Good Family

by Terry Gamble

  But this was different. The ground beneath my feet seemed unstable as if the earth had tilted, though no one else seemed to notice. The lights of the city reeled. Somewhere from the middle of the ocean, a tidal wave was heading to the coast.

  “There you are,” said Angus. He found me tottering on the edge of the terrace. Taking my arm, he gently steered me back toward the pool. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “She’s a producer.”

  “I don’t want to meet anyone.”

  Angus stopped, looked me in the eye. He was wearing an ascot and Men’s Wearhouse faux-Brioni. His hair was slicked back, but when he put on his Wayfarers, I started to laugh.

  His mouth twitched. “What?”

  “Angus, it’s dark out.”

  “What are you talking about, Maddie?”

  There was a crescent of white just beneath the edge of his left nostril. I took off my shoe, rubbed my toe where a blister was forming.

  “Where’d you get the cocaine?” I said, alert to a possible reprieve from this purgatory. Angus pretended not to hear me, but behind his Wayfarers, he did the calculations. He knew I was tenuous, knew I could easily shatter. Not that he minded. It was a matter of timing, he told me later.

  “Come meet this producer,” he said evenly, “and I’ll get you the blow.”

  The producer was an edgy, fast-talking woman with short black hair who wasn’t much older than I. She was amazingly thin. Every time she put her hand on my arm, Angus looked eagerly from her to me. I must have smiled convincingly, must have nodded in the right places, because the woman, too, was smiling and talking even faster, stroking me with her hand. I clutched my wine, pretending to study the horizon. When she momentarily turned to signal the waiter for a drink, I hissed at Angus, “Get the coke.”

  Later, we were driving in a huge car with leather sofas. “You’ve got to see this,” the producer was saying. She was amped up about showing us something—her apartment, a movie set—I wasn’t sure. The night was going nowhere in a haze of brake lights and Madonna on the stereo.

  And Angus, nodding, said, “Show us what you got.”

  The situation was cinematically seedy. The crystal decanters, the marquee lighting, the fake pine smell of air freshener. My heart was in my throat, and I wanted to tell the chauffeur to drive faster, faster, back through Arizona, straight through to the heart of the country.

  “Jewish section,” said the producer as we passed the kosher delis and clothes stores along Western Boulevard. “This is where I grew up.”

  Angus smiled benignly. He put his hand on my knee. “Addison grew up around here,” he said. “Tell her, Addison.”

  “Pasadena,” I said dully, staring out the tinted windows, my heart racing from the coke and the bleakness of the landscape.

  “Practically neighbors,” said the producer, her hand caressing my other knee.

  I said nothing, but didn’t remove her hand. I had always thought Angus would make his move—was, in fact, resigned to it, but the tongue that slid up my neck in the back of the limousine wasn’t Angus’s. I closed my eyes. My breath became sharp and shallow. She removed the spaghetti straps of my cocktail dress, nuzzled my chest. My eyes rolled toward Angus, who looked on placidly. I’m drowning, I tried to tell him, longing for his help. He nodded as if he understood, held the coke spoon to my nose, gently pressed one of my nostrils shut. Instantly, Angus looked like my only hope. I inhaled deeply just as the producer grasped me, found me with her lips. Even Angus looked surprised.

  Adele’s here with Guthrada,” Dana was telling me, “and Sedgie’s coming tomorrow.”

  Pacing with the cordless phone, I stared out the window in hope of deciphering the outline of mountains. I had had two hours of sleep, and my brain felt like seared tuna in the noonday sun. “Is she pregnant?” I asked.

  “Huh!” Dana said impatiently. “Adele has ten percent body fat. You know she’ll never get pregnant.” Dana knew all about infertility and the quest for pregnancy, having gone through years of testing. For whatever reason, she and Philip had failed to conceive. “Jamie’s here,” Dana said.

  Oh God, I thought, remembering the back of the limousine. I had extracted myself from the producer, pulled up my dress, said something lame and witless about having been raised in Pasadena. When they dropped me off around 3 A.M., I’d staggered into the guestroom bathroom and thrown up.

