Blake took another look at it. “I’ll be damned. You remember that, Tor? Aunt Martha used to bake a ton of cookies and bring them over in potato chip canisters.” He hadn’t thought about that in years.
Then he thought about the night of Martha’s funeral and he went cold.
“How’d you get this?” he asked Matt, wanting to move the conversation along.
“I don’t remember. Mom says Martha gave it to me. Here you go.”
Torrie held the rabbit in her open hand. It wasn’t Matt’s fault. He’d been too young.
If Torrie was upset, Blake couldn’t tell from her face, which wasn’t able to do much in the way of expressions anymore. Torrie closed her hand around the rabbit. It seemed like everything was going to be OK, and he felt a careful relief.
You couldn’t pretend that people didn’t exist, or that things hadn’t happened.
Torrie said, “Don’t you want it?”
“I kind of think it should stay around here.”
Because Matt wasn’t going to. That much seemed clear. He was going wherever it was that a guy with a guitar went these days. So many kids left here now. They felt they were missing out on things, they wanted a chance to earn the kind of money that everybody except him was pulling down these days. He worried about his own kids. You didn’t raise them just so they’d grow up and you’d never get to see them.
He guessed he should be happy for Matt because he was doing what he wanted. Maybe some people just weren’t born to stick around. They already had a ticket on that rocket to the Final Frontier.
Torrie put the rabbit up in a windowsill where you could see the shape of it against the light. It looked more like a cat perched up in a tree than anything else.
Blake was just getting ready to say they should head back. Torrie crossed the room and came back with a T-shirt she spread out on the table. The picture printed on the front was the one Torrie had taken of him, the one where he was turning into a board or a tree.
“What’s this? I’m a shirt now?”
“I owe you money.”
“Money, what for?”
“Guy in Seattle sold a bunch of you.”
“Wow,” Matt said. “You’re a hit in Seattle.”
“He says, to Japanese tourists.”
“You’re shittin’ me.” He couldn’t get his mind around it. People on both sides of the Pacific Ocean walking around wearing him on their chests.
“Hey Uncle Blake, if I ever get to Japan, I’ll look you up.”
“You do that, slick.” He saw it behind his eyes: the ocean waves slapping against each other, the cities and trains and temples, the slash-stroke writing, the women dressed up like fancy, teetering dolls. The Land of the Rising Sun.
He told Torrie she didn’t owe him money. They listened to the rest of Matt’s music for another moment and a moment and a moment more.
Italy
JUNE 1998
This was the trip his wife had always wanted to take, although like most things she wanted, Ryan had needed to talk her into it. And it had been a wonderful vacation. They reminded themselves of this whenever they had to get past some unavoidable and predictable space of boredom or irritation. The great time they’d been having was on one side of the chasm. They had only to ride things out, reach the other side, where a new and unexplored great time awaited them. Although they tried not to think of it in such terms, the grand amount of money they were spending made happiness feel like a matter of some urgency.
The kids had done really well, better than expected. They had probably been more awestruck by the plane ride than anything else. Sam had never flown before, and Anna had been too young to remember it. So that the airport crowds, the loudspeaker announcements, the smiling stewardesses in their trim uniforms, the cunning little packages of peanuts were all new to them. As was the terrifying skyward lurch. There were a few bad moments then, but soon they were coaxed by the impossible views of clouds, close up, all around them, underneath!
Anna was ten, Sam was six. Anna was her mother’s. Sam was his. Everybody said so. They were a little genetic laboratory, a real-life demonstration of selected traits. Anna had Ellen’s sturdy seriousness and gray eyes. Sam could have been any one of Ryan’s Norwegian farm relatives from the last century. “Mom,” Sam said, looking down at this new country of sunlit fleece, “how do clouds stay up?”
