All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  “It’s Christmas,” said my sister Darcy on the extension. “We love you!”

  “Much love to everyone up there except that bastard father, behaving the way he is. Sweet and kind, everyone thought. So ha to that! And ‘folks,’ dear god, he says ‘folks.’ I’ll leave it at that. It’s too much, girls.”

  “Peace on Earth,” added Catherine.

  Mrs. Wall rang out in song. “Deeee-viii-yuuun . . . O night, O night deeevine,” her voice insisted.

  At the door, Dean crossed his arms. He was already in his parka for church.

  “Mrs. Wall is singing,” I explained. I held out the phone so he could hear.

  “Cathy,” my mother whispered to my sister on the phone, “the woman must stop her singing. She doesn’t have the voice. It’s like a ruptured duck. And in my household. No one bothers to tell her.”

  I missed them. They were my team. My small army of women. The living room would be warm, the radiators ticking. Platters of salmon on black bread, and small disks of caviar on toast. Outside, the lights on the Christmas trees would shine all the way down Park Avenue. The smells would be deep cinnamon, evergreen, and clove, and Mrs. Wall would be in the foyer in a velvet muumuu, stationed under the mistletoe in the door frame, a goblet of milk punch in her hand, bright pink lipstick staining the rim of her glass, her eyes looking off dreamily at the chandelier as she sang.

  “I have to go, you guys,” I told them. “It’s time for the service at the church.”

  My mother let out a short laugh. “First, they sit around insulting each other, then they go pray.” She lowered her voice. I could hear the exhale of her cigarette smoke. “I simply can’t stand a daughter of mine involved.”

  “Ho-ho-ho,” my sister Darcy put in.

  “A fine Christmas, girls,” my mother added. “Jesus Christ.”

  Heading toward Main Street but turning off, away from Route 68, the road soon became sparser. Slowly the bed-and-breakfasts and smattering of houses thinned out. The Camden Hills lay to the left, silent in the darkness. It was a clear night, and the lighthouse on Curtis Island stood sentry just offshore. The Christmas candles in the windows of the lone estate on Hound’s Tooth Head glowed as we passed. As the road away from Camden narrowed, it curved into the farmland on Appleton Ridge, where a young man named Jerry Grantham had been killed two years earlier when his truck skidded on glare ice late one winter afternoon.

  “He should have had chains,” Jessica said. She had waited for me, the others already headed to the Congo in Raymond’s station wagon, all except Raymond Jr. and Claire, who had stayed at home to erect their tent in the attic and go to sleep. Jessica made an elaborate detour, driving the upper hills in Helen’s car so she could secretly smoke. She opened all the windows in the old Volvo. Whenever I went anywhere with Jessica, the most mundane acts suddenly seemed illicit.

  “He was the type, though. Typical Jerry, not to have his chains on before the first storm. He was one of those big mountain-guy types, always most comfortable out of town. I think he always thought the woods would protect him. But they figure he died instantly. So that’s something. He was less than a hundred feet from the barn he and his fiancée, Lynne, had just fixed up. Lynne was at home, and, according to Mom anyway, at least an hour must have passed before a car passed by and found the truck upturned.”

  We passed Lynne’s barn, where a few lights were on. Jessica flicked an ash out the window. “I never liked that girl. I know things haven’t slid easily for her, but what a moony-eyed dope. You should have seen her in high school, the looks she used to give Dean. Big cow eyes. Really dumb too. Cow eyes and cow hips.”

  The things Jessica hated were simple: women who got her brother’s attention, stupidity, and fat. “Good thing Dean found someone in my image,” she said. By which I assume she meant a bitch. It was Jessica’s highest form of praise.

