The Curse Page 3

  All of it too fast, and too slow. Syd appeared to be oblivious to the chaos and she hated him, envied his detachment. He moved through it as though he were packing for a weekend in the Poconos, and one evening she locked herself in the bathroom and cried for an hour while he pleaded to be forgiven for whatever it was he had done wrong.

  She lay awake too many nights painting and repainting, papering and paneling, laying new floors that mirrored the ceiling, covering them then with carpeting far too lush to walk on with socks, much less shoes. She considered, over a piece of graph paper, raising part of the roof in the back so she and Syd could have a real studio of their own and not bother the baby whenever it, he, she, came to unsettle their routine.

  The baby.

  "Are you asleep?"

  "Should I be?"

  "I want to talk to you."

  "Do you know what time it is?"

  "It's important."

  "About the house."

  "About the house, and stop reading my mind! Syd, are you sure we're doing the right thing, what with the economy and all going to hell like it is? I mean, it's a pretty big step we're taking, you know. We won't be able to just pack up and leave when we get tired of looking at the same walls and floors all the time. What if we don't like the neighborhood? Suppose the people living there really liked the family that was there before us and resent our moving in so quickly before they have a chance to forget them? What if you don't like driving all that way to the city every day? What if —"

  "Terry, please."

  "But we have to think of these things, Syd. They're important!"

  "We've signed the contracts, angel. What more can I say?"

  "You could tell me you love me, you know."

  "Would it help?"

  "Some."

  "Then come over here and let's discuss all these important points like grownups."

  "I don't think you want to discuss anything."

  "Neither do I."

  One afternoon she stood in front of the bathroom mirror and bunched her hair to the back of her head with one hand to see if she would look more Irish or Spanish with it shorn. All it did, she decided gloomily, was make a thin face thinner, pale skin more white, the lips of her undersized mouth too big and too red; she never had to use lipstick and somehow felt betrayed that she couldn't. She stepped back, then, and pushed up onto her toes to see if her figure had altered, her bust line enlarged as a result of becoming a tyro homeowner. Then she slapped each breast in turn and damned their mediocrity, wondering why Syd managed to find them so attractive when he could have had (she liked to believe) any one of a thousand women far more provocatively structured. She shrugged and tried to encircle her waist with her hands, frowned at the slight bulge below her navel as though the look would turn the fat into an embryo.

  "You know something? I do believe you are finally cracking up, Theresa Ann O'Hare Guiness."

  Her reflection pouted and brushed lightly at the hair that hinted at blue when the lights were dim.

  "On the other hand, you sure as hell don't look like an illustrator for brats’ books either."

  There was a faint shouting on the street below, a door slamming down the hall, a child screaming in the stairwell, a cat stalking loudly on the fire escape. Suddenly she felt lonely.

  After a quick call to the secretary who worked for Syd and three other men, she took a cab to Penn Station and caught the first train to Connecticut. Two hours later she dropped in on her younger sister and spent all afternoon, evening, and the following morning shedding the last of her fears by unloading them on what was left of her family.

  "If Pop were alive," Peggy said, "he'd tell you to stop bothering us and do what you want. You're a big girl now, in case you hadn't noticed."

  Terry wrestled with her cup of tea and followed the designs in the kitchen table's Formica top. "Pop's dead now, Peggy."

  "All right, then, forget him and take my advice, and stop bothering me. I got troubles of my own, in case you hadn't noticed."

  Terry looked up and saw the rabbit fear in her sister's eyes vanish as quickly as it had appeared. "Vic?"

  Peg nodded, brushed a strand of red hair from her eyes. "He's going to lose his job again, I think. Cutbacks at the plant are even taking out the senior supervisors now. Vic swears we're heading for a depression. He wishes he never came over here; at least in Eire, he could starve with his friends." She tried to grin away the pain, turned instead to look out a dirt-streaked window. "He says you ought to see the lines standing by the bulletin board waiting for the posting of the new layoffs. It sounds like college, when they stick up the exam grades and you can't wait to see how badly you failed."

