by Ann Packer
“You have noticed, haven’t you?” he said.
“Maybe we should just talk at school tomorrow.”
He stepped off the porch and headed for the car. He tried not to stomp, but he could feel himself emitting upset and knew he looked ridiculous. If he had called her over the weekend, this never would have happened.
At home, the afternoon was condensing into a typical Sunday evening, and after dinner he holed up in his room and began what he knew would be about seven hours of homework. He couldn’t stop thinking about the terrible scene on Gina’s porch, returning again and again to the truth of the statement he’d made about his mother. She didn’t care about anyone but herself. He was tired of pretending she was normal. He decided he’d prefer an out-and-out broken home like Gina’s over the sham that was his family. Then he thought about Gina’s father and realized that she had never once complained about him, though Robert knew she didn’t like him. Robert, in making such a true statement about his mother, had brought honesty into their relationship. He spoke the truth while Gina spooled out lies. She was just a junior and a full year younger than he, so maybe she wasn’t ready to be genuine, but he was.
If he hadn’t been so overwhelmed by homework he might have stayed in his room and nursed this idea, held it close until it was ready for the world, perhaps even discovered it was only half-formed and would not survive for long. Instead, doomed to be up until one or two in the morning, he decided to hell with it and went out to the living room.
His siblings were sitting with his father, all quiet with books or their thoughts, even James. “Where’s Mom?” he said.
“Where do you think?” Rebecca said.
“After dinner?”
No one responded. It wasn’t unheard of for Penny to go back to the shed after dinner. Sometimes she didn’t come back until everyone was in bed.
“I wanted to tell you,” Robert went on, “that I’m going to break up with Gina tomorrow.”
His father looked up. Rebecca frowned, conveying doubt rather than disapproval. Ryan was stretched out on the couch, and he laid his book facedown on his lap. James shouted “You can’t do that!” and ran from the room.
“What happened, Rob?” Bill said.
“She’s just too young for me. She’s immature.”
“Immature,” his father repeated.
“I don’t really have time for a girlfriend. It’s senior year—I’m so busy. I have college applications.”
“You’re almost finished with your college applications,” Rebecca said.
“People say fall semester senior year is the most important time of high school. Kids get ahead of themselves and think they’re finished, but they aren’t. You have to be careful not to get sidetracked.”
“Did something happen?” his father said.
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Robert said. “It’s not like I was going to marry her.”
James had disappeared into the bedroom hallway, just out of the others’ sight. He came back and said, “Then I will!”
“James,” Robert said.
“You can’t break up with her! I love her!”
“James,” Bill said, holding out an arm. “Come here.”
“Everyone does this!” James cried.
“Does what?” Rebecca said.
“Breaks up.”
Bill had been wondering when this would happen. When he tried to talk to Penny about the message she was giving the children, she brushed him off or began a recitation of grievances both old and new. “Come here, honey,” he said, and James joined him on the couch.
“In the past,” Bill said, “when we’ve talked about your mother and the shed, we’ve focused more on why she needs time alone for her projects. But I know you must be wondering what’s going on between the two of us. James, is that what you’re wondering?”
“I’m not wondering anything,” James said.
“I am,” Rebecca said.
“No one’s going anywhere,” Bill said. “Or at least nowhere else—nowhere farther.”
“She can go wherever she wants,” Robert said. “As far as I’m concerned.”
“Mom or Gina?” Rebecca asked him.
“Very funny. Gina’s not going anywhere, I am. To college.”
“Any second now.”
Robert glared at her. “Are you on the rag?”
“Rob,” their father cautioned.
“It makes women irritable,” Robert said. “You told me that yourself.”
“Maybe Gina was,” Rebecca said. “Did you think of that this afternoon? When you had your fight?”
“We didn’t have a fight,” Robert said. “How many times do I have to tell you guys? Maybe I won’t break up with her after all, I don’t even know for sure.”
“Don’t break up with her,” Ryan said. “You love her.”
Robert returned to his room, but his homework was more daunting than ever. He went to the telephone. Gina answered on the first ring, and he said, “Yes, if you’re still wondering.” It was important to him that he not have to explain himself: that she understand he meant yes he missed her without his having to say so.
“Oh, good,” she said. “Though I never doubted it.”
Relief flooded him. He was a fool and had come close to losing her. What would his life be without her? Dry, dull, dead. He said, “I wish you were here.”
