First things first, on the day of our recent visit.
The world will end if we don’t pause to admire Maureen’s garden, which she sees as her annual chance to get things right. Dirt, seeds, and colorful expectations all watered at regular intervals. Though the least verbal of the six Blais children, she is a walking lexicon of plant names, genus, phylum, species.
“Mademoiselle has a fine eye for flowers,” Jacqueline says to Maureen, echoing Franny’s old construction in French class. “Mademoiselle was wise to marry an engineer because now there is someone contributing to the gene pool who knows the difference between a wrench and a screwdriver.”
It is common for twins, especially if they share the same crib, to develop their own private language. We are quadruplets, sharing a vocabulary of catchwords and references known only to us, which, when we communicate with each other in our maddeningly low voices, evoke reactions so excessive that others often feel infuriated, left out, stranded on the shore.
For a while now, as an antidote to the burden of all those years with Raymond, we have had a glad-tidings policy in our dealings with each other.
The most minuscule event is greeted with whoops of joy. Jacqueline was recently taken out to lunch by her boss, and she had scallops. Maureen might get a new shower door. Christina’s son’s band has been asked to play at some girl’s sweet sixteen party. “Good news,” she says. “The Afflicted have a gig.”
“Since when,” Jacqueline wants to know, “in the history of humankind have the afflicted not had a gig?”
We often think about what our children will do with their lives. They are no longer babies picking flowers off our dresses. We applauded when they sang the Earth Day rap at their crunchy elementary schools. We went on the field trips to the Egyptian section of museums for a scavenger hunt: Find a sarcophagus, find Horus, find an ankh. We sat through The Mikado and The Snow Queen as well as the usual assortment of swim meets and track events and painful piano recitals in which each note came out encased in concrete. We hosted mud football birthday parties, which are exactly what they sound like. To my children and their friends, John Fitzgerald Kennedy is the good-looking president, the one to whom that famous girl with cleavage, Marilyn Monroe, sang a sultry version of “Happy Birthday” in Madison Square Garden. JFK was for civil rights and for men on the moon, and he had a showdown with Cuba that almost ended the world. The schools that bear his name are called Jail for Kids, an accident of initials that makes every child who makes the joke feel unusually clever.
Feeling shockingly old, we watched as they labored over term papers about the Beatles: term papers entitled “Eleanor Rigby as Antihero” and “Assonance in ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’”
We’ve seen some of them through acne and first loves. We’ve supervised projects in which they’ve created three-dimensional models of cells out of candy, with jawbreakers for the nucleus, trying not to say what we’re thinking: You won’t need science. We never did. We sold tickets to and sat through a community theater production of Annie for two weekends in a row. We went on that awful ride at Disney, the one with the song about how it’s a small world, after all. Two of the children drive already and are old enough to kill people in a war. The oldest is at Trinity College in Hartford majoring in English and economics; the next is off to Wesleyan to play soccer and study French and film. The others hope to become an English professor, a doctor, a psychoanalyst with a side business writing children’s literature (or maybe just own a coffee shop on Martha’s Vineyard), and the baby of the bunch would like to grow up to be someone who invents video games.
We worried, of course, about what would happen to our mother after Raymond died.
At the beginning, she seemed disoriented, without a foothold. That first summer, she would sometimes sit out in the yard, turning her face toward the sun, as if to welcome its gentle touch. We would be gathered, the rest of the children, a couple at a time, and she would commence her daily dose of listening in on the conversation of others while pretending not to. She also could have been a reporter, with her odd conviction that information is more interesting when obtained in a roundabout way.
Maybe she’d like some butterscotch candies, or some hore-hound drops, we would say. Some boxed cards from one of the museums. A trip to Watch Hill for some clear clam chowder.
She would suddenly stir, having heard it all.
“What do you think I am? A trinket monger? An easy mark for the innocent treat?”
This was the summer in which Clinton had to own up to having had sex with that woman. The DNA in Monica Lewinsky’s dress from the Gap was being examined. At one point the government engaged in a flurry of firepower avenging some international incident against some embassy somewhere as an obvious distraction from the circus. This oddball moment in American history had the remarkable effect of breaking down all those years of our mother’s prudish reserve.
“Oh,” she said, bored. “That Clinton. He just doesn’t want us to think about his semen.”
We were now a family without Major Scenes. The histrionics of the days with Raymond were gone. This latter-day docility was almost as disconcerting.
We knew she had successfully crossed over to the other side of the bridge when she resumed her old laments, the ones that sustain the crankiness that keeps the blood circulating. She recently observed a communication from my son’s school about the proper attire for his high school graduation: “Boys should wear suits, or a suit jacket and tie, and girls should wear modest white dresses with slips.” She sniffed when she read it: “In my day, you never would have had to specify the modest or the slips, but at least they’re trying. At least there are still some scraps of protocol floating around in this very untidy world.” In her late eighties, she still smokes, she eats red meat, and she fails to see the sin in a touch of wine in the evening, just a touch.
She still thinks about her own funeral and hopes that in any service to mark her passing, propriety is as important as pomp.
