by Holly LeCraw
“Well, then you won’t.”
“Our first game is next weekend.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I have to be able to play. In good academic standing and all that bullshit.”
“You need to stay healthy.”
“I am healthy. That’s the point.” He blinked.
I sighed. “One more thing,” I said. “It’s probably too late—but your dad mentioned the Air Force Academy, and I had the impression I needed to write a recommendation.”
“I got Ms. Hawkins to do it,” he said. “It could be your junior or senior English teacher. I had an A in her class,” he said, and he shrugged, and I couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed or accusatory. In my class, he kept dipping to a B minus. “So. You know. Sorry. And,” he said, his voice getting louder, “she hasn’t always known me. I’m not the fucking janitor’s kid. The fucking diversity dream.”
“Jesus, Zack—”
“Just a little black. Not black enough for some people but black enough for them.”
“Come on. Really? You think that’s how I think of you?” He glared at me. His face was white, and fine beads of sweat stood at his hairline. “Zack, is your head hurting right now?”
“No. It isn’t.”
“Zack—”
“It’s not. Thanks, Charlie.” And he was gone.
THOSE LAST DAYS OF NOVEMBER. Leaves gone. Sky cold indigo. Chill sliver of moon, chill spark of Venus. If I timed it right, I could get home when there was still a line of burnished light along the horizon, behind the house. On the grandest nights, great columns of purple cloud made operatic strokes over the mountains. Five minutes too late, though, and the sky would be gray black. As if nothing had ever happened.
NICK AND MAY’S FIRST DATE was successful. I discovered this, however, only when I found out they had gone out again, and then again. Nick was cagey. “Nicky,” I said. “I don’t want details. I don’t care. It’s really fine.”
“No details. Okay.” And I knew he was trying not to grin. That there were details.
The Saturday morning came when I called him about our plans for a hike that day, and he wasn’t home. I hung up the phone and looked at the clock: 8:00 a.m. I had done it to myself. Done it to myself.
I had never seen the inside of May’s place, a narrow blue town house a few blocks from Nicky’s.
The kids sniffed it all out, inevitably, although I never saw the two of them closer than several feet together at school, although Nick still ate with students, and at chapel he and May were never in the same pew. I was a little surprised at the total restraint, attributed it to May. But then one evening I was walking past the gym to my car and there they were, pressed against a wall, sheer Hollywood. It was the route they would have taken to walk to either of their houses, and so what had happened was that they just couldn’t wait.
Her hands on the back of his head, pressing; he was wearing the bomber jacket and between his legs I saw hers, moving; I saw his hips, saw them wanting.
Anyone could have seen them and I realized how she needed him, how she wanted someone to help her break the rules.
I needed to not think of any time ever when I had pressed against her like that and it had been a long time ago and never should have happened and no, I could not remember, I could not remember a thing, no scents or sounds or whispers, and it was the next day at lunch that we were all sitting together and May across and down the table from Nick and her wall up and so cool Ah May you look so cool and then I looked down at her hands on the table and saw them lying there, so still, still, I realized, with effort. Was she thinking she would never be twenty again? That she might as well? That this was her last chance to be carried away in this fast-moving current? Or was she not thinking at all?
Her hands trembled to reach across, to cradle his face. To once again confirm his reality. To keep him.
NICK AND I SPENT THANKSGIVING at Divya’s, with her boys, home from college and law school, and a few of their friends, assorted vagabonds and castaways who lived across the country, too far to go for a holiday weekend, plus a guy who Divya whispered was Anil’s new crush. Divya often had other teachers or foreign students from Abbott, but this year it was just us. I wondered, had things been different, if May would have come; she was the classic example of the Abbott teacher who might want to avoid family, might claim hardship traveling when, really, the truth was that her colleagues felt more like family, in the end. But her family was too close for excuses. I assumed she was at Binky’s, in Providence.
The usual script, in matters large and small, was followed. “Ram,” Divya said, “I don’t mind if the football is on the TV, but turn it down. You aren’t even watching it.”
