Sweet Talk Read online

  “I can’t think of anything to say,” I told my mother the first time she urged me to write to him. He had already been in Turkey for three months. She stood behind me at the heavy library table and smoothed my hair, touched my shoulders. “Tell him about your tap lessons,” she said. “Tell him about ballet.”

  “Dear Dad,” I wrote. “I am taking tap lessons. I am also taking ballet.” I tried to imagine what he looked like. I tried to put a face before my face, but it was gray and featureless, like the face of a statue worn flat by wind and rain. “And I hope you have a Happy Birthday next month,” I concluded, hoping to evade the necessity of writing him again in three weeks.

  • • •

  The autumn I turned twelve, we moved to Fort Niagara, which was the administrative base for the missile sites strung along the Canadian border between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. It was a handsome post, full of oak trees, brick buildings, and history. The French had taken the land from the Indians and built the original fort. The British took the fort from the French, and the Americans took it from the British. My father recounted the battles for us as we drove there along the wide sweep of the Niagara River, past apple orchards and thick pastures. My grandmother sat in the back seat and made a note of each red convertible that passed. I was supposed to be counting the white ones. When we drove through the gate and saw the post for the first time—the expanses of clipped grass, the tall trees, the row of Colonial houses overlooking the river—my grandmother put down her tablet and said, “This is some post.” She looked at my father admiringly, the first indication she had ever given that he might be a good match for my mother after all. She asked to be taken to the far end of the post, where the Old Fort was. It sat on a point of land at the juncture of the lake and river, and looked appropriately warlike, with its moat and tiny gun windows, but it was surprisingly small—a simple square of yellow stone, a modest French château. “Is this all there is?” I said as my grandmother and I posed for pictures on the drawbridge near two soldiers dressed in Revolutionary War costumes. It was hard to imagine that chunks of a vast continent had been won and lost within the confines of a fortress hardly bigger than Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland. Later, as we drove back along the river, my father said in his aphoristic way, “Sometimes the biggest battles are the smallest ones.”

  The week after we settled in our quarters, we made the obligatory trip to the Falls. It was a sultry day—Indian summer—and our eyes began to water as we neared the chemical factories that surrounded the city of Niagara Falls. We stopped for iced tea and my father explained how the glaciers had formed the escarpment through which the Falls had cut a deep gorge. Escarpment—that was the term he used, instead of cliff. It skidded along the roof of his mouth and entered the conversation with a soft explosion.

  We went to the Niagara Falls Museum and examined the containers people had used successfully to go over the Falls early in the twentieth century, when there was a thousand-dollar prize given to survivors. Two were wooden barrels strapped with metal bands. One was a giant rubber ball reinforced with a steel cage. A fourth was a long steel capsule. On the walls were photographs of each survivor and plaques explaining who had been injured and how. The steel capsule was used by a man who had broken every bone in his body. The plaque said that he was in the hospital for twenty-three weeks and then took his capsule around the world on a speaking tour. One day when he was in New Zealand, he slipped on an orange peel, broke his leg, and died of complications.

  We went next to Goat Island and stood on the open bank to watch the leap and dive of the white water. My mother held her handbag close to her breasts. She had a habit of always holding things this way—a stack of dinner plates, the dish towel, some mail she had brought in from the porch; she hunched over slightly, so that her body seemed at once to be protective and protected. “I don’t like the river,” she said. “I think it wants to hypnotize you.” My father put his hands in his pockets to show how at ease he was, and my grandmother went off to buy an ice-cream cone.

  At the observation point, we stood at a metal fence and looked into the frothing water at the bottom of the gorge. We watched bits and pieces of rainbows appear and vanish in the sunlight that was refracted off the water through the mist. My father pointed to a black shape in the rapids above the Horseshoe Falls. “That’s a river barge,” he said. He lowered his voice so that he could be heard under the roar of the water. “A long time ago, there were two men standing on that barge waiting to see whether in the next moment of their lives they would go over.”

