Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  In the kitchen the air was humid and thick with the smell of cooked meat and boiled potatoes and induced in Marisa a kind of torpor, so that she was unable to move.

  “Can I get you anything?” a young woman asked her.

  “No,” Marisa said. “No, that’s okay.” Her thoughts were all churned up. The needs of superb children, she thought. She leaned against the doorframe. So this was it, she thought: everything about this place reminded her of the church-run camp she’d been sent to the summer her mother’s health got worse. At Camp Zaragoza, she’d made lists: flowers, hearts, sand-dollars, silly, inconsequential things, carefully printed on a scrap of paper, to help keep her thoughts pinned-down and orderly, instead of flying around in her head like bats. She’d had to take a Bible with her. It was on another list — an official list — along with two bathing suits, insect repellent, a flashlight. Her mother had got out of bed and had gone down to the basement, where she’d found a Bible in a box of old books. Marisa remembered her mother wiping the dust off the Bible. Before handing it to Marisa she had opened it and had read: In the beginning, as if the words surprised her. The Bible had print so tiny the words appeared sly, furtive, guarded. Marisa had liked it, though, the way it smelled, of dust and antiquity, and the small weight of it in her hands, and the fact that her mother had given it to her. Unfortunately, it turned out everyone at Camp Zaragoza had a new Bible written in a plainer style, with coloured maps of The Holy Land. The woman in charge, who was called Senorita, because she’d been a missionary in Mexico, took the old Bible away from Marisa and loaned her one with large clear print. Then she was assigned to a class for kids who’d flunked the test in Bible knowledge, where she was given multiple-choice tests: Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac: a) on a mountain in the land of Moriah, b) on Mount Ararat, c) beside the pyramids in Egypt.

  She’d hated Camp Zaragoza. And here it was again. The sun was beating in the kitchen windows and in the middle of the room flies circled furiously. When she went outside to the deck with the spoon, Ben was gathering up their plates, because the wasps were frightening Logan.

  That evening, games of horseshoes and tag and hide-and-go-seek were organized on the lawn above the beach. After the games a fire was lit in the fire pit below the dining room, in front of the beach. Everyone sat around in a circle and roasted marshmallows and sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and “If I Had a Hammer.” Logan sang along. His chin was gooey with melted marshmallow. He and Emily sat on the grass in front of Marisa, who stared into the flames.

  She was far away, in a different place, thinking about her last day at Camp Zaragoza, when Senorita had called her into her office and said she had something very serious to tell her. She still couldn’t think about it without feeling chilled and weak. Senorita had told Marisa her mother had gone to be with the angels. Then she’d made her sit down and lower her head and then someone, one of the camp counsellors, brought her a glass of warm ginger ale. What Senorita had told her had seemed outrageous. Her mother would never leave her. Marisa had tried to impress on her the truth: her mother did at times get sick, she’d have a fever and go to bed, but she always got better. She and Norman would make her weak tea, the kind she liked, with cinnamon and a little milk. Their mother said it did her good. She always got better. This was what Marisa wanted to tell Senorita.

  In Senorita’s office there was a metal table with an electric kettle, a teacup, and a jar of instant coffee on it. On the wall there was a calendar with a picture of the Holy Spirit dove-like over a Midwestern wheat field. At Sunday morning services, Senorita spoke in tongues, which sent Marisa and some other girls from the remedial Bible class into fits of giggling: another strange, uncontrollable visitation. Later, they were punished by being confined to their cabins or given Bible verses to memorize. In Senorita’s office all that seemed forgiven, if not forgotten. Senorita held Marisa, enveloping her in surprisingly spongy and yielding flesh that smelled of harsh soap, cafeteria food, and the dusty, fragile pages of the old Bible, returned to her by Senorita before she left the office. Later, Senorita instructed all the campers to join hands in a circle with Marisa. They recited the Lord’s Prayer and sang, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Marisa felt nothing. Her heart was a little stone thing. For the rest of the day she waited for her father to come and get her. She had her sleeping bag baled with twine, her clothes packed in a gym bag. She slipped her lists of words into the old Bible, marking the story of Abraham and Isaac alone on the mountain in the land of Moriah, the two of them laid waste by intention and capitulation and devotion.

