Ted

Mark Catalano

Ted stands at the end of the dining room table. He is deep into his project, the making of a doll from old black socks, some scraps of green felt, and cotton balls for stuffing. All his idea. He has a cigar butt in the side of his mouth and ash down the front of his T-shirt. He is elated. He has never sewn a thing, ever, and the black doll, smeared with ash, is almost finished. He thinks it is perfect. In a minute he will charge outside with his creation and show his sisters, who are lying on the patio, sunbathing, and drinking Fresca.
    Ted’s father is in the living room reading the newspaper and Ted can hear the paper rustle now and then. His mother disappeared into the bedroom. She and Ted’s father are having a fight.
    “He’s only nine years old!” his mother said before storming down the hall. His father, who encouraged Ted by handing him a half-smoked cigar, laughed.
    “Don’t overreact,” he said from his chair. “It’s a learning experience.”
    “Don’t overreact? You always say that,” his mother said. “You’re driving me crazy!” Ted worked right through it all, focusing, their voices drifting as if from a great distance. Later, Ted’s father put his paper down and, seeing Ted sewing and chomping on the cigar, leaned back and roared with laughter. Ted smiled. Not long before, on their vacation to Bermuda, Ted’s mother also overreacted when Ted was allowed to mix and drink a cup of sugary, black instant coffee while playing gin rummy with his sisters one rainy afternoon. That time his mother also disappeared into the bedroom and stayed there while, after the game, an energized Ted put on a show, imitating Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual,” then walking on his hands, then tap dancing like the black man on Lawrence Welk, grinning as he windmilled his arms. He had his father in stitches. The girls just stared. “How’s it going?” his father asks now. “Great. Almost done.”
    “How’s that cigar?”
    “Great,” Ted says, taking it from his mouth and examining it. But he is beginning to feel sick. Also, his thumb hurts where he jabbed himself with the needle. It is brilliant outside, and now he wants to be out there playing.
    His father stands up and says, “Let’s see if we can salvage this,” and he walks down the hall toward the bedroom. Ted grabs the doll and the cigar and bangs through the screen door to the backyard.
    His sisters lie face up in their bikinis on lounge chairs: Jane’s radio is playing. Both wear black sunblinders on their eyes, little double-ended, plastic spoons.
    “Look at me!” Ted says then jams the cigar in his mouth and holds up the doll.
    Jane, twelve, removes her blinders and sits up. She tucks her hair behind her ears with her fingers. “You jerk,” she says.
    Betty also sits up. “You jerk,” she says. Betty, who is seven, wears her hair in pigtails.
    Ted takes the cigar from his mouth and tosses it into the ivy. He goes over and kneels on the brick patio near his sisters.
    “Look—I made it.”
    Jane takes the doll from him and examines it. “Where’s its head?” Ted points to one of the bumpy, irregular appendages with a triangle of green felt on it.
    “It doesn’t have any eyes or anything,” Jane says.
    “I have to put them in.” Ted crouches nearer. “Look at the hat.”
    “What is it supposed to be?”
    “A monkey.”
    “It’s dumb.” Jane tosses the doll back at him and lies back down. Betty watches Ted toss the doll into the air, catch it, then spin it up onto the roof as he walks away toward the hammock.

Jane is carefully pulling a comb through their mothers wet hair. Her hair is coppery gold in the sunlight, and it lifts and falls as the comb travels down her back, her hair almost reaching the lounge chair where she and Jane sit together. Betty kneels close to them on the bricks, watching.
    Not long ago, Ted would do this too, linger over his mother’s hair, hold it up and drop it piece by piece like a golden waterfall. But he’d stopped wanting to. Now he sits on the edge of the hammock, swinging back and forth.
    His mother looks at him, smiling. “Come sit over here, Teddy,” she says. “Help Jane out.”
    “Nah,” Ted says. He gets off the hammock and starts climbing onto the tree, pulling himself up to the forked branch. He is careful not to meet his mother’s eyes. It seems she looks at him a lot now, watching him do things, keeping her eyes on him too long, making him want to be away from her.
    “Come on Teddy, do it for me,” she says. Jane stops combing.
    “Let Betty,” he says. He stands up on the big branch, balancing. He is a little dizzy, and he steadies himself by grabbing a higher branch.
    “Be careful,” his mother says. Ted shimmies up higher and sits in the part he calls the crow’s nest. He looks back at the house and can see the rooftop with the white chimney and the wires and the metal tubes. He sees the monkey doll sitting up against the TV antenna, baking on the shingles.
    “All right, who wants to go swimming?” His father’s voice comes from down below, through the screen door. Ted can just make out his face through the screen.
    “Me!” he shouts.
    “Me!” says Betty.
    Jane continues combing. His mother sits quietly.
    His father comes out onto the stoop with his hands in his pockets and a pipe in his mouth. He looks at his wife, who looks back at him steadily. Then he smiles up at Ted.
    “There you are,” he says. “Well. Get your suits on.”

