“A beer’d be fine,” said Fred, and when Merit offered to get it, I didn’t protest.
“That is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen—and I’ve been to Thailand, so I know beauty,” said Fred as Merit went into the kitchen.
“Are you sure you’ve looked carefully at all the competition?” asked Audrey, uncrossing and crossing again her long bare legs.
Fred smiled, his eyes fixed on one of her feet and the row of toes tucked inside a strap of her platform sandal, their nails as curved and frosty pink as shells.
“Don’t mind her,” said Faith. “She’s a divorcée without shame. Hey, Slip, got a cigarette? I don’t like Audrey’s.”
I shrugged and held up my palms. “I quit, remember?”
“You did?” said Kari, the only nonsmoker in the group. “That’s wonderful—since when?”
“Since three weeks and four days ago,” I said proudly.
“What do you mean, ‘a divorcée without shame’?” Audrey asked Faith. “First of all, I’m separated, not divorced, but when I am, why should I have shame?”
“Here we are,” said Merit, cradling a half dozen bottles of beer. “I’ve got the opener in my pocket.” She bumped her shin on the coffee table as she set the beer bottles down. “Ouch,” she said, sitting on the couch. “Now let’s all have another drink while Fred tells us what it was like over there in Vietnam.”
I expected the color to vanish from Fred’s face, and it did; I also expected him to bolt out of his chair, but he didn’t. Instead, he very methodically jacked the cap off each beer bottle and handed one to each of us. “Ladies,” he said, toasting us with his bottle, “I realize you’re all story lovers—who isn’t? But you must also recognize that storytellers are people who tell stories—probably because they like to, right? I mean, who likes to tell a story they themselves never want to hear again, stories they tried for years to forget?” He took a long draw of beer, and I watched as his Adam’s apple, underneath the tumbleweed of his beard, bobbed up and down.
“But since Slip is my wonderful redheaded sister and since you are all her wonderful blond and brunette friends”—boy, I could hear the liquor kicking in—“and since you probably will never find yourselves on a battlefield—although I think you,” he said to Audrey, “would kick ass in combat; women should be drafted, don’t you think?” He took another swig of beer, finishing it. “Anyway, since I have packed up the old kit bag and will be heading out for Motown tomorrow and it’s unlikely I’ll see most of you again . . . well, maybe I will tell one little story. One little story of war.”
He picked up the remaining bottle of beer on the table and proceeded to make fast work of it. Watching him, my heart thrummed in my chest and I wondered if I should call it a night right there. I was worried about Fred, worried about his story and what it might do to him, and yet I was also excited, as excited as I’d been the first time I stood on the high dive of the Jersey City municipal pool. Fred was going to do what he’d failed to do with my parents, my brothers, with anyone: he was going to talk!
He examined his thumbnail for a long enough moment that I thought he might have changed his mind. Finally he chewed off a little flag of a hangnail, looked at me, his eyebrows raised in sort of an apology, and began.
“There was this guy in my squadron. We called him Mitty, as in Walter, and you know why?” He didn’t bother to answer, just put his feet up on the coffee table, crossing them at the ankles. “We called him Mitty because he was always telling these crazy stories about how he was a Hollywood stuntman—he said practically any western made in the early sixties had him in it. He also said he could play any instrument ever made and that he’d taught Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys how to drum and the Mamas and the Papas how to harmonize. I mean, the guy was total bullshit. When he wasn’t in Hollywood riding bareback or giving music lessons, he was in the Florida Keys studying dolphins or in the Swiss Alps testing out his newly designed aerodynamic ski poles or bindings or whatever. We all loved the guy even though we knew he was full of bullshit because his crazy stories made the time pass, made us forget that we were getting shot at and might not even be on the fuckin’ planet the next day, let alone the next hour.”
Fred paused to swallow the rest of his beer, and the rest of us took his cue, taking long draws from our own bottles as if we were parched.
“Excuse my French, by the way,” he said to Merit.
“That’s all right,” said Merit.