Back in the living room, Bill and the three younger children were quiet again, James burrowed into Bill’s side as if they needed each other for warmth. Bill was thinking about his family, his first family: his parents and sister when he was a child in Michigan. Thanksgiving always brought the past back to him, as it was contrived to do. In Michigan, the holiday had elevated the ordinary formality of a Sunday dinner into an affair of state. Both sets of relatives came for the day, his mother’s farm family and his father’s townsfolk. The occasion was as tightly orchestrated as a military maneuver. Even the conversation was orchestrated, with groups and subgroups forming and re-forming around observations about the weather. In the Thanksgivings of Bill’s memory, there was always snow on the ground, and he and his sister, along with their two much older cousins, twin boys named Gilbert and Lester, sat at the parlor window and watched as the shadows on the snow darkened in the falling light. Bill’s father said grace from the head of the table, and if he couldn’t stop himself, Bill carefully opened his eyes to see if anyone else might be opening theirs. Once, his maternal grandmother was watching him, and the look she gave him would have shamed a stone. Penny’s indifference to religion had been a relief to him, enabling him to avoid what had seemed the inevitability of raising his children in the church. Now the horror at Jonestown made him wonder about the cost of keeping his family out of organized religion—out of religion altogether, yes, but more important out of organized religion, the practice of it, the activity of belonging to a congregation. It seemed to him that Jonestown must confound his children all the more because they had no experience of worship. James had said Jim Jones forced his followers to live in shacks. To teach him and the others that the people had gone willingly, voluntarily, seemed to Bill a task beyond his capabilities as a parent.
“Dad,” Rebecca said. “You said no one’s going anywhere. Are you sure about that?”
“Yes,” he said, though he wasn’t.
“Did she actually say it?” Rebecca was sitting very straight at the front edge of her chair, her dark hair pulled away from her face in a ponytail so tight that Bill thought it must hurt.
He hesitated. Ryan’s book was open, but Bill could tell he was listening. James was listening, too.
“I wish you weren’t worried,” he said at last, knowing the words to be inadequate, though no more so than he felt.
At ten o’clock, with all the children in bed except Robert, Bill drank a glass of milk in the empty kitch
en, found a flashlight, and went outside. It felt as if it had been dark for days, but it was only November 26 and the nights would get longer before they began to get shorter. He made his way down the driveway to the spur. At the shed, he knocked.
“What?” she said as she opened the door. She took in his serious look and said, “What is it? Is someone sick?”
“What are you doing?”
“Working.”
“No, here. What are you doing here? Away from your family.”
She hesitated. “Not far away.”
“No more,” he said. “No more of this. From now on, you stay in the house after dinner.”
She stared off to the side, and for a moment she had the wistful look that had captivated him twenty years earlier. He’d staked a lot on the idea that he could make that look go away but had not counted on what might replace it.
“All right,” she said.
“All right?”
“Yes.”
He waited to see what else she might say. When nothing was forthcoming, he thanked her and made his way back up the hill, wondering if it was in his character always to ask for too little. Was it in hers always to ask for too much? He said good night to Robert and went to bed. He lay awake, watching the clock, and then fell into a light sleep during which he dreamed that he was awake, waiting. When he woke in the morning he could hear her in the kitchen, and though her side of the bed was lightly disturbed, he wasn’t sure she’d been there.
• • •
Breakfast was generally chaotic but never more so than after a vacation. The children were up and down from the table constantly, running back to their rooms for pencils, homework, books. Most mornings, once everyone was gone, Penny sat with coffee for an hour or more, absorbing the tranquility of the empty house, but today she went straight to her studio. If she had to give up working in the evening she wanted to get every second she could out of the daytime. Once she was there, though, she felt paralyzed, wondering what she’d promised and why he’d objected—why now?
The Sacramento trip must have galvanized him—their unexpected coming together on Thanksgiving night. She thought back: the room overheated, the poor quality of the mattress angling them both toward the middle. She lay on her side facing away from him while he lay on his back. She waited for him to fall asleep, but after several minutes he rolled closer and rested his fingertips on her hip. The last time had been early summer, and as she was thinking regretfully about how much she once loved this, he pushed her hair aside and touched the back of her neck. She could smell his erection. The kids were nearby, her parents right across the hall. She pushed her hips back, then pulled her nightgown to her waist and pushed closer. She felt heat and arousal, uncertain which was his and which was hers.
“Turn around,” he murmured, but she stayed as she was, reaching between her legs for him.
“Not like that,” he said, pulling away and rolling onto his back again.
She turned and faced him. She could tell that he wanted her, but not the whole of her—not the part of her that mattered most, her soul, her essence.
He touched her waist. She touched his cheek, his lips. He sighed, and she slid her leg over his. Fondling his nipple, feeling his hand on her thigh—what in years past had been a single system became two systems, the things she was doing to him and the things he was doing to her, the two of them like trains on parallel tracks as they arrived at their separate destinations.
She lay next to him, not even their hands touching. After a moment she felt his toes brush hers. He said, “Let’s go back.”
“I can’t.”
“You won’t.”
“I can’t,” she said, and she rolled away from him and grabbed a tissue to dry herself.
Monday morning, and sunlight angled through her studio window. Her worktable ran along one wall, its surface littered with sketches and pencils and glazes and pastes and glues. Most mornings she began by clearing space, the task itself a warm-up for whatever she would do in the hours that followed, which in recent weeks had been collage. She liked how finite each board was, finite and yet receptive, limited and yet capacious. She used nine-by-eleven card stock, black or cream, and she set the finished collages on a narrow shelf she’d had the contractor install around the perimeter of the room, two feet below the ceiling.
