Uncertain Ground Read online

  “Emmett!” I was furious with him. He was absolutely too much trouble. I knelt beside him and grabbed both his shoulders.

  With one arm he reached up and pulled me toward him.

  “Leave me alone!” Panic overcame me. I hit his chest with both fists, but he held on.

  “Never kissed you before. …”

  “Let me go!”

  “No.”

  He pulled me so close I could see darker flecks of color in his eyes.

  The heavy yeasty smell of beer flowed all around us. I got an arm free and aimed at his face.

  He caught my hand in mid-air. “Don’t.”

  Raising my head, I saw Luis had walked up behind Emmett and was silently forcing the pole of the umbrella in the sand. Yellow shade flared above us. Emmett let go of me, reached for the thermos, heaved a great sigh, and poured himself some coffee.

  I rolled away from him. I truly hated him at that moment, hated him so much I wanted to cry. At the same time I didn’t want to cry, not in front of Emmett and Luis. I busied myself with my sandals, got them off and still holding onto their straps, ran west down the beach to the little rippling waves of the ocean that flowed everywhere and nowhere.

  Chapter Three

  I kept walking down the beach wishing for Tony Gregory even though it wouldn’t have been any easier to deal with Emmett if he had been there. It would have been worse, lots worse. They would have despised each other on sight. Even so I tried to see him in front of me, blonde, fair as I was and blue-eyed too, we’d joked about kinship. His family was mostly Scandinavian while mine were, as far as anyone had traced them, French followed by generations of Scotch-Irish. When I wrote to him, I could visualize him better. Now, outside, he faded before I could get his face in mind. Why was he so hard to hold onto? I slowed to a walk swinging my sandals, one in each hand, watching the Gulf’s trash wash up. There must have been a storm somewhere. Sargassum littered the shore in steaming rust-colored piles that straggled across the sand and filled the air with the medicinal smell of iodine reminiscent of falls, cuts on knees, and the stinging remedy used by adults all my childhood, of medicine cabinets, doctor’s offices, of scabs and scratches, the unending novelty of one’s own blood flowing and the need to staunch it immediately. Mercurochrome we sometimes called “monkey blood,” but iodine remained iodine, the more painful sovereign remedy.

  A sandpiper zigzagged in front of me scarring the sand as it ran. I hadn’t told Emmett about Tony. Why should I have? He would never have understood me. I didn’t understand my reactions myself. I guess I felt abandoned, loved and lost though not for any particular reason. I’d been the one who had to leave.

  Away at summer school in Colorado for six weeks earlier that summer, I’d fallen in love with Tony Gregory, the guy with two first names, he called himself. My timing was terrible. I’d just finished my freshman year; he was in second year law school and unhappy. Family expectations pushed him. He thought he’d finish even if he hated law school. Just then it seemed that a number of the boys I knew went to school to please someone else. Maybe it was only the time. A lot of fathers came back from military service full of regret about time lost during the war and directed their sons to make something of themselves. Tony said his father was one of those.

  The boys I studied journalism with had made their own choices. Many of them disparaged themselves. “Going to change the world, aren’t we! Make it over. Tell the truth! Free the people!” They grinned mightily and falsely. Just beneath the self-mockery they carried on their crusades, stayed up all night chasing stories, meeting the campus paper’s deadlines. Some worked part-time waiting tables in dorms or sorority houses or in small cafes around the campus, places already dependent on students’ schedules. The Daily Texan was a scaled down version of a big city daily. We were in training.

  “Trade school,” was our name for the journalism program, and most everybody loved it. I wasn’t altogether sold on the program. Sometimes news was immensely important; sometimes it was immensely trivial, and I couldn’t decide if the two balanced. So much of the work was repetitious. How many days of the rest of my life did I want to spend reporting meetings, trying to find fresh angles about annual parades and rewriting other rewrites about the history of campus buildings? Maybe, I told myself, I found it hard to be enthusiastic because I was a novice who was only assigned the easy stuff. If I continued, I might get to do something worthwhile—and I liked the other journalism students. After the paper had been put to bed we sometimes met in a little dark bar near campus for a few beers. Nobody had the money for anything more or the time for a serious hangover.

