Ordinary People by Judith Guest
“Listen, don’t worry,” Conrad says. “Everything’s fine.”
“I don’t know, man. You’ve been acting funny lately.”
It trips the lever on the thing he meant not to say. “Laze, take my advice. You hang around with flakes, you get flaky.”
“Shit, I knew that was it. Well, why you pissed at me?”
“I’m not pissed!”
“Ah, Connie. I know you.” He tries a grin. “Look, I’m sorry. I’d be pissed, too, but you shouldn’t have quit—”
“That’s not why! Man, I said it was a fucking bore.” He slams his locker closed, giving the lock a savage twist as he walks away. Lazenby falls into step beside him.
“Wait a minute, listen, will ya? I talked to Salan and he says—”
“Well, quit talking to people!” he snaps. “Leave me alone!”
The bell rings shrilly over their heads. They stare at each other.
“Ah, shit,” Lazenby says. “The hell with you.”
A hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if he has been punched—Never mind screw him screw them all they were Buck’s friends anyway—he walks on to class, feeling nothing.
“So, what does your dad say about it?” Berger asks.
He sighs. “I haven’t told him yet.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. The timing isn’t right. He sweats everything so much. He’ll just worry about it.”
“So you haven’t told anybody? Your mother?”
“My mother? No. Listen, my mother and I do not connect, I told you that before.”
“So, does that bother you?”
“No. Why should it?”
Berger shrugs. “I don’t know. Some people it might bother, that’s all.”
“My mother is a very private person,” he says. “We don’t ride the same bus. Who does? What do you have in common with your mother? Surface junk—brush your teeth, clean your room, get good grades. My mother—” He stops. Careful, careful. “People have a right to be the way they are,” he says.
“Noble thought,” Berger says. “So how’s it going? You feeling better since you’re not swimming?”
“I guess.” He picks, with his thumbnail, at the wooden arm of the chair.
“Sleeping better?”
“I jack off a lot. It helps.”
Berger grins. “So what else is new?”
He slides down to the end of his spine, his legs stretched in front of him, staring at the floor. Over his shoulder, the clock ticks loudly.
“Come on, kiddo,” Berger prods gently. “Something’s on your mind today.”
“Nothing’s new, nothing’s on my mind. I don’t think anything. I don’t feel anything.” Abruptly he sits up. “I oughta go home.”
Berger nods. “Maybe so. What is it that you don’t feel, huh? Anger? Sadness? Any of the twenty-eight flavors?”
A tiny seed opens slowly inside his mind. In the hospital the seed would grow and begin to produce thick, shiny leaves with fibrous veins running through them. More leaves to come. Like tiny, curled up fists they will hit at him. He tightens his grip on the arms of the chair. The wood is sticky and wet under his hands. He wets his lips nervously. “What time is it?”
“Lots of time,” Berger says. The eyes are fixed on him, a tender and compelling blue. “Hey. Remember the contract we got? You wanted to have more control. You see any connection here, between control and this —what’ll we call it—lack of feeling?”
He closes his eyes. A jungle in there, inside his head. He opens them quickly. “I didn’t say I never feel things. I feel things.”
“When?”
“Sometimes.”
“You gonna give me the famine, wars, violence-in-the-streets business again?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Come on, kiddo, I’m doing all the work here. I thought you told me you didn’t like to play games.”
“I don’t. I’m not. I don’t know what you want.”
“Then, I’ll tell you. I want you to leave ‘I don’t know’ out there on the table with the magazines, okay?”
“And what if I don’t have an answer? You want me to make one up?”
“Yeah, that’d be nice. Make me one up right now, about how you’ve turned yourself inside out and the overwhelming evidence is that there are no feelings in there no-how.”
“I said I have feelings.”
Berger sighs. “Now you have ’em, now you don’t. Get it together, Jarrett.”
“Why are you hassling me? Why are you trying to get me mad?”
“Are you mad?”
“No!”
Berger sits back in the chair. “Now that,” he says, “is a lie. You are mad as hell. You don’t like to be pushed. So why don’t you do something?”
“What?”
“Geez, I don’t know! Tell me to fuck off, go to hell, something!”
“Fuck off,” he says. “Go to hell.”
Berger laughs. “Glory, what feeling. When’s the last time you got really mad?”
He says, carefully, “When it comes, there’s always too much of it. I don’t know how to handle it.”
“Sure, I know,” Berger says. “It’s a closet full of junk. You open the door and everything falls out.”
“No,” he says. “There’s a guy in the closet. I don’t even know him, that’s the problem.”
“Only way you’re ever gonna get to know him,” Berger says, “is to let him out now and then. Along with the boots, and tennis rackets, stale bread, whatever you got stored up there. You go through it, you sort it out, you throw some of it away. Then you stack up the rest, nice and neat. Next time it won’t be such a big deal.”
“I don’t have the energy,” he says.
“Kiddo, you got any idea how much energy it takes to hold the door closed like you do? That’s power. Your own personal power and nobody else’s.”
“Sometimes,” he says, “when you let yourself feel, all you feel is lousy.”
