Ordinary People by Judith Guest
“Looks like you’ve got company.”
She gets out of the car the instant he pulls it to the curb. He reads in the light from the street lamp the car’s Ohio license plates.
“Is it your father?”
“No,” she says. “Not my father.”
The porch light is on. The door opens as they come up the walk.
“Hi, honey.” Her mother stands in the doorway. “You remember Mr. Ferrier, don’t you?”
The man is light-haired and heavy-set, with a rough, outdoor look about him. He reaches out to take Conrad’s hand, smiling broadly.
“Jen, you’re prettier than ever. Nice to meet you, Conrad. Jarrett, you say? Any relation to the Jarretts who own the drugstores in Akron?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He smiles at the man. He always admires these take-charge guys, they make awkward situations, like meeting people, fast and simple. He glances at Jeannine. She is not smiling.
Mrs. Pratt says, “Paul and I were thinking about going to get a quick bite to eat. Honey, would you mind keeping an eye on Mike?”
“I don’t know,” Jeannine says stiffly. “We were going to the show.”
Her mother laughs nervously. “Honey, Paul’s on a business trip. He’s only here for tonight. He’s leaving tomorrow for Minneapolis.”
“I’ll bring her back early, Mother,” the man says, winking at Conrad. “Don’t worry.”
“It’s up to Con.”
“I don’t mind,” he says. He looks swiftly from mother to daughter.
“Good, then,” Paul says. He gathers Mrs. Pratt’s coat from the arm of a chair. “See you later. See you, tiger.” He reaches around the couch to ruffle Mike’s hair, and they are gone, out the door. It slams behind them.
Mike peers over the back of the couch. “Can we have popcorn tonight? Mom said.”
Jeannine doesn’t answer; she stands, staring at the television screen, her hands at her sides, lips pressed tightly together.
Conrad waits, feeling awkward, as if he has come in on a movie in the middle. He peels out of his jacket and drops it on a chair. “Let’s make popcorn,” he says.
She looks at him. “I’ll make it, you stay here. Mike, turn down the TV. It’s too loud.”
She disappears into the kitchen and Conrad sits beside Mike on the couch.
“What’re you watching?”
“Nothin’. Friday night stinks. Hey, you wanna hear me play the guitar?”
“Hey, yeah. When did you start?”
“Couple weeks ago. Mom bought me a guitar. She says if I do good, she’ll buy me a better one for my birthday.”
He listens to the chords: C and G, D and A. E minor. A minor. After each chord change, Mike looks up, expectantly.
“Fantastic.” He rewards him. “Terrific.”
“Nah. But I don’t think it’ll take me long to get good, do you?”
“Nope. Anyway, you got time. You’ve got your whole life, right?”
Mike hands him the guitar. “Now you play something,” he orders.
He entertains him with a Simon and Garfunkel tune he still remembers, then some James Taylor, John Denver, a little Eric Clapton, for good measure.
“Hey, you’re really good, you know?”
Way to go Jarrett can’t resist can you? You sure can impress the hell out of those eleven-year-olds.
He hands the guitar back. “It’s not hard,” he says. “You keep working at it. You’ll be able to do it in a while.”
In the kitchen, a cupboard door bangs.
“I’ll go check on the popcorn,” he says.
She has her back to him, all business.
“Jen, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Never mind. I’m acting dopey tonight. Just forget it, ignore it, okay?”
“Okay,” he says. “He seemed like a nice enough guy to me.”
“Well, he’s not!” she snaps. “A man who dates a married woman, in my opinion, is not a nice guy.”
“I thought your parents were divorced.”
“They are! Now they are! They weren’t before he came along. He was a friend of my father’s—” She stops abruptly. “I’m sorry, this is all very boring for you.”
“I’m not bored.”
“Well, you should be. I am. And I don’t like acting like this over it. And especially I don’t like it, in front of you.”
“Why, in front of me?”
He moves across the kitchen, toward her, and she quickly turns her head away. She is crying. “Oh, damn!” she says, “I’m sorry, I can’t help it, oh, damn.”
