not yet one o'clock. "Tell me about him," Annabelle demands. "Who?" Though he knows. "Our father." Nelson shrugs. "What's to say? He was narcissistically impaired, would be my diagnosis. Intuitive, but not very empathic. He never grew up. It occurred to me just now, passing a bunch of old guys in a barbershop coming over here, that he died when he did because he wanted to. Those of us around him were begging him not to die but he wouldn't listen." Nelson has rephrased Pru's sleeping with his father just out of the hospital as a way of begging him not to die. Not a bad reframe, he thinks. "Why didn't you want him to die, if he was so awful?" "Did I say he was awful? He was careless and self-centered, but he had his points. People liked being around him. He was upbeat. Since he never grew up himself, he could be good with children, even with me when I was little. The smaller they were, the better he related. He was a better grandfather than a father, since he could clown around and have no direct responsibility and not give you a sinking feeling. Me he kept giving a sinking feeling. I mean, he did things, too. He ran away from Mom to shack up with your mother. He got involved with a megalomaniacal black guy and a masochistic runaway white girl and got our house burned down. He had a crush on this nitwit young wife of a friend of my parents when they were in a country-club phase. Then he had a long secret affair with his oldest friend's wife. I say friend, but in fact he and Ronnie always hated each other. I mean, this is not a constructive personality we're talking about." "Yet you didn't want him to die." "What do you want me to say? Hell, he was the only father I had. What am I supposed to do, wish him dead?" Annabelle smiles. Her soup bowl is empty. "Some would say that would be normal." "That Oedipal crap, you mean? Freud is fun to read, but in the workplace he doesn't hack it. Nobody in the business uses Freud any more." But he is more stunned by her saying that than he shows. Would be normal. He had wanted his father to live, to continue to take care of him, to be a shelter however shaky. There is a louder scream of wind outside, old tropical storm Floyd. The ceiling lights flicker and then go out. At the same moment, the waitress brings their salads. "Oops," she says. "Can you two lovebirds see to eat, or shall I hunt up some candles?" "We can see enough," Nelson says. In the gloomy light, flickering as the wind outside lashes the trees, Nelson leans forward and softly explains to his sister, "He was tall, about eight inches taller than me, and had an athlete's nice easy way of carrying himself. It pained him that I wasn't more like him. He had been a wonderful basketball player in high school, back when it was still a white game." "That doesn't exactly make a life, does it though?" Annabelle asks, lifting the first forkful of salad to her face. She has a slightly eager way of eating, keeping her mouth closed in a satisfied smile as she chews, her upper lip shiny with salad oil. "That's what everybody kept telling him all his life," says Nelson. "But I don't know. At least it was something to remember about yourself. I have nothing like that to remember about myself." "What about your family?" she asks, before taking the next bite, being careful to keep the bacon bits balanced on the piece of spinach. "They left me. My wife, Pru, who you saw pregnant that time at the party that you've forgotten all about, left me over a year ago and took the kids. Back to Ohio, where she's from. Akron. I met her when I was a student at Kent State." He doesn't say she was a secretary, and older than he; he is embarrassed about that. "My girl, Judy, is nineteen, twenty next January, and off everybody's hands except a bunch of boyfriends', and the boy, Roy, and I keep in touch by e-mail. He's fourteen and knows more about computers than I ever will." "Why did she leave? Pru." "I don't know. I guess I disappointed her. She thinks I'm a pipsqueak." She waits to finish chewing and says urgently, "Nelson, you're not. You're a caring, intelligent man." "Yeah, well. You can be that and a pipsqueak too. I can be frustrating. Pru always wanted us to get a house of our own and I could never see the point, my mother sitting on all those rooms over in Mt. Judge. I didn't want to leave her alone. My mother." "But now she's married." "Yeah. But then I didn't want to leave her alone with my pretty awful stepfather. Hey-do I sound normal, or do I sound sick? When I'm over with my sickos I don't have to listen to myself. I just let them talk. Boy, do some of them babble! Everybody thinks their little story is the story of the universe." The waitress comes back from the kitchen and puts an unlit candle in a pottery holder on the booth table and lights it. "You didn't have to do that," Nelson tells her. "We're about to go." "Why go?" The waitress saunters to the door and looks out its halfwindow at the