Good Family

by Terry Gamble

  “I’m shit-faced,” says Sedgie. “Where’s my room?”

  Sighing, I gather the letters together, stack them on the bedside table, and rise. The dull ache of sleeplessness and anticipation presses against my eyes as I lead my cousin down the hall, show him where to sleep.

  It is midmorning, and Sedgie hasn’t risen. Jessica and I have pulled out bowls, softened butter, and are now cracking eggs in an attempt to resurrect Louisa’s perfect tollhouse cookies. The kitchen is filled with golden light, sifting through the forest like brown sugar. Miriam wanders in and pops a Snapple, telling us that Mother has had a hard night, and our cackling would wake the dead.

  After Miriam leaves, Jessica stares at the breakfast dishes that Miriam hasn’t so much as looked at. “Doesn’t she help around here?”

  In a whisper, I tell Jessica that Miriam is a nurse, and that when Dana hired her, Miriam made it very clear that her duties were limited to caring for our mother. No cleaning. No cooking. Don’t bother to ask. Instead, we wait on Miriam the way we would a high priestess who cares for our temple and speaks directly to God—in this case, Mother, with whom our communication has ceased. It is Miriam who tells us if Mother’s had a difficult night, if her bowels are congested, if she is peaceful or restless, happy or sad. Like a reader of omens and tea leaves, Miriam has the sight.

  Jessica thinks this over, scoops a handful of chocolate chips into her mouth. Both of us, in our addicted way, are hitting the chocolate. Less than three days, and I can feel my body swelling. Mayonnaise and chips. Butter.

  The phone rings in the dining room. I wait for Dana to pounce on it. Finally, on the sixth ring, I rise.

  “What…is going on?” says Ian on the other end after I pick up.

  “Oh, it’s you.”

  “You said you would call. Who’s there?”

  “Sedgie,” I whisper, cupping the phone to muffle my voice.

  “The movie star? How’s he look?”

  In point of fact, Sedgie has only been in one movie, in which he was cast as the long-suffering husband of a bipolar Amish woman whose manic break sent her running to the streets of New York. Sedgie’s big scene was when he climbed onto his buggy, stalwartly declaring he was going to retrieve her, but before he could even pull onto the Pennsylvania turnpike, a storm kicked up, wetting the roads, making it impossible to see—especially in a broad-brimmed hat—and Sedgie, buggy and all, ended up in the ditch. It seems like a sad and not far-fetched metaphor for Sedgie’s life.

  “He’s still asleep,” I say. “No, wait. I hear him.”

  Sedgie, stubble-cheeked and dressed in his boxers, stumbles down the stairs and past me into the butler’s pantry, where he starts fishing around for a coffee cup. He is wearing sunglasses, and the way he paws through the china gives him the appearance of a blind man trying to find his way.

  “Christ,” says Sedgie, picking up and putting down one chipped cup after another. He reaches to the farthest shelf, finds what he is looking for, blows in it to get the dust out, and staggers to the coffeepot. Armed with coffee, he makes his way back to the dining-room table. I watch him, trying not to laugh. He takes a gulp, makes a face.

  “It’s two hours old,” I hiss from the phone desk, pantomiming gagging.

  “What?” says Ian.

  “I was talking to Sedgie.”

  “So how does he look?”

  Ian, who’s had a little crush on Sedgie ever since the Amish movie, maintains Sedgie has Harrison Ford potential. I can’t quite see it, especially this morning with the bed head and the beer belly and the white, freckly skin that only comes out at night.

  “He has sunglasses on,” I say in the hushed tone of a mourner.

  Sedgie must have noticed my whispering because he suddenly bellows out, “Who the fuck died?”

  I tell Ian I have to go.

  “Mother has had a hard night,” I tell Sedgie in a calm, steady voice. He screws up his eyes at his cup. I recognize that cup from our childhood, one of the six our grandmother painted by hand. I thought they all had broken over the years, but here is Sedgie’s still intact, his name in red cursive on the side.

  “Where the hell am I?” He looks around the dining room, mutters something about culture shock. I remind him he only came from Poughkeepsie, which isn’t exactly a cultural hub, but I know what he means.

  “It’s all relative,” I say.

  “Relative-zzz,” says Sedgie. Then—as if it just occurred to him—he blinks at me. “Maddie,” he says, “MaddieAddieUnderpants. When was the last time you were here?”

