Up Island by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

it’s not going to happen,” I said, trying to push the words out on a wavering stream of breath. “This is just one of those things that happen to men your dad’s age sometimes. It won’t last, how could it? I didn’t tell you because it’s going to be okay. I didn’t UP ISLAND / 49
    want you to worry. Nothing’s going to happen to the family.”
    Teddy leaned close over me and closed his eyes and shouted, “He’s going to marry her! You call that being okay?
    You call that nothing happening to the family? He’s going to fucking marry her!”
    “Teddy, language! Did he say that?”
    “No. She did. She said she thought I should know, so there weren’t any false hopes and stuff. She said it needed to be out, clean and honorable. Honorable! Jesus Christ!”
    “What did your dad say?” I could barely form the words with lips that had gone stiff and numb.
    “Nothing,” my son said. “He didn’t say anything. He had his eyes closed. Mom…he looked stupid ! They both did. You know what they had on? They had on bike shorts, black bike shorts that matched, and Coke T-shirts. Jesus, Mom, Dad doesn’t even have a bike…”
    I almost laughed around the numbness, in sheer relief. It was some kind of madness, then. Some kind of male climac-teric thing. We could work this out, ride this out. Tee in bike shorts? The image was simply ludicrous, nothing more.
    Where was the danger in this?
    “Sweetie, it doesn’t mean anything. I promise you. You wait and see. It’s certainly not a good thing, but it’s not fatal, either. In six months or a year we’ll have forgotten all about it—”
    “ She has a ring!”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “She has a ring! He gave it to her! It’s this big, ugly old green thing; she wears it on her right hand, but she showed it to me and told me that it was his covenant with her, and he didn’t say it wasn’t. He didn’t say 50 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    anything more. He looked like he was going to hurl right there in the Coke box. I hope he did. All over his bike shorts.
    All over hers.”
    I could not get my mouth to move. I tried to say something into the wreckage of my son’s face, but I simply could not speak.
    “Goddamn you all,” Teddy said in a low, terrible voice and turned and ran from the library. I heard his footsteps pound up the stairs and heard Lazarus jingling behind him, heard his door slam, heard the inevitable music start. But I heard no more from Teddy.
    I rolled myself slowly and in sections off the sofa and on to the floor.
    “I want my mother,” I heard myself sob. And I cried and cried for the woman only ten blocks away, who could not hear me.
    And then I got up and called my father, called him out of sleep, and said, “Daddy, something’s happened and I need to come home.”
    “Come on home, baby,” my father said. “I’ll put some coffee on.”
    When two become one, as people said of a conventional Atlanta marriage of my time, everyone knows the drill and swings happily into action. There are firm rules and rituals for the treatment of the newly wedded pair, for their fêting and giftings, for their duties and responsibilities. There are even prescribed ways of thinking about the couple that go back God knows how far, especially in the South. All of this saves a great deal of time and bother.
    But when one becomes two, the opposite is true UP ISLAND / 51
    and confusion reigns. More than confusion, I found. When Tee walked out, he left a kind of free-floating panic and an ensuing ostracism in his wake, only thinly veiled with sympathy. It was as if a sudden stench had settled over me, from which everyone was averting their nostrils while pretending it did not exist. Sometimes even I could smell it, lingering like body odor, and it made me feel slovenly and guilty, as if I should have bathed and so spared my friends, but had chosen not to. It was far worse because I felt in my very marrow that the same stench, if it touched Tee at all,