Family Dancing

by David Leavitt

  Three months later, Alex was living with Marian in a condominium on Nob Hill, where they worked at twin oak desks by the picture window. Lydia had moved into a tiny house in Menlo Park, twenty miles down the peninsula, and had a tan, and was taking classes in pottery design. The house in which Douglas, Mark, and Ellen grew up was emptied and sold, everything that belonged to the children packed neatly in boxes and put in storage at a warehouse somewhere—the stuffed animals, the old school notebooks. But none of them were around for any of that. They had gone back to Los Angeles, Hawaii, New York—their own lives. Mark visited his mother only once, in the spring, and she took him on a tour of her new house, showing him the old dining room table, the familiar pots and pans in the kitchen, the same television set on which he had watched “Speed Racer” after school. But there was also a new wicker sofa, and everywhere the little jars she made in her pottery class. “It’s a beautiful house,” Mark said. “Harmonious.” “That’s because only one person lives here,” Lydia said, and laughed. “No one to argue about the color of the drapes.” She looked out the window at the vegetable garden and said, “I’m trying to become the kind of person who can live in a house like this.” Mark imagined it, then; Alex and Lydia in their work clothes, sorting through twenty-six years of accumulated possessions, utility drawers, and packed closets. They had had no choice but to work through this final housecleaning together. And how had it felt? They had been married more years than he has lived.

  “Under the Weather” is not the strangest name of a Cape Cod cottage, nor the most depressing. On Nantucket, for instance, there is a house called “Beyond Hope”; another called “Weak Moment”; another called “Seldom Inn.” “Under the Weather” is small for such a large group, has lumpy beds and leaky faucets, but stands on a bluff, directly over a shoal where lobstermen pull up their traps. Alex and Lydia spent their honeymoon in the cottage one weekend twenty-six years ago, and loved it so much they vowed to return with their children, should they survive the war. A couple of years later, right after Lydia had Douglas, they persuaded the old woman who owned it to rent it to them for two weeks a year on a regular basis, and since then they have come every summer without fail. They hold onto the cottage as a principle, something which persists even when marriages fail, and other houses crumble. Perhaps for this reason, they have never bothered to ask anyone how it got its name. Such a question of origin interests only Mark, for whom the cottage has always been a tainted place. He remembers, as a child, coming upon his parents before dinner piercing live, writhing sea urchins with their forks, drawing them out and eating them raw. He remembers hearing them knocking about in the room next to his while he lay in bed, trying to guess if they were making love or fighting. And he remembers his own first sexual encounters, which took place near the cottage—assignations with a fisherman’s son in a docked rowboat puddled with stagnant seawater. The way he figures it now, those assignations were the closest thing he has known to being in love, and his parents must have been fighting. No noise comes out of their bedroom now. Alex sleeps in the living room. What keeps Mark awake is the humming of his own brain, as he makes up new names for the place: “Desperate Efforts,” perhaps, or simply, “The Lost Cottage.” And what of “Under the Weather”? Who gave the cottage that name, and why? He has asked some of the lobstermen, and none of them seem to remember.

  Since their arrival, Mark’s parents have been distant and civil with each other, but Mark knows that no one is happy with the situation. A few weeks after he got back from his visit with his mother, Alex called him. He was in New York on business, with Marian, and they wanted Mark to have dinner with them. Mark met them at an Indian restaurant on the top of a building on Central Park South where there were gold urinals in the men’s room. Marian looked fine, welcoming, and Mark remembered that before she was his father’s lover, she had been his friend. That was the summer he worked as her research assistant. He also remembered that Alex almost never took Lydia with him on business trips.

  “Well,” Alex said, halfway through the meal, “I’ll be on Cape Cod this June, as usual. Will you?”

  “Dad,” Mark said. “Of course.”

  “Of course. But Marian won’t be coming, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wish she could, but your mother won’t allow it.”

  “Really,” Mark said, looking sideways at Marian for some hint as to how he should go on. She looked resolute, so he decided to be honest. “Are you really surprised?” he said.

