"You'd better get ready."
It startles me. Can she know? Can she perceive mental states now that hers is largely gone?
"The beauty parlor isn't open until 9:30," my father says.
"Then we'd better be ready."
My mother has an appointment at her beauty parlor every day of the week. They oblige her there, with, among other services, the application of her lipstick as she likes it, and when she emerges looking like Emmett Kelly with a blue Virginia Graham hairdo, they assure her how good she looks in condescending tones.
"We'll be ready," I say.
"Do you," she says, turning to me, "have a license to meddle?"
This is a bit of the old girl. These vodkas are having a restorative effect.
"Yes," I say.
"It's expired," she says. To my father; "Your son's got a meddling license." She means, I think, to emphasize the your, to saddle him with me, but in missing the emphasis she indicts my sex, she invokes the daughter she never was able to have, and so you cannot know finally if the emphasis is misplaced or simply badly timed. She does this curious emphasis often.
My father and I keep quiet waiting for her little tempest to pass, probably both now doubting the wisdom of allowing her the three towering cocktails. "I know what lips are," she says, grinning, as if to acknowledge she has been naughty in this passing assault, "but what's stick?" Thus she is restored, occupied by lipstick, one of her two or three central preoccupations (the beauty parlor, the high stuff) since her illness set in. In a moment she'll be again deciding I'm handsome beyond all rational measure. By her flare-up, my father is spared my kook speech. When they retire I wander about the house; it is a blend of low ranch and tall Georgian, which means twenty small columns across the broad, split-level front, where once four tall columns would have been. The rooms are museum set pieces, matched collections of antiques assembled by my mother.
In the kitchen I am surprised to find my father back down, having another drink, his face a brick-red hue and his lips aligned in a tall, narrow pursing, as if carefully stacked up for the sake of neatness. I get a beer.
Without turning his head to look at me, he says, "You're not doing anything? Now the lips are pressed out into a grim line, a shade lighter than when they'd been in the warehouse position.
"No, sir. For once you are correct."
He makes no move.
"In fact," I say, "I'm doing less than anything." I have noticed that in my dealings with him I am invariably cast back into an adolescent kind of smartness, and he responds in kind by pretending to hear me out without listening, waiting to tell me where I went wrong.
"You don't need any more beer." In our family, one is never accused of drinking to excess until the accuser is on the floor himself, from where he will utter his sudden call for temperance.
"I'm going to wait up and talk to the yardmen."
He looks at me with true alarm.
"What?"
"Fuck with them."
"Those are good, steady boys."
I go out into my old room, a garage apartment designed to look from the outside like an old, detached Southern kitchen. It is set up for poker now-a beautiful felt table and chips on a lazy Susan and a fully stocked bar. I get a small cooler and pack it with beer and get a canvas deck chair and plan to set up camp for the night on the tennis court. You're not doing anything. I thought, by God, to prove it.
I walk the tennis court, cracking acorns on the deep green composition surface made nearly black by the shadows of the oaks. In the early morning, hours before my father takes my mother to the beauty parlor, but only a bit sooner than she begins to pester him to do so, two black men about fifty years old, whom my father without malice calls The Boys, will arrive to rake the yard. I wish The Boys would sweep the courts as well, sweep these acorns going off like firecrackers out here at three in the morning. I pop, I skid, I skate. I lose track of time, I think-perhaps out of drinking shape without Mary-because it is suddenly dawning and I see The Boys arrive and set up to rake, nearly invisible in their green uniforms in the fog, talking as low and gently as if they were fishing.
As a child I thought The Boys were a constant two men and only now realize that they change over rapidly, supplied by a lawn service with access to an apparently inexhaustible supply of quiet, early-rising blacks. To my father I believe they are a constant team-The Boys.
Suddenly my exact position-as reagent, binding surfactant-in the reaction series of life gets clearer. Since Wallace had echoed Mary, certainly since Tom "accidentally" appeared on my personal bus driver's route in a town of his fond bestial memories, I could tell that the series was self-governing and rapidly moving to inexorable conclusions. But now I thought to look at the business bond by bond-to pull the test tube off my head and see things molecularly, as it were. I watched The Boys. Before my very unscientific eyes they were aligned with all the better fools-James and Ebert, of course, but if they did not suggest Wallace and Napoleon out there in a fog of low wages, I'd be damned, and I thought of Hazel and Bruce, and they, The Boys, were quite likely accomplished actors; they were not distracted by the self-centeredness of the Orphan and the other true fools. These are the thoughts you can have, drunk at Eve in the morning, skating on acorns on your private tennis court.
But I saw that it was data, and it felt like nearly final data. I have seen the better scientists I know-Friedeman can do it--sense magically when enough experimentation has been done, when data are yet an uncollated mess and no rational measure could suggest quitting time. I had that feeling watching The Boys rake in the fog.
I exploded acorns on the way toward them, and one of them saw me and stopped, looking at me as if I were a deer or something not seen in the last twenty years. I held my beer up to him in greeting.
"You guys want a cold one?"
"Naw."
"It's all right."
"Know."
"Yes, it is."
"Say know."
"Really, man. I'm the-"
"Say I know iss all right. Old man himself making is the offer. Talk trash."
"He was?"
He raked a small pile of leaves up.
"In that case, I withdraw the offer."
"Better."
My silly little mood was ruined, but it was good to know you can't rout fifty-year-old men just because other fifty-year-old men call them The Boys. I shook the yardman's hand. He gave me the standard black limp, so limp you don't see how it could be remotely attached to the muscular arm that extends it. I waved over my head to them as I left the yard. They were indifferent.
A little sanity at six in the morning demonstrated by men raking leaves for life-by men in full possession of nothing-jotted down fine in the blurry data column I was filling.
* * *
At ten we sat in the formal dining room at my mother's request and had what she calls brunch. It is no different from breakfast, and the dining room is not used even for holidays now, but for my visits it is brunch in the dining room. Beyond these alterations of decorum, she ignores me.
She is got up-suit, pearl choker, matching shoes and bag-to go to the beauty parlor. Between courses, served from the kitchen by the maid, she asks my father the time.
"Don't ask me again," he finally says. He says this without anger, but it sets her off on a vengeful course anyway.
She looks at me and catches me examining the design in the china. "That china's expensive," she says, looking then directly at my father.