  Every time she thought about it, Marisa remembered the ride home differently. It was pouring with rain, it was a sunny day, it was the dead of night. There were frogs leaping across the road. Lightning split a tree and it crashed to the road in front of the truck. Her father was silent, morose; he drank a can of beer as he drove. Norman was reading; he had his feet up on the dash. Or he was asleep. Or perhaps he wasn’t in the truck; perhaps he’d stayed at home, and was waiting for Marisa on the porch, in the dark, alone.

  Don’t think about it, she told herself. Banish it. But she couldn’t. It was being here, at Serenity Cove. It’s not fair, she thought. I’m not registered in a workshop; I don’t even have a therapist.

  She and Logan went down to the beach and Logan waved at a seaplane as it banked and gained altitude and headed toward the Coast Mountains.

  “Bienvenido,” Logan shouted. He looked at her uncertainly and said, “He didn’t hear me.”

  “He might have,” said Marisa. “I think for sure he saw you.”

  Logan said he was going in a plane to see his mother. A big plane, he said, holding his arms wide. He was going to sit with the pilot. The pilot knew where his mother lived. “I’m going there,” he said. “I’m going to Argentina.”

  “I know you are,” Marisa said. “You’re going to see your mommy.”

  “Are you coming, too?” he said.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said. She pointed out a heron standing in the shallows. A duck paddling around a log floating in the water, two people gliding past in a kayak. Logan gave these things a critical look, as if he considered their existence debatable. The beach was not sand, but sandstone.

  Sandstone, she told Logan, was a kind of sedimentary rock, shaped by the tide and storms into all these interesting whirls and loops. “It looks like a birthday cake, doesn’t it?” she said, running her hands over the rock. “It looks like cake batter.”

  He appeared dubious. “A black cake?” he said. “A cake that’s made of rock?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  Marisa jumped from one outcropping of sandstone to another, nearly losing her balance once. Logan tried to do the same, but he got scared. “Stop, Marisa,” he cried, and she did stop. He took her hand. She smiled at him. They were friends, she thought. She wanted to tell Logan that she’d lost her mother, too, but in her case the loss was permanent and deep as a well, and she didn’t know how to explain that to herself, never mind to a child. He’d figure it out, of course, just from knowing her, because it was part of her, like the shape of her hands.

  Early that morning Logan had crawled out of his cot and into bed with Ben and Marisa. He wanted to know: if it was morning here, what time was it in Buenos Aires, where his mommy lived? Ben told Logan his mommy would have had lunch by now. She’d go for a walk in the garden or she’d watch a movie, or go out to see a play. Whatever she did, though, wherever she went, she’d be thinking of Logan.

  Ben told Logan about the wind in Argentina, a magnificent warm wind called the Zonda that swept from the Pacific over the Andes and down to the plains, where it ripened the grapes in the vineyards. He told Logan about the haciendas and the gauchos and the fact that Argentina was the eighth largest country in the world. His mother was learning to speak Spanish, Ben said to Logan, but when she dreamed of him, she dreamed in English, just as Logan did. As he spoke, Ben seemed sad. He sounded to Marisa as i
f he, too, had just woken from dreams of the absent Maureen.

  Maureen had met Luis when she’d gone to Argentina on behalf of the travel agency she worked for. (A travel agent, Ben said, so naturally she’d named her son after an airport.) Luis’s adopted twenty-four-year-old son had met Maureen in the city of Mendoza, where he was to show Maureen’s group an old rail line between Mendoza and Chile that was in the process of being restored as a tourist attraction. Something happened there, Maureen was taken ill, she thought a poisonous spider had bitten her, and the son had arranged for Maureen to recuperate at his father’s home in Buenos Aires. Luis was made aware of their imminent arrival. He called his own personal physician. He hired a private nurse. Luis, too, had an adventurous spirit, it seemed. He’d gone ice climbing in Banff, spelunking in Indonesia — or Malaysia, or somewhere — and had crossed a desert in North Africa on a camel. In any case, he had captivated Maureen, this Luis. She did return home, as soon as she’d made a complete recovery, but she knew she wouldn’t stay. There was a divorce; there was a marriage. That was the story, Ben said.

