The Perfect Sonya
The Perfect Sonya by Beverly Lowry
(Page 3 of 3)
The remark had no bearing on the circumstances; it was only a convenient exit line and a general statement of fact, denoting his truest feelings about her. All Pauline's life, Jack Miller waited for her to fail badly enough that his sentiment would make some dint in her defense against him. All her life she planned strategies to disappoint him.
He turned on his heel and, passing the bear, went to the end of the block. At the corner, beside a pretend saloon with wooden swinging doors, he wheeled around and faced her like a gunfighter. Thinking he might come back, Pauline drew herself up to her full height. But Jack only pointed his finger at her–pointed, let his hand drop, raised it and pointed again–and then turned and left.
Vacations never worked out, not ever. She wondered if other families really had fun the way they said.
They didn't go anywhere that often. With Mavis in and out of treatment all the time, they never knew when she'd be up to traveling. Mavis had this problem. Nerves, her family said. Pauline imagined nerves to be something like a rat in her mother's brain. Sometimes the rat slept, but when it wakened and began to gnaw, Mavis's brain turned to sawdust; her mother went away and left someone else behind, a stranger, made of stone.
And so mostly they stayed where they were, out from Baytown in the big white house on the banks of Cedar Bayou, with their dogs and cats and horses and one cow.
Only sometimes when they had a nice night together–it happened–playing Parcheesi or sitting in the porch swing watching stars and lightning bugs–the three of them grew first wistful, then sentimental, then dreamy. And when they got dreamy they did this family trick together–a balancing act, like three people on one bicycle on a circus high wire.
Exercising that familial skill, Jack, Mavis and Pauline forgot to remember how terrible other vacations had been and how they had vowed–sworn to God!–never to take another. They would have heard about other families' trips, to Colorado where you could ride a train straight up the side of a mountain, or to the Blue Ridge Mountains where the horizon was said actually to be blue. All the other families said they had such fun, swimming in clear cold streams, eating fried shrimp with drawn butter. Carried away, Jack would send Pauline to get out the atlas and, following major highways with their fingers, they would decide, like a regular American family, to take a trip.
Most vacations, they never reached their destination. The thread inside Mavis's mind started to frazzle or Jack got fed up with something–the heat, a mediocre motel, Pauline's need to go to the bathroom–anything would do. He might suddenly, in the middle of nowhere, stop the car, get out, look up at the sun and say, "If I wanted to be hot, I could have stayed at home," and they would turn around and go back.
The summer Pauline was eight, they actually made it to Carlsbad Caverns. Inside the cave, Mavis fell apart. Puffing like a steam engine, she had to be led back out by flashlight. Jack went with her. Pauline stayed to see the rest of the cave. When she came out, Jack was standing at the exit waiting, that vein in his temple thumping, his red face swollen with rage.
Pauline would just as soon they never went anywhere . . . although she did like certain features about hotels, room service and candy bar machines, the smell of the empty drawers, the swimming pool, some even with high dives. What she hated was the feeling that the success of a vacation depended on her, on what kind of time she had and how they watched her, how on the road they kept telling her to look, look, every time they passed a cactus or a tree. They never let her just sit there. She always had to say something or they either picked a fight or–worse–got swelled up and refused to speak.
Scenery was nothing. Nothing happened. Scenery was just out there.
Jack's Thunderbird was parked a block down from the Indian village. Pauline heard it start up. He gunned the motor hard. The other tourists went back to their looking. The boy waiting to have his picture taken steppped inside the bear's arms. He was only six or so. To get in, he did not have to duck.
"I ain't afraid," the boy said. And as he stood leaning against the bear's belly, hands in his pants pockets, the boy looked directly at Pauline. He smiled for the camera. His father snapped the picture and said, "One more, son, to be sure."
Pauline turned away. If she had a brother or a sister, she'd have been better off. There'd have been someone else around to keep her from feeling so watched and responsible all the time.
She had asked Mavis to have one, preferably a girl; she really wanted a sister. But a brother would do.
Mavis was old for a mother, forty. Jack was forty-five. Mavis hadn't said no to the baby. She hadn't said yes exactly–really, nobody had babies at forty–but she hadn't said no.
Pauline picked up her camera and, with her skirt, wiped the dust from the lens. In the distance, the Thunderbird roared away. When he came to a paved street, Jack did something to make the tires squeal.
When her father went at her, Pauline never felt like crying. She could not fight and cry at the same time. But when the fight was over, the rest of her feelings came down and she wanted to go sit in a closet in the dark, press her eyeballs into her bony knees and–comforted by the smell of sour shoes and mothballs–cry all night.
She pretended to be rubbing dirt from her eyes with the back of her hand. Mavis sashayed over like a girl, fluffing her hair. Mavis was getting fat again, the first sign of trouble. After the fat stage came the stone-dead nothing time, when Mavis sat in a chair by the window with her bourbon and refused to move or speak. Sometimes Pauline slid her face down in front of her mother's to see what Mavis was looking at, but it was only the yard, the trees, nothing new. When the zombie stage had gone on a few weeks, there would finally come a night of whispers and telephone calls, of car tires crunching in the white shell drive and then silence. In the morning Mavis would be gone. Pauline would be alone in the house with her aunt, the great Wanda, her steady presence.
"It's okay, Mama," Pauline said. "Here," she said. "You take the camera." She handed her mother the Kodak and took her hand. "We'll get a cab home."
"Home?"
"The hotel."
Pauline led her mother toward a telephone booth beside the swinging doors of the fake saloon. The fat stage was not so bad. At least she was still normal.
Nobody used cabs much in Arkansas and so it took a long time for theirs to arrive. While they waited, Pauline let Mavis take one picture of her beside the bear, standing a safe distance away, her hands at her waist, clasped tightly.
Mavis pressed the red button and–too soon; she moved too soon, the picture would be blurred–lowered the camera. "He should like that," she said. And she smiled. Mavis had two looks, happy and sad. The greatest smile, up at the edges, like an angel on a Valentine. When she was sad, her face collapsed.
In the cab, Pauline pressed herself close to her mother. Now she would get to swim. Maybe the lifeguard hadn't cleaned the pool. Maybe Jack would stay gone. She and Mavis could order from room service. It was Sunday. They could lie in their beds and watch Ed Sullivan.
Mavis felt warm. Round and enveloping. Next to her mother, alone with her, taking care of her, Pauline felt safe and protected.
A nothing kind of incident, no lasting repercussions, nothing that hadn't happened before. Yet every second is as fresh to Pauline this minute as if she were standing on the street of the Indian village, eleven years old instead of thirty-two, in Arkansas instead of Texas. Mavis giving her that shove, Jack being his ridiculous self, pretending to be what he is not, with no picture of how he might appear to anyone else, locked into his own stubborn sense of himself, the big man, Tex, the Iron Duke. The motheaten brown bear is always close. Surely he invades her dreams. And she is still afraid. The bear's eyes pin her to the wall, even in memory, some twenty years later when she is grown, has moved, established a career, her own life. Even though she tells herself, Stuffed, the bear was stuffed, the memory sticks. Crawls lightly but surely up her spine like a feather-footed insect.
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