by test
These restrictions on a freedom that appeared otherwise almost without bounds were part of a ruthless devotion to a democracy in which, according to my mother's plan for her offspring (for she did have a comprehensive one), our collective childhood and adolescence would be very, very different from hersa vow she often repeated without getting too much into specifics. Her credo was that all of us would arrive at adulthood together (with a margin of error for our differences in age) bearing a minimum of trauma-induced scars, or at least with the scars evenly divided among us; no favorites would emerge. Like a scrupulously honest schoolteacher who forbids her students to sign their papers in order to assure them of her fairness to all of them by reading blind, but who nonetheless can't help guiltily recognizing the handwriting of each, my mother forswore preferential treatment and tried to rectify her indulgence in it by approaching our separate talents as so many lovable peculiarities. Mine was smartness, a tic or minor handicap I had to learn to live with as best I could.
Before I went off for the first year at college, my mother threw me a going-away party, a huge lasagna dinner (my favorite dish) to which she invited all the relatives, neighbors and friends she could mustera sizeable regiment she could infallibly command to social functions on a few hours' notice. Neither of my parents had been much involved in the decision, application, or any other aspect of my preparations to attend college, but once I had figured out how to do so, and was ready to depart, I was honored by this special extravaganza, one my mother could indulge in to the fullest of her peerless culinary capabilities by treating the occasion as she would a significant birthdayfor after all, every
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one of her children was born, and therefore had birthdays, and in that respect I was no different from any of my sisters. I was simply celebrating the birthday of Smartness, and I would go off to college and be a great success at whatever I decided to do, it didn't matter what, and make everybody proud and contribute significantly to the Gross Domestic Product of our collective self-esteem.
Another of her designs revealed itself by evening's end. Birthdays mean presents, and after the party, when we had cleared the lambrusco bottles away and she and I remained alone in the kitchen, she asked me to count up the money in the envelopes I'd been handed in the course of the evening by those invited to the dinner. The checks and bills came to well over a thousand dollars, enough to supplement my scholarships and loans and keep me afloat the first year if I managed it carefully. There had never been any question of my parents being able to contribute to my college costs, pressed as they were by their own overwhelming money worries, and I never considered even opening the subject with them. But hard-times financier that my mother was, she managed to raise a short-term fund, to turn a pretty profit on her dinner party and so contribute to my particular needs, yet in strict accordance with the necessities of her pocketbook and the dictates of her ruthlessly democratic code of child rearing. There was never enough money for any of us, but there always turned out to be just enough for all of us.
Though I didn't ever finish college, lack of money played no part in my decision to drop out. Doing without and making do has bred a certain extravagance in all my mother's children. Elaine will sometimes allow a letter she's written me to lie around unmailed for weeks and then, deciding all at once that it must arrive immediately if not sooner, she'll send it express mail, to the tune of eleven dollars. Judy's weakness, since the advent of call waiting, is to telephone long distance and then put you intermittently on hold while she transacts business with the dry cleaners or cheers one of her aerobics clients out of despond. By a similar impulse, I came to consider college not as training for a career, but as an occasion for lavish expenditures of mind, and even though I came close to receiving a degree more than once, I abandoned each program as easily as I took it up, indulging in a luxury like leaving unfinished an expensive meal in a restaurant. While each of us has become in our own way a workaholic like my mother, there was not, as in the proverbial poor immigrant family, any expectation that we would scrimp and save and apply ourselves in order to enter professions, make good pay, become prominent and productive citizens. It's true that Poor Richard's fifth rule"Frugality. Make no expence but to do good to others or yourself, i.e., waste nothing"was often forced on us by circumstance. But as an ethos, his Rules for Perfection, in our household, would probably themselves have been put to frugal use, folded up and set underneath a glass of iced tea to soak up the excess condensation.
My decisions to leave school were met with no incriminations except my
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own occasional ones about squandering talents, and I am free to knock about for as long as I like without chattels or encumbrances, now writing computer software, now helping an oceanographer friend chart wave motions on a well-provisioned icebreaker ship in the Arctic Circle. For myself, I've mostly accepted the fact that my multifarious mental quirks probably won't ever coalesce into a prolific or consistent brilliance. I'm only sometimes bothered by pangs of wishing still to prove myself a Great Mindthe kind that leaves behind works tangible enough to be bound up in green leatheretteand of trying to decide at what point the expectancy of youth irrevocably becomes the procrastination of adulthood. For my mother, no matter how old I get, I'll always be her wunderkind, the prodigal son, forever on the verge of yielding up a definitive abundance of something or other, forever offering a deferral of that moment as comforting and predictable in its approach to infinity as a repeating decimal. I don't think she would object to my fondness for using mathematical metaphors to formulate our relation to one another and her aspirations for me. We share an understanding of how numbers are both real and imaginary, finite and infinite, and how the abundance she's always hoped for is as tangible as the balance in the checkbook ledger or the food she put on the table or the son who ate it, yet also is something beyond, which can never come into being completely but only be perpetually imagined. My mother the breadwinner and baker of earthly delights believes, as I do, that it's possible, even if sometimes costly, to have your p and eat it too.
