Good Family

by Terry Gamble

  “Why don’t we haul them ourselves?” I cast a look at him. “Oh, come on, Philip. No one will see.”

  But Philip has his own ideas, and Dana usually capitulates. “Why don’t you two hash this out,” Dana says, turning on her heel, “and let me know what you decide.”

  I peer over the edge of the railing and nudge Philip. “Look.”

  Below us, Derek is already hacking at the fallen branches. Squatting, he shoulders an immense birch limb, complete with leaves, and begins to drag it down the path.

  “What the hell—?” says Philip.

  I watch Derek disappear beyond the dunes. For the first time in years, I feel a visceral desire for a drink. Branches and twigs have flattened the sunflowers. The sandy soil has washed over what’s left of the boardwalk. Slowly, the forest is reclaiming us. It will take fortitude and will to beat it back, tame the sands, and wrestle the unruly tendrils into something resembling the summer garden of our great-grandmother. I would have sworn that I’m more drawn to the beauty of wild things, but the crushed, surrendered artifice of Grannie Addie’s garden makes me sad.

  I pour milk onto my cornflakes, listen to plans for canoe rides and tennis, jam sessions in the afternoon. Jessica is going to sing, accompanied by Beowulf. There is a striking musical talent in their generation, and I wonder where it came from.

  Miriam comes out of the kitchen, carrying a tray of Ensure, Snapple, and toast. She draws a bead on Adele as if she still can’t believe what blew in the night before. Clearly, Adele is the result of a séance gone bad.

  Jessica is examining the charms on Adele’s bracelet—a seated Buddha, a jade Ganesh, a Celtic cross, a heart, praying hands, a bug of some sort, possibly a beetle—all having to do with her latest religion. “I love it,” says Jessica, fingering each charm like beads in a rosary. “Love it, love it, love it.”

  “It has nothing to do with anything,” Sedgie says. He has had a long talk with Adele that morning and decided that the whole religion is bogus. Just watch, he told me. They’ll get her dough.

  I thought this was a little rich coming from Sedgie.

  Adele’s eyes settle on Jessica. “Your wrist,” she says, nodding at Jessica’s tattoo. “It’s Celtic?”

  The seduction is beginning. I recognize the signs. Like flies to flypaper.

  “Tell me,” says Adele, mesmerizing Jessica with honeyed attention, “are you drawn to the Celts?”

  Sedgie chimes in from across the table. “She’s a wanton little pagan, Dell.”

  Adele, her eyes not leaving Jessica, says, “There’s nothing wrong with paganism. You just have to know your gods.”

  “Mammon,” says Sedgie. “Now, there’s a god.”

  Adele gives Sedgie a long, cool look. Nothing ruffles her.

  “But you’re probably thinking more of Gaia,” Sedgie persists. “The earth-goddess thing. Or the one with all the arms and tits.”

  “Betty,” I say.

  Sedgie and Adele look at me.

  “My friend Ian calls God ‘Betty.’”

  “Who’s Ian?” says Sedgie, but the spell is broken. Pulling her wrist away, Jessica snorts with laughter.

  The hours of summer days on Sand Isle seep into one another. Meals pass the time. The sun moves overhead, leaves stir, the wind on the lake kicks up. One has the vague impression of morning, and then suddenly it is afternoon. The desultory feeling of a languid Midwestern summer overtakes me, and I meander from room to room. For a while, voices drift up from downstairs—the sweet harmonies of Jessica and Beo. But that sound, too, ebbs, disappears, drifts off to the beach or elsewhere.

  Mother is sleeping. Miriam has rolled her onto her side, and her knees are drawing up, her back rounding as if she is receding into her birth. Her breath is uncannily steady for someone who has smoked for years. If there’s a heaven, she once said, I’ll be able to smoke there. A soft curl of gray hair falls across her forehead, and I tuck it back. Leaning forward, I smell her skin.

  In my mother’s bedroom, as with most of the rooms of the house, there is a little desk fashioned between the wall studs. A pull of the knob, and it opens to reveal slots for mail and pens, scissors, and Post-its. In a drawer are sheets of yellowed paper: Evelyn Petrie Addison, The Aerie, Sand Isle. One-cent stamps from the forties with pictures of Teddy Roosevelt. Stamps from the fifties with soldiers waving a flag. I reach into the drawer, discover a gold thimble, an ashtray with scraps of beach glass, a pearl earring, a lipstick, a miniature bottle of vodka that my mother squirreled away just in case. I can imagine Grannie Addie writing her friends in her beautiful scrawl, describing summer pastimes, the evolution of children. I pull up a chair and sit. Taking an old ballpoint and a sheaf of stationery, I begin a letter to Dr. Anke.

