The Sea of Light (37 page)

“No, Sir.”

“Do you know how dangerous it is to speed?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“I could give you a citation, Jack, for going twenty miles above the speed limit. And a fifty-dollar fine. Do you think that’s fair?”

“No, Sir. I mean—I don’t know, Sir.”

“Oh, God!” moans Babe, “It’s all my fault! Please,
please
Officer,
please
don’t give him a ticket! I mean, if you have to, give the ticket to
me.
I
know
he’ll never do it again!”

A flicker of a smile softens the hardcore face, then dies.

“What do you think, Jack? Are you going to break the law again?”

“No, Sir.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Yes, Sir.”

He hands the registration and driver’s license back to me. My hands won’t lift to hold them; Babe reaches across and takes them instead.

“I won’t write you up this time, Jack. You’re a lucky guy today. But consider this a warning.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“The only place I want to see you speeding is on the track, in a race. Got that?”

“Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”

“And you, Miss. You shouldn’t encourage anyone, much less a family member, to drive over the speed limit. First of all, it’s against the law. Second of all, it is dangerous.”

“Yes, Officer. I’ll never, ever do it again—I promise.”

“Athletic family, huh? I think I’ve heard your name somewhere, I forget where. Good luck at the Olympics.”

“Thank you, Officer. Thank you
so
much.”

“Drive carefully now,” he says. And pushes the shades back up his nose, stalks away from the car with gun and nightstick riding his hips, drops of water pearling his leather jacket in the rain.

I don’t start up until he’s careened smoothly away at a lightning pace, tearing out of sight around a curve in the road, his white and blue I-mean-business car hugging all the contours. Watching him go, I lean back. The sweat’s gushing down my face, over my ribs from my armpits, even soaking through the denim legs of my jeans. Suddenly it seems intolerable to be without my supershades anymore, and I grab the fuckers off the dashboard, harshly.

“Jack, it’s okay.”

“Christ, I feel like such a moron. Where’d you learn to pull all that innocent girly jock shit off?”

“From Liz.”

“Liz—”

“Liz Chaney.”

Oh, I say, and hope that this mention of the name doesn’t send her off into her nutsy never-never land again; but it doesn’t.

She seems okay. Really. Truly.

Well, almost.

But, for a moment, I remember the way she was—before, long, long before, it seems, even though maybe it was just a couple of years ago—how I used to run up to her at the airport, so happy that she was back for a visit. Like she was my bodyguard within the family. With Babe around, I’d stop caring what they fought about.

But remembering too much makes me feel like I might cry. And the truth of the matter is that I’ve already just about blown my manly cookies for the day. Hunched over the wheel of my mother’s new BMW crying, because I almost got a speeding ticket, but didn’t because my big sister saved my ass by bullshitting some cop while I sat there frozen with terror, is not exactly the image I want to present to her—not to Babe, not to myself, or to the world.

I dread this fucking Christmas dinner like I’ve never dreaded any fucking Christmas dinner before—even though they are all pretty gruesome. I want to warn her somehow, but can’t. And I certainly can’t save her from it, any more than I can save my own sad ass, because I don’t know how to start talking about it, where to begin; because the old Babe I used to run to at airports is only here with me in flashes, now, and whatever else she is or will become is stuff I will never, ever know. But she was my friend, my best, best friend, and I miss her. I miss her.

I mutter a couple of swear words and jam keys back into the ignition, peel off the side of the road setting windshield wipers to fastest speed. I’m careful, this time, to stop at all the stop signs and red lights. Even though, with my supershades on, I want to run them all. And if I was some cyborg robot android headhunter sent from the future, and I was lugging around a sawed-off twelve-gauge and an Uzi submachine gun, I would just hide behind the cool, mirrored lenses and run them all down—all the obstructions: vegetable, mineral, human.

*

We pull into the driveway. From the salty iced-paved beginnings I can see that, up near the house, the garage doors are still open, Volvo there but no Saab, which means the old man is not back yet. Long trip for Alka-Seltzer. The trees and bushes are ordered, neatly pruned, dripping water and ice.

“Jack, stop a minute.”

I do, edging the BMW’s rear end out of the street slowly, careful not to get much curbside slush on it. I sit there, letting the soft new engine hum, waiting. She glances at me sideways.

“Look, I—um. I dated this guy for a while, up at State.”

“Yeah?” And I think, Oh great, now she’s going to tell me she’s knocked up or she went and got VD or AIDS. So I don’t look at her, just wait.

“But I stopped seeing him.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Jack, I think I’m queer. Or, like, bisexual, or something.”

“You mean a homo?”

“Yes. Well, not quite. Maybe.”

“Just because you broke up with some jerk?”

“No.”

“Why, then?”

“Because of some stuff, you know, stuff I’m—have been—going through. I mean, I just do.”

Fine, Babe. What am I supposed to say now? See a shrink? Go for it? Just get laid? What I do say comes out of nowhere.

“So you’re a bisexual dyke. So what.”

“Oh shut up, Jack!”

I laugh, automatically shift and the car rolls forward through the smooth blacktop puddles. “Come on, Babe, get real. Knock-knock! This is the world, right? not fantasy land. I mean, I saw you with that guy—”

“Kenny.”

“Right.”

“Okay. But you didn’t see the rest of my life. And, I mean, you don’t know the rest of what it is now—”

We purr into the garage, a perfect fit. Lights blink on; I press the button on the remote control and, behind us, the right-hand door moves quietly down. Without either of us getting out, or even unbuckling a seat belt, she starts to talk, telling me things that, quite frankly, I would rather not hear and certainly will not repeat and that, truth be told, I have kind of blocked out of my consciousness, because who in hell wants to be told that their sister is not just physically damaged, and mentally stuck out there sometimes where the buses don’t run, but a fucking muff diver too?

