He checks in to the King Eider Inn and calls his mother, as he has every day since his dad died.
“Hi, Mama,” he says.
“Darling!” she replies.
Does Not Deserve A Response
My brother and I play croquet early in the morning while we wait for the Rubatinos to wake up. How can they sleep so late? We’ve already been up for a couple of hours.
The front lawn is uneven, sloping slightly toward the juniper hedge. Dark green spots alternate with straw-colored barrens. The Doctor’s Wife doesn’t think it’s worth installing a sprinkler system and she certainly doesn’t fertilize. Fertilizer runs straight into the lake and causes algae blooms. The Dusslers have a green lawn.
I’m aiming for my brother’s croquet ball. This is my last chance to redeem myself. If I hit him, then I get two extra shots and can maybe catch up. I tap my ball. It wobbles to the left as it runs through the dewy stubble, coming to rest an inch from his ball. He clicks his ball into mine and then knocks me into the sand. I throw my mallet across the lawn.
“Let’s play again,” he says.
Is he kidding? I’m very angry and I stalk away down the dock, taking my shirt off, ready to go for the first swim of the day, away from the cruel wickets.
“Are you sure you don’t want to play again?” my younger brother asks. “You can have a head start.”
One Way
Today we’re having a hot dog roast for lunch and the Rubatinos are here too. Mom is holding a pot and grandma is carrying the big wicker hamper. Spicy cowboy beans are in the pot. From the hamper comes potato chips, mustard, relish, pickles, chopped up onions, paper plates, reusable plastic spoons, marshmallows, chocolate, and graham crackers.
The hotdog skewers hang from a nail in the cabana. The skewers are sturdy pieces of metal twisted around themselves so that they form a fork at one end and a loop at the other. I’m inordinately proud of our hotdog skewers. Other people have to use coat hangers. Even my mom had to use coat hangers.
I stick the skewer into the fire so that it glows. I like to do this for two reasons. One is I like to think that I’m disinfecting the skewer. The second is that the hot dog sizzles when put on the hot metal. I prefer my hot dog burned on the outside, so it goes into the center of the fire until it is black and then into a hot dog bun with mustard and relish, no ketchup.
The fire dies down and then we make smores. My brother holds his marshmallow over the fire, patiently turning it so that it becomes a caramel color. The Rubatinos have their own varying ways of roasting the marshmallows, falling somewhere in between the extremes of my brother’s method and mine. My way is the best. I stick my marshmallow close enough to the embers so that it ignites, which as far as I’m concerned is the whole point of marshmallows and fire.
My grandmother has taught us that there is always one correct way to do things.
A Birthday Party
My brother and I walk back from the lake, carrying the rubber raft on our heads, our towels draped over our shoulders. Everybody is here tonight, my mom and dad, Petrea and her husband and little daughters, Bob and his second wife. We’ve converged from up and down the West Coast, California, Oregon, and Alaska. My brother and I are the last up from the lake. We walk under the front deck to the door to the basement. We drop the raft off inside. Children are not allowed to come from the beach through the front door and across the carpet, nor are we allowed to walk upstairs from the basement, so we make our way along the side of the house, up the little steps and on the walkway below the willow tree. A small, square, metal plate with a finger hole rests over the pipe to the heating oil tank. I step on this metal plate so that it makes a noise as it shifts from one side to the other. I can’t walk on this side of the house and not step on the plate. It’s a rule I have.
Across from the garage and carport my grandmother is deadheading roses. She’s wearing gardening gloves and holds clippers in her right hand. A bucket for the detritus rests on the blacktop. These are large roses, fat variegated, red, pink and peach, height of summer sun open.
“Come give this flower a sniff. It’s called Fragrant Cloud.”
I put my nose in the middle of it. My feet are in a warm puddle. Grandma turns back to her work.