He puts his arms around her. “It’s all right,” he soothes. “It’ll work out all right.”
“I don’t think so.” Her voice is husky. “I kept hoping something would happen, I kept thinking they would decide to get back together, and I know, I know that’s just stupid! It’s stupid even to think about it! They don’t love each other. They just don’t and that’s that, so why do I make such a big deal of it?” She pulls in her breath, and her arms are around his waist, her head on his chest. He stands, holding her; tests the feeling of someone leaning on him, looking to him for support. He feels as if he could stand here holding her forever. Her lashes are wet, golden in the harsh overhead light. He lifts her chin with his hand and kisses her. Her face is tear-streaked, her mouth loose under his, turned slightly down. He has never felt so strong, so needed.
25
Audrey pours him a cup of coffee.
“Not much to celebrate with, is it?” She smiles at him. “Ward’s going to stop for beer on his way back. He and Beth went riding. He’s been dying to show her that horse.”
He leans back, relaxed. “That’s okay, I can wait. I’ll just sail along on this high for a while.”
“Seventy-one, that’s really good, isn’t it? I’m not much of a golfer.”
“It’s the best I’ll do in this thing, I’m sure. I was playing over my head today. God, it was beautiful out there, too. Summer comes early around here, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, no, take my word, Cal. This isn’t summer ! Summer is absolutely unbearable! ”
“Where are the boys?” he asks.
“They’re right outside. In the pool.”
“Gee, they look great. They’re getting so big, I hardly recognized them.”
“I know. I can almost see them growing myself.”
Their two sons, Charlie and Kerry, are ten and seven, now. Lively and wild, streaking through the house, snapping towels at each other’s bottoms and thighs. They are built like Ward, plump and square, and they are large for their ages. Blond, with Audrey’s wide blue eyes.
“Charlie’s such a daredevil,” she says. “He wants to do everything Ward does, and now. Kerry’s more cautious.”
Like his own. Buck was the one he had to watch. Conrad had all the common sense that his children, together, were allotted.
She puts a bowl of fruit on the table, and sits down across from him.
“How is Con?” she asks.
“Pretty good.”
“I thought he must be. Ellen writes, but she doesn’t tell me much. Her letters are: ‘Hi, how are you, how are things? We’re fine, everything’s fine.’ Not too informative. And I tried to talk to Beth last night. She made me feel like it was off limits, sort of. Then I started to worry a little.”
“No, he’s fine.” A lot of subjects are becoming off limits, these days. On the flight down here, he had attempted a discussion of their summer plans. Would she like to go to London? Dubrovnik? Did she have something else in mind? She met his questions with polite indifference. Whatever he would like to do was fine with her. He took it as delayed punishment for Christmas. Okay, fair enough. But his try for a talk about the conversation he had with Ray in the bar was greeted with stony silence. She definitely did not want to hear any of that. She did not want to explain what she had meant in her talk with Nancy.
“If you don’t know, Cal, it’s hopeless for me to try to tell you.”
And she had twisted toward him in the seat, saying, “Please! Can’t we just go and have a good time for these few days? Is that what you got me up here for, so you could make me say what you want me to say? Please, let’s just not have any big discussions, let’s just relax and have fun for a change.”
So, okay, he blamed himself. He had come on too strong, maybe. He would relax. He would have fun. He would quit nagging her to confide in him.
“You’re always so sincere, ” she said bitterly, “and so pushy.”
But it surprises him that she would be as reserved with Audrey. She likes Audrey. And it was an honest question. An honest interest, not like Marty Genthe’s. Why duck it? He is in the process of making a discovery: that he never knows how to read her, and she offers him no clues. There are fewer and fewer openings into the vast obscurity of her nature. He is on the outside, looking in, all the time. Has he always been?
“I know,” Audrey says, “that you have to be careful with Beth. I mean, emotion is her enemy. She wants everything to go smoothly, to go right. You know. The way she’s planned it.”