whipped, glistening city. "Pitch black in the east," she says. "Over behind the courthouse." A cardboard sign tucked into the molding says on this side in Day-Glo letters CLOSED. She takes this sign and reverses it so that CLOSED faces the street. The couple in the booth hear the lock click. "The stove and grill are out," the waitress explains. Nearer, Nelson hears this other female voice, as soft, as transparent as the voice inside his head, say, "Tell me more about your father, as you saw him." The girl is trying so hard to be sweet. Maybe she is sweet. But Nelson dislikes talking about his father. It pulls something too obscure and precious out of him. When he tries to think back to what it was like growing up he keeps getting a picture of his father and him in the front seat of a car, both of them having nothing to say but the silence comfortable, the shared forward motion satisfying. Nelson is being driven somewhere. To the piano lessons that gave him butterflies because he never practiced enough during the week, as Mr. Schiffner with his lavender shirts and tiny Hitler mustache always detected. To soccer practice when he was in that weekend league of middle teens and had hopes of being a star, small but agile. To Billy Fosnacht's or some other friend's, there weren't that many, for a sleepover. Meanwhile his father's big head was happy with his daydreams and his hands were light and pale on the steering wheel, with big translucent moons on the nails, usually one hand while the other absent-mindedly patted and stroked the back of his head in a gesture that maybe went back to the days when teenagers had wet ducktails, like Sal Mineo or James Dean in the old rebel movies Nelson could watch on TV. His father had been a rebel of a sort, and a daredevil, but as he got older and tame he radiated happiness at just the simplest American things, driving along in an automobile, the radio giving off music, the heater giving off heat, delivering his son somewhere in this urban area that he knew block by block, intersection by intersection. At night, in the underlit ghostliness of the front seat, their two shadows were linked it seemed forever by blood. To Nelson as a child his own death seemed possible in so perilous a world but he didn't believe his father would ever die. "I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. Mom-mom -my grandmother on my mother's side, the Springers-would always say how I resembled Fred, her husband. He was on the shortish side like me, and sharp at business stuff, and bouncy. But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way." "I loved my father, too," says Annabelle, "the man I thought was my father. He could fix anything-you know how around a farm everything is always breaking down, he never let on he was flummoxed, just would sigh and settle down to it. He had this wonderful confident, calm touch-with my mother, too, when she'd let her temper fly. Whenever the excitable of my patients get to acting up, I try to think of him and act like he'd act." Nelson's inner ear tells him there is something wrong with this. He is being sold something. But it may be that his ear is jaded, hearing all day about families, dealing with all the variations of dependency and resentment, love and its opposite, all the sickly inturned can't-get-away-from-itness of close relations. If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence. "He sounds great," he grunts. "Every time my father tried to fix anything around the house, it got broken worse." He hears these words and wonders if they are fair. He remembers his father digging in a garden he had made in the back yard, even building a little wire fence to defend the vegetables against rabbits. He remembers his father on one of their car trips somewhere pleading with him not to get married, not to get himself trapped in marriage, even though Pru was pregnant and the wedding day set: he shocked his son by suggesting an abortion and offering to pay her off. I just don't like seeing you caught. You're too much me. I'm not you! I'm not caught! Nellie, you're caught. They've got you and you didn't even squeak. He had fought his father off, accused him of being jealous, denied the resemblance the old man was pushing. You don't necessarily have to lead my life, I guess is what I want to say. Well, he hadn't, exactly, and marrying Pru hadn't worked out, exactly, but what pains Nelson now is seeing that his father had been trying as far as his narcissism allowed to step out of his selfish head and help his son, trying to shelter him from one of those disasters that most decisions entail. He had tried to be a better father than Nelson could give him credit for, even now. He says with an effort, "But he wasn't all bad. We used to have great games of catch in the back yard. And he'd take me to Blasts games out at the stadium. Once we even drove down to Philly for a Flyers game, somebody had given him tickets." "I met