My brother and I hose our sandy legs off with the spray attachment that prickles. At a party one is generally expected to take a shower and put on clothes. Shoes are not absolutely necessary, but a clean pair of pants and a shirt is. I take a shower and then take my time, lying on my bed naked, reading my book from the stack of books we checked out from the Everett library. My brother and I share what is now referred to as the dormitory room but that used to be my mother’s room. The beds my mother and aunt Petrea carved their names into are long gone. Twin beds flank a nightstand. On the wall hangs an oval mirror in a wooden frame, a tile with a duck on it, and a drawing of a gnarled oak tree. Petrea did the pen and ink drawing. She’s still considered the artistic one of the family.
I hear grandma downstairs in the kitchen with Petrea and mom, getting dinner ready.
The adults are all showered and dressed when I go downstairs. The men pull the grill out from under the carport to cook the steaks. It’s mom’s birthday so hors d’oeuvres are in the living room. We have cheese and olives, but also Cheetohs in a Havilland bowl. The Cheetohs are a sort of a joke granny has made. The adults drink Champagne and the kids have Martinelli’s in flutes. We eat dinner on the front porch, looking out over the rhododendron bushes to the lake. The umbrella is up to block the still bright sun. The adults drink their white wine.
“That’s nasty,” my brother says, pointing at a loud motorboat flying across the lake. It’s slim, sitting close to the surface of the water. The back sprouts what looks like a jet engine, and the boat is piloted by a bearded man wearing a Speedo. He doesn’t even have anybody skiing behind him. We find him and his boat guilty on serious charges of sensibility and good taste. We don’t have our own ski boat, so our scorn is mixed with jealousy.
“What’s wrong with English?” Bob asks, as the adults grow quiet. My brother and I turn our attention to the conversation.
“What do you mean?” my mom asks slowly.
“It seems to work for an awful lot of people.”
“How about my students? They shouldn’t have to give up their Spanish. They should be supported so they know more than one language.”
“Why would you want to keep learning the language you’ve been trying to forget?” Bob asks.
“Maybe they don’t want to forget,” my mother replies.
“Why would anybody want to speak anything other than English?” Bob asks. “It’s in their own best interests to only speak English.”
“Look, Bob, there’s all sorts of research that shows that you don’t have to give up your first language to learn English. Why wouldn’t you want to know more than one language?”
“English works. What’s wrong with it?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“I mean, aren’t we all the same? Why can’t we all speak the same language?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“I think it emphasizes the differences.”
Bob’s new wife, Petrea’s husband, and my dad stay out of it.
“You live in Alaska, you don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the country,” Petrea says.
“We live differently in Alaska. There’s no racism in Alaska.”
“What about the Alaskan native languages? Once those are lost we’re never getting them back. That doesn’t worry you?” my mom asks.
“I think it would be better if we all spoke English. Then we could communicate better with each other.”
“You just don’t understand, do you?”
“Don’t understand what?”
“You don’t understand how hard it can be for people,” my mother says, growing louder.
“You girls, you’re just do-gooders. We’ve got too many do-gooders trying to change things in
this country that don’t need changing.”
“Well, insurance companies are ruining this country,” my grandmother jumps in.
“Do you want me to be a do-gooder too?” Bob asks the group.
“You think that’s all I am?” asks my mother.
“I don’t want to be a social worker. I don’t think that helps anything.”
“You’re such an asshole!” my mom says through gritted teeth. She begins crying, jerking herself up from the table and taking her plate with her into the kitchen.
Bob clomps down the outside stairs. My brother and I start to take dishes in to the kitchen, where my mom is still crying, loading the dishwasher.
“How can he believe that shit?” asks Petrea when she comes in, taking a dishrag from the drying cabinet next to the sink.
“I don’t fucking know,” says my mother. Bob enters through the back door.
“I’m sorry girls,” he says, touching his sister’s shoulders. “I didn’t mean to make anybody cry.”
“That’s OK. I think you’re right Bob,” Petrea says.
“I’m right?” he asks. His deep voice lilts up.
“Yeah, why don’t we just cut out people’s tongues if they try and speak Spanish?” Petrea asks. “That would solve the problem, right?”
