by Adam Haslett
“No,” she says. “It’s no use protesting. You will be feted whether you like it or not.”
It’s Celia who’s come. I’d expected one of the boys. She flew in only this afternoon. As soon as I close the door and wave good-bye to Suzanne, Celia puts the car back in gear and we’re off, no chance for a quick half-hug over the emergency brake now that she’s got her eyes on the road.
“Sorry if I’m late,” she says. “Michael didn’t remember what time we were supposed to get you.”
“Oh, don’t worry. How was the flight? Is Paul with Michael at the house?”
“No. He’ll be here in a few days.”
“I thought the two of you were flying together.”
“Well, it turns out we didn’t.”
I’m not supposed to ask about these things. I never was.
She looks older than a year ago, more serious still. She’s cut her hair short, and as usual wears no jewelry or makeup. Not that I do myself much, or ever encouraged her to, but the lack of it is somehow more severe on her. I sometimes wonder if she’s trying to avoid the attention she gets from men. But if I said such a thing she would roll her eyes and sigh. They all sigh, my children. It’s their most frequent response to me.
She asks me how work was. I tell her I’m just glad to be finished through the holiday. “I wish you could stay for longer,” I say.
“I told you, it was hard to find someone to cover me even for this long.”
These people she sees have such problems that I worry about her, that all their woe comes to rest on her shoulders. But she gets impatient with me if I mention it over the phone. She could have done any number of other things, but I’ve never pretended to give her professional advice. Not like her father would have. And she’s never asked for it.
In spring and fall these back roads to the house are full of color and light, but at this time of year the ground is muddy or snow-covered, and shrouded now in the early dark. In January, it will be twelve years that I’ve been doing this drive. It’s where I cried in the beginning—in the car. I suppose because I knew the crying could last only so long, that I’d be arriving home soon and would have to account for myself to Alec and Celia. That was back when I was forgetting everything—keys, bills, what to get at the grocery store. And much of what happened too, apparently, because those years are still a blur to me.
Everyone said not to make any big decisions right away. Continuity, that’s what the children needed. You might regret a rash move. Which I understood. But there was the mortgage, and the town taxes, and the credit card bills we’d run up during his illness. That Walcott would hire me twenty years after I’d last worked in a library was a miracle. Still, we’d bought the house on John’s salary, not mine. My mother had left my sister and me a small bequest, and Penny helped out now and then. But I was often at the end of my tether, not sure if I had enough in the bank to write another check. And Celia was a good organizer, she always has been. She’d sort through bills and call the credit card people if I’d fallen behind, arranging for smaller payments. She seemed to take to it naturally, without my asking her. But it was lousy of me, I’m sure, relying on her like that. I know now that she resented it, having to take care of me when we were all still reeling. I know that isn’t why she went to California, but she is the only one of them who’s gone so far.
“You saw Michael, then,” I say. “How did he seem to you?”
“I didn’t know he had a beard.”
“Yes. I’m not sure it suits him.”
“He seemed okay. Not worse.”
“Still no word from Bethany.”
“Yeah, I’m aware of that.”
“It’s such a pity about Caleigh.”
“Mom, she’s a lesbian. And that was years ago.”
“I’m just saying. They still like each other so much.”
I think everyone’s a bit bisexual and it seems a pity to be strict about it if people get along. But I’m sure that’s naive. They’re all very sophisticated, my children, and quick to point out when I’m not.
“Did you see Mercury last night?” I ask. “It was such a clear sky here, and it was so bright. It’s closer to Earth than it’s been in thirty years, we should go out and look later, you probably don’t see it as well from the city. We’re supposed to get snow this evening but then it’s supposed to clear up. I was hoping we’d get out to the Allens on the twenty-seventh, they’ve invited all of us, and I know they’d like to see you. Drew’s back—I told you he’s engaged, didn’t I? They met in Peru on some kind of hiking expedition. Samantha’s her name. It’s all quite sudden, I think, but in any case, she’ll be there, too. You’d like to come, wouldn’t you?”
“Come where?”
“To the Allens’.”
“Maybe. I’ll have to see.”
Whenever she and Alec come home, no sooner do they get in the house than they’re on the phone making plans to be elsewhere, with friends. It’s been like that for years. There’s no use complaining, but then, they’re here so infrequently.
“Well, I know they’d like to see you.”
“What day is that? Our appointment is on Tuesday.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I told you I was going to make an appointment, and that’s when he could do it.”
“Well, I’d have liked to have known.”
She accelerates into the turn onto Garnet, tilting me toward the door.
“I didn’t think we had a big schedule,” she says.
It’s Celia’s idea—her professional estimation, I suppose—that the four of us should go and speak to someone together. I don’t have a huge amount to say, but if it helps the three of them, I have no objection. I will go along and receive my criticism. It’s just a shame it has to be straight after Christmas.