  “He’s engaged.”

  Nausea seized me again, but before I could say anything to Dana, there was a clicking on the line. “Wait a minute. I got a call.”

  I depressed the cradle on the wall phone.

  “Addison? You hungry?”

  “I’m not talking to you.”

  “Listen, I’ve got someone here who—”

  I punched the cradle again and got Dana on the line. “What do you mean, ‘engaged’?”

  Dana cleared her throat. “Aunt Pat said they’re taking the tiara out of the vault.”

  “We-ll…it could be for one of his cousins?” I said hopefully.

  “He’s here with a woman, Maddie.”

  Click, click, click. “Hang on.” I took a long, deep breath. “Angus, what do you want?”

  “Hellooo?” said Dana, perplexed.

  “Damn.” I depressed the cradle with my thumb, held it down an extra second, then put the receiver cautiously to my ear. “Angus?”

  “I’m coming over,” said Angus.

  “No, you’re not.” But Angus had hung up. Again, I punched the cradle. “Dana, can I call you back?”

  I could hear muffled voices, then my mother’s voice saying, She’s being ridiculous. Tell her to come. “Maybe Mom can tell me that herself.”

  Again, the muffled voices, and my mother got on the line. “Maddie? Your father would love it if you’d come.”

  I wondered what my father would say about that pretty little scene last night. I started to tell my mother that I was in trouble, that I was overwhelmed. What was I doing in California? I wanted to tell her that the world had provided me with too many choices in no apparent order. But before I could say, I’m drowning, the incessant click of call waiting began again.

  “You’d better answer that,” my mother said.

  Honestly, Addison, I had no idea.”

  Angus had appeared as promised, and now we were seated beside Dana and Philip’s pool on chaise longues, drinking Bloody Marys. He seemed suspiciously perky given the amount of drugs and alcohol we’d consumed the night before.

  “Seriously,” he went on, “I thought she was interested in me.”

  “No, you didn’t.” It was three in the afternoon but, as my mother would say, it had to be five o’clock somewhere.

  “I was quivering, Addison. Lit-rally quivering.”

  I sipped my Bloody Mary. My headache was subsiding by fractions. Hair of the dog, Angus had said as he marched through the door of Dana and Philip’s house, helped himself to their liquor cabinet.

  I wanted Angus to go away, but he continued to babble. “I know she’ll call you. I know it—”

  “I just want to forget about it—”

  “You can put it on your résumé. ‘Felt up by famous producer.’”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  Angus looked at me and smiled. I was beginning to recognize that particular smile—a combination of pity and complicity. “I wish I’d had a camera.”

  “Oh, please.”

  Angus sipped. His hair was slicked back as if he’d just washed it. “You’re not really into sex, are you?”

  “Spare me your boarding-school prurience.”

  Angus reached over and touched my stomach. I shifted uncomfortably as his fingers played around my navel like butterflies. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s one of the things I like about you.”

  His fingers continued to move in circular motions. My belly rose and fell. Something creepy was happening in my toes. Angus licked his lips. His fingers slipped benea
th my shirt.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  But he didn’t. He kept stroking until my eyes closed, and I started to feel like I was floating. I had that same sensation I’d had the night before of needing him—the way one needs a life preserver when one is going down. I was terribly sleepy, my eyes like stones, my skin sucked dry by the California sun.

  “I can’t take much more, Addison,” Angus said.

  I waited for him to kiss me, or to get up and take me by the hand, lead me into the house. But he didn’t. He just touched me as if he knew that’s what it took. I wanted to say, You bastard.

  But Angus, his voice thick, his accent even thicker, spoke first. “Marry me, Addison.”

  I yelped with laughter, but when I opened my eyes, I saw he was serious. He wasn’t gorgeous like Jamie, but his eyes were green like Derek’s.

