“I love that one.”
“The braces! Don’t you have one without the braces?”
“I loved you in braces.”
“Ugh. It was so painful, getting them tightened. I remember that.”
“They gave you a lisp. It was very sweet.”
“God, Mom. There’s nothing sweet about a lisp in a teenaged boy.”
“You weren’t a teenager, quite. You were twelve.”
“Even worse. On the cusp of being a teenager.”
“In you, there was something sweet, somehow. I know, I know, you didn’t think so. But it made you seem so—”
“So what?”
“So innocent. Or something.”
“Right,” he said.
“Stephen?”
“What?” He had discovered a spot on the hardwood and bent down to examine it.
“Nothing is going to happen in fifteen minutes.”
“I know.”
“So go, already,” she said. “Go to the hardware store with your father. He could use some male company, God knows. Just go.”
After they got the tape William said he wanted a Creemee.
“Really?” Stephen thought of Jane at the house. She would call Ginny if she needed anything, of course. Lillian was around somewhere too, and Olivia and Philip. Jane was not alone; Jane would not succumb to any sort of tragedy if he, Stephen, decided to eat ice cream with his father. “A Creemee sounds good,” he said reluctantly, untruthfully. “Let’s do it.”
They drove down to the Creemee stand between the waterfront and the bike path, where a teenager with a long flop of hair served them each a cone. Stephen took a stack of the thin, barely useful napkins from the holder and they settled themselves on a bench overlooking the lake. Not far from them a line of tourists waited to board a cruise ship. Two boys—ten, maybe, legs skinny and brown and scabbed, shaggy haircuts and baggy clothes—went by them on skateboards.
“Sometimes I do this,” William said, licking the sprinkles off the tip of the cone.
“Do what?”
“Sneak out on your mother in the middle of the day and have an ice cream.”
“Geez, Dad,” said Stephen. This knowledge, delivered though it was in a genial, conspiratorial tone, made him sad. “Do you have to sneak out to get an ice cream, at your age?”
“Sixty-five next month,” William said cheerfully.
“Aren’t you supposed to be sneaking out for a beer, if anything?”
“Ah.” William licked at his ice cream. “That’s the thing. A beer tastes better at home in the summer, in front of the Red Sox, after a hard day of work. A Creemee: that’s better away from home.”
“But you have to sneak it.” Stephen watched an elderly couple toddle down to the edge of the water. The man held a cane; the woman held onto his elbow and guided him.
“No, I don’t have to sneak it.”
“But you like to sneak it.”
“Well, it’s easier, sometimes.”
“Easier why?”
“Because then I don’t have to see if your mother wants to go, or arrange to bring something back for her if she doesn’t, or explain why I want an ice cream, or feel guilty for having it, or wonder if she’s thinking about my cholesterol. Which makes me think about my cholesterol. It’s just easier, sometimes, to go out on my own.”
Stephen surveyed the scrappy grass under his feet. There was a group of ants moving about. He envied them suddenly, their ignorance and industry, their incapacity for self-doubt. “Jesus,” said Stephen. It was depressing to him, to think of his father and his surreptitious ice-cream cones. “Is that what marriage becomes, in the end?” Guilt over an ice cream? Hiding on a picnic bench somewhere by yourself? And yet there was William, licking away, as happy as a little boy, so who was Stephen to begrudge him his small pleasures?
“That’s not all marriage becomes,” said William. “And I don’t consider this the end.”
Stephen squinted at the ants. He searched his mind for scraps of memory about his parents. He could remember his mother in a bathing suit, wading out into the lake on a humid August afternoon. He could remember his father teaching him to ride a bike without training wheels; he remembered the feel of his father’s hand on the bicycle seat and then the terror and the exhilaration when he let go. He could remember Lillian running up the stairs and slamming the door to her room, and his mother standing at the bottom of the stairs, her face red and pinched. But everything was filtered through the lens of his own experience, and nothing gave him any clues to what his parents’ actual marriage was like. “So what does it become?” asked Stephen.
“A lot of things.”
“Good things?”
“Mostly.” William popped the remainder of his cone into his mouth and leaned back, lifting his face to the sky. “This weather is perfect.”
“Ugh,” said Stephen. “Too humid.”
“You New Yorkers. With your air-conditioning.”
“I worry that Jane’s going to melt up there in the bedroom.”
“She may,” said William mildly. “But she seems to be handling it well.”
“We’re only two weeks into it.” The elderly couple had seated themselves on a bench. He saw the woman point to something out on the lake. “There’s so much left to go.”
William nodded, and crumpled his napkin into a ball. “True,” he said. “But she’s made of steel, that one. She’ll persevere.”
“Yeah,” said Stephen.
“You will too.”
“Yeah.”
William reached over and clapped him on the back; it was a gesture so familiar, so reminiscent of his childhood, that he was suddenly grateful for his father, and for the Creemee, which he had eaten too fast and which was already giving him a bellyache, but a pleasant sort of bellyache, like the sort you got as a child on Halloween just before bedtime when your parents finally took away your bag of candy.
