Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(24)
After that came the threat of a tongue stud, but luckily she’d consulted him first. What had he said? “You want the inside of your mouth to look like a biker’s jacket?” Maybe not: too much risk of the answer being yes. Certainly he wouldn’t have informed her that some men view such baubles as blowjob advertisements: that might have been an incentive. A health warning: “You could die of septicemia of the tongue?” Health warnings don’t work with her, as she considers them a challenge: her superior immune system will surely crush any microbe the invisible world may toss her way.
More likely he’d said, “You’d sound like Daffy Duck and you’d spit all over everyone. Not attractive, in my books. Anyway, the stud wave has passed. Only stockbrokers get them any more.” That at least made her giggle.
It’s best not to overreact to her. Push, and she pushes back. He hasn’t forgotten her childhood tantrums and the fights she used to get into, flailing her long arms ineffectually as the other children laughed and jeered her on. He’d watch, almost in tears himself: he couldn’t extricate her, confined to the boys’ side of the schoolyard as he was.
So he avoids confrontation. Languor is a more efficient method of control.
The twins were christened Marjorie and Martin, at a time when parents thought alliterative names for children were snappy, and were costumed alike in miniature overalls. Even their mother – not the sharpest knife in the drawer – realized that it would not do to stick Martin into a dress because he might turn into a pansy, her term. So there they are, aged two, in their matching sailor suits and their tiny sailor hats, holding hands and squinting into the sun with their elvish, lopsided smiles: his skewed up at the left, hers at the right. You can’t tell whether they’re boys or girls, but you have to admit they’re delicious. Behind them is a man’s body in a uniform, it being the war: their father with the top part of his head cut off, which was shortly to happen to him in reality. Their mother used to weep buckets over that photo when she’d been drinking. She viewed it as a premonition: if only she’d held the camera straight, Weston’s head would not have been cropped like that and the fatal explosion would never have happened.
Gazing at their past selves, Jorrie and Tin feel a tenderness they seldom display to anyone in the present. They’d like to hug those scrumptious little scamps, those yellowing, fading echoes. They’d like to assure the pint-sized seafarers that, though their voyage through time is about to take a turn for the worse and will remain worse for a while, it will all work out in the end. Or near the end; which is, let’s face it, where they are now.
Because, voilà, here they are together again, full circle. A few inner wounds, a few scars, a few abrasions, but still standing. Still Jorrie and Tin, who’d rebelled at being nicknamed Marje and Marv, and who’d taken to using their last syllables as their real, secret names, known to them alone. Jorrie and Tin, in revolt against society’s plans for them: no white weddings, for instance. Jorrie and Tin, who’d refused to knuckle under.
Again, that’s their story. Privately Tin can recall quite a few mortifying though satisfying knucklings-under he has submitted to, in the wild nighttime shrubberies of Cherry Beach and elsewhere, but no need to sully the ears of Jorrie with those. At least he never ran into any of his students while nervously prowling the midnight pathways. At least he never got mugged. At least he never got caught.
“So heavenly,” says Tin, smiling at the photograph, which is framed in fumed oak and resides on the dining room wall above the art deco buffet, a steal when Tin acquired it forty years ago. “Too bad our hair went dark.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” says Jorrie. “Blond is overrated.”
“It’s coming back,” says Tin. “The ’50s are having a moment again, have you noticed? It’s the Marilyn thing.”
He does not believe in the ’50s moment as portrayed recently on screens large and small. While they were going on, the ’50s seemed like normal life, but now they’ve become the olden days: fodder for television shows in which the colours are wrong – too clean, too pastel – and the crinolines are too numerous. Hardly anyone had a ponytail in real life, nor did the adult men always wear tailored suits, with fedoras tilted at a jaunty angle and white pocket handkerchiefs starched into triangles.
They did smoke pipes, however, though pipes were fading even then. On the weekends they mooched around in moccasins and jeans – primitive jeans, but jeans. They read their newspapers while sitting in their Naugahyde lounge chairs with matching hassocks, drinking a relaxing Manhattan and smoking fit to kill; they lovingly washed and waxed their sharp-finned and over-chromed gas-guzzler cars; they mowed their lawns with push mowers. Or that’s what the fathers of the twins’ friends did. Tin has a spot of wistfulness in his heart about the bulbous lounge chairs and the shiny, lethal cars and the cumbersome push lawn mowers. If their own father had lived, would things have been better for Tin himself?
No. Things would not have been better, they would have been horrific. He would have had to go fishing: hoick fish up out of the water and assassinate them while uttering manly grunts. Crawl under cars with wrenches, saying things like “muffler.” Be slapped on the back and told his dad was proud of him. Fat chance.
“Though Ernest Hemingway’s mother did it,” said Jorrie.