  He told us the story of the barge then—how it had broken loose from a tug near Buffalo and floated downriver, gathering speed. The two men tore at the air, waved and shouted to people on shore, but the barge entered the rapids. They bumped around over the rocks, and the white water rose in the air. One man—“He was the thinking man,” said my father—thought they might be able to wedge the barge among the rocks if they allowed the hull to fill with water. They came closer to the Falls—four hundred yards, three hundred—before the barge jerked broadside and stopped. They were there all afternoon and night, listening to the sound of the water pounding into the boulders at the bottom of the gorge. The next morning they were rescued, and one of the men, the thinking man, told the newspapers that he had spent the night playing poker in his head. He played all the hands, and he bluffed himself. He drew to inside straights. If the barge had torn loose from the rocks in the night, he was going to go over the Falls saying, “Five-card draw, jacks or better to open.” The other man sat on the barge, his arms clasped around his knees, and watched the mist blow back from the edge of the Falls in the moonlight. He could not speak.

  “The scream of the water entered his body,” said my father. He paused to let us think about that.

  “Well, what does that mean?” my grandmother said at last.

  My father rested his arms on the fence and gazed pleasantly at the Falls. “He went insane.”

  The river fascinated me. I often stood between the yellow curtains of my bedroom and looked down upon it and thought about how deep and swift it was, how black under the glittering surface. The newspaper carried stories about people who jumped over the Falls, fourteen miles upriver from our house. I thought of their bodies pushed along the soft silt of the bottom, tumbling silently, huddled in upon themselves like fetuses—jilted brides, unemployed factory workers, old people who did not want to go to rest homes, teenagers who got bad grades, young women who fell in love with married men. They floated invisibly past my bedroom window, out into the lake.

  That winter, I thought I was going to die. I thought I had cancer of the breasts. My mother had explained to me about menstruation, she had given me a book about the reproductive systems of men and women, but she had not told me about breasts and how they begin as invisible lumps that become tender and sore.

  I thought the soreness had begun in a phys. ed. class one day in December when I was hit in the chest with a basketball. I didn’t worry about it, and it went away by New Year’s. In January, I found a pamphlet at the bus stop. I was stamping my feet in the cold, looking down at my boots, when I saw the headline—CANCER: SEVEN WARNING SIGNALS. When I got home, I went into the bathroom and undressed. I examined myself for enlarged moles and small wounds that wouldn’t heal. I was systematic. I sat on the edge of the tub with the pamphlet by my side and began with my toenails, looking under the tips of them. I felt my soles, arches, ankles. I worked my way up my body and then I felt the soreness again, around both nipples. At dinner that night I didn’t say anything all through the meal. In bed I slept on my back, with my arms stiff against my sides.

  The next Saturday was the day my father came home late for lunch. The squash sat on the back of the stove and turned to ocher soup. The chicken fell away from the bones. After lunch he went into the living room and drank scotch and read a book. When I came down for supper, he was still sitting there, and he told my mother he would eat later. My grandmother, my mother, and I
ate silently at the kitchen table. I took a long bath. I scrubbed my chest hard.

  I went straight to my bedroom, and after a while my mother came upstairs and said, “What’s wrong?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She stood in front of me with her hands clasped in front of her. She seemed to lean toward her own hands. “But you’ve been acting, you know”—and here she laughed self-consciously, as she used the forbidden phrase—“you know, you’ve been acting different. You were so quiet today.”

  I went to my chest of drawers and took the pamphlet out from under a stack of folded underpants and gave it to her.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “I think I have Number Four,” I said.

  She must have known immediately what the problem was, but she didn’t smile. She asked me to raise my nightgown and she examined my chest, pressing firmly, as if she were a doctor. I told her about the soreness. “Here?” she said. “And here? What about here, too?” She told me I was beginning to “develop.” I knew what she meant, but I wanted her to be precise.