Ted sits on the end of the diving board eating a tuna fish sandwich. Aunt Renee swims laps, breaststroke, crossing over the large yellow flowers Uncle George painted on the bottom of the pool. They are at Aunt Renee’s house, at her pool. She is not their aunt, and Uncle George is not their uncle. “Our best friends,” Ted’s mother once said. Uncle George is not home. Betty is eating her sandwich at the round table next to their father. Ted watches Aunt Renee swim. On one pass she stops and grabs Ted’s foot, looks up at him, and laughs. Last summer they all went camping together, and one night Aunt Renee tucked him into his sleeping bag. She kissed him good night, right on the lips.
    Ted’s father is leaning back in his chair, legs crossed, drinking beer from a green bottle. He watches her swim, too. He wears a Panama hat and smiles a lot, his eyes and teeth bright in his dark face.
    Aunt Renee climbs out at the shallow end. Ted looks at the deep cleft that runs down the center of her back and at her wet black hair, cut short like a boy’s, which she smoothes with both hands. She wraps herself in a towel and sits at the table.
    “Your turn,” she says to Ted’s father.
    “Forgot my trunks,” he says. “So, I can’t really. Unless au nature!?”
    “Now, now,” Aunt Renee says. “Borrow George’s. They’re hanging in the shower.” She lights a cigarette. Betty watches her. It is common knowledge in their home that smoking cigarettes will kill you. “Cigars and pipes, on the other hand,” their father explained, “are sublime.”
    “Now Betty,” Aunt Renee says, “how’s your mother?”
    “Good,” Betty says. She concentrates on her sandwich, her feet, crossed at the ankles, swinging under her chair.
    “I’ve been so bad,” Aunt Renee says. "I really have been meaning to call her. I’ve been bad. Will you tell her that?"
    “Uh-huh.”
    “And how’s Jane? Does she have a boyfriend yet?” Betty looks at her wide-eyed She shakes her head slowly.
    “Oh, she must. Betty, you can tell me. Jane’s getting so pretty, she must have a dozen.”
    “Don’t rush her,” Ted’s father says, smiling. “She’s a good girl.” He takes one of Aunt Renee’s cigarettes and lights it for himself. Betty stares at him.
    “And how about you, Teddy? You’ve gotten so handsome this year. What was her name? Patty? Peggy? Or did you break her heart?”
    “No,” Ted says, looking down at the water.
    “No little friend?”
    “No,” he says. He looks up, and Renee’s red lips are there, smiling at him.
    “Maybe,” he says.