They’ve chosen the new restaurant down from the inn, and of course it’s far too expensive. Eight dollars for a salad. Sixteen for pasta. I could have made a perfectly good meal at home. There was no need to be lavish. Michael has no money for this kind of thing, which means it will be all the other two, and I can’t let them do that. A New Traditional Grill, it calls itself, oak banquettes gleaming under brass lights, the kitchen on display behind a glass barrier, not a stitch of fabric to absorb the diners’ voices rising over the music and clatter of pans.
Trying to be heard over the din, I tell the waitress I’ll have the soup, which produces a chorus of sighs.
“It’s your birthday!” Alec practically shouts.
“I had a big lunch. I’ll just have a bite of yours.”
The waitress and I exchange a smile. She seems like a friendly young woman.
“Order an entrée,” Alec instructs, “and we’ll get a bottle of wine. What kind of wine do you want?”
“A bottle?” I ask.
Michael rolls his head back on his shoulders, as if praying to the heavens, which he certainly isn’t.
“We’ll need another minute,” Celia says.
It’s so good to have them all here, and I don’t want to argue, but it makes no sense to order food I don’t want.
“You like fish,” Alec says. “Get the grouper.”
Eighteen dollars. He’s like his father: spending as if he has the natural right to live now as he plans to later.
“I’m fine. Maybe I’ll get a dessert.”
“You can’t make her eat,” Celia says with cool fixity.
“It’s dietary martyrdom,” Michael says. “It has a long pedigree.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m just not that hungry. Let’s not spoil it, let’s just have our meal, can’t we?”
We reapply ourselves to the menus, the moment passes, and Michael asks Alec if he thinks he’s becoming identified with the white-male power structure now that he works for a national news magazine. “Purely at the level of the psychic,” Michael says, as if clarifying. “I’m not saying you’re a reactionary. As such.”
“I’m a researcher and I edit news sum
maries,” Alec says. “And my boss is a woman.”
“Right,” Michael says. “But is she a radical feminist?”
“She’s a features editor. She’s not radical about anything.”
When the waitress circles back to us, I’m allowed my soup.
“But would you say—again, at the level of the psychic—that the life-worlds of the people you work with are constituted at least in part through an identification with the structures of wealth and power they report on?”
“I’d say they’re underpaid and distracted, and most of them are political junkies.”
“I’m not talking about electoral politics.”
“Why? Because you think they’re irrelevant?”
“I wouldn’t say irrelevant. They’re obviously central to the fantasy of nationalism—”
“I’ll have the stuffed chicken,” Alec says.
“I told you Alice Jolly went to Vassar with your godmother, didn’t I?” I ask Alec, not certain if I remembered to or not. The three of them glance at me dumbfounded, as if braced for the outburst of some insane relative at Thanksgiving. “Alice Jolly, she’s married to Arthur Jolly, the man who edits your magazine. She went to Vassar with Ursula. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Michael says.
“I just thought it was quite a coincidence.”
“That’s precisely what it isn’t,” he says, at which point I give up.
As usual in such places, the portions are obscene. Michael’s pork chop could feed a village. My soup comes in a bowl a foot wide with an extra basket of bread I neither want nor need.
Alec consumes his food with something akin to lust, devouring it in minutes. His creaturely habits haven’t changed since he was a boy, though they are strained now through his more elaborate persona, which makes for a certain tension. It’s as though the fever of his adolescence never burned off, but he’s desperate not to show it. He wishes he were smoother, and tries hard to be. Which can make him brittle. Difficult not to think that it has something to do with his being gay. The effort to control people’s impressions of him.
He was only seventeen, still a boy, when he announced it to me, and yet he did it with such seriousness and finality. When I suggested he might want to keep an open mind, that people often go through phases, he asked if I’d said the same to Michael and Celia when it became obvious they were heterosexual. Which I obviously couldn’t say that I had. He seemed greatly satisfied by his rhetorical victory. I know better now than to tell him I worry about AIDS.
“So,” Celia says, “just so everyone’s been informed, we’ve got our appointment on Tuesday.”
“Is it with a Lacanian?” Michael asks.
“He does family therapy,” Celia says. “We’re not lying on couches and being told to leave after five minutes. We’re not doing theory.”
“Isn’t that what you studied?” I ask Celia.
“Mom, I have a degree in social work. Michael’s talking about literary criticism.”
“Not literary,” he says. “In fact, I think we need to move away from the text, into the realm of pure affect.”
“He’s a psychotherapist, okay? He’s going to talk to us about the dynamics that have built up over the years.”
“The dynamics,” I say.
“Patterns,” Celia says.
“Which are a bad thing?”
“If you don’t want to go,” she says to me, “you don’t have to.”
“No, no,” I say, not wanting to upset her. “I’m sure there are patterns. And no doubt they’re my fault.”
“Case in point,” Alec says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, eliciting another roll of the eyes, as if it’s too obvious to explain.
“No doubt I was a wretched parent,” I say. “And burdened you all with all sorts of things I shouldn’t have.”
“Oh, Mom, come on,” Michael says, “please.”
“What?” I say. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
Their expressions go blank with patience.
“I should have sold the house and moved us somewhere that doesn’t remind you all of the past. Somewhere you wanted to come back to more than twice a year.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” Alec says. “You like the house.”
