by Ann Packer
“Remember,” Robert said, “how we tried to think of ways to get her to do stuff with us?”
“Oh, my God!” Rebecca exclaimed. “I haven’t thought of that in so long.” She turned to Bill. “We had a crusade. We brainstormed things we thought she’d like and wrote them down. I’ll bet I still have the piece of paper somewhere.”
“Was bacon on the list?” Bill said, but he was distinctly uncomfortable and busied himself at the juicer, pressing hard on each orange half as, behind him, Robert and Rebecca exchanged uneasy glances. For the first time—though hardly the last; she would puzzle over this for years, until the question itself became the story—Rebecca wondered if her mother’s protracted withdrawal from the family could be seen as a response to some behavior or attitude in her father. It was an equal and opposite reaction, she imagined explaining to someone, and then she tried to remember if there was a concept in physics that meant You started it.
Robert felt bad, too, and he struggled for something to say. “Have you both realized,” he began, uncertain where he was going, “that in a few years,” and then it came to him, “if the three of us are waiting somewhere together, whoever comes to get us will say, ‘Dr. Blair, Dr. Blair, and Dr. Blair’?”
“Hey, you’re right,” Rebecca said, and Bill looked over his shoulder and said, “That’s pretty nifty,” and all three of them began to feel better.
Bill said he’d wake the kids and suggested Rebecca start cooking the bacon and Robert head for the shed.
It was gorgeous out, and Robert went down the driveway slowly, thinking both that he should get back to the city to study and that he would very much like to spend the whole day in Portola Valley, maybe the whole weekend, especially if he could convince Rebecca to stick around for a while.
“Mom,” he called as he passed his car, parked at the shed last night because he’d looked in on her when he first arrived. “Yoo-hoo.”
She came out and waved. “Perfect timing!” She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night before and looked as if she hadn’t slept: hair still in its braid but wild and mussed around her face.
“We’re making breakfast,” he said, but as soon as the words were out he was close enough to see into the shed, and he stopped short. Behind her, leaning against her worktable, was a new assemblage. He gaped at it. “No way.”
She looked over her shoulder and then faced him again. “I need your help. It’s too heavy to carry, I want you to drive it up.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“What?”
“James will—”
“Oh, don’t be silly, he won’t care. Can you give me a hand? I think I’ve made a real breakthrough, I want everyone to see it.”
By then Bill was back in the kitchen with Rebecca, and James was in the shower, but Ryan and Sierra were moving slowly, Ryan sitting naked at Rebecca’s desk while Sierra lay naked on the sheets and tried to explain what she’d learned on her trip and why Ryan shouldn’t be sad about her decision to call Martin Degenhart and tell him she was ready for the plane ticket to New York that he’d offered her. “I won’t be gone that long,” she said. “And if I don’t go, I’ll be like the planted seed that never sprouted.”
“You figured it out,” he said.
“What?”
“That I didn’t eat my mushroom.”
“No, baby, no, I just need to do this. Look at you at Santa Cruz. I—Wait, you didn’t eat your mushroom?” Slowly, she sat up and looked at him. Her breasts were sweet and full, her nipples with the same flat, satiny smoothness and deep rose color as her mouth.
He shook his head. “I wanted to take care of you.”
“Oh, my God, Ryan. Now I really have to go.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I thought you were getting it last night, I thought you were with me. Beauty is different from—”
“I was. You feel beauty instead of you are beautiful. I do get it. You think that guy—”
“Martin—”
“—stopped you because of something in you, not just your looks.”
“That’s sort of it,” she said. “But Ryan, you lied.”
“It was dark up there. James was in a weird mood. You won’t be the unsprouted seed, I promise. You are sprouted.”
“I’ll come back. Or you’ll come with me. You can meet me there this summer.”
