Tiny Little Thing

  “What classes? Aren’t you done with college?”

  “Dance classes. I’m a dancer. I dance with this amateur group, teach the younger kids.”

  Her slender calves, curved with muscles. The lithe grace of her back. The taut arms, the elegant enigma of her, delicate and rope strong at the same time.

  “Of course,” he said. “Jesus, of course. I should have guessed.”

  “Yes, well, I love it. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that made me feel right. Made me feel myself. And Mums said fine, live in Boston and do your dancing, the perfect way to wait him out until he proposes . . .”

  “Damn it.”

  “So I did, and I just thought—well, it never occurred to me—”

  “What?”

  “That I was supposed to stop, once we got married.”

  “Who says you have to stop?”

  “No one said. It’s just assumed, by all of them. I realized it about a month ago, just before I saw you for the first time. I’d had tea with his grandmother a couple of days before, and she said something—I don’t remember exactly, she’s so elliptical, she sneaks everything in until you realize too late that she’s been scolding you all along or committed you to some awful thing or another—anyway, just what a relief it must be, giving up the dancing, all that hard work, I could concentrate on getting our house set up and having babies, helping my husband with his work. . . .”

  “Damn it.”

  “And it’s not that I don’t want any of it. I want babies, I love babies. That little boy today . . .” Her eyes welled up at the corners.

  “What does he think? Your fiancé?” Strange, that he could talk about this fellow as if he were an inanimate object of some kind, a cipher, when in fact Tiny had promised to marry him. Had known him for years, had gone to endless dinners and picnics and football games, probably frolicked in the Cape Cod sand with him. Probably even had sex with him. He existed. A real person whom Tiny, this tempting Tiny sitting by his side, inches away, was supposed to be in love with.

  “He assumes it, too. Of course he does. They all think alike in that family. Single-minded.”

  He swore again.

  They sat quietly, without saying anything. Cap thought about his drink in the kitchenette, but he couldn’t move an inch, couldn’t direct his body to exist anywhere else than right here, next to Tiny, her steady pulse, the slow dance of their fingertips revolving around each other. He’d given up trying not to think about sex. He’d given his imagination all the rein in the world, picturing her naked beneath him, writhing on top of him; now he added in the intoxicating element of her dancer’s athleticism, the sensuality of dance itself. Ballet, he was sure of it. Tiny was the ballet sort of girl. Christ almighty. He was sitting on the sofa, screwing fingers with an engaged ballet dancer.

  She wasn’t the only one going to hell.

  “But it’s not just that,” she said. “That was only the moment of realization, the moment I knew I had to escape somehow. It’s been building all year, ever since the night we got engaged.”

  “Then why did you do it? Get engaged? Say yes?”

  “Because that’s what I do.” Softly. “I do what I’m supposed to do. Girls like me, we wear our pearls and we write our thank-you notes the very next morning, and we fall in love with only the best sort of young man, the kind of man who’s going places and will take us with him. And when he asks us to marry him, we say yes.”

  “But why? That’s the part I don’t understand. Anyway, I’ve seen girls like that, I know girls like that, and you’re not one of them.” He pauses. “On the outside, maybe, but even then . . .”

  “You don’t understand. There’s this allure. It’s like a scientist striving for the Nobel Prize, the ultimate mark of success in your chosen field. You won’t just be any old wife, living out in the suburbs, same thing every day. You’ll be his wife, meeting exciting people, doing exciting things. The night he proposed, it was the night of my dreams. The night I’d been waiting for all along. The culmination of all my efforts, right? And it was. It was a hell of a night.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Oh, it was the limit. The absolute limit. Do you know how he did it?”

  “No idea.”

  “You’ll love it. Picture this. It was the night after he graduated from law school. I’d been waiting for years, you know. I almost gave up on him a dozen times, but . . . well, he was . . . he is—you’d have to know him, I guess—he’s dazzling. He holds you in his palm. He’s the one, there’s no one else close.”