  “Nothing surprises me where your mother is concerned,” Alex said. Mark supposed Alex had tried to test how far he could trespass the carefully guarded borders of Lydia’s tolerance, how much he could get away with, and found he could not get away with that much. Apparently Lydia had panicked, overcome by thoughts of bedroom arrangements, and insisted the children wouldn’t be able to bear Marian’s presence. “And is that true?” he asked Mark, leaning toward him. “Would the children not be able to bear it?”

  Mark felt as if he were being prosecuted. “I don’t think Mom could bear it,” he said at last—fudging, for the moment, the question of his siblings’ feelings, and his own. Still, that remark was brutal enough. “Don’t push it, Alex,” Marian said, lighting a cigarette. “Anyway, I’m supposed to visit Kerry in Arizona that week. Kerry’s living on a ranch.” She smiled, retreating into the haven of her own children.

  Once, Mark had been very intimate with Marian. He trusted her so much, in fact, that he came out to her before anyone else, and she responded kindly, coaxing him and giving him the strength to tell his parents he was gay. He admires her, and understands easily why his father has fallen in love with her. But since the divorce, he will not talk to Marian, for his mother’s sake. Marian is the one obstacle Lydia cannot get around. Lydia never uses Marian’s name because it sticks in her throat like a shard of glass and makes her cry out in pain. “Certain loyalties need to be respected” was all she could say to Alex when he suggested bringing Marian to the Cape. And Alex relented, because he agreed with her, and because he realized that two weeks in June was a small enough sacrifice, considering how far she’d stretched, how much she’d given. “Marian and I can survive,” he told Mark at the Indian restaurant. “We’ve survived longer separations.” That intimacy scalded him. As if for emphasis, Alex took Marian’s hand on top of the table and held it there. “We’ll survive this one,” he said.

  Marian laughed nervously. “Your father and I have been waiting ten years to be together,” she said. “What’s two weeks?”

  Little about the cottage has changed since the Dempson children were children. Though Alex and Lydia talked every year about renovating, the same rotting porch still hangs off the front, the same door creaks on its hinges. The children sleep in the bedrooms they’ve always slept in, do the chores they’ve always done. “You may be adults out there,” Lydia jokes, “but here you’re my kids, and you do what I tell you.” Ellen is a lawyer, unmarried. Two days before her scheduled departure she was asked to postpone her vacation in order to help out with an important case which was about to go to trial. She refused, and this (she thinks) might affect her chances to become a partner someday. “Ellen, why?” Mark asked her when she told him. “The family is more important,” she said. “Mother is more important.” Douglas has brought with him Julie, the woman he’s lived with for the past five years. They do oceanographical research in a remote village on Kauai, and hold impressive fellowships. Only Mark has no career and no aspirations. He works at temporary jobs in New York and moves every few months from sublet to sublet, devoting most of his time to exploring the city’s homosexual night life. For the last few months he’s been working as a word processor at a bank. It was easy for him to get away. He simply quit.

  Now, a week into the vacation, things aren’t going well. Lydia is angry most of the time, and whenever anyone asks her why, she mentions some triviality: an unwashed pot, an unmade bed. Here is an exemplary afternoon: Douglas, Julie, Mark, and
Ellen arrive back from the beach, where they’ve been swimming and riding waves. Lydia doesn’t say hello to them. She sits, knitting, at the kitchen table. She is dressed in a fisherman’s sweater and a kilt fastened with a safety pin—an outfit she saves and wears only these few weeks on the Cape. “Are we late?” Douglas asks, bewildered by her silence, out of breath.

  “No,” Lydia says.

  “We had fun at the beach,” Julie says, and smiles, unsure of herself, still a stranger in this family. “How was your day?”

  “Fine,” Lydia says.

  Ellen rubs her eyes. “Well, Mom,” she says, “would you like me to tell you I nearly drowned today? I wish I had. One less person to make a mess. Too bad Mark saved me.”

  Lydia puts down her knitting and cradles her face in her hands. “I don’t deserve that,” she says. “You don’t know what it’s like trying to keep ahead of the mess in this house. You have no right to make fun of me when all I’m trying to do is keep us from drowning in dirty dishes and dirty clothes.”

  “Didn’t we do the dishes after lunch?” Douglas asks. “We must have done the dishes after lunch.”

