Family Dancing

by David Leavitt

  “That’s terrific,” Alex says. “What’s next?”

  “Fixing to get married, I suppose,” Henry Traylor says. “Go to work, have kids.” He is a round-faced, red-cheeked boy with ratty, bright blond hair. As he talks, he manipulates without effort the outboard rudder of the little boat which is carrying them out into the sound, toward the marked buoys of the planted pots. Out on the ocean, Alex seems to relax considerably. “Your mother seems unhappy,” he says to Mark. “I try to talk to her, to help her, but it doesn’t do any good. Well, maybe Julie and Ellen can do something.” He puts his arm around Mark’s shoulder—an uncomplicated, fatherly gesture which seems to say, this love is simple. The love of men is simple. Leave the women behind in the kitchen, in the steam of the cooking pot, the fog of their jealousies and compulsions. We will go hunt.

  Henry Traylor has hauled up the ancient lobster trap. Lobster limbs stick out of the barnacle-encrusted woodwork, occasionally moving. “Now you just grab the little bugger like this,” Henry Traylor instructs Douglas. “Then you take your rubber band and snap him closed. It’s simple.”

  “O.K.,” Douglas says. “Here goes.” He stands back and cranes his arm over the trap, holding himself at a distance, then withdraws a single, flailing lobster.

  “Oh, God,” he says, and nearly drops it.

  “Don’t do that!” shouts Henry Traylor. “You got him. Now just take the rubber band and fix him tight. Shut him up like he’s a woman who’s sassing you. That’s right. Good. See? It wasn’t so hard.”

  “Do that to your wife,” says Henry Traylor the elder, “she’ll bite your head off quicker than that lobster.”

  Out of politeness, all three of the Dempson men laugh. Douglas looks at his handiwork—a single lobster, bound and gagged—and smiles. “I did it,” he says. Mark wonders if young Henry Traylor has ever thought of making love to other boys, thinks rudely of propositioning him, having him beneath the boat. “I seen you look at me,” he’d say. He thinks of it—little swirls of semen coagulating in the puddles, white as the eddies of foam which are gathering now on the sea in which they float, helpless, five men wrestling with lobsters.

  They go back to shore. The Traylors have asked Alex and Douglas to walk up the hill with them and take a look at their new well, so Mark carries the bag of lobsters back to the house. But when he gets to the screen door to the kitchen, he stops in his tracks; Ellen, Lydia, and Julie are sitting at the table, talking in hushed voices, and he steps back, fearful of interrupting them. “It would be all right,” Ellen is saying. “Really, it’s not that outrageous these days. I met a lot of really decent guys when I did it.”

  “What could I say?” Lydia asks.

  “Just be simple and straightforward. Attractive woman, divorced, mid-fifties, seeks whatever—handsome, mature man for companionship. Who knows? Whatever you want.”

  “I could never put that down!” Lydia says, her inflection rising. “Besides, it wouldn’t be fair. They’d be disappointed when they met me.”

  “Of course they wouldn’t!” Julie says. “You’re very attractive.”

  “I’m an old woman,” Lydia says. “There’s no need to flatter me. I know that.”

  “Mom, you don’t look half your age,” Ellen says. “You’re beautiful.”

  Mark knocks and walks through the door, his arms full of lobsters. “Here I am,” he says, “back with the loot. I’m sorry for eavesdropping, but I agree with everything Ellen says.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter, Mark,” Lydia says. “Alex wouldn’t care anyway if he found out.”

  “Mom, will you stop that?” Ellen says. “Will you just stop that? Don’t worry about him anymore, for Christ’s sake, he isn’t worth it.”

  “Don’t talk about your father that way,” Lydia says. “You can tell me whatever you think I need to know, but you’re not to speak of your father like that. He’s still your father, even if he’s not my husband.”

  “Jesus,” Ellen says.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” Ellen says, more loudly.

  Lydia looks her over once, then walks over to the stove, where the water for the lobsters is boiling. “How many did you get, Mark?” she asks.

  “Six. Daddy and Douglas went to look at the Traylors’ well. They’ll be back any minute.”

  “Good,” Lydia says. “Let’s put these things in the water.” She lifts the top off the huge pot, and steam pours out of it, fogging her reading glasses.