  She spoke in a curiously emotionless voice, echoing Cap’s own attitude: as if her fiancé’s charms were something you might read about in a magazine profile, unconnected with a breathing human being. Cap wanted to ask if she loved him, really loved him, but it seemed clumsy somehow. A vulgar question to ask, in the middle of such a confession.

  “I knew everyone was expecting him to propose,” she said. “My girlfriends were starting to laugh behind my back: Oh, he’ll never ask her, she’ll be waiting till she’s sixty. Most of them were already married or engaged. It was humiliating. I forgot why I wanted to get married, or why I wanted him, I just wanted the damned ring already. God, I’m so lousy, aren’t I? How did I get this way?”

  Without warning, she yanked her fingers away from his and jumped to her feet. She crossed the floor, rubbing the knuckles of her left hand, while Cap leaned forward on the sofa cushion and measured her elastic stride, the length of her neck.

  She stopped in front of the wall of photographs. The sunlight hit her profile head-on, draping her in gold. “Anyway. We went out to a big dinner with his family to celebrate the graduation—top of his class, of course, he gave a speech and everything, a grand speech, oh yes, stirring, they all told me that, see, he’s a great one for speeches—and everyone toasted him, his grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins, the whole clan of them. Admiring their crown prince. So proud. We took up an entire banquet room at the Copley Plaza. Champagne and caviar and filet. A great big chocolate cake, his favorite. They don’t splash out often, his family, but when they do . . . well, they make their point. I sat next to his sister. She took my arm and talked about how happy they all were. Grateful, she said. That was the word. How much everyone loved me. How good I was for him. The perfect girl to settle him down. Can’t you just hear it? What a hoot.”

  She laughed and shook her head and reached out to smooth down the edge of one of the photographs, which was curling at the corner. “God, the lights were so bright. I don’t know why I remember that. All those chandeliers. Anyway. Afterward, he took me out for a drive in his convertible—it was midnight, by then—and somewhere in Wellesley we stopped by the side of the road, in the moonlight, and there was this picnic basket waiting for us with a bottle of champagne. And the ring. Glittering there at the bottom of my glass. Can you believe it? He’d left the ring there at the roadside, the whole time we’d been eating dinner. A ring like that.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Well, that’s him all over. Nothing bad can touch him, can it? The bill never comes due. So I was thrilled and said yes and we drank down the whole bottle, there by the road. In the moonlight. I don’t know how we made it home. And I woke up the next morning with the worst hangover in the world and thought, Now what? Mother’s happy. He’s happy. The families are happy. Well, not my sisters, I imagine, but they’re never happy with me. So why aren’t I happy? I mean, my exciting life is about to begin at last. Why aren’t I happy, for God’s sake?” Her voice died away. She braced one hand on the wall and lifted the other to shield her eyes. “And I’ve been trying to figure that out ever since.”

  What was that about a force field? It was down without a trace, every barrier zapped out, the electric fence switched off, leaving only her tender and vulnerable skin between them.

  Why aren’t I happy? He considered the words, which mi
ght mean anything. Might mean a spoiled girl doesn’t know happy when it spills champagne at midnight on her pretty young bosom. Might mean a restless soul yearns to break free of her gilded shell. What was happy, anyway? Was he happy? Did it matter? Or did you just keep on doing the thing you were supposed to do, whatever it was: did your duty, did your part to keep the whole vast machinery of the world clicking along, and leave all the happiness bullshit to bored housewives and college students with too much time on their hands?

  Her head was bowed. He wanted to walk over and take her in his arms.

  “All right.” He wove his fingers together. “Fine. So you don’t want to get married after all. Why not just call it off? Tell them you can’t go through with it. Call it all off.”