While Anna just stared. Ryan put an arm around her shoulders. “Look,” he told her. “There’s another plane over there, do you see it? I wonder if it’s crossing the ocean too.” Sometimes he thought he understood his daughter better than his son, if only because she’d been around longer. Sam was still a cheerful savage, immune to most terrors. Anna needed to be reassured that hurtling through space in a pressurized tin can was absolutely normal, natural, and delightful. One of the lies parents told children for their own good.
When they first arrived in Rome (the children cranky, jet-lagged, complaining of tummyaches, earaches), it was hard for them to be impressed by anything. The Colosseum, which was too hot for anyone’s comfort and had the look of something that ought to be either built back up or torn down. After one museum gallery, the pictures all looked alike to them and talking about the Renaissance only made them fretful. This although Ryan and Ellen had primed them for weeks beforehand with Let’s Go to Italy! coloring books and storybooks and fun examples of Italian vocabulary. (Buon giorno! Grazie!) Children only saw what was here and now, not any of the past glories. Here and now, in Rome at least, had been the staggering, murderous traffic, clouds of unfurling exhaust, trampling herds of tourists, food the kids didn’t want to eat. Thank God for gelato.
“Hey Anna,” Ryan said. “It’s lemon. You like lemon, don’t you?” And her little round chin stopped its trembling. What wouldn’t he do to comfort her, coax her, shield her from hurt? How much longer would ice cream be enough?
Florence, Orvieto, and Venice had gone better for all of them. The kids had settled into the routine of travel and regained their noisy energy. There were the family-friendly activities that had been promised: the hands-on pasta-making workshop, the mask-making workshop. The actor dressed up in pantaloons and doublet and plumed hat who scared Sam at first with his extravagant delivery, his barker’s spiel designed to convey historical narrative in an entertaining manner. So it reminded them of Disneyland. Kids liked Disneyland.
Ryan and Ellen were also privately relieved by the presence of other peoples’ loudly misbehaving kids, those who screamed and squalled and provoked their parents into shows of public discipline. Although they were always mindful not to invest or project too much of themselves into other people’s opinions of their children, since it might be their turn next to deal with tantrums or brattiness. Still, how well Anna and Sam looked by comparison to this or that raging child, how comely, how sweet, how serious. They were good and vigilant parents. It was nice when some of that showed.
And if parenting had come to replace other parts of marriage, if every other sentence seemed to begin with “The kids,” if unspoken things took up more and more space between them, well, none of their problems were anything new, in the history of the world. Especially this ancient world they had come to view, its palaces and fountains and statuary, its courts and grottoes echoing with old secrets. So much that was bloody and splendid and barbaric and grand had happened here. They were content to be eclipsed for a time. That was part of a vacation too.
It was the height of tourist season, you could hear English spoken on every street, which struck Ryan as somehow rude. And disappointing, as if they’d waited too long to come, and now everything had been tamed and colonized for them. There were charter tours that catered to Americans, with cheerful Italian guides and well-plumbed hotels. Even though Ryan and Ellen decided against these, it was hard to avoid incongruous reminders of home. An Italian TV lady with a Jennifer Aniston hairdo introduced a feature on Jennifer Aniston. The Stars and Stripes lurched into view, a whole field of them, worn on the T-shirts
of some girls’ high school athletic team. Basketball? Lacrosse? Ryan couldn’t tell. They clomped off in their shorts and braided hair, the flags jigging over their breasts.
“Maybe if we were Italian,” Ellen said, frowning. “I mean if it was our heritage, there would be things we’d recognize, things that would resonate for us. Not that it isn’t all amazing . . .”