  “If you can call that doing them,” Lydia says. “They were soapy and greasy.”

  “I’m sorry, Lydia,” says Julie. “We were in such a hurry—”

  “It’s just that if anything’s going to get done right around here, I have to do it, and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it.” She reaches for a pack of sugarless chewing gum, unwraps a stick, and goes to work on it.

  “This is ridiculous, Mom,” Ellen says. “Dishes are nothing. Dishes are trivial.”

  “It’s that attitude that gets me so riled up,” Lydia says. “They’re trivial to people like you, so people like me get stuck with them.”

  “I’m not people. I’m your daughter, Ellen, in case you’ve forgotten. Excuse me, I have to change.”

  She storms out of the kitchen, colliding with Alex, whose face and clothes are smeared with mud and sand.

  “What are you in such a hurry for?” he asks.

  “Ask her,” Ellen says, and slams the door of her bedroom.

  Lydia is rubbing her eyes. “What was that about?” Alex asks.

  “Nothing, nothing,” she says, in a weary singsong. “Just the usual. Did you fix that pipe yet?”

  “No, almost. I need some help. I hoped Doug and Mark might crawl under there with me.” All day he’s been trying to fix a faulty pipe which has made the bathtub faucet leak for twenty-five years, and created a bluish tail of rust near the spigot. The angrier Lydia gets, the more Alex throws himself into repair work, into tending to the old anachronisms of the house which he has seen fit to ignore in other years. It gives him an excuse to spend most of his days alone, away from Lydia.

  “So can you help me?” Alex asks.

  “Well,” Mark says, “I suppose so. When?”

  “I was thinking right now. We have to get out and pick up the lobsters in an hour or so. Henry said we could ride out on the boat with him. I want to get this job done.”

  “Fine,” Douglas, says. “I’m game.”

  Mark hesitates. “Yes,” he says. “I’ll help you with it. Just let me change first.”

  He walks out of the kitchen and into his bedroom. It is the smallest in the house, with a tiny child-sized bed, because even though Mark is the tallest member of the family by three inches, he is still the youngest. The bed was fine when he was five, but now most of the springs have broken, and Mark’s legs stick a full four inches over the edge. He takes off his bathing suit, dries himself with a towel, and—as he dresses—catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. It is the same face, as always.

  He heads out the door to the hallway, where Alex and Douglas are waiting for him. “All right,” he says. “I’m ready.”

  Of course, it was not this way at first. The day they arrived at the cottage, Lydia seemed exuberant. “Just breathe the air,” she said to Mark, her eyes fiery with excitement. “Air doesn’t smell like this anywhere else in the world.” They had spaghetti with clams for dinner—a huge, decadent, drunken meal. Halfway through Mark fell to the floor in a fit of laughter so severe it almost made him sick. They went to bed at three, slept dreamlessly late into the morning. By the time Mark woke up, Lydia was irritated, and Alex had disappeared, alone, to go fishing. That evening, Ellen and Julie baked a cake, and Lydia got furious at them for not cleaning up immediately afterward. Douglas and Julie rose to the occasion, eager to appease her, and immediately started scrubbing. Douglas was even more intent than his parents on keeping up a pretense of normality over the vacation, partially for Julie’s sake, but also because he cherished these two weeks at the cottage even more than his mother did. Ellen chided him for giving in to her whim so readily. “She’ll just get angrier if you take away her only outlet,” she said. “Leave the dirty dishes. If this house were clean, believe me, we’d get it a lot worse from her than we are now.”

  “I want to keep things pleasant,” Douglas said. He kowtowed to his mother, he claimed, because he pitied her, but Mark knew it was because he feared more than anything seeing her lose control. When he and Douglas were children, he remembers, Lydia had been hit on the head by a softball one afternoon in the park. She had fallen to her knees and burst into tears, and Douglas had shrunk back, terrified, and refused to go near her. Now Douglas seemed determined to make sure his mother never did that to him again, even if it meant she had to suffer in silence.

  Lydia is still in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, when Mark emerges from under the cottage. She is not drinking coffee, not reading a recipe; just leaning there. “Dad and Doug told me to pack up and come inside,” Mark says. “I was more trouble than help.”

