Believe Them, page 1
ALSO BY MARY ROBISON
An Amateur’s Guide to the Night
Days
Oh!
One D.O.A., One on the Way
Subtraction
Tell Me
Why Did I Ever
Believe Them
Copyright © 1988 by Mary Robison
First published in the US in 1988 by Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
First Counterpoint paperback edition: 2019
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.
Seven of these stories appeared first in The New Yorker: “While Home,” “In the Woods,” “Mirror,” “I Get By,” “Trying,” “For Real,” and “Seizing Control.” The author is extremely grateful to the magazine for permission to reprint them. “Your Errant Mom” appeared first in Gentelman’s Quarterly. “I Get by” appeared also in the 1987 O. Henry Prize Stories collection.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Robison, Mary, author.
Title: Believe them : stories / Mary Robison.
Description: First Counterpoint paperback edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018049852 | ISBN 9781640091887
Subjects: LCSH: United StatesSocial life and customs—20th century—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3568.O317 B4 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049852
Cover design by Jenny Carrow
Book design by Jordan Koluch
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Roger
Contents
Seizing Control
For Real
While Home
Your Errant Mom
Trying
In the Woods
Again, Again, Again
Culpability
Mirror
Adore Her
I Get By
Seizing Control
WE WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO STAY up all night, but Mother was in the hospital having Jules, and Father was at the hospital waiting.
We spent a long time out in this blizzard. We had the floodlights on out behind the house, and our backyard shadows were mammoth. We kicked a maze—each of us making a path that led to a fort like an igloo we piled up at the center of the maze. We built the fort last, but then nobody wanted to get inside. Hazel patted the fort and said, “Victory!”—from a movie she knew or something. We didn’t quit and come in until Sarah, the youngest, was whimpering.
Our cuffs and gloves were stiff and had ice balls crusted on them. Our socks were soaked. All of us had snow in our boots—even Terrence, who had boots with buckles. Zippers were stuck with cold. Our ears burned for a long while after, and our hair was dripping wet from melted snow. We put everything we could fit into the clothes dryer and turned it to roll for an hour.
Our neighbors on both sides had been asked to guard us and watch the house (there were five of us kids, not counting Jules), so when it got late and the TV had signed off we put out the lights and had a fire in the fireplace instead. We didn’t subscribe to cable, and Providence, where we lived, has no all-night channel on weekends (this was a Friday). Sometimes we could get Channel 5 from Boston, but not that night, not with the blizzard.
Hazel, who was the oldest of us, was happy about the fire but baffled about the television. Hazel was retarded. She’d get the show listings from the Providence Journal and underline what she wanted to see. To do this, she must have had some kind of coding system she’d memorized, because of course she couldn’t read. This was the first time Hazel had ever been awake when the TV wasn’t.
She watched the fireplace, and once when she saw an up-shoot of flame she said, “The blue star!” which was what she called a beautiful blue ring that our mother wore. Hazel watched the fire some more and kept quiet enough. She had her texture board with her on her lap. “Smooth . . . grainy . . . soft,” she recited, but just to herself, as she felt the different squares.
Terrence got on the telephone and called up a friend of his—Vic, who’d claimed he always stayed up all night. Terrence couldn’t get anyone but Vic’s very alarmed parents. He didn’t give them his name. Terrence was also drinking a bottle of wine cooler—Father’s—which wasn’t allowed, but the rest of us had shared a can of beer earlier and now we were having coffee that we’d made in the drip machine, neither of which we were allowed to do, either. We figured we were all about even and no one would tell.
Hazel started to get annoying with her texture board. She had torn off the square of wide-wale corduroy, and she kept wanting the rest of us to feel the beads of rubber cement left on the backing. “Touch this,” she said over and over to Willy, our other brother.
We took her to bed, to our parents’ king-sized bed—which we thought would be all right this once. And Sarah, the baby, was there in bed already. At first Sarah pretended to be asleep while Hazel was undressing. She could undress herself if she stood before a mirror, and she knew to arch her back and work her hands behind to get her bra unhooked. She never wore clothing that looked retarded. In fact, whenever Father said to her, “How come you always look so pretty?” Hazel really would look pretty. She swung her arms when she walked, the same as the rest of us.
Sarah pretended to wake up suddenly. She wanted her cherry Chap Stick—her lips were so dry, she complained. Terrence must have heard Sarah—we were downstairs—because she was being so insistent. He called, “You left it out in the yard! You had it outside with you. You left it.” Sarah believed Terrence, because his voice had authority. He was very attuned to voices, and he knew how to use his though he was only seventeen. He’d say to Hazel, “Don’t sound like you’re six years old. You’re not six.” Or if someone said just what was expected and predictable Terrence would ask, “Why should I listen when you’re only making noise?”
Sarah wanted us to retrieve her Chap Stick. But the blizzard was still on, and nobody was going back out there, however sorry for her we felt. Most of the time when Sarah was outside, she’d kept her wool muffler over her mouth to protect it. Willy had to wrap it around her, under the hood of her parka, so it was just right. She had baby skin and the cold got to her.