Renee is painting Betty’s toenails and Betty, eating a frozen toasted almond bar, observes the procedure, fascinated. “So glamorous,” Aunt Renee says. Teddy hovers behind them, watching her hands work with the brush, her own fingernails painted the same deep red.
    When the phone rings, Aunt Renee screws the bottle shut and tells Betty to stay put for a minute. “Don’t touch!” she says and leaves Betty looking down at her feet, toes splayed and separated by cotton balls. Ted is balancing on one foot, working on his Creamsicle. “Let me see,” Ted says, and sits next to Betty.
    “Don’t touch,” she says.
    Ted grabs Betty’s foot. "I’m just looking," he says and rubs his thumb across the big toenail, smearing the polish.
    “Dad!” Betty yelps. Their father is inside changing into a swimsuit, getting another beer. His face appears at the kitchen window.
    “How you kids doing?”
    “Teddy messed up my toenail polish!”
    “Play nice with your sister,” he says.
    “Are you coming swimming?” Ted asks.
    “Sure,” he says, “I’ll be right out.” His head stays in the window, his face floating here in shadow. “In a minute.” His father’s dark face makes Ted think of a blade. It is sharp—his nose sharp like Ted’s grandfather’s, his sharp Adam’s apple. His cheeks are bony and sharp, too, and are always stubbly when he comes home from work and picks Ted up to kiss him hello. The face worries him at times, showing up in his dreams where it lurks in a hallway, vanishing and suddenly reappearing around a corner, eyes staring, causing Ted’s sleeping body to flinch.
    Ted waits patiently. He can swim without his father, having learned the summer before, but swimming is a splashing struggle to stay afloat, to hold his head up and catch short breaths of air. Besides, nothing is better than when his father swims, too. Except when his father decides to be a shark-chasing Ted underwater, closing in as Ted dog paddles furiously, grabbing Ted’s foot, making him shriek, then surfacing, laughing. No, he likes to ride on his father’s slippery shoulders and dive down below the surface, cruising peacefully through the flickering lights and shadows. An underwater world, vast, endless.
    Betty is reclining in the chaise, looking at Vogue. Aunt Renee’s sunglasses are huge and a little cockeyed on Betty’s face. Ted gets up, wanders toward the house.
    Always, it seems, Ted is waiting. Waiting for his father to arrive, for his father to take him someplace, to play a game, waiting for him to laugh and be pleased by Ted’s antics. While he is waiting, Ted is never quite sure the waiting will stop On the train last month, when the two of them just took off for New York one weekend, Ted had a bad feeling that his father might not return from the bar car, that he would arrive at the station in that city alone, even though his father’s bag was overhead and his jacket rolled up on the seat next to Ted’s. He came back just as the train slowed for the station, but most of the trip. Ted spent waiting for him to come around, to look at Ted and laugh, to be glad they were on this adventure together. His father was sour. He fought with the clerk at the Waldorf Astoria when he tried to give them a “shitty room.” He argued with a bartender, telling him to call the cops if he did not like Ted sitting at the bar, but then ignored Ted who, for his father’s benefit, grinned and winked and weaved on his bar stool, pretending to get drunk on his Shirley Temple. And worst, when at the Empire State Building Ted made a “comedy” recording in the make-your-own-record booth—complete with yodels, belches, and frog sounds—his father listened on the playback machine and only nodded, his thoughts on more important things.
    Ted goes through the sliding glass doors into the living room. The tiles are cool under his feet, and he walks through and stands on the fur rug before the empty fireplace. The house is not like his own. It smells different. There are books on tall shelves and paintings on the walls. A chair hangs from the ceiling by a chain. Above the fireplace is a portrait of Aunt Renee, painted when she was very young. Her hair was long then, pulled back; and her face, soft and full of love, gazes down at Ted.
    Aunt Renee is in the kitchen, still on the phone. Ted pushes through the swinging saloon doors and sees her leaning against the sink with the phone to her ear, her hand over her mouth, giggling, looking at Ted’s father, who is wearing only his shirt and hopping on one leg, trying to get the other into Uncle George’s swimsuit.
    “Ted!” his father says. “Hey Ted!” He stops hopping and slips into the suit.
    “Your mother’s on the phone,” Aunt Renee says, her hand over the mouthpiece. “Do you want to say hi?”

