The Amateur Marriage Read online

  If Lindy had been here, even the air would have felt different—spiky and unreliable. Lindy had an entire long side of the table to herself, opposite George and Karen, and whenever she made one of her pronouncements she tended to stretch out her arms and grip both corners as she spoke, taking over not just the table but the whole kitchen. This was a skinny, bony girl (deliberately skinny, calorie-obsessed—a girl who weighed all her clothes before deciding what to wear to the doctor’s office), but somehow she managed to loom; she managed to seem bigger than the four others put together. She spat out words like “middle class” and “domestic” as if they were curses. She quoted a line from a poem called “Howl” that got her banished to her room. She urged books upon her parents—her beloved Jack Kerook and someone named Albert Caymus—but when her father asked if they had Language (as he called it), she said, “Oh, what’s the use? Nothing’s going to change you. I don’t know why I bother.”

  With all these literary interests you would think she would make straight A’s, but in fact she’d had to repeat a semester of English last summer, and her first-term report card this fall had had no grade higher than a C; and that too was a subject for endless altercation—her father saying, “Caymus-Shaymus, if you can’t even pass a test on Silas Marner,” and Lindy saying, “If that is not typical! You’re so stuck in your narrow-minded little money-grubbing rut, nothing matters if it isn’t for credit, if it can’t fit into a high-school transcript, if it doesn’t look good on a resume,” and their mother saying, “Now, Michael, it’s nice she’s doing some independent reading,” and their father saying, “If you wouldn’t always take her side, Pauline, she might learn a little self-discipline,” and their mother saying, “Oh, fine! I suppose it’s all my fault your daughter’s flunking out . . .”

  Their mother returned with the coffee pot and leaned into their father’s shoulder as she filled his cup. “Thanks, sweetheart,” he said, and he reached up to pat her hand before he took his first sip.

  When they found out Lindy was missing, Karen would be held accountable for her “yes.” Oh, yes, she had said, Lindy had come home all right; Karen had peeked into her room. Dressing after breakfast, she felt a dull, dank weight growing in the pit of her stomach. She stripped off her pajama top, tugged on a sleeveless undershirt, and then sat numbly on the edge of her bed, staring down at her rabbit slippers. Her parents would point out that because she had told a lie, the authorities’ search for her sister had been tragically delayed. If Lindy was in trouble somewhere—say, buried in an underground vault with a twelve-hour supply of oxygen—it would be Karen’s fault she died.

  Goose bumps were prickling her arms and she was starting to shiver with cold; so she stood up and finished dressing. She put on the underpants embroidered with SUNDAY, her rosebud-printed blouse, her pink corduroy jumper and pink knee socks. But no shoes. Instead she padded out the door, making as little noise as possible, and went down the hall to Lindy’s room.

  You might expect someone as wild as Lindy to be messy and disorganized, but the odd thing was that she kept her room very neat. Her clothes (mostly black, except for those that their mother had bought without consulting her) hung in a row in the closet. The bulletin board intended for party invitations and team pennants and snapshots of her classmates displayed a single poster: James Dean smoking a cigarette. The books in the bookcase were lined up according to height, and the bureau top was bare except for three family photos in dimestore gilt frames. It almost seemed nobody lived here. Was that the whole point? The phrase “clean getaway” popped into Karen’s mind.

  Neatest of all was the bed: the pillow plumped, the top sheet folded over, the coverlet stretched taut. It was unthinkable that anyone glancing into this room could imagine that bed was inhabited.

  Karen went to the closet for Lindy’s bathrobe—an old man’s ratty thrift-shop overcoat that always made their mother shudder. She crossed to the bed, drew back the covers, and laid the robe in a long, bulky shape down the center. When she pulled the covers up again it looked as if someone without a head were sleeping there, but she solved that problem by rearranging the pillow, bunching it in such a way that a head might be buried beneath.

  If you just peeked in, only peeked, you could be excused for supposing that the bed was occupied.