But she wanted a third dimension. Out of nowhere she remembered balsa wood—a thin, lightweight wood the boys had used to make airplanes and boats. Maybe she’d think of something to do with that? She hurried up to the house and searched Robert’s room, his desk drawers, his bureau. Nothing. Ryan and James’s room was far messier and she took a deep breath before entering. She went through their drawers before turning to the closet, which was big and dark and littered with games and cars and trucks and puzzles and even a bin of chunky building blocks no one had touched in years. She found Ryan’s badger and James’s dog. Finally she came across a small tugboat that she thought had been made of balsa wood, but none of the wood itself.
That was okay, though. It was better, because she’d have to buy some, and who knew what else she might find at the craft store? There was a new store she’d heard about in the city, and she decided to go later in the week; she could take a look at some of the galleries on Geary while she was there. This was the life she wanted—not the life of that foolish girl in front of her husband’s childhood home, that girl holding a fourth baby. Who had four babies? “Think how much we love the three we have,” Bill said when, newly and accidentally pregnant with James, she wept and wept. “I’ll die,” she said, and he smiled an indulgent smile that chilled her. They’d always agreed on three, but in those days before Roe v. Wade she’d been unable to bring up the possibility of “taking care of it,” too afraid of what he’d say, the law-abiding citizen, the moralist. That he was a doctor who almost certainly could have found someone to help—well, that had just made it all the more impossible to mention. The night shortly after James’s birth, when he told her about what he’d done while building the shed: for a time it had made her feel better, but that was long ago.
She returned to the kitchen. In the old days she’d worked in the mud pantry all morning long, inconceivable now that she had her studio. The mud pantry was tiny, cramped. Where formerly she kept bags of clay there were now jars of bulk granola and dried beans—the groceries of a family not quite hers, though you couldn’t fault her for trying. Her children preferred Frosted Flakes and Chef Boyardee, and Bill, who ought to care about such things, insisted it wasn’t a big deal if they ate junk from time to time, not in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t. But she wanted the children to eat what she thought they should eat. She wanted them to want to eat the right foods—not to complain, when she served dried fruit for dessert, that they were being mistreated.
This had happened the night before. After a weekend of eating her parents’ diet, all the more galling in light of how bad it was for her father, she’d put out a plate of dried apples and walnuts, and the children had laughed at her, even Ryan and especially Robert, who at dinnertime had been more down at the mouth than he’d been in Sacramento, which was saying a lot.
Tonight she would serve the kind of dinner she wanted to serve, which meant she should drive down to the store now, before it got busy at lunchtime.
On the car radio she heard “shot and killed” and “city hall” and “Jim Jones,” and she switched it off. The memory of James on Saturday, climbing onto the dining room chair and shouting, “Welcome to Jamestown!” What kind of maniac streak did he possess? And what kind of violent streak, if she was to believe her mother about Friday afternoon? James beating on Ryan—that could not happen again. She would have to crack down on James if Bill refused.
Making her way through the grocery store, she gathered spinach, mushrooms, brown rice, unsalted crackers, wheat germ. In the bulk-food aisle, she shoveled pumpkin seeds into one plastic bag and raw
almonds into another. She found unfiltered apple juice, cloudy as an old aquarium, and yogurt made from the milk of goats.
She kept the radio off as she drove home. At the house, she unpacked the groceries and hurried to her studio, where she had pots to glaze and a pair of collages to finish.
Just before three she heard the sound of Ryan’s carpool, and a little after that the sound of James’s. It was a blessing that Sand Hill Day dismissed early, so that Ryan was always home when James arrived. Her mother had admonished her about being absent when the kids got home from school, but really the kids preferred each other, and Ryan was as motherly as she was, if not more so. He would make James a snack, ask James about his day. Robert and Rebecca usually got a ride from a neighbor girl whose parents had bought her a car, and they would walk up from the road in a little while.
Time got away from her, and it was pitch dark by the time she made her way up to the house, late to embark on the healthy dinner she’d planned. Instead of the spinach and brown rice casserole she’d imagined, she decided she would cook each one simply and separately. Chop the mushrooms and throw them in a salad. She used the kitchen door to enter the house, surprised to see all four kids in the room together, sitting around the table. She glanced at her watch, thinking it must be later than she’d realized, but it was only a little past six, an hour earlier than their usual dinnertime. Bill wouldn’t arrive for another twenty to thirty minutes.
“Mom,” Rebecca said, getting to her feet as Penny entered the room.
They looked grim, all of them. Ryan’s friend Sierra was there, too, sharing Ryan’s chair with him, her cheek resting between his shoulder blades.
“Goodness,” Penny said. “You all look like someone died.”
In the sudden quiet, the stove clock ticked audibly. Rebecca and Robert had argued, during the car ride from school and periodically since arriving home, about how their mother might have reacted—might be reacting—to what had happened. Rebecca contended she’d be upset—she imagined her mother in tears, was convinced that was why Penny hadn’t come up yet. Robert believed Penny wouldn’t—didn’t—care and was in the shed because she was still working. Neither considered the possibility that she didn’t know.