  “Oh, God. You don’t understand my family. You don’t understand his. They’ll talk me out of it. They’ll tell me it’s cold feet. Every bride feels this way. Nerves. And then they’ll say I can’t back out. Everyone’s counting on me, everyone believes in me. He needs me. He’s the perfect match. And that’s the thing, you know.” A burst of half-hysterical laughter. “He is! The absolute perfect match. I might be First Lady one day, I’ll bet, if we play our cards right. If we put every foot right. Imagine that! What a triumph, what a life we’ll have.”

  A queasy feeling stirred the bottom of Cap’s belly. The rear lobes of his brain.

  But she was turning now, turning toward him, and her face was so bleak and pleading he couldn’t think of anything else. Just her. Tiny, in her berry-red dress, her luminescent sun-draped skin.

  “And I’ll suffocate,” she said softly. “Worse. I’ll become one of them. This is my last chance, Caspian.”

  He rose and walked to the kitchenette to fetch his drink, which he finished in a long and greedy gulp. He slammed the glass back down on the counter. Hard enough to make the cupboards rattle. Make the Frigidaire gasp and sneeze.

  “You’ll help me, won’t you? I saw you at the coffee shop today. You knew what to do.”

  He looked up. She stood right there where his living room met his kitchenette, braced with her white palm high against the wall, just above the top of her head. One stocking foot was curled around the other calf. He wondered if he could span her waist with his hands, like a girl from another century.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know what to do.”

  Tiny, 1966

  Pepper wants to know how long it’s been since I last made love. (That’s not the term she employs.)

  I lean against the wall of the shed and cross my arms. “What the hell kind of question is that?”

  “A simple, direct one. With a simple, direct answer. Come on. A week? A month?”

  “It’s not a fair question and you know it. I lost a baby, remember?”

  “Four weeks ago.”

  “And Frank’s away.”

  “What’s that? I can’t hear you when you mumble like that.”

  I push myself off the wall and walk forward to the front end of the Mercedes-Benz. The hood is up, and Pepper’s legs emerge from the side, clad in old blue dungarees and salt-stained sneakers. Her torso is buried deep, lost to view behind the raised metal hood. I place my hands on the edge of the grille. “Frank’s away,” I repeat.

  “Oh, yes. Campaigning.”

  “It’s his job, Pepper.”

  “It’s July. The election’s in November.”

  “The primary’s in early September. And there’s fund-raising. That’s the big thing, fund-raising. You can never have too much money.”

  “Well, he was back last weekend. Did you do it then?”

  “I’m not going to answer that.”

  “So you didn’t. Why not?”

  “Pepper!”

  “All right, then. Forget the past four weeks. When was the last time you did it? When he got you pregnant to begin with? Oh, shit. Can you find me a wrench?”

  I stalk to the toolbox. “What kind of wrench?”

  “I don’t know. Any old wrench. But answer the question.”

  I grab one of the rusty metal wrenches—at least I think it’s a wrench—and carry it back to the gaping oil-smelling hole in which my sister is immersed. “Here you are.”

  Without looking, she thrusts a dirty palm in my direction and plunges the wrench into the hole with her.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I ask.

  Pepper’s head pops out from the German innards. Her valuable chestnut hair is wrapped up in a checkered cloth, like Rosie the Riveter. A tiny smear of grease forms a fetching beauty spot at the corner of her mouth. She holds out the wrench. “Tiny, this is a screwdriver.”

  I snatch it back and head for the toolbox again. “You would know.”

  You might perceive how expertly I avoided Pepper’s last question. The truth is, we’ve had this conversation before, or something like it. Pepper—I don’t mean to shock you—she loves to talk about sex. I let her rattle on, up to a point. Why not? It’s all about the intimacy of watching her work in the dilapidated old shed, brashly taking apart a delicate high-performance Mercedes-Benz engine and attempting to put it back together again, all the while keeping the whole affair secret from the nosy big noses of the Hardcastle females. (Well, Tom, too.) I keep a bucket of suds (soap, not beer) next to the door, so she can wash off the grease before she emerges, and even then I live in delicious terror of her being found out by that fetching smear of black grease on her cheek.

  As to why, I have no idea.