him, you know. At the car lot. He seemed nice. Of course I had no idea he was my father, but he acted fatherly, And funny." "What did he say funny?" "Nelson, how can you expect me to remember?" And then it comes to her. The bright June day, the Toyota agency tucked over on Route 111 across the river, the drive with Jamie at the wheel, and the heavy tall middle-aged salesman with his pale fine hair in the front. He sat in the death seat, Annabelle in the back. She says, "It was the time of the gas shortage. He said all the hardware stores in Brewer were selling out of siphons and soon we'd all be standing in line for everything, even Hershey bars, I forget how that came up. It was like he didn't really care if we bought a car or not." "He didn't. The only job he ever gave a damn about was operating a Linotype machine like his own father. Then Linotypes got obsolete." "That's sad," his daughter says. The waitress is standing there in her green apron. "Could I interest either of you in any dessert?" Nelson said, "I thought you closed up." "Yes well, I did, but the cook's still out back, he thinks the power may be coming back on. For dessert we have tofu, honied oatcakes, puffed goat cheese baked in little ramekins, and lo-cal frozen yogurt. That's lo-cal, not local. And lately we've put in some home-baked pies, since people kept asking. They are local. Let me see-shoo-fly, lemon meringue, and apple crumb. We may have a piece of the rhubarb still left. We can't warm them, though, as long as the power's out." She is the mother, it comes to Nelson, that he and Annabelle have in common. The waitress is pure Brewer, her face squarish and asymmetrical, like a bun pleasantly warped in the oven. Goodhumored suffering-sore feet, errant sons, daily complaints- radiates through her uniform. And yet, though this woman feels old to him, she is possibly not much older than they are- somewhere in her forties. "The apple crumb sounds good," he says, not wanting this lunch to end. For what happens next? It's not like a first date, where a second or third leads to fucking. "I shouldn't," his sister declares, "but let me try the honey oatcake." The waitress says, lowering her voice confidentially, "It tends to be a little dry. My advice would be to have it with a scoop of the frozen vanilla yogurt. On the house. If the power stays off, it'll all be melting anyway." "You're wicked," Annabelle tells her. Her plump face beams, her eyes shine like a birthday child's as she assents. She still has, after living twenty years in the city, a country-girl innocence that, if she is taken as his date, embarrasses Nelson. In his embarrassment he studies the wall above the booths, whose theme is greenery-ferns and bushes and overhanging branches, brushed on in many forest shades. What he has never noticed before, all those noons grabbing a bite at the counter, is that a pair of children are in the mural, in the middle distance with their backs turned, a boy and a girl wearing old-fashioned German outfits, pigtails and lederhosen, holding hands, lost. "So," he says. "I don't think I've told you much about my-our- father. Mom has a lot of photos and clippings back at the house- would you like to look them over sometime?" He wants to give her her father, his father, but when he holds out his hands the dust pours through them, too fine and dry and dead to hold. Time has turned the spectacular man to powder, in just ten years. "I don't think your mother wants me in the house again," says Annabelle. "Of course she does," he says, knowing she doesn't, and adding, "It's my house, too," when it isn't, yet. "I thought one of you said green tea," the waitress says, putting down two cold desserts and two steaming cups. "The water was still hot, and they all claim it's good for you. The Japanese live longer than anybody. They had on Sixty Minutes last Sunday these two female twins, over a hundred years old each, that are like rock stars to them." "Green is great," Nelson says, to chase this motherly woman away. When the siblings have their privacy back, he says to his sister, "This is great, meeting you. I just wish my father could have known you. He hated not having a daughter." "That's unusual, a bit. Weren't all men his age male chauvinists?" "He wasn't crazy about males, me included. I think he saw other men as competition. For the women. He was very scared of his homoerotic side. He suppressed it. His only male friend, really- do you want to hear this?" "Oh, yes." "-was a car salesman who was screwing my mother for a while. That made it all right somehow, to have a little male intimacy. Charlie, that was the guy's name, he died too, a couple years ago. Another lousy ticker, though unlike Dad he went the full route- triple bypass, pig valves, pacemaker, God knows what all. It worked for a while, but not forever, as you would know, being a nurse. My mother kept in touch with him, even married to Ron. That generation, once they"-he