Good Family

by Terry Gamble

  Standing next to Jessica scrubbing potatoes at the sink, I am overcome with that midsummer sanguinity born of good food and fresh air, the sting of the day’s sun, and lots of noisy company. In spite of myself, I feel almost happy.

  “So,” I say to Jessica, who is brown as chocolate, “do you really think you’re ready for a kid? They puke and poop and keep you up all night. Worst of all,” I say, “they’ll turn out just like you.” I say this with affection.

  Jessica is up to her wrists in blueberries as she mixes them with sugar. “Mine will be different.”

  We all think we’re different—that the fruits of our labors or our loins are in some way exempt from the banality of other people’s reality. We think that we can produce something loftier, transcendent. No pettiness in our marriages. No shallowness in our kinder. Our work will have impact and meaning.

  Jessica licks at her fingers, leaving a cockeyed mustache of blueberry above her lips. At moments like this, she looks vulnerable. Even the tattoos and the piercings and the unlikely colored hair seem more childlike than menacing. I spit on the towel and make a move toward her face.

  “Yuck,” she says. “My mother used to do that.”

  “You and your mother,” I say. “When are you going to give her a break?”

  “When are you?”

  “Fine, fine, fine.” We stare each other down.

  “It’s different now,” says Jessica, the first to shrug. “It’s just that…when I was a kid, I felt like I, you know, belonged. Like all those marks on the dining-room wall had something to do with me. I thought I could trace my ancestors back through those names to grandfathers and great-grandfathers and great-greats.”

  “Well, you can. Sort of.” I eye her, thinking about the significance of those gouged feet and inches, the Faustian bargains we made when we signed on the dotted line. “Your mark’s up there. You’re stuck with us. Besides”—I give her a meaningful stare—“your parents got to choose you. The rest of us were just the luck of the draw.”

  Philip, just up from the dock, pokes his head in the kitchen. “Everything under control?” he says in a jovial sailor’s voice before disappearing, presumably to my grandfather’s former office, commandeered by Philip, whose sole client is a very old, very rich woman in Pasadena.

  Under her breath, Jessica says, “Dad will of course kill me.”

  “That’s the difference between our fathers,” I say. “I always thought everything I did was going to kill him.”

  Jessica finds this funny, but it occurs to me as if in a revelation that my father is really, truly dead, and that nothing I do now can affect him. I feel both bereft and liberated. No one to assess my progress or flinch at my failures. Drying my hands on a dishtowel, I consider the ramifications.

  Ian,” I say, fingering the photograph of my grandfather hanging over the phone table. “What would you say about me having a baby?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  It is six o’clock in New York, same as here. Ian has just woken up from a nap. Tonight, he will go to an art opening and, later, meet up with the musician from Hoboken we befriended while filming him. His evening sounds foreign, illicit even. Here, Dana is organizing a game of charades after dinner.

  “I’m not old,” I tell him, my eyes grazing a picture of Dana and me on our mother’s lap.

  There is a pause at the end of the line. I picture Ian in his boxers, the ones his friend gave him printed with lipstick kisses, sitting at the edge of his Philippe Starck bed, his face scrunched up the way he does when he’s considering a proper edit. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  Ian isn’t a prude, exactly, but he’s old-fashioned. He believes in the convention of marriage, if not necessarily a heterosexual one. He believes children should call adults Mr. and Mrs. unless invited to do otherwise. He believes, with the fastidiousness of a penitent, in washing your hands each time after peeing and wearing shoes to dinner. “Ian,” I say, “have you ever thought of having children?”

  His answer comes quickly, almost urgently. “Okay, so you are losing your mind. It’s not healthy for you, Maddie, to be there alone. This line of thinking, for instance.”

  “I’m not crazy. Don’t tell me I’m crazy.”

  “Listen to me. It’s the place.” He stops. I can hear the sound of drawers being opened and shut. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. I want you to call the airline tomorrow. I want you to get a ticket.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “Get a ticket, Maddie.”