  I don’t agree with what you said about Angus, I write. What was to be gained by marrying him? Certainly not salvation. My father led us down that path of virtue as if there was no other, and yet look what happened to me. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps I wanted to redeem my mother.

  The morning after I married Angus, I knew I had made a mistake.

  It didn’t work, I write. The redemption thing. My mother’s gone downhill twice as fast since my father died. If freedom is what she wanted, she certainly didn’t take to it. If you saw her now, you’d understand. She’s lingering between living and dying. She’s lingered there so long.

  Behind me in her bed, Mother breathes. I chew on the pen. Outside, the sunlight bangs off the water. I think I make out our sailfish sail skittering westward. It’s been years since I sailed, years since my father died.

  Dr. Anke told me she was trying to get me to reconnect with my feelings. She said this the same way my tennis coach used to say, We’re trying to get some spin on that serve of yours. They both made it sound as if my life depended on it.

  Do you remember the story of when I went into treatment? We had lost Sadie, then Angus and I divorced. After Dad died, Mother simply turned away as if it had all been my fault. Do you think it brought home the uncomfortable fact that we all have choices?

  Dr. Anke and I have covered this ground countless times. You break rules in families like ours, and they close ranks. Better to be quietly drunk than flagrantly sober; better to be miserably married than wantonly divorced. The fact of my cousins’ imperfect lives didn’t deter my father from judging his own children. But after he was gone, my mother had a choice. And her choice was harsher than his.

  Mother gives off a sudden, loud snore. Her arm is reed thin. The tendons in her neck protrude like fallen branches beneath the snow. When I was a child, I crawled into her lap, let her enfold me in her smoky perfume, her spangle-covered arms. She would rest her chin on my head, rock me, sing the song about mockingbirds and diamond rings, even when I was too big and my legs touched the floor. I knew who I was then. I knew I was alive.

  I ball up the letter to Dr. Anke, toss it into the wastebasket. In the mirror, I smear some lipstick from the drawer on my lips. Revlon Passion Pink, #421. The effect is eerily incongruous with who I think I am.

  Ifind Miriam in a room off the kitchen. It is a room of projects waiting to happen. There is a bed and a sewing machine. An old, broken rock tumbler sits on a table amid a battlefield of unpolished rocks. In the closet are shoe boxes of photographs to be stuck into albums, framed or pitched out. In an armchair in the corner, bent over a gateleg table sits Miriam, sorting flowers. Between leaves of paper, she is laying down snippets of Queen Anne’s lace. The room is quiet except for a low, rhythmic snore that I identify as coming from the receiving end of a baby monitor that Miriam has clipped, walkie-talkie style, to her lapel. It reminds me that Mother is with us, even as I sit on the old spool bed that groans under my weight.

  “What is it?” says Miriam. She doesn’t look up.

  “Nothing.” I used to go down to Louisa’s room until I was a teenager. At some point, I became aware enough to understand that this was exclusively Louisa’s territory, and although I was tolerated, I was no longer wholehe
artedly welcome. After that, I lost interest anyway, preferring other company to that of our cook. But there was a time when I asked Louisa a million questions—questions about her children (two), questions about where she grew up (Louisville), questions about cooking (you jes’ look at the recipe, child, but nothin’ is rule). She took her tollhouse-cookie recipe with her to the grave, but we’ve made our stabs at it, melting the butter or substituting lard, halving the baking powder, stirring by hand instead of by blender. But Louisa held her magic close, and the memory of her cookies exceeds in virtue those that we have eaten since.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “What does it look like?”

  I can see Miriam’s pressing flowers, but I want to understand why.

  “So I can remember,” she says.

  It seems so Victorian to embody memory in the flattened and parched remnants of flora.

  She says, “Don’t you have any hobbies?”

  I consider telling her how, when I was pregnant, I used to drive aimlessly, waiting for ideas to come. Sometimes a scene would catch my eye, stirring my imagination in such a way that I could envision it on film. “I’m not a hobby person.”