rejects the obvious verb-"once they went to bed together, they didn't get over it." This has taken him a long way sideways. It's true, what the psych instructors at Johnson Community said, if you let somebody talk enough, everything comes out, underside first. "So Dad and Charlie are up there in Heaven," he ironically concludes, "seeing us get together." "When will we get together again, I wonder," Annabelle says, unironically. She has this frontal mode, part of her innocence. How innocent can you be, at the age of thirty-nine, in the year 1999? "Soon," he promises. He wonders what he has taken on. "I want to work something out. You should meet more people than just me." "Oh?" "Sure," Nelson says in confident, big-brother style. In the same style he signals to the waitress, who has been standing behind the counter, looking out at the storm through the window beside the tall aluminum urns of cooling coffee and hot water. "I keep waiting for branches to fall," she tells them, "but they don't, quite." "Pennsylvania can't afford a good hurricane," he kids her. "We should all move to the Carolinas." He hungers for a hurricane, he realizes-for an upheaval tearing everything loose. The twilight gloom in the place does seem to be lifting. Nelson cups his hand behind the flame and blows out the candle. The waitress brings their bill handwritten on the back of a menu card torn in half: $11.48. "I hope you have the right change, because with the power out I can't get into the cash register to make any." Nelson looks into his wallet and has one one and the rest twenties. The MellPenn ATMs only dish out twenties, encouraging consumers to spend faster. New bills, too. He hates how big Jackson's face has gotten, and the way it's off-center. His expression is more wimpy. They've turned this old Indian-killer into a Sensitive New Age Guy. It looks like play money. Annabelle sees Nelson hesitate and asks, "Do you want some money from me?" "Absolutely not." The waitress may have been motherly, but he's damned if he's going to leave her an $8.52 tip. Nor does he want to take Annabelle's money: it would give the whole encounter a pipsqueak flavor. He is trapped, pinched, squeezed between impossible alternatives: dysfunctional. He could put it on a credit card but that, too, takes electricity. "You could owe me to next time," his sister mildly says. He ignores her and stares into his wallet at the edges of gray-green money as if a miracle will sprout. And it does: the lights come on. The machinery of the place begins to hum all around them. "I'll have to open up again," the waitress complains. She taps off a dot-matrix slip and he takes a five and two ones out of the change. "Thankyou, sir. You two have a nice rest of the day, now." Brewer is still a place where a tip of more than ten percent wins some gratitude. "Good lunch," Nelson tells her. "Good and healthy. Lots of crumbs on the pie, like my grandmother used to bake." "Come again," she says, but automatically, moving on sore feet to wipe their booth table and reset it with paper placemats. Outside, the wind is bright again, whirling the droplets off the Bradford pear trees. Annabelle's booties glisten; she ties the red scarf beneath her chin, making her face look graver and slimmer. A spattering hits it, and she winces, then smiles. She doesn't know what to expect next. He wants to hand her the world but doesn't know quite how. "That was fun," he tells her. "We'll be in touch. " And he kisses her on the cheek, tasting the rain, imagining her skin as half his, thinking, My sister. Mine. "She's Dad's, all right," he tells his mother. "That same weird innocence, that way of riding along." "She wasn't just riding along the day she came here," Janice says. "She was determined, that little scruffy hairdo and showing off her legs right up to the crotch." "How would you like to have her here again? Invited this time, with some other people." "What other people? What am I supposed to say-this is my dead husband's bastard daughter from forty years ago? It was humiliating enough at the time, that whole nightmare, Nelson. I don't see why I should put myself through it again. I can't believe you're asking me-aren't social workers supposed to be so sensitive?" "Not to their own families, necessarily. Mom, she's family. We can't just ignore her, now that we know she exists. Just a family dinner, maybe with Ronnie's boys." Of the three sons Ronnie and Thelma had, two are presently unmarried. Georgie, the middle one, lives in New York, though his dreams of being a chorus-line dancer are faded. Alex, the oldest and nerdiest and most successful, lives in Fairfax, Virginia, he and his wife having divorced. Alex is no Bill Gates but he has done well and is about Annabelle's age. Ron Junior, the youngest, dropped out of Lehigh after two years and is settled in as carpenter for a local construction company. He married a local girl; they have three kids under