Acts of Love (29 page)

“Yes.”

“I can't believe you did that. Why?”

“Because no one in this family ever wants to face the truth. Now it's here. You can't avoid it anymore.”

“Is that what you think, Sandy?” Ann asked angrily. “That you've captured the truth on this stupid little machine? Is that what they taught you in college? What you've so brilliantly captured is just words. It has nothing to do with the truth.” She thrust the machine back at Sandy. “Here. Take it.”

“You just don't want to hear it,” Sandy said petulantly.

“You're right. I don't.”

“I should have known.”

“Just what is it you are trying to prove?” Ann asked. “What are you always trying to prove?”

 

B
Y THE END OF THE MONTH
, Sandy had used up all the tapes she had bought and had to purchase more. Sometimes she hid the recorder under the table at dinner. Once she tried putting it outside of Jonathon and Estelle's bedroom, but all she got was static. Afternoons were best, when Estelle was alone, talkative and weary and free.

Sandy sat behind her locked bedroom door, earphones on for torturous hours as she transcribed the tapes, labeling and dating them, her typewriter going clack clack clack, filling pages and pages that she planned to study later.

There never seemed to be the time to write to other newspapers, to send out résumés and clips. The papers lay on the floor, neglected and dusty, already yellowing. She used a few of the sheets to wrap the growing stack of cassettes in, and hid the packages in the rear of the closet. It was only when the cash she had saved from her job as a waitress at school ran out that she realized she really would have to take some action. She drove that morning to the
Chronicle,
in the white clapboard building on Main Street.

“I'd like to speak with Ray Stinson, please,” she told his secretary.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No. But I'm sure he'll talk to me.”

The managing editor, listening from his office a few feet away, came out to see who the cocky young woman was. “I'm Ray Stinson,” he said. “Can I help you?”

In fact, Sandy was not cocky, but because she still had no intention of staying in Hardison, much less at the
Chronicle,
she had the temporary confidence of the apathetic. She looked at the secretary, and then back to Stinson. “I'd like to discuss a job with you.”

A week later, after reading her clips and her résumé, Ray Stinson offered Sandy a job on a trial basis and told her to start the next morning. At first she was given assignments that no one else wanted, an open house at the garden club, the high school science fair, and even these came under Stinson's stringent criticism. She was writing too quickly, too thoughtlessly, too sloppily. He had thought she was a serious young woman. Perhaps he had been mistaken? She sat across from him, staring at the floor.

“Let me tell you something,” he added sternly. “If you don't think your work here is important, neither will anyone else. Now get this condescension out of your copy or leave. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she answered glumly.

Though she resented his heavy hand, she knew deep down that he was right. And she found, to her surprise, that the stories themselves became more interesting as she buckled down, began asking more questions, taking more notes. Soon her byline was appearing with some regularity. She worked long days, made friends with a few of her co-workers, and began to drive around Hardison during her off-hours in the used car she had bought with her first two months' salary, discovering streets and corners and people she had never had an excuse to explore before, brushing off the dirt and examining them as if they were artifacts. She no longer taped Jonathon and Estelle quite so often, but she neatly filed away the transcriptions.

On the day, four months later, when she finally moved out to the rented apartment above Riley's liquor store, Jonathon helped her carry the last box to her car. He had never said to her “I'm proud of you,” had never said “I love you.” But as he straightened up after depositing the carton on the back seat, he took her forearm, gave it a quick squeeze—the most explicit physical affection he had ever shown—and disappeared back into the house, where Estelle stood watching from behind the curtain in the living-room window.

 

G
RADUALLY
, Ray Stinson began to give Sandy better assignments—Congressional candidates, a case of corruption in the sanitation department, changes in the zoning laws that affected the local environment. As she progressed, Sandy came to believe that this local news she had secretly disdained was, in fact, often more significant to people's lives than all the reports from abroad, and this fresh sense of import permeated her work. Only occasionally did she wonder whether this theory grew out of the experience of staying and writing in Hardison or was formulated to justify it. Nevertheless, when the paper moved to the Bunker, she was given a prime desk, close to the editor's office. Though a few of the other writers claimed that she was not really that good, and one even floated the rumor that she was sleeping with Stinson, in general she got along well with the others. She had one unfortunate affair with a staff photographer, and after that she kept her romances private. She knew the others talked about her—twenty-five, then thirty, and still not married; in Hardison that was almost news. But she didn't care. When she grew restless one winter, in between men, in between moods, she moved into the house on Kelly Lane. Ray told her that she should look into buying, that it made more sense financially, but she never considered it. This was still just temporary. She rented the house immediately upon seeing it, packed in one morning, and hired the first movers in the phone book. She was not by nature a collector, preferring the sensation of few possessions, and most of those light, movable.

Sometimes, on long, dateless nights, on rainy Sunday afternoons, she would dig out the transcriptions of Jonathon and Estelle from the Moroccan-leather folder she stored them in. She would sit with them spread before her on the coffee table in the living room, paper and pen in hand, moving excerpts here and there, trying to find a pattern, but never succeeding. Like a familiar word repeated and repeated until it has lost all meaning and context, she no longer even remembered what she had meant to find.

Sometimes, too, she listed the changes in Ann and Ted's lives, so much more tangible than the mere incremental alterations in her own: Julia's first day at school, Ali's birth, Ted's new company, all the concrete proof of procession.