“No guitars. If someone wants to sing, fine, as long as it’s in Latin.”
Jacqueline pretends to be taking down her requests, scrawling without a pen on an invisible pad.
“No guitars.”
“No kiss of peace.”
“Banned: the kiss of peace.”
“Those handshakes and hugs between strangers, so typical of today’s world. No one gives a hoot about formality.”
“Hideous.”
“As for music, wasn’t it St. Augustine who said that when you sing in church, you pray twice? However, I am certain he was not referring to folk songs. What he had in mind was something rich and classical, like ‘Ave Maria.’”
“In Latin?”
“Naturally. And, who knows, maybe someone could also sing ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ or ‘The Rose of Tralee.’ What’s wrong with both?”
“I don’t know, Mom. You’re not the type for a hootenanny.”
“Good point. Jacqueline, when you were little, you used to be so airy-fairy, but now I’d say you have a head on your shoulders. Also, no tributes. I can’t stand the idea of my personal affairs being alluded to in public for even a moment.”
“We’ll pretend we never heard of you.”
“Afterwards, a small gathering of the old gang would be fine. What’s left of it. You can always serve a decent sherry. Harvey’s. Now, I know what you’re thinking. This is a funeral. It would be disrespectful to turn it into a picnic. But we’re Irish, and technically, after a long life, it can be both.”
Finally, for a woman who prides herself on her lack of practicality, she sometimes startles us with odd outbursts of efficiency. “I don’t care if I’m cremated. I understand that’s more practical and the Church permits it now, but I want a proper burial, and I don’t want to be stuck away in the corner of someone’s closet.”
Don’t worry, we assured her, we’ll take care of your cre-mains.
“Cremains? What kind of word is that?”
It’s mad
e up, like brunch.
“Brunch? I didn’t say a word about brunch.”
Zoomie, zoomie, zoomie, zoomie, zoom.
As children in Granby, we used to love to watch The Wizard of Oz. It was like Gone with the Wind, one of the few movies we got to see more than once during the pre-video age, when the theatrical rerelease of classics was a rare and widely heralded treat.
But we always had to contend with the fresh disappointment that the Wizard was really just a funny little man with smoke and mirrors.
We were coming home one night from seeing the movie in Holyoke, gliding along Route 202 in our mother’s hearse-sized Nash Rambler, out of sorts from the empty feeling brought on by the curtain falling and the uneasy truce between the mix of buttery popcorn and Junior Mints in our stomachs. We passed the Green Pine Dairy on our left, the dubious motel on our right, sailed through Five Corners, past Dressel’s and the Hilltop Nook.
We jabbed each other with loose elbows, and at one point Michael threatened to open the door of the moving vehicle and jump out if we didn’t leave him alone. We had teased him, three simple syllables, a galvanic response: “Toto’s dead.”
Next came the usual melange of comments whose exact authors are now lost to me.
“I’m so mad at that dumb Wizard.”
“He tricked people into thinking he could do more than he could.”
“Why couldn’t he really be magic?”
“Why couldn’t he be someone special?”
At the wheel of the car, our mother resisted the urge to take her eyes off the road.
“Settle down, children.”
We kept poking and pulling and kicking.
She lit her second cigarette of the short trip.
“I said settle down. In the end he did what he could. He was a good man. His only real mistake was that he was in over his head.”
We amble, my sisters and I, over to the cottage we rent for our mother every summer at Groton Long Point, the place where my uncle owned a house for a time when he was trying to churn out those archetypal experiences of childhood happiness for us: salt air, bracing dips, the freedom to be yourself around the sea. The cottage our mother stays in now is a weather-beaten throwback to the days when cottages really were cottages, with mismatched dishes and sagging wicker chairs and decks of cards buttery from years of overuse and worse-than-mediocre paintings of boats in all kinds of weather. It is a summertime cliché, as predictable as peeling skin, melting ice cream, and hot sand.
While at the cottage, one of us spies an old edition of Trivial Pursuit and starts to riffle through the cards, testing each other with a few sample questions about the fuel capacity of Air Force One and the year in which the League of Nations was formed. The usual blather about wars and treaties, popes and kings, ball games and endgames.
We all agree: they (that amorphous majority called they) should create a Trivial Pursuit just for females. We even come up with possible names for the game. How about Ovarian Oddities or Second Sex Sundries? The questions would be ones that women should be reasonably expected to answer. Quick: What’s the difference between baking powder and baking soda? Which is more flattering on most female figures: dirndls or skirts cut on the bias? To the best of your ability imitate the ululation of the women during the Battle of Algiers. How many moons does Jupiter have? Jacqueline’s was my favorite: “What lucky lady from Smith College had a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine during the summer in which the Rosenbergs were electrocuted?”
“Maybe,” she says, “the game should just be for our family. What did the teabags that Mom’s thrifty friend used to hang on the clothesline resemble? Which tragedy breaks a man, the first or the second? Who are the worst drivers? Recite the last line of Riders to the Sea. Did Ronald Reagan ever make a good movie?”