ten. Nelson doesn't see that much of his stepbrothers except when Georgie, escaping from the stresses of the Big Apple, has to crash in the big front bedroom that until Pru pulled out had been Judy's room. But they generally gather for Thanksgiving, a meal that Thelma always put on in grand style and that Ronnie insists Janice continue with, though she will never be the cook Thelma was. The first Mrs. Harrison had been a schoolteacher and brought to her housewifely duties a sense of order and measure and respect for the holidays, and also a flair, a flourish of excess. It must have been this excessive part of her that latched on to Harry, loving him to her own disgrace. Janice dreads the turkey-how big to buy it, how long to cook it, at what temperature-and never gets it right. Either the breast is so dry that the slices crumble under Ronnie's carving knife, or the joints are bloody and the children at the table make noises of disgust. Family occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first our parents and elders and then our children and their children. One of the things she and Harry secretly had in common, beneath all their troubles, was dislike of all that, these expected ceremonies. Mother had been a great churchgoer and Daddy tagged along but Janice always felt uncomfortable, on the edge of crying when the organ blasted in, especially after Becky died and God had done nothing that terrible time to help. She and Harry were happiest, really, when they were in Florida, just the two of them in Valhalla Village, golf for him and tennis for her and separate sets of friends and most meals taken at the perfectly adequate and pleasant restaurant there, Mead Hall with its modernistic Viking decor. Janice's brow wrinkles. "I don't quite see it, Nelson, as being anything but forced and awkward. Just because this dead slut wished this girl on us-" "Mom, she's my sister. Listen. If she can't be a guest in this household, maybe the time has come for me to move out. Pru always said I should anyway, for my self-respect." "She did? Pru said that?" Janice had imagined that she and her daughter-in-law had shared the house pretty well, all those years after Harry died and they agreed to sell the Penn Park house Harry had loved. She had been off most of the day doing real estate, and Teresa had had to be home with the children and naturally had cooked the meals and did housework and some light outdoor work. It was only right, instead of paying rent. After Ronnie came into the household, it was never so easy. There were currents. Ronnie had his own ideas about how things should be done, in the kitchen and everywhere else. The way Thelma had always taken care of him, he was particular. Thelma spoiled men: it was a kind of malice, and lasted after her. Poor Nelson. He has this bee in his bonnet-doing something for this girl nobody knows. It clutches at Janice's heart, to think that he always wanted more of a family than they could give him-a bigger, happier one. He had loved her parents because from them descended this sense he craved of a clan operating in the world, this big stucco house a fort of sorts. The boy had wanted her and Harry's happiness so. When they quarrelled even without much meaning it his little face would go white with worry like a bubble trying not to burst. And all this healing he still wants for everybody, it makes her heart gripe to think of how they must have hurt him. "I don't know, Nelson." Janice yields. "Maybe at Thanksgiving. She'd get lost in the crowd." "Mom, that's forever away." "Close enough for us to get used to the idea. I'll have to approach Ronnie. I know he'll be dead set against it." But when, that night or the next, in their bedroom, she describes to her husband Nelson's silly sad desire, and puts forth her Thanksgiving suggestion expecting it to be knocked aside, Ronnie says, his voice dragged into a more youthful, thuggish register, "Well, I guess it wouldn't kill us. I'd be interested to see how Ruth Leonard's daughter turned out." He pronounces her name, which Janice always has trouble remembering, so easily; it brings home to her that Ronnie and this slut had been lovers, some weekend down at the Jersey Shore, back before Harry got to know her himself, which had always galled him, though Janice could never see that he had the right to mind. But Harry had been like that: he thought he had a lot of rights, just by being his wonderful self.

Chapter 3

From: Roy Angstrom [royson@buckeyemedia.com] Sent: Friday, October 22, 1999 8:04 PM To: nelsang. harrison@qwikbrew. com Subject: Happy birthday jokes Dad have a great party with whoever!!! Heres an oldie but new to me and it struck me as pretty droll. President Clinton was visiting Oklahoma City after the may 3rd tornado and a man whose house was demolished put up a sign: HEY BILL HOWS THIS FOR A BLOW JOB? The Secret Service made the man take it away. I guess this is a true story what do you think?