Where was the real Italy? How would they know? So much strangeness in the midst of so much strangeness. The elegant carabinieri, certainly the tallest men in Italy. The little golden towns, the walls of ancient, lichened stone, the excellent wine, both red and white, that they drank and drank without, it seemed, ever getting drunk. All the things they had been warned against: pickpockets, beggars, overpriced taxis, scams. In Florence, two young men on a motor scooter slowed beside them in a concerning way. “Where you from?” one called, and when Ryan said, “Chicago,” they laughed and brandished imaginary machine guns, rattaratta tat tat, waved and rode off. What a goofy, happy moment, a relief, a release. In Venice the gondoliers were bored, oh painfully bored, with having to haul the tourists around. They waited sourly on the landings in their silly striped shirts and ribboned hats. Ryan and Ellen opted for the vaporetti instead. There was no reason to pay money for such guaranteed contempt. And this made them happy too, as if they had escaped some circle of tourist hell.
At Peggy Guggenheim’s museum they were certain they saw a figure from a long-ago American scandal, a man whom in other circumstances they might have approached and wished well. But he was so clearly on vacation and off duty that they decided to leave him be. A small and thrilling miracle from the god of coincidence.
They discovered that Spaghetti Caruso, a particular dish, was prepared with chicken livers and so was rightly and passionately rejected by Sam. When he was older they’d remind him of this. It would attach itself to him, the story would become part of him.
For their last five days in Italy they rented a hillside villa in Umbria with a view of olive and cypress and lemon trees, its own swimming pool, maid service, and satellite TV. There were a number of other such vacation villas occupied by tourists, although they were all designed and sited so that they each felt entirely private. There was a fully equipped kitchen and a modern supermarket to serve the villas. And, in the pretty town at the top of the next mild hill, some excellent restaurants. It was a chance to relax, their reward for having been so many places and dutifully seen so many sights.
Ellen was worn-out and complained of headaches and spent a lot of time napping under the ceiling fan in their bedroom with the curtains drawn. The kids liked the pool, but it seemed that once the momentum of the trip slowed, much of the fun was over for them. “When are we going home?” Anna demanded on their first day.
“On Sunday,” Ryan told her, glad to have an answer for her, even if it wasn’t the answer she wanted. He was close to being vacationed-out himself. He was ready to sleep in his own bed, turn the trip into pictures and souvenirs, put a bow on it. But first there would be this interlude.
The villa had a shelf of books and magazines left behind by other, mostly English-speaking guests. While Ellen slept, he supervised the kids in the pool and leafed through the old copies of Time and Der Spiegel, a couple of glossy and forbidding literary journals, the detective novels and thrillers that were considered ideal for vacationing. None of them engaged him. He was always saying he wished he had more time to read, but either that was untrue, or else none of these materials were what he thought of as reading.
He and the children piled into the tiny rented Fiat and made a trip to the supermarket, where Ryan allowed them to select American breakfast cereal, processed cheese, and hot dogs. He made fried chicken for their dinner, and for himself and Ellen, pasta with lemon and artichokes and shrimp. She was still pale and puffy-faced, but felt well enough to come to the table for dinner, eating a little and smiling fragilely at the children. Later she sat with Ryan on the terrace.
The kids were inside in front of the television. Of course. “What are they watching?” Ellen asked. The colored smear of the television screen was behind them in the living room.
Ryan went inside to check. “Baywatch,” he reported back. “David Hasselhoff, dubbed in Italian.”
“I guess that’s OK. I worry about the commercials. They always seem to be showing bare breasts or some such thing.”
“Well then, Italian kids must see that stuff too.” He wasn’t sure what sort of point he was making.
“I guess so,” Ellen said, seeming to lose interest. Ryan stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders. “Mm,” she said. It wasn’t really that hard to be nice to her.
“How’s the headache?”
“Better. Kind of a dull roar. Background noise.”
“You can just take it easy tomorrow. There’s nothing we really have to do.” They had considered taking some excursions into the countryside, tours of wineries, tours of olive-oil factories, but nothing they’d planned out.
“It’s boring for you here,” she said in a regretful tone.
“I can go into town if I get antsy.” He hadn’t been aware of feeling bored until she’d spoken. Now he felt it weighing him down as if he were underwater.
