The bedroom Dana occupied was adjacent to the master bedroom and opposite the john. In the off-season, it belonged to the Rosens’ little girl who, judging from the evidence arrayed around the perimeter of the room, was a child with a scientific bent. On bookshelf and dresser top, end table and vanity was a formidable collection of spiders in jars. The spiders were all currently dead, but this was no indication that they had not been alive and hale when little Dwight (for such was the darling’s name — Dwight Rosen) had incarcerated them and fed them their wingless, legless flies, the withered carcasses of which now littered the bottom of each jar. As a homey touch (or perhaps as further nourishment — who knew the mysterious workings of the scientific mind?) Dwight had further provided a carpet of lettuce for each of her jarred prisoners, which leaves were now wilted, brown, and mildewed. Altogether, her collection was a little unappetizing.
Her room was an airless chamber, a single screened window facing the door, an opposition adequate perhaps for cross ventilation if the door were left ajar, but since Dana and I were naked on little Dwight’s bed, I had not deemed it appropriate to leave the door ajar, or even unlocked. Yes, the pink door was locked, and the flowered window shade was drawn over the screened window, so that the groping and the writhing on the bed was contained within those four walls even as the spiders were contained in their jars, unseen by any eyes save those of the Walt Disney characters who cavorted on the wallpaper, they being only dumb forest animals who could register neither complaint nor surprise.
My mother, while not wishing to aggravate our tenuously resolved Oedipal situation by letting on that she knew Dana and I were, uh, ah, enjoying an, uh, ahem, sexual relationship, had nonetheless collared me in the kitchen on the Friday after my grandfather left for London and informed me that she had been invited to a party down the beach at the Stenquists’ (Erik Stenquist being a closet queen with a wife who was apparently deaf, dumb, and blind) starting at live p. m. and that she’d be there until eight o’clock, at which time she planned to meet my father’s ferry, it being his habit (now that his vacation had ended) to take the six-thirty p. m. boat from Sayville every Friday night, and the eight-ten a. m. back each Monday morning.
“So I’ll be gone from five o’clock to a little after eight o’clock,” my mother said.
I said, “Oh, okay, Mom.”
She looked at me steadily, hazel eyes unwavering, and said, “I’ll be leaving at about ten to five, and your father and I won’t be back until a little after eight.”
“Fine,” I said.
“We’ll have dinner then,” my mother said. “Just some cold cuts, will that be all right?”
“Great,” I said.
“At eight o’clock or a little after,” my mother said. “When your father and I return.”
“Right,” I said, “you’ll be gone from five to eight.”
“Yes, from five o’clock to eight o’clock,” my mother said.
“Okay,” I said.
We nodded at each other like teacher and pupil who had just come through a particularly difficult educational experiment and were now anxious to march off to our just and separate rewards, hers being a few martinis at the Stenquists’, mine being Dana.
It was about seven o’clock, I suppose (I don’t really know because I had taken off my watch and put it on Dwight’s vanity alongside a jar containing a very large black and, I was sure, poisonous and thankfully dead spider) but it was probably around seven or thereabouts because we had come into the bedroom at five-thirty, giving Mom a half-hour’s grace period, and had made fast and furious love, and were now beginning to explore each other again, not truly explore because you cannot explore territories already claimed, but beginning to walk around our acquisitions like proud landholders with pleased smiles and small nods, appreciatively and gratefully, and beginning also to get a little excited in the bargain, all metaphors aside. It was about seven o’clock, then, when I heard footsteps in the hallway outside, and sat straight up in bed, and heard the bathroom door closing across the hall, and heard someone urinating. Dana had clutched the sheet to her naked breasts (it’s true that girls do that, I had never believed it when I saw it on the screen) and had turned to me with her brown eyes wide, neither of us speaking, both of us listening to the interminable stream across the hall behind the closed bathroom door, and then the door opened again, and there were more footsteps, retreating, the floorboards creaking in the old seaside house, and I heard my father’s voice call from the living room, “Dolores?” and hesitate and then call again, “Anybody home?”
I was, by this time, already out of bed and pulling on my blue jeans while Dana fumbled with bra and panties, neither of us speaking, listening for those footsteps that would bring Old Sherlock directly to the spider lab of Dwight Rosen, but hopefully not before we were both properly dressed and admiring all those lovely dead arachnids in their jars. The footsteps instead stopped outside the master bedroom next door. My father hesitated in the corridor again, called “Dolores!” again, and then went into the bedroom. I heard the door whisper shut behind him. I heard the slip bolt being thrown. I looked at Dana. She was dressed now and frantically combing her hair. I heard the telephone being dialed in the bedroom next door, a toll call, judging from the number of times the dial was twirled, and I thought several things in tumbling succession. I thought first what a good thing it was that my father hadn’t allowed Dana and me to share this bedroom next to the master bedroom because the walls were obviously paper-thin and he would have been able to hear every rattle and creak of every spring on Dwight’s narrow bed, and I thought it odd that Dana hadn’t mentioned hearing any of my parents’ own nocturnal action, and suddenly wondered if they still engaged in such action (Oedipal wish), and thought also that my father was probably calling his office with some last-minute instructions, having undoubtedly left some time after lunch to catch an earlier boat than usual, forgetting for the moment that it was now seven o’clock or thereabouts and the office would be closed, forgetting all of these things in the next few moments because that was when my father’s voice cut through the cardboard walls with their Disney characters cavorting, cut through my thoughts, cut through my life and made it abundantly clear that this my America was a phony bitch of a land where anything of worth or value was becoming buried under an overwhelming heap of garbage. All of this my father accomplished in less than twenty sentences.
“Hello,” he said. “Everything all right?”
“I just got here,” he said. “It’s okay, she’s out somewhere.”
“I ache all over,” he said.
“Oh, really,” he said, and chuckled. “That’s very interesting.”
“Stop it,” he said, “you’re giving me a hard-on.”
“Listen,” he said, “I’d better go now.”
“Will I see you Monday?” he said.
“I love you,” he said.
“Goodbye,” he said.
That was how my father honed the steel blade my grandfather had helped to pour and hammer. That was how my father — in a voice strangely unlike his own, coy, flirtatious, arch — convinced me that I would not go back to Yale in the fall, I would no longer use my student deferment as an excuse to avoid confronting the draft, I would instead drop out of school and do whatever I could in protest against this war that seemed to me representative of everything rotten in America, including my father.
I could not look at Dana.
We left little Dwight’s bedroom and walked noisily out of the house, the fucking hypocrite.