Someone from the Congo always called the Jackson household right after Thanksgiving to see if any of the three boys might be coming home. The three would make perfect wise men, the Congo organizers annually agreed, especially if one or more had conveniently grown a beard over the year, as one or more invariably had.
The day after Thanksgiving, wreaths with red velvet bows were hung on all the lampposts along Main Street. Dodge Everett, who ran the car repair store in town, dropped in to pick them up at the Women’s Collective, where they were hand-made. Weather permitting, they remained up until Twelfth Night, when Dodge came by in a battered pickup truck to take them down. The routine of this tradition relaxed the town around the bustle of the year’s end; it was a predictable rite and as such could be counted on when often nothing else could. Yet everyone remembered the year a freak ice storm scattered pine and ribbons all over the harbor two days before New Year’s. The sudden mess unnerved the whole town until gradually the last of the flotsam of greenery and ribbons rode out silently into Penobscot Bay in the dawn of the new year.
There was also the traditional reappearance of the town’s young people, those who had left Camden to go on to college and jobs elsewhere and returned home for the break. Up and down the street, as Dean and I did our Christmas shopping, people stopped to greet him. “Mr. Foul Shot!” one man called out across the street at us. “Back in the flesh!”
Sometimes in the middle of the night, when Dean couldn’t sleep, his hands would jut up in the air, making mock foul shots in the dark. In those moments, I knew whatever was bothering him, he was calming himself down by working his way back from his present to his sweet past.
When it came to local sports, Dodge Everett, also the high school basketball coach, was a well-thumbed almanac. “How about that game in Lincolnville—’75, I think it was—when you guys really showed them how to play hoops?” Dodge said. In the chill of the December afternoon, he and Dean making clouds with their breath as they spoke, Dodge counted out the scores of winning games on his gloved fingers. “You come by and see us, Dean-o. Sure would be a thrill for the kids, having you show up at team practice one day. Local hero and all.”
He looked at me and winked. “Mr. Foul Shot, he is. That’s our boy.” He punched Dean in the arm. “Come on by and see the old gym. Give the kids a thrill.”
“Honey, I hear you ran into Dodge in town this afternoon,” Helen said. We were at the dinner table. Red candles glowed in the candelabra. Nonnie made little figurines out of red yarn that she called Cossacks. They lined the mantelpiece and the sideboard. In the living room, they dangled off branches of the Christmas tree like doomed mountaineers.
Dean’s brother Chris poured wine into the cut glass goblets. He creased his brow as he poured, careful to keep the measurements equal, the bottle held just over, never touching, the rim of each glass. “I’m perfect at this,” he said. “A real sommelier.”
At the head of the table, Raymond Sr. was carving the lamb. In the kitchen Helen poured the drippings into a gravy boat, shook mint jelly out of the jar. “Dodge’s wife, Josie, called to tell me he’d seen you, honey,” she said as she walked in.
“I saw Nelly James,” said Nonnie. Nonnie was ninety-one. She had been celebrating Christmas with Helen and Raymond since they had married thirty-five years earlier. When her husband, Lester, was still alive, the two would drive up from their home in Westerly, Rhode Island, together. Now she was widowed, and Chris always drove down from college to retrieve her. She sat at the foot of the dining table in a pale purple sweater suit. “Nelly came by to have tea with me. I was busy, what with the Cossacks to finish and all, but we had a nice chat.”
“Nelly came by to have a nice visit with you, Mother,” said Helen, setting the gravy boat down at her husband’s side of the table. “Drat.” She swept up some overflow with a finger and licked it.
“Jesus, Mom,” said Chris. “Do we really need your spit in the gravy?”
“That Nelly James never misses a chance to come by and poke her head in,” Nonnie continued.
Helen held out her hands and smiled across the candles, across the bowls of vegetables, across the roast, to her husband. In the candlelight, Raymond’s bifocals were flickering shields of glass.
“Can we do a toast?” she asked.
Everyone groaned.
“We’re just getting started on this grub here, Mom,” said Dean.