  "I remember," said Terry, wishing there was something, anything she could say to cut her sister's strain at the source; but there was still the house, and moving day was set for less than two weeks from today. Normally it would have taken at least three months, according to the bank's loan officer, but when he had seen the size of their deposit, the amount of their intended down payment, he fairly collapsed into a spasm of red tape splicing and paper machinations that supposedly sped up the process. Terry wasn't at all sure it was actually true, and hoped the little man wasn't going to ask for a tip or something.

  "Come out," Terry said as Peg dumped the cups into the sink. "When you can, come out and see us."

  "Don't worry," Peg promised. "We'll visit."

  And Terry hugged her tightly before rushing out to mollify the waiting taxi. Visit they no doubt would, she thought on the train back to the city, like they did the first time Vic had been laid off—a visit that had lasted for well over two weeks and had driven Syd to working nights for the first time since they'd been married. Pulling into the station, she had an uncharitable vision of the baby's room being turned into a miniature efficiency with boarding house privileges. Not that she begrudged Peg the help, but she often wondered what the redhead planned to do with her college education. The fact that Vic had none was becoming less and less superfluous.

  "Hey, listen, angel, don't worry about it," Syd told her. "We'll sic the Indian on them and hang their scalps in the den."

  "That wasn't nice."

  Syd only shrugged, but he didn't apologize.

  It was too late to change their minds.

  They moved.

  And Terry was shocked at the callous way she fled the city, always believing she was as sentimental as any woman could be about attachments, no matter how uncomfortable. There should have been some memories, the cherished scrapbook kind, she wanted to tell Syd as he maneuvered to keep their Japanese hatchback behind the truck carrying what remained of their belongings. We've spent most of our lives on one side street or another, and it doesn't seem fair that I couldn't find something more to carry with me besides relief. Something. Anything. Even a chunk of brick or brownstone. A smudge of dust off the living room windows, for crying out loud.

  But in those close to three decades, both their families had evaporated in the wake of company transfers and personal wanderlust, their friends proved in retrospect to be no more than dinner and theater companions, and their dreams of success became unaccountably more attainable when protected by the crowded width of the Garden State. It was her plan that inspiration should flourish more openly in the quiet of The Lane, solidify and grow strong before the city could muster itself to trample it under smog and scare headlines.

  She looked back only once. On the George Washington Bridge. She was unimpressed, and wondered what in hell she had been doing all those years when escape now seemed such an obvious solution.

  Syd had picked her up at her publisher's, and she clutched tightly in her lap the newest edition of a series' volume she'd worked on some four years earlier. She intended the slim yellow book to be both talisman and mentor: whenever she felt constricted by her maddeningly slow progress toward international fame and lucrative awards, she would take it out to measure her professional growth and warn herself about slipping too far from a child's view
of the world; and whenever she ranted at the prose and story and pronounced her obvious natural ability to do far better than whatever manuscript she was working on at the time, she would compare the book to her own handwritten pages secreted in the bottom of a locked desk drawer, and puncture her own ego's balloon. Only slightly less painful than the barbs of the critics, but it would be less all the time. Distance, she decided, would finally make the difference between a hobby and a career.

  By morning's end she was dozing. By midafternoon, when the van was at last unloaded, she prepared to relax, then gaped at the preternaturally prompt arrival of the furniture warehouse delivery truck. She immediately declined Syd's exasperated insistence on food and drink and ran herself on sheer frustrated desperation. Nothing was going to fit. Nothing would look right anywhere, and it was the damned store's fault for those totally unrealistic setups. All their money had been spent in a vain boxing match with a vague shadow of something called their yet-to-be.

  She cried when a mover scraped a lounge chair against a white wall and left a streaked black line right where any visitor could see it; she cried when she followed an appliance man into the basement laundry room and watched the way he manhandled washer and dryer into position without the proper regard for the future they would bleach and fluff dry.