  The Congo was pearl white with candles in each window. People filed in in hushed tones. By the side of the vestibule the Jackson family was waiting, held back because Helen insisted we all walk in together as a family. A mother of sons, she knew how a boy jammed his hands in his pockets, the weight of his distraction. The Jackson boys, at church, waited just so, their scarves loosened and parkas unzipped, leaning against the plaques along the sidewall or pacing silently like caged lions. Jessica had always been a single unit until I came along, shy in her way, uncommunicative, without conspirators. Now there were two of us. “Two females” is how Helen referred to us. “We have two females in the family now,” she’d say to her friends, as if she’d been looking at a chromosome readout. Helen knew it was silly at this age to expect it of us, but she nonetheless expected some curveball, some theatrical sort of rebellion. She didn’t know what, but she had heard her friends Nelly and Jan speak for years about the trouble with raising sisters, and so despite our age she kept on her guard. It wasn’t anything she had had experience with. Maybe we would giggle in the sermon, or trip getting into the pew and expose our lingerie to the Congo congregation. She had had only brothers herself, and so she recognized the behavior of her sons, the way they drank milk out of the carton in front of an open fridge, the years of smelly sneakers and sports equipment cluttering up the hallway, the grateful way they ate everything she cooked. Like Jessica, she was used to being the only girl in a family of boys. Her anxious look, as we entered the church, made us both clasp our hands over our coats and walk solemnly, eyes on the floor, following the boys up the aisle to the pew.

  At the end of the long aisle, Helen waved and signaled to various people. Raymond leafed slowly through the hymnal open on his lap. Dean sat with his hand in mine; occasionally he scratched one finger lightly against my knuckles. Then the organ began the processional carol, “Adeste Fideles,” and everyone rose. With the music, the small community of people standing in long rows of family joined together temporarily, in honor of the holidays, in song. They sang unevenly, some louder than others, some softly, as if unsure of the tunes. Some spent the time with their heads averted, watching the others. Beneath the complex pattern of wood beams on the church ceiling, the ancient room swelled with their secrets.

  “I’m the one married sixty-six years, longer it would be if Lester was still alive, so don’t think I don’t know a few things.”

  I sat with Nonnie in the guest room at the top of the stairs, the voile curtain playing against the wall as Helen’s portable floor heater blew warm air into the room. Nonnie was teaching me how to make her Cossack dolls out of knitting wool. Her bony hands worked slowly as she spoke.

  “I know this,” she went on. “People are always looking for the answers. There’s only one answer when it comes to marriage. You have got to make it stick.”

  It was clear she was practiced at making the little woolen men, her Cossacks, who dangled off the branches of the Jacksons’ Christmas tree each year. She barely looked down at her hands as she worked the yarn.

  “There were plenty of times I could have gone off, or Lester, but what were we going to do then? I ask you. Isn’t it all about family? About family sticking together? You know it is. You give out all the pieces of your heart. And then there’s always more to give. This old heart would be long gone now if that wasn’t the truth.”

  As Nonnie spoke, she looped a black piece of yarn around the middle of the red to make the first Cossack’s waist sash.

  “I remember like it was yesterday,” she told me. “No. Not even. Like it was just this very morning, just today, that I first saw Raymond Jackson, the first time he came a-courting Helen. He was a handsome boy, I’ll tell you, a good looker from the start in that spanking-white US Navy uniform of his. You went weak all over, looking at them in their uniforms in those days. It was summertime, he came to our house in that Navy getup of his, and I knew he was one of the good ones. Good Yankee blood. I thought he understood. But you never really understand the way a man’s mind works, don’t even try. You know that, right?”

  She looked up at me. “Listen here, they d
on’t even understand it themselves,” she said, “most of the time. A woman’s mind is different. Here, hold this for me.” She gave me a ball of red wool and drew a strand of yarn out long. She looped it around her forefinger and thumb. Age spots mottled the fine white skin of Nonnie’s hands, yet her fingernails were long and gleaming. “We all want to pretend it’s equal now. Women and men. Well, it will all be equal in heaven. Down here, a man’s mind is still going to be a different matter no matter what amendments get passed. We have rights, yes, but we’ll never be able to change a man’s brain and whatever’s in there, well, I’m not asking. I’m not pretending to know. A strong woman keeps her own counsel, I always say.”

  A whistle blew just then, from downstairs. After a while Jessica appeared in the doorway, in her leotard and leg warmers. She had her hair in a ponytail and a sweatband around her forehead.

  “I’m getting ready to start,” she told me. “And you are my pupil.”

