Up.
Hello, buildings.
Down.
“No! I don’t want to! I’m going, Luke! I don’t want to play with you!”
“Okay,” Luke whispered.
Up. To the blue sky.
Down. To the gray earth.
Byron was off, running out to the sandbox, his face red. He yelled something at Francine. She went over to yell at him.
Hello, branches.
Hello, benches.
Mommy said, Byron has to get his way or he gets angry, but if you let him, then you can’t have fun. But I know how to have fun even if I don’t get my way. So if I play what Byron wants, there’s no more problems, no more yelling, right, Mommy?
No, she said.
Francine slapped Byron and he cried.
“I’ll let him stay in my swing,” Luke called back to Pearl. “He can swing with me.”
“No, honey, he can’t fit in your swing. Francine’s gonna take him home. He’s tired, he needs to nap.”
Francine carried Byron off. Luke could hear him crying even when they got too small to see, even when they disappeared behind the bushes. “I wanna play with Luke!” Byron screamed over and over.
“I’ll see him tomorrow, right, Pearl?” Luke asked.
Sure.
Tomorrow I’ll tell him he has to play some things my way.
DIANE GRABBED the hard cheeks of Eric’s ass and pushed him to her, his thighs strong, flexing against her skin, his penis filling her, his mouth breathing on hers, saying, “You’re so beautiful, you’re so beautiful … ”
“Diane!”
She jerked up from her spread of pleasure and hit her head on the porcelain. “What is it!”
“A call for you.” Peter opened the door of the bathroom and looked in. “Friend of your mother’s. Eileen somebody.”
“Can you bring it in here?”
“It’ll reach?”
“Yes.” She got herself a cigarette immediately. Why is that busybody calling? Did I forget something? Mom’s birthday, the anniversary of Daddy’s death, their anniversary — no.
Peter brought the phone. “Don’t electrocute yourself.”
“Hello?” She began the conversation with innocent curiosity, and found herself in a dark world, inhabited by indistinct shadows and dreadful uncertainties. Eileen was Lily’s best friend. Lily had had a bad cold for two months. Eileen kept urging Lily to go to the doctor. She finally went today. The doctor told Lily she has a heart murmur. They’re going to do a test, where they take a picture of her heart. She might need open-heart surgery. Lily told Eileen she didn’t plan to tell Diane. “Don’t want to worry her,” Eileen quoted Lily as saying.
Even facing death, Lily wanted to be impossible. She knew Eileen would call me. She knew — oh, what’s the point? Mom must be terrified.
Diane got out of the tub, meaning to get dressed before she phoned Lily, but her hand trembled when she reached for the towel. She sat on the toilet seat, pulled a towel down to cover herself, and dialed.
“Hello,” Lily answered, a hello of such despair and terror and weakness that Diane would have known something was wrong even if ignorant.
“Eileen called me, Ma,” Diane said.
“I’m so angry at her! I told her—”
“She had to, Ma. Listen, what did the doctor say?”
“I have a heart murmur!” Lily said as if the diagnosis were a personal affront. “They have to give me a catheterization. My friend Judy had one. You know they’re dangerous? He won’t tell me, of course, what it might be. But this is what they do before you go in for open-heart.”
“But the doctor didn’t say you needed surgery?” Maybe Eileen was exaggerating. Please.
“No, of course, he didn’t say. You know doctors. All he’s thinking about is not getting sued. I told him you’re a lawyer. I didn’t tell him you quit.” She laughed at herself. “I don’t know. I thought maybe he’d take better care of me. He scared me,” Lily said in a funny voice, not one Diane recognized from her mother’s repertoire. No bark, no whine, no sarcasm, no bitterness, no anger. She sounded like a friend. “I didn’t like him,” she added, an afterthought, not important.
“Dr. Shwartz?”
“No! This is a cardiologist that Shwartz sent me to. He’s not qualified for something like this.”
“When’s the—”
“This Friday. That’s what scared me. He’s in a big rush. They don’t rush unless—” She laughed again, only it was mixed with tearfulness.
“I’m coming to Philly, Ma. I’ll leave in—”
“No, no. Eileen’ll go with me. Wait until it’s something—”
“I see, I’m only supposed to come when you’re dying.”
“I hope you will come when I’m dying!” Lily answered, outraged, missing the point as usual. “I expect you to—”
“Ma!” My God, I’m yelling at her. “Ma, I’m coming, okay? There’s nothing for me to—”
“Oh, and I suppose Byron is nothing. You can’t leave him for—”
“I can leave him for two days. In fact, I can leave tonight.”
“At this hour!”
“I’ll take the car. There’ll be no traffic—”
“No, no. There’s no point. You’ll be exhausted when you get here and me — well, I won’t get any sleep tonight. I’ll be up making noise, probably disturb you.”
Diane had to hang up on Lily in order to get going. She had to be rude to get Lily to allow her to be considerate.
Diane explained the situation to Peter in a breathless rush while packing. Diane was glad to go, to do something; idle, she would be tortured by worry.
“What do I tell Byron?” Peter said. What a response. Not, I’m sorry. Can I help? Should I come? Well, Peter hates my mother. She’s just a stupid cartoon to him, a Neil Simon character, something you sneer at from your seat in the theater, someone whom you cry for at the curtain, if the actress is good enough and the playwright sophisticated enough to know the New York audience is full of people with mothers like that, and they don’t want to think thoughts that are too terrible. Shut up, Diane! She’s sick. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
“Tell him Grandma is sick,” she told Peter, “and I’m going to take care of her for a few days. I’ll call him in the morning. If everything goes well Friday, you can both come down for the weekend. She’d love to see Byron.”
The look on Peter’s face! Why, if he were on trial, a jury would hang him for that look. “Um, this weekend is bad—” he started to complain.
“Let’s not worry about it now. Okay? I’m going.”
Once at the door, after kissing a sleeping Byron good-bye, she added something to Peter: “If she’s in real trouble, you’re bringing Byron this weekend.”
“Okay,” he said, chastened. “Give her my love.”
Diane softened, kissed him good-bye. In the parking garage, when she started the car, she thought: I don’t want his help anyway.
NINA FELT something crawl on her. she sat up from her bed of grass and looked away from the trees, the long-haired trees that swayed above her, waving hello—
Who was it? Luke? No sound from his room. She turned on her side and gasped with horror.
Eric was upright in the bed, wide-awake, staring out as if he’d seen a ghost.
“Eric!” she cried out. “What’s wrong?”
Eric’s head moved slowly, a robot activated by her voice. His big face looked at her. “They’re too hard. Luke’s shit is too hard. It’s not just that he’s holding it in. He’s really pushing now, really trying. I mean, after the first couple times, he gets serious and really tries. I’ve looked at them. They’re hard.”
Her heart was still pounding. She coughed, in order to clear out the choking scare, so she could breathe. “Eric, you’re gonna kill yourself. Relax. He’s doing great. You’re doing a great job.”