Helen took the hands of the two sitting closest to her, her mother and Dean. “Now. I just want to thank you all for being here with me this year,” she said. “It always means a lot, but for me, this year, it’s just very special.” She looked around at her family. “We’re family, first and foremost. I’m very grateful for that and I thank you all.”
During the visit of the boat, the summer before, Raymond and Helen had first told us they were going to have a trial separation. Four days on the double-ended schooner in Penobscot Bay, where there was nowhere to run, they decided would be a good chance to claim our undivided attention. One night, the night before we set sail, I thought I heard Raymond coughing, followed by a light step that creaked the floorboards down the hallway to the back stairs. Fingers dialed the phone by the half bathroom; then the receiver hung up. But it may not have been Raymond at all but rather the after-drizzle of a dream: noises imagined in the vulnerability of half sleep. I would lie on my back a long time in the still house, Dean’s breathing steady beside me, until I heard breakfast sounds. It started with classical music on the radio. The refrigerator door would open, then shut. But no smells, no other sounds. Because breakfast was not toast, or bacon, or anything that smelled like Helen’s usual cooking those summer mornings. And you could not hear cornflakes getting their milk splattered on. At least not with my ears.
As we sailed out of the harbor the following morning, the hills over Camden were soft and purple against the dark blue August sky. Helen put her hands on her hips and breathed in the sea air. “Purple mountains majesty,” she said. “You know where those founding fathers got that idea if you look back at our town.”
Raymond adjusted things, pulling at sails and re-coiling ropes. Occasionally he asked Dean to do something and they worked in tandem, barely a word between them. Gradually the busy community lost definition and melted into a blur, the white steeple on the Congregational church the last focal point, shrinking smaller and smaller, finally just a toothpick, then gone altogether as we bounded out.
We anchored in the cove in the evening and for dinner we ate lobster, tearing at the bright bodies, tossing the shells over the side. Dean skimmed a lobster tail across the smooth water. It didn’t skip exactly, but made a few shaky ruptures on the surface before it sank.
“A lousy substitute,” Dean said to his father.
Raymond shrugged. “You’ve gotta try everything.” This was Raymond’s motto, handed to him from his stint in the Camden volunteer fire brigade. “When you don’t know what you’re going to need,” he’d say about whatever, “roll everything.”
“Honey, you need another sweater?” Helen asked me.
“She’s always cold,” said Dean.
“Oh, I know, she’s our city girl,” Helen said. She sat on a boat cushion, the kind with two handles, for easy throwing to overboard victims. She stirred sugar into a mug of coffee. The steam swirled, misting her face so she looked like a silent-film heroine. “Still, honey, I think you could use a new one. Let me make you one for Christmas.”
Since Helen had knit me the red claret sweater during the visit on the lake, I wore it every visit I made to Camden. “I bet you could have fun with this, dear,” she told me as she fitted it to me, stretching a tape measure along my back as I held my arms out in a T.
“Anyone, anything else?” Helen asked. “Anything hot?”
There were times I regarded Helen almost as an exotic animal, her behavior both fascinating and strange. A life made up of unconditional offers. Fudge, sweaters, hot drinks.
“Pizza,” said Raymond, “if
you’re calling out.”
“Cute, Daddy,” Helen said. “Daddy, real cute.”
But that was not what marked the visit of the boat. It came later, just barely twilight.
“Mom and I have something to say,” Raymond said. Dean and I were lying up on the cabin roof, side by side on our stomachs; below us Helen and Raymond sat in the cockpit.
“We’re going right down the line with this,” Raymond said. As he said it, his right hand cut the air in front of him. The line was Raymond Jr., Dean, Jessica, then Chris. Whenever Helen and Raymond had something important to say, they announced it in order of birth.
“We phoned Raymond Jr. yesterday,” Helen told Dean, almost apologetically.
“So tell then,” Dean said. “What’s the big news?” Dean hated it when Raymond Jr. knew something he didn’t.
Raymond looked down at his hands, and so did everyone else. Everyone watched Raymond fold his fingers in on themselves, then open his palms, then close them again. Then he opened his palms once more, straining them back, letting all his fingers wiggle at once. Here’s the church, I was thinking. Here’s the steeple.