“You’re talking about now?” He began to cry, and after a moment so did she. They lay down together and salted each other’s skin. Sierra had been approached by Martin Degenhart on a Tuesday in October, and while she listened politely to a straight-haired stranger in a leather jacket tell her he could make her famous, Ryan sat innocently in a lecture hall at UC Santa Cruz with no idea that sixty miles away an assault was being launched against his life.
“Guys,” Rebecca said from the hallway, knocking lightly. “Are you coming?”
There was no way for them to pull apart and get dressed, not until they’d made love, and so they began, their fingertips and palms and lips and tongues traveling routes so familiar that the ground had scarcely to be touched before the destinations were reached. Sierra was in a state of exquisite sensitivity, and she came three, four, five times, until the hallucinations of the night before seemed never to have stopped and the tapestry of trees that had revealed itself to her in the meadow draped over her again like a heavy and gorgeous blanket.
Ryan left her sleeping. He went into the bathroom and was washing his face when James appeared in the open doorway. “What’s the matter?” James said.
Ryan looked in the mirror. His eyes were red, and despite the washing his face looked blotchy. “Nothing. Sierra might go to New York.”
“Change is cool,” James said. “I’m going to the Priory.”
“Come on.”
“No, really.”
They made their way toward the kitchen. The front door was open, and their mother was standing just outside with Robert and Rebecca.
“What are they doing?” James said.
“Boys,” their father said, coming out of the kitchen. “I just put biscuits in the oven. Where’s Sierra?”
Rebecca spun around and held up her hand. “Stop.”
But James wasn’t going to be ordered around, and Ryan and Bill kept pace with him, and in a moment they were all looking at Penny’s new assemblage, larger than any she’d ever done, a four-by-six-foot open box with a cellophane egg noodle bag thumbtacked at the top, an ancient nursing brassiere dangling nearby, a bent wire hanger suspended from a teacup hook, a crumpled cookbook page held in place by a safety pin, a plastic Halloween witch’s mask hanging from an elastic thread, and a handful of Christmas tree tinsel clumped around a rusty nail. There was more, much more, but the thing that had everyone’s attention was at the center of the piece, held in place by four poultry trussing needles. It was Dog.
“Mom,” Ryan gasped.
James barked out a laugh, but his face was burning.
“It’s okay,” Ryan said to Penny. “Just take him out and give him back.”
“It’s not like I care,” James said.
“Of course you care,” Ryan said. “He’s your dog.”
Bill was dumbfounded, but at last he found his voice. “Penny, this is outrageous. It’s beyond the pale. What were you thinking?”
She stared at him for a long moment. “You want to know what I was thinking? Do you kids believe he really wants to know what I was thinking?”
No one had a response. Robert felt guilty about having helped her get the piece up to the house, and the guilt made him angry, and the anger made him wish he’d stayed in San Francisco or even in Michigan with Julie Anne—in some place that felt like home. Rebecca remembered that “beyond the pale” referred to the part of Ireland that was beyond the area controlled by the English, and then, almost but no
t quite aware that she was intentionally distracting herself, she distracted herself further by wondering if the nursing bra was one her mother had actually worn and saved or if she’d bought it at Goodwill. Ryan looked at the thumbtacks and imagined a picture of Sierra on the cover of a magazine and how thousands and thousands of copies of that picture could end up pinned to the walls of thousands and thousands of men.
James came closest to thinking about his mother’s question and its obvious answer. Instead, he noticed a tear in her shirt that exposed the vulnerable skin of her underarm, and he recognized a kind of rigidity in his father’s posture, and in order to resist going where these observations would take him, he made a decision. Summoning a tone of great injury, he shouted, “I’m out of here,” and he took off at a run.
9
JAMES
I was born at the Stanford Hospital on January 6, 1968, the same day Dr. Norman Shumway reported to a crowd of waiting journalists that he had transplanted a heart into the ailing body of one Michael Kasperak, the first such surgery in America. The hospital had the air of a carnival, and in the maternity ward my mom’s obstetrician had to call three times for someone to come suction meconium from my tiny lungs. To me this says everything—not the medically historic significance of my birth date but the fact that I was born with my mouth full of shit.
