Read Online Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) by Richard Yates - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Richard Yates
Ads: Link
seclusion they prized, and there was a small lake for swimming close by.
But the best and most bracing part of the country was getting there: the trip across the George Washington Bridge and the long pastoral ride up the divided highway. As with certain other family pleasures, expectation topped fulfillment.
“… I think this is my favorite time of year,” Janice was saying, “when it’s just beginning to get fresh and cool again. Oh, I suppose it’ll be even nicer in a few more weeks when the leaves really turn – all those lovely yellows and oranges and reds and browns – but even so, this is marvelous.”
“Mm,” he said. She had done a great deal of talking since he came home from Bellevue yesterday – most of it serving no purpose except to fill silence – and he knew that was because he’d said so little himself: he had mostly drunk bourbon and looked out of windows, or sat blinking in bewilderment along the shelves upon shelves of tightly packed books. “Well,” he saidnow, doing his best, “it’ll sure feel great just to lie on a blanket in the grass.”
Tommy, in the back seat, had been silent since leaving home. He was methodically pounding an unused regulation baseball into the oiled pocket of his fielder’s glove, and he wore a New York Yankees cap. The Yankees were far ahead in the American League pennant race, and Tommy liked winners.
“How do you want to work it, Champ?” Wilder asked him. “Take a swim first and then play catch, or play catch and then go swimming?” And he instantly regretted calling him “Champ.” He used that nickname, or “Buster,” or “Slugger,” only in times of family tension when it seemed urgent to be hearty (on mornings, for example, when he knew the boy had lain awake and heard his parents fight the night before), and he knew that Tommy knew it too.
“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “I don’t care.” And the flawless surface of the road sped along under their tires.
The way they worked it was to play catch first, while Janice, wearing a big floppy hat, knelt and squatted in the sun to weed her vegetable garden.
It wasn’t a good game of catch – no warm, sweat-raising pull and release of muscles with each exchange, no clean flight of the ball to a satisfying
pock
in the glove, no easy laughter and congratulations (“Hey! …”; “Nice! …”). Well over half of Tommy’s throws were wild and sent his father racing breathlessly over the grass or down on all fours under the bushes, where twigs whipped his face and mud soaked the knees of his clean chino pants. Once a pine needle stabbed him in the eye.
Then his own throws began to go wrong, making Tommy do the running, and if nothing else, that gave him a chance to get his wind back. “Let’s try – let’s try a couple of grounders,” he called, hoping to make it easier on them both, but there wasnothing easy about grounders on this lumpy ground: the ball jumped and flew in crazy directions; they ran and went sprawling and Tommy’s Yankee cap fell off.
“Haven’t you two had enough?” Janice inquired, smiling up from the garden. “Don’t you want to go for a swim?”
“How – how about it, Tom? Feel like calling it – calling it quits?”
“I don’t know; I don’t care.”
Things didn’t go well at the lake either, but that was to be expected. Janice was an excellent swimmer and Tommy was good too, for his age, but Wilder had been afraid of water – and afraid to admit it – all his life. Through boyhood and youth he had done his best to avoid swimming; when it was inevitable, he’d endured it as a kind of aquatic clown, thrashing and dog-paddling, helplessly gulping and inhaling water, scared of putting his head under but taking hilariously graceless flops from springboards to win laughs he never heard as he struggled blind and terrified back to the air. This was one of the first things Janice had learned about him, before they were married, and had caused one of
But the best and most bracing part of the country was getting there: the trip across the George Washington Bridge and the long pastoral ride up the divided highway. As with certain other family pleasures, expectation topped fulfillment.
“… I think this is my favorite time of year,” Janice was saying, “when it’s just beginning to get fresh and cool again. Oh, I suppose it’ll be even nicer in a few more weeks when the leaves really turn – all those lovely yellows and oranges and reds and browns – but even so, this is marvelous.”
“Mm,” he said. She had done a great deal of talking since he came home from Bellevue yesterday – most of it serving no purpose except to fill silence – and he knew that was because he’d said so little himself: he had mostly drunk bourbon and looked out of windows, or sat blinking in bewilderment along the shelves upon shelves of tightly packed books. “Well,” he saidnow, doing his best, “it’ll sure feel great just to lie on a blanket in the grass.”
Tommy, in the back seat, had been silent since leaving home. He was methodically pounding an unused regulation baseball into the oiled pocket of his fielder’s glove, and he wore a New York Yankees cap. The Yankees were far ahead in the American League pennant race, and Tommy liked winners.
“How do you want to work it, Champ?” Wilder asked him. “Take a swim first and then play catch, or play catch and then go swimming?” And he instantly regretted calling him “Champ.” He used that nickname, or “Buster,” or “Slugger,” only in times of family tension when it seemed urgent to be hearty (on mornings, for example, when he knew the boy had lain awake and heard his parents fight the night before), and he knew that Tommy knew it too.
“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “I don’t care.” And the flawless surface of the road sped along under their tires.
The way they worked it was to play catch first, while Janice, wearing a big floppy hat, knelt and squatted in the sun to weed her vegetable garden.
It wasn’t a good game of catch – no warm, sweat-raising pull and release of muscles with each exchange, no clean flight of the ball to a satisfying
pock
in the glove, no easy laughter and congratulations (“Hey! …”; “Nice! …”). Well over half of Tommy’s throws were wild and sent his father racing breathlessly over the grass or down on all fours under the bushes, where twigs whipped his face and mud soaked the knees of his clean chino pants. Once a pine needle stabbed him in the eye.
Then his own throws began to go wrong, making Tommy do the running, and if nothing else, that gave him a chance to get his wind back. “Let’s try – let’s try a couple of grounders,” he called, hoping to make it easier on them both, but there wasnothing easy about grounders on this lumpy ground: the ball jumped and flew in crazy directions; they ran and went sprawling and Tommy’s Yankee cap fell off.
“Haven’t you two had enough?” Janice inquired, smiling up from the garden. “Don’t you want to go for a swim?”
“How – how about it, Tom? Feel like calling it – calling it quits?”
“I don’t know; I don’t care.”
Things didn’t go well at the lake either, but that was to be expected. Janice was an excellent swimmer and Tommy was good too, for his age, but Wilder had been afraid of water – and afraid to admit it – all his life. Through boyhood and youth he had done his best to avoid swimming; when it was inevitable, he’d endured it as a kind of aquatic clown, thrashing and dog-paddling, helplessly gulping and inhaling water, scared of putting his head under but taking hilariously graceless flops from springboards to win laughs he never heard as he struggled blind and terrified back to the air. This was one of the first things Janice had learned about him, before they were married, and had caused one of
Similar Books
