It Read online

  She would hate herself for these thoughts, these uncharitable thoughts, and promise to do better--to stop drinking these bitter gall-and-wormwood cocktails. Months would go by when she did not think such thoughts. She would think: Maybe all of that is finally past me. I am not that girl of eighteen anymore. I am a woman of thirty-six; the girl who heard the endless click and grate of those driveway stones, the girl who twisted away from Mike Rosenblatt's hand when he tried to comfort her because it was a Jewish hand, was half a life ago. That silly little mermaid is dead. I can forget her now and just be myself. Okay. Good. Great. But then she would be somewhere--at the supermarket, maybe--and she would hear sudden tittering laughter from the next aisle and her back would prickle, her nipples would go hard and hurtful, her hands would tighten on the bar of the shopping cart or just on each other, and she would think: Someone just told someone else that I'm Jewish, that I'm nothing but a bignose mockie kike, that Stanley's nothing but a bignose mockie kike, he's an accountant, sure, Jews are good with numbers, we let them into the country club, we had to, back in 1981 when that bignose mockie gynecologist won his suit, but we laugh at them, we laugh and laugh and laugh. Or she would simply hear the phantom click and grate of stones and think Mermaid! Mermaid!

  Then the hate and shame would come flooding back like a migraine headache and she would despair not only for herself but for the whole human race. Werewolves. The book by Denbrough--the one she had tried to read and then put aside--was about werewolves. Werewolves, shit. What did a man like that know about werewolves?

  Most of the time, however, she felt better than that--felt she was better than that. She loved her man, she loved her house, and she was usually able to love her life and herself. Things were good. They had not always been that way, of course--were things ever? When she accepted Stanley's engagement ring, her parents had been both angry and unhappy. She had met him at a sorority party. He had come over to her school from New York State University, where he was a scholarship student. They had been introduced by a mutual friend, and by the time the evening was over, she suspected that she loved him. By the midterm break, she was sure. When spring came around and Stanley offered her a small diamond ring with a daisy pushed through it, she had accepted it.

  In the end, in spite of their qualms, her parents had accepted it as well. There was little else they could do, although Stanley Uris would soon be sallying forth into a job-market glutted with young accountants--and when he went into that jungle, he would do so with no family finances to backstop him, and with their only daughter as his hostage to fortune. But Patty was twenty-two, a woman now, and would herself soon graduate with a B.A.

  "I'll be supporting that foureyed son of a bitch for the rest of my life," Patty had heard her father say one night. Her mother and father had gone out for dinner, and her father had drunk a little too much.

  "Shh, she'll hear you," Ruth Blum said.

  Patty had lain awake that night until long after midnight, dry-eyed, alternately hot and cold, hating them both. She had spent the next two years trying to get rid of that hate; there was too much hate inside her already. Sometimes when she looked into the mirror she could see the things it was doing to her face, the fine lines it was drawing there. That was a battle she won. Stanley had helped her.

  His own parents had been equally concerned about the marriage. They did not, of course, believe their Stanley was destined for a life of squalor and poverty, but they thought "the kids were being hasty." Donald Uris and Andrea Bertoly had themselves married in their early twenties, but they seemed to have forgotten the fact.

  Only Stanley had seemed sure of himself, confident of the future, unconcerned with the pitfalls their parents saw strewn all about "the kids." And in the end it was his confidence rather than their fears which had been justified. In July of 1972, with the ink barely dry on her diploma, Patty had landed a job teaching shorthand and business English in Traynor, a small town forty miles south of Atlanta. When she thought of how she had come by that job, it always struck her as a little--well, eerie. She had made a list of forty possibles from the ads in the teachers' journals, then had written forty letters over five nights--eight each evening--requesting further information on the job, and an application for each. Twenty-two replies indicated that the positions had been filled. In other cases, a more detailed explanation of the skills needed made it clear she wasn't in the running; applying would only be a waste of her time and theirs. She had finished with a dozen possibles. Each looked as likely as any other. Stanley had come in while she was puzzling over them and wondering if she could possibly manage to fill out a dozen teaching applications without going totally bonkers. He looked at the strew of papers on the table and then tapped the letter from the Traynor Superintendent of Schools, a letter which to her looked no more or less encouraging than any of the others.

  "There," he said.

  She looked up at him, startled by the simple certainty in his voice. "Do you know something about Georgia that I don't?"

  "Nope. Only time I was ever there was at the movies." She looked at him, an eyebrow cocked.

  "Gone with the Wind. Vivien Leigh. Clark Gable. 'I will think about it tomorrow, for tomorrow is anothah day.' Do I sound like I come from the South, Patty?"

  "Yes. South Bronx. If you don't know anything about Georgia and you've never been there, then why--"

  "Because it's right."

  "You can't know that, Stanley."

  "Sure I can," he said simply. "I do." Looking at him, she had seen he wasn't joking: he really meant it. She had felt a ripple of unease go up her back.

  "How do you know?"

  He had been smiling a little. Now the smile faltered, and for a moment he had seemed puzzled. His eyes had darkened, as if he looked inward, consulting some interior device which ticked and whirred correctly but which, ultimately, he understood no more than the average man understands the workings of the watch on his wrist.

