Ordinary Love and Good Will (21 page)

By the time we get to the house, Liz and Tom are dressed, the blankets are folded and stacked, and water is boiling on the woodstove. As we step in, stomping snow off our boots and making a flurry, I call out, “Did I tell you the Harrises might come and skate, Liz? I’m sure the pond is frozen all the way to the bottom after this week. Tom, get your skates, son. Time to get some fresh air.” He stands in the middle of the room, gawking at, perhaps, his nemesis.

Nevertheless, he wipes his nose, gets his skates from the skate chest, finds his coat, and Liz, without saying a word, does a surprising and impulsive thing. She steps up to Lydia Harris and kisses her affectionately on the cheek, as if Lydia knows and welcomes all the thoughts we have had about her. And Lydia’s response is intriguing—in the split second between the knowledge that she is about to be kissed by a virtual stranger, and the kiss, she grows a second, cooler exterior, a skin separated from herself by a quarter-inch of airspace, a storm-window skin. The kiss does not seem to
be followed by any discomfort, or even recognition, on Lydia’s part. As for Liz, she glances at me, exhilarated by what she has done. “Yes! Go skating,” she carols. “When you come in, I’ll have some apricot buns. I’ve been longing for some apricot buns!”

The path to the pond is uneven and slippery. The buildings and beds, when we glance back at them, look humble and drab, poor rather than handmade, but the pond glitters invitingly where the wind has blown away the floury dry snow. Tommy’s bragging to Annabel about how we swim in it all summer and skate on it all winter, and it’s full of trout, too, seems the expression of my own thoughts. After all, function is the superior virtue, isn’t it?

Annabel says, “I thought he said it was frozen to the bottom.”

“We aren’t going to fall through.” Tom is a bit scornful.

“Well, where do the trout go? Are they frozen, too?”

“Of course not.” He doesn’t go on, nor does he turn to me for help. He says, “Can you skate?”

“I took lessons in Boston last winter.”

In spite of lessons, the two children are about equal, and in fact have something of the same aggressive style. In no time at all, Annabel has shed her fuchsia coat (dropped it in the middle of the pond, and Lydia has fetched it and folded it neatly on a rock) and is racing Tom back and forth across the ice, two laps, then four, then six. She has as little glide as he does—their legs churn, their arms flail, but they never fall down. They shout at one another, at us, at nothing. Once Annabel simply peels off a scream. Lydia smiles, says, “Isn’t that awful? I mean, it’s only high spirits, but it’s so piercing. Nathan’s brother keeps saying he’s going to get her a summer job as a screamer in horror movies.”

“They have those?”

“Oh, sure. They don’t want the actors to scream and strain their voices. Marcus says she has perfect natural
technique—total relaxation of the vocal chords. I say, Don’t encourage her. But she’s always been a screamer.”

Lydia is in no hurry to skate. She sits across from me on a large rock, looking around or watching Annabel. Every time her eyes come back to her daughter, her expression softens—the sculptured, dignified quality that is her natural demeanor grows momentarily receptive. It happens repeatedly, no matter what else she is doing or discussing. And when Annabel laughs, Lydia smiles. I have to admit that I sort of resent it, as if, in some peculiar way, Annabel were unworthy of such intensity.

“She’s a pretty little girl.”

“Oh, yes. And she knows it, too. I’ve been thinking lately that I made a mistake telling her all these years. My mama never let the word ‘pretty’ cross her lips, and when Annabel was a baby, she told me she was proud of that, proud of the way my sisters and I had so little vanity. But I knew that just because we never heard it didn’t mean we didn’t worry about it. My sister Zuby used to say that we must be awfully homely if even our mama wouldn’t say we were pretty. So Annabel was, and I told her she was, and now she’s very persnickety about what she wears and how her hair looks. I don’t know. It must be different with boys.”

And truly it must be, if Tom, as he is doing now, can wipe the snot off his nose with his glove, look at it, wipe it on his pants without a second thought for the bandana in his pocket.