It is hot out and we decide there is no cure for it other than a bold dip in the ocean.
On our walk to Main Beach, we pass small children equipped with string and buckets, wielding rocks in order to smash mussels as bait for crabs. It is a sunny day, but there was a tropical storm a few days before, not a hurricane but its rip-roaring, wind-belching, branch-breaking understudy, in which at least one cottage lost its deck and a large uprooted tree gashed a roof in half. There is an extra layer of stuff on the beach that must have washed overboard from boats during the rains. A dish towel, a single oar, an empty mayonnaise jar. The beach is also, as usual, littered with itself, seaweed and driftwood, smelling of salt and of rotting vegetation. “Free aromatherapy,” says Jacqueline. “Do you realize how much this would cost at the mall?”
We head toward the second, less crowded, entrance at Main Beach.
“Do you think Mary Cassatt would want to paint us?” says Jacqueline, less a question than a preposterous wish. The raft out in the distance—a swaying gray square—hosts its usual guests, several perfect teenage bodies, boys and girls, sunning themselves. Despite the best efforts of deep thinkers to find deep meaning, sometimes a raft is just a raft.
“Dream on, Play Jay,” we say.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says.
“Uh-oh,” I say, unable to resist the old forms, “that must be quite a strain.”
I am ignored, most regally.
“Those encyclopedias Raymond used to sell. Well, at least it wasn’t Bibles out of a suitcase. Maybe we were all too harsh. Maybe Mom was right: he was ahead of his time.”
We have no idea what she’s driving at.
“And those wooden spools that he thought would make good candlesticks? There’s an element of Martha Stewart to it, of Cute Country Living.”
“What do you mean by that?” I ask, impatient.
“You take some useless gewgaw from a defunct factory, paint it an historic Williamsburg color, and sell it for twenty times what you put into it, creating a market for, how does that saying go? You taught it to me, a market for something people don’t need and never really knew they wanted.”
In the water out by the raft some children are yelling, “Marco! Polo!” Their voices have a disembodied musicality canceled out by the squawks of the ducks.
“And all his collectibles, like the bicycle plates with out-of-date names? Remember them?”
We nod.
“And how about the Moxie thermometer, the old commercial signs with peeling paint, the Pepsi glasses? Well, ever hear of Antiques Roadshow?”
Some gulls swoop down, competing for the spillage from a box of Cracker Jacks.
“But this is my favorite. This is the best. This proves my point beyond dispute. Remember the International Book Search?”
“Of course I do,” I say. “I’ll never forget the letters with twisted syntax from sincere professors from foreign countries putting their faith in his promise to find …”
Christina and Maureen join in: “Any book, anywhere, anytime!”
“Think about it,” says Jacqueline. “Does that sound familiar? Does that sound like one of those new online companies?” She stops in her tracks, arms akimbo, “Like Alibris.com or what?”
Silence.
“Maddy,” says Christina, “why aren’t you saying something?”
“I’m quietly agreeing.”
“There are some people,” says Jacqueline, tossing me a look, “who give their best compliments simply by ceasing to be critical.”
“Touché, Jay,” say the other two at once.
“Traitors,” I mutter. “Crack, crack, dig, dig.” I should have treated them more harshly when they were young, like the Oldest Sister I heard of who used to feed her siblings raw hamburger because she liked to pretend to be a lion tamer.
We have thrown our towels on the sand and are at the edge of the water now, poised for first the slap, then the caress.
“One more thing, not about Ray,” says Jacqueline. She looks up at the sky, squinting. “Dare I say it? Yes, I do. I dare. If I’m not mistaken, the sky today is the color of …”
She pauses.
“Of what?” we ask, smili
ng, suspecting that the answer will be something that winks at us across the vale of time. We are bonded by blood and by our family language, by all our old slogans and sayings.
“Lapis lazuli.” She thrusts two thumbs up.
I stare at her, amazed. “You must have been waiting forty years to use that word in a casual context.”
“I have,” she says, “and that’s too long. How’s about a little Tennyson while we’re at it?”
All of us begin reciting in unison as we move toward the edge of the beach:
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro’ the room,
She saw the water lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Then we propel forward, flinging ourselves into the Long Island Sound, relishing its welcoming embrace, liquid and primitive; such a comfort, such a return. We each swim a few spirited strokes and then, together, we float, and for a sliver of a second, we are light again, light at last, light like long ago.
Epilogue
“NEVER WRITE THE ENDING OF THE STORY,” IS THE ADVICE MY MOTHER-in-law the psychoanalyst always gives her patients when they assume the fix is in, when they fool themselves into thinking they have finally figured it all out.
I saw for myself the wisdom of these words when I realized that a book like this is never truly finished, that I am forever coming up with new twigs to add to the nest. And it’s not just me, but also the members of my family who keep saying, “You didn’t mention the time when …” But a memoir, though it records the past, is nearly the opposite of a historical record in any official sense. It is merely one individual’s admittedly flawed version.
The question I hear most when people outside the family find out I’ve written a memoir: “How did they react?”
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