“It’s part of America, Ma. It’s aural wallpaper.”
“Those poor boys who don’t get to have their Thanksgiving dinner,” Divya said, of the college players.
“Those poor boys who can’t read,” Anil said.
“I like having the game on,” I said. “Ram is right. And if you were southerners, you’d know those boys are gods. They’ll get their turkey.”
“Oh, God, turkey,” Divya said, as she also did at some point every year, “this huge ridiculous bird that no one really likes—”
“Ma!”
“—someone come help me carve.”
She had first cooked a turkey when she and Win had been a young couple. He brought it up, every year. He always said it had been wooden on the outside and bloody on the inside.
“It was an act of love,” Divya would retort. “I cooked it so you could have your Norman Rockwell fantasy.” Fahnt-a-zee. Looking at Win purse-lipped. And there he’d sit in his bow tie, and he’d look at me and wink.
She was still cooking that turkey for Win, every year. When it came out, golden brown and, indeed, Rockwellian, it was a sanctified bird.
Ram sat at the head of the table—the tide had been pushing me that way, but I felt it wasn’t right and I’d sidestepped at the last minute. However, I ended up carving. Ram claimed he’d wreck it. Anil said he was better at scooping, as in mashed potatoes. “Oh, Charlie, just go ahead,” Divya said. “Everyone is hungry.” I wore my bow tie in honor of Win. I touched it when I made a toast to him. Ram and Anil looked indulgent but secretly pleased and Nick looked entranced and said, “Hear, hear,” when I was done.
Nick seemed to be taking the place of a long-lost relative, familiar and yet with a veneer of the strange, who had this year dropped back in on a family and on rituals he had forgotten but found irresistible. At the table he was a bit bashful and listened intently to everyone else talking, with a slightly distracted, almost anthropological air.
“Nick,” Divya said, “where is May today? I forget what she told me.”
His mouth was full. “New Hampshire,” he said, muffled. He swallowed. “I forget which brother it is. A lake house. It’s about an hour and a half away.”
“Binky lives in Providence,” I said, before I could stop myself. “He must be doing well. Buying a lake house.”
“No, I think it’s Laird,” Nick said. He didn’t even hesitate on the name.
“It’s on Lake Winnipesaukee,” Divya said. “Now I remember.”
“That means ‘place of drunken waterskiing’ in Wampanoag,” Ram said.
“Not in November it doesn’t,” Anil said.
“Well, I asked her to stop by,” Divya said. “If she was back in time.”
She was warning me. This consideration, if that was what it was, made me livid.
“Doubt it,” Nick said, his mouth full again. “Think it’s an all-day, all-night deal.” She was the secret he was holding within himself. In the moments when he seemed to be disappearing in front of me, he was thinking of May.
Anil and Ram watched us, eagle-eyed. Something was up, but they didn’t know what. “Hey, Charlie,” Anil said, “could you pass those beans?”
“Sure thing.”
“You made these, right? As usual?”
; “It’s my highest culinary accomplishment,” I said.
“Doesn’t it involve, like, cream of mushroom soup? And a can opener?” Ram said.
“Maybe.”
“Well, they taste just like Mom’s,” Nick said.
“I got the recipe from her. Such as it is.”
“She doesn’t cook much either,” Nick said to the boys.
“There’s mixing involved,” I said. “Stirring. Must be done to precise standards.”
“How is your mother, Charlie?” Divya said.
“Doing fine.”
“Do you know her, Divya?” Nick said.
“We’ve never met. Oddly enough. After all these years.”
“She’s coming for Christmas,” Nick said.
“Really! That’s wonderful!”
“She’s going to stay with Charlie.”
Divya looked at me quickly and I gave what I imagine was a rather wan smile. “Time for her to finally see the place,” I said. “Don’t know why it’s never worked out before.”
“Well, now she has two of you here. Now there is no excuse.”
“That’s right,” I said. “None at all.”