  It still makes me flinch—how Sedgie had found my underwear I’d stuck in the trash after I’d peed during a game of Sardines. He’d strutted around with them on his head, a towel trailing down his back, proclaiming himself “Lawrence of Sand Isle.”

  Dodging the question, I go on the offensive. “So, how’s the divorce?”

  Sedgie’s eyes, bloodshot, pale, gaze back at mine over the rim of his childhood cup. His forlorn expression seems to say, I am Sedgie Hadley, the only son of Jack Hadley and Patricia Addison. I was supposed to be a lawyer, a doctor, a banker, anything but an actor, but here I am—a semiemployed, quasi thespian, burned out, wasted, going through my second divorce.

  His expression says (or I think it does) that nothing prepared him for this, that his Andover yearbook’s prediction of success along with all that was promised by halcyon summers spent on Sand Isle have come to naught, that his childhood fear of the dark was, in fact, prescient, and that no matter how much vodka he drank, women he went with, coke he stuck up his nose, life has proven to remain scary after all.

  “She’s taking me to the cleaners,” he says dolefully.

  Even Ian predicted it. I remember my lawyer saying years ago that I had to give my ex-husband money, and though I countered that we’d been married less than two years, my lawyer said, But you have all the cookies. It was a strange and offensive concept to me—that someone could pry off part of you and claim it for himself.

  What does it mean to you, this money? Dr. Anke once asked.

  I laughed flippantly. Oh, you know, groceries, rent.

  But her eyes bored into mine, and she said, But you have much more money than that, don’t you? Rent and groceries aren’t the concern.

  But they are, I thought. They are if you’re not sure you could do it on your own, if your only stabs at employment have been acceptable jobs like babysitting or wrapping presents at Christmas. And what does it mean to have someone go after you like that, demanding restitution, as it were? How do we get our restitution—we who hold all the cookies? How do we get compensated for that sly comment about cows when we were pregnant, or for the slap to our face when he called us an ungrateful bitch? Where’s our remittance for the time spent apologizing for the way we looked, for the way we acted, for the friends we chose (or didn’t)? If we have all the cookies, our only choice is to give them away. People rush into our lives like tides stripping a beach of its sand. It’s the way the world works. We can make no other contract. Maybe Jessica has it right, doing it all on her own.

  I gaze back at Sedgie, wondering if he noticed the sunflowers I put in the splatter-glaze vase by his bed. His once-red hair is dulling to gray. Hadn’t he realized I peed in those pants? I touch his hand, but he flinches. I want to tell him he’s worth more than this, that he deserves better, but at this moment, with his reddened eyes, the chipped cup in his grip, Lawrence of Sand Isle looks like a derelict, as resourceless as a bum.

  FIVE

  My mother, it seems, has thrown nothing out. Miriam has told me to fetch a bed jacket, and now I am entranced by an archive of my mother’s fashion life. Looking at the remains of her wardrobe, I remember the time, dressed in an evening gown, she walked straight into the lake. She was wearing peach chiffon.

  That particular dress is now Permasealed in a Saks Fifth Avenue bag, wedged between a Lanz of Salsburg bathrobe and a shift patterned with flowers of shocking pink. I pull down a powder-blue jacke
t of quilted satin and return to my mother’s bedside. Ever since we have taken her off the majority of her meds, she has seemed less agitated. It’s not the morphine, which Miriam administers in moderation, careful not to overmedicate. This new serenity seems to be related to us ceasing any attempts to get her well. She can now relax into her invalidism. She can languish unmolested. For a moment, I envy her.

  “Mom,” I say, “we’re going to dress you up a little. The cousins are starting to arrive. They’ll want to see you.”

  Her eye darts to mine, and I read trepidation. Ambivalence, certainly. Leave me in peace, she seems to say.

  “Mom,” I persevere, “you know you like to look good.”

  She cannot deny it. In years past, she’d have gone to her grave dressed for the Queen, but the stroke has made grooming, much less dressing becomingly, nearly impossible. Miriam gives her a comb-out every day, washes her hair once a week in a bowl. But sponge baths and adult diapers are hardly the stuff of an extravagant toilet.

