The Complete Collection. William Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ it hurts. I know also how that kind of poison does get into good relationships; you can’t completely wipe it out. Mom’s just a smart enough amateur psychologist to pick up minor dissatisfactions, vulnerabilities and lean on them. But she’d better be careful; better yet, I’d best get her out of there.

      I drive her home. It’s getting late and she still hasn’t eaten. I don’t feel like cooking and I don’t want Mother in the kitchen, so I take her to one of her favorite restaurants, a crappy place called the Williamsburg Inn. I can always eat a second dinner, especially when I’m anxious and feeling pressed or depressed.

      This Williamsburg Inn is a phony colonial-style place on the corner of National and Sawtelle in West Los Angeles. It has a red-brick façade with colonial white woodwork and thin, fake, wooden columns across a narrow porch. It even has one of those intolerable little statues of a black boy in a red suit with knickers where you’re supposed to tie your horse. Hell, there isn’t a horse within twenty miles, but there are a lot of blacks.

      Then there’s all the superpatriotic business with flags draped over everything. Fake copies of the Declaration of Independence blown up fifty times are on the walls along with about twenty copies of Stuart’s George Washington. It’s awful. The waitresses are dressed in Martha Washington-style costumes with a deep decolleté. They must hire these girls by bra size. Also, the whole place is pervaded with a vague, antiblack feeling, very superpatriot, very Virginian.

      They probably have several not so subtle ways to discourage any black who might walk in by mistake, little things you can’t quite put your finger on: smaller portions, overseasoning, slow service – that kind of stuff.

      Normally, this is a restaurant Mother loves. She says things like ‘Such a nice type of people eat there,’ or, ‘It’s so “refined”.’

      But now she’s into complaining. Nothing is any good. Nothing is good as it used to be. Jews must have bought the place. The drink before dinner is no good; they didn’t put any alcohol in it, just fancy ice, water and fruit. So what else is new? That’s why the cocktail was invented; people can think they’re drinking without using much alcohol.

      Then it’s the service. That poor girl with her boobs falling into our plates can’t do anything right for Mother.

      The food is mediocre at best, and expensive. I listen to Mother gripe through each course. I let her go on; she’s enjoying herself, at least it keeps her mind off Dad. I listen again to all the details of their visit to Williamsburg in Virginia with the Barlittles. It must have been ten years ago and I’m sure I’ve heard about it five times. Williamsburg is a town the Rockefellers fixed up the way it never was so people won’t ask for the money robbed from them by crooked oil deals.

      When we get home, I tell Mom I’m going to sleep out in the garden back bedroom. I show her the signal system Dad’s rigged and how to use it. She wants to know why I’m not sleeping in the house. I know if I’d said I’d sleep in the side bedroom, she’d want me to sleep in the garden. I know that. I’m not evasive enough to deal with Mom.

      But I do sleep. Mom gets through the night without any problems, too.

      But the next day I have to stop her five different times from doing crazy things that could kill her. Also, she can’t believe I can cook dinner.

      Mom has the ultimate put-down when everything goes wrong; that is, when somebody else is doing anything right without her help. It goes like this.

      ‘My God, look what my idiot child can do, he can boil an egg! Who’d ever believe it? I didn’t know you had so many talents, Jacky. Soon you’ll be the best water-boiler for men over fifty on Colby Lane.’

      We work through various versions of this during the entire dinner process.

      Afterward, we go in and watch TV. Mother sits in Dad’s chair with a stool pulled up to put her feet on. She has a habit of crossing her legs or feet, and the doctor has made a point about how this is bad for circulation. It’s one of the things heart patients aren’t supposed to do. She’s always forgetting and I keep reminding her. I spend more time watching her feet than watching TV. Probably I’m trying to get even for the dinner put-down.

      Also, the back-seating on the dishwashing was overwhelming. I happen to know she’s a sloppy dishwasher, sloppier than I am, and that’s saying something. But you’d swear we were preparing those dishes for brain surgery.

      At about eleven o’clock, I get so tired I go back to the bedroom. She’s still sitting up in the chair and says she’s not sleepy yet. I don’t feel like fighting her.

       11

      Next morning, Billy really wants to drive. What the hell, he should feel I have confidence in him. If we have an accident, we’ll change places with each other just before we die.

      Today we’ll be coming down the eastern side of the Rockies and it’ll be tedious driving. We leave early, but no matter how early you take off, it’s one long line of trucks. Not many trucks take Route 70, because of the pass, but enough do; so it’s a drag and the road isn’t wide enough for passing.

      I make a rule, no passing unless we both agree. I’ve driven with Billy before. Also, I’m in charge of music. I don’t want to be nervous about his driving and at the same time have ‘Bobby boy’ singing through his nose; telling me how he has exclusively discovered the meaning of life.

      It’s a gorgeous day. The pass is twelve thousand feet and we’re starting down. We curve along in the sunshine; massive trees and rocks, crisp creeks shining at the bottom of deep cuts. The road meanders through hairpin turns. All along are sections being built for the big highway to go through here someday.

      We’re never going to agree on passing. Billy can’t see more than seventy-five yards along the road ever, and those semitrailer trucks are at least thirty yards long. They’re lined up in front of us far as we can see.

      So after he’s put on the direction signal a couple of times and I’ve shaken my head no, Billy pushes back his seat and drives with his arms straight out. His head is tilted as if he’s looking through bifocals. Thank God, we can’t go more than thirty miles per hour.

      There isn’t much in the way of music. We’re out of range for Denver and there’s nothing but Country Western from small towns.

      I’d like to find a Glenn Miller eight-track. I wonder if they’ve made any tapes of that music. I’ll bet there’re a lot of people, people my age, who’d enjoy hearing those old tunes again … ‘Moonlight Cocktail’, ‘Sunrise Serenade’, ‘In the Mood’ …

      I could tell Miller from the first bar. He’d set up his woodwinds to carry the theme; then his brass and percussion would move in, blend with some kind of magic weaving to pick it up. I could almost see it in my mind. It was like watching a dancer, or slow-motion pictures of a basketball player dribbling, making a shoulder fake, springing and pushing off a jump shot while fading.

      I had every record Miller cut. When I was fifteen I bought one of the first portable record players. The replacement battery was the size of a motorcycle twelve-volter. The thing cost a fortune. I’d play Miller out there in the aviary for my birds. It was heaven playing those old 78s, three minutes on a side, listening to Glenn Miller having a concert with my birds. I even wrote him once about it but didn’t get an answer.

      While СКАЧАТЬ