Nelson, sitting in the little upstairs front room staring at the computer screen, shifts in his swivel chair, pained. If this is the only way his son can communicate, it's better than nothing, but he wonders how much the kid knows about blow jobs. Though after this Lewinsky business even kindergarten kids know about it, it's right at the top of the news hour. Pru used to do it to him at first, especially before they got married, but as the marriage went on did it less and less, even when both were high on something or when he went down on her, her fuzzy little redhead's pussy, skimpy compared to, say, curly-haired Melanie's. One such time he got into position for her to reciprocate and she confessed outright that she hated the smell. What smell? he had said, feeling himself beginning to wilt. I wash. You can't help it, she had said. It's a smell that won't wash off. It's kind of acidy. Anyway, I'm afraid you'll come in my mouth. Why, honey? Why are you afraid? That's so nice, once in awhile. For you it is. You used to like it. I don't remember that. I just said it because I knew you wanted me to. You lied to me? People can get AIDS, you know, that way. Well my God. If I have AIDS you'll get it anyway. How could I have AIDS? I haven't been with anybody but you for ages. So you say. What about those coke whores, before you got clean? Coke whores, there are no coke whores. There are just women who aren't as uptight as others, is all. It was true, back before he was clean, when he was a regular at the Laid-Back, the girls who hung around there looking for drugs and action liked to give blow jobs because it was a quick way to bring a guy off and less fuss and muss for them. They didn't even have to take off their pantyhose in the car. Their mouths did smell afterwards and when he was stoned he liked to kiss them even though they resisted and said he was sick, basically queer. Those girls for all their being whorish had very little imagination, very narrow parameters. If I was going to get AIDS it would have showed up by now. Not necessarily. I read where the virus can be dormant for fifteen years. It hides around the base of the spine. Well my God. And this is supposed to be a marriage. You can fuck me though. Now there's a rational woman for you. What about AIDS? Nelson, I said you can fuck me. Take it or leave it. I'll leave it. I've lost interest. So you have. What a baby. And it was lovely to have a woman's head down there, all that hair under your hands, the tips of her ears and back of her neck, you can't see her face but her shoulders tense up when you come, and some have said it excited them too, but according to Pru they were lying because they wanted something else. Women lie the way blacks lie. If you're a slave face telling the truth gets you very little. They forget how. He sees that all the time at the Center. Only for the powers that be does knowing things pay off. Only they can afford to know the truth. He doesn't like Roy knowing what a blow job is. The boy is fourteen, masturbation should be enough. The tightness of it, the newness, the feeling of leaning up against a tall white closed door, the sensation Nelson used to get of standing on his head for a second, the tiny muscles going into spasm: the sensation moves you into another world, up and out, chilly like ice cream, private like thought, a metallic taste in the mouth afterwards, the taste of having been somewhere different. But he wants the images in the boy's head to be innocent, bridal, the girl who sits next to him in an Ohio classroom lying under him all lace and crushed flowers in his mind as he comes in his bed's safety. Not this juvenile filth off the Internet. Who would have thought the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent? And Dad heres another one. A guys wife on there honeymoon begs off making love and she goes to sleep and gets up at 3am to get a glass of water and sees hes still awake and asks why. He says his dick is so hard their isnt enough skin left to close his eyes with. This is more like it, Nelson supposes. Straight married sex, at least. Judy has gone off the deep end with boys, he doesn't know when she lost her virginity, it must have been in Pennsylvania, when they all still lived in this house, Judy in the front bedroom, there were some pretty late dates, he remembers, coming in that sticky front door, whose pop woke him up, footsteps slithering up the stairs, when she was just sixteen, seventeen, and still had her freckles. Pru would know. Pru would't talk about it with him. Well why not? she asked back one time. Your Aunt Mim's a tart, all you Angstroms are like rabbits. And she herself, with Dad, in this very room he sat in now, his face lit by a computer screen. He could never quite wrap his mind around it. Which was healthy. There is such a thing as healthy denial. Children use it to keep the image of the caregiver benign despite abuse. Pru when he got after her about it would say she didn't understand it either. It just happened, Nelson. Things just happen. Not every thing happens for some deep reason, like you were taught at socialwork school. Oh, is that what I was taught? Yes, and to keep asking questions, instead of trying to give answers. I should have answers? What's your question? Why do you keep bugging me about what happened once between me and your father, when we were both half out of our minds; me with your druggy stunts and him with his poor beat-up heart? He's dead, Nelson, your father is dead, he and I won't do anything again even if we wanted to. Which we don't. Didn't. Nelson looks out across Joseph Street at the neighbor's second-story windows, hoping