Late in the night, Hazel punched Sarah in the face when they were supposed to be sleeping. Probably they were asleep, and Hazel was probably having a dream. Terrence was interested in dreams and wrote about his in a dream journal he kept. Sometimes he’d ask us questions about ours, or he’d talk to Mother and Father about the meaning of dreams. But he didn’t ask Hazel if she was dreaming when she swung and socked Sarah.
We all talked at once: “I can’t find a coat. . . . Wear mine. . . . Un unh, I hate that coat. . . . This is wet! . . . Go look in the dryer. . . . Get a blanket—get two! . . . No one will see you except maybe the doctor. . . . It makes virtually no difference what you’re wearing or how you look. . . . Another towel for her nose! . . . Let’s just get out of here.”
Terrence warmed up the old Granada out on the street, where Father parked it because the driveway was snowed over. We left Hazel alone in our parents’ bed, and we carried Sarah. We put her in the back, and then two of us got on either side of her. Sarah was covered up with a blanket and also Father’s old topcoat.
The snow blew around in the headlights. No one else was out, and we urged Terrence to run the red lights. He said he couldn’t afford to—his license was only a learner’s permit. He also had a fake license from one of his friends, but the fake said Terrence was twenty-six, which wasn’t believable. We begged him to put on some speed. We said that with a hurt person aboard, the police might even give us an escort through the storm. Terrence said, “Well, I checked her out and she’s not that hurt, unfortunately.”
A man walking his brown poodle loomed up beside us for a moment. The poodle was jumping around in the deep snow, loving it.
“Dog,” Sarah said through her towel bandage. She was wide awake.
AFTER THE EMERGENCY ROOM, WE left Sarah on the car seat. She was out cold from the shot, even though the doctor said it was just to relax her. Her nose was nowhere near broken.
We’d driven awhile and then we hustled into an all-night pancake place, there off Thayer Street. Inside it was steamy and yellow-lit, although it felt a little under heated. We took over one side of an extra-long booth, each of us assuming giant seating space and sprawling convivially. Our arms were spread and they connected us to one another like paper dolls.
We spent time with the menu, reading aloud what side stuff came with the “Wedding Pancake,” or with the “Great American-French Toast.” Willy wanted a Sliced Turkey Dinner Platter, but Terrence said, “Don’t get that. It’s frozen. I mean frozen when served, as you’re eating and trying to chew.” The waitress approached, order pad in hand. She wore a carnation-pink dress for a uniform. We fidgeted in irrelevant ways, as if finding more comfortable s
After the waitress, we discussed what we’d tell Mother and Father, exactly. They’d be so busy anyway, we said, with baby Jules. They’d been busy already. Father had painted the nursery again, same as he’d done for each of us.
We wondered if washing-machine cold-water soap might remove the bloodstains Sarah had left on the pillowcase.
“We’ll tell them . . .” Terrence said, but he couldn’t finish. We pressed him. We wanted to know.
“O.K.,” he said at last. “We just give them the truth. Describe how we seized control.”
We said, “They’re going to ask Sarah, and she’ll say, ‘Ask Hazel.’”
OUR PARENTS ASKED HAZEL. SHE told them everything—all that she knew. She said, “Share. . . . Admit who won. . . . People look different at different ages. . . . Providence is the capital of Rhode Island. . . . Stand still in line. . . . Mother and Father have been alive a long time. . . . Don’t pet strange animals. . . . Get someone to go with you. . . . Hold tight to the bus railing. . . . It is never all right to hit. . . . We have Eastern Standard Time. . . . Put baking soda on your bee stings. . . . Whatever Mother and Father tell you, believe them.”
For Real
I WAS IN THE DRESSING rooms, comfortable in my star’s chair, a late evening in October. We had taped three shows. My lounge chair was upholstered in citrus-green fabric. My section of the studio dressing rooms was all lollipop colors, in case a Cub Scout troop or something came through.
I was alone, confronting a window. I could see lights around the Dutch Pantry restaurant, and a single truck enduring the horrific eastbound uphill grade on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Beyond that, the mountains—which were florid in the autumn daylight—had darkened to a hostile black-green, as if they were closed for the night to visitors. Their pointy peaks were brushed with beautiful cloud smoke, though, and on the piece of Lake Doe that I could see, there lay a startling reflection of the night’s quarter moon.
I was Boffo, the girl clown, who hosted Channel 22’s Midday Matinee. We ran old bad movies on the MM—or worse: old TV pilot shows we passed off as movies. My job was to ridicule the films and gibe at our sponsors, so the viewers at least would have something to smile about. The job was complicated. I felt tested, whenever the cameras were aimed at me, to improve the little monologues and jokes I had written—to act funny, as if I really was Boffo.
Three years of playing her had told on my face. I used an expensive, hypoallergenic clown white that I special-ordered from Chicago, but my complexion was coarsening. My wigs were coral-pink acrylic, with tubes for hair; I wore a skullcap, under which I had to keep my real hair cropped short—an inch or so at most. The fact was, I never wanted to be a clown. I hadn’t gone to clown school in Florida or anything, but I’d studied broadcast journalism here at our own Penn State. I didn’t even particularly like circuses. I was pushed into the job by management.