  For a long time, Ben said, he’d felt bitter and angry. He’d found himself plotting something crazy, like burning down Maureen’s great-aunt’s house, relocating to an entirely different part of the world and making sure she never again saw Logan. That phase had, mercifully, passed. He was reconciled; he was learning to let go. That was partly why he’d come here, to Serenity Cove. “It must be that, don’t you think?” he said. “It can’t be the food.”

  The tide was coming in; the sea lapped at the rocks. It was pale on the surface and filled with light, but darker beneath. Marisa thought of the times she and Norman and their mother used to go to Dungeness Spit. Their mother would draw stick figures in the wet sand: Norman and Marissa and her, hands linked, round smiling faces. She kicked off her shoes and went and stood in the water, shading her eyes with her hand, as if she could see a ship sailing in. The wind blew her hair around. Every time she took them to Dungeness, she said, “We are at this moment standing on the northernmost point of the contiguous United States. And every year more sand accumulates and the point reaches farther and farther to the north.” She loved facts, historical and scientific facts: names and dates. When she’d met Jeff, she’d been an art student. On the kitchen wall she’d hung some of her favourite paintings, including one Marisa remembered clearly. The painting was by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It was called “Children’s Games.” Her mother had cut it out of a library book. Norman had said, “Ma, you can’t do that to a library book.” He’d bent over the desecrated book, a thin, serious boy, his elbows cupped in his hands, as if he, as well as the book, had sustained an injury. “I know, I know,” their mother had said. “This is a bad thing I’m doing. But I love this painting. It’s a crazy, wonderful painting.”

  She used a razor blade to remove the colour plate from the book. She worked slowly, taking a break to flex her fingers and hold her hair out of the way.

  “How many games can you find?” she asked Marisa.

  “Blindman’s bluff,” Marisa said. “Tag, leapfrog, tug of war.” The figures in the painting were riding hobbyhorses and rolling hoops. They were playing tug of war and climbing trees and getting dunked in a stream. They were tossing bones, gambling, trying to beat the odds. From what she remembered, it was the adults at play more than the children. The adults had usurped the children’s games. Tiny, squat figures, with faces like clay, little, sullen, smudged mouths, eyes like beans. The games, the rules of the games, wouldn’t let them go, and dusk was coming on. In the distance there were buildings, church spires, green, sunlit fields, a little Medieval Flemish village, the promise of custom and safety, reward for labour, a simple meal, but no one dared stop the games to look. That was how Marisa saw it. She used to stare at the picture until the figures in the painting dragged her into the village square, into the waning light. The air smelled of rain, the earth was stirred up with the passage of wheeled carts and horses and feet. Everything was suffused with an ancient, golden light that dimmed or annihilated sight and sharpened other, more immediate senses, making her feel a little like a dumb beast that rocked unsteadily on its four legs. The people laughed and pulled her along, prodded her, but they weren’t being mean. It was like being resuscitated after a long period of dormancy or something. The last time she’d visited her father the painting had still been on the kitchen wall. She should go and get it. Children’s games, she thought. Wasn’t that what this was all about: the same scene, the same probing, febrile games, people acting like children, defenceless, trying to laugh, aching to learn something true and enduring. The sense of something to be won or lost.

  Not long before her father took her to Camp Zaragoza, he told her and Norman that their mother had leukemia and she wasn’t going to get well. She wasn’t ever going to get well.

  How long did she have? Norman had asked in a thin voice. Their father said he didn’t have a clue. He said the doctors and radiologists and haematologists clammed up when he questioned them. He knew they thought he was a jackass for being persistent and expecting them to actually do something. He stopped. He said from what he understood she didn’t have long; days or weeks.

  Marisa remembered Norman picking assiduously at a hangnail, his eyes brimming. She had wished her father could have comforted her and Norman. Why couldn’t he? He should have talked to them. He was too full of his own pain. That day he walked out on them. He went to the bar. He drove around in his truck. She didn’t know what he did. He just wasn’t there.