  Miriam places the pages into a viselike contraption and says, “Then what kind of person are you?”

  We got Miriam through an agency. Nothing on her résumé mentioned her tendency toward bluntness. My mother would have liked her—probably does like her. Except that Miriam would never have put up with my father. She would have looked him right in the eye and said, “If you’re so smart, why don’t you run for president?”

  “I tried to knit once,” I say. “Dana taught me.” I remember that pink yarn, the tiny pattern, those four pieces I never sewed together.

  “Why’d you stop?”

  I concentrate on the snoring coming from the monitor clipped to Miriam’s breast. I am struck by the absurdity of my mother’s persistent breathing. It takes me back to a time when I’d ignored the monitor on the kitchen counter while talking on the phone.

  When I was a child, Louisa would fold me into her outstretched arms and tell me I was special, but I can’t fold into Miriam, nor she into me. I want to ask her why she went into nursing, why she cares for the sick, and if along the way she has made her peace with death. I want to ask her what she sees when someone takes his or her last breath. Is it something to be feared or welcomed? Is it no more eventful than finishing a meal? I want to know what Miriam knows, but the moment passes, broken by a halting snore. I can see Miriam’s age in the tender way she lifts to her feet. Her stockings are rolled down, and the pink quilted slippers are crushed at the heel.

  “You should get one,” she says. “A hobby, I mean.”

  Jessica and Beowulf are singing in clear, harmonically perfect voices. Beowulf lies back on the couch, his eyes closed, his fingers occasionally plucking an articulated chord. Mostly, though, they sing a cappella. Their voices blend, swerve, match in mysterious ways—Jessica’s high and singsongy, Beowulf ’s raspy—in a song I recognize from Godspell.

  Where are you going? Where are you going? Can you take me with you?

  It strikes me that they hardly know my mother, that for the last ten years while they were growing up, she was practically a ghost. She’d sit at the table and smoke, mutter something to the help—a different person every summer after Louisa died—push her food around on her plate while all around her swirled random conversation. At least, that’s how I imagine it for the last decade since I’ve been here. The cousins and the cousins’ children must have fled the table as quickly as possible in search of talk and laughter away from the glum gaze of my mother.

  “Would you sing that for Evelyn?” I ask. The request surprises even me. Jessica breaks off and eyes me inscrutably. I wonder what Edward would have made of my niece’s brand of jungle eyes.

  “Mom said we weren’t supposed to bother Grannie Ev,” says Jessica.

  Beo produces a languid chord. “Do you think she’d even know?”

  “Why not?” The proper music nourishes the soul, or so they say. Even plants seem to thrive.

  Now it is almost evening, and the house is filled with unfamiliar smells. Odors as succulent as sautéed onion and garlic, tinged with something even more exotic like ginger and basil that don’t mesh with my memory of Louisa’s cooking. It’s actually Dana’s turn to make dinner tonight, but coming into the kitchen, I hear her laughing with Sedgie and wonder where they found such ingredients when all I could find were dreary lettuce and American cheese. The two of them are standing over the old Magic Chef stove, Sedgie with a dishtowel wrapped turban-style around his head, brandishing a pan and speaking in a dead-on East Indian accent, “You must not bruise the basil like so.”

  “I’m going to pee,” says Dana. Tears are trickling down her face.

  I look at Sedgie, who continues in the melodious accent. “What is one to do, sahib?” I must have done the eyebrow thing because Sedgie suddenly looks exasperated and drops back into his normal baritone. “Oh, Maddie, lighten up for once.”

  I feel affronted. I want to protest that it’s Dana, not me, who’s the serious one. But Dana can’t even catch her breath, and every time she looks at Sedgie, she starts to laugh again.

  “Where’d you get the basil?” I ask.

  “Fabulous basil,” says Sedgie. “Farm stand out the shore.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” I say, my glance falling on a stained, amber-colored bottle with Extra Virgin, Cold Pressed written on the label. “Where’d you get the olive oil?”

  Sedgie looks at me patiently. “From New Yawk, cuz. Sometimes, you’ve got to bring your own.”

  I sniff. It seems a little unseemly, this bringing of one’s own ingredients. We’ve always made do with Crisco and locally grown produce like parsley. Now the table is stocked with an array of tomatoes and lettuces and beets.