  Dinner passes quietly. Alex is in a questioning mood, and his children answer him obediently. Douglas and Julie talk about the strange sleeping habits of sharks, Ellen about her firm, Mark about a play he saw recently Off Broadway. Lydia sits at the head of the table, and occasionally makes a comment or asks a question—just enough to keep them from panicking, or staring at her all through the meal. Mark notices that her eyes keep wandering to Alex.

  After dinner is finished, Julie and Lydia carry the dishes into the kitchen, and Douglas says, “O.K., are we getting ice cream tonight, or what?” Every night since their arrival, they have gone to get ice cream after dinner, primarily at the insistence of Douglas and Julie, who thrive on ice cream, but thrive more on ritual. Ellen, who has visited them in Hawaii, revealed to Mark that they feed their cat tea every morning, in bed. “They’re daffy,” she said, describing to him the way Douglas held the cat and Julie the saucer of tea it licked from. Over the five years they’ve been together, Mark has noticed, Douglas and Julie have become almost completely absorbed in one another, at the expense of most everything around them, probably as a result of the fact that they’ve spent so much of that time in remote places, in virtual isolation. They even share a secret language of code words and euphemisms. When Julie asked Douglas, one night, to give her a “floogie,” Mark burst out laughing, and then they explained that “floogie” was their private word for backrub.

  Tonight, Ellen is peculiarly agreeable. Usually she resists these ice cream expeditions, but now she says, “Oh, what a great idea. Let’s go.” Mark wonders what led her and Lydia to the conversation he overheard, then decides he’d prefer not to know. “Let’s go, let’s go,” Douglas says. “Mom, are you game?”

  But Lydia has her face buried in the steam rising from the sink of dishes, which she has insisted on doing herself. “No,” she says. “You go ahead.”

  Douglas backs away from the sorrow in her voice—sorrow which might at any moment turn into irritation, if he pushes her harder. He knows not to. “How about you, Dad?” he asks Alex.

  “No,” Alex says, “I’m pooped. But bring me back some chocolate chip.”

  “Give me money?” Douglas says.

  Alex hands him a twenty, and the kids barrel into the car and head off to the ice cream parlor in town. They sit down at a pink booth with high-backed, patent-leather seats which remind Mark of pink flamingos on people’s lawns, and a waitress in a pink uniform brings them their menus. The waitress is a local girl with bad teeth, and Mark wonders if she’s the one Henry Traylor’s going to marry someday. He wouldn’t be surprised. She’s got a lusty look about her which even he can recognize, and which he imagines Henry Traylor would find attractive. And Douglas is watching her. Julie is watching Douglas watch, but she does not look jealous. She looks fascinated.

  Ellen looks jealous.

  They order several sundaes, and eat them with a kind of labored dedication. Halfway through the blueberry sundae he is sharing with Ellen, Mark realizes he stopped enjoying this sundae, and this ritual, four days before. Julie looks tired, too—tired of being cheerful and shrieking about fixed faucets. And Mark imagines a time when his brother and Julie will feed their cat tea for no other reason than that they always have, and with no pleasure. He remembers one weekend when Julie and Douglas came to visit him in New York. They had taken the train down from Boston, where they were in school, and they were flying to California the next afternoon. All that day on the train Douglas had been looking forward to eating at a Souther
n Indian restaurant he had read about, but the train arrived several hours late, and by the time he and Julie had gotten their baggage the restaurant was closed. Douglas fumed like a child until tears came to his eyes. “All that day on the train, looking forward to that dinner,” he said on the subway ride back to Mark’s apartment. Julie put her arms around him, and kissed him on the forehead, but he turned away. Mark wanted to shake her, then, ask her why she was indulging him this way, but he knew that Douglas had indulged her just as often. That was the basis of their love—mutual self-indulgence so excessive that Mark couldn’t live with them for more than a few days without thinking he would go crazy. It wasn’t that he wasn’t welcome. His presence or absence seemed irrelevent to them; as far as they were concerned, he might as well not have existed. And this was coupledom, the revered state of marriage? For Mark, the amorous maneuverings of the heterosexual world are deserving of the same bewilderment and distrust that he hears in his sister’s voice when she says, “But how can you just go to bed with someone you’ve hardly met? I could never do that.” He wants to respond by saying, I would never pretend that I could pledge eternal allegiance to one person, but this isn’t really true. What is true is that he’s terrified of what he might turn into once he’d made such a pledge.