“THIS RIDICULOUS CHINA.” This was also an annual complaint. It was Win’s mother’s expensive heirloom wedding china that couldn’t go in the dishwasher. She always said the boys expected it. I can’t imagine they would have noticed, but the ritual was in stone and Divya would not admit she’d done the chiseling.
I heard cheering, and looked out the window above the sink. Between shreds of cloud the sky was a watery blue, and the sun was casting long shadows. Nicky, Anil, and Anil’s friends were high-fiving one another while Ram and his friends looked on in mock glumness; then they all huddled and re-formed. White teeth and handsomeness abounded. “The Kennedys appear to be playing football on your lawn,” I said.
Divya came over next to me and looked out the window. “Some of them are remarkably tan,” she said. She watched for a minute, a hard-won contentment emanating from her. The light shone through the bare branches of the maples at the edge of the yard, and for a moment I was blinded. “Look at the sun,” she said. “So low. Ah, it’ll be dark soon.”
“We’re in the last days of Ordinary Time.”
“That sounds so ominous.”
“Just the inexorable march of the liturgical calendar.”
“That doesn’t help, Charlie.”
“Actually we’re all waiting for the solstice. Deep instinct. Primordial.”
“Maybe you are nothing but a pagan after all,” Divya said.
“Maybe you’re right.”
They re-formed and ran another play, and as we watched Nick went diagonal and then reached up a long arm, casually, almost as though it were not a part of his body and instead controlled itself, and caught the ball. He loped easily to the goal line and there was more rejoicing, and then I saw a new figure walking into the yard, a long-legged girl in jeans and tall brown boots, and as I watched May walked straight up to Nick and kissed him, in front of God and the college kids and everybody. For a second they were together, so tall, complete, and then she stepped back, she was laughing.
“Oh good,” Divya said. “She was able to get away.”
I knew that there were many possible comments to make: That she had escaped in record time. That the traffic must still be light. That it was good she’d gotten home before dark. That I, myself, would rather sleep in thumbscrews than have a long dinner with Laird and Binky. That I had believed it when Nick said she was staying there overnight, if I had thought of it at all, which I must have been because here I was thinking I thought she was going to stay overnight. But not saying it. Because nothing bothered me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t warn you before today,” Divya said. “But I doubted she would really come.”
“I didn’t need a warning.”
“I thought Nick would mention it to you.”
“Nothing needed mentioning.”
We washed and dried in a heavy silence. Divya was shaking her head. “I was wrong. Wrong, wrong. I am sorry.” She put a plate down with a clink on the stack on the kitchen table. “Charlie, what have you done?”
“What have I done? What are you talking about?”
Divya dried another plate, came back to the drainer. She didn’t look at me. “Charlie. It’s not good.”
I gave up pretending ignorance. “You talk like I have control of the world, Div. Would that it were so.”
“The only conclusion I can come to is that you have lied to him.” I didn’t answer. After a moment she said, stubbornly, “To Nicky.”
I sighed. “About what?”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I told him that May and I were an item, briefly, a long time ago, and that it’s good and over, dead as a doornail, and that is the truth.”
“I never knew why it ended, Charlie.”
“Doesn’t matter. We were too young or too old or too stupid or whatever. Preston was dying. It isn’t even interesting—it seemed terribly profound at the time, but we were just a mismatch.”
“I know you would do anything for him,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean you have to.”
“You seem to think I’m very noble, Div.”
“Maybe you are.”
“Ah, no.”
“Charlie—”
“Leave it,” I barked at her, and then was ashamed. “Please.”
“And I am surprised at May too.”
“She has my blessing. I told her so. Not that she needs it.”
She put another plate on the dry stack. “Charlie. You won’t let anyone help you.”