“I guess it will be a whole different world for Jane anyway, after the baby is born.” William lobbed his napkin into the trash bin and stood, jangling his keys in his pocket.
Stephen took a deep breath. Here we go, he thought. He rose. “Actually not all that different,” he said.
“Oh?” William had his wallet open and was arranging the change from the ice-cream cones with the other bills.
“She’s going straight back to work.”
“Straight back, as in?” William closed the wallet and returned it to his pocket.
“As in after three weeks or so. Maybe four.”
“And then?” William had begun walking back toward the car and Stephen followed one step behind him; he felt like a child again, hurrying to keep up with a parent.
“And then I’m going to take care of the baby,” he said to his father’s back.
His father stopped, and turned slowly around. “Really?”
“Really.”
William opened his mouth and then closed it again. “Full-time?”
“That’s the idea.”
“And your work? The editing?”
“I’ll take a break from it. I’m not all that crazy about it at the moment anyway.”
“I see.” William looked briefly to the sky, then turned his eyes back to meet Stephen’s gaze.
“You see, you really see, or you see, you don’t know what else to say?”
“Not sure,” said William. “I see… well.”
“What?”
“I guess what I don’t see is why—”
“Why what?”
“Nothing.”
“Why what? Why you spent all that money sending me to Middlebury?”
“Stephen. I didn’t say that.”
“But you thought it.”
“Perhaps.”
They began walking again, together, and William pointed his keys toward the car and pressed the unlock button. The car beeped its response.
“But. Did you ever ask Lillian the same question, why you spent so much to send her to colle
ge?”
“Well, no. But. It’s different.”
“Is it?”
“I don’t know. Isn’t it?”
“It shouldn’t be.” Stephen slid into the passenger seat and looked steadily out the window. The elderly man and woman were making their way back across the parking lot, pausing every so often.
“Does your mother know?”
“No. Not yet.”
“If I were you, I’d hold off on telling her just now.”
“Yeah,” said Stephen. “I figured.”
“She’s apt to blame Jane for it.”
“I figured that too.”
“She’s apt to think it’s a bad decision.”
“I know that.”
“She’s—”
“Dad, I know.”
They drove in silence away from the waterfront and back toward home. Stephen looked out the window, at the old mill buildings turned into trendy shops or funky eateries. Every time he came home, it seemed, the city he had grown up in had changed more and more. Revitalization was what they called it. Giving new life to. And wasn’t that what he and Jane were doing, in a way? Giving life to. Not new life, but life. Giving life to something that had not had life before. Not revitalizing. Vitalizing.
“What does Jane’s mother think?”
“Robin?”
“Does she have another mother?”
“No, Dad. Of course she doesn’t.”
They passed a long low building advertising hot yoga. On the other side of it was a building materials shop and a computer repair shop. It seemed incongruous to Stephen, these three vastly different businesses all in the same place, but then again perhaps that was the point of the revitalization.
BIKRAM YOGA, the sign said, with flames leaping out over the B on the sign.
“There’s no place I’d rather be less than a hot yoga studio,” said Stephen.
“Now, or always?”
“Well, always,” said Stephen. “But now especially. I mean, on a day like today.”
“I think the idea is that you get so hot in there that when you come out here it doesn’t seem like any big deal.”
“Oh. Is that the point?”
“I don’t know for sure. So, what’s this about Jane’s mother? And your arrangement?”
“She thinks that it’s wonderful.”
“She does?”
“She does,” said Stephen. “She thinks this is the way it should be. She thinks men should step up, do their part.”
“Their part?”
“Yes,” said Stephen. He let his hand fall cautiously in the breeze outside car, and then he fully extended his arm, watching the wind work at the fine, soft hairs between his wrist and his elbow. (“Not fair,” Rachel had told him when they were in high school. “Your arms are more like girl arms than mine are.” He could see her now, scrunching up her nose in the bathroom, a bottle of bleach cream spilling onto the countertop.)
“She thinks,” he continued, “that an arrangement like this might have saved her marriage, back when Jane was a baby.”
Now he was embellishing, though embellishing was rather a kind phrase for what he was doing, and lying outright was perhaps more appropriate; Robin, though supportive of his and Jane’s decision, had never said anything of the sort.
In fact, he knew very little about Robin’s marriage to Jane’s father, and neither of them mentioned him often. It was as though he had vanished completely into the mist, leaving Robin and Jane to fend for themselves.
“I see,” said William. They had come to a four-way stop. William waited patiently for the other three cars to progress—only in Vermont, thought Stephen, was such forbearance possible—and guided the car into the intersection.
“Yes,” continued Stephen, figuring that he was in for a penny and might as well be in for a pound. “You see, they were so ambitious, both of them, both her and Jane’s dad, and there wasn’t enough room for all that ambition and a baby. Something had to give.”
“And Jane’s father gave.”
“And Jane’s father gave,” agreed Stephen.