Thirty-seven years later, I was born again. I don’t mean I accepted Jesus Christ as my lord and savior. I mean I arrived at last among my people.
I was at a low point when I found them, a part-time cashier at a Costco in Eugene, Oregon, making ends meet only because of my share of the rent we were collecting on the Portola Valley house. I lived across the Willamette River from Eugene, in working-class Springfield, in a four-unit apartment complex that backed onto the parking lot of a multiscreen movie theater. My roommate was so quiet and reclusive that all I really knew about him I learned on the day he interviewed me, when he said certain scents gave him migraines so I’d have to use his brand of shaving cream and deodorant if I wanted to live there.
I spent my free time watching Three Stooges DVDs on my dad’s old laptop. Dating seemed like too much work, but a U of O dance professor had flirted with me in a café, and we had sex from time to time. One evening we were on her porch and her neighbors walked by, a middle-aged couple carrying matching water bottles in pouches at their waists. We chatted, and maybe because I was in a bad mood anyway I started in on a spiel I’d been developing about the isolation of modern life. Where had I gotten this? I didn’t know. I’d been spouting it for a while, long enough that even I found it boring.
“I mean,” I said to the dance professor and her neighbors, “how well do you guys know each other? You live on the same block and this is only the second or third time you’ve talked, am I right? I wish there was a club I could join that would give me a bunch of people I could call if my power went out. Or I got sick. And they would have to help.”
“I have half a dozen people like that,” the dance professor said. “They’re called friends.”
“But friends can bail. They’re allowed to be busy.”
“You’re talking,” the husband said, “about an intentional community. We know people in one, right here in town. They’re looking for new members. Do you want to talk to them?”
I kept myself from snickering. I imagined a bunch of earnest people with a mission statement, having three-hour meetings to talk about how often and where they should have their three-hour meetings. “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.”
“Why?” the dance professor said. “Call and find out about it. It’s not like you’ve got anything else going on in your life.”
Nothing like hearing the truth to shake a guy up.
They called themselves the Barn, twenty-six people spread over seven households dotted around Eugene. The idea had originated with two couples, the Smith-Berkoffs and the Rankin-O’Sullivans, who’d met when their children were in preschool together. They wanted a community and decided to make one. Getting dinner on the table seven nights a week was at the top of everyone’s stress list, so each Tuesday and Thursday one household made enough dinner to feed the entire Barn, and the other households sent someone to pick up the food. Next, a monthly workday rotated from household to household, when everyone would pitch in on a big project. And finally, the whole group got together on the first Sunday of each month for a meeting and potluck.
I was invited to a gathering at Amazon Park. It was July, and there were blankets spread under trees, kids swarming a play structure, adults chatting. I liked the way subgroups formed and re-formed, by age, gender, hobbies, pieces of common history. I talked to two guys who shared my passion for Neil Young, a woman who’d grown up in Palo Alto. “This is James,” people kept saying. “He’s interested in us.”
That evening I logged on to the Barnboard with my guest password and found a list of the members. In addition to the Smith-Berkoffs (Marie, Dan, two kids) and the Rankin-O’Sullivans (Sarah, Greg, three kids, and a live-in grandfather), there were the Lees (Priscilla, Mike, no kids), the Batchelors (Terri, Tom, three kids), the Komarovs (Margo, single mother with two kids), the Norton-Fieldings (Celia, David, two kids), and the Kinsellas (Beth, Stan, no kids).
“So I guess I’d be the Blair?” I typed, and within minutes I’d gotten four responses, from “Whatever you want” to “Wouldn’t you just be James?” to “Let’s see what happens organically” to my favorite, from Celia Norton, “You already are.”
“So I’m in?” I asked Dan Berkoff on the phone a couple days later.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, don’t you want to do a background check?”