  “Oh?” Lydia says.

  “Yes,” Mark says, and sits down at the table. “I have no mechanical aptitude. I can hold things and hand things to other people—sometimes. They knew my heart wasn’t in it.”

  “You never did like that sort of thing,” Lydia says.

  Mark sits silent for a few seconds. “Daddy’s just repairing everything this vacation, isn’t he?” he says. “For next summer this place’ll be tiptop.”

  “We won’t be here next summer,” Lydia says. “I’m sure of it, though it’s hard to imagine this is the last time.”

  “I’m sorry it’s such an unhappy time for you,” Mark says.

  Lydia smiles. “Well,” she says, “it’s no one’s fault but my own. You know, when your father first told me he wanted a divorce, he said things could be hard, or they could be very hard. The choice was up to me. I thought I chose the former of those two. Then again, I also thought, if I go along with him and don’t make trouble, at least he’ll be fair.”

  “Mom,” Mark says, “give yourself a break. What did you expect?”

  “I expected people to act like adults,” she says. “I expected people to play fair.” She turns to look out the window, her face grim. The table is strewn with gum wrappers.

  “Can I help you?” Mark asks.

  She laughs. “Your father would be happy to hear you say that,” she says. “He told me from the beginning, I’ll let them hate me, I’ll turn the kids against me. Then they’ll be there for you. He was so damn sacrificial. But no. You can’t help me because I still have some pride.”

  There is a clattering of doors in the hallway. Male voices invade the house. Alex and Douglas walk into the kitchen, their clothes even more smeared with mud, their eyes triumphant. “Looks like we fixed that pipe,” Alex says. “Now we’ve got to wash up; Henry’s expecting us to pick up those lobsters ten minutes ago.”

  He and Douglas stand at the kitchen sink and wash their hands and faces. From her room, Julie calls, “You fixed the pipe? That’s fantastic!”

  “Yes,” Douglas says, “we have repaired the evil leak which has plagued this house for centuries.”

  “We’d better get going, Doug,” Alex says. “Does Julie want to come hunt lobsters?”

  “Lobsters?” Jul
ie says, entering the room. Her smile is bright, eager. Then she looks at Lydia. “No, you men go,” she says. “We womenfolk will stay here and guard the hearth.”

  Lydia looks at her, and raises her eyebrows.

  “O.K., let’s go,” Alex says. “Mark, you ready?”

  He looks questioningly at Lydia. But she is gathering together steel wool and Clorox, preparing to attack the stain on the bathtub.

  “Yes, I’m ready,” Mark says.

  At first, when he was very young, Mark imagined the lobstermen to be literal lobster-men, with big pink pincers and claws. Later, as he was entering puberty, he found that all his early sexual feelings focused on them—the red-faced men and boys with their bellies encased in dirty T-shirts. Here, in a docked boat, Mark made love for the first time with a local boy who had propositioned him in the bathroom of what was then the town’s only pizza parlor. “I seen you look at me,” said the boy, whose name was Erroll. Mark had wanted to run away, but instead made a date to meet Erroll later that night. Outside, in the pizza parlor, his family was arguing about whether to get anchovies. Mark still feels a wave of nausea run through him when he eats with them at any pizza parlor, remembering Erroll’s warm breath on his neck, and the smell of fish which seemed to cling to him for days afterward.

  Alex is friends with the local lobstermen, one of whom is his landlord’s cousin. Most years, he and Douglas and Mark ride out on a little boat with Henry Traylor and his son, Henry Traylor, and play at being lobstermen themselves, at hauling pots and grabbing the writhing creatures and snapping shut their jaws. The lobsters only turn pink when boiled; live, they’re sometimes a bluish color which reminds Mark of the stain on the bathtub. Mark has never much liked these expeditions, nor the inflated caricature of machismo which his father and brother put on for them. He looks at them and sees plump men with pale skin, men no man would ever want. Yet they are loved, fiercely loved by women.

  Today Henry Traylor is a year older than the last time they saw him, as is his son. “Graduated from high school last week,” he tells Alex.