  She fought and lost when Syd insisted they hang the draperies to keep the neighbors from premature snooping.

  She fought and lost when he demanded they put her framed first sketches along the far wall of the living room.

  She fought and won the right to cry unashamedly when the last of the delivery vans spouted blue exhaust in the early dusk. And as she did, Syd scooped her into his arms and carried her laughing across the threshold, dumped her on the sofa and instantly poured her a four-finger drink he guaranteed would knock her out for the rest of the weekend.

  "No," she said, pushing his hand and the glass away. "I just need to rest a little. You don't realize how much work there is left to do."

  Silence, then, as he drank and she permitted herself a footnote of pride at the way the drapes matched the floral browns of the upholstery, and how it all gave the room a faintly Victorian cast. A favorite trick, then: a camera panning to set the scene—to her left the wall with her sketches, a portable television on a cherry stand in the front corner, a sturdy elongated cobbler's bench beneath the front windows, Syd's armchair with its back to the front door. A short wall, then, as yet unadorned, and the hall leading to the rest of the house. Back to her left, and the single brass lamp glowing dimly between sofa and wall. She closed her eyes briefly. Opened them, and she searched the room for hints of ghosts, and was pleased and amazed that it was all perfectly familiar, right, as it should be in a first home so recently quiet after chaos. She allowed herself an audible sigh of content.

  "Didn't think we'd really make it," said Syd finally. "I thought for a while there that one of us was going to have a heart attack."

  "Not you, of course," she said, swinging her legs up to prop themselves on the arm, laying her head in his lap.

  "Of course not," he said. "I was perfectly calm throughout the entire operation. But my God, angel, you should have seen yourself! Why the hell were you crying all the time? I thought this was supposed to be a happy time."

  "It is. But I like to cry. It's my privilege."

  "As a woman, no doubt."

  "Nope. As a perfectly normal human being on the verge of a nervous breakdown."

  They stared at the hidden front windows, seeing through the gently folded cloth to the street, the house opposite, the hills, the highway, the city they would visit only because they worked there. Somewhere not far to the west was the Delaware River, and Terry imagined she could hear it—it, instead of the traffic and the downstairs neighbors and the sirens and the brakes that barely prevented an accident a hundred times a night.

  Just as she felt herself falling asleep, Syd disturbed her by twisting around.

  "What?" she said.

  He scratched at his face, the back of his head. "I'm not sure I like that picture window back there, after all. Even with the curtains I keep thinking someone is looking in at me from outside the house."

  "Darling, there are no apartments or houses or wigwams out there. Believe me, I tell you this true. I wouldn't lie. There's nothing there but the yard and the meadow."

  He nodded and finished his drink. "Yeah, I suppose you're right. Habit, I guess. It's going to take some getting used to, isn't it?"

  His hand rubbed absently over her stomach, caught itself in a familiar rhythm and pressed slightly harder in widening circles until it brushed the underside of her breasts. She closed her eyes and stretched, sensation beneath the cotton blouse oddly enhanced and definitely erotic at the lack of street noise and the aroma of exhaust, feet thumping up stairs and fists pounding on walls. Hooking her fingers around his neck, she lifted herself to his face and wondered which of the rooms they would baptize first; bedroom, living room, the middle of the hall. She turned onto her side and pressed into his stomach.

  The doorbell chimed. "Shit," he said without taking his lips from hers.

  "Watch it, boy, you're in mixed goddamn company." She sat up quickly and pulled her braid to smooth it. Then she took his hand and held it to her breast for a moment before pinching his cheek. "Maybe it's our first neighbor come to call and bid us fond welcome. Or something."

  "Huh!" he grunted disgustedly. "Where the hell were they when we were moving? Good of them to wait until all the work was done."

  "Shut up, crank," she said over the chimes' repeated summons. "Now go let them in. We might as well start this suburban stuff right."