  Ultimately, I didn’t say yes out of audacity or whimsy or even righteous conviction. I was a child running through a train station, searching for sanctuary in my father’s hand. Angus was rubbing my stomach, and I, soothed by vodka and the feel of his touch, suddenly longed for him as if he was my salvation. He seemed to understand. If Angus wasn’t exactly like the boys I’d grown up with, he was a damn good imitation—down to the pinkie ring on his left hand. He was familiar, and his familiarity promised safety. So when I said maybe, which Angus took as saying yes, yes, yes, I virtually climbed into a car and set off down a highway with him driving, pedal to the metal, our speed approaching ninety as we hurtled toward a nonnegotiable curve.

  FIFTEEN

  Ultimately, Angus did make his move, and I did let him touch me. There was a delicious, toothachy inevitability about it all. Within a week, he was staying with me at Dana’s house. By August, we were engaged. “We’re a team, Addison,” Angus said before we made the call to my parents. “We drive our own train.”

  I had the phone in my hand. It wasn’t as if I had to marry him. But the possibility of choices eluded me—partly because of my drinking, partly because of Jamie’s engagement, partly because, to my horror, I exhibited a degree of fertility unknown to my sister and Adele.

  “Anyone who wants to can climb aboard. If they don’t, we’ll just pass them by,” Angus went on, expanding the metaphor. I had no idea what he was talking about, but it was not an altogether unpleasant image. I had never thought of myself as a driver of trains, a passer of others. Angus seemed confident and assured, absolutely certain he knew what was right. As far as he was concerned, the deal was sealed. He took a can of nuts from Dana’s pantry, popped it open while I dialed the Aerie in Michigan.

  Chewing on cashews, Angus said, “Tell them it’s a synergistic marriage of artistic intention.”

  The phone on the other end was ringing. No one was picking up. I could imagine the empty house abandoned for the lake.

  “Tell them,” Angus went on, “I’ll support you in the manner to which you’re accustomed.”

  A click. A voice on the other end. “Addison residence.”

  “Louisa? It’s me, Maddie.”

  “Ooohhh, Miss Maddie. What’s wrong now?”

  It wasn’t the greeting I’d hoped for. “Louisa, is my mother there?”

  “No one’s here, child.”

  “Dana?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  Angus went on. “Tell them we can all be there by Labor Day.”

  “Louisa, look. They’ve got to call me at Dana’s. I need to speak to them.”

  Silence at the other end. Then: “Girl, you sound strange.”

  Knowing there was little hope in putting something over on Louisa, I whispered loudly into the phone, “I’m getting married.”

  Louisa made some kind of “Oh!” that could either have been joy or agitation. She dropped the receiver. I heard rapid footsteps and, in the distance, Louisa shouting someone’s name. Minutes seemed to pass. Then Dana picked up the phone. “Maddie?”

  I took a deep breath. “Dane—you know that guy who dropped me off at your house in June?”

  “Louisa just told me you’re getting married.”

  “Tell her,” said Angus, “we’ll get the ring later.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said.

  “The guy with the accent?”

  I braced myself for one of my family’s pronouncements about my choice of partners. “His name is Angus.”

  “Who is he?”

  I found myself reciting Angus’s story of the confiscated farm, the dreary boarding school, the long-dead father.

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Years,” I said, though the first time I’d ever talked to him was maybe eight months earlier.

  Pause. “Are you pregnant?”

  I was stunned. Put so baldly, the fact of my pregnancy took on a new lucidity. I felt my future crystallizing out of germination, mitosis, the replication and differentiation of cells.

  Dana was breathing heavily. “When?”

  “Um,” I said, “Labor Day. We thought the end of summer would be good. Everyone will still be in Sand Isle.”

  “No. When’s the baby due?”

  I did the math and, with reluctance, said, “April, I guess.”

  “So you’re not showing?”

  “I’ve barely missed my period.”

  Dana didn’t laugh. She was all business. “Don’t tell Dad.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said.

  We went to Sand Isle in the middle of August. My parents seemed rather taken with Angus. I, on the other hand, felt sucked into a vortex from which I couldn’t emerge. My father, who had never been to Africa, pressed Angus for details. Angus was quite a storyteller, weaving images that would have impressed Dinesen about the blood-red African sky. My mother sipped her drink, laughed at Angus’s jokes, seemed particularly pleased that he, in turn, laughed at hers.