  I lift her hand, feel the bas-relief of veins, the knobby fingers once adorned with red nails and beautiful rings. Miriam raises her from the pillow, and I thread her arm through a sleeve, arrange the jacket behind her. Miriam does the same with the other arm. Delicately, I tie the bow beneath my mother’s chin. She smells of baby powder and looks almost pretty now—her pale blue eye alert. Dr. Mead has explained the physiology of the stroke by analogizing the death of oxygen-starved cells to a movie screen gone blank.

  You mean she can’t move her left side because it’s paralyzed?

  No, answered Dr. Mead. Your mother can’t move her left side because, as far as she’s concerned, it simply isn’t there.

  Miriam and I prop Mother up. I set her hands in her lap. “Lovely,” I say, though my enthusiasm is met with silence.

  Miriam beams at me across my mother. “Sometimes I dress her up nice. Put on her jewels. You like wearing your things, don’t you, Evelyn?”

  She should, I think. She’s earned every one of them.

  “Her circle pin, for instance,” Miriam goes on. “Perks her right up.”

  “So why don’t we put on some of her jewelry?”

  Miriam smiles more than a little conspiratorially this time. Crossing the room to my mother’s underwear drawer, she returns with a white satin box engraved with the initials EPA. After our mother had her stroke, Dana put the better pieces in the safety-deposit box, but there are still a few pins, her sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring, her scarab bracelet, some strands of pearls, the thin band from Tiffany our father gave her for their fortieth anniversary.

  “And look at this,” says Miriam, pulling out a gold signet ring engraved with a winged lion.

  “A griffin,” I say.

  “She told me it was her college ring.”

  My mother appears to be half smiling. She went to college for a year during the war before telling her father that it was a waste of money, that there was a war going on, and that she was going to get married anyway. She dropped out at nineteen, was married the following year.

  “She loved art history,” Miriam says fondly. “Monet just sent her.”

  I look from my mother to Miriam and wonder when they had this conversation. My mother never told me she studied art history. As far as I knew, the zenith of her college career was being the queen of the May festival.

  “What else?” I say to Miriam.

  “Music,” says Miriam with a nod. “She said she got more out of her music-appreciation class in one semester than in ten years of studying piano.”

  I gape at this. I had absolutely no idea. “She hardly ever played.”

  Now it’s Miriam’s turn to stare. “That upright downstairs? Didn’t she ever play it for you?”

  “Heart and Soul,’” I shrug, remembering the way her nails clicked and scratched the wood behind the keys. “Chopsticks.’”

  “No, ma’am,” says Miriam. “Your mother studied Mozart.”

  My God,” says Dana, finding Miriam and me in our mother’s clothes and jewelry—me in a Pierre Deux jacket turned up at the cuffs, Miriam in the pink flowered print. Mother, herself, is dressed in the peach chiffon, diamond circle pin at her throat.

  “We were having a bit of a drag fest.”

  I can tell from her expression that the three of us must look like refugees from a yard sale. Miriam, who’s on the heavy side, can’t zip up the shift, but the pink of the flowers offsets her skin in a way my mother’s pallor never did.

  “You remember this dress, Dane?” I say, fondling the silky peach of Mother’s sleeves. “Remember when she went swimming?”

  “Your wedding,” Dana says, her mouth puckering as if she’s just eaten something sour.

  I nod, remembering the way our mother had headed toward the lake at the end of the reception on the yacht-club lawn. It was Labor Day, ninety percent humidity and ninety degrees in the shade. The toasts had been made, I was a married woman, slightly nauseated, and my husband had disappeared with his best man. There was an abrupt, awkward pause after the band took a break. The light from lanterns strung across the dance floor lit up the lake, and my mother, drink in hand, suddenly turned and walked into the water, her peach dress billowing around her like a gossamer jellyfish. Soon, everyone followed her. In ones and twos, we all ended up swimming.

  “I thought she threw that dress out,” says Dana, suspiciously eyeing our mother as if to say, What else haven’t you told me?

  A queasy, uncomfortable feeling rises in my chest at the subject of my wedding. My marriage—brief and unhappy—was an embarrassment to my family. I had married a liar and an opportunist, but I was worse. An unfit mother; an unfit wife.

  I decide to change the subject. “Look,” I say, holding out Mother’s hand. “Mom’s college ring.” Dana’s mouth is set in a thin line, her eyebrow still raised at Miriam’s and my invasion of Mother’s closet. “Whatever happened to that boyfriend whose ring you pitched into the lake?”