  Further protest was only a formality, which he indulged in obscenely until he reached the door. Then he waited as she posed behind the sofa, one hand carelessly on the back, the other stroking the braid as though it were a cat on her shoulder. Then she nodded, fighting the sudden flurry in her stomach, and couldn't help gaping when the man and two children walked in. It was an instant's examination.

  He was easily a foot taller than Syd, and twice as broad at shoulders and hips. Midnight hair parted in the middle and held close to the skull by a plain brown leather band. Clean shaven. High cheeks made larger by abundant good health. And when he smiled a greeting, his eyes retreated into shadows and became deep wells of black. There was no guessing his age properly, but when he stepped into the light, ushering the two boys ahead of him, she saw faint ridges in his dark skin, and the highlights in his hair became strands of vagrant gray. He wore a dark plaid shirt, wide-belted jeans and, when she allowed herself a quick downward glance, sharply pointed boots as black as his eyes.

  "You must be Mr. McIntyre," she blurted, and ducked away from Syd's disapproval by coming forward with her hand extended. He held it briefly, and she nearly jumped at the coldness.

  "Indeed," the man said, the smile remaining, becoming impossibly larger. "Ah, the word is already out. My cross. But first, these are my grandchildren, Kit and David. Bookends, as you can see."

  Syd shook hands with the twins solemnly and the courtesy was solemnly returned. Terry resisted the temptation to hug them and brought them all into the rectangle of furniture. McIntyre chose the bench, and the glow from the lamp gave his face a bronze uncertainty that made her think instantly of a death mask, and just as instantly she wanted to apologize for the thought.

  Syd made an unnecessary show of settling into his chair before leaning forward to rest his forearms on his knees. "You said the word was out?"

  "Hush, dope," she whispered, and hurried into the kitchen to look for snacks and something to drink. If she'd only taken some time to run down to that little store she'd seen on Hawthorne Street! She tried to sound as though she were whipping up a feast, but strained nevertheless to hear the answer to Syd's question, laughing at herself when she realized she needn't have bothered—McIntyre's voice would have carried in a hurricane.

  "Indeed, Mr. Guiness—"

  "Syd, please. And m
y wife's Terry."

  "Syd. Thank you for that. Well, it appears that my family has become the conscience scapegoat for inadequate salesmen who can't close a deal around here."

  There was a pause as Terry returned with a tray and served soda to the boys and coffee to the men. It was suddenly an awkward moment, and she cast for something to say without seeming condescending or patronizing. In reviewing several possible lines of dialogue, she found herself grinning at their inanity, and when she looked up, wondering at the continued silence, she saw the four of them staring openly at her. Flustered, she attempted a diversion by asking the boys what grade they were in, what subjects they were studying. McIntyre laughed and pulled his grandchildren to his side. Neither had even attempted a smile.

  "You're kind, Mrs. Guiness—Terry—but don't feel as if you have to apologize for what you're thinking. And don't worry about the boys. Sometimes I think the only woman they respond to is their schoolteacher. Even their mother has a problem."

  Terry smiled her relief. "Thank you," she said. "I'm not the most tactful person in the world, you see."

  "So," he said suddenly, and loudly, slapping at his tree-trunk thighs. "Tell me about yourselves, if you like." The boys quickly clambered onto his legs, balancing themselves with an arm around his shoulders. "Then I will give you all the dirt there is to have in this deceptively quiet little street."

  Terry felt instantly on her guard while part of her chided her wariness as a product of her city living. To her surprise, Syd wasted no time in launching into what she considered to be an ultimately boring narrative. Several times she tried to interrupt with a question of her own, but she was ignored on all accounts except when asked to clarify or nod agreement. McIntyre listened politely, smiled when appropriate, laughed at exactly the right times, and for the proper length. Again she tried to stem the biography, but Syd's face began to flush in his excitement. His hands moved from his knees, pointing to her sketches, picking up one of her books to show an expansively impressed McIntyre, a passively interested set of twins.