  “So,” she said, turning her attention to me. I noticed that, for the first time, she hadn’t come up with a derogatory name for my boyfriend. “Bridesmaids?”

  I hadn’t thought about it. I was feeling nauseated most of the time. My listlessness seemed epic. I stared back at my mother in dumb, addled silence.

  “Dana, of course,” my mother went on. “And Adele. Don’t you have any college friends?”

  “I’ve got plenty of friends,” said Angus, who doubted my ability to produce a guest list. His mother would be appearing. An old friend from boarding school would be his best man. Derek was living in France, and Edward was institutionalized. But Sedgie would be an usher. Hurried phone calls, the stamping of envelopes, the frantic perusal of catalogs. My mother and Aunt Pat would separate the worthy wedding gifts from the “shovundas” that were to be returned or given away. It would all come together in a blur of fabric swatches and the sickeningly sweet smell of lilies.

  Three weeks later, I was standing in the bathroom, dressed in my great-grandmother’s antique lace. There were no full-length mirrors in the Aerie—a legacy of our Protestant aversion to vanity—so I stood on the toilet to catch a glimpse of the total effect in the medicine cabinet. The effect was not good. I looked undercooked, the depravity of June having spilled into July before it was preempted by morning sickness and a marked absence of vitality. My eyes were holes; my collarbones protruded; my skin looked sallow and prematurely old.

  “Will you hold still?” said Dana. She was trying to cinch in the sash of the dress we’d rescued from the costume box. Ringlets and a parasol would have completed the picture, but my hair hung drably, in spite of my mother’s efforts to tease it into something more buoyant.

  Dana was dressed in peach moiré, as was Adele. Neither of them looked delighted. Adele had been married for six years to a holistic shaman who went by the name Guthrada, and was trying desperately to have a baby. Lack of body fat, Dana insisted, but here I was, as skinny as Adele, yet indisputably with child—a fact I had shared with no one but Dana.

  “I’m going to puke.”

  “Don’t you dare, Maddie. Don’t
you dare!” Dana’s eyes glared ominously as if to say, Haven’t you caused enough problems? Words from my mother’s mouth. Words from Aunt Pat. Dana grasped my sash so tight, I thought she would never let go. She would walk me down to the croquet lawn at the yacht club, see that I didn’t pass out from nausea or heat or from being utterly overwhelmed by my situation.

  “Nerves,” pronounced Adele. And then nodding as if the reason was obvious, added, “Your mother-in-law.”

  Aunt Pat had been looking smug ever since the arrival of Angus’s mother, whose appearance and demeanor cast into doubt the authenticity of Angus’s story about the farm. All the English have bad teeth, my mother said. Besides, she’s a widow—as if this explained the state of her clothes. But when Aunt Pat inquired about her deceased husband, Mrs. Farley was taken aback. “Passed away, you say? More’s the pity.”

  Later, Aunt Pat had remarked that Mrs. Farley was very “interesting.”

  “Not very evolved,” said Adele, examining her cat’s eyes in the mirror. Adele was reveling in the recent assertion by a channeler that she was the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. It boded well for Adele’s karma—the one fly in the ointment being her inability thus far to produce a child. Within a year, Adele would find more flies in the ointment in the revelation of Guthrada’s mistress, but in that summer of 1986, she felt her course was set.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. Dana glared at me, but I wanted to see Adele knocked down a peg for that comment about Angus’s mother, who, in spite of her dreary clothes and bad teeth, I rather liked. Adele’s smile didn’t drop, but I heard the quick intake of breath, saw the flicker of an eyelid, and knew I had hit my mark.

  Adance floor had been laid out on the croquet lawn, tiny lanterns strung overhead. The wedding was late in the day, the shadows long and heralding autumn. Once—many summers before—my mother, Dana, and I had stayed through Labor Day after Dana and I had come down with chicken pox. We had watched the other families on Sand Isle leave, watched Harbor Town empty of summer people while the lake turned from blue to green. For a week, the Aerie and the island became our own private universe. My mother taught us how to play spit and bathed us in calamine lotion. To this day, Dana bears a scar just below her ear.