“Well, actually, we don’t even have a mirror in the house.”

“Are you joking?”

“It isn’t a moral statement of any kind, we’ve just never had one.”

“How do you know what you look like when you go somewhere?”

“We look in a window, or we ask each other. Liz used
to say, before she would go to town, ‘Well, do I look like a person who’s going to be stopped and searched by the welfare department?’ ”

Lydia doesn’t say anything. Will this be what offends her, finally?

I say, “I mean, for us, the point is to stay above a certain disreputable level, not to attain some fashion standard.”

“My mama would love it.” She smiles, this time at me rather than at Annabel.

I say, “Do you want to skate? Don’t you think we should give these kids some competition? Besides, my ass is freezing.”

“You go ahead. I’m not much of an athlete.”

I stand up and shout, “Hey! Let’s play tag! I’ll be it!” I slither onto the ice, find my footing, and go at once for Tom, who is nearer. He almost evades me by stopping suddenly and turning, but I whip around and tag him. He goes for Annabel, then me, then Annabel again. When he touches her she screams, but leaps after him at once, almost catching him. I stand with my back to the pair of them, acting nonchalant. She chases him for a moment, then turns and tags me. Instantly I tag her back, as if we were evenly matched, and she glances up at me, not smiling, her face registering recognition of the antagonism between us. She skates after Tom, at first languidly, then quickly. He stumbles on a nick in the ice and she catches him and tags him. He tries to crawl away and they start laughing. They are children—the telling sign is that touching one another means nothing.

In the woods by the pond, hanging over an old maple stump, is the tractor-tire inner tube we use in the summer. It is partially deflated with the cold, but Tom grabs it and throws it across the ice, at Annabel. As it passes her, she sits in it and slides a foot or two, and then he is upon her, spinning her around and around. She staggers up and then
wrests it away from him. He wipes his nose on his sleeve and churns after her. She pushes the inner tube across the pond, screaming. When he is just behind her, she swings it around and knocks him down with it. Lydia is on her feet at once, but Tom is up, laughing, chasing Annabel screaming across the pond. She is skating fast, her arms swinging. As she twists to look back at him, I see again how beautiful she is—broad shouldered, lithe, naturally strong—and I think, Catch her, catch her, wash her face with snow! I am as hostile and angry as I have been in years. He does not catch her, but she comes to the indistinct edge of the ice, and goes sprawling in the snow.

Once in a while, one is instantly punished. I am punished. She lies still. Under the snow could be rocks, jagged, unyielding. It is hard to remember. Tom is laughing and gasping. Lydia is still sitting down. That anger I felt a second ago is as lost to me, perhaps as fatal to her, as a stone loosed from a slingshot. There is another second, in which the breeze lifts Tommy’s hat and carries it a yard or two across the ice, red on white. And then Lydia and I are kneeling in the snow at the edge of the pond and Annabel is pushing herself out of it with her arms. She is slow. Lydia, across from me, takes the child’s face in her hands. She says, “Playing a little rough, sweetie pie?”

Annabel sobs.

Lydia lowers her voice, to get the girl’s attention. “Does it hurt somewhere? Open your mouth.”

She opens her mouth. There is blood around her teeth.

“Did you hit your teeth on something?”

Annabel sobs. Lydia turns her over, onto her lap. I begin feeling around the body print for stones.

“Annabel, talk to me.”

“I bit my tongue.”

“Did you hit your head on anything?”

“There don’t seem to be any projecting stones.”

Annabel shakes her head. “It’s just my tongue. Don’t let the blood get on my sweatshirt!” This last she cries out in a near panic. I pack together a handful of clean snow. “Put this in your mouth. That will stop the bleeding.” She takes the snow, holds it politely in her hand.

“Put it in your mouth, sweetie,” says Lydia. “He’s right.”

She cries, but she puts it in her mouth.

