7

       WES

    Don't you just love it when the whole family gets together?  I just love it!

    It is as if she were making a toast.  They all look up, indulgent smiles hiding whatever they might be thinking.  It is evident that there's an agreement to the effect that Janice be allowed her outbursts of romantic mishmosh and sentimental slobberings.  It is touching in a disconcerting sort of way; she is so sincere.  She is alone in that respect.  I used to think it was stupidity, pure and simple, but I've come to regard it as something finer, some sort of innocence that seems to have no source.  Her husband even seems to be vaguely uncomfortable with her, never knowing what to expect and yet never really surprised.  She wanders about, apologizing to anyone who'll listen, for being late.  The baby on her shoulder--Derek or Jimmy, I can never keep them straight--rides like so much dead meat, never moving or looking about, content to let his mother take him anywhere, trusting in her judgement.  The other--Jimmy it must be; the eldest is usually named for the father isn't he?--runs after her, hands grasping for her legs when he is still yards behind.  When she stops, pausing along her rounds to bestow each member of the family with her blessing, he dives, tackling her about the knees.  The legs are testaments to her chosen life; indigo veins in base relief beneath the translucent white skin, ankleless, disappearing at one end into plaid bermuda shorts and penniless loafers at the other.  She tousles his hair absently as she speaks to whomever she has fallen upon.  Somehow I imagine her as a subject from some old Renaissance master:  a madonna, fingers intwined in the dark bangs of her child, face lit by the judicial use of tempera and the eye of God.  There is something in the bovine wistfulness of her downcast eye.  Yes, perhaps Raphael or Bellini.

    Susan regards her with a little sadness, but I cannot say that I have not seen the same look returned.  They pity each other for opposing reasons.  Susan thinks of her as imprisoned by her motherhood, and she thinks of Susan as missing the greatest of opportunities, confused by too many books and magazines into believing the new myth about a woman's place instead of the old.  This, I was told in Introduction to Fiction, is irony.

    The fire is too high.  He fans the smoke away with a paper plate folded over his thumb.  Doug and Eric keep a respectful distance, mugging and laughing into their hands.  Jim rests on his heels only a few feet from the frightful blaze, peeling the outer layers from a piece of some sort of weed.  His thumb nails, wide, blunt, stained, separate the tiny leaves mechanically, flicking them away.  When there is nothing left, he picks another without looking down.  His eyes don't leave the flames.

    Susan's mother's voice can be heard above everything else, Oh, give it here.  I should know better than to ask you to do          Give it here.  Susan, do you think you could cut the rolls?  I know we won't need them for a while, the way your father is going.  Eric.  Eric, you and Doug move Grandpa.  He wants to be under the chestnut          No no, this way!  This way!  Wes, how do you get anything to eat at home?  Is she this bad at home?

    I smile.  There is nothing else to do.

    Susan's Aunt Elvira pats her arm.  They exchange weary, heartfelt smiles.  Oblivious, her mother laughs at her own joke.

    Eric moves the old aluminum chair and stands behind it, unsure if he should help Doug steady the old man.  They descend from the concrete slab slowly, the old man carefully balancing himself between the muscular shoulder of his grandson and the cane he grasps in his left hand.  Doug minces his steps, still resembling a cat, this time one edging his way along a crowded window ledge.  They reach the chair without mishap, no flowerpots spilled, no bones broken.  The old man eases backward slowly, ending in a sudden lurch into the webbing.  A skindiver plunging into the water in slow motion.  His cane stands beside him.

    He tugs at the sweater that has become twisted around him.  His eyes make a single stern glance over the entire group; I cannot help but think that I see an awful contempt there, in those eyes.  It is replaced immediately with his usual visage of oblivious contemplation.  No one else seems to have noticed.  Only Janice has followed the short trek across the yard, but nothing in her faces changes, nothing hinting that she too saw that fleeting slippage of his mask.  I feel I have just witnessed a momentary baring of teeth by a supposedly harmless house pet.  I hear Susan's mother laughing near me, Is he always like this?  He's as bad as your father.  Drifting off like that!

    Wes?  It's Susan.

    Yeah?

    Mom wants to know how many hamburgers you can eat.  She has to get them out of Grandpa's refrigerator.

    Ah, just one, I think.  There's a lot of other stuff.

    She is smiling.  Daydreaming?

    I nod.

    Well, she whispers, try to keep awake for a little while more.  It'll only be a few more hours.  I'll drive first.

    No, I'm not sleepy.  Just thinking.

    About what?

    Oh, nothing.