How to Catch a Frog

by Heather Ross

  I WENT TO COLLEGE BECAUSE I HAD to go somewhere. My options were limited—my grades in high school had been less than stellar despite the best efforts of a few very supportive teachers and my clear knack for all things home ec. There wasn’t any money. My father, whom I had little contact with, had decided that my mother’s family could afford to send me easily, so he should not have to, and my grandfather had decided that doing so would spoil me and would continue my dependence on him at a time when he was beginning to realize that my mother would always need his help, which made him angry.

  I learned this one day in June, right before I graduated from high school. I had come home from what was probably another day of swimming and smoking cigarettes at Second Hole just as his car was leaving our driveway, quickly. My mother was sitting in the kitchen. “Your grandfather was just here,” she said, “and he told me that he’s not going to be giving you any money for school, that he’s changed his mind about helping you.” It should have made me panic. If I had understood at that moment how hard it would be, I might have done just that. But I didn’t know, so all I felt was relief. This meant that I could do what I wanted now, without his judgment or control, which was something that almost nobody in my mother’s family had, but it also meant that I would be working while I was in school, and borrowing, and applying for more financial aid. I had chosen a local state college, perched on a high hill in a pretty little town, because I knew that I would be accepted (which I was, by the skin of my teeth) and because it was near enough to a ski resort where I felt confident I could get a job. It was like the town I had grown up in, but with a college. It seemed the logical choice.

  The pressure to find work in a town without much going on had begun years earlier. I was paid for my first job when I was twelve, when I charged a truck full of rowdy college students from Montreal five dollars to show them the way to a swimming hole that they wouldn’t have found without me. I rode in the back of the pickup with a few of them, and I could see they had little experience traveling this way because they were foolish enough to think that the bump formed by the wheel well was the best seat, when I knew it to only appear to be so and to actually be terribly bumpy, especially if you were starting to need the sort of bra that you didn’t have.

  As soon as I was old enough, I started working in a restaurant owned by a friend’s parents, washing dishes and then waiting tables and eventually tending bar, all before I was legally allowed to set foot in a bar. I was a disorganized, unreliable employee. I had no car or telephone, no bank account, no watch. I was the waitress who wouldn’t just forget about your ketchup or your straw but about you entirely. My tips were meager, but even if they had been more plentiful, I wouldn’t have managed to save a cent. I spent whatever I earned on food—to finally be able to feed myself was thrilling—and on cigarettes, cheap makeup, and six-packs of beer (procured by the older brothers and sisters of friends).

  When I found myself at the end of that final and rather social summer, and just days away from the day I was to move into the dorms, I had less than fifty dollars to my name. I put everything I owned into a black garbage bag and asked the older sister of a friend to drive me the sixty miles to my new home and school. My mother came along for the ride. Her license had been revoked for excessive and recurring speeding tickets, all of them written by the same town constable, who had a magnetic flashing light that he could mount on the roof of his unmarked car by just reaching out his window as he pulled out of his hiding place to chase down my mother. She contended that he was out to get her, and I didn’t disagree, but the truth was that she had done nothing to avoid him or his speed trap, nor had she even once bothered to slow down. She and I sat in the financial aid office at Johnson State College, where we were helped through a series of simple applications and loan documents, and then I was allowed to move into my dorm room. My mother said good-bye, told me not to do anything stupid, and then was gone.

  The thing that would make both college and holding down a job hard for me to manage was that I had difficulty with authority, having been raised with few limits and minimal supervision and by parents who did not have nine-to-five jobs, or even jobs. I had a similar approach to teachers as I did to bosses: I wasn’t about to let anyone else decide what I did on a sunny afternoon, even if it was the week before finals. I skipped my very first college class—ethics, of all things—because I was invited to visit what was promised to me to be the finest swimming hole in the area (it was a total disappointment) by my resident assistant, who was supposed to be doing what he could to ensure my success as a freshman coed. When I showed up for that same class ten minutes early (that was an accident; I still didn’t have a watch) two days later, I recognized a pretty girl from my dorm floor whom I liked immediately because I could tell that she didn’t blow-dry her hair, either. (At the tail end of the eighties, this was as clear a political statement as any.) Plus, her sweater looked hand-knit. I took the seat next to her. “Were you here on Monday?” she said in a tone that made it seem OK to reply honestly that I had ditched class to go swimming, but that it had not been worthwhile. She gave me a raised eyebrow and smile, and a little nod, and then we were friends.

