Good Family

by Terry Gamble

  It is raining, and the wipers barely make a dent. I take back-country roads, coasting past farmland and orchards separated by islands of deciduous woods. When I finally arrive at the airport—a cinderblock building and an asphalt strip in what would otherwise be a pasture—the rain has lifted, and my hair is curly with the humidity. I could spend hundreds of dollars in New York to get this look. The downside of all this humidity is the perspiration on my forehead, the little pimple forming next to my brow. Nearly forty, and I still break out.

  I get out of the car and search the sky, blooming with thunderheads, for Jessica’s plane. Pulling my mildewed foul-weather gear tight, I lean against the door—anything but go inside, where stubble-chinned teenage boys play Doom or Mortal Kombat in a haze of greasy hamburgers.

  “Maddie?”

  A figure is coming toward me, calling my name. I push back my hair and squint into the wind.

  “Jamie,” I say. “Wow.” My old boyfriend, whom I haven’t seen in twelve years, still looks the same. I, on the other hand, have frizzy hair and a zit.

  We awkwardly kiss at each other’s cheeks. It seems a perverse gesture for two people who have once been so intimate. Jamie has a Burberry raincoat slung over his shoulder and a briefcase, and his hair is slicked back, which, in my opinion, looks a little eighties, yet on Jamie, undeniably attractive. No gray in his blond. Darkly tanned. I smile inanely and try to expunge the image I have of him in my college dorm room, completely naked, his bath towel dangling from his erection like the white flag of surrender. The last I’d heard he’d become president of his family’s company. They’d made their money in plastic garbage bags, later expanding into a wider panoply: bags that zipped together, bags that withstood heat, bags that burped.

  Thank God for trash and leftovers, I used to say to him, but the forty-four-year-old man standing before me looks humorless compared to the boy of my college memories, and I doubt the old joke would amuse him.

  “I didn’t know the flight was in,” I say, noticing he still has that mole on his cheek. “I’m waiting for my niece.”

  Jamie scans the sky. “North-worst,” he says. “They’re always late.”

  I used to wish Jamie and I had met for the first time when we were in our thirties instead of when we were kids. If only we’d done some living prior to meeting each other, our timing would have been perfect. But looking at him now, I suspect I was wrong. My life is leagues away from Jamie’s—like sailboats whose courses diverge by one degree and end up on separate continents. The last time I laid eyes on Jamie, it was from a distance. He was standing on a dock. He had slicked his hair straight back from his face, and was running his hands over it, back arched, his elbows splayed. It was an exquisite gesture—something out of F. Scott Fitzgerald or a Brylcreem ad. I felt I was seeing him through water, like a face on a boat you see as you slip below the surface and sink.

  “You heading out, then?” I ask him.

  “Just got in,” he says, jerking his head toward the tarmac where the private planes are parked. There used to be a line of single-engine prop planes, the occasional twin engine. Now there is a fleet of Learjets and Gulf Streams, one of which appears to be Jamie’s. Ever so faintly, I hear Aunt Pat’s voice saying, You didn’t try hard enough.

  Jamie cocks his head. “Haven’t seen you around here for a while. Why the honor?”

  Eleven years exactly. “My mother.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, you know,” I go on, doing something spastic with my hands, “Dana’s here. The cousins are arriving. The typical scene.”

  Jamie smiles. Again, I have that sensation of being submerged. For the first time, I notice his teeth are unnaturally white. His eyes I can’t read.

  “It’s a great family,” he says.

  I fail to suppress a hiccup-y sort of laugh. I can’t tell if I’m nervous or merely incredulous. “A great family,” I repeat, looking away. “That’s for sure.”

  “And you?”

  “Oh, I’m great, too.”

  “I mean, where are you living?”

  “New York. For years now.”

  He nods, and I see a flicker of that wounded, wary look he used to give me. “Well, then.”

  “Yeah,” I say, giving him a little wave. He turns and walks away. Remembering my manners, I call after him, “Say hi to…”

  He turns back, a questioning look on his face. “Fiona,” he finishes for me.

  “Yes,” I say. “Fiona. Give her my best.”