Fifteen minutes later, as we are climbing the path back to the house, we begin exchanging self-blame. I say, “I shouldn’t have wound them up like that, playing tag.” Lydia says, “I saw the edge of the pond coming. I should have shouted to her.” I say, “I saw they were getting rough, and I should have said something.” Lydia says, “I hate to be the kind of mother who’s always saying be careful and watch out.”

“What would your mama say?”

She laughs. “ ‘Any bones broken?’ and ‘Can she walk on it anyway?’ ”

I laugh.

“I shouldn’t make a story out of Mama, but she’s tough—right, Annabel?” Annabel nods, pacified but shaken. At the house, Liz has whole-wheat buns cooked upside down with dried apricots and maple sugar. Annabel won’t even taste one.

5
.
February

A few days later, it occurs to Liz and me simultaneously that Lydia and Annabel’s visit only seems to have been routine, that we had better discuss it in light of the autumn’s events, which now seem unpleasant but distant. The dread I felt, in particular, of a mysterious but inevitable disintegration, has proved groundless. Doesn’t the Harrises’ visit prove that some sort of assimilation has taken place? Didn’t we demonstrate to Tom through our actions and our words that Lydia and Annabel were like any other friends or acquaintances, perfectly acceptable and welcome, different in no way? After Tom goes to bed, we sit by the stove and catalogue the signs:

“He wasn’t any more shy, even at first, than he is with anyone else.”

“He talked to her.”

“He even tried to impress her. When we were walking down toward the pond, he was talking about fishing.”

“He didn’t get the look, either. That’s what I was afraid of.”

“He played rough with her, but she was up for it. And he didn’t go overboard. When she fell, it sobered him right up, right there.”

“That doesn’t always happen.”

“Their behavior was perfectly reciprocal. He didn’t do anything inappropriate.”

“And at the end he was quite polite to Lydia. I didn’t detect any anxiety or fear of her, or revulsion. When she held out her hand, he simply took it.”

“Well, I never thought he was a dyed-in-the-wool racist. I always thought he was just spouting something he’d heard.” I pause, and Liz says, “I was worried for a while that he somehow got it from us.”

“From your mother?”

Liz rolls her eyes. “He hasn’t seen her since he was two. I’m sure when she was here the last time, she was far too busy deploring our living conditions to bother with his social education. I thought it might be genes or something.” She looks over at the sound of my skeptical sniff and smiles. “Come on. We don’t know every little thing we are communicating. We might think we weren’t racist, but still let something drop.”

“On what occasion? There were never black people in Moreton until now. We don’t have television. We don’t even have a radio or a record player.”

“You know something? Annabel could be the first black person Tommy’s ever seen, except in a magazine.”

“I can’t believe that.” But we sit back and stare at one another, because suddenly our little boy’s life, which we always think of as nestled into ours, even partaking, somehow, of what we did and saw before him, appears to us as it must to him, vast, whole. I say, “It is weird to think that this is all he’s ever known.”

Liz’s glance is sly. “Wasn’t that the point?”

I get up and adjust one of the window panels and take a turn around the room. It was, but when I think of it like this, it seems a little frightening. Liz calmly picks up her knitting, and though I am tempted to divulge my little flutter of panic, this sudden inner vacuum, still narrow as a hair,
but real, I don’t. I say, “Actually, I didn’t find Annabel an especially attractive child.”

“With those eyes? You must be blind!” Liz laughs.

“She has a very sour attitude.” I know I sound harsh. “She thinks it’s her right to be pleased with everything.”

Liz eyes me.

“She just dropped her coat in the middle of the ice and expected Lydia to retrieve it.”

Liz smiles.

“What?”

“Every time she said a word, you scowled. It’s not our business.”

“Most of her words were dissatisfied or unpleasant.”

“She fell down and bit her tongue! She’s seven years old, anyway.”

“I’m glad she’s not our kid.”

“She’s very pretty and graceful. And I bet she’s smart, too, and I don’t believe for a moment what the teacher said last fall about maybe she didn’t understand the word ‘nigger.’ She doesn’t have the easiest life.”

“I would have thought the same thing if she were blonde and blue-eyed.”