  On her way out, Karen stopped by the bureau to study the photos. One was on her own bureau too, as well as on George’s—though pretty well hidden, in both cases, by piles of clutter. It was their parents’ fifteenth-anniversary picture, a full-color studio portrait that their mother had framed for each of them. Their father was in his dark suit and their mother in a gray dress, so that the most noticeable color was the blue satin fake-sky backdrop. Both of them looked self-conscious and stiff and surprisingly young, although it wasn’t that long ago.

  The second photo was last year’s Christmas card, FROM OUR HOUSE TO YOUR HOUSE, HOLIDAY GREETINGS 1959, the Caption read, beneath a picture of George and Karen smiling and Lindy scowling. They all three wore red-and-white reindeer sweaters, which might explain Lindy’s expression. An accident of composition—the vertical line of a curtain edge separating her from the other two—accentuated Lindy’s difference, her darkness and thinness and sharpness next to George and Karen’s soft blondness. Their mother had found the photo disappointing, although it was the best of the bunch. Signing the cards at the desk in the TV room, she had repeatedly grimaced. Wouldn’t you know that Lindy would snitch one and go off and buy a frame for it, as if to make a statement!

  The third photo was Grandma Anton, who had died when Karen was in kindergarten. Karen barely remembered that seamed and pocketed face, that no-color, no-style hair, but Lindy still missed her because their grandma had loved Lindy best, or so Lindy claimed. She claimed Grandma Anton was watching over her from heaven; that nothing could go wrong in her life because she was under Grandma Anton’s constant care, which she knew for a fact because at difficult moments her grandma’s favorite song, “Whispering Hope,” would come wafting into her head for no reason. Karen thought Lindy was probably right. It was such a namby-pamby song, so old-ladyish (nothing like the hammering rock-and-roll music Lindy ordinarily listened to), how else to explain its presence?

  Their grandma had died of a stroke, and their mother had taken it terribly. This was their father’s mother, not their mother’s, but their father had acted just quietly sad while their mother had cried for weeks. She said she should have been more sensitive to Grandma Anton’s feelings, more considerate, more responsive to her complaints. She worried that God would punish her; that she would get old herself one day and find out how it felt to live far away from her friends, the only grandma in the neighborhood, nothing to do and no place to go unless her daughter-in-law condescended to drive her, which she oftentimes might not. Their father told her she was making too much of it. “Making too much!” their mother cried. “How can you say that!” and their father told her, “Now, calm yourself, Poll.” The C word, Lindy called it. “Calm yourself; calm down”—always guaranteed to get their mother going. Plus she hated the name Poll. Everybody knew that, most certainly including their father.

  Lindy herself hated the name Lindy. She said it sounded like a girl in pink gingham. At the beginning of this school year she’d started making all her teachers address her by her full name, Linnet. (She’d been named for an English bird that a soldier had mentioned to their mother during the war.) At first Karen had tried to call her that too, but it had felt so unnatural that she’d gradually given it up. Still, she sympathized, and once when a teacher phoned and asked for “Lin-NET Anton’s mother or father”—stressing the wrong syllable, as everyone tended to do—Karen had felt a kind of bruise deepening in her chest. She had had a glimpse then of what it must feel like to be misunderstood and peculiar and not well thought of by grownups.

  She set an ear against the door, listening for her parents, before she stepped out of Lindy’s room and padded back to her own.

  In the car, their m
other said you couldn’t very well force children to go to church if their own father wouldn’t go. Then she slammed on the brakes and said, “Oh! I’m so embarrassed! I thought part of this road was for me.” She was speaking to the driver of an oncoming station wagon, although of course he couldn’t hear her. “I beg your humble pardon,” she told him. Then she took a sudden right without a signal, her right rear tire bumping over the curb. It was Karen’s turn to sit up front and she pointedly grabbed the dashboard, but her mother wasn’t paying attention. “Mimi Drew makes her children go to church and Sunday school both,” she was saying, “and afterwards at the dinner table they each have to talk about one thing they learned there. But then, her husband is a deacon. Whatever a deacon is.”