to see the woman of the house undressed. There are three windows, the middle one holding a plastic pumpkin with a light bulb in it, the two flanking it dim-lit, the one on the right probably a hall landing but the others giving on the bedroom, which he guesses is a child's bedroom. That semidetached house for years was occupied by an elderly couple who lived toward the back of it, in the kitchen and TV den, but this young couple with their two little children have different living arrangements and once in a while you see the wife moving around in her bathrobe or underwear, black bikini pants and two beige cups as snug as skin, the kind of bra advertised in the Brewer Standard illustrated by models, names like Secret Shaper, Seamless Charmer, Lace 'n Smooth, Nearly Nude. Pru used to wear bikini underpants but as her bottom broadened she went in for old-lady white cotton panties with enough fabric for a truck-driver's Tshirt. You can fuck me, though. He needs a woman. Doing a job and coming back to his mother and stepfather and TV comedies made for twenty-somethings in New York City isn't a life. He sleeps badly: not enough skin left to close his eyes. But at his age as of today forty-three he would feel silly in single bars or the party circuit, if he could find it. The action that used to exist at the Laid-Back up at Ninth and Weiser was ages ago-other lifestyles, other drugs in fashion. Cold War worries, Japan worries. With the century ending all this is sinking into the history books. And he's afraid getting back into circulation might get him back into coke, or Ecstasy if that's the thing, or the ever-cheaper heroin; it's so easy to slip back when you don't feel you have much to lose. Talking to the substance abusers at Fresh Start, he can't much argue when they argue for it. Happiness is feeling happy. Maybe it shortens your life but when you're dead what's the diff? Living to the next hit, the next scrounged blow-out, gives their lives a point. Being clean exposes you to life's having no point. Things are pretty cool here Dad. 10th grade is organised not much differnt than the 9th except that you are a sophmore and get more respect then lowley freshmen. There are a lot of American African students at North High but you can get along if you mind your own busness and don't make slurs and the courses are pretty easy. First quarter I got four A's and a B in biology but the biology teacher Mr. Pedersen says he knows I can do even better. Judy is driving mom crazy out most nights and some mornings her bed not even slept in but she is thinking of signing up for training to become a flight attendent for USAirways, there hub is in Pittsburg. Mom is working longer hours for this lawyer Mr Gekoppolos (spelling close) downtown on Buchtel Ave but says to tell you we still need your check and it's late. Thats pretty much it for now Dad I want to play one game of TOMB RAIDERS and then study hard for a biology quizz. TTFN (ta ta for now) luv u:-) ROY. Nelson's eyes sting, reading this in the tiny print the Windows 98 gives you. Even the print and tiny icons are made for very young eyes. The boy is smart, if the grown-ups over him don't fuck up his head. And Judy, maybe she knows what she's doing. She has evidently no fear of flying, though doesn't like the idea of his daughter in the sky all the time. Dad used to be nervous about flying too.

From: Dad [nelsang.harrison@qwikbrew.com] Sent: Sunday, October 24, 1999 9:31 PM To: royson@buckeyemedia. com Subject: paternal affection Roy-Great grades, congratulations. Keep it up. Great jokes, though don't they ever have any clean ones? Sex can be funny but it's also damn serious, about the most serious thing we do. It's good Judy is meeting lots of people but tell your sister not to cheapen herself. Other people tend to take us at the valuation we put on ourselves and a woman is always more vulnerable to a bad opinion. I'm glad she is thinking of a vocation even if it's not the one I would have chosen for her. Our family has been pretty earthbound up to now. Tell your mother I will get the check off but Ronnie thinks I should be contributing more to the household expenses since he is retired and on his pension plan and Social Security, meanwhile the cost of everything including real estate taxes goes up. The big news here, in my mind at least, is that you have an aunt none of us knew about-a girl your grandfather had by another woman when I was a tiny child. Her name is Annabelle Byer. Nobody knew about her until she showed up some weeks ago and told her story to your grandmother. I took her out to lunch last month and we got along very well. We talked as if we had known each other all our lives. She is a nurse just like I work in mental health-how's that for a coincidence? Grandma is going to have her here for Thanksgiving and maybe you can meet her when your mother brings you east for Christmas. I can hardly wait to see you all. August in the Poconos was nice but it was too long ago. Everybody's health here is good. The drought this summer has been washed away by a lot of rain this fall but it's too late for the farmers. The only thing close to a joke that I've heard is from one of the black clients at the Center, who has a lot of "Yo momma's so fat" jokes. The only ones I can remember are: She can sell shade, she puts mayonnaise on aspirin, and when she goes to the movies she sits next to everybody. We have a very fat lady at the Center and he never tells these jokes around her. I am very proud of you, Roy, and love you very much. Dad. P. S.: Notice how when I use a contraction, I put in an apostrophe. Haven't they taught you that yet at school? Also, "there" is