Gradually, two things happened. I stopped feeling so reduced by the clown suit. The first months, putting on the nose and wig and the purple gloves with gigantic gauntlet-style cuffs, I had always winced and apologized repeatedly to myself. I got around that by deciding one day that the suit was only a disguise—something to do with my act, not me. I hadn’t invented Boffo or her costume. What else happened was that I became convincing, actually pretty good at playing her. Also, I grabbed a crazy amount of pay.
I came back from the window and tried to call Dieter, using the special oversize clown telephone near my chair. I had to thump the out-call tablet four times, because Channel 22’s phone system was no better than its movie library. Arranging the receiver so it didn’t touch my greased cheek (I had another show to tape, so I was still in full Boffo gear), I tapped off Dieter’s number. In the mirror, my cheek was porous and as white as a sheet of rag paper. While Dieter’s telephone rang, I found myself trying to loosen some of the coils in my phone’s exaggerated wire cording. I permitted ten rings. No Dieter. “Wo ist Dieter?” I asked myself.
Dieter was the only guy I bedded with just then. He was a few years my junior—a recent college grad, in fact—which was part one of the problem. He was employed by the Channel 22 news department. He was all set as long as his student visa remained valid, which it wouldn’t for long. Dieter was a West German citizen, and he was going to get shipped nicely back there soon if he didn’t come up with a legal reason to stay.
“So what the goddam hell is this not-there jazz?” I asked in my shrill Boffo voice. I often reverted to character when I was in clown rig. I pretended to abuse the enormous receiver, throttling it before I dropped it back onto its rest. “Dieter is always home in die Nacht. Nacht is ven the news happens!”
Dieter wanted to marry me, and plenty of times I had agreed, so he could stay on in the States. But I didn’t want to marry Dieter, really, and that was part two of the problem: he knew.
I made fun of him a lot, for being such a tidy person and so formal-acting. He wore starchy white shirts always, with cuff links. The line in his side-parted hair was ever straight. “Was ist das?” I would say to him. “Did you use a slide rule and a T-square to get that straight a part? It’s centered perfectly over your left eye!” An outsider might think I treated him condescendingly, but I wasn’t asking any outsiders.
I plucked up four rubber balls and juggled them. I flapped my Stars and Stripes shoe, as long as a diver’s fin, on the tile. I got a rhythm going with the soft pops of the rubber balls and the splat of my shoe. That’s what I was doing—that and worrying about Dieter—when Terrence, the floor director, opened the dressing room door and said, “We need you for the spot.”
“See the moon?” I asked Terrence.
The spot was a little promo for a coming show. Out in the studio, I stood where they told me to, before Cary Williams’s camera. I juggled the balls and kept slapping my shoe.
Terrence said, “Three, two, one,” and pointed to me before he was distracted by something happening over his headset. We waited.
I liked Cary Williams, the cameraman. He was in his fifties, dimpled and shy, with an impossible laugh. I said, “Hey, hi!—it’s Boffo. For tomorrow—whoa, brother. We’ve got a movie that’ll bring up your breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner. And next you’ll get to hear me read a medical review on toxic shock syndrome. Lastly, we’ll have a visit from Sam and Janet. Sam and Janet who?”
Pete, who was holding up the cue card, said flatly, “Sam and Janet evening.” That was our oldest joke.
“Yeah, yeah, could we just do it right for once?” asked Terrence.
I peeked around the trunk of Cary Williams’s camera. He was not even smiling. I said, “If I had to do it right, I’d quit.”
I HAD A PRETTY COMFY condo, with a view of the mountains and Lake Doe. When I was home there, nobody knew I was Boffo the clown. Tonight, because of a flood watch and drenched roads, Dieter was staying over.
I got into bed with him, but also with a vinyl-bound notebook that I balanced against my knees. I tried writing some material—just dumb puns and so on—for a Gregory Peck movie we had scheduled. The film also had Virginia Mayo in it, so I was goofing around with “Ham on rye, Greg, and hold the mayo,” and variations of that kind of low-grade snorter.
I couldn’t get much written. I was too conscious of Dieter and how much more convenient the future would be if I loved him some, or at all. He was sharp-looking enough—cool-faced, with a romantic broken nose, from being a wrestler for a while in college. He had a slippery grin that was a trick to summon.
“Laugh, Dieter! This is honestly funny, and I’ll think more of you,” I’d tell him sometimes as he helped me get dressed. He’d hold up the big stiff costume while I boxed my way into it. Then he’d steady me, so I could fold myself way over to strap on the floppy, dazzling shoes.
“Right, ja,” he’d say, his face entirely sober.
He tried especially hard whenever we watched a taped Midday Matinee rerun together. But he always failed because he didn’t have the same references. At first, I figured I’d just catch Dieter up—give him the lowdown on somebody like Charlton Heston and why it was a pleasure to crack on such a jerk. But that wouldn’t have done much good.