  "The turtle couldn't help us," he said suddenly. He said that quite clearly. She heard it. That inward look--that look of surprised musing--was still on his face, and it was starting to scare her.

  "Stanley? What are you talking about? Stanley?"

  He jerked. She had been eating peaches as she went over the applications, and his hand struck the dish. It fell on the floor and broke. His eyes seemed to clear.

  "Oh, shit! I'm sorry."

  "It's all right. Stanley--what were you talking about?"

  "I forget," he said. "But I think we ought to think Georgia, babylove."

  "But--"

  "Trust me," he said, so she did.

  Her interview had gone smashingly. She had known she had the job when she got on the train back to New York. The head of the Business Department had taken an instant liking to Patty, and she to him; she had almost heard the click. The confirming letter had come a week later. The Traynor Consolidated School Department could offer her $9,200 and a probationary contract.

  "You are going to starve," Herbert Blum said when his daughter told him she intended to take the job. "And you will be hot while you starve."

  "Fiddle-dee-dee, Scarlett," Stanley said when she told him what her father had said. She had been furious, near tears, but now she began to giggle, and Stanley swept her into his arms.

  Hot they had been; starved they had not. They were married on August 19th, 1972. Patty Uris had gone to her marriage bed a virgin. She had slipped naked between cool sheets at a resort hotel in the Poconos, her mood turbulent and stormy--lightning-flares of wanting and delicious lust, dark clouds of fright. When Stanley slid into bed beside her, ropy with muscle, his penis an exclamation point rising from gingery pubic hair, she had whispered: "Don't hurt me, dear."

  "I will never hurt you," he said as he took her in his arms, and it was a promise he had kept faithfully until May 28th, 1985--the night of the bath.

  Her teaching had gone well. Stanley got a job driving a bakery truck for one hundred dollars a week. In November of that year, when the
Traynor Flats Shopping Center opened, he got a job with the H & R Block office out there for a hundred and fifty. Their combined income was then $17,000 a year--this seemed a king's ransom to them, in those days when gas sold for thirty-five cents a gallon and a loaf of white bread could be had for a nickel less than that. In March of 1973, with no fuss and no fanfare, Patty Uris had thrown away her birth-control pills.

  In 1975 Stanley quit H & R Block and opened his own business. All four in-laws agreed that this was a foolhardy move. Not that Stanley should not have his own business--God forbid he should not have his own business! But it was too early, all of them agreed, and it put too much of the financial burden on Patty. ("At least until the pisher knocks her up," Herbert Blum told his brother morosely after a night of drinking in the kitchen, "and then I'll be expected to carry them.") The consensus of in-law opinion on the matter was that a man should not even think about going into business for himself until he had reached a more serene and mature age--seventy-eight, say.

  Again, Stanley seemed almost preternaturally confident. He was young, personable, bright, apt. He had made contacts working for Block. All of these things were givens. But he could not have known that Corridor Video, a pioneer in the nascent videotape business, was about to settle on a huge patch of farmed-out land less than ten miles from the suburb to which the Urises had eventually moved in 1979, nor could he have known that Corridor would be in the market for an independent marketing survey less than a year after its move to Traynor. Even if Stan had been privy to some of this information, he surely could not have believed they would give the job to a young, bespectacled Jew who also happened to be a damyankee--a Jew with an easy grin, a hipshot way of walking, a taste for bell-bottomed jeans on his days off, and the last ghosts of his adolescent acne still on his face. Yet they had. They had. And it seemed that Stan had known it all along.

  His work for CV led to an offer of a full-time position with the company--starting salary, $30,000 a year.

  "And that really is only the start," Stanley told Patty in bed that night. "They are going to grow like corn in August, my dear. If no one blows up the world in the next ten years or so, they are going to be right up there on the big board along with Kodak and Sony and RCA."

  "So what are you going to do?" she asked, already knowing.

  "I am going to tell them what a pleasure it was to do business with them," he said, and laughed, and drew her close, and kissed her. Moments later he mounted her, and there were climaxes--one, two, and three, like bright rockets going off in a night sky ... but there was no baby.

  His work with Corridor Video had brought him into contact with some of Atlanta's richest and most powerful men--and they were both astonished to find that these men were mostly okay. In them they found a degree of acceptance and broad-minded kindliness that was almost unknown in the North. Patty remembered Stanley once writing home to his mother and father: The best rich men in America live in Atlanta, Georgia. I am going to help make some of them richer, and they are going to make me richer, and no one is going to own me except my wife, Patricia, and since I already own her, I guess that is safe enough.

  By the time they moved from Traynor, Stanley was incorporated and employed six people. In 1983 their income had entered unknown territory--territory of which Patty had heard only the dimmest rumors. This was the fabled land of SIX FIGURES. And it had all happened with the casual ease of slipping into a pair of sneakers on Saturday morning. This sometimes frightened her. Once she had made an uneasy joke about deals with the devil. Stanley had laughed until he almost choked, but to her it hadn't seemed that funny, and she supposed it never would.

  The turtle couldn't help us.

