by Ann Packer
Robert enjoyed her flippancy but wondered at her nonchalance over the fact that he would be leaving. Best-case scenario, they had ten more months—if they lasted.
Their relationship had begun when they were jointly assigned the task of putting up recruiting signs for the debate club, which had, the previous June, seen two-thirds of its members graduate. Within several days they had sped through the stages of holding hands and walking arm in arm, but they slowed down on the stretch from first base to second, a deceleration that Robert had decided was his choice, reflecting a gentlemanly restraint, and therefore not just acceptable but honorable. Still, he had a goal in mind, the shedding of his virginity sometime before his eighteenth birthday in March, or by graduation at the latest, and he worried that her apparent indifference to their impending separation meant she had decided against crossing that final frontier with him.
James was ten and large for his age. He was attracted to Gina in the way a dog is attracted to and quickly overtaxes the patience of a friendly new human. When she came through the front door he ran to greet her and, lacking any real conversation, reported to her in excruciating detail the games he’d played during recess and lunch on each of the days since he’d last seen her.
“James never leaves us alone,” Robert said to his father early one morning when the two of them were up before the rest of the family.
“Never?” his father said.
“He bothers Gina. He makes eyes at her, I’m serious.”
“Does Gina complain?”
“No, but she doesn’t like it.”
“Has she said so?”
Robert had hoped to elicit a different reaction from his father, and he changed the subject. He said, “I’m going to talk to Mr. Verhoeven after school today.” Mr. Verhoeven was the honors physics teacher, a thin, bespectacled man with a wing of white hair over each ear. He had given Robert an A+ on the most recent test, but had written—somewhat ominously, in Robert’s view—“See me if you want” on the test paper, below the grade. Robert had agonized for a couple of days but had finally decided, thanks in part to Gina’s input, that the A+ probably meant Mr. Verhoeven wanted to encourage him. “He wants to recommend you for Harvard” was what Gina actually said.
“James is young,” his father said, not taking the bait.
“He’s ten.”
“I mean he’s young for his age. Development is very individual. He’s big, so people expect a lot of him.”
“You mean I do.”
“No, honey, that’s not what I’m saying. He’s your brother and that colors how you see him. If he were someone else’s brother, or a neighbor, I think you would react differently to him.”
“He wouldn’t be in my house bugging my girlfriend.”
“It’s you he’s bugging.”
“He lies down in my doorway! And then won’t move!”
“And to think he used to save that for Rebecca.”
Robert had forgotten this: James lying in Rebecca’s doorway after dinner, and how she called Ryan to bring her glasses of water or sharpened pencils so she could avoid stepping over James and thereby gratifying him.
“You know what I’m going to say?”
“It’s important to treat little kids well.”
His father smiled. “Children deserve care.”
Robert thought there was something unfair about this, because what was he but a child who deserved his father’s care? Also, his father used to say it wasn’t Robert’s job to take care of his siblings, which was a nice idea but hardly true in real life. Robert had been watching out for all of them, especially James, forever.
“You’re shipping out soon,” his father said.
“So I should be more tolerant.”
“No, I was just thinking how much I’ll miss you.”
As November progressed, Robert began to talk about inviting Gina to go on the family’s annual Thanksgiving trip to Sacramento. He imagined walking with her around his grandparents’ neighborhood and perhaps stopping at the local elementary school to make out. The family car held only six people, though, and his mother raised the question of what Gina’s mother would do without her. She also pointed out that there would be nowhere for Gina to sleep, given how tight it always was with just the family.
So Robert was out of luck. When they arrived on Wednesday evening, he greeted his grandparents with an obvious lack of enthusiasm and then spent the next two hours trying to make up for it by playing cards with his grandfather and brothers. John Greenway had congestive heart failure and pretty much lived in a chair in the front room. He was supposed to wear special socks to improve the blood flow in his swollen ankles and feet, but he claimed they were too stretched out and did him no good anymore. He wore plain black socks instead, and corduroy slippers both indoors and out. Sometimes he was so tired that he had one of the boys play his hand for him; he would have his proxy set his cards in a rack only he and the proxy could see, and he would whisper instructions while the other two boys hummed so they couldn’t hear. James loved this, and when it was time to hum he got to his feet and marched in place and did a fair imitation of a kazoo. His once silky white-blond hair had darkened gradually; it was nearly black now and growing thicker and coarser. He was taller than Ryan. Ryan watched him march and hum and thought there was a good chance that James’s voice would start to change before he reached junior high.
Ryan had skipped junior high. Sand Hill Day had turned into a K through 8, with Ryan and the other five kids his age forming the pioneer class, and he was going straight to high school when he left. Wednesday night, once the cardplaying was over and he was in bed, he realized that when he got back to school on Monday he’d have only six more months at the school he loved.