“I see.” They drove on in silence, and after a few minutes they turned down the road that led to their neighborhood. Most of the summer gardens were coming into full bloom now; the window boxes on the little Cape around the corner were full to bursting; in one yard, in defiance of Burlington’s earth-friendly attitude, a sprinkler had been casting an arc of water since William and Stephen passed the house on their way to the hardware store.
“Dad?” said Stephen.
“Yup.” William had turned the radio to a jazz station; he was tapping his fingers steadily on the steering wheel.
It was difficult for Stephen to know what his father was thinking. It occurred to him that it had always been difficult to know what his father was thinking, but for the most part that hadn’t mattered. When it had, the three of them had had Ginny to act as translator. Now, suddenly, it seemed very important that he understand his father’s point of view; it seemed important that he garner his father’s approval and acceptance.
“I know what Mom would say. I mean, I think I can guess—”
William snorted. “And you’d probably be right.”
“But the thing is, this feels right. It feels like the most right thing I could be doing right now.”
“Good,” said William, nodding. “That’s all you can ask of yourself.”
“But I get nervous.”
“About what?”
“About something happening, to the baby.”
“It won’t.”
“It could.”
“But it won’t.”
“If anything happens—” said Stephen.
“Then what?”
“Then I’m not sure our marriage would survive it.” It was the first time he’d admitted this, to himself or to anyone else. He thought of Jane sweating in the bedroom, wearing his gray T-shirt. He thought of her small upturned face, her plaintive eyes, her protruding belly. He thought of how she looked at home, in New York, when he interrupted her at work: like an animal cornered.
“Oh, now,” said William. “Your marriage can survive plenty.”
“Maybe so,” said Stephen.
“You’d be surprised by its resilience. Most people are, once they put things to the test. You think you’re there now, you think you’re all the way in it, but you’re only in the middle of one stage.”
“I guess so,” said Stephen, but he wasn’t at all sure that his father was right. It seemed that since Jane had become pregnant their marriage had undergone a subtle but unmistakable shift, and he was sure that if she were to become unpregnant they would be unable to go back to being the way they had been before.
“Why, your mother and I—”
“Stop!” said Stephen, holding up a hand. “That’s enough. I get what you’re saying.”
“Stephen?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry about that, back there. My reaction.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll be a great father.”
“Yeah? I think it will be hard.”
“It’s all hard, you know. All of it. Any way you slice it. There’s no point looking for the easy way out because… well, there isn’t one.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s it.”
William turned into their driveway. Olivia was drawing in chalk on the porch steps. A container of bubbles had overturned on the grass in front of her, and an assortment of stuffed animals was seated on a plaid blanket in the center of the yard, with paper plates and sippy cups set out in front of them. A purple pig wore Olivia’s sun hat low over its eyes.
“Can you believe you’re going to have one of those someday?” said William, nodding his head toward Olivia.
“God help us all,” said Stephen.
William stopped the car and pressed the buttons to raise the windows before he turned the engine off.
Olivia danced an approximation of a jig toward the car. She wore a bl
ue sparkly tutu with the top part of a green two-piece bathing suit. Her hair was done up elaborately in many pigtails, with all manner of barrettes and ribbons attached to them. “Grandpa!” she said.
“Olivia,” said William. “Where has your grandmother gone?”
“She went to the bus station. For Aunt Rachel.”
“Who?” said Stephen.
“What?” said William.
“Aunt Rachel! Aunt Rachel is coming.”
Ginny drove too fast to the bus station. If they stop me, she thought, I will tell them my little girl is in crisis and I’m going to get her.
How she worried about Rachel sometimes: how her heart ached for her. Ginny’s youngest daughter had grown up so happy and optimistic, trusting in the world and its basic goodness, that the prospect of watching her suffer from life’s little cruelties was too much for Ginny. There was a time, in Rachel’s youth, when she didn’t want to let the little girl out of her sight, when she didn’t even want to drop Rachel off at a birthday party or the shopping mall with her friends. She couldn’t trust that the world’s unkindness would not bring her to despair.
And if they stop me and then they get in my way, I will run them over.
She did drop her off, of course, she tried her best to peel back the layers of concern and to allow Rachel to navigate the world on her own. Which it seemed for a while she had finally learned to do: she had secured a job, and then a boyfriend, a live-in arrangement that didn’t exactly mesh with Ginny’s own sense of propriety but had allowed her to believe that Rachel was heading in the right direction. Was well taken care of. And then he had broken her heart, Marcus, and he had left. And now this.
Perhaps it was the way she was standing, with her shoulders sagging forward, or perhaps it was the size of the Greyhound bus behind her that dwarfed her, but Rachel looked small, vulnerable. Shrunken down and defeated.
“Oh, sweetheart,” said Ginny. She had barely parked the car before she was out of it and running toward Rachel. “Oh, sweetheart, you poor thing.” She led her toward the car and, when she was safely inside, closed the car door carefully, the way she would with a child who might not know enough to keep her fingers out of the way.
When they were on their way back to the house she said, “How long are you staying?”
“I’m not sure.”
The Arrivals: A Novel Page 14