  What quickly became apparent about Kerry and me was that while we liked exactly the same things—swimming in fresh water, bad weather, boys who were funny and who dressed like Grizzly Adams, wine of any color but especially pink, smoking Marlboro Reds while listening to sad music, knitting, and fries with gravy—we came from very different places. Kerry was from a lovely, woodsy town in Connecticut where everyone had jobs or had never needed them. She had been brought up along with a sister and a brother, both older, in a pretty house by a mother who took care of it and of them in a way that seemed effortless to me, and a father who worked as a stockbroker and came home before six every night. I had been hearing about all of this before Thanksgiving break of our sophomore year, when she offered me a ride to her house, where I would spend two nights before taking a train and then a subway to meet my own family in Brooklyn.

  Family dinners, my own or anyone else’s, always made me hold my breath. My mother came from a family that could not be called close. She and her three siblings had all grown up at separate boarding schools and maintained an intense competition with one another. There were only two times each year when my mother and her brothers and their children, and my sister and I, were together: when my uncles came and met their families in Vermont for two weeks each summer, and over Thanksgiving, when we were all in Brooklyn at my uncle’s large house. Our days together in Vermont could be idyllic, full of swimming and tennis and berry-picking and long hikes in the woods. But something happened at dusk, and the dinners during these periods, held around a large, oval table in the kitchen in The Red House at the top of the mountain, were like poorly organized, sometimes violent tournaments.

  My visiting uncles both worked in civil service, one in city government in New York City and the other for the World Bank, which required him to spend large chunks of time away from his family in Asia. Their discussions were about important political issues, and my mother’s opinions were dismissed and belittled openly, regularly. All of us kids would listen as the tones among them grew less patient and more angry as the meal progressed. They would lay traps for one another, my uncles engaging another brother or their one sister in a dialogue, leading them into an argument that they could not win, questioning them in an increasingly patronizing tone, and finally delivering a single blow that left the defending party angry and hurt. But when their prey reacted angrily, when my mother or a brother tried to stand up for themselves, their older brothers would switch instantly to an expression of concern and dismay, assuring everyone that they had not done anything wrong, that their target was just sensitive, overreacting, unstable. It could slowly drive a person crazy.

  We, the younger generation, would slip away quietly and meet again upstairs, where we would listen to the final rounds, until my uncle Mike, the youngest brother, would leave with a slam o
f the screen door, and my mother would call to us from the stairway, angry and without patience, and demand that we get in the car immediately, that it was time to go. We would walk slowly up the huge, sloping lawn in the dark, with millions of stars and sometimes the moon over our heads. One night my mother was especially angry and had walked out with her still half-full glass of wine. “Mom, you can’t drive with that,” I said. “You’re right,” she answered, and with a single motion of her arm, she splashed the contents of the glass through the open window of my uncle Halsey’s car, onto its steering wheel and dashboard. I felt proud of her, at that moment, because it hurt to see the way she was treated by them, and I wanted so much for her to able to beat them, just once.

  So I dreaded family gatherings, and dreaded even more the rides home afterward with my mother, driving recklessly, muttering and smoking. My father once told me that my mother talked to herself, out loud, and that this made him very nervous when they were married. I explained to him that she wasn’t talking to people who she believed were there, that she was merely continuing one of the many arguments she had with her family members, and that it didn’t matter whether they were in the room or not. I wonder still if it ever occurred to my uncles that the sport of belittling her could mean such a dangerous ride home for my sister and me. My cousins and I, as much as we loved one another and hated the way our parents treated each other, modeled their competitive behavior, staging mock Olympic games, short-sheeting each other’s beds, and putting each other’s underpants in the freezer. It was usually the boys against the girls, just like at the dinner table. Still, these were games, and we loved and protected one another in the way that siblings would. Even though our behavior toward one another was never mean-spirited, I would become furious if I felt that I was being disrespected or mistreated, and I would try to stand up for myself in the way that I wanted my mother to stand up for herself against her brothers.