  Sedgie is moving through the house, clanging a large triangle we use to call everyone to meals. Behind him, Jessica, looking like Helen of Troy bearing the fruits of war, carries a platter steaming with lamb and potatoes. Everyone gathers in the dining room, oohing and aahing over Sedgie’s fare. Whatever Ian says is drowned out by the din. I cup my mouth to the phone and tell him I have to go.

  Sedgie takes a sip of his drink. “So, Derek, when’s Yvonne coming?”

  “Yvonne never comes, Sedge. You know that.”

  “I thought with the family and all.” Sedgie stabs a potato with his fork and misses, sending the potato across the table. “Whoops,” he says.

  The first time I met Yvonne was just before she and Derek were married. She had been his model at Yale, and he followed her to France, bringing her back almost like an offering or as evidence that his life was continuing elsewhere.

  “Perhaps she finds us odd,” I say, feeling a budding rekindling of my old allegiance to Derek. “What do you think, Philip?”

  Philip gives me an appraising look from beneath black brows. “Nothing that the rest of us can’t handle,” he says, although no one points out that he’s the only in-law left among us.

  Dana, I notice, seems edgy. When she again suggests charades after dinner, everyone protests, but Sedgie comes to her aid by insisting it’s a wonderful idea. Looking gratefully at Sedgie, Dana takes a sip of wine, turns to Beowulf, and asks him about school.

  “School,” says Beowulf, “is a temporal sop to the sublime.”

  Dana has told me that Beo is going to join a rock band if his composing doesn’t work out. I notice he is eating with his fingers. Jessica’s eyes are fixed on him. The various colored clips in the form of butterflies dotting her hair give the effect of a tangled, albino bush upon which insects have landed.

  Beowulf turns to me. His ponytail has come loose. Beneath his lower lip is a little patch of facial hair I have an urge to wipe off. He says, “I saw that piece you did about Bene Sadah. It was really fine.”

  The ten-minute clip on the musician in Hoboken. “You’re kidding,” I say. It never occurs to me that my family would actually see any of the films or segments Ian and I produce.

  “Who’s Bene Sadah?” says Philip.

  In a patient voice, Beowulf says, “An awesome syntho-fuguist.”

  “That sounds obscene,” says Dana.

  “Bene Sadah, Bene Sadah,” says Sedgie dreamily, tapping his pointer fingers together in anticipation of charades. “Two words. Second word…sounds like…We could act out sodomy. That would be fun.”

  “I want Sedgie on my team for charades,” says Jessica, her eyes dancing, the butterflies threatening flight.

  Having Sedgie on our team turns out to be less of a boon than expected. By the time the dishes are done, he is tanked. He stretches out on the floor, proceeds to fall asleep. Stepping over him, I curl up in a corner of the couch. Beowulf has drifted to the piano and has begun to play, while Jessica is busy shredding paper and tossing the pieces into two bowls, one for each team—Dana, Jessica, Sedgie the unconscious, and me on one, Beowulf, Philip, and Derek on the other.

  Hand over hand, Beowulf strikes an eerie progression of notes. The day that started out so vividly blue has shifted suddenly as an evening storm blows in. Michigan weather is like that. If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes is the tired old joke. Already we can hear the sound of distant thunder as Beowulf ’s hands come down hard on the first few
chords of the Appassionata.

  It’s in our genetic code, this playing of charades. We know all the gestures describing movies or quotations or plays or songs or books. We could do it in our sleep, as Sedgie will demonstrate. We write on our slips of paper, huddled conspiratorially, gloating with shared sadism as we plot to stump and baffle.

  “How about Titanic?” says Dana.

  “Too easy,” I say.

  “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch?” says Jessica. “In Watermelon Sugar the Deeds Are Done and Done Again as My Life Is Done in Watermelon Sugar?”

  “Oranges,” I say. “Everyone knows the Brautigan.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” Dana says.

  Sedgie gives a loud snore.

  We go first. Jessica bravely crosses the living room and plucks a piece of paper from the basket Philip thrusts at her. Her brows knit together, then I see a tiny smile form upon her lips. Clock starts. Jessica cups her left hand around her eye, makes circular motions with the right.

  Film!

  Soon she is on all fours, prancing around like a dog, lifting her leg on a chair. She is a dog. Reservoir Dogs! Straw Dogs!