  But the plane drowns out the last of my sentence, and I start toward the cinderblock building. “Jerk,” I mutter under my breath, more to myself than Jamie.

  Jessica, her hair shorn and bleached stark white against her olive skin, tosses her duffel bag into the back of the Malibu.

  Nice tattoo,” I say, noticing the newest pattern encircling her wrist.

  Jessica beams, ignoring my sarcasm. “It’s Celtic.”

  “That’s appropriate,” I say, mentioning that the Addisons are Scots-Irish from way back.

  But Jessica looks about as Scottish or Irish as Miss Saigon. Half-Vietnamese, half-Caucasian, she was given up for adoption as an infant. Dana and Philip, who had tried for several years to have a child before being told they couldn’t, seized the opportunity in spite of our mother’s dubious response to Jessica’s Asian roots. It’s not that she’s Oriental, our mother had said. I just worry she might not fit in. Given that our mother was ostracized for having red nails and being from Missouri, she felt qualified to speak on the subject. But disparity in bloodlines notwithstanding, Jessica and I have a bond. Her wary dark eyes are not unlike my gray ones at her age.

  She slams the door, and we drive off, Jessica cracking the window, lighting up a cigarette.

  I cast a sideways look. “Yes, I do mind if you smoke.”

  Jessica rolls her eyes, draws once more on the cigarette, and flicks it out the window. The stark white of her current hairdo replaces the sinister burnt orange of last fall.

  “Great,” I say. “Start a fire.”

  She sticks out her tongue where a gold stud is planted like a pea. “Thanks, Mom.”

  Jessica was the most enchanting and squeezable of babies. Whenever I was in Pasadena, I’d rush to see her, watching her progress from black-haired toddler to sure-footed soccer star, her serious brown eyes beneath blunt cut bangs. Then came high school.

  “Kick the Ecstasy habit?” I say, trying another angle, but the look on my niece’s face says, Don’t. Sullen and closemouthed on the subject, she turns away from me and looks out the window at an orchard speeding past.

  I release the steering wheel and hold my hands up. “Scout’s honor. Our secret.”

  Now she’s in college. According to Dana, she rarely calls home.

  Jessica shakes her head and changes the subject. “You haven’t told me who’s coming.”

  So I begin the litany: the ambiguous arrival of Adele, as well as the questionable status of Sedgie, whose grown kids are employed and, thus, have limited time to travel.

  “Real jobs,” I say to Jessica, with a meaningful look. Derek’s wife, Yvonne, is climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, but Derek, who has flown in from Paris, is due in this week along with Beowulf. “They’re driving.”

  “Beowulf,” says Jessica wistfully. “And you think I’m the drug addict?”

  It’s almost seven now, an escaping bit of evening sun casting a sharp blade across a cornfield. We push on. The State Road turns into the Lake Road, and we descend into Harbor Town and, finally, to Sand Isle. I park the car in our spot, and Jessica loads her duffel into the ferry that is waiting at the dock. The ferry driver—the one who called me “ma’m” the other night—unties the lines, pushes off. He glances at my niece, but says nothing. His radio is turned off tonight. “Ma’am,” he says again, but I don’t mind.

  “What’s your name?” I ask the driver.

  “Mac.”

  “Do you carry a gun, Mac?” I say, indicating his guard’s uni
form. His eyes flicker briefly—long enough for me to believe he does. I exhale, close my eyes, think of Jamie with his jet and his Burberry coat. The channel is patterned with the reflections of clouds and smells of gasoline and fish. Reaching the other side, Mac helps us onto the dock.

  Sedgie has called to say he will be getting in late. He is driving from upstate New York, where he’d partied with the cast after the close of their Sondheim review, and now he’s somewhere northwest of Lake Erie, concerned that his car might break down, seeing that there’s no Citroën mechanics in Canada, but I point out he’s not far from Quebec, and surely there must be someone.

  “Your geography sucks,” he says.

  “So when are you getting here?”

  “Days. Weeks. What room do I have?”

  I remember how he used to call dibs for sleeping in the bunkroom and needed to keep the bathroom light turned on. When he was a kid, he had freckles like red ants swarming on pale skin and was the first to run screaming if a bat flew down from the attic. Now he walks onstage in front of hundreds of people, invisible behind the footlights, exorcising his fears by becoming someone else.

