Up Island by Anne Rivers Siddons

rolled the television set on its stand over to the end of the sofa, lay down full-length, covered myself with the plaid Ralph Lauren afghan Caroline and Alan had given us last Christmas, and clicked on the remote. On the screen a dark-haired, vulpine young woman coaxed hysterical tears from a black teenager and an older woman I thought might be the child’s mother, and made a face of terrible, false sympathy as the tears escalated into screaming. The audience roared its approval. I turned the volume down as far as it would go, and for the rest of that day and into the evening I watched the screen as if the lives of the silent wraiths held captive within it were the only reality in the world. I found that I did not need their sound, only their movement.
    At some point, in the middle of the afternoon, I UP ISLAND / 47
    think, the phone began to ring. I let the answering machine take the calls until the bell threatened to break the skin of my fugue state, then I got up and tottered on numb legs over to the phone and turned the bell off. I did not play the calls back; I knew who they would be. My mother, wanting to know if I was going to take her shopping in the morning.
    The ladies of the Salvation Army auxiliary committee meeting I myself had called, and had missed. Livvy, to see why I had not been at our weekly doubles match with two other Coke wives at the club. I shuffled back to the sofa and watched television some more, watched and watched. Finally, I remembered Lazarus and let him back in, fed him, and scrunched over on the sofa as he settled in beside me, sighing happily, and fell into his familiar, twitching sleep on top of the afghan. Sometime later than that, long after dark, I slept, too.
    The overhead light went on deep in the timeless, thick night—hot, because I had been shaking with chills all day and had not turned on the air—and Lazarus groaned and lifted his head. I sat bolt upright, eyes blinded, heart pounding.
    “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” Teddy’s furious, trembling voice cried, and I scrubbed at my eyes and squinted, then saw him, standing over the sofa, his fists clenched, his face red with rage and recent crying.
    “Tell you?” I said stupidly. I could not think what he meant.
    What time was it? Why was I down here in the library, stiff and smothering from the afghan and the weight of the dog?
    “Tell me Dad had a little piece on the side,” he shouted.
    “Tell me old Dad was playing hide the wienie with Coke’s pet legal eagle…or would that be

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    eagless? Goddamn, Ma, why didn’t you tell me? I’m not a fucking baby!”
    “How do you know that?” I said thickly. “Who told you that?”
    “You want to know who told me? She told me! Put her hand on my shoulder and stood there and told me like I was her goddamn little brother or something, smiling this shit-eating smile, saying she was sorry for my pain but after everything got straightened out she hoped I would one day be glad to have her in my life, like she was glad to have me in hers. Glad to have her in my life! Yeah, right, glad…Ma, she said you knew…”
    “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said. I did not.
    “I saw them!” he shouted, beginning to cry again. “I saw them at the fucking concert! So did Eddie! So did everybody else I’ve ever known from school or anywhere else. And they saw me, and she gets up from her seat—they’re in a box, of course, the Coke box—and comes down and puts her hand on me and says all that… her. Not Dad, her. Dad wouldn’t even look at me. I had to go up there to the box…and even then, he wouldn’t really look at me. He said he’d see us tomorrow and we’d talk it all out, and that he was sorry I found out this way; he’d really meant to tell me, but at least now we had it out in the open where we could deal with it. Deal with it! Deal with what? How long have you known about this? Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “Because