  “You’re getting breasts,” she said.

  “But I don’t see anything.”

  “You will.”

  “You never told me it would hurt.”

  “Oh, dear. I just forgot. When you’re grown up you just forget what it was like.”

  I asked her whether, just to be safe, I could see a doctor. She said that of course I could, and I felt better, as if I had had a disease and already been cured. As she was leaving the room, I said, “Do you think I need a bra?” She smiled. I went to sleep watching the snow fall past the window. I had my hands cupped over my new breasts.

  When I awoke, I did not recognize the window. The snow had stopped and moonlight slanted through the glass. I could not make out the words, but I heard my father’s voice filling up the house. I tiptoed down the back staircase that led to the kitchen and stood in the slice of shadow near the doorjamb. My grandmother was telling my mother to pack her bags. He was a degenerate, she said—she had always seen that in him. My mother said, “Why, Zachary, why are you doing this?”

  “Just go pack your bags,” my grandmother said. “I’ll get the child.”

  My father said conversationally, tensely, “Do I have to break your arms?”

  I leaned into the light. He was holding on to a bottle of scotch with one hand, and my mother was trying to pull it away with both of hers. He jerked his arm back and forth, so that she was drawn into a little dance, back and forth across the linoleum in front of him.

  “The Lord knows the way of righteousness,” said my grandmother.

  “Please,” said my mother. “Please, please.”

  “And the way of the ungodly shall perish,” said my grandmother.

  “Whose house is this?” said my father. His voice exploded. He snapped his arm back, trying to take the bottle from my mother in one powerful gesture. It smashed against the wall, and I stepped into the kitchen. The white light from the ceiling fixture burned across the smooth surfaces of the refrigerator, the stove, the white Formica countertops. It was as if an atom had been smashed somewhere and a wave of radiation was rolling through the kitchen. I looked him in the eye and waited for him to speak. I sensed my mother and grandmother on either side of me, in petrified postures. At last, he said, “Well.” His voice cracked. The word split in two. “Wel-el.” He said it again. His face took on a flatness.

  “I am going back to bed,” I said. I went up the narrow steps, and he followed me. My mother and grandmother came along behind, whispering. He tucked in the covers, and sat on the edge of the bed, watching me. My mother and grandmother stood stiff against the door. “I am sorry I woke you up,” he said finally, and his voice was deep and soothing. The two women watched him go down the hall, and when I heard his steps on the front staircase I rolled over and put my face in the pillow. I heard them turn off the lights and say good-night to me. I heard them go to their bedrooms. I lay there for a long time, listening for a sound downstairs, and then it came—the sound of the front door closing.

  I went downstairs and put on my hat, coat, boots. I followed his footsteps in the snow, down the front walk, and across the road to the riverbank. He did not seem surprised to see me next to him. We stood side by side, hands in our pockets, breathing frost into the air. The river was filled from shore to shore with white heaps of ice, which cast blue shadows in the moonlight.

  “This is the edge of America,” he said, in a tone that seemed to answer a question I had just asked. There was a creak and crunch of ice as two floes below us scraped each other and jammed against the bank.

  “You knew all week, didn’t you? Your mother and your grandmother didn’t know, but I knew that you could be counted on to know.”

  I hadn’t known until just then, but I guessed the unspeakable thing—that his career was falling apart—and I knew. I nodded. Years later, my mother told me what she had learned about the incident, not from him but from another Army wife. He had called a general a son of a bitch. That was all. I never knew what the issue was or whether he had been right or wrong. Whether the defense of the United States of America had been at stake, or merely the pot in a card game. I didn’t even know whether he had called the general a son of a bitch to his face or simply been overheard in an unguarded moment. I only knew that he had been given a 7 instead of a 9 on his Efficiency Report and then passed over for promotion. But that night I nodded, not knowing the cause but knowing the consequences, as we stood on the riverbank above the moonlit ice. “I am looking at that thin beautiful line of Canada,” he said. “I think I will go for a walk.”