  “Bruce Digby?” Dana rolls her eyes. I wonder if Dana dwells on Bruce Digby the way I dwell on Jamie. She’s been married to Philip for two decades now and, unlike me, Dana isn’t the type to languish in nostalgia or regret. “That was the worst summer of my life.”

  “I couldn’t believe you did that.”

  She casts me a sideways look. “Did what?”

  Miriam is humming something I discern as “Für Elise.” I pull the lapels of Mother’s Pierre Deux jacket together. It smells of cedar and mothballs. “Pitched his ring.”

  Dana sighs. “It wasn’t the least of it.” Without bothering to elaborate, she turns and leaves the room.

  Maddie?”

  I look up dreamily. I’ve fallen asleep in the hammock, lulled by the madness of Mrs. Rochester, a copy of Jane Eyre gaping beside me. It is as I’ve always imagined—waking up to the solicitously handsome face of a prince who can truly see me, but try as I might to sit up in this web of rope, I can’t make traction and fall stupidly back.

  “Derek?”

  He holds out his hand to brace me. Awkwardly kicking my legs off the hammock, I come to my feet. His eyes—green pools within pools plumbed by observation and contemplation—study mine.

  “Maddie.” He says it so softly, it’s as if he holds a bird. No lover has said my name like this. Not even Jamie. Certainly not my ex-husband, who only used my surname. Derek says it in a way that makes me feel that he has traveled across mountains and deserts to find me, like the source of the Nile. For a moment, I totter, lost in those eyes, and I think, I would follow him anywhere.

  I rouse myself. “I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.”

  “We sped.”

  “We?”

  “Beowulf,” he says, telling me he had his son with him—as if traveling with one’s child was as rare and privileged an experience as being accepted among nomads.

  Derek is not tall. Forty-eight, and his cheekbones are still reminiscent of the exotic masks he collects from Africa and New Guinea. The roug
hness of his hands speaks of his more recent work—the tree carvings chiseled while roped in twenty, thirty feet up (ancestral, totemesque faces peering down at whoever chances through that particular bois ou forêt), the granite stacks constructed in the middle of rivers, painstakingly photographed, left to the elements to wash downstream. “And you?”

  It is an impossible question begging uncharted territory. He won’t accept my usual answer of Fine, fine, fine, so I think of saying, You got about a year?But he’d probably answer yes.

  “Yeah, well,” I say, my eyes drifting upward. “You know about Mother?”

  Not missing a beat, he says, “She’s choosing this, you know.”

  I look skeptical.

  Derek nods. “She wants to be touched, cared for. It’s exactly what we have to do.”

  I feel the same frisson of annoyance as I did with the hospice ladies and their know-it-all manner. “A little extreme. She could have hired a masseuse.”

  Derek cocks his head. Again, those fathomless eyes. When he cups my cheek in his hand, I flinch, but Derek’s hand stays with me. “Haven’t you ever been touched, Maddie? Deeply?”

  This from him. The screeching of crows grows louder. A squirrel runs up the trunk of the oak just off the porch, and the air smells faintly like skunk. “You’re in the Love Nest,” I tell him, hesitating a second before I remove his hand.

  From the kitchen, a burst of laughter. Something is cooking. Not chocolate-chip cookies, but something healthy. Tofu, I think. Broccoli. Following the scent and the laughter, I find Jessica seated at the table, leaning on her elbows, her head inclined toward a young man as ravishing in his own right. The last time I saw Beowulf he was gangly and brooding. I remember Jessica’s allegation about Beowulf’s drug addiction and wonder if it’s true. Dana sent me a CD of some of the songs he’s composed while at Oberlin—track after track of unrequited love. Drugs. Longing. Even the enchanted son of Derek is prone to the most prosaic of despairs.

  Now he reminds me of Edward at that age, although Aunt Eugenia’s darkness is even more exaggerated in her grandson, whose prominent nose and searing smile have more to do with the genes of his French mother than anything Addison. The look he gives me is unfocused, as if he doesn’t quite know who I am. When I kiss him, he looks embarrassed. He also smells faintly of pot. I eye the tofu frying on the cook top. “So what’s so funny?” I ask.