“Oh Wayne,” May had said, “do shut up. You are a total embarrassment.”
5.
“Listen,” my mother said to me, about half an hour after she’d arrived the next morning. “What’s the matter with that big guy?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said.
“Who is he, anyway?”
“Leonard Gannet.”
“Oh,” my mother said. “It is? That’s Leonard? Oh dear.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“Well I know his mother and she’s so delightful.”
“You shouldn’t judge by appearances.”
“Really,” she said, “he’s a mess, Liz. He looks as if he walked into a buzz saw.”
“He did. You want a coke or something?”
“Do you people have alcoholic beverages, or is that not allowed along with caffeine and nicotine? In my day, the big no-no was sex.”
“That’s what was wrong with your generation.”
“You’re so naive. Nowadays, you people tend to treat sex the way our parents treated bathing. It was a revelation to them that you could have more than one bath a week. Not only that, it was good for you. I don’t know. In my humble opinion, it takes away all the glamour and mystery.”
“Of bathing?” I asked.
“Of sex!” she said, and grabbed my arm impatiently, and then frowned and pointed to her chest. We stopped.
“What’s the matter?” I said. She was panting. We were walking from the parking area to the pond, and although the path was steep it was well-worn and all downhill.
She laid her hand upon her heaving chest and looked away from me, up into the trees while she struggled to catch her breath. “It’s just a cold,” she said after a moment. Her voice was thick. “Don’t look so distraught.”
“Ma,” I said, “when was your last check-up?”
“Oh,” she said sarcastically, “do I look that bad?”
“You’ve lost some weight.”
“I needed to lose some weight. Besides,” she had started walking again, “there’s no one to cook for. Not that I’m complaining, only I wonder how your father’s doing? I doubt his twice-a-year cooking routine will be a big help.”
I said nothing, trying to think how, during this long summer’s day together, I could more or less continuously derail the incipient uncomfortable conversation.
“But isn’t it a gorgeous day?” my mother asked, lifting her face to the sun, and closing her eyes. She’d herself derailed the discussion, maybe interpreting my silence as disapproval. “I’ve always loved The Fourth, especially when you kids were small and we’d go out to Oldfields. Here, let me just sit for a minute.”
We’d reached the redwood picnic tables and benches which had been set up at the edge of the pond. She sat down, shakily inhaled several times and then in a strained voice asked for a glass of water. May and Wayne sat down on the other side of the table. I introduced everyone, and then started back up to the house to get a pitcher of water. On the way, I nearly collided with Leonard, who was just coming down the path. We both leaped apart, and the woman who was with Leonard gave a startled laugh. She was a middle-aged woman with a heavy coil of dark blond hair—I thought she was very handsome. She looked over her shoulder at me, smiled and shrugged, then I heard her say to him in an amused lightly-accented voice, “You can’t introduce me?”
He went past me down the path, I imagine glaring, although of course I couldn’t see his face.
I took my time in the kitchen, getting the ice water and then slicing some hard-boiled eggs to decorate the potato salad I’d made. I’d never done much cooking before I came here, but I found that I enjoyed cooking for the group. I wondered if my father’s girlfriend cooked for him? Or perhaps he cooked. Yes, I’m sure that was how it was. I think my father would shop for his dinner, cook it and eat it because he’s a man of such steady and regular habits.
He never cooked at home, with two exceptions—Christmas morning and the Fourth of July. On both these holidays he cooked breakfast. On Christmas morning, we always had real Scotch oatmeal, the kind that is nutty and you steam for a long time in a double boiler. And then we’d have oranges and orange juice, ham sliced thin, scrambled eggs and coffee cake. On the Fourth of July we always had blueberries and cream, and bacon and eggs any style. That was it—his total cooking contribution for the year, but it was wonderful because generally we were an eat and run breakfast family.
So that was how The Fourth started, a holiday from the moment we got up in the morning because my father was in the kitchen. Later, we’d pack all sorts of food into cardboard boxes and baskets, and we’d drive out to Oldfields. Just before we got there, we’d come to a strip of country road that had a border of orange day lilies on both sides, and every year as the car navigated the bend before the lilies came into view, my father would say, “I wonder if the lilies are out?” and my mother would say reassuringly, “Of course they’re out.”
Why do I remember the day with such joy? Nothing much happened at Oldfields. Perhaps it was the novelty of having open fields to run in. Unless it was over ninety degrees, my grandfather and I used to ride out together. When we came to the first field, he would say, “Shall we trot?” and when we came to the second field, he would say, “Shall we canter?” I liked my grandfather a lot and never could understand why he and my mother didn’t get along. I suppose it was because he didn’t care for conversations. When any sort of real conversation got under way, he’d go get himself a drink, or wander out to the barn to look at the horses, or find a screwdriver and start tightening the tiny brass screws on the handles of the dining room sideboard.
After we came back from our ride, and we’d sponged off the horses, we’d all swim in the pool. That’s about all we did, there was really nothing to it, but it seemed to me like a completely happy day. Just like a kid, I woke up this morning thinking, It’s the Fourth! and then I remembered that Skip wouldn’t be around. At once a cloud-like pall passed over the day for me, and I rolled over and went back to sleep.