  Tony had both. He voted for Eisenhower and drank Scotch just as his father did. At the same time he vowed he really wanted to be a chef.

  I couldn’t understand why he didn’t simply go ahead and go to a cooking school. If he couldn’t find one in the U.S. he liked, wasn’t there was one in France? It seemed to me that a twenty-three-year-old boy could choose to go almost any place to study anything. I’d had to persuade my father that, aside from my own lack of interest, girls didn’t necessarily have to study home economics or elementary education, that I could be a reporter.

  Tony only said, “They would never let me do it.”

  “Who has to let you?”

  “My father. Always my father. And my brothers, but they’re secondary. My mother doesn’t give a damn as long as I do what my father wants— My family is a middle-class joke.”

  “My brother doesn’t get along too well with my father either, but he doesn’t want to be anything particular. He just despises school.”

  “Me too— Law school.”

  There was something more I knew. Law, to the Gregorys, was surely a cut above cooking no matter what fancy French schools might be available. To Tony’s people in Omaha, a chef was the guy in the tallest white hat that forked the steaks.

  For using his parents’ money and hating their choice, Tony accused himself of indulging in the luxury of guilt, an odd idea to me. How could guilt be a luxury? It was always available. All I understood was he often drank too much. I began to drink more when I was with him.

  Those six weeks in Colorado I studied history and philosophy; they made me sad because I was realizing once more there was no way I could help change the world entirely. Since the bombs had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I lived under the same cloud of dubious hope as the rest of my friends. Born in peaceful times, we longed for them again, a paradox because none of us wanted to be stuck in the past.

  Tony and I went to the opera in Silver City, to the dog races in Denver, rode the roller coaster that screamed out over a lake in an amusement park, went swimming in mountain lakes, tried the highs and lows of everything. Tony insisted, “Caviar and hot dogs!” It was frantic, exhilarating, and finally frustrating. I kept hoping to find a way to smooth over the edge of desire.

  Tony reserved a motel room the last night I was in Boulder. We sat outside of it in his car and argued. Like most of the girls I knew, I feared pregnancy and had little faith in rubbers. I’d known girls at the university and in Leon High School who disappeared, didn’t come back after Christmas vacation or left abruptly at mid-semester. We knew … all of us did, they were pregnant. In Leon when I was in high school, the school board had ruled against pregnant girls attending as if the mere sight of one might be contaminating.

  Tony and I were as far apart as we could be on the front seat. My backbone rubbed the door handle on my side. He kept saying, “I don’t see why not. We love each other. I want you.”

  “I want you too … but—”

  “What?” He leaned toward me a little and I couldn’t help meeting him in the middle. He’d already loosened my bra when I pulled away and began buttoning my dress. Tony had been initiated in a whorehouse somewhere. How expert he was I could only imagine, however he knew well how to slide zippers down, unbutton the smallest buttons, unhook the tightest hooks. Women’s underclothes, though he liked to complain about vario
us complications, were no mystery to him. He would even hook a bra up in the back if I asked. I didn’t ask that night.

  “I can’t,” I repeated.

  “You want me, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I can’t have you though.”

  Whirling around in my head was the memory of a girl I knew at school packing all her clothes in her parents’ car that spring. She wasn’t showing yet, but we knew she was in trouble. Her parents were in such a hurry to get her away, so frantic about her supposed disgrace, they hadn’t waited long enough to let her slide her clothes on the metal rail hanging over the back seat. All of us who drove back and forth to school had one like it. Everything was slung in a heap under the railing, she got in between her father and mother in front, and they drove off. The white starched net of the petticoats we wore in layers beneath full skirts was so buoyant that hers rose and fell against the closed back windows like foamy waves imprisoned.