Thanksgiving dinner took place at two o’clock in the afternoon and involved moving Grandpa Greenway from the front room to the dining room, where custom required that he relieve the turkey of its meat with a carving knife that once belonged to his grandfather. He could neither stand up for ten minutes nor relinquish the duty, so Bill put the bird on a rolling cocktail cart and pushed it to the old man’s chair. Ryan remembered being in a store with his grandfather when he was seven or eight and how his grandfather spent a long time looking at an electric carving knife and then said, as he led Ryan away, “That would be giving in.”
Penny sat next to her father but returned to the kitchen, where her mother was transferring peas to a serving bowl. At seventy-six, Audrey Greenway was as shrunken as her husband was puffy, and her hands were knobby with arthritis. She had been cooking for a day and a half and was pleased with the way everything had come out, the stuffing just how her grandchildren liked it, the sweet potatoes mashed for her husband.
“Coming, coming,” she said to Penny. “This is the last thing.”
“Mom, Dad shouldn’t be trying to carve. Bill should be doing it.”
“Oh, I don’t know. What’s the harm?”
Penny had hoped her mother would recognize and appreciate her concern for her father, and there was a slight edge to her voice as she said, “He could have a heart attack.”
“He’s probably going to have a heart attack.”
“Not today! How can you be so blasé?”
“Penny, please. Try to relax.”
“I can’t believe you’re telling me to relax.”
Audrey raised her eyebrows briefly, a tactic Penny knew from early childhood, when it had had the power to silence her. Audrey had married and borne Penny late in life, and Penny sometimes thought her whole existence would have been different if she’d had a younger mother.
“Go on,” Audrey said. “I’m right behind you.”
Penny returned to the table, but she felt chastised. She listened to the holiday talk: the children telling their grandparents what they were doing in school; Bill asking his usual questions about his in-laws’ lives, r
emembering, as he always did, to inquire especially about Audrey’s work at the horticulture club and how John’s hardware store was doing under the new ownership. Penny stayed quiet and felt expendable, also familiar from childhood.
After dinner, the children lounged in the front room and watched through the windows as the afternoon light failed. It was fully dark before long, and they were lethargic from the food yet at the same time restless.
“I’m going to call Gina,” Robert announced, but then he didn’t move, which peeved Rebecca since he had taken the only comfortable chair not occupied by their grandfather, leaving the rest of them to make do with the couch and folding chairs.
“Go if you’re going,” she said.
Robert frowned. “What is that? God.”
“Don’t say ‘God.’ ” Rebecca took a quick look around, but her grandmother was out of the room and her grandfather was asleep in his chair.
“What are you talking about?” Robert said. “I can if I want to.”
Their father sat on a folding chair, holding open a section of newspaper that Robert knew, from having checked the date earlier in the day, was over a week old. He said to Robert, “But do you want to?”
Robert felt his face grow warm. He knew it was a trick question but didn’t know in which direction the trick would go. “What do you mean?”
“I mean if it would make someone else unhappy. It’s your choice, but—” Bill let his voice trail off and looked at Robert.
“I said it once,” Robert said.
“It’s okay,” Bill said gently. “I think you understand now.”
“Understand what?” Penny called from the dining room. She had found a measure of solace in a junk drawer from the garage that she’d brought inside to see if it contained anything interesting, but she was still out of sorts. “How can you expect them to understand?”
“I’m sorry?” Bill said.
She came to the arch between the front room and the dining room. She’d pulled her braid over her shoulder, and it hung like a pull-cord down the front of her shirt. She was thin, but time had softened her face, making her look younger than her forty-four years, which in turn made her hands—roughened and crisscrossed with cuts, the nails permanently split and discolored—appear to have been borrowed from a woman who’d spent her life cleaning other people’s houses. She said, “We’ve never educated them about religion, so how can they understand?”
Bill cleared his throat. “I just meant Robert might choose his words differently here. I was saying I thought he understood it’s a choice.” He glanced at Robert and smiled slightly. “As I think he does.”
At this, Grandpa Greenway startled awake and said, “Now then, now then.” He shifted in his chair and moved his hands to his lap. They looked like baseball gloves: big shapeless paws with fingers like sausages and no definition at the knuckles. For dinner he’d worn a camel sport coat, but he’d traded it for a golf cardigan, and he fumbled for a moment with the buttons, then gave up. He said, “Who’s hungry? James, are you hungry?”
James looked to his father to see if this was a joke. His father was smiling but looking at Robert, so James couldn’t be sure the smile meant he should laugh.
“James,” Grandma Greenway called from the kitchen. “There’s more pie.”
Ryan nudged James. He wanted James to wriggle around and maybe laugh a little and then go into the kitchen. That’s what he would have done—not for pie but to make both grandparents happy. In the kitchen, his grandmother would put her finger to her lips and then get out a plate and a knife and noisily draw the knife across the plate. Then he would open the silverware drawer and rustle around in the forks and perhaps, if he felt like it, smack his lips together a few times.