When I finally went downstairs, Leonard was cooking breakfast. Like Frankenstein, his face was wrapped in bandages. He couldn’t talk, and after I stood there for a moment, perplexed, he held up a message he had lettered on a steno pad:
HOW WANT YOUR EGGS?
I was murderously cruel to him. I said, “Ah. Silence at last.” He stood there stoically holding his sign. He really looked very funny, with his swollen eyes and black brows peeking out between the crisscrossed gauze, and bandages across his hair with that one idiotic cowlick still sticking up at the back of his head. “Well, let me see,” I said. “I guess I’ll try scrambled. How are you feeling? Better?”
He turned away, giving no indication that he’d heard me. He cracked eggs into a bowl and began whisking them and then heated some margarine in a frying pan. He set a mug of coffee before me. His eyes were swollen into slits, but still you could see the anger; the gray pupils seemed to radiate reddish sparks. He turned away, going about his tasks like a coolie, bent and with gritted teeth. He stood at the sink scrubbing utensils, the tendons in his long arms tense and flexed. His shoulder blades looked huge in his shapeless gray tee shirt. Where did it come from, this urge I had to punch him between his shoulder blades? Did he bring this out in women? I wanted to hit him there as hard as I could, knock the breath out of him.
He went to the stove, wrapped a dish towel around the handle of the iron frying pan, scraped the eggs onto a plate and set it before me. I don’t know why—I grabbed his hand, hung onto it at the fleshy part, like a dog with a bone. Did I want to just hold his hand? Or maybe break his fingers? He pulled his hand away with a yank and hit me on the head with the side of it, a hard chop. This enraged me. I jumped out of my chair and punched him in the chest. His eyebrows flew up, the pan hit the floor with an iron knell. He grabbed me at the sides of my arms and squeezed, hoisted me up and shook me. Then put me down.
I looked at him, amazed. I said stiffly, “I�
��m so sorry.”
He said nothing. He couldn’t speak, his face a pale bandaged balloon. And then I sat down again and stared at the eggs—they were both runny and burned, a stupid combination. I’d been looking forward to them; he’d offered them to me, and here they were—ruined. I began to cry. I cried into the scrambled eggs and over the toast and I had no real idea why I was crying, but at the corner of my vision I felt his long grayish presence—he was standing at my left side.
He said, “Eee.”
“What?” I asked, looking up at him.
He straightened the plate in front of me with a little jerk. “Eee.” He picked up the paper napkin and dropped it into my lap. Handed me the fork. I looked up at him, astounded. A hank of his black hair hung aslant in front of the bandage that crossed the top of his skull. I wanted to ask him, Why am I crying? Why is everything so wrong? Why is it I’m young, I’m only twenty-five, and I have no life? I’ve just become engaged and I feel that I have no life? My brother’s sick and my mother says, “Look at the good side—he’s not in Vietnam.” My father’s in love and I find this—terrifying.
I didn’t tell him any of these things, of course—he had problems of his own. I thought of him in the wicker chair, holding the washcloth up to his face and crying. What was he crying for? He must love her very much. She doesn’t love him, that’s quite apparent. I wanted to say to him, “Look, friend. She doesn’t love you. Give it up, it’s a lost cause.”
But of course I said none of these things.
He sat down at the trestle table across from me. He picked up a glass of orange juice and sipped it through a straw, and then frowned and looked down, reading The New York Times. He looked up, raised the paper. Did I want to read? All right, I said. He shuffled through the paper, gave me the Style Section. The only thing I ever read in the so-called Style Section was the news of the Women’s Movement, which this newspaper always carried under Style. The women of the world were having a revolution and the Times had turned it into a fashion statement. To wear a bra or not? Thousands of women gather at an international conference—news of it is on the Style Page. Death by trivialization. I glanced at the page—nothing of import. He handed me the front section, and perused Sports. I wondered if this was a miniature of marriage: first frustration, then violence, then death, divorce, resignation. My parents never struck each other, but once in the kitchen, they threw fruit. Bang! Bump! Plop. Ripe peaches, oranges, bananas all hit the walls. We had to have the room repainted.
He sighed, a grunt-like sound, a kind of “ooof.” I looked up at him and then looked down. What was wrong with me? It was suddenly clear—I wanted to go to bed with him. I was full of desire for him. If the others hadn’t been around I would have taken his hand, and led him somewhere, eased off his tee shirt, unzipped his pants.
I knew that he knew my thoughts—I felt it. His face, bulbous and bandaged, his slitted, puffy, angry eyes, swollen pale lips, everything that was skin within the confines of the bandage began to redden. I could see the blush, starting just under the crimped neck of his gray tee shirt move slowly, unevenly up his freshly shaven throat.
My own face was burning hot. My chest felt squeezed, I couldn’t breathe. I got up quickly, took the plate to the sink. Scrip, scrape, ran the water hot over the plate.
I didn’t have to see, I could feel—he was right behind me. If I took one step back. I turned. He looked down at me. I shook my head. Now it was as if the blood had left his face—he looked pale, totally drained.