Betty and Ted fight over rights to the front seat of the convertible, but Ted is reminded that Betty is too small to sit alone in the back. So Ted rides back there alone, looking up as they drive, the trees meeting overhead and breaking the sunlight into a million pieces. Ted did not get to swim with his father. His mother called to tell them that Betty had to get ready for riding camp, so swimming was postponed. “We’ll go back later,” his father said. “Or we’ll go to the beach.”
    Ted stays in the car after they pull into the drive, still looking up at the sky. He hears the car doors open and slam shut, but looks over only when Betty squeals. His father has picked her up, and she sits on his shoulders, a ride Ted is getting too heavy for. He watches them walk, his father’s flip-flops clapping slowly on the brick walkway.
    The front door, hidden from Ted’s view, opens, and he hears his mother. “Surprise,” she says.
    Ted’s father, with Betty aboard, is standing below the stoop.
    “Jesus Christ,” his father says.
    “Mama!” Betty shouts from her perch. His father puts Betty down and stands, staring. Then some woman Ted does not know appears on the stoop, some woman with a familiar uncertain smile and short, choppy, orangish hair no longer than Ted’s. Then he recognizes his mother and sees her hair is gone, that she cut it off on purpose.
    “What the hell have you done?” Ted’s father says. Betty has her hand over her mouth, and now Jane is there in the shadows, looking darkly at their father.
    “You wanted me to,” his mother says. “You said you were sick of it.”
    His father is not talking, but Ted can see that his mouth is silently working and something is building in his face. His Temper they all call it, and the children are waiting for it now, the face going red and the eyes swelling toward an explosion. The Temper has a regular place in Ted’s dreams, taking the form of a sound, starting gently like a friendly whistle and quickly growing to a huge, wild roar.
    But this time Ted’s father stands dumb while his mother does the shouting. “I know!” she is saying. “I know what you like!” It is her face that is red, her eyes that have become large and frightening. “You like it this way, don’t you? Just tell me,” she says. Then she sits down on the stoop, her face in her hands with the girls close to her. Ted’s father, like Ted, just looks. Ted looks at this woman with the small, reddish head, who used to be his mother but is now someone not quite her, despite those familiar freckly shins and those dirty tennis shoes.
    His father turns back toward Ted, who is still in the car. Ted wants to make a face, do something to make his father laugh, but he doesn't know what.
    “Goddammit,” his father says.

They pull into the beach parking lot. The car does not stop at the attendant’s chair but continues over to the far end, where his father swings it into a spot. His father opens the trunk and takes out the beach chair and towels. Ted is still in the backseat. “Low tide,” his father says. He shuts the trunk and starts walking.
    Ted is several steps behind him as they walk across the little covered pavilion on their way to the sand. “My God, it’s hot,” his father says. He stops and waits for Ted. “Ready to swim?” Ted nods. “Good,” his father says, ”I’m broiling.”
    Ted sees the parking lot attendant coming after them, walking up the steps of the pavilion. He is an older man, older than Ted’s father, and he wears black socks with his shorts and sandals, and a safari helmet.
    “Uh-oh,” Ted’s father says, smiling. “The fuzz. Let’s scram.”
    “Mr. Ryan,” the attendant calls, but Ted and his father are on the sand, walking toward the water. Ted knows the car has no parking sticker on it, and the last time they came, Ted's father had an argument with the attendant. “I pay taxes in this town,” his father said then. “I’m a law abiding citizen.” “You still need that sticker, Mr. Ryan.” Ted knows the attendant from the movie theater, where he works behind the refreshment stand. Ted’s father called him a jerk. The whole family was in the car then, and they went home, and the children, disappointed, played in the lawn sprinkler.
    His father is heading for the edge of the beach by the jetty. Ted is having a hard time keeping up, then stops to remove his flip-flops, which make for rough going in the sand. “This way,” his father calls from ahead without turning. The parking attendant is nowhere to be seen now, and Ted wonders what he will do. When Ted finally catches up to his father, he is on the other side of the low wooden jetty, already sitting on his beach chair, stripped to his plaid boxer shorts. He lights a cigarette and stares out over the stretch of wet sand to the sound, which lays flat and murky.
    Ted watches his father closely, worrying about what will happen next. The cigarette his father is smoking is a part of it, he knows. Other things will follow. He is sure of it. It is just beginning.
    When after a little while he sees the policeman coming down the beach, he suddenly sees what it will be. The policeman makes his way past the beach blankets and sunbathers, avoiding little children and beach balls and sand buckets. He is coming toward them in his long pants and white shirt, everything jangling on his belt—his club, his gun in the holster, handcuffs, ammo. And now Ted knows. That club is going to smash his father’s head, the handcuffs will bind him up for the trip to jail. The gun will point at his father's chest, and it might go off. So before that happens Ted is up and running after his father, who is already making for the water. “Come and get me, copper!” his father says, walking backward, knee deep, and he laughs when a small wave makes the young officer standing at the water’s edge backpedal. Ted misses that part. Ted is running, diving and flopping, then running again in the shallow water, trying to figure out the fastest way to reach his father, to get him down below the surface before the bullets start flying.

“Ted” appears in our Summer 2001 issue.