  It’s not as if I’m actually planning to drive off with Pepper, should she miraculously succeed in getting the damned automobile running again. (No, don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the entire tragic list of casualties and snafus; let’s just say that thirty years of idleness isn’t good for a delicate high-performance Mercedes-Benz engine, especially when tended by one young woman with plenty of moxie but no previous mechanical aptitude, reading from a disintegrating old manual written in German and obtained by Joe’s Garage at great expense from God knew what channels.) It’s not as if I’m not already busy. It’s not as if I haven’t got a million ties binding me to my promising life, to my marriage, to this summertime patch of Cape Cod and its winter cousin on Newbury Street.

  Maybe I just enjoy spending a few leisured minutes with my sister, every so often, for the first time in my life.

  Pepper’s voice continues, muffled by metal. “So. Poor old you. Pretty Franklin’s a dud in bed. Or else the spark’s just gone. Have you thought about swinging?”

  “Swinging?”

  Pepper leans her elbows against an exhaust pipe. She takes the wrench—at least, I hope it’s a wrench—from my hand. “You know. You meet at someone’s house, you have a few drinks, you eat a few canapés, you switch husbands . . .”

  “I know what swinging is, Pepper. I’m just not going to discuss this with you. You’re not even married. You have no idea . . .”

  “I’m just trying to help, darling. Trying to pry the old prude out of you.”

  “You’re trying to pry, period.”

  “Well, I’m curious to know why my sister isn’t in love with her dazzling husband.”

  “I am in love with my husband.”

  “Then why aren’t you out on the campaign with him, smiling pretty for the cameras and the big-pocket donors and then screwing like rabbits in the hotel afterward?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Pepper!”

  “Politicians are sexy, Tiny. It’s a fact. If you don’t, some other girl will.” She laughs and waggles her wrench. (I’ll say that again: waggles her wrench.) “Hell, even if you do, some other girl might. He’s only human.”

  I have no answer for that. I turn away and wipe my hands on my apron.

  “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s right up inside some tart from his campaign office this minute, you know, in the back room where they keep the VOTE FRANK
bumper stickers, some shapely little tart like me . . .”

  There is a cough from the doorway of the shed.

  I spin. Pepper bangs her head on the hood of the Mercedes and drops the wrench—clangedy-clang-clang—on the pile of delicate high-performance Mercedes-Benz engine parts scattered next to the front fender.

  My hands freeze inside the folds of my skirt. My throat freezes, too. It falls to Pepper to greet the new arrival, which she does in typical Pepper fashion, throaty on the vowels, double on the entendre.

  “Well, hello there, Frank. We were just this second wondering where you might be.”

  • • •

  I must have been seventeen or eighteen, still in school but nearly a woman. I went to the kitchen in my old quilted dressing gown, looking for a glass of milk from the icebox. It was late, which was unusual for me, so I suppose I’d been up reading. Anyway, I didn’t need to go hunting in the icebox, because the milk bottle was on the kitchen table, and Daddy was pouring himself a glass. He looked up, surprised, as if it were some extraordinary thing, finding your own daughter in your own kitchen.

  “What’s the matter, Daddy?” I asked, reaching for a glass from the cabinet, because I saw from his face that he was drinking the milk because he was trying not to drink the Scotch.

  “Oh, nothing,” he said, and then, as an afterthought: “Lost another case.”

  I sat down and poured the milk into my glass. “You win some, you lose some, I guess.”

  “But I lose a lot of them, don’t I?” His hair was rumpled, his eyes bruised.

  I remember wondering why he cared. It wasn’t as if Daddy’s career was anything more than a hobby; it wasn’t as if the family’s capital wasn’t safely invested in nice straight government bonds, yielding just the right amount, enough to pay the maintenance on the apartment and the house in East Hampton, enough to pay the housekeeper and cook and driver, the school fees and the dresses, the club dues and the fresh weekly flowers.

  I ventured: “If you don’t enjoy it, you could always retire, couldn’t you?”