  “No,” I said. I said it again. “No.” I wanted to remember later that I had told him not to go.

  “How long do you think it would take to go over and back?” he said.

  “Two hours.”

  He rocked back and forth in his boots, looked up at the moon, then down at the river. I did not say anything.

  He started down the bank, sideways, taking long, graceful sliding steps, which threw little puffs of snow in the air. He took his hands from his pockets and hopped from the bank to the ice. He tested his weight against the weight of the ice, flexing his knees. I watched him walk a few yards from the shore and then I saw him rise in the air, his long legs scissoring the moonlight, as he crossed from the edge of one floe to the next. He turned and waved to me, one hand making a slow arc.

  I could have said anything. I could have said “Come back” or “I love you.” Instead, I called after him, “Be sure and write!” The last thing I heard, long after I had lost sight of him far out on the river, was the sound of his laugh splitting the cold air.

  In the spring he resigned his commission and we went back to Ohio. He used his savings to invest in a chain of hardware stores with my uncle. My uncle arranged the contracts with builders and plumbers, and supervised the employees. My father controlled the inventory and handled the books. He had been a logistics officer, and all the skills he might have used in supervising the movement of land, air, and sea cargoes, or in calculating the disposition of several billion dollars’ worth of military supplies, were instead brought to bear on the deployment of nuts and bolts, plumbers’ joints and nipples, No. 2 pine, Con-Tact paper, acrylic paint, caulking guns, and rubber dishpans. He learned a new vocabulary—traffic builders, margins, end-cap displays, perfboard merchandisers, seasonal impulse items—and spoke it with the ostentation and faint amusement of a man who has just mastered a foreign language.

  “But what I really want to know, Mr. Jenkins,” I heard him tell a man on the telephone one day, “is why you think the Triple Gripper Vegetable Ripper would make a good loss-leader item in mid-winter.” He had been in the hardlines industry, as it was called, for six months, and I was making my first visit to his office, and then only because my mother had sent me there on the pretext of taking him a midmorning snack during a busy Saturday. I was reluctant to confront him in his civilian role, afraid I would find him s
omehow diminished. In fact, although he looked incongruous among the reds, yellows, and blues that the previous owner had used to decorate the office, he sounded much like the man who had taught me to speak in complete sentences.

  “Mr. Jenkins, I am not asking for a discourse on coleslaw.”

  When he hung up, he winked at me and said, “Your father is about to become the emperor of the building-and-housewares trade in Killbuck, Ohio.”

  I nodded and took a seat in a red-and-blue chair.

  Then he looked at his hands spread upon the spotless ink blotter and said, “Of course, you know that I do not give a damn about the Triple Gripper Vegetable Ripper.”

  I had skipped a grade and entered high school. I saw less and less of him, because I ate dinner early so that I could go to play rehearsals, basketball games, dances. In the evenings he sat in a green chair and smoked cigarettes, drank scotch, read books—the same kinds of books, year after year. They were all about Eskimos and Arctic explorations—an interest he had developed during his tour in Greenland. Sometimes, when I came in late and was in the kitchen making a snack, I watched him through the doorway. Often he looked away from the book and gazed toward the window. He would strike a match and let it burn to his thumb and fingertip, then wave it out. He would raise the glass but not drink from it. I think he must have imagined himself to be in the Arctic during those moments, a warrior tracking across the ice for bear or seal. Sometimes he was waiting for me to join him. He wanted to tell me about the techniques the Eskimos had developed for survival, the way they stitched up skins to make them watertight vessels. He became obsessive on the subject of meat. The Eskimo diet was nearly all protein. “Eat meat,” he said. Two professors at Columbia had tested the value of the Eskimo diet by eating nothing but caribou for a year and claimed they were healthier at the end of the experiment than they had been before.