Berger nods. “Maybe you gotta feel lousy sometime, in order to feel better. A little advice, kiddo, about feeling. Don’t think too much about it. And don’t expect it always to tickle.”
On another shopping trip after school, with his head somewhere else, he sidesteps a puddle, nearly walking into someone coming the other way.
“Oh,” she says. “Hi. How’re you?”
Embarrassed, he mumbles an apology; then looks at her. It is Jeannine.
“What’re you doing up here?” she asks. “I thought the swim team practiced until six.”
“They do,” he says.
“I thought you were swimming.”
“I used to,” he says. “I don’t any more.”
“Oh. Don’t you swim as well as you sing?”
“What?”
She laughs. “Just kidding. I’m getting to know your voice now. You’re the tenor who stays on pitch.”
He takes it as a reprimand. She should not be able to hear him above the others. “I’ll sing softer tomorrow.”
“No. You know, you ought to be doing the solo in that Russian thing. You have much better tone than Ron.”
The voice of authority. He knows about her: that she has applied for a music scholarship to the University of Michigan, that she takes private voice lessons, that Faughnan is in love with her ability. He has stood in the back of the auditorium after class, listening to her practice, while Miriam Gleason accompanies her on the piano and Faughnan stands next to her, stopping her in the middle of a phrase, instructing her. She nods her head, gravely; goes back and repeats, all the time looking as if she is the music itself, and she is small and grave and beautiful; her hair shimmers under the stage lights; her eyelashes are light-gold crescents.
“You want to have a Coke?” he blurts out suddenly.
She hesitates. “Sure. Fine.”
They walk along the street together and she fills the spaces easily with words while he, amazed and dumb-struck at what he has just done, s
“—kinds of music that I like. He’s the most classical-minded teacher, don’t you think?”
Not Pasquesi’s. It is always crowded after school; filled with people that he knows, and yet, doesn’t know any more. The windows are opaque with the steam of bodies. Just walking by the place reinforces his sense of separation.
“There’s a place up around the corner,” he says.
“Fine. It’s nearer to my house. I have to be home by four-thirty. My brother doesn’t have a key.”
She looks up at him. Clear, blue eyes. Like someone else’s. With a start, he recognizes them. Berger’s eyes. Weird.
Inside the small, nearly empty coffee shop (it is not an in-place, obviously), she loosens her coat; slips out of it. She is wearing a gold-and-yellow-striped sweater, a gold chain around her neck. He cannot look directly at her, focuses his eyes slightly to the left of her face.
“Well,” she says, “I’m doing all the talking. What kinds of music do you like?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Modern jazz. Folk rock. Whatever’s around, I guess.”
“You don’t like classical?”
“I’m not too familiar with it.”
“Do you know baroque? Telemann? Ortiz?”
“No. Tell me about them. Telemann and who?”
She looks down at her hands, flushing. “What a dull conversation. I’m sure there must be things you’d like to talk about.”
He laughs, reaching into his back pocket. “Sure. I carry a list around with me. Here. Pick a subject.”
She looks up, then, and smiles at him. “Why is this always so hard? The first time you talk to somebody—”
He calculates quickly. The first time. A second time. Other times—and the tension within him dissolves. They talk: about movies, about books, about his classes, her classes, what she likes, what they both don’t like, about being new to a school and having to start over, making friends....
She glances at her watch. “Oh, I’ve got to go. He has fits if I’m late.”
He walks her to the railroad tracks, where they stand and talk some more. It is snowing again, and she buttons her coat up to the neck, tucking her hair inside the collar.
“I told my mother to give him his own key. She works until six, and she doesn’t like to leave the house open all day. He’s eleven, but he’s sort of a scatterbrain. She’s afraid he’ll just lose it. Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“No,” he says. “No, I don’t.”
She makes a face. “You’re lucky. Anyway, thanks for the Coke. And thanks for walking me.”
The huge, airy flakes sizzle away to nothing on his suède jacket.
He watches her as she runs across the street. On the other side, she waves to him. He waves back and heads down Western, against the snow, keeping his head bent, staying close to the buildings. He would like to run, only the street is crowded with people. They would stare at him, wondering what the hell he was doing, was he trying to stir up trouble? So many people in the world, so few behavior tracks, you can’t even run any more without attracting attention to yourself, and he turns his head as he passes the window of a travel agency. He stops: goes back to get a closer look.
In the window a model airplane sleek and silver-green shearing off between two papier-mâché mountain peaks. Held up by a thin shaft of wire from below somewhere. Fastened to its body. Behind it a travel poster: Ski the Laurentians!
He narrows his eyes sees the path again clean and clear and dizzyingly steep Buck sweeping around the curve and disappearing the wind screams in his ears he blindly follows staying up staying up nearly to the end when the smallest of moguls flips him he has let it cross his mind that the slope is too hard for him dangerous as hell skiing beyond yourself it is how you break a leg or get killed. And Buck bending anxiously over him: “Hey, buddy, you okay? Talk to me!” When he can breathe when he knows that nothing is lost or broken he wheezes feebly, “I missed the goddamned turn!” and Buck sits down beside him laughing. “You were Killy himself coming around, what happened?”