a location and "their" is a possessive pronoun. He pushes the SEND key without rereading it. He sounds like the kind of prissy father he never had but didn't especially want, either. His father used to say, Whenever anybody tells me what to do, my instinct is to do the exact opposite. But order and organization must be kept in the world. Ties of affection must be expressed, or nothing holds. Nelson shuts down the computer, gingerly. Sometimes the machine for no reason freezes, with a rebuking message: This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. The only glow from across the street now is the electric pumpkin grin. The time he did see the woman across the street in her underwear, her stomach looked stark white, and wonderfully long, dented by its belly button, deep like the doctors do them now. "Aunt Mim? It's Nelson. Your nephew." "I know you're my nephew, doll-how many others you think I got? Sweetie, what's up? How's life in the old country?" Her voice is dry and crackled, parched by cigarettes like the desert from the sun, but nice, with family warmth rushing into its old veins at what she takes to be an emergency. Otherwise, why would he be calling? She is six years younger than Dad so she would be sixty now, not old for some professions but in hers ancient, long out of it, even with face-lifts and ass-tucks and the marvels of modern dentistry. Nelson wonders when she turned her last trick. You get the occasional sex-worker at the Center and some of them keep on with a few old customers almost like a marriage. Now, without her brother or her parents to link her to the region, Aunt Mim never comes back. The last time was Dad's funeral. There wasn't a body, just a square, lidded urn made of a composition substance like pressed bran flakes. Mom had him cremated down in Florida because it was easiest transportationwise. She and Nelson, taking turns at the wheel, brought him back north in the slate-gray Celica in which he had made his last run. Pru had flown down with the kids the day after he and Mom had caught a night flight from Philly but by the time she landed Dad was already gone. Gone and his body, six foot three and two hundred fifty-five pounds, whipped from the hospital to the crematorium. Pru was in disgrace because of having confessed, having been raised as a Catholic to confess everything, that she and Dad had committed- what would you call it? -double-barrelled adultery. Incest of a sort, one night only. She and the kids were scrunched into the two-door sports car's inadequate back seat, and the thick composition box, like a Styrofoam cooler but smaller and dense with its distilled contents, rode in the trunk among all their suitcases. It had been a tough tight packing job to get everything in and Nelson had not been especially gracious when little Judy, who was nine then, burst into tears, their first night's stop at a motel outside Savannah, because she couldn't bear to think of Grandpa all alone out there in the cold dark trunk. The two motel rooms didn't have too many high safe surfaces for such a sacred and ominous thing- surprisingly light, baked bone flakes, Harold C. Angstrom concentrate-so they settled on the top of the mock-wood cabinet holding the television set that slid in and out. Mom and the kids slept in that room, and she had to keep talking them out of climbing up and opening the box and looking inside. He and Pru were so upset with each other they couldn't sleep and finally fucked in an effort to get relaxed, which made them both madder and sadder than ever. The next night, in a Comfort Inn beyond Raleigh, Mom and Pru took one room and he and the kids the other. They fell asleep before he did, they were watching Roseanne on television, but in the morning he was still groggy, and after he and Pru had some words at breakfast that left everybody feeling they were tiptoeing on broken glass they all drove off leaving the ashes in their big square bran-colored cookie jar on the spareblankets shelf of a Comfort Inn closet. It was Judy who remembered, about two exits up the road. Though Nelson floored the accelerator, it seemed to take forever getting to the next exit and reversing their direction on 95. His whole body went watery with guilt and hurry. The black desk clerk, who had just come on duty, looked dubious at Nelson's panting explanation, but let them have the key again. It was strange to be let back in, as if into an empty tomb-as if they all had died or been abducted. The beds were still unmade, the towels wet outside the shower stall. They found a child's toothbrush in the bathroom as well as Grandpa's remains sitting docilely on the cabinet shelf, the square urn blending in like one of those combination safes motels sometimes give you. Nelson felt this tremendous rush of reunion at the time, taking the canister into his arms, a bliss of wiped-out sins. Afterwards, with schooled hindsight, he saw that there had been a certain unconscious vengeance in their leaving Dad behind, as he had more than once left them behind. Nelson doesn't remember if they all laughed about it, forgetting the head of their family like that, but he does remember that Aunt Mim wore too much black at the funeral, all-black, gloves and hat and big sunglasses, more a style statement than a proclamation of mourning. She stood out like a swish vampire among the quiet orderly rows of the hillside cemetery, on the back slope of Mt. Judge, where Earl W. (1905-1976) and Mary R. (1904-1974) Angstrom rested beneath a rose-colored polished double headstone one grassy stride away from the smaller, older, duller dove-colored stone saying.

REBECCA JUNE ANGSTROM

1959