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In the MacAdams' Swimming Pool
by Nicola Schmidt
It is cool and bright; the Macs always put too much chlorine into their pool, but Christine opens her eyes anyway; the round light in the shallow-end wall makes the water glow turquoise. The tiles around the sides are sky blue and sea blue and white. She swims underwater to the middle of the pool and surfaces and treads water and breathes. Splashing, she clambers up onto an inner tube, and the dry rubber on top tugs at the skin of her legs. She lies back, her feet and arms and bottom in the water, and as she kicks with her toes, the tube spins. The blank sky above her dips into purple along one edge but is still green and bright on the other side. Ripples slap with faint, tinny plashes against the tube's inside ring.
Little Den-den Welch churns up the water behind Christine; he barks like a seal, splashing and spluttering.
She does not know where Jamey MacAdam has gone.
In front of Christine, her sister Pam sits on the diving board sharing a bottle of beer with Suze MacAdam. They wear one-piece bathing suits with thin straps that cross over and hook in the back, with narrow glossy triangles holding their breasts.
Christine's old tank suit squeezes her armpits and the tops of her legs; her mother told her the new one, purple with a halter top, which like Pam's is all straps and ties but not so shiny or skimpy, is more her age, more sophisticated, but standing this afternoon in front of the bathroom mirror, Christine was unsure; it would be no good for duck dives, for swimming like an otter. Yesterday, in the department store changing room, her mother brushed the bangs away from Christine's eyes and looked at her reflection and said, "How about a proper hair cut soon, Teenie?" and Pam, still grouchy because their mother wouldn't buy her a bikini, said, "You look like a goofy little boy.
"Christine says, "Did Dad say you could have that?"
Pam takes a swallow, hands the bottle to Su
ze, and stares down at Christine. "Teenie, that old swimsuit's way too small for youyou know what I mean?"
Suze wipes her grinning mouth on her knee and hands the bottle back.
"You shouldn't be having beer," says Christine.
"Oh grow up," Pam says, and crosses her legs and looks away and drinks.
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Suze touches Pam's shoulder and says, "So go on. What were you saying about"
And Pam says, "But you can't tell, Suze, this is just between us, no telling, right?"
Suze leans forward hugging her knees. "OK, sure, I swear, so go on." Suze tucks her wet hair behind her ears and nods as Pain talks, but Christine can't hear over Den-den's splashing. Pain is saying something about Carl, his Camaro, quarter of twelve. Then Den-den gasps and splashes once and is quiet, and while he is underwater Pam sighs, and Suze says, "God, what a pain." Suze looks over her shoulder toward the adults, and Christine follows her glance, paddles herself around with her feet until she faces the patio.
The grown-upsher parents, the Macs, the Welchesare gathered around the picnic table. The grill is still smoking, and the women rewrap buns, screw the caps back on ketchup bottles and relish jars, while the men pass around beers, pour wine from big dark bottles and hand out glasses as if there's a game going onMusical Drinks. And then, still like an unexplained game, the adults separate, rearrange into pairs around the patio.
Suze whispers, and she and Pam laugh. "It's true," says Suze. Their talk sounds like swishing, like wind and long hair and moving pants legs and skirts.
At the end of the pool, Mrs. Welch grunts and rises from a lawn chair, holding up an empty wine glass. She squats next to a red cooler and some wine bottles, and sets her glass on the concrete. As she fills the glassshe picks two bottles up and puts them down and then pours from a thirdshe says, almost shouts, to Christine's father, although he is right there in a lawn chair just like hers, "So how're missiles these days?" She rises into a crouch and pulls the chair closer and then without ever standing all the way up flops back into the chair. With one hand she holds the glass to her dark red mouth and with the other points and flutters at Christine's father. "I mean radars, forgive me, it's just radars, isn't it? How're radars treating you, hm?" And she grins, and her upper body sags, and Christine's father grins.
Suze says, "And old Blob Welch"
"What?" says Pam. "What? Tell me."
"When he kissed me hello this afternoon, he tried to slip me the tongue."
"No way."
"I swear."