“I missed the goddamned turn, that’s what happened!”
He hangs on now, pressing his hand lightly against the wall, below the window, waiting for the familiar arrow of pain. Only there is none. An oddly pleasant swell of memory, a wave of warmth flooding over him, sliding back, slowly. It is a first.
He looks around: the street behind him, the shoppers, the dull-gray parking meters near the edge of the sidewalk. Everything in place; as it was before. Obscured at once by his awareness of it, the moment blurs. He cannot reach beyond it. He does not need to. At peace with himself, he walks home through the falling snow.
13
The Christmas-tree lot has a sign over it: FIRS BY LENNIE. From two loudspeakers mounted on the pay booth, canned music blares forth “Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful,” and Cal clenches his gloveless hands together against the cold, stamping his feet.
“How’s this one?”
The lot man lifts a tree from its hole, shaking the snow from its branches.
“No. Not tall enough,” Conrad says.
The man looks at Cal. “Tall as you are, sonny,” he says, dropping the tree back into its hole. “You want taller? I got taller, over here. Come on.”
He is built like a lumberjack (Lennie himself?), with a red-and-black-checked lumberjack shirt tucked into mud-colored overalls, his forehead and ears banded by a purple knit ski-shield. They follow him, Cal stepping carefully on the path of bark and pine needles, trying to keep the mud off of his shoes. He eyes the lot man’s thick rubber boots with longing.
“How about this?”
“No,” Conrad says. “Too scrawny.”
The man gives Cal a faintly patronizing smile, showing him what he thinks of fathers who let their sons run things. He points out a huge blue spruce, dense and full. “Okay, how’s that one?”
“That’s terrific,” Conrad says. “Hey, that’s it.”
Cal issues a feeble protest: “Con, it’s twelve feet tall!”
“You guys live in a church, or what?”
Conrad is busy surveying it from all sides, a smile on his face.
Cal reaches for his-wallet. “Okay, how much?”
“Twenty bucks.”
He whistles. “Thought this was a buyer’s market.”
“Not this year.” The lot man is cheerful, forgiving. “Pay at the booth. Me and sonny here’ll tie it on your car. You guys be sure and let me know when the services are, ya hear?”
Weightless with joy he watches while his son assumes the burden of this small decision. At dinner tonight, Conrad had told him of his plans for the kind of Christmas they should have this year. “Just greens and pine cones, nothing fancy. Lights on the tree, but no ornaments. Popcorn, cranberries, maybe a few candy canes, how does that sound to you?”
“Sounds great,” Cal had said. A few deft strokes and the picture had been painted, as easily, as confidently as Con had scanned the menu and ordered: “Hamburger. Onion rings. Chocolate malt. Banana cream pie.”
Just last summer, Cal had sat with him at a lunch counter near the hospital. He had stared at the single-sheet bill of fare, enclosed in plastic. After ten minutes, he had passed it over to Cal with a weary sigh. “You order, okay? I can’t decide.”
They drive through Evanston, decked out in all its Christmas finery: fake garlands of pine, wrapped around lampposts and colored lights strung across the intersections. It does not have the air of fantasy, of fairyland, that covers Lake Forest. It is too big a city for that; its streets are too dirty, its buildings too coarsely utilitarian. Yet, there is a confidence and completeness about this town that Cal loves.
Too many places he has been seem tainted with that anxious atmosphere of unreality; a one-sidedness of conception. Too perfect to be believed. Aspen. Indian-wood. Florida. Exotic and comfortless, like movie sets.
“I
“Never mind, sonny,” Cal says. “When we’re stringing popcorn and cranberries till our fingers fall off, you remember who did the picking.”
Heat curls about their ankles, as thick as water.
It goes up easily, fitting easily under the cathedral ceiling in the family room, dominating the space before the window. Crisp, blue-green lace splashes across the snow-white of the draperies.
“I think it’s silly,” Beth had said that morning. “We’ve got a perfectly good artificial one in the basement. The needles will absolutely imbed themselves in that white shag, Cal.”
“It’s probably flat and limp as hell. We haven’t used it for five years—do you realize it’s been that long since we’ve had a tree? We’re always on our way to somewhere a week before Christmas.”
She had shrugged, turning away. “Do what you want.”
She had had a meeting tonight anyway, so when Conrad met him at the office after his session Cal had suggested dinner out instead of the TV dinners waiting for them at home, and the tree-shopping expedition. Now he lies on his back as he gives the screws in the stand a final tightening. Conrad holds on to the trunk.
“Some of the lights have burned out. I’ll pick up some extra bulbs on my way home tomorrow,” Conrad says.
The front door opens and a gust of cold air greets them. Moments later, she joins them.
“How do you like it?” Cal asks. He looks up through the branches at her: a splash of orange skirt and paler orange blouse. Those graceful, pretty legs.
“I like it,” she says. “It’s lovely.”
He feels a sudden rush of love for her; gets to his feet, floating and weightless again. “How was your meeting?”
“It was interesting,” she says. She goes to the bar at the opposite end of the room. “I think I want a drink. How about you?”
“Sure. Here, I’ll make them.”