  I think I expected dinner at the Canfields’ house to be the same because I vaguely recognized in Kerry’s descriptions of her home life the same trappings of intellectual, WASP-y America that my family clung to. Or maybe I couldn’t imagine that a family like Kerry’s really existed, with nobody coming to the table already angry, fighting for position.

  We were greeted at the door by Kerry’s sister, Kim, and mother, Virginia. Kim was just a year older than Kerry and was attending Dartmouth. She was soft-spoken, sweet, and clearly brilliant. There were no self-celebrating family photographs hanging on the walls of their gray clapboard house, just small and simple paintings that were, I knew, very good and also mismatched enough that I could assume that they were all of places or by people that mattered to the family. They welcomed me with a polite warmth and expressed interest in my extremely unremarkable and half-assed pursuit of a college degree in a way that made me wonder whether being accepted into a small state college (again, by the skin of my teeth), where I was pulling straight Cs, was actually a much bigger deal than I thought.

  Kerry’s father, David, came home minutes after we got there and walked straight into a room that seemed dedicated to both cocktails and memorabilia related to what looked like an idyllic country club and its golf courses. There was a small television hidden in a cabinet that would never, ever, in the dozens of visits to come, be turned on in my presence unless there was an important golf game on or a movie night had been announced. Kerry showed me the large room that she and her sister shared while her parents had drinks in thick glasses with lots of ice cubes. Dinner was mostly ready and had been left warming before any of us had walked through the door. I was standing with Kerry in the small half bath across from the back door when her older brother, Chris, came home from a long run. He was ridiculously handsome. His jaw looked as though it had been carved from a giant block of cold butter and his eyes were bright and blue. His excitement in seeing Kerry pulled him right into the bathroom with us. I had never seen a brother show such clear love and admiration for his own sister. He smiled the whole time he spoke to us, his perfect white teeth gleaming, with a loud, confident voice and a laugh that sort of reminded me of the old men from The Muppet Show, except that the old men from The Muppet Show were not sexy, nor were they wearing very tight, stretchy, sweat-soaked long-sleeve tees in a deep navy blue that set off their ruddy cheeks and blue eyes. Chris paused between every word, confident that we would wait patiently for the next, stretching out his thoughts carefully. He was mesmerizing. He looked at Kerry with an obvious, protective pride. He gave me a polite but slightly suspicious glance.

  Chris left us for the shower and appeared again just before we all sat down, dressed as though he was going to a school dance. Dinnertime conversation began with updates on neighbors, mostly glowing and only ever-so-slightly gossipy. News in my hometown was usually about which couple had most recently split or who had driven their car straight into the mud-room of the Thirsty Boot Saloon after accidentally putting it into first gear while trying to back out of the parking lot. News in Ridgefield, at least in this stage of the Canfields’ family life, was about who had been accepted into which prestigious school, and how Kerry’s tight group of high school friends, who had been adopted into their family the way I would eventually be, were faring at their respective colleges. Mr. Canfield was funny and clearly loved his children, and I adored him.

  Kim asked me about where I had grown up, and I kept things sort of vague. Kerry had undoubtedly filled in her family on my unconventional situation, on the fact that I was financing my own education through a last-minute flurry of student loans and a patchwork of part-time jobs and on how I lacked the life skills or maturity to be doing it with much success or grace. Virginia asked me more questions about my parents than I could answer without making them seem negligent, but this had always been the problem with talking about my mother and father. I suddenly felt the need to paint a picture of my family that was appealing, perhaps rugged and rural, yes, but uniquely classy. My mind went quickly to the cover of the October L.L. Bean catalog sitting in the Canfields’ foyer. I tried to steer the conversation toward my mother’s admirable skills and talents at surviving in a remote part of Vermont with few resources. Somehow this led to Chris asking me a question that I wasn’t expecting. “And does your family usually hunt and dress its own Thanksgiving turkey?” Clearly I had gone too far in painting a picture of my mother as a survivalist. The only wild game that she ever killed was whatever was unlucky enough to find itself in the path of her speeding Honda. My answer came too fast, with little thought to how it would sound. “No, we go to my uncle’s house in Brooklyn,” I said. “But if we were at home we wouldn’t be able to get a turkey anyway, because they are really hard to hunt.”