  She was silent for a moment, perhaps considering the question of deacons. When she wasn’t talking she drove better. She had on the blue angora knit that she worried made her look fat; it did cling slightly to the gentle swell of her stomach but it also showed up the blue of her eyes, which Karen always thought of as true blue—a deep and sincere blue. A nearly invisible blond fuzz gilded the skin above her pointy-lipped, bright mouth. Karen’s friends were constantly telling her she had the prettiest mother. Karen always said, “Oh! Do you think so?” as if it were a brand-new idea. Secretly, though, she agreed.

  They took a left on Turtle Dove Lane, where Karen’s best friend Maureen lived; but Maureen went to church in the city somewhere and they hardly ever got to see each other on Sundays. Karen stared longingly at Maureen’s house as they passed it—the screened side porch where they’d spent the summer weaving lanyards, and the little staked tree in the yard with its leaves turning such a vivid yellow that they made her eyes squinch up.

  “If your father went to church I’d be more in my rights to tell Lindy she had to go too,” their mother said. “I know you can’t cram religion down people’s throats, but church would give her sort of an outlet, don’t you think? She could join the Sunday-night youth group and meet a more wholesome brand of young person. What did she say, George?” she asked, looking at him in the mirror. “Did she say she wasn’t coming to church because she was opposed to church, or just because she wanted to sleep?”

  George must have shrugged. “Ah, well,” their mother said. Karen twisted in her seat to see George’s expression, but he was gazing serenely out the side window, his hands relaxed on his knees. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth! “Go ask Lindy if she’s coming with us,” their mother had told him before they set off, and he had returned a moment later and said, “Nah. She’s going to stay home.” If it occurred to him that he was as guilty now as Karen—that Lindy might be running out of oxygen at any second—he didn’t seem concerned.

  “I don’t believe he’s antireligious so much as he’s antisocial,” their mother said. Evidently she was back on the subject of their father. “I mean, the man has no friends, have you noticed? Not counting his customers in the grocery store, or the neighbors whose parties I drag him to, he doesn’t know a soul! Whereas I, on the other hand . . . Why, I can’t think what I’d do without friends! I just need to share my feelings with people. Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m feeling till I’ve said it out loud to Mimi or Dot. Oh, excusez-moi, monsieur, I didn’t realize we were supposed to exceed the speed limit here.”

  In fact she had slowed to a crawl—something she often did while talking—but now she accelerated just as the car that had honked behind her was veering left to overtake her. The other car dropped back again. She said, “You know what I mean, Karen. When you and Maureen get together, gabbing to each other . . . And George, you’re pretty social too, considering you’re a boy. But Lindy is more like your father. A person can’t guess what might be on her mind! She’s got me totally baffled.”

  Karen had a sudden idea. Maybe George really had talked to Lindy. If Lindy had crept to her room unnoticed—which of course she would try to do, wanting to avoid a scene—and slipped between the covers, because naturally she’d be sleepy . . . Then George had stuck his head in and said, “Lin? You coming to church?”

  “Go away,” she’d have told him, muffled. “No. Leave me alone.”

  And he had said “Okay” and closed her door.

  Karen should have considered that possibility before. She sat back in her seat, feeling much better. They passed a fish pond carpeted over with red and yellow leaves. This was such a beautiful fall day.

  But when she checked Lindy’s room again after they got home from church, the old man’s overcoat still lay in the bed like a log. (Now she wondered how she could have imagined it would fool anyone.) The pillow was still bunched where Lindy’s head should be. Karen closed the door again and returned to the kitchen. She was feeling faintly sick. The smell of Sunday dinner—something “gourmet” involving curry powder—itched the inside of her nose.

  “Whose turn is it to set the table?” her mother asked. “Is it Lindy’s? Go wake her up! There’s a limit to how long a person should sleep.”

  Karen could probably have evaded a while longer, but all at once a kind of tiredness swept over her. “She’s not there,” she told her mother.