 

E
VERY SUMMER
, Ann was overtaken by the desire to have a barbecue, complete with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, patterned paper napkins, colored plastic forks, and neighborhood children scrambling about with ketchup and melted ice cream streaming down their shirts. She plotted it obsessively—how much chicken? how many hot dogs? what pattern napkins? whom to invite?—as she did so many of the rituals that had been only rumors in her own childhood. But her compulsive attention to detail, to the minutiae of what should have been spontaneous, rendered everything slightly askew. There was always something a little too new and shiny and synthetic, and her guests tended to stand around in polite but awkward clusters, unable to relax. Sandy, embarrassed for Ann, did not enjoy these gatherings, and yet she was oddly proud of the effort and always made a rebellious show of having a good time. When she had still not received her summons by mid-August, she began to worry. Finally, it was Ted who called.

“How does this Sunday sound?” he asked.

“Does that give Ann enough time?” Sandy asked doubtfully.

“Well, it's only going to be us this year.”

“What's the matter? She's not sick, is she?”

“Sick?” How many times had he asked her recently if she was all right? She used to say he never asked her anything. Now, of course, she did not answer. “No,” Ted said. “She's fine. Is four o'clock okay?”

Sandy stood in the kitchen, watching Ann squeeze lemon onto the potato salad. “So where are the crowds? How come no starving masses this year?”

“That was always something of a joke, wasn't it? I mean, did any of those people ever invite us back?”

“I thought you loved those big barbecues. They were a part of the summer, like mosquito bites.”

“Things change.” She laughed. “You know, Ted used to bitch for weeks before each one about the cost and the imposition on his precious time. I thought he'd be glad when I told him I didn't want to do it this year.”

“And he wasn't?”

“No.” She smiled strangely. “All the things I used to want that he ridiculed, all the things I don't have the energy for anymore, he suddenly wants. Funny, huh?”

“Like what? Besides barbecues, I mean?” Sandy asked.

Ann shrugged and continued to glance out the window, but she did not see her children, her husband in the yard, only the unlit room on the other side of town, with its neatly hung pants and stacks of tomato soup and perfectly aligned furniture, where Mark Karinski was waiting for her. “I don't know. Nothing.”

Sandy brought the marinated raw chicken out to Ted. “At least she didn't buy you an apron that said Dad,” she said, laughing, as she handed over the platter. She stood with him over the smoky coals, the scent filling their hair, as he began to spear the meat and put it on the grill.

“Is Ann okay?” Sandy asked. “Is there something I should know about?”

He laughed bitterly. “I'm not the one to ask.” There were mornings, afternoons when he called the house three, four times, and never got an answer. “Where were you?” he asked her later. “Out,” she said, and started dinner, or the dishes, or a crossword puzzle.

“What about you?” he asked.

“What about me?”

“Do you want this?” He looked back at the house, surrounded with speckled orange tiger lilies, Julia and Ali a few feet away, sitting in the freshly mowed grass playing cat's cradle, and then back to her.

“No,” she answered seriously.

“You never know what you might like until you try it.”

“Said the spider to the fly. You also don't know what you might be allergic to until you try it.”

“They're often the same thing.”

Ann, who had been watching them from the kitchen window, came out, put the bowl of potato salad on the table, and walked over to where they were standing. “What are you two conspiring about?” she asked.

“Ways to make you happy, dear,” Ted said, and began to baste the chicken with the thick maroon sauce that Ann had perfected years ago. He put his free arm around her and squeezed her waist. Sandy, sitting at the table, looked over at them, their backs to her, his arm around her, hers stiffly by her side, rising slowly, reluctantly, but rising nevertheless, to wrap around him.

The next time she saw them together, three weeks later, they were standing exactly the same way, at Jonathon and Estelle's funeral.

 

S
ANDY SLIPPED HER OLD KEY
into the front-door lock.

Nothing had changed since the morning after the funeral when she and Ann had first come here together. Nothing had moved.

Two light bulbs had blown out, and there were none to replace them with. Jonathon and Estelle's light bulbs would continue to blow out, one by one. She put the two boxes of garbage bags she had brought on the living-room table on top of a stack of stained tabloids. The real estate agent was coming tomorrow. Sandy had been surprised when Ann had not wanted to return with her, had not wanted to keep anything from the house, from them, but when she had tried to probe this unlikely unsentimental turn, she had quickly been rebuffed. “You go.”

She unsealed the box of trash bags, took one out, and went to Jonathon and Estelle's bedroom. She opened the closet door and stared at the jumble within of shifts and shoes and shawls. A month before the accident, Estelle had called her at work at four o'clock and asked her to come over. She said the electricity would be shut off if they didn't pay the bill by five o'clock. Jonathon was at a student's, and Ann wasn't home. Sandy grudgingly went over. Estelle met her at the door with the check. “I don't know what I'd do without you, sugar bum.” She tried to kiss Sandy, but Sandy shied away. “You can't do this all the time,” Sandy scolded. “You just can't do this. Aren't you ever going to learn?” She left with the check in hand. She could not remember now, despite countless attempts, if Estelle had kissed her in the end or not.

She closed the closet door and lay down on their bed.

Once, she had slipped into their room without knocking and happened on Jonathon, sitting by Estelle's side as she lay sprawled across the bed, quietly stroking her hand, caressing each finger as if it were a precious jewel. And with each finger, he told her a different reason why he loved her. “Because when you laugh, you are still the youngest girl in the world to me. Because when we are together, nothing else exists.” Her free hand was resting on the top of his black head as she watched his mouth, waiting for the next words, for the next reason, anxious and greedy and blue.