I do my best to stay where I am, make her think I am listening, really listening. I do my best to make her think that some part of me hears, and understands. But it all really sounds like some kind of sick bullshit to me, and what I really wish is that she’d go see a psychiatrist again and take the right pills or something; because, God knows, I have got other things on my mind, like Christmas dinner, for instance—the catastrophe that awaits us. And I could use a friend right now; I wish the old Babe, protector and ally, was sitting here next to me. So, muttering uh-huhs from time to time, I really just don’t look at her, or say much.

*

Later, I’d keep thinking that if I’d only been able to warn her somehow, like I’d been warning myself all morning and afternoon, things would have turned out differently. We wouldn’t have had all the bullshit we had that day. Which, in some bizarre way, sort of signaled the obvious beginning of things falling apart. Although, if you ask me, things had been falling apart with the whole fucking family, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and their weird little offspring—but without the on-screen laughs—for a pretty long time.

Only, I don’t know how long. Things have to begin somewhere, don’t they? But if you asked me how this all began—this bullshit, I mean, this ruin—I’d say: Maybe it began that Christmas dinner. Or maybe it began when Babe’s plane went down into the Sargasso Sea. Or maybe, just maybe, it happened somewhere long ago, far away. Before my birth. Before any of theirs.

Maybe that’s why I made the call to State. I figured this coach of hers deserved fair warning; to know that it wasn’t Babe fucking up, but the family. Then, too, I needed to talk. I needed a friend.

Christmas Dinner

(
BARBARA
)

We grew up thinking it was all going to be more of what we knew.

By that, I mean the New England style: summers on the Cape, the rest of the seasons spent in a variety of places less rustic. But we were tougher than the others, those pallid rich Northeasterners. We grew up tall and large-boned, like my mother’s ancestors, rugged Scandinavians who’d settled the Midwest, surviving fever, drought, childbirth, locust plagues, and dust storms to do it, distinguished by our large, quite capable hands and an internal equilibrium that consistently defied all of the world’s attempts to ruffle it.

It was a lineage marked by stronger legs than arms. In fact, in the nothing North Dakota town they came to own—through hard work and frugality and a superb business sense, complementing good luck with investments—common wisdom held that once a Johnson began to run, you never would catch him.

Never take a Johnson down.’

That is the way my grandfather put it.

And, in the end, the old bastard did compensate somewhat for ruining the lives of most of his available female descendants, early on: He bestowed his excellent physical genes selectively throughout the family; so that, in the particular modern-day unit of marriage and miscegenation to which I had attached myself, to which I had chained my destiny in a fit and folly of romantic love, my son Jack inherited the long, strong legs and reed-slender chest that, deceptively, contains a fabulous pair of lungs; and my oldest daughter inherited the long, strong legs, and the fabulous lungs; and her broad chest and shoulders and long, strong arms from someone less white.

My father’s stock was different: a line of genteel Eastern bankers. From him, I inherited delicate lips and lashes, and a willingness to be shrewd when circumstances warranted.

All of these qualities can be seen in Jack.

And all of them, too, in my oldest daughter. Except, perhaps, the shrewdness.

But that—that is the luck of the genetic draw.

*

My brothers learned sailing and tennis, graduated from Dartmouth, married decently and went into business. I was the youngest, and spent a somewhat coddled childhood learning a mean game of golf. I believe that, in my spare time, I painted dull still lifes with watercolor and egg tempera, and dreamed of performing heroic deeds. My bedroom walls were lined with newspaper clippings of the athletic exploits of Mildred Didrikson Zaharias, who was my only hero. I followed The Babe’s game closely.

*

At night, I dreamed of love.

The pale, handsome boys I dated failed to move me. My fantasies were filled instead with dark dashing pirates and bronzed sheiks, forbidden foreign warriors—who traveled the high seas in search of beauty and raw gain, instead of a good closing price. These fantasy creatures were violent and passionate men whom only I could move to tenderness.

In waking life I went thrill-seeking: standing at the edge of high cliffs during our school field hikes and closing both eyes to see how far I might sway; hitching up my skirt to climb fences at a zoo, embracing the bars of the leopard cage; diving into frigid ocean waves at Maine beaches in early spring; skipping school one afternoon to watch a building burn down, while firemen rushed in with their shining tools and ropes and the neighborhood ran screaming, and I stood there in the glow of the flame until smoke blackened my dress and my hair dripped sweat.

* * *

On that long, hot day, I became intimate with fire.

It was the subtle blue light at the core of each flame that fascinated me. I’d have liked to hold it; and I would have, but for my hereditary good common sense. Still, it filled me with a rippling, expansive feeling that made me want to laugh and weep. It was, I thought, what they meant when they spoke of being in love.

But how did
they
know, how could they? all of these grownups who would have me marry some straw-colored stockbroker.

And one day, there was Felipe Delgado. Handsome, dark-skinned. Examining me from across the room at a party, with his molten eyes. Then he approached, his smile very white. He was holding a thick book under one arm. Briefly, he made a motion to me of greeting and deference, as if tipping the brim of a great invisible straw hat.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“I study languages.”

“English?”

“No. English I know already. Even though you can’t know everything of a language so large, I know it enough.”

“Okay. What, then?”

“The language of machines.”

“Of machines?” |

“Of machines called computers. There are different kinds. They speak different languages. We create new languages to store in these machines. They speak to us with the words we give them. We translate the
words of problems into their new languages—we give them the problems, you see; and in their new languages they provide us with solutions. In corporate work, one day soon, I guarantee you, any man who doesn’t speak at least one or two of these new languages will be completely out in the cold. Because soon all enterprise will depend on them. And personally, Miss—?”