  Nonnie looked her granddaughter up and down and clicked her tongue. “Well, look at you, Jessica. You don’t have any clothes on.” Then she amended that. “Except socks.”

  “Class is starting,” Jessica repeated.

  “You go ahead,” I said. “We’re kind of in the middle here.”

  “We’re artists at work,” Nonnie said. “You can join in, Jess, if you put some clothes on.”

  “I’m off,” Jessica said. “I’m also at work.”

  Jessica was teaching a fitness class in San Francisco, and over the holiday she was working on her routine. On most afternoons in the Jackson living room, she and I would prance and stretch amid the furniture and holiday decorations. She shouted instructions and I obediently followed. After, we rested with tea.

  Nonnie looked at me after Jessica had gone downstairs. “Such a lovely girl, I don’t know why she wants to look like a skeleton. But here, where was I. Hold that light up, will you, so I can see to get the necktie on this little fellow.”

  She took the red yarn and yoked one side with a strand of black. She tied a knot and snipped the extra while I held the gooseneck desk lamp down over her handiwork.

  “The important thing,” she went on, “is, even if you could understand a man’s mind? You can never see inside of anyone else’s marriage. Not really. Certain things never show up when you’re on the outside looking in. The wallpaper on the inside, I mean. The fine design.”

  The wallpaper on the inside, the fine design. I thought about that. How do we put up the walls that define our marriage; how, over time, do we etch the fine design?

  “To be honest,” Nonnie said, “I didn’t see Dean as the type to marry a city girl. Maybe Chris. Chris has an eye for the fancy. He’s the only one of the boys to ever notice my ring. ‘Oh, Nonnie, that’s so beautiful,’ he told me.”

  She held up her left hand. The ring she’d worn over sixty years was a narrow gold band, a diamond braced on either side by a small sapphire.

  “Chris was only nine when he said that, and already an eye for expensive. My diamond ring. So it will be for Chris when I go, it will be for his girl. But Dean, Dean has always been content with the little things. Yes, that’s why I didn’t really understand why he was so taken with you, to be honest. ‘Oh, she’s a country girl at heart,’ he told me about you, first time he brought you up here to Camden. ‘Trust me.’ But I wasn’t so taken in. There you were with your New York City ways. That tuna salad you made with the French name and the anchovies.”

  “Niçoise.”

  “And your mother in those fancy leather pants when I first met her—green leather pants! I’d never. I could have sworn they were plastic. They looked like garbage bags. ‘Trust me, Nonnie,’ Dean told me. And like I told you, far be it for me to question what someone else sees on the inside.”

  She smiled. “That’s why the pictures I save from weddings are of the table settings. At your wedding, I sent Chris down to take the shot while everyone else was up by the house getting seated before the ceremony began. I always want a shot before anything gets soiled, when it’s all still fresh. To me, your table setting is real art, the pink rosebuds, the gold-rimmed plates. I have the photo on the sideboard in my dining room, right next to the one from Helen and Raymond’s wedding. Maybe you can’t see inside anyone else’s marriage, but a photo of a table setting from a wedding, now that’s the true art, it lasts forever. Okay now. Hold your hand up for me, help make one of these guys with me.”

  She looped red yarn back and forth a number of times, between the forefinger and thumb of my right hand. “Hold steady,” she said. “I’m going to put his little belt on now.” She took a strand of black yarn and pulled it tight around the yarn in the middle section between my two fingers.

  “So,” she went on, “I’ll tell you something every young married girl like you ought to know. The ‘what if’ principle.” Her voice was at a register barely above a whisper. She leaned in toward me, over the electric heater. “You don’t know what I’m referring to, right?”

  “I don’t know, that’s right.”

