Magda and he saw that everything here was the cause of everything else, through invisible lines of blame and effect. Magda was somehow the tomato's fault.
“Hi,” Ben's mother said cheerfully.
“Hello,” Magda answered.
Grandpa came and kissed Magda's cool, powdered cheek. Ben's mother made a line with her mouth, a tight smiling spasm.
“Hey there,” Grandpa said. “You buy out the stores?”
Magda's face shifted over into an attitude of impatience and disdain, like a car going from forward into reverse. The beach was full of broken glass; sea gulls were ruining the shingles on the roof. “I couldn't find a dress,” she answered. “Everything was hideous.”
“We're having another shindig here next week,” Grandpa said proudly. “One of Magda's charities.”
“Cancer,” she said, and the satisfaction returned to her face.
“Mm,” Ben's mother said.
“A big deal, this one,” Grandpa said. “Tents, a band. Army of fairies with flowers and hors d'oeuvres.”
Ben's mother looked at the clock and said, “I don't know what's keeping Todd.” Magda was the tomato's fault and cancer was Magda's fault and everything, Magda and cancer and the broken glass that washed up on the beach, referred back to Grandpa, standing proud and happy in a battered straw hat. Grandpa was the one Ben loved above all others.
“Anna was trying to talk me into a green thing,” Magda said. “Chiffon, with sequins. Hideous. There's nothing here, tomorrow I will have to go to New York.”
“Yes, New York is full of dresses,” Ben's mother said. “Oh, look, here he comes.”
Ben's father's car was gliding up the driveway. Leaf shadows fell over its sleek maroon flanks, and Ben felt the tick in his belly. Soon he'd be alone again with his parents.
“Take the tomatoes,” Grandpa said. He picked up a brown paper bag, shook it open with a quick competent snap of his wrist. Grandpa always knew what he was doing. He was kinder than Magda but, like Magda, he could give himself whatever he needed. He loved his tomatoes, his house. He put the tomatoes into the bag, another and another and another. There was his strong brown hand, there was the fat fullness of the tomato he loved. Ben felt the rising sensation again, the shifting at his crotch, and knew he could slip over into the wrong condition, the lost place. He rescued himself by running out to meet his father's car.
Ben's father had parked and was getting out. He brought his stern self-sacrifice with him, his endless virtue. Ben ran to him and entered his father's goodness, the rigor and the daily work of him. For a moment Ben and his father were the same person. Then his father said, “Hi, pal, how goes it?” and the sound of his voice was enough to separate them. Ben's father lived a life of expectation. Ben was what he waited for.
“Okay,” Ben said. He paused between the two conditions, the lost and the visible. With a surge of panicky love, he forced himself.
“I practiced my free shots,” he said. “I sank seven out of ten.”
“Good. That's very good.”
His father was smooth-skinned and broad and anxious for happiness. Ben gave whatever he could find.
“I want Grandpa to raise the hoop,” he said. “I want him to raise it all the way.”
“Do you think you're ready?”
“Uh-huh.”
Ben peppered the air around himself with punches. He danced for his mother; for his father he struck the air with his fists. His father had a handsome face, a body nervous and graceful as a boat. His father's eyes measured what they saw, made quick decisions.
“Simmer down, buddy,” his father said, and his voice was so full of delight that Ben punched the air with a new determination, a fiercer mock fury. His father smiled, shed a thin beam of love for the future. He would run for senator. He would drive with a steady hand, be satisfied by food, find mercy in his work.
“Is your mother inside?” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you both ready to go?”
“Yeah.”
Ben's father touched his shoulder. His hand said that it was time to be calm, to move with precision and modesty. Ben imagined him that way at work, touching the people and the computers and the telephones, bidding them all to help him go forward, to make a sterner world that rewarded the good and annihilated the bad. Ben stopped hitting the air. He walked with his father into the house, where his mother was waiting.
She told his father she was happy to see him. She kissed his mouth, quickly, to be finished with kissing,