  “The Anchor Room,” I say, naming a room that used to have anchors on the curtains and bedspreads until Aunt Pat replaced them with now-faded chintz.

  “Not the Love Nest?”

  “Taken.”

  “By?”

  “Derek’s coming tomorrow.”

  “Derek, Derek, Derek.”

  I wait for Sedgie to ask about my mother, but he doesn’t. Mostly, Sedgie thinks about himself, which is why he’s driving alone in a Citroën across Canada.

  “So, babe,” he says, “stick some Stoli in the freezer, and I’ll see you in the—” His cell phone cuts out before I can tell him we’ll leave the wagon at the ferry and not to wake us.

  Dana and I finish picking up the kitchen, tossing the plastic containers from the take-out burgers and fries. There is something sad and despairing about such a meal in a kitchen that used to turn out standing rib roasts and beef Wellingtons. Even Jessica commented on the dinner, saying it was pathetic and she could do better. Great, said Philip, why don’t you?

  Dana, Philip, and I are bone-tired from that day’s errands and chores. The boats had to be inventoried, dragged down to the beach. Canoes, the sailfish, some obsolete Windsurfers. Even the blunt-nosed rowboat that always sinks stakes a claim on the shore.

  And then there are the linens. Most of the blankets are moth-eaten, the sheets torn and stained. The beach towels are threadbare, and the bath towels, once an upbeat color like coral or cherry, have faded to a bland, fleshy salmon, sandpaper-rough and stiff.

  “Really pays to get here first,” I say as we tie up the garbage, but Dana flashes me a look that makes me wish I could take it back. I have no cause for complaint. When you disappear for years, you abdicate your right to an opinion.

  Furtively, I have read the brochures left by hospice. They tell us how to keep our loved one comfortable. They talk about grief. I turn this pebble of a word over in my mouth. It is a hard thing, rough at the edges, yet small enough to swallow and pass unnoticed through one’s gut unless it sticks in your craw. Sometimes I think my grief is stuck so tightly, I will gag on it. But you can’t vomit grief. I’ve tried. I’ve shoved my finger down my throat or swallowed tequila between retching so that I might retch again.

  I’ve heard it said you don’t get over loss, but that grieving shifts when you wake up one morning and it isn’t the first thing you think about. When did I wake up and not think of Sadie, first and foremost, the tug on my breast?

  I drag the swollen trash bag two stories down to the wood room. It is cool and vaguely insidious, yet comforting with its familiar dank smell. I open the trash can, shove the bag into its mulchy gut. For a moment, I am transfixed by darkness. I remember hiding here during a Sardines game more than thirty years ago. How long had it been before Dana found me? I was braver then. I relished the dark.

  “Maddie? Are you in here?” I jump, turn around. It is Jessica standing in the door. “What are you doing?”

  “Trash,” I say.

  “I thought I’d make a fire,” she says, jerking her head toward the woodpile.

  I switch on the light. Someone has replaced the old yellow bulb with one of those fluorescent, long-lasting things. It casts us in a faint blue glow, illuminating the wall of stacked logs. Together, we start loading wood into a canvas bag. Jessica’s eyes are heavy-lidded, and she seems quieter than usual. “Glad to be here?” I say.

  She looks at me, and there’s something knowing in her look. We share a moment of mute acknowledgment—that heaven, limbo, and hell, like the center of a compass, are all really the same place, depending on how you look at it.

  “I want to ask you something,” she says.

  “Shoot.”

  “Did you ever want to have a child?” She looks hard at me.

  The moment drags out. Something is pressing against my chest, and I can’t make a sound.

  “I mean,” she adds quickly, “another child?”

  One by one, the rocks slide off, and I can breathe again. So many years have gone by, twelve months per year.

  “I’m almost forty,” I say.

  And she, only half my age, says, “I’m thinking about it.”