  Marisa and Logan found Ben sitting with Mike and Grace at a picnic table near the playground. They were discussing the last session of the workshop Ben and Mike had been in, which had been more of a workout, Mike said, if you asked him. In the workshop they’d got into an intense discussion of what was meant by the term unconditional love. Marisa got down on the grass with Logan and Emily and Emily’s little plastic zoo animals. She became aware that the grass was crawling with ants. She put her hand down and an ant crawled onto it, scurried around, fell into the cool green world it knew best.

  Grace pulled the tab off a can of Diet Coke and took a drink. She said she didn’t get it. As far as she could see, love had to be conditional on something, otherwise it became indiscriminate and lost its value. Mike said it didn’t have to be that complicated. What it meant, he thought, was not giving up on someone because they’d done something you didn’t especially like or approve of. “Although, you’re right,” he said. “We do pick who we love, don’t we, even if we don’t do it consciously, which kind of undermines the whole concept, doesn’t it?”

  “I think,” Ben said, “that what Garth meant was that we grow — we achieve some kind of growth — when we’re capable of loving people who are different from us, people who don’t conform to our expectations or our way of life. That’s what I understood, anyway.”

  Grace put her head down with a little thunk on the picnic table. “I have needs,” she said, “and my needs are not being met.”

  “Poor baby,” Mike said. He rubbed her back.

  Grace sat up. She turned around and touched Marisa with the toe of her sandal. “You never did make it to my Tai Chi class, did you?” she said. “Oh, well. Maybe next year.”

  That night, Marisa and Ben stood on the porch outside their room. Logan was in his cot, asleep. The wind in the trees and the waves along the shore made a sound like subterranean breathing, as if the sleeping people in the little cottages were all dreaming the same inescapable dream. Ben said they’d never do this again; they’d never spend a week like this, together but apart. “My word,” he said. “What was I thinking, coming here with you? Here,” he said. “Come here. Put your arms around me. Let me hold you.”

  She touched Ben’s face. In the dark he seemed real to her. He seemed like a dear man. Serenity Cove, she told Ben, reminded her of another place, a summer camp she’d gone to as a child.

  “No kidding,” Ben said. “Every vacation I ever went on as a ki
d was to a place like this. A doctor’s family, you know: holidays got taken very seriously. So anyway, then what do I do? I come here to shed a little light on my life as a child and as an adult.”

  “A superb adult.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know about that. Anyway, maybe there is no light bright enough. When I try to understand all the shit that’s happened to me lately, the divorce, juggling Logan’s preschool with Isolde’s schedule, the house, the job, it all begins to seem immaterial — unreal, you know — like something I invented for some nefarious purpose I didn’t in the least comprehend. But why should the circumstances of my life mystify me? That’s the question. Or maybe, God forbid, the answer.”

  But he had to say he couldn’t imagine being here without her. Who else would have been so patient with Logan? And with him, for that matter. She’d been a real trooper.

  “That’s me,” she said.

  No, no, he didn’t mean it that way, Ben said. She understood. She was water, Ben was stone. He was constant, as constant as anything could be, given the duress of wind and waves and time. One of the first things he’d told her, when she’d started work in his department at the hospital, was that his parents had counted on his being a doctor, like his father, but he’d failed a mandatory pre-med course and the rest was, as they said, history. This is me, he seemed to be saying. This is who I am. In the office, he rolled up his shirtsleeves and made the coffee. He believed in long, rigorous staff meetings, with plenty of coffee and soft drinks and pizza. He believed in dialogues and discourse and give and take. He was the boss and the rebellious wisecracking underling at the same time. He tried harder than anyone Marisa had ever known. But what Marisa saw in his eyes sometimes was fear. Stalking him was fear, the fear of being alone, of losing more than he’d already lost. But he stayed just ahead of this fear. He pretended it had no power over him. Years from now, Ben would still be saying jokingly: this is the room where my son was born. These are my ex-wife’s coats taking up all the space in the hall closet. She gave me this house, but I have to live in it for a hundred years, like a prince in a tower. What a character my ex was, he would say. What a riot.