  “Okay so. Did I happen to mention Jacob Fairfax to you ever? No? Never? I thought not. Jacob was a boy who grew up in Westerly, a few streets down from our house. Our families knew each other, from church and whatnot. Jake made a good living, he had taken over his father’s country store when he was just barely twenty. He came to get me for a ride one day when I was just about eighteen. He must have been close to twenty-five when he came calling. My father nearly had a fit—a boy, a young man by that time, coming to get his daughter for a ride in a motorcar. What I remember is his coat, it was a nice brown tweed, and his red mustache. Nothing ever came of it. He deposited me back at home, and I remember my father hollering for a bit. I imagine he had a few salty things to say to Jake Fairfax behind my back because Jake never came back again, he went off into the day and left his memory behind. I was wearing my blue wool hat that day, pale blue like a winter sky. The following year Lester came home from the Great War, and we were engaged soon after that. But whenever I see a blue hat like that one I wore as a girl when I was out on the road with Jake, I think, What if . . . That’s all the cheating I ever did. My memories of Jake Fairfax and the motorcar ride. Just the what-if.”

  “The what-if.”

  “We all have them, don’t we. The what-ifs.”

  “I suppose we do.” I thought of Eliot Andrews, and for a fleeting second, I wondered what he was up to. What if.

  “I like to think it’s a purer kind of cheat,” Nonnie said. “The what-if. It grows old with you, keeps close and as fresh as you want it to be. No one can touch it, and no one need know. That’s how we did it in my day, because what would we have done, Lester or me, going off on a hoot with somebody or other. No way to get beyond it after that. So Lester need never to have known that for sixty-six years, the memory of Jake Fairfax in his brown coat with his cranberry mustache was in our bed with us. Sure, a girl’s got to have a little something on the side. Just make sure the side is in the mind. And in the meantime, you make it stick. That’s the only secret to marriage, mark my words. Make it stick.”

  Patch as much as you need; it doesn’t hurt.

  “I want to say something,” Raymond Jr. said after dinner. We were back in the family room. Chris was playing with the plastic pins on the map above the couch. It was a map of the world. The family stuck pins in every area where one of them had traveled. Each person had a color. Up until recently, Raymond Sr. had been winning with his green pins—all his boat races, cruises over the years, and then European junkets for conferences. Since Dean and I had gotten married, his yellow pins were populating most of Western Europe and bits of Africa, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific. There were many struggles among the siblings about this. Chris, who had been to study in Spain, was the most vocal. “Just because you have been there,” he’d say, looking at me but speaking to the group at large, “doesn’t mean Dean qualifies to automatically stick his pins in.”

  “But they are a team,” Helen wo
uld say. “That’s the point. The marrieds are a team.”

  “You and Dad have been married since Christ was born, and you aren’t a team,” Jessica would argue.

  “We are a team, honey,” Helen would say. Looking over at her husband in his La-Z-Boy she’d add, “Right?” and nod her head.

  “Oh my god, Mom, stop.” Jessica, who was in her favorite spot in front of the woodstove, rolled over on her back. “Stop forcing yourself on the man. I can’t bear to watch it.”

  “It hardly matters, Mom hasn’t been anywhere anyway,” Raymond Jr. interjected.

  “It’s a dumb game,” Chris added. “Let’s just stop it. Let’s stop it right now.”

  The yellow pins came up whenever the Jackson family had guests visit over the holiday. They would ask about my travels.

  “I just went as a kid, with my father when I was young.”

  “She speaks French,” Helen would point out. “Our city girl has spoken to African tribes.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Chris would say. “Mom, get a life.”

  The guests were always perplexed. “It’s not necessarily true,” I would say. “My father was there learning Swahili, is all.”

  “Is all?” the guests would ask.

  “See?” Helen would say. “Swahili! Have you ever?”

  “I learned a few words, ‘lion,’ ‘elephant,’ that sort of thing. But it’s not like we were living in the bush or something.” I’d shrug. It all sounded absurd. “We were driving around in a zebra-striped minivan,” I’d add.

  “A zebra van! Have you ever?” Helen would insist. “She could have been stampeded by elephants.”

  “This is irrelevant,” Jessica would say. “Let’s hear about Alaska for once.” One summer, Jessica had studied with a dance troupe in Anchorage.

  “Or Spain,” Chris would put in.

  “Elephants can kill,” Helen would go on. “The mothers, to protect their young, they stop at nothing. They did a whole segment on the National Geographic show. Hard to believe, but true.”