Is it that obvious? Is it even true? He remembers Carole Lazenby’s words at lunch that day. “She’s a perfectionist.... She never lets herself get trapped ...” Oh God, that is not true, not true at all, once she was trapped and she knew it. She knew it, then. A night in August, hot and sticky. She had gone out for a walk. Alone. He sat, alone, in the living room, thinking about the set of her shoulders as she walked away from the house; she had looked so small, so sad. And he had gotten up, gone after her, found her in the back yard, weeping, and trying not to weep. Those dry, tight sobs. It Was the only time he saw her cry. She had not cried at the funeral. Not at all. He had cried. Howard and Ellen had cried. But she and Con had been stony and calm throughout. The scene in the garden had come later, much later. After Con. After the other thing. She had crouched on the ground with him beside her, crying over and over, “How did this happen? How did it happen?” and nothing he said could reach her. She was grieving. He had thought it a good thing. At last. She had not been able to, before. Now she could.
They had neither of them cried that night on the dock. Too awesome, too catastrophic for tears. That murderous, lead-colored moon. The sky, wispy with cloud-strings. The black water all around them, indistinguishable from the black sky. The people who didn’t know who they were, only that something terrible had happened: “Those kids never should have been out there without power.” A man next to him had answered, “Doesn’t make any difference. The lake whips up like that and it doesn’t make any difference, power or not.” And the radioed message from the cruiser: “We found her, sir. She’s dismasted. Only one on board. Sorry.”
“They’ll find him,” she had said, gripping his arm. “They’ll find them both.” Her hand had felt small and childlike in his. What had it been like out there? he had often wondered. Impressive. Enough to rob them of happiness, of security, of the easy peace of mind that is nothing but lucky accident. Enough to put Con in the hospital for eight months. They had not found them both. They had not been able to find Buck for two days.
Morbid thoughts. He looks across the table at Audrey, who is frowning slightly at him.
“Is something wrong, Cal? I mean, something else?”
“No,” he says. “What could be wrong? Here I sit with my lovely sister-in-law, a seventy-one under my belt, on the way to winning the first tournament of my career, what could be wrong?”
A car has pulled up in the drive, and Ward’s voice, booming through the door, greets him: “Hey, you big-city dude, how’d you make out?”
“I made out great!” he says.
“What did you shoot?”
She follows Ward into the kitchen, looking like a sixteen-year-old, in jeans and a red-checked shirt, her hair in pigtails.
“Seventy-one.” Audrey says.
“Seventy-one! Oh, Cal, that’s marvelous! That’s just great! Oh, you are going to win it this year, you really are!”
“Hey,” he says, “you’ll jinx me.”
“Nobody did better, did they?”
“Not today. Still two days to go, though.”
Ward sets down the case of beer in the middle of the kitchen. “What you need,” he says, “is an early ride tomorrow, to set you up.”
He laughs, looking at Beth. Her eyes are alive, her cheeks burned from the sun. She is freeing her hair from the braids, tossing it back over her shoulders.
“Listen, I had her on the biggest damn horse you ever saw today, and she was beautiful! She’s got great hands—”
“Oh, shut up, Ward!” She looks at him, laughing.
“Buy her a big Appaloosa, keep it in your back yard over there in leafy Lake Forest—”
“Why is it that Texans always confuse ‘big’ with ‘best’?” Cal teases. “Just like that crazy airport, Jesus, I thought O’Hare was bad!”
“Whaddya mean, that’s a great airport! It’s the ultimate! Ten thousand acres of concrete!”
“And ask a security guard when the baggage is, and he tells you, ‘I have no idea.’ ”
They all laugh.
“Well, we got a few problems to iron out, yet,” Ward says. He has turned, over the past five years, into a native Texan, with the drawl, the handlebar mustache, the hat, the boots, the works. He does not look like a computer-company executive, but that is what he is. The image he prefers to project, however, is pure cowboy.