  Chris’s eyebrows shot up. “And why, pray tell, is that?” he asked, genuinely interested.

  If I had thought for a moment before I had spoken, if I had said the words to myself, the ones that I had heard so many times that I had never questioned them, I would have realized how ridiculous they would sound when uttered in Ridgefield, Connecticut. But, instead, I spoke. “Because,” I said, “they can throw their voices.” Chris dropped his fork and leaned back in his chair, as his eyebrows went up at least two inches, a smile slowly spreading across his face. “Do they?” he said, smugly. Kerry and her mother bit their bottom lips and lifted their eyes toward me. Kim scolded Chris protectively, using only one eyebrow, which won my heart, but it was David who leaned forward and told me, “Go on.”

  I told the Canfields as much as I knew about wild turkeys, about how Benjamin Franklin had wanted a turkey to be on the nation’s official seal, instead of the bald eagle, because he believed the turkey to possess the same characteristics as the wily, outgunned revolutionary and the bald eagle to be a scavenger and a thief that stole its prey from the hardworking raptors after they were tired from a successful hunt. He believed that the bald eagle represented the imperialist, not the free man. I told them about the turkey that had been served at a town hall dinner in northern Vermont, when I was
very small, that was meant to help fund a free dental clinic, and how the bird had been shot at by so many hunters that three people had broken teeth on the buckshot still in its meat, themselves now requiring a dentist. I didn’t tell them about the turkey that my mother had hit, or how she had had to pry it out of the broken grill of her car and then had run over it again, this time on purpose, an act that would have seemed more humane had she not been doing almost sixty on a narrow dirt road in the first place.

  What was remarkable about the Canfields, on that evening, was that they listened to me. I had never sat like this at a table, surrounded by a family interested in what I had to say, and was torn between my luck at having found them and my jealousy at not having it for my own. I was beginning to picture the rest of my stay with them, which I had hoped would be much more of this, being listened to and fed delicious food surrounded by nice people, until Chris announced that he was doing a little landscaping work for the parents of a friend the next day and that he wanted to take Kerry and me along to help. Kerry agreed because she was his sister and because she was always eager to earn a little money during breaks and the summer, and I didn’t feel like I could say no, as a guest, but immediately felt the heat in my face that was a symptom of my issues with authority, and instinctively I tried to find a way out. I reminded Kerry that we had a friend coming over the next day, a dorm mate who lived on Long Island, also on her way home for Thanksgiving. She would arrive in the early morning. “Perfect,” said Chris, “I’ll have three helpers.” He got up from the table without making eye contact with me and went out for the evening. I wondered what sort of girl Chris Canfield would spend an evening with. Probably one who had been accepted at a good college and did not have a mother who ran over turkeys, at least not on purpose.

  Chris woke us up far too early. Meredith had been dropped off even earlier. She had grown up on Long Island and had worked at a clothing store in Manhattan during high school, and every piece of clothing she owned had a title that included the designer’s name and a description, and when she referred to each of them, you could hear the capital letters in their titles. I found it strange that she didn’t seem to notice how little thought the rest of us put into our wardrobes. She once joined us for a quick dip in the river in a Hand-Block-Printed Putumayo Sarong, a fluorescent orange Adrienne Vittadini Gold Ring Tankini, and pair of Ralph Lauren Cross-Strap Sandals. Kerry was wearing a Pair of Shorts That Had Once Been a Pair of Pants, and I was in a swimsuit that had small rips in its sides from where I had stuffed beer bottles into it to sneak into the movies. Swimsuits were pretty much my only undergarment for six months out of the year in those days.