“Anyway,” continued Fred, “I always thought he knew his role as the bullshit artist was just that; a role. Just like Simmons was the guy who was always cool under fire, Slomovitz was the guy who could fix anything that was broke, Donnelly always had the good dope. Mitty was there to entertain us.”
“But one day—and I can feel the air on my skin still; it was so hot and damp, steam was rising from the jungle floor—Mitty and a guy named Webber and I were goofin’ off, trying to catch this little wild pig that had been hanging around camp. I think we were supposed to be on some kind of reconnaissance mission, but we were so stoned, we didn’t know what the fuck was going on. We were standing under this tree, making sounds we thought a pig might find attractive—Mitty of course saying things like ‘When I was practicing veterinary medicine, I made a study of the mating rituals of the Hampshire pigs, and I found that a low oink means “let’s be friends“ ‘—and we’re cracking up when all of a sudden there’s this sound of thrashing, of someone running through the jungle, and then right in front of us are two Viet Cong. Only they weren’t the wily tunnel dwellers who could disappear and reappear like chipmunks. These were just two kids, probably not more than fourteen years old, a boy and a girl, playing war.”
The summer night air that wafted in through the open windows (we still didn’t have—or want—air-conditioning) suddenly felt cold and drafty, and I rubbed my bare arms. I saw Merit do the same thing.
Fred raked his fingers through his beard, and his eyes stared ahead at what looked to me like the floor lamp I had gotten on sale; but to Fred—who knows what he saw. None of us spoke as he stared off. It was like all of us were hypnotized, waiting for either the master to speak or to tell us that we could.
A spasm rippled through Fred’s shoulders. I knew he couldn’t be cold in that heavy fatigue jacket, and seeing that shiver that had nothing to do with cold seemed to snap me out of my trance. I was about to say, Fred, it’s okay, you don’t have to say any more, when he sighed and, cupping his bad elbow, started talking again.
“They raised their hands in surrender just as Webber fired, and the boy flew through the air—really, it was like his body didn’t stop the bullet but took it for a little ride. The girl cried out, and bang, Webber fired at her, but she didn’t fly through the air. She dropped, just crumpled to the ground, her eyes as round as her mouth. We ran over to her, and blood was spurting out of her shoulder like a little red geyser. Mitty leaned down toward her, blood splattering on his flak jacket, and then this girl, this girl bleeding to death on the jungle floor, looks into his eyes and she spits on him. And Mitty says, ‘Well, that’s a fine how-do-you-do,’ and the next thing I see, he’s reaching into his pocket and pulling out a rubber. He always had the craziest shit in his pockets—a tube of his girlfriend’s lipstick, Cracker Jack toys, a little address book he said had Ho Chi Minh’s private home number in it, clumps of leaves.
“Mitty unwraps the rubber and zips down his pants, and Webber says, ‘What are you doing, man?’ and Mitty says, ‘You can hardly expect me not to use protection—as a doctor, I do not intend to go home with a case of the clap,’ and then he straddles this girl whose breathing is getting all raggedy and we just stand there watching as he pounds himself into her.”
I wished with every fiber of my being that I hadn’t heard this story, and judging from the silence that choked the room, I wasn’t alone. Finally Audrey said, in a voice that sounded like she was being strangled, “Oh, my God.”
I touched my forehead. It was sli
ck with sweat. “What . . . why? Why would he do such a thing?”
Fred closed his eyes. “What you should ask, Slip”—here Fred opened his eyes to look at me—“is why Webber and I didn’t stop him. What you should ask, Slip, is why Webber—honest to Christ, one of the nicest guys I ever met—climbed on top of that poor girl when Mitty was done with her. And what you should also ask, Slip, is why I didn’t do a thing about it.” Fred clawed at his beard. “When Webber pushed himself off her, the blood had stopped spurting from her shoulder, and the red stain had grown until there wasn’t an inch of her white shirt that wasn’t red. She jerked once, and I knew she was dead. So what you finally have to ask, Slip—although the goddamned problem is that no one ever wants to know—is why she had to be alive through that.”
Again that awful choking silence filled the room. Merit’s hands were cupped over her mouth, and Kari looked like she’d just taken a carnival ride that spins you upside down.