He has always been the most protective of me, in his way. It’s been true since he was young. I remember walking with him when he was only five or six, holding his hand, and his looking up at me and saying very earnestly, “I would die so that you could live.” It was one of those preternatural utterances children sometimes make when they first glimpse that things don’t last forever. It has always stuck with me, though. He may have been a hyperactive child, and may still be stubborn and overexcitable, but his love is the simplest.
About the house, he’s right. It took time, but I am comfortable there now. My first instinct was to leave. The alarm would startle me awake in our bed each morning, and I’d think: He’s going to be late for work, you have to get him up. And then I’d see the unruffled covers beside me, and I would feel ill once more, as in that first moment—John. Never again. But you can’t sustain that sort of thing. It wears you out. Celia and Alec had high school to finish. Michael needed a place to come home to. When Alec left for college—Celia had instructed him to follow her example and apply only to institutions with need-blind admissions—and before Michael dropped out, I thought again about moving, wondering if being there on my own would be too much. But there were the things I liked. The quiet street, with no house opposite, just grass and trees running down to the path along the brook, and the fireplace, which I use most evenings in fall and winter, and the old sash windows like the ones I grew up with, and two healthy pear trees in the front yard.
For the longest time, I didn’t have the energy to do anything to the yard. But eventually I dug up the old beds that had gone to seed, and tilled a larger patch in the back for a garden. I cut off the lower branches of the trees that blocked out the sun, and took the evergreen bushes that had climbed up past the windowsills down to their stumps. The garden doesn’t amount to anything grand—daffodils, tulips, a few rosebushes, some tomatoes and herbs. But there’s satisfaction in it.
Alec, whose chicken is actually quite tasty, explains to Michael how a thirty-year mortgage works, speaking to him like a tutor incensed by the dimness of his charge. He’s trying to get through to his brother that I’m still paying for the house, and will be for years, which is why, he says, Michael can’t keep relying on me to pay his student loans for him.
“What business is that of yours?” Celia retorts, instinctively shielding Michael, who keeps his eyes on the table. “She can do whatever she wants to. You’re obsessed with money.”
I’m inclined to agree with her, but I don’t say so just now, as it seems unfair to Alec.
“I had an interview this week,” Michael interjects. This comes as a surprise. I’ve heard nothing of it. He usually tells me everything, in great detail. “It’s a record distributor. They’re not sure they have the money yet. She said she’d let me know soon.”
“That’s good,” Alec says, more softly now, chastened by the news.
He gets so frustrated with Michael. They think that I don’t see these things, that I’m distracted or exhausted. But I see them as clearly as when they were little, chasing each other around the octagonal house, shrieking in the yard, Alec forever wanting his brother’s attention. Most all of who they are now was there then. They trace themselves no further back than adolescence because that’s when they began getting their ideas. But so much of them has nothing to do with all that. They are their natures. Which they’d shout me down for saying.
For dessert, Michael is kind enough to split a berry tart with me; he leaves me most of the filling, and I leave him the crust.
When the bill arrives, I reach for it first, and am astounded by what I see. Michael and Alec had one beer each; there were three entrées, a s
oup, and two desserts. And yet you’d think we’d emptied the cellar and kitchen. When I dare to express my disbelief, they exhale in unison.
The trouble is that my direct deposit isn’t for two more days, and my checking account’s off because of Christmas. They should have just let me cook. Michael didn’t even finish his pork chop. I reach into my handbag and get out my credit card, but Alec says, “You’re not paying.”
“Don’t be silly, there’s no reason for you all to do this. It’s too much. Really, it is.”
He’s counting the bills Celia has handed him from her wallet. From his messenger bag, Michael produces a ten, which he holds out sheepishly to his brother. Alec takes it without looking up and adds it to the count, which Celia follows from across the table. He puts the cash in his wallet and clicks a Visa down against the bill, closing the plastic folder over it and sliding it to the edge of the table. I’m still holding my card out but he ignores it. I just can’t help wishing we’d gone somewhere less lavish. I appreciate their intention to treat me to something, but I’d honestly be more relaxed at home.
We wait in our own little zone of silence while the nice young waitress takes our bill to the register. A moment later she is at our shoulders again.
“So this got declined,” she says. “Did you want to try another card? Cash is fine too.”
“Yes, another card,” I say, holding mine up to her, but Alec has already snatched the bill and tells her we’ll need another minute. “Now come on,” I say, “don’t be ridiculous,” but he’s left the table, bill in hand, and is headed out the front door of the restaurant into the beginning of the snow.
“Of course,” I say to the other two, “there are perfectly nice places that aren’t quite so expensive as this.”
Celia shoots a glance at me in a clear warning of anger. She’s the only one who looks at me that way, who can wither me with my failings so easily. All I didn’t protect her from is right there on the surface still, in her shiny black eyes.
“It wasn’t my idea,” she says. “It was Alec’s.”
“Did he go to get cash?” Michael asks, as if he materialized at the table seconds ago and has no idea what is transpiring.