  No! Dog is the first word of…three words. Second word, little word. A…the…at…to…in…IN!

  Dogs in…

  Dogs in…heaven?

  “Dogs in Space!” I shout out, jumping up, and Jessica shrieks and hugs me. We are brilliant; we are staggeringly awesome.

  “Dogs in…space?” repeats Dana, mystified.

  I glance at Beowulf, who looks gratified. “That is so obscure,” he says.

  “Australian punk band,” I explain to Dana, while Jessica hoots, saying, “Oh, man, I never thought they’d get that!” Except for Sedgie, our team high-fives all around.

  Now it is their turn. Philip steps forward and draws a slip. We all peer at it while he mulls his strategy for The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory.

  “No problem,” he says under his breath.

  Even I have to admit Philip is good. In a whirlwind of acting out book, thirteen words, elephant (forming a trunk), universe (like sky, but big, bigger, biggest), I think of Mother upstairs, our hilarity percolating up, intruding upon her peace. She, who sat staring out of windows for years before her stroke, can no longer avoid the fact of our family.

  Now Philip is acting crazy, going after the word demented for dimensions, but no one gets it, so he moves on to the gesture for sounds like, then fondles his chest to rhyme with quest.

  But Philip’s team stares at him blankly, and finally he throws up his hands in disgust as Jessica calls time.

  “The Elephant’s Universal Lunatic?” Derek ventures, but when Philip tells them, they all cry foul.

  “Bestseller,” I say.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” says Philip, fixing on me. “Now it’s your turn.”

  I get up, stretch, and sashay over. Covering my eyes, I reach in, choose a scrap of paper, unfurl it. Folding the paper back up, I wonder whose suggestion it was. Everyone on the opposing team looks smug. I wheel around and face my team. Jessica’s almond eyes, Dana’s softly out of focus, Sedgie’s shut. I make quotation marks with my fingers and indicate fourteen words. I point at all of us, make a gesture as if gathering us together.

  All of us…family.

  I nod. I think of my mother upstairs. I act out the second word and start to smile inanely.

  Crazy? says Dana.

  I shake my head.

  Happy?

  Yes!

  I act out the seventh and tenth words by mimicking crying, then ponder how to convey the fifth, when Sedgie suddenly stirs, raises his head like a turtle, gapes fuzzily at me, and, holding up a finger, recites, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’” before slumping back into oblivion.

  I yelp while everyone else gawks at the sodden Sedgie. I turn to see Philip’s bemused expression. Evidently, it was his idea to use the Tolstoy. I give a little bow, and wonder why he chose it.

  The evening waltzes on. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Middlemarch. We act out lizard and sisters for Lysistrata. The rain has started falling in big, splatty drops, and Dana says we should cover the porch cushions and close the windows. Already, doors are slamming around the house. Bam, bam! I wonder if Mother is sleeping through this Wagnerian shift in the weather. Everyone dashes to his room to batten down the hatches, when, suddenly, the lights go out.

  Of course, none of the flashlights work. Like blind men, we paw through drawers, groping for batteries. The best we come up with is matches, and soon the house is glowing in a golden combination of votive, beeswax, and birthday candles, while the thunder comes louder and faster. Miriam has shown up in her hairnet and bathrobe, saying that the storm was agitating Mother, but now she is drugged and sleeping.

  “What kind of drugs?” says Beowulf.

  Sedgie stirs like Lazarus from the dead. “A séance!” he announces in a surprisingly sober voice. “Given the Gothic circumstances.” Miriam gives him a long, incriminating look as if he has suggested something illegal. “Come on, Miriam, you’re not afraid of a couple of ghosts?”

  This from Sedgie, of all people.

  “Some things are best left alone,” says Miriam. Her face by candlelight looks sharply planed as she tells us she’s had her share of the spirit world while taking care of the dying. “Why go conjuring?”