  “Not there?”

  Karen kept her face expressionless.

  “What do you mean, she’s not there?”

  “She isn’t in her bed. I just looked.”

  “But where is she, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her mother turned to George, who was niching bits of icing off a devil’s-food cake on the counter. “Have you seen her?” she asked.

  He said, “Nope.” His voice was as flat as Karen’s had been. He may have felt equally tired.

  “Well, she didn’t just vanish into thin air! Both of you saw her earlier; how far could she have gone?”

  George and Karen said nothing.

  “This kind of thing’s got to stop,” their mother said. “Where’s your father? Michael!” And she slammed her spatula into the skillet and went out into the hall. “Michael!” she called. They heard her opening Lindy’s door, stepping into the room for a moment before she continued toward the stairs. Presumably she was going down to the TV room, where their father spent his Sunday mornings working on the household accounts. But whatever they said to each other couldn’t be heard from the kitchen.

  At dinner, all their mother wanted to talk about was Lindy’s disappearance. “She made her bed up so it looks as if she’s in it,” she said. “This was premeditated! Something’s going on.”

  Their father, on the other hand, was more interested in reviewing the budget. “Every month,” he said, “I assume a certain amount will be spent on a certain category. I’ve told you this before, Pauline.”

  “How can you think of money when your daughter’s missing?” she asked.

  It did seem hardhearted of him, till Karen remembered that as far as their parents knew, Lindy had been missing no more than an hour or so. Then their mother looked ridiculous, with her eyebrows knitted so anxiously and her fists clenched on either side of her plate. When she was upset, she used fancier words. “Unconscionable,” she said, and “fathom.” “I cannot fathom why a girl in Lindy’s circumstances, from a loving and caring home—”

  “We’ll have to have a talk with her,” their father said. “Now, charitable donations, for instance. Charitable donations are no different from any other expense. It’s true they benefit someone else, but still we need to budget for them. We can’t just give to all and sundry any time the whim overtakes us.”

  Oh, great, he was back on the Orphans’ Fund. Their mother sat up straighter and asked, “Haven’t we had this discussion?”

  “Yes, but now I see you also wrote a check to the—”

  “Michael! Your oldest daughter’s in some undisclosed location with a bunch of shiftless deadbeats in black turtlenecks, and all you can think of is—”

  “Well, for God’s sake, Pauline, you’re the girl’s mother! Why don’t you put your foot down?”

  They faced each other from o
pposite ends of the table, their eyes hard and narrowly focused. At such moments, Karen always felt that the children in this family might as well not exist. Her parents were such a couple! So self-centered! She fixed her mind on her plate; she tried to fork up her rice without including any of the yellow stuff on top. George, however, was eating everything item by item, plowing through his string beans first and then his rice-and-yellow-stuff and then his Waldorf salad. He had one elbow on the table and his free hand was supporting his head, but nobody bothered correcting him.

  Across from Karen, Lindy’s glass of milk stood untouched, growing warmer by the minute. There was nothing more disgusting than room-temperature milk. Just thinking about it made Karen’s stomach turn over.

  Their father went into the city to check on the store and their mother didn’t object, although ordinarily she would have. (The store wasn’t even open on Sundays. Sometimes it seemed he just got the fidgets any time he was home too long.) Instead she seized her chance to telephone each of her sisters and consult with them about Lindy. “I mean, you never had this happen, did you?” she asked one of them. (Sherry? Megan?) “The child is completely beyond our control! I don’t know who we think we’re kidding, here.”

  George was working on his history project—a diorama of the First Continental Congress—and he shooed Karen out of his room when she tried to talk to him. She decided she might as well assemble her costume for Halloween. She was planning to go as Castro; already she had a cigar borrowed from Maureen’s father. The beard would be a problem, though. She wanted actual texture, not something drawn on with eyebrow pencil. In the end, she found a ball of black yarn in her mother’s sewing cabinet and took it back to her room to experiment with.