There was a wet plate in my hands, and the only reason I didn’t raise it up and dash it into soapy pieces on the floor was that I could remember Win in this kitchen, holding what might have been the same plate, a towel tucked into his waistband, humming. “What kind of help, precisely, are you offering?” I said. “To fix what problem? I have a brother who is in love. I have a brother who is happy. I have a brother who is in Abbottsford, Massachusetts, also known as the Yankee fucking Shangri-la, who is not going to get blown up by an IED or some crazy-ass fundamentalist suicide bomber while he’s here, and because he is in love and he is happy, then maybe he’ll stay. If there are other issues you’d like me to take up, let me tell you I am fully occupied at the moment, and I am completely content.” I rinsed the plate under the tap. I put it in the drainer with great care. I kept my back to Divya and my eyes on the sink. From outside I could hear clapping and laughter, ringing in the dying afternoon, the unmistakable sounds of our paradise on earth.
IT WAS TRUE that Anita was coming for Christmas, and true of course that it had been Nicky’s idea. Not long after his first couple of dates with May, he had said, “What are we doing for the holidays? We have to decide.” Oh, we. “I just realized I’ll be here for them. I mean in the States.”
“Traveling is a bitch over Thanksgiving.”
“Okay.”
Too easy. He had that sad, hopeful look, and I knew that once again he wouldn’t ask why Anita and I rarely spoke, no matter how hard we pretended for his sake. Instead he would just stand there (okay, right now he was sitting, we were sitting on the patio) with his buoyant longing.
I was braced and thinking that Atlanta wouldn’t be so bad if Nick was actually there. I’d done it plenty of times since Anita and I had fallen out, I’d pretended for a long time. But Nicky said, “I was thinking Mom could come here.”
“Here?”
“And stay with you. You always say you rattle around here. In this house.”
“That’s true.”
“So, I think she would like it.”
“Have you already asked her?”
“No,” he said.
I believed him. He could not dissemble. “I was just wondering. If she’d said anything to you.”
“No. She didn’t. But has she ever been here?”
“No.”
“Why not, Char
lie?”
“Because I always went to see you.”
“Oh.” He wanted to trust me. He did trust me. He soldiered on. “I think she would like it,” he said again. “We can show her everything. Introduce her to everyone.”
So he wanted her to meet May.
“And she needs to see this,” he said, and gestured out to the mountains, and then for good measure bounced out of the chair, roamed off the flagstones and into the grass. “This is you. She should see this place.”
Oh, his particular genius. Exactly what I did not want her to see. Myself, everything I couldn’t change. But as always the easiest thing to do was to roll over, hum a mindless little tune, admit no complication. “Okay,” I said. “Sure. Christmas here.”
“The beginning of a new tradition.”
“Sure.”
“Maybe there will be snow,” Nick said. “Someone was telling me. There are all these signs. This farmer’s almanac stuff. Like, there were a lot of acorns this year. And the caterpillars were fuzzier than usual. That’s a thing. Meaning snow. Meaning a heavy snowfall.”
“Signs and portents.”
“Yes, Charlie.”
Oh, how he was stymied by his dour older brother. Oh, I saw it all, what he wanted: sleigh bells, perfection. Perfection and harmony weren’t usually his gig, though—it was like he wanted it for me, for Anita, as though he knew our chances were dwindling, that maybe this was as close as the stars would ever align. “Sure,” I said. “A white Christmas. Chances are good. Chances are always good.”
Sixteen
Going back down the stairs I passed Celia and Zack on the landing, oblivious to anyone else going by, in tense conversation as usual; but even though they might have been on the verge of breakup, I envied them. Then was quickly ashamed. That pain: of course I remembered it. But oh, how it mattered.
CHRISTMAS PARTY AT DIVYA’S. One of the things that could be counted on, and wasn’t I fortunate to have so many of them? These rituals that stood alone, that couldn’t be altered or ruined?
Faculty, spouses, little girls in hair bows, little boys in knitted vests. Sprinkling of garish Christmas sweaters. This year Divya wore a green sari shot through with gold threads. Her bun was complicated. Her jewelry was so abundant that I thought she might clink when she moved—but it was too loud in the house to tell.