“Hee hee hee,” is the way Bob laughs. He’s a giant, six feet six inches and two hundred and forty pounds. His eyes squint as he shakes. When he laughs he really goes for it.
Fixing the Dock
My brother and I drive with Bob to the concrete yard in Everett to buy the ten-inch sewer pipes we’ll use to fix the dock’s rotting pilings. The wooden pilings don’t rot underwater, so only the tops have to be cut off. After Bob cuts the rot off, we’ll cap the piling with the sewer pipe and then we’ll make forms out of tarpaper. The forms will be filled with cement up to the crossbeams of the dock.
Bob stands in the deep water sawing down a piling while my brother and I transport the pipes from the car, pushing the wheelbarrow down the lawn to the cabana and then down to the end of the dock. Bob gets out of the water. The wind howls. I shiver in my t-shirt and swimming trunks. Bob takes a green length of rope to make a noose to go around the pipe so that we can ease it down into position. As we’re lowering it down, the pipe slips out of the noose and sinks to the bottom of the lake. Somebody will have to dive to get it.
Bob jumps in, facemask on. He is a sea mammal glowing under water, tugging at the rope, bringing his arms around the pipe and then pushing off the bottom, lifting the pipe to the surface where he slips it over the top of the piling.
I don’t care for this kind of work. Why can’t the my grandmother hire somebody to take care of this for us? She agrees with us, imploring Bob to stop.
“I’ll just replace the pilings a few at a time,” Bob says.
More Work on the Dock
One summer while I’m still at Stanford, I call to ask the Doctor’s Wife if I can bring a friend. My friend Namazzi is from Uganda by way of Deerfield and Stanford. Her three brothers are scattered around New England and Europe at boarding schools. She has a long neck, her hair is twisted into tiny inch-long braids, she has a wide nose, and is very beautifully, evenly, deep dark brown in the way that hardly anybody is evenly anything. Her grandmother’s uncle was the king of Uganda.
“You invite whoever you want. We’ve had all kinds come here,” the Doctor’s Wife says, unimpressed when I tell her Namazzi’s family history.
That summer we also spend a few days working on the dock, replacing the planking near the cabana. Namazzi works along with the rest of us, wielding a hammer.
“Oh, we’ve even had royalty visit,” I hear my grandmother say casually, a couple of years later.
The Freezer
“I hate to think about what to fix for breakfast. I never know what people want,” my grandmother says to me.
“Can’t they get their own breakfasts?” I ask. I’m here before an invasion of the other family members. I flatter myself by thinking I’m here to help.
“Do people want eggs?” she asks.
“You don’t want eggs.”
“No, I don’t want eggs,” she says shuddering. “What should we have for breakfast this morning?”
“Cereal?”
“Hmm, I bought a quart of half-and-half but I forgot milk,” she says, looking in the refrigerator.
“I’ll have toast.”
“No, we’ll eat our cereal with cream. Everybody puts cream on cereal,” she says grandly. Everybody does not do this. We eat our cereal in quiet, blissful concentration.
“I have cinnamon rolls in the freezer,” she says, after we’ve licked the last drops of cream from our spoons. She has a full-sized freezer on the utility porch that holds pounds of butter, homemade chicken stock, salmon, wild blackberries, ice cream, nuts, butter, lamb chops, whole casseroles, and pies. When I was little I had access to a limitless supply of Fudgesicles, Otter Pops in lurid colors, strawberry yogurt Push-Ups.
She has been known to freeze garbage. “Everybody freezes garbage,” I’ve heard her say. “What else are you supposed to do with fish remains on Saturday and you don’t want them stinking up the garbage cans?”
“Do you think the cinnamon rolls will be OK for breakfasts?” she asks.
“Of course they’ll be OK,” I say. “My dad will eat a whole package by himself.”
To make the rolls she mixes the ingredients into a sticky dough, separating it into medium-sized balls. The dough rises and she punches it down a couple of times before using a rolling pin to flatten the balls into long rectangles. She shakes a cinnamon and sugar mixture over the surface, drops raisins on one edge, tucks dough over the edge with the raisins, continuing to roll until she has a log that she cuts into pieces. She lines the rolls up in a buttered Pyrex dish. The process usually begins in the early morning, continuing into the middle of the afternoon.