  I still wanted Tony Gregory. I wrote him letters full of descriptions of my everyday life. I went here, did this, saw that and at the end of each one I said I missed him. My parents, I reminded him, had insisted I come to Galveston. They wouldn’t send me back to Boulder anytime soon. His letters to me were brief: he was sometimes bitter about our need to live according to others’ rules, and yes, he missed me too, but he had to go to school the rest of the summer. For once he was so sensible I wondered if I loved him more than he loved me?

  I turned to look back at Emmett who was still lying on the beach, his legs straight out in front of him. Beside him Luis was digging in the sand with both hands.

  A fat gray-haired woman holding her skirt up out of the water waded near me. A little boy clinging to her hem in back, began dipping it into the water behind her. She wheeled around.

  “Let go, Jimmy. Here I try to keep dry and you’re getting me all wet.”

  She grabbed up her skirt tighter in one hand and gave the boy the other.

  By the time I’d walked back to Emmett, I saw he was asleep.

  Luis looked up and said, “Don’t worry. He’ll be all right soon.”

  “Has he been drinking all afternoon?”

  “Possibly. I stopped by around three. He was drinking then.”

  I knelt beside him and watched while he traced the outline of a figure in the sand. It was a face of some kind maybe. He’d added some small shells and sargassum all tangled like hair on top.

  “What is this?”

  “Nothing. If I had some plaster, I could make a casting.”

  “What would it look like?”

  “Like it does here only reversed.”

  “A mask then?”

  “Maybe.”

  Some quality in his voice made me study him. Until then I don’t think I’d truly looked at him. He was just another guy Emmett had met in a bar, somebody helpful. Emmett seemed to have helpful friends around, other boys who would see he got home safely. Probably he attracted people who liked to look after others. Luis, when I saw him more clearly, was first of all, a beautiful color, a golden tan. His hair, short as everybody’s, had been sun bleached, brown to almost blonde. He had a long face, a long nose, blue-green eyes. I thought him handsome, though a little odd and, in some undefined way, different. I kept looking at him while I told him we were in Galveston visiting an aunt and uncle. Once anyone began talking to Luis, I learned later, they began telling him things.

  “Emmett’s from Mullin, a little place near Leon where I live. I doubt you’ve ever heard of either of them. They’re just Central Texas towns that exist for the people who live there, for them and their congressman, and…the newspapers if a tornado or a flood comes along.”

  “Oh?”

  “Emmett goes to A&M. I’m at the university … in Austin.”

  He nodded. “I went to art school there.”

  “And now?”

  He was staying with his father that summer. He’d been living in Mexico, in Guanajuato.

  “I don’t know it. I was in Cuernavaca once for a few weeks studying Spanish. It wasn’t long enough to learn much. I’d like to go back.”

  Luis laughed. “At least you’re trying. Most people here don’t.”

  “I know. My father says we are provincial. He hates traveling himself, but he insists that I learn a foreign language.”

  “You like traveling more than he does then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  At twenty I’d been moving most of my life. In forty-two we went with Mother to Florida to join our father. He lived on his post while we shifted from to rent house to rent house. After my fourth school that year, they decided it was going to be a long war. Mother thought we’d be happier back in Nashville where my father had his last job, so we moved to an apartment near grandmother’ house. When the war was over, my parents wanted a change. It was time to try Mother’s state. We’d come to Texas to be the new kids in school again—this time in Leon. All the wandering seemed ordinary to me; staying put was strange. None of my new friends in Leon had ever moved except from one house to another in town and most of them had lived in the same houses all their lives. Still they had wanted to get away to college as much as I had.

  Luis had drawn his knees up to his chin and was staring out toward the Gulf.

  “We should go,” I said.

  “It’s beautiful here in the mornings early. Why don’t you come down?” Luis asked as if he were inviting me to his home.

  I’d never been to the beach early in the morning. When we were living in Florida we were taken late in the afternoons, after two always.

  “On weekdays,” Luis insisted, “it’s almost empty early. People come down from Houston and all the little towns around on weekends. Come Monday.”

  Emmett rolled and yawned. “God, I’m thirsty!”