“The fact is,” Raymond said. He looked up at Helen with a slant half smile, then looked down again. “It seems I have fallen in love with another woman.”
Helen put her hand on Raymond’s back, then withdrew it. For slow preposterous seconds, no one spoke. For starters, the idea seemed absurd. Raymond in love. Raymond with his gold bifocals, his skinny little legs. Raymond romancing? Raymond Jackson in love?
It seemed too awkward and potentially nauseating to ask for details, besides which, after Raymond spoke, Helen started to cry. Quiet whimpers, sniffles mainly, her chin resting on her fist. I realized I’d never heard Helen cry. Usually a laugh was her guard for everything. A lusty head-thrown-back kind of whoop that pushed everything else back inside.
“‘Seems’?” Dean said. “As in, you’re not sure yet? Seems you have fallen in love, Dad? Really? ‘Seems’? That’s the word you’re going with? Come fucking on.”
“We haven’t made any permanent decisions yet,” Helen finally got out, wiping her eyes. “We’re going to give it ’til Christmas, right, Daddy?” She groped for Raymond’s hand and he let her have it. Pink parka, pink fingernails, pink face.
“This is pretty disgusting,” Dean said after a while. He shuddered.
“What do you mean, honey?” Helen asked. “I don’t understand.” She asked him pleasantly, as if she had just asked him to explain long division.
Dean went on. “Look at you, Mom. Sitting there like a fucking wounded animal. Dad, I want to kick you in your back, straighten out your posture, man. What the hell?”
“Okay, fair enough,” Raymond said. “You’ve got a right to be mad. I am okay with that. I deserve that.” He looked up at me. “I want to know what our city girl thinks,” he said, his eyes blinking calmly.
What did I think. They were supposed to be predictable—not like my parents, where potential surprises lay behind every waft of smoke, every can of Budweiser—and to want the same things. That had always struck me about Raymond and Helen. There was never any vying over decisions, or if there was, no one knew it. They moved as one complacent force through a lifetime of card games and homemade sweaters and cheese sticks.
A million words floated in my head. A million random, useless words. “I don’t know. You guys always seemed so perfect to me.” As I spoke, Helen nodded, sniffling. “Well, I guess now you seem more normal.”
Helen laughed through tears. She grabbed a lobster shell that had fallen to the bottom of the boat and tossed it over her shoulder. “Normal!” She turned and patted her husband’s knee. “That’s a new one, isn’t it, Daddy?”
Raymond cast his eyes out to sea, as if looking for something, a fin, a periscope, anything to distract us with. Family time was supposed to be happy time.
“I don’t know,” Helen said. “Maybe I’m crazy, but I’ll tell you this.” She gave a long blow into her tissue. “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a minute.” She smiled, her eyes wet and bright. “Not too many people can say that, you know?”
As soon as the photos from our wedding were sent to Camden, Helen and Raymond looked at the images of themselves and had a reaction. I should have worn a darker blue, Helen thought. Dark hides more, it’s more forgiving to a figure. I can’t possibly be that heavy. Raymond thought, I should get contact lenses, those gold-rimmed specs make me look like an old grandpa. I can’t possibly be that ancient. They ordered no copies of photographs of just the two of them. Soon after this, they started taking a journal-writing class at the local Y in Camden. “Do a little something new,” Helen said. “Bring in a little spice back to the old marriage,” Raymond added. It started as a kind of experiment, a therapy exercise. All the couples they were friendly with in town were doing some form of therapy, and they were eager to try. In class, they were asked to keep a notebook and to write in it every day. To write down whatever came into their mind, for forty-five minutes. Raymond usually did this in his den. Helen preferred the living room, listening to classical music on the stereo. They followed the class instructions carefully. Put it all out there, the instructor encouraged the class. See what you can learn when you set pen to paper and let your mind roam where it will.
Helen wrote a lot of lists. Shopping lists, Christmas lists, wish lists, a To Do list and a Not To Do list. “This is one of the things I have to stop doing,” Helen wrote on the Not To Do list. “I have to stop speaking for Raymond. I have got to stop assuming I know what’s on his mind. Because I don’t. I obviously don’t.”