  Dana, who seems to have composed herself, says, “We’re making a pasta sauce.” Over the backs of chairs, they have strung long strands of flattened, homemade noodles. Obviously, Sedgie has brought his own kitchen equipment as well. “And check out these tomatoes,” Dana adds. “Heir-loom.”

  Dust motes swim in blades of fading light cast from the venetian blinds. Dana flips on a switch; the fluorescent light pulses on. She holds a cookbook, but Sedgie takes it from her and, in an uncanny imitation of Louisa, says, “You jes’ look at the recipe, but nothin’ is rule.”

  “Dana,” I say abruptly, “what do you think about Jessica and Beo singing to Mother?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. Music.”

  Dana’s eyes narrow. “Is this Adele’s idea?”

  I cross my arms. “Did you know Mother used to play Mozart?”

  Dana has that same suspicious look she had the other day when Miriam and I dressed Mother up.

  “I read the hospice brochures,” I say. “They suggest music to soothe the patient.”

  “What do you mean, she used to play Mozart?”

  I hold up my hands. “Evi-dent-ly, it’s what she told Miriam when she was still talking.”

  Sedgie adds a dollop of red wine. The sauté pan sizzles maniacally. “I remember Evelyn playing the piano when I was a kid.” He yanks the pan, and the onions hop in unison. “I wonder why she stopped.”

  I can imagine all sorts of reasons for stopping. Maybe it was something my grandmother said. Or my father. Or the aunts. Maybe she decided there was no point in going on. There are myriad reasons for walking away from something you love. “Remember how she used to sing ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’?” I say.

  “Dancing,” Dana says, shuddering, “in her bedroom after dinner.”

  “She’d had too many cocktails. Besides,” I say, running the arugula under a faucet, “she was capable of better.”

  Dana warily eyes a cluster of beets. “I hate beets.”

  Sedgie is still dancing around the kitchen like a deranged swami. Already a little drunk, he deglazes the pan w
ith a spatula, then twirls to the sink, where the pots and pans are soaking. Years ago, a vole or a mouse got into the pipes and died. For a week, flies kept swooping out of the drain whenever Louisa turned on the faucet. By the time the plumber fixed the pipe, the flypaper we’d hung over the kitchen door was coated with tiny black corpses.

  I stare at the mound of suds, pondering the mystery of Chippy, my long-vanished chipmunk. After a brief hesitation, I say, “Why do you suppose she stopped?”

  “I don’t know.” Dana sounds depressed, but it could be the beets. “Why do people stop doing anything? Why do kids stop talking to their parents?”

  I know she’s worried about Jessica. They were close when Jessica was a child. Then Dana could read her, but now her daughter is as inscrutable as runes.

  “You, for instance,” says Dana. “All those years you just stopped talking to Mother. Or Edward.”

  I shake out the arugula, pat it with a paper towel. Sedgie hums, up to his elbows in suds as he swizzles dishes and tosses them into the drainer. It’s been a long day, and I suddenly want to lie down in the hammock and rock myself to sleep. I feel inevitably forty, my past dragging behind me like a train. I can’t remember the last time I marked my height on the wall behind the door in the dining room. The calendar on the kitchen wall depicting the lighthouses of northern Michigan tells me it is August 14, 1999, but it could be the summer of 1987 for all my failure at moving on. I run my hand across my breast, remember how tired I was that August. Sadie was a colicky baby who cried a lot. I would walk her up and down the hall. No one could sleep on those hot, crying nights. You’ve got to get her on a schedule, my mother had said. When you were a baby, we always let you cry.

  Sometimes we stop speaking to our parents the way we stop speaking to our friends, our lovers, our spouses. The throat closes, and no sound comes out. Rust forms. Like the pipes in these old houses, clotted with the minerals of hard water, words become a trickle if they come at all.

  The last time I spoke to Edward was after we lost Sadie. I had furled into myself the way Mother is furling into herself now, but my pathology wasn’t physical. I made myself sick with longing and guilt and wine, thinking, If you try to remember your baby, and you can’t see her face, but can still smell her, are you crazy? At the time I thought maybe Edward could tell me, but I didn’t know how to find him. It was in the days when no one was talking about Edward. I called Aunt Eugenia.