  Miriam sweeps out of the room in a penumbra of candlelight, but Sedgie is not to be dissuaded. He insists we all gather in a circle around a cluster of candles on the living-room floor. Philip excuses himself to go down to the beach and check the boats. We all take a deep breath. Except for the sound of the rain and the wind, the house is quiet. Candlelight has honey-coated the room with its cedar walls and shelves crammed with knickknacks and books. In the glow, I can barely make out their spines—The Indian Drum and War and Peace, some obscure novels from the forties, a couple of Agatha Christies, and a dog-eared Harold Robbins. We still have the record player and the cherished albums, though they haven’t been played in years. The bongo drums are new—maybe Derek or Beowulf’s. I close my eyes.

  Someone starts to giggle. Sedgie makes a groaning sound—something borrowed from Macbeth, but Jessica says, Sssh, listen!

  I don’t know if I am expecting the room to fill with light, but there is an unmistakable sense of a new presence.

  “This isn’t funny,” says Jessica.

  “Shhh!”

  A creaking board. The tread of footsteps. A thump. The front door flies open. We scream in unison.

  In the doorway stands a cape-clad figure, starkly silhouetted. Sedgie, his voice no longer bold, says, “Jesus Christ!”

  “Close,” says Adele, throwing back her hood to reveal a shockingly hairless head. “At least,” she says, her billowing cape reminiscent of countless dramatic entrances, “you could have met me at the ferry in this bloody rain.”

  PART TWO

  SEVEN

  My grandmother Bada died in the autumn of 1964. Aunt Eugenia and Uncle Halsey moved into Bada’s bedroom the following summer. Aunt Pat and Uncle Jack took the Schooner Room; my parents were in the Lantern Room. We younger cousins slept in the back bedrooms that had been added, twin beds stuck any place they could fit, bunk beds built into the eaves.

  “I call the single bed in the bunkroom,” said Sedgie, who was the loudest, brashest of the cousins, but everyone knew he was afraid to sleep alone.

  After Bada died, my mother surveyed the living room, cast her eyes on the decomposing ship model on the mantelpiece, and said it was time to brighten the place up.

  “What do you mean, ‘brighten’?” my father asked.

  She slapped the back of the couch, sending up a poof of dust. “I mean some color other than menopause green.”

  After dinner, the grown-ups sat on the porch drinking, smoking, plotting change. We could hear their voices, but not their words. The smell of tobacco crept int
o the living room, a smell unknown in my grandmother’s time. I wondered if the fabric festooning the card room in the tower would come down. The walls were draped like a fortune-teller’s tent with silk damask acquired in Turkey by my great-uncle who had ridden around on a camel. It had been a scandal in the family—not that he brought back the silk (along with several carpets and a hookah), or that he had been in such proximity to WWI without actually fighting in it—but that he’d been in so unseemly and unchristian a country in the first place. To my great-grandmother’s horror, he insisted the silk be used in the summerhouse, and there it continued to drape, a swagged indictment of the family pariah.

  “Louisa,” I said later as she helped me brush my teeth, “what do you think will change?”

  “Oh,” said Louisa in her lilting drawl, “nothing much changes around here.”

  Being the youngest, I was to sleep in the nursery. It was a tiny room in the farthest reaches of the top floor, big enough only for a twin bed, a crib, and a bureau. For the first years of my life, Louisa had slept in the bed, me in the crib. But my mother, feeling it was time for me to sleep alone, decided to promote Louisa from nurse to cook and move her to the help’s quarters beneath the stairs.

  “Sleep with me, Louisa,” I begged. “Just tonight.”

  “Say good night to your mama,” Louisa said sternly, but I could see she was pleased.

  Later, she lay next to me on the narrow bed, talking in her slow sentences about her life in Ohio. She had left two daughters—“love children” she called them—with her own mother when she came to work for my parents in California. “Summer nights in Ohio was heavy cream, baby girl. And you knew God was watching you. You knew ’cause you could see His eyes.”

  “What do God’s eyes look like, Louisa?”

  “Have you ever seen fireflies, child?”

  Soon, Louisa was snoring, and I, too, must have drifted off because I jerked awake to a sound in the room. Thinking it was my mother coming to evict Louisa, I pretended to be asleep, but the room seemed to fill with the scent of lavender. I slowly opened my eyes. The moon-brushed trees pressed against the window in front of which I made out a form bending over the crib.