“Oh, dear…”
“I can squeeze in there and get it out.”
“Are you sure—?”
“Why don’t you all just go downstairs? I can get started on this. It’s got to be neat and clean. It’s a mess now. There’s not too much you have to show me.”
“Well, I suppose…”
“Come on, Mary. Let the boy get to work.”
He went back to the front room and began to push the paper over to one side of the room.
“Bobby, come on back from there. I don’t want you getting in trouble.”
“Momma…”
The door closed:…the boy? Well, he was used to having his age misjudged. (Where do they want me to put this crap!) He turned around and, with a sandal, stepped on something else. He kicked back paper: a kitchen fork.
He put his notebook on the chair Mrs. Richards had set right, and began to fold the wrapping paper to yard-square packets. Out there on the balcony, he could toss it over. Shit-colored angel flakes? And the furniture: crash! No, can’t do that very well. Drag all that junk to the elevator, drop a traveling furnished room to the cellar. Punch around in the basement dark with it? Beating on the wall, thumping on the floor? Not that either. Put it all on one side of the room, sweep and scrub, then all to the other. Burn it in the middle? What does she expect?
At any rate, in ten minutes, half the floor was clear. On the black (with white marbling) vinyl, he’d already uncovered a saucer filmed with dried coffee; Time with a wrinkled cover he recognized from several years back; some paint-crusted rags—
The knock made him jump.
June called, “It’s just me…”
When he opened the door, she stepped in with a bottle of Coke in one hand, in the other a plate with a sandwich. The sandwich had a hole at one side. She thrust them out and said: “Please, don’t say anything about last night, at the bar! Please! Please?”
“I didn’t say anything to your mother.” He took plate and bottle. “I wasn’t going to get you in trouble.”
“They don’t know anything about that…! The paper had the pictures, but they didn’t have my name…though everybody knows it anyway!”
“All right—”
“They looked at them, Mother and Daddy. They looked at them and they didn’t recognize me! Oh, I thought I was going to die…I cried. Afterward. Oh…” She swallowed. “Mother…sent that up to you. She thought you might be hungry. Please don’t say anything?”
“I won’t,” and was annoyed.
“It was like you were playing with me. That was awful!”
He took a drink. “Did you find him, George Harrison?” It was bubbly but tepid.
She whispered, “No…”
“What did you want him for?”
Her totally vulnerable look made him grin.
He put the plate down on the chair, considering whether to accept what so resembled the once rejected; then he took the sandwich and tore through the hole with his teeth. Spam. And mayonnaise. “He was there. You shouldn’t’ve run off. He came out just a minute later.” He swallowed. “Hey, you want a picture of him?”
“Huh?”
“I can get you a picture of him, if you want, not like they had in the newspaper.”
“No. I don’t want a picture of him. What kind of picture?”
“Big full-color poster. Buck naked.”
“No!” She dropped her head. “You are playing with me. I wish you wouldn’t. It’s just awful.”
“Hey, I just…” He looked from sandwich to bottle. He wasn’t hungry, but had eaten in complicity. Now he wished he hadn’t. He said: “If you play by yourself, you’re just going to lose. If I play with you, maybe you’ll…have a chance.”
Her hair swung; she looked up, with a confusion he paid her the compliment of assuming feigned.
“Tomorrow I’ll get you the—”
“You were supposed to wait for me,” Bobby said from the doorway. “Mom said we were supposed to come up here together…Gosh, you almost got this room clean.”
June made shoulder motions which Bobby did not exactly ignore; neither did he respond. Instead, he said, “You got that stuff around your neck. Like this.” He held up his bright wristlet.
“Yeah.” He grinned. “Bet you won’t tell me where you got yours.”
Bobby looked more surprised than he’d expected. “I told Mom and Daddy that I just found them.”
June said, petulantly, “You shouldn’t wear them.”
Bobby put his hands behind his back and humphed, as though this were an exchange from a frequent argument.
“Why shouldn’t he?”
Bobby said, “She thinks terrible things happen if you wear them. She’s scared. She took hers off.”
June glared at him.
“You know what I think?” Bobby said. “I think even worse things happen to people who wear them for a while and then take them off!”
“I didn’t take it off.”
“You did!”
“I didn’t!”
“You did!”
“It wasn’t mine! And you shouldn’t have said you found it. I bet really bad things happen to people who steal them.”
“I didn’t steal it!”
“You did!”
“I didn’t!”
“You did!”
“Oh…!” In sibling frustration she flung her hands out to end the antiphon.
He took another bite of pulpy bread; swallowed it with warm Coke: bad idea. He put both down.
“I’m going back,” Bobby said. “You better come too. We’re supposed to be together.” And marched out the door.
She waited. He watched.
Her hand moved in the side folds of her skirt, started to come up. Then she raised her head.
“Maybe you better—”
“Oh, he’s going to go exploring.” Contempt?
“Why do you want to find…George?”
She blinked. A word lost itself in breath. “I…I have to. I want to!” Her hands tried to raise, each one, in turn, holding the other down. “Do you know him?”
“I’ve seen him.”
For all her light-eyed ash-blondness, her expression was incredibly intense. “You just…live out there?”
“Yeah.” He examined her face. “So far I haven’t needed a…” Intense, but it told him little. “…I haven’t been here anywhere near as long as you have.” He forced his shoulders down; they’d hunched to fend something he had not even consciously acknowledged an attack. “I hope you find him.” It wasn’t an attack; it was just that intensity. “But you’ve got a lot of competition.”
“What…?” Her reaction to his realizing it was to suddenly lose all of it. “What do you want?” She sounded exhausted, looked as if she would repeat it with no voice at all. “Why…did you come here?”
“To clean up…I don’t know why. To play, maybe. Why don’t you let me clean up? You better go back downstairs.” He picked up another paper and folded it, growling and flapping, to manageable size.
“Oh…” And suddenly she seemed just a very young girl again. “You’re just…” She shrugged; and left.
He finished the paper, put the revealed junk in the kitchen, up-righted more furniture, and thought about this family.
They filled his mind while he finally shouldered into the packed room; he reached innumerable decisions about them which he lost to scraping chair legs, collapsing bridge tables, drawers that would not fit in their chiffoniers. One thought, however, remained surfaced for the time it took to move five pieces into the swept front room: Trying to stay sane under that sort of madness drives us nuts. He contemplated writing it in his notebook. But none of the words (and he had taken out his pen) weighed enough to pull his hand to the paper. The thought vanished in the gritting hinges of the writing board to a rolltop desk. Who had stuffed all this junk in here? (Drive? Pressure? Effort?…but was exerting too much of it maneuvering a daybed, on its end, around a bureau.) With slick underarms and gritty neck, he toiled, contemplating hours and wages. But it was difficult to judge slipping time while shuffling and arranging so much hollow dialogue.
When he went out on the balcony, the sky was the color of dark stone. His nasal cavity stung. He thought he saw movement down in the grounds. But when he took the rail, to look over, it was only smoke. And his forearms were sore. He went inside. He ate the rest of the sandwich. He drank the Coke, now flat as well as warm.