“The things I miss most” was another list. “Cigarettes, my brother Bob (Bob was killed in World War II), summers when the kids were young, my father’s clambakes on the beach, sometimes, Homer Winfree.” But she changed that last one. “No, the idea of Homer, not Homer himself.” Homer had been the boy who came to court her while Raymond was off in the war. Homer had asthma and couldn’t go to the front, and spent the long Sunday afternoons of the war in Nonnie’s kitchen making light conversation and accepting the women’s offers of tea and cake.
Raymond wrote about a lot of things. His family, his friends, his kids. He wrote a lot about expectations. “I would like to do something I’m proud of, something on my own.” The words “my own” came up a lot. “I love Helen, but I need some time away from her,” he wrote once. “I’d like to be more on my own.” Again and again, the same phrase was repeated, practically word for word: “I need some time alone.” Finally, Raymond told his notebook about Cathleen. “There’s this girl in my office. Well, not a girl, a woman.” Cathleen was just forty. She had straight dark hair and wide-set eyes. For years, she told him one day, she had had a crush on him. She liked his gentle manner and his easy gait. Now they were having lunch together, taking their separate cars to a diner in Rockport. The first time, he was just back from the wedding in East Hampton. He told her all about it. About having to have the rehearsal dinner clambake under the tent and not on the beach as planned (the caterer was not up to Grampa’s standards, he added), and about the tennis matches by the cottage. Then he told her about John McCulloch having a sudden stroke. “The guy just up and died, like that,” he told Cathleen. “Daughter’s wedding. One minute there, and the next, breathing with a ventilator in the next town.” Cathleen’s eyes widened. “I don’t want to go like that,” Raymond told Cathleen. “It really makes you think. Started me thinking, anyway.” Cathleen nodded. She patted Raymond’s hand. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered across the table as he drank his chowder. “Life is short,” Raymond told the notebook. “Sometimes you have just got to seize the day. It could have been me, hooked up to machines. You never know what’s going to hit you.” He told that to Cathleen. “Seize the day,” he told her, as they guiltily spooned up chowder at the Rockport Diner. She nodded. Outside the nip of late fall was in the air. Soon the first flakes of snow would dust the harbor town. Suddenly, Raymond confessed
to the notebook, he was thinking about Cathleen all the time.
“Confidence,” Helen wrote on her wish list. “I feel like such a boob all the time. Raymond says nothing has happened yet between him and Cathleen, but he thinks he might be falling in love.”
“I feel like an adolescent,” Raymond wrote. “Or, that’s its springtime.” But he crossed out “springtime”—“(Too cornball),” he wrote in the margin as an editorial note to himself. Over the winter and into the next spring, Raymond and Cathleen followed their now familiar routine along Route 1 to Rockport, or sometimes all the way to Wiscasset for ice cream. He would drive first, leading the way; she’d follow, waving to him at stop signs so he’d see her happy face in his rearview mirror. It made his day, those glimpses of his junior associate in the rearview mirror of his car heading to the diner with him. “Maybe it’s a phase,” Raymond wrote in his notebook as spring turned to summer, and summer again into fall. “Do I hope it’s a phase, or don’t I?”
“Will things ever be the same again?” Helen wrote. But that launched her into another list. “People I can’t forgive: My mother, for crying all the time, over everything.” When word came that Helen’s brother Bob was dead, Nonnie cried so hard it’s all Helen remembers of her adolescence. A small once-resilient woman crumpled by grief. “Bob, for dying. I always thought we could have gotten along.” Helen was a male-oriented woman, she always said. When the “hard core” of Camden used to get together, it was Helen who always joked around with the men while her friends Nelly and Jan kept to themselves. “Raymond. Yes, Raymond Jackson too,” Helen wrote on her list the week we were due to arrive in Camden for Christmas. “I’m finally getting really ticked off about this.” But when Raymond was around, Helen was eager, attentive, like a schoolgirl with a crush. “I thought I had been doing everything right,” she wrote. “But I must have been doing it wrong.”
All Happy Families Page 13