Christine frowns and closes her eyes and dips the back of her head into the water. Somewhere down the road, at the turning circle perhaps, firecrackers pop. The inner tube revolves. There are cold soft bands around her calves and arms at the water's surface.
Someone chuckles, and a woman says a long "Oh." Christine raises her head. Mr. Welch and Mrs. Mac lean together against the mesh fence. Mr. Welch touches his green beer bottle to Mrs. Mac's bare shoulder and mumbles some-
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thing. Mrs. Mac laughs and twists the end of her ponytail with her left hand. She looks up at Mr. Welch over the rim of her glass as she sips and nods, and then they turn together to look over the fenceat the dark back yard, at trees where a purple bug light sparksand Christine cannot see their faces. Their shoulders touch, level with each other because Mr. Welch bends at the middle, his rear end thrust back.
Small cold hands grip Christine's ankles, and Den-den bobs up between her feet and coughs and spits into the water. Still hanging on, he ducks his head down and wipes the sodden blond-green hair from his face with his arm. He looks up at Christine and blinks. "Wanna play otter?"
"I don't know," she says. "Maybe."
Den-den tugs at her legs, splashes himself with her feet. The inner tube rocks.
And then the sliding screen door scrapes open and bangs shut, and Jamey MacAdam, loose-shouldered and lanky, in his grass-stained white soccer uniform and his blue baseball caphis red hair curls out through the hole at the backis looking at the salads left on the table; he peels back the foil over the wooden bowls and pokes, puts carrot disks and cucumber slices and cherry tomatoes in his mouth one after another, chews and chews. His arms and legs are freckled and skinny, and his handsshe has just noticed this latelyseem older than the rest of him, teenaged already, wide and darker.
"Come on, come on, Teenie Otter."
"I guess not. Maybe later."
Den-den lets go, sinks with his arms straight up, and swims away underwater just like a frog.
"Hey," her father shouts. He is standing now and holding up a beer bottle and he steps away from his chair, his back to Mrs. Welch, who frowns beneath her black crescent eyebrows. "Come on, everybodyto Independence! Happy Fourth."
Pam says, "Oh jeeze, Dad," and all the adults raise their glasses and bottles and drink from them, except Mrs. Welch, who takes off her eyeglasses and holds them out in the air, like a stripper with a necklace perhaps, and closes her eyes and rolls her head. Then she puts her glasses back on and sips her wine while her left arm dangles to the ground and her fingers strum the air.
Christine's mother, in her new pink sundress, stands barefoot at the top of the swimming pool steps and balances a wine glass on the handrail. Mr. Mac stands next to her, one hand in the pocket of his tennis shorts. His other hand touches Christine's mother's bare back. She smiles up at him and tilts her glass so that it just nudges his hip. They murmur, and Christine's mother turns away from the pool, and Mr. Mac's hand floats to her shoulder.
Den-den doggy-paddles back towards Christine, and without looking at him she strokes herself away. She says, "I don't feel like playing right now," and
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then hears him swim back to the shallow end and splash up the steps, leaving her alone in the pool.
The inner tube rocks and spins Christine slowly. The sky is violet-black.
Den-den, squeaking to himself, finds a tennis ball in the grass, throws it up and catches it with splayed fingers, tosses it again and darts stumbling forward, misses, and chases the ball across the patio. Jamey scoops the ball up, bounces it twice, then pitches it across the lawn, and Den-den runs after it. And then Jamey eases himself up onto the table; he reaches for a bag of chips and drinks soda straight from the bottle. He turns toward the pool, and Christine paddles herself around. The adults are dragging lawn chairs onto the grass beside the mesh fence. The screen door scrapes open and shut.
The grown-ups murmur and shift and settle in their chairs. They lean forward to speak low to one another, to touch shoulders and knees. Mr. Mac sits between Mrs. Mac and Christine's mother with an arm along the back of each woman's chair. Mrs. Mac leans away from him with her arms crossed on her knees and her fingers waving and talks with Christine's father Mrs. Mac's lips move, and her fingers wave and curl and uncurl and brush Christine's father's arm, but Christine cannot tell what Mrs. Mac is saying. Mrs. Welch's head tips back and her mouth is open. Then her head flops to one side and her eyes open and she jerks upright.
"Jesus but it gets dark fast now," Mrs. Welch says.
Bob Welch stretches and puts a hand on the aluminum arm of his wife's chair. "Hey maybe it's time we called it an evening. What do you say?" He stands, rubs his hips, says to Mr. Mac, "Gets toward night and we can't even keep our heads up. We're getting old, Mitch, I tell you, regular ruins."