“That poor girl,” she said finally. “Poor you.”
Fred snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, poor me, watching my brothers in arms rape a fourteen-year-old girl. Poor me, who was so scared he couldn’t think of a way to get those crazy motherfuckers off that dying girl.”
I thought I might be sick. Why had I thought it was important for Fred to talk about what happened over there? What was I thinking?
“Oh, man, I’ve really brought this party down, haven’t I?” said Fred, as lightly as if he were apologizing for a mild off-color joke. “But remember, that’s only one story of many I could tell you.”
The rest of us sat there, stunned, trying to comprehend what he said when he slapped his thighs and stood up.
“Well, ladies, I believe there’s a bar stool somewhere in this fair city with my name on it.”
“Fred,” I said, my horror coalescing into outrage, “I think you owe all of us an apology. How could you tell us something like that?”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished them back in. My brother’s eyes were pools of sadness, and in them I saw reflected my sanctimonious outrage. “Fred, I—” I began again, but he held up his hand. I watched him leave the room, my mouth still open, the words ashes inside it.
For a long time, none of us had any words. Too stunned to smoke, too stunned to drink, we just sat there in the horror that had entered my living room.
“You know how you always hear war is hell?” said Audrey finally. “Well, I always imagined the movie hell; the black-and-white blood and guts, the private dying in his sergeant’s arms and using his last breath to ask the sergeant to please give his dog tags to dear old Mom.” She lit a cigarette and I saw her hands tremble. “I had no idea war was this kind of hell.”
I bent my head, and the thought that made tears ooze out of my eyes was this: I really knew nothing at all.
September 1976
HOST: KARI
BOOK: Roots by Alex Haley
REASON CHOSEN: “Because it’s time we honor everyone’s history.”
Halcyon days. The thought came into Kari’s mind at least once a day: These are my halcyon days.
Two days before school started, Freesia Court held its annual Almost Labor Day Circus, and Julia had been given the prized role of ringmaster. At eight years old, she was a rangy child, long-legged and knobby-kneed, with a nimbus of fluffy brown curls. Her eyes were a pale, buttery hazel, her skin a delicious caramel color. She was taking ballet, to the delight of her teacher, who called her a natural dancer, and she was a perfect mimic who could pick up the traces of Faith’s southern accent as well as the voices of her favorite cartoon characters. Her Snagglepuss was particularly accurate. Kari thought she was the most fantastic child in the history of children, and the only regret she had about her daughter was that she would never know Bjorn and vice versa.
“You would have gotten along like gangbusters,” Kari told her when they sat looking through her wedding album.
“Is that good?” asked Julia.
“That’s very good.”
The girl pressed her finger on Bjorn’s face, in the picture where he and Kari were leaving the church in a shower of rice. “So that’s my dad,” she said, and Kari didn’t correct her. “Did he like tapioca pudding?”
Kari nodded. Tapioca pudding was Julia’s favorite. “He loved it.”
Julia knew she was adopted; Kari had taken the opportunity to tell her the first time Julia, at that time four years old, asked why they didn’t look alike.
“Because another mommy grew you in her tummy.”
“She did?” asked Julia. “Why didn’t you?”
“That’s just the way things turned out,” said Kari. “The mommy that grew you in her tummy couldn’t keep you and wanted to find the right mommy for you, and she found me.”
“How? How did she find you?”
“God helped her, sweetheart,” said Kari, which seemed to be all the answer Julia needed.
Julia now knew her father was black and her mother was white, but she didn’t press Kari for details of her adoption. Kari knew the day would come, but just as she knew she would someday die and that someday the earth would be swallowed by the sun, she wasn’t about to lose sleep over it.
After the hot dog and potato salad supper, an assemblage of lawn chairs was set up in Slip’s backyard and the adults sat in them, chatting about plans for the holiday tomorrow, swatting at the occasional late-season mosquito, and waiting for the show to begin.
A recorded drumroll quieted everyone, and then Julia, strutting in front of them, announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the greatest show on earth, a show that will thrill you, chill you, and one for which we will bill you!”