At some point in their life together he had assumed the burden of making her happy. Her most familiar mood, what he thought of as her default position, was one of exasperated suffering. Which he must attend, coax, tease, and try to reason away. He would never be entirely successful; at best she would only be not unhappy. But he would always be obliged to try.
Was that the worst thing he could say about her? If he was looking for excuses, was that the best he could do? He shamed himself with these thoughts, but not enough to keep him from dishonesty.
He’d had two affairs, one of them brief, one of them lengthy. He believed that Ellen had suspicions, but no actual proof or knowledge. It had sobered him, how easy it was to get away with such things, also how little effort it would take to deal a marriage, his or any other, a fatal and rupturing blow. And that he had not been willing to do.
Both had been women he knew at work or through work. One, the first, had been younger than he was by fifteen years, a reckless, adventuring girl who alarmed him with her highs and lows, her crying jags, her cocaine, her theatrics, which, although deliberate and calculated, she thought of as impetuous charm. She was exactly the kind of girl you worried might show up to a rendezvous naked underneath a coat. It had only lasted a few weeks, then she’d moved to Toronto to be with an old boyfriend. Even now, if his phone rang at odd or unexpected hours, Ryan’s first sweating thought was that she was calling.
The next woman had been his age, divorced, and lonely enough to accept what he had to offer without wanting more, or at least, so it had been in the beginning. But over the year and a half of their time together, she’d made more and more space in her life for him, become more and more wifelike, fussing over his health, his clothes, stocking her kitchen with the brand of coffee he liked, even aquiring a bathrobe for his use. He began to back away. He’d hoped to let things die a natural death and avoid a scene but there had been one.
They’d been in her car, she was driving him to Union Station for what would be the last time. Ryan said, “I thought we were just going to enjoy it until it was over.” It was at that point in the argument: anything more generous and less craven had already been offered and dismissed.
“Fuck you,” she said. “I don’t remember signing that piece of paper. I don’t exist solely for your convenience.”
“We could still keep in touch,” Ryan said. Another remark he would be ashamed of later.
“You mean, Dial-A-Geisha. You mean, you call me whenever it fits into your fucking schedule, and I will soothe and entertain you and listen with great interest to all the tiny events of your tiny life. No thanks.”
He didn’t answer. She was driving too fast then hitting the brakes heavy, and he concentrated on just being able to get out of the car alive.
“
You know what the hell of it is? You probably love me, in some chickenshit way. It’s just not important enough for you to do anything about it.”
“Would you Jesus Christ watch where you’re going,” Ryan said. Brake lights were flaring red in front of them, and she was looking straight at him.
The hell of it was she was probably right. Chickenshitedness. An important component of screwing around. He wished she would become a good memory, not someone who came to mind, as she did now, only when he felt irritable and guilty.
Well, if he felt guilty, it’s because he was guilty. He’d tried to reclaim some notion of himself as he had been: not just younger, but certain that his journey through the world would be a blazed trail, not one stupid foot in front of the other.
From the terrace at night you could see the lights of other villas through the weaving, waving trees. A scent of eucalyptus mixed with the residue of the day’s baking heat. At a little distance was the walled town that dated back to before the Etruscans.
Ellen said, “I just wish we’d met more Italians. Besides hotelkeepers and tour guides, I mean. I wish the kids had. Everybody we ran into was from Dallas, or Los Angeles.”
Ryan said that was the way it was set up, these trips. Parts of the country were just big holding pens for tourists. Walking with Anna and Sam on a sidewalk in Florence, they’d seen two little Chinese boys, dressed in shorts and kneesocks and jackets, walking alongside each other, one’s arm thrown over the other’s shoulder as they looked at a book. Miniature Italians, in almost every respect. “Who are they?” Anna had asked, and Ryan said he didn’t know, just some boys. There would be a story there, but he wouldn’t be able to guess it. All over the world, people ended up in the damnedest places.
He said, “I think I will run into town for a bit.”
“What, right now?”
The Year We Left Home: A Novel Page 29