“Hey, let’s break out the Coors, we’ll celebrate the company, and the beautiful day, and a big seventy-one tomorrow!”
“Little seventy-one,” Beth corrects him. “What are we doing for dinner tonight? I’m starved!”
“Let’s just throw some steaks on the grill, how’s that? Aud can whip up a salad, we’ll be in business.” He ruffles his sister’s hair affectionately. “Hey, I’m glad to see you so cheerful, Sissie. Things going good for you again, huh?”
A pause; a half-step off the beat. She does not look at Cal. “Yes,” she says. “Things are going fine.”
“Good. I’m glad you could come. Mom and Dad wrote and said Con was staying with them, huh?”
- “Yes,” she says.
“So, what’s the status? How’s he doing? Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine, Ward.”
He does not catch the slight frown.
“He seeing anybody? I hear you do that, sometimes. You know, like an outpatient sort of thing.”
“He’s seeing a doctor in Evanston,” Cal says. “Twice a week. No, once a week, now. He’s coming along.”
“Twice a week!” Ward lets out a low whistle. “That must have kept you pretty busy at the office, huh, Cal?”
“It was worth it.”
Beth is studying her wristwatch intently. A platinum watch, set with diamonds. His gift to her on their fifteenth anniversary. In April they will have been married twenty-one years.
“Listen, I’m not kidding,” Ward says. “Tomorrow morning, before you tee off, just a good, brisk ride. It’ll do great things for you!”
He laughs. “No, thanks. I’ll stick to my sport. You two go ahead.”
“Did I tell you not to marry a dude, Sissie? Hey, this sister of mine rides better than anybody around here, so you do well tomorrow, or we’ll send you back east by yourself!”
26
On Sunday, at breakfast, his grandmother asks, “What time did you get in?”
He knows that she knows. The light was on in their bedroom when he pulled into the drive; off, as he came up the stairs.
“I don’t know. Twelve? Twelve-thirty?”
“One-thirty,” she says.
“One-thirty, then.” He nods amiably, helping himself to the toast she has kept warm for him in the oven. The small breakfast nook is washed in sunlight. Sun glints off the jar of honey sitting on the table, filtering through the pale yellow curtains at the window. His head si
“How can you expect to get a decent night’s sleep, coming in at that hour?” She is frowning across the table at him.
“I give up. How can I?”
She sighs. “Everything’s a joke with you, isn’t it?”
“Grandmother, you know something, I’m nuts about you,” he says cheerfully. “You’re always agitating, I think it’s great. You oughta run for President. No kidding.”
He gets to his feet, pushing the chair back.
“Where are you going?”
“Outside to wash my car.”
“Well, don’t get chilled. It’s not summer, you know.”
“I know, I know!”
It is a perfect day. The temperature is in the fifties. It threatens to break a record. And tonight he will go to Jeannine’s to study. Seven-thirty. Thinking about it makes his skin ripple pleasantly, his stomach pull. A feeling you get going up in an elevator. Shouldn’t plan ahead like this shouldn’t expect minutes hours and the elevator comes down you could hit the ground but what a trip. Last night, he took her out, again: the old Saturday-Night-Show Date. Afterward, at Lombardi’s they had run into Phil Truan and Shirley Day. Phil had talked about the four of them going bowling sometime and Jen had said, “Oh, I’m a terrible bowler, ask Con.” And Phil had said, “Hey, so am I, ask Con,” and suddenly he was the authority figure, although he does not remember Truan being a bad bowler; he was probably just being nice, making him feel important.
Truan is a nice guy. That is the truth. He would like to do something with him again. He liked the look of Jeannine and Shirley, leaning toward each other across the table, the peach-silk river flowing toward Shirley’s dark curls. Everything looks washed and new this morning. The concrete, wet from melting snow, smells clean; the soap, sharply pungent; the water, cold as it runs over his hands.
And another truth. That there are no secret passages to strength, no magic words. It is just something you know about yourself. Since last night—no, before last night—it is as if he knew it all along. He is strong, he is able, because he is.