  I handed him the coffee.

  He frowned at the thermos and put it beside him as if he meant to consider it later.

  “How did you get so far down here?”

  “Caught a ride.”

  “You hitch-hiked?”

  “Naw. Fellows in the bar before brought me.”

  “And left?”

  “I guess.”

  He handed the unopened thermos back to me.

  “Come on, Celia. Don’t be mad.” He stood up, pressed bits of caked sand flaked off his jeans. “I’ll even drive back.” He winked at Luis. “Let’s drink beer again sometime.”

  I collected Emmett’s boots and carried them with me to the car knowing I’d better drive. He could do it; I wouldn’t enjoy riding with him though.

  Bertha was in the kitchen when I came in the side door. Emmett avoided her by going around the house to the front and running upstairs immediately. So I was left to explain to our aunt where I’d been in her car, not that she minded us using it. She’d told us to. But even if we were twenty and both in college, I knew she expected us to account for ourselves. Bertha was nosy but she also truly cared about whatever everyone under her roof was doing. Uncle Mowrey went through a debriefing in the afternoons when he came in. He didn’t say much, silence being his habit, yet he generally had a little news for her, some comment on a person he’d seen or a call he’d received, and on hearing it, she would talk for five minutes or more reviewing first his whole day, then, at greater length, her own.

  Delivering my account, I watched her face carefully. Except for the shape of it and the olive color, she hardly looked kin to the other Chandlers, to Estes, or Mother or Uncle Blanton. It was peculiar how brother and sisters could look so unalike. There was Kenyon, dark-haired like all the Chandlers, while I was decidedly kin to the Hendersons with my light hair and eyes the same blue as my grandmother’s. Bertha’s skin was badly wrinkled. Though smooth on her cheekbones, it fell in little lines under her eyes. Gray already, large bosomed, she was not pretty, nor according to earlier pictures, had she ever been. She was imposing, not dignified or stuffy but strong. With no children of her own, all the Chandlers, I supposed, were her children. The eldest certainly,
Bertha remained the stoutest—she said so herself—and my father said, “the most decorated.” She loved diamonds and wore them sprinkled about like raindrops in pins, a watch, earrings, rings.

  They flashed on her fingers while she was busy picking out bits of shell from a bowl of fresh crabmeat.

  “What was it this time, Celia?”

  “The beach. I left you a note. I went down to get Emmett.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m worried about. What is Emmett drunk on this time?”

  I shifted from one foot to the other before sitting down in the chair across the kitchen table from her. “He’s not terribly drunk. He drank some beer this afternoon.” I dodged her question wondering at the same time why I bothered. Bertha could bear to hear the truth although she wouldn’t like it.

  “He’s going to turn out just like Blanton if we don’t watch him.”

  I’d seen Blanton once at his home in Laredo and three times at our house in Leon, all Thanksgiving visits. Though supposedly alcoholic, I’d never seen him drunk even if both Bertha and my mother vowed he was often. All the Chandler men drank. So did the women, though they drank a lot less. On holidays the men, my father joining them, settled in overstuffed chairs in my parents’ big back bedroom to drink. They said they were staying out of the women’s way in the kitchen. Actually Uncle Blanton and Uncle Estes hardly knew what to do with themselves inside. They talked about politics a little, commented on Southwest Conference football, spoke of livestock, of horses, weather—the long drought especially—the market for cows, calves, and sheep. I would overhear them when I was sent to call them to the table. Ice rattled in their bourbon, and their voices rumbled together slowly like bears’ growling companionably in a nearby cave. Most of the time my father listened. He was an engineer and knew nothing about ranching. It took both uncles a long time to say anything much, yet he liked their talk. Nobody came to the table drunk.

  “Aunt Bertha, do you really think Uncle Blanton drinks too much?”

  “He always has. When he bought land down on the border, he stayed too much alone at first, trying to make a go of it, then he waited too long to marry. We used to hope he’d slack off, and he just grew into it. I see Emmett’s inclined in the same direction.”