  I don’t even know what question to ask. I am the one she called when she hadn’t slept in three days because of the drugs. I am the one she almost—almost—tells the truth to, although she rarely speaks the truth at all. Even this—a notion so ridiculous I can’t put words to the possibility—may or may not be true. Ever since she turned fifteen, Jessica has spoken her whims just for the shock value, their impact like a punch to the face. Her own parents are numb from her whims, sometimes acted upon, sometimes not.

  “I thought it’d be, you know, cool.”

  “Cool?” I stare at her incredulously, the word curdling in my mouth. “Do you know what it takes to raise children? Money, for one thing. And patience. And maturity. Oh, and a partner. Have you thought about that?”

  A sudden longing for the clear rightness of my father gives way to feeling provincial and stodgy. I can’t see Jessica’s eyes clearly in the semidarkness, but I can feel her become defensive. “I don’t need a partner.”

  I suppose she doesn’t. Sometimes a partner is a liability. Sometimes it’s better to be on your own. “Easier to get a puppy,” I say as I reach for the canvas bag.

  The sound of a toilet flushing. It is still dark. Sometimes I wake up like this—between two and four in the morning, flooded with anxiety, too late to take a pill. Dana tells me that it will get worse in my forties, that sometimes she doesn’t sleep at all. She worries, she tells me. Constantly. I wonder if soon I, too, will have that hard line between my brows.

  Dana never slept well after they adopted Jessica. First there was the crying in the night, the feedings. Then came the night terrors or Jessica’s climbing into bed because she was lonely or frightened. And during those few years when Jessica did sleep, Dana lay awake, wondering if there would be intruders. Or a fire. Or an earthquake. For the last few years, Jessica has been going to raves, staying out all night. We had all hoped that when Jessica left for college, Dana would sleep, but she lies awake nonetheless, wearing her vigilance like a straitjacket.

  Compared to Dana, I sleep like a baby. Me, whose own child stopped breathing for no reason at all. Perhaps I sleep because I find Sadie in my dreams and, for a moment, it comforts me.

  I wonder if it was Dana who flushed the toilet. Maybe I should go to her door, whisper her name. I will tell her about my life, make her listen. I will say, Do you know your twenty-year-old daughter is thinking about having a child? Dana will become a grandmother through adoption or artificial insemination or because of some obliging male. And then it will start all over again—a new heartbeat to fret over.

  How different it is for Jessica. My mother and my aunts were not yet twenty when they met the men who were to be their guidin
g forces for the next forty or fifty years. That’s what college was for—to meet your husband. And from my aunts and mother, life asked the following: go forth and be fruitful; and when you are done, hire a nurse. Go on thereafter to acquire jewelry, redecorate, join the garden club. Should you have problems along the way—say a hot flash, a pill problem, a philandering husband, breast cancer—treat it lightly and without care. Too much emphasis can make those bogeys real, and it’s best to affect a fey sort of detachment, even if your children bring it up. Especially if your children bring it up. Eventually, your husband will be dead, and you’ll have at least ten good years of doing whatever you damn well please while maintaining the myth of marriage and motherhood. Try not to drink too much.

  Those of us who grew up in the sixties and seventies seldom dated. We went around in groups or met in coffee shops to debate Zionism and apartheid, the Pill vs. the IUD, the poetry of Leonard Cohen vs. that of Dylan (Bob or Thomas, depending). If we met someone decent like Jamie, we were suspicious. We would find ourselves in our thirties, the sun showing itself in lines around our eyes, often childless, often husbandless, but for the lucky ones, well employed.

  I wish I had a kaleidoscope so I could take all the pieces of my mother’s life, the pieces of mine, throw the shards together, find a pretty pattern that I could hold up to Jessica and say, Here, this is how you do it.

  Someone is standing in my doorway.

  “Hey, cuz,” he says.

  “Sedgie?” My voice is bleary. I ask him what time it is, if he found the wagon. Feeling for my glasses, I come across the scattered pages of my great-grandmother’s letters strewn across my bedspread.

  “You forgot the Stoli.”

  I half sit up. From the look of him lurching in the doorway, it seems he found it anyway. Sedgie is here, and soon they will all be coming—the cousins—and the house will start to awaken. It will yawn, groan, stretch its bones. Like a transfusion, the family will invigorate it. Consanguinity. The ties of blood.