“You like us, we like you. What we’re doing is pretty simple. If it doesn’t work, we vote you out.”
It was like falling in love, but with a whole crowd rather than a single person. Everyone was so open and welcoming. I found out that the group had been inspired by Dan Berkoff’s childhood memory of growing up Jewish in suburban New York. Within his synagogue, groups of families helped each other with religious observation and other aspects of Jewish life. The Barn had the same idea, minus the religious observation and the word “Jewish”: a group to help each other with life.
If the official activities were the monthly meetings and the workdays and the twice-weekly dinners, the community’s true life sprang from postings on the Barnboard. “Does anyone have a good recipe for tamales?” “We’re going to feed the ducks and have two extra seats, anyone want to get rid of a kid for a couple hours?” “Starting clothing drive for Katrina victims, care to help?” I jumped right in. I didn’t have much to offer in the way of recipes to share or equipment to lend, but I had a lot of time and got an enthusiastic response whenever I said I was going to such-and-such a store and did anyone need anything. I participated in as many threads of conversation as I could, even posting one- or two-word responses so I would get notified when there were further comments. Not that I really needed to get notified, since I was checking the board every hour to see what was new.
The first workday happened about three weeks after I joined, a daylong project digging out and replanting the Kinsellas’ backyard. By dinnertime I was completely wiped and felt better than I had in a long time. “Feels good, doesn’t it?” Tom Batchelor said. I twisted from side to side, stretching my back. “Yeah,” I said, “in that oh-hello-muscles-I-forgot-about way.” “No, this,” he said, sweeping his hand to indicate the group. “I mean this.”
I really didn’t know how to cook, so for my first dinner I used my employee discount to buy bags of salad and pans of Costco enchiladas. I knew this was pathetic and was a little worried I’d get a discontinue notice, like the phone company turning off your service: Due to incompetence we are hereby terminating our agreement with JAMES BLAIR to participate in the organization known as THE BARN. Instead, people started inviting me to come watch how they did it—to learn how to cook
for a crowd, someone said, kindly skipping over the more basic fact. “What do you normally eat?” Marie Smith asked as she showed me how to make tomato sauce with actual tomatoes. She was asking how I’d gotten by in life. By the skin of my teeth was the answer.
Being six-four, I was asked to clear off the top shelf, get the ball out of the tree, hang the new light fixture. “You’re so handy,” Terri Batchelor said one workday as I painted her kitchen ceiling without a ladder. I figured she meant tall. “Isn’t James great?” people said to each other. “You’re a great addition, James.”
I was used to disappointing people, so all of this was pretty new, and I wasn’t surprised a few weeks later when it seemed the other shoe was about to drop. “Can I be honest about something?” Margo Komarov said to me one afternoon as I stood at a picnic table slicing watermelon. I was gearing up to make a joke out of whatever came next, but she smiled and said, “I wasn’t sure about you at first, but I’m so glad they voted me down.”
Twenty-five hours a week I still worked at Costco. Still hated it, but it bothered me less. My boss was an asshole, but even that didn’t bother me much. Most Mondays I worked one to seven, leaving my mornings open, and in late September I answered a post from Sarah Rankin looking for someone to drive her dad to physical therapy. From then on, I was his chauffeur, this cool grandpa from Seattle who’d ruptured his Achilles doing a half Ironman. He was maybe five-seven and all muscle, though the injury had sidelined him and he complained about how fast he was losing tone. The physical therapy office was on the other side of town, so we had some time in the car together. “Don’t get old, James,” he told me one morning. “Are you exercising? Can’t do anything about your genes, so get your butt moving.” He was seventy-five, the age my dad was when he died, but he seemed younger, more like sixtysomething. Back at the house that day, he showed me photos from his two dozen triathlons and then directed me to make us a vegetable smoothie while he sat at the kitchen table with his foot propped up. “Another thing?” he said. “Don’t let your wife die. Get a wife—and then don’t let her die.”