“I’m essentially a lazy person,” she explains, maybe even believing that this could be true. “I don’t mind doing anything if I can do it ahead of time.”
Attention
My mom and I have tricked my grandmother into staying down at the lake while we make salmon salad sandwiches from last night’s leftovers. We mix the grilled fish with chopped up celery, mayonnaise, dill and then spread butter thick on the bread, topping the sandwiches with lettuce and tomatoes from Carleton’s farm stand. I get a bag of chips from the bin kept on the utility porch and then load up a tray with iced tea, the sandwiches, and chips, to take down to the lake to my boyfriend Matthew, my grandmother, Petrea, and Petrea’s almost all-grown-up daughters, my cousins.
The cousins wait until the last possible moment to come out from the sun and under the shade of the cabana. They are trying to get as dark as they can this summer. The older girl cousin is a scientist about to go UCSF for her PhD in immunology, but this summer she’s working as an accountant for G.I. Joe’s, a sporting goods store in Frontier Village. Frontier Village has outgrown its original confines, eating into the woods on all sides.
The other cousin, in college, has been helping my grandmother organize the basement this summer. There have been several battles about how things should go. No one in this family could be accused of not having an opinion. Both of the cousins’ jobs allow them to work in the morning and then sun and swim in the afternoon.
As I set down the tray, I sense an odd sort of stillness. My brother and Petrea are reading. Matthew gives me a look like he wants to talk to me.
“I forgot to bring cups,” I say. “Matthew, do you want to help me?”
“Your aunt Petrea kicked me,” he says as we walk up the lawn.
“That means she likes you.”
“It hurt,” he says. “I think I’m going to have a bruise.”
“Really, if she didn’t like you she’d just ignore you.”
“How old is she?”
“You know what my great-grandmother Petie used to say?”
“What?”
“The older we get the more like ourselves we become.”
He isn’t impressed by this family saying.
The Summer We Cry
Bob’s leg has been hurting and so after limping around for six weeks, he visits his doctor. It turns out the leg is broken. It broke because he’s riddled with cancer. This is in June of 2002.
In July, I stand in the kitchen with my arms around my grandmother, feeling strange to be crying so plainly. I’m not a crier, but the tears come hot and fast. My parents are in Italy for a month and a decision had been made not to ruin their trip. They are to be told how sick Bob is when they come back.
When Bob was in college and tried to enlist, he was rejected by the army because the FBI had put a red flag on his file. After he graduated from college, he moved to East Oakland, where he joined a Socialist Worker’s Party commune. He was a labor organizer, took lots of LSD and was even arrested once. After he left the commune, he found a job at a big insurance company in San Francisco. He met Eve, an Arapajo aeronautical engineer who worked at Boeing. Together, they went deep into the philosophy of Gurdjieff, hoping to reach a higher level of consciousness.
Something about the Gurdjieffian rejection of modernity and, I’m sure, the incomparable hunting and fishing, brought Bob and Eve to Fairbanks, Alaska, where Bob became a Republican, and Eve an alcoholic. When their marriage ended, Bob, like many others in the state, became a Libertarian. Alaskans refer to the rest of the world as The Outside, a term that even the big Anchorage newspaper uses.
Bob hunted ptarmigan and ducks, fished for King salmon, married again, opened his own successful insurance agency, and when he was fifty, he adopted Native Alaskan twins. He’d seemed settled and happy finally.
Over the course of the summer Bob grows worse and worse. At the beginning of August, my mom and brother fly to Alaska to spend time with him and to help his wife out with the boys. My brother and Bob talk about God, the Christian God, because Bob has just joined the Presbyterian Church. My brother is in divinity school at Yale, on the academic rather than priestly track. Bob has thrown himself into Christianity like he’s thrown himself into everything else. He subscribes to a journal called the Biblical Archeology Review.
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