  “So when’s the summit conference taking place?” Ellen says now, dropping her blueberry-stained spoon onto the pink table. Everyone looks at her. “What do you mean?” Julie asks.

  “I mean I think we should have a talk about what’s happening with Mom and Dad. I mean I think we should stop pretending everything’s normal when it isn’t.”

  “I’m not pretending,” Douglas says.

  “Neither am I,” says Julie. “We’re aware of what’s going on.”

  Mark watches Ellen’s blueberry ice cream melt down the sides of her parfait glass. “What has Mama said to you?” he asks.

  “Everything and nothing,” Ellen says. “I hear her when she’s angry and when she wants to cry she does it in my room. One day she’s cheerful, the next miserable. I don’t know why she decided to make me her confidante, but she did.” Ellen pushes the sundae dish away. “Why don’t we just face the fact that this is a failure?” she says. “Daddy doesn’t want to be here, that’s for sure, and I think Mom’s beginning to think that she doesn’t want to be here. And I, for one, am not so sure I want to be here.”

  “Mom believes in tradition,” Douglas says softly, repeating a phrase they’ve heard from her a thousand times.

  “Tradition can become repetition,” Ellen says, “when you end up holding onto something just because you’re afraid to let it go.” She shakes her head. “I am ready to let it go.”

  “Let what go?” Douglas says. “The family?”

  Ellen is silent.

  “Well, I don’t think that’s fair,” Douglas says. “Sure, things are stressful. A lot has happened. But that doesn’t mean we should give up. We have to work hard at this. Just because things are different doesn’t mean they necessarily have to be bad. I, for one, am determined to make the best of this vacation—for my sake, but also for Mom’s. Except for this, without this—”

  “She already has nothing,” Ellen says.

  Douglas stares at her.

  “You can face it,” Ellen says. “She has. She’s said as much. Her whole life went down the tubes when Daddy left her, Cape Cod or no Cape Cod. This vacation doesn’t matter a damn. But that’s not the end. She could start a new life for herself. Mark, remember the first time Douglas didn’t come home for Christmas? I’ll bet you never guessed how upset everyone was, Douglas. Christmas just wasn’t going to be Christmas without the whole family being there, I said, so why bother having it at all? But then Christmas came, and we did it without you. It wasn’t the same. But it was still Christmas. We survived. And maybe we were a little relieved to find we weren’t as dependent on your presence as we thought we’d be, relieved to be able to give up some of those old rituals, some of that nostalgia. It was like a rehearsal for other losses we probably all knew we’d have to face someday—for this, maybe.”

  Douglas has his arm around Julie, his fingers gripping her shoulder. “No one ever told me that,” he says. “I figured no one cared.”

  Ellen laughs. “That’s never been a problem in this family,” she says. “The problem in this family is that everybody cares.”

  They get back to the cottage around eleven to find that the lights are still on. “I’m surprised she’s still up,” Ellen says to Mark as they clamber out of the car.

  “It’s not so surprising,” Mark says. “She’s probably having a snack.” The gravel of the driveway crunches beneath his feet as he moves toward the screen door to the kitchen. “Hi, Mom,” Mark says as he walks through the door, then stops abruptly, the other three behind him.

  “What’s going on?” Mark asks.

  Alex is standing by the ironing board, in his coat, his face red and puffy. He is looking down at Lydia, who sits in her pink bathrobe at the kitchen table, her head resting on her forearms, weeping. In front of her is half a grapefruit on a plate, and a small spoon with serrated edges.

  “What happened?” Ellen asks.

  “It’s nothing, kids,” Alex says. “Your mother and I were just having a discussion.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Lydia says, raising her head slightly. Her eyes are red, swollen with tears. “Why don’t you just tell them if you’re so big on honesty all of a sudden? Your father’s girlfriend has arrived. She’s at a motel in town. They planned this all along, and your father never saw fit to tell any of us about it, except I happened to see her this morning when I was doing the grocery shopping.”