  Sometimes, for no reason at all, she would wake up with this thought in her mind like the last fragment of an otherwise forgotten dream, and she would turn to Stanley, needing to touch him, needing to make sure he was still there.

  T+was a good life--there was no wild drinking, no outside sex, no drugs, no boredom, no bitter arguments about what to do next. There was only a single cloud. It was her mother who first mentioned the presence of this cloud. That her mother would be the one to finally do so seemed, in retrospect, preordained. It finally came out as a question in one of Ruth Blum's letters. She wrote Patty once a week, and that particular letter had arrived in the early fall of 1979. It came forwarded from the old Traynor address and Patty read it in a living room filled with cardboard liquor-store cartons from which spilled their possessions, looking forlorn and uprooted and dispossessed.

  In most ways it was the usual Ruth Blum Letter from Home: four closely written blue pages, each one headed JUST A NOTE FROM RUTH. Her scrawl was nearly illegible, and Stanley had once complained he could not read a single word his mother-in-law wrote. "Why would you want to?" Patty had responded.

  This one was full of Mom's usual brand of news; for Ruth Blum recollection was a broad delta, spreading out from the moving point of the now in an ever-widening fan of interlocking relationships. Many of the people of whom her mother wrote were beginning to fade in Patty's memory like photographs in an old album, but to Ruth all of them remained fresh. Her concerns for their health and her curiosity about their various doings never seemed to wane, and her prognoses were unfailingly dire. Her father was still having too many stomach-aches. He was sure it was just dyspepsia; the idea that he might have an ulcer, she wrote, would not cross his mind until he actually began coughing up blood and probably not even then. You know your father, dear--he works like a mule, and he also thinks like one sometimes, God should forgive me for saying so. Randi Harlengen had gotten her tubes tied, they took cysts as big as golfballs out of her ovaries, no malignancy, thank God, but twenty-seven ovarian cysts, could you die? It was the water in New York City, she was quite sure of that--the city air was dirty, too, but she was convinced it was the water that really got to you after awhile. It built up deposits inside a person. She doubted if Patty knew how often she had thanked God that "you kids" were out in the country, where both air and water-- but particularly the water--were healthier (to Ruth all of the South, including Atlanta and Birmingham, was the country). Aunt Margaret was feuding with the power company again. Stella Flanagan had gotten married again, some people never learned. Richie Huber had been fired again.

  And in the middle of this chatty--and often catty--out-pouring, in the middle of a paragraph, apropos of nothing which had gone before or which came after, Ruth Blum had casually asked the Dreaded Question: "So when are you and Stan going to make us grandparents? We're all ready to start spoiling him (or her) rotten. And in case you hadn't noticed, Patsy, we're not getting any younger." And then on to the Bruckner girl from down the block who had been sent home from school because she was wearing no bra and a blouse that you could see right through.

  Feeling low and homesick for their old place in Traynor, feeling unsure and more than a little afraid of what might be ahead, Patty had gone into what was to become their bedroom and had lain down upon the mattress (the box spring was still out in the garage, and the mattress, lying all by itself on the big carpetless floor, looked like an artifact cast up on a strange yellow beach). She put her head in her arms and lay there weeping for nearly twenty minutes. She supposed that cry had been coming anyway. Her mother's letter had just brought it on sooner, the way dust hurries the tickle in your nose into a sneeze.

  Stanley wanted kids. She wanted kids. They were as compatible on that subject as they were on their enjoyment of Woody Allen's films, their more or less regular attendance at synagogue, their political leanings, their dislike of marijuana, a hundred other things both great and small. There had been an extra room in the Traynor house, which they had split evenly down the middle. On the left he had a desk for working and a chair for reading; on the right she had a sewing machine and a cardtable where she did jigsaw puzzles. There had been an agreement between them about that room so strong they rarely spoke of it--it was simply there, like their noses or the wedding rings on their left hands. S
omeday that room would belong to Andy or to Jenny. But where was that child? The sewing machine and the baskets of fabric and the cardtable and the desk and the La-Z-Boy all kept their places, seeming each month to solidify their holds on their respective positions in the room and to further establish their legitimacy. So she thought, although she never could quite crystallize the thought; like the word pornographic, it was a concept that danced just beyond her ability to quantify. But she did remember one time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying: Hello, Patty! We are your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood.

  In 1976, three years after she had thrown away the last cycle of Ovral tablets, they saw a doctor named Harkavay in Atlanta. "We want to know if there is something wrong," Stanley said, "and we want to know if we can do anything about it if there is."

  They took the tests. They showed that Stanley's sperm was perky, that Patty's eggs were fertile, that all the channels that were supposed to be open were open.

  Harkavay, who wore no wedding ring and who had the open, pleasant, ruddy face of a college grad student just back from a midterm skiing vacation in Colorado, told them that maybe it was just nerves. He told them that such a problem was by no means uncommon. He told them that there seemed to be a psychological correlative in such cases that was in some ways similar to sexual impotency--the more you wanted to, the less you could. They would have to relax. They ought, if they could, to forget all about procreation when they had sex.

  Stan was grumpy on the way home. Patty asked him why.

  "I never do," he said.