Flannery had written the script, but Kari doubted anyone could have delivered the lines as well. The ringmaster was a coveted role, and some of the older children (Bryan Forrest and Joe McMahon in particular, although she wasn’t going to mention any names) thought it was their given right, even if they’d already played the role. But Slip was an organizer who believed in democracy first and talent second, although sometimes she got lucky with her casting, as she had with Julia.
“Our first act,” said Julia, adjusting the satin lapels of the tuxedo jacket Kari had whipped up, “has been called the toast of Europe. Ladies and gentlemen—the Dancing Danceroni Sisters!”
Slip’s stereo had been set up on the small brick patio, and Dave (he no longer wanted to be called Davey) Forrest placed the needle on the album. (He had decided he was too big to participate in the circus but grudgingly agreed to be the sound man.)
“Jeepers Peepers” blasted its stirring first bars as Reni, Melody, and Jewel Iverson, in their matching pink leotards and tutus, raced out of the family-size tent that had been set up near the clothesline (in this circus, the performers performed outside the circus tent, which served instead as the dressing/green room and would later house the children who didn’t want to sleep under the stars for the best part of the whole night—the circus camp-out). The adults burst into applause, and Kari nudged the beaming Merit, who sat next to her.
Reni did an expert shuffle-ball step, followed by Melody’s just-as-expert one, followed by a hesitant and arrhythmic tapping by Jewel. There was a soft whir as Merit snapped her Polaroid camera and the picture slowly spit out.
“Hi, Mommy!” said Jewel, with a wave of her pudgy little arm.
“God, she’s a doll,” said Audrey, and Kari nodded. She loved all the neighborhood children, but Jewel, the little girl she and the Angry Housewives had helped deliver, was everyone’s pet.
Merit’s daughters had inherited their mother’s beauty, but what Kari found most compelling about them was their sisterhood; she had never seen such a tight-knit trio of sisters.
Julia and Reni were best friends and in the same class at school, but Julia didn’t like playing at Reni’s house because the sisters were always included.
“I mean, I like them, Mom,” explained Julia, “but Melody isn’t even six yet and Jewel’s thr
ee, and well, sometimes I just want to do bigger-kid stuff.”
“I can understand that,” said Kari, nodding.
“Well, Reni can’t. She doesn’t mind at all that they play with us. In fact, once we had her bedroom all to ourselves and we had the dress-up box out and then all of a sudden Reni says, ‘Oh, Mel and Jewel love dress-up,’ and she goes to the hallway and calls them! And we never have her bedroom all to ourselves!”
Kari loved summer evenings, standing and talking with other parents as the kids ran around playing games of Starlight Moonlight or Kick the Can, and she couldn’t help notice how if one of the three sisters was It, the other two would help her find the rest of the kids.
“Let’s give the dancers a big hand,” urged Julia in her scripted show-biz lingo as the sisters finished their final steps and took a bow.
Kari flinched, hearing a loud, shrill whistle behind her. She turned around to see that Eric, two pinkies in his mouth, had joined the audience. Merit’s posture suddenly changed—it seemed as if a weight had been pressed on her shoulders, and her hands clutched and unclutched each other.
“All right, you’re probably wondering—what’s a circus without lions?” asked Julia, pacing in front of the row of parents. “A circus without lions is no circus at all—that’s why we have them! Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from deepest Africa, the most dangerous lions of all and their trainer, Vladimir!”
Kari laughed, wondering if Flan, the scriptwriter, thought Vladimir was an African name or just generally exotic.
Audrey’s eleven-year-old son Bryan, who in Kari’s eyes seemed to have grown five inches over the summer, swirled his cape and cracked his whip, which was a long ribbon attached to Bonnie’s old baton.
“Back! Back!” he ordered as Flicka, wearing one of Julia’s tutus around her neck to suggest a mane, bounded out of the tent, followed by Bryan’s brother Michael and Slip’s son. In painting the boys’ faces, Faith had heeded their requests to make them look “really scary” instead of “babyish,” and they wore the costumes Kari had made out of terry cloth and loops of yarn.