Bill said a walk might be a good idea, and the children—including Robert, who had forgotten entirely that he wanted to call Gina—jumped to their feet and found their jackets. Penny stayed behind, her interest in the junk drawer sharpening into excitement, followed by a vision of nuts and bolts and washers stacked together so they looked like trees, then laid out—maybe in an old metal cake pan—to resemble a forest. Or maybe her father’s old tools themselves—screwdrivers and wrenches and pliers—could be made to look like trees, shrubs, flowers, and could populate a metal garden. Her father might even get a kick out of it. She remembered going to the store with him on the occasional Sunday, when he was closed for business, and how she walked up and down the empty aisles while he sat in his office and went over the books. Her favorite was the electrical aisle, with its spools of wire and cartons of lightbulbs. She was fascinated by lightbulbs, how delicate and shatterable they were. At home she always begged to be the one to replace a burned-out bulb, a task her father carefully supervised, his finger at the switch so they could test the new bulb as soon as she’d finished screwing it into the socket.
He was just sitting there in his chair, staring off into space. “Dad,” she said, but quietly, and he didn’t hear her.
She laid two metal spacers at right angles and thought of Jesus on the cross, then of Bill reprimanding Robert for saying “God.” Long ago, his efforts to please her parents had delighted her, but when she tried to thank him he brushed it off, as if insulted by the idea that he might have behaved otherwise.
The God thing didn’t come up again until the next day, when the three younger children were alone in the front room. Robert and their father had gone to buy their grandparents a Christmas tree, their mother and grandmother were grocery shopping, and their grandfather was resting in his room.
“I don’t get it,” Ryan said. “We say ‘God’ all the time.”
“But we shouldn’t here,” Rebecca said. “Grandma and Grandpa believe.”
“Since when?”
“Since always. It’s not that big a deal. I just thought Robert should be more careful.” She felt a little guilty about scolding Robert for saying something they all said all the time, but Robert wasn’t present for her to make it up to him. “You can if you want,” she told Ryan. “Believe, I mean.”
She had, back when she was eleven or twelve—or had tried to, praying on her knees beside her bed several nights running. She’d stopped when she found herself squinching her eyes shut as hard as she could and clasping her hands together as tightly as she could—as if the activation of small muscles could speed things along.
“I might want to someday,” Ryan said.
Rebecca and Ryan were on the couch, each reclining against an arm, while James sat on the floor in front of the TV. He had the volume low, as he’d been instructed for his grandfather’s rest. Flipping the channel whenever an ad came on, he was listening to his brother and sister with more interest than he generally felt. Life for James revolved around the difficulty and necessity of making changes to his mental or physical state, or both: to get from sitting to running, from reading to listening, required an effort akin to that of a traveler who must repack his suitcase and change countries every day or so.
“What’s pantheism?” Ryan said. “Is that where you believe in nature?”
Rebecca said, “It means you believe God is everywhere, God is in all things. ‘Pan’ is all, ‘theism’ is belief. ‘Pandemonium’ is all devils. ‘Pan-American’ is all Americas.”
“Pan American is an airplane,” James said.
“Dad went to church when he was little,” Rebecca went on. “So did Mom. Religion was a much bigger deal back then.”
Ryan knew all about his father’s churchgoing because his father told stories about spit-shining his shoes and how important it was in those days for children to “mind” their parents, especially at church, which was an occasion for solemnity above all. Ryan remembered a story in which his father had gotten the giggles in church and literally gnawed open his knuckle, he was trying so hard not to laugh. Ryan had wanted to know what was so funny, but his father couldn’t remember. What made his fath
er’s face change was when Ryan asked why their family didn’t go to church. His father’s cheeks seemed to droop, and the area above his upper lip grew dark. “I guess I lost my religion,” he said after some time had gone by. “Where?” Ryan said, and his father said, “Korea, son.” Ryan stayed quiet after that; all the children knew their father didn’t like to talk about the war.
“I’ve never been on an airplane,” James said now, looking at Rebecca and Ryan.
“That’s not true,” Rebecca said. “We went to Michigan when you were a baby.”
“That doesn’t count, I don’t remember it. Why is it so hot in here? When’s everyone coming back?”
“Not for a while. And Grandpa needs it like this.” Rebecca turned to Ryan. “Did you do the Greek myths at your school? Oh, yeah, I remember, you were each a god. You wanted to be Apollo but you were the ocean one, what’s his name, Poseidon.”
“I had a blue cape.”
“I’d be Hera but she married her brother.”
“I used to want to marry you.”
Rebecca knew this but wished Ryan hadn’t said it. What was going to happen to him next year when he joined her at Woodside High School and saw what life was really like? Someone who would say something like that didn’t have the skin for high school; she wasn’t sure he had the skin to walk around in the world.
She said she needed to do homework and left the boys by themselves. As the only girl she had a tiny room all to herself—the boys slept in the front room, Ryan and James on the foldout couch and Robert on a cot. She climbed onto her bed and leaned against the pillows. The difference between religions seemed less important than the difference between religion and its absence. Belief would drape itself over everything else in your mind. She imagined Ryan taking refuge in religion as a way to limit the social options of high school—he’d be in an even smaller group than Robert’s tiny world of debaters. And it would separate him from the family. What would her father say? She couldn’t imagine his reaction.