  “Oh, God,” Mark says, and leans back against the wall of the kitchen. Across from him, his father also draws back.

  “All right, let’s not get hysterical,” Ellen says. “Let’s try to talk this through. Daddy, is this true?”

  “Yes,” Alex says. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell any of you but I was afraid of how you’d react. Marian’s just here for the weekend, she’ll be gone Monday. I thought I could see her during the day, and no one would know. But now that everything’s out, I can see that more deception was just a bad idea to begin with. And anyway, am I asking so much? All I’m asking is to spend some time in town with Marian. I’ll be home for meals, and during the day, everything for the family. None of you ever has to see her.”

  “Do you think all this is fair to Marian?” Ellen asks.

  “It was her idea.”

  “I see.”

  “Fair to Marian, fair to Marian,” Lydia mumbles. “All of this has been fair to Marian. These two weeks you were supposed to be fair to me.” She takes a Kleenex and rubs at her nose and eyes. Mark’s fingers grip the moldings on the walls, while Julie buttons and unbuttons the collar of her sweater.

  “Lydia, look,” Alex says. “Something isn’t clear here. When I agreed to come these weeks, it was as your friend and as a father. Nothing more.”

  “So go then!” Lydia shouts, standing up and facing him. “You’ve brought me lower than I ever thought you would, don’t stand there and rub it in. Just go.” Shaking, she walks over to the counter, picks up a coffee cup, and takes a sip out of it. Coffee splashes over the rim, falls in hot drops on the floor.

  “Now I think we have to talk about this,” Ellen says. “We can deal with this if we just work on it.”

  “There’s no point,” Douglas says, and sits down at the table. “There’s nothing left to say.” He looks at the table, and Julie reaches for his hand.

  “What do you mean there’s nothing left to say? There’s everything to be said here. The one thing we haven’t done is talk about all of this as a family.”

  “Oh, be quiet, both of you,” Lydia says, putting down her cup. “You don’t know anything about this. The whole business is so simple it’s embarrassing.” She puts her hand on her chest and takes a deep, shaky breath. “There is only one thing to be said here, and I’m the one who has to say
it. And that is the simple fact that I love your father, and I will always love your father. And he doesn’t love me. And never will.”

  No one answers her. She is right. None of them know anything about this, not even Ellen. Lydia’s children are as speechless as spectators watching a woman on a high ledge: unable to do any good, they can only stare, waiting to see what she’ll do next.

  What she does is turn to Alex. “Did you hear me?” she says. “I love you. You can escape me, but you can never escape that.”

  He keeps his eyes focused on the window above her head, making sure never to look at her. The expression on his face is almost simple, almost sweet: the lips pressed together, though not tightly, the eyes averted. In his mind, he’s already left.

  Aliens

  A year ago today I wouldn’t have dreamed I’d be where I am now: in the recreation room on the third floor of the State Hospital, watching, with my daughter, ten men who sit in a circle in the center of the room. They look almost normal from a distance—khaki pants, lumberjack shirts, white socks—but I’ve learned to detect the tics, the nervous disorders. The men are members of a poetry writing workshop. It is my husband Alden’s turn to read. He takes a few seconds to find his cane, to hoist himself out of his chair. As he stands, his posture is hunched and awkward. The surface of his crushed left eye has clouded to marble. There is a pale pink scar under his pale yellow hair.

  The woman who leads the workshop, on a volunteer basis, rubs her forehead as she listens, and fingers one of her elephant-shaped earrings. Alden’s voice is a hoarse roar, only recently reconstructed.

  “Goddamned God,” he reads. “I’m mad as hell I can’t walk or talk.”

  It is spring, and my youngest child, my eleven-year-old, Nina, has convinced herself that she is an alien.

  Mrs. Tompkins, her teacher, called me in yesterday morning to tell me. “Nina’s constructed a whole history,” she whispered, removing her glasses and leaning toward me across her desk, as if someone might be listening from above. “She never pays attention in class, just sits and draws. Strange landscapes, star-charts, the interiors of spaceships. I finally asked some of the other children what was going on. They told me that Nina says she’s waiting to be taken away by her real parents. She says she’s a surveyor, implanted here, but that soon a ship’s going to come and retrieve her.”