I left the room.
What was wrong with me?
I thought I was sick. Malaria, yellow fever. One of those tropical things.
I thought of Skip. In my thoughts—is this what they called projection?—I saw him in bed with a girl, a blond.
We were going to be married in August.
I decided to go running to get the bugs out of my system. While I ran—every slap of my sneakers raising dust—past banks of orange lilies and into the thicket’s gloom—I thought of my mother and how I would deal with her. She would ask me, of course. Not about myself, I didn’t mean that, ’though I would have to announce sometime today: ‘Skip and I are engaged.’ No, not about that, about my father. She would ask, “Have you seen him? How is he?” I would say nothing. But of course, later, if she found out, if she knew that I knew he had a girlfriend, she’d be angry. Feel betrayed. Still, I didn’t think I could face it. Not today. Not on The Fourth. So what was the strategy? Keep her busy. Get her to talk to the others. That should do it.
At least for a little while.
6.
“Oh it was enchanting,” my mother said. “I can see why Liz likes it here. I drove up out of the village on a road I didn’t know and there I was, at the top of the world. An enormous sky, mountain ridges off in the distance, acres of golden fields and horses … there were horses everywhere!”
“You were on Lowery’s Lane,” May said. “The horse farm is owned by some people named Obriskie. They’re terribly rich.”
“Ah,” my mother said. “The rich are always with us.”
I said, “They raise Trekehners.”
“What’s that?” my mother asked.
“A breed of horses,” I said. “Polish or East German.”
“Of course she’d know that,” my mother said to May. “If you put Liz in any new place, she always gets to know the plants and animals first. She knows her horses but does she know the neighbors?”
“I know our neighbors,” I said. “At least, I know some of them.”
My mother liked to get a place doped out into social and political niches. Who was everybody? What did they do for a living? How much did they earn? How did they vote?
And what difference did it make? It always seemed strange to me that our family’s “perfect democrat” was so bent on categorizing everyone. My father, on the other hand, had no social antennae and never made social distinctions.
And then I thought, Relax, you’re too irritable. She’s feeling a little shy and she’s being talkative and animated to make a good impression on your friends. Remember how in high school she always overdid it?
I glanced at her, sitting a few feet away from me across the redwood picnic table, and I had one of those moments of cold clarity, when we see a person we love as a perfect stranger, stripped of the mask of familiarity. She was leaning across the table saying something about the war. A breeze picked up and lifted a strand of graying hair, and she brushed it back and self-consciously smiled. In the last few months she’d aged considerably. Her shoulders were hunched, her hair had gone quite gray, her face was a wreath of wrinkles. Why not? With my father decamped, she’d become the family burden-bearer: she was like a stone caryatid, bent under the weight of my brother’s care.
My fiancé and I had not much discussed the family problem, that is to say, my brother John. Whenever I brought the subject up, Skip would look uneasy and I would back off: I didn’t want to freight our every moment with heavy baggage. I was scared I would lose him, scared he’d look at me one day and say, shaking his head, “I can’t handle this.” Once Mrs. Loomis had asked me, “Honey, do you think it’s hereditary?” I said I didn’t know. She’d said, exasperated, “Surely you must know about your kin?”
Later I’d asked my mother some questions, for example, how her mother had died. She’d given me a sarcastic look, and then said, “Don’t worry. It was pneumonia.”
“Okay,” May said, “enough of this sitting around. Who wants to go climb the ridge? Liz, you do. You haven’t even been up there yet.”
“Yes, I have,” I said.
“Not in the daytime,” Sal sang out. He stood a few feet away, grinning and glistening and dripping pond water. His fuzz-covered pot belly hung out over a pair of old cut-off jeans that clung to his wet thighs an inch from disaster. He was methodically wringing out hanks of his long black hair, and his curly black beard lay on his chest beaded with drops of water.
“Who is that?” my mother asked rearing
back and peering at him sharply.
“That’s just Sal,” I said. “Salacious Sal.”
“But why on earth would you go up to that ridge at night?” my mother asked me. Then her face snapped shut and she said, “Oh.”
“If we’re going to do this walk,” May said, gracefully standing, “we better go now, before Leonard makes us cook the hamburgers.”
I yawned and stretched elaborately and said, “I think I’ll go, I need the exercise.” I’d only spent an hour with my mother but already I needed a break from all that persistent brightness.
“I think I’ll go, too,” my mother said.
“Oh, but you can’t!” I said.
“Why not?” my mother asked.
“Because! It’s a really tough climb. It’s … awful!”
She got up from the bench smiling grimly. “I’m old,” she said, “but I’m not dead.”
And so we left the glistening dark green pond, the water lilies, the darting iridescent dragon flies, and a noisy show-off of a red-winged blackbird who kept skimming the cattails and reeds, doing dips to display his yellow and red epaulettes and (like my mother) whistling brightly for our attention. Leonard was shaking charcoal into the grill while his Aunt Louise sat in a lounge chair, placidly reading under the shade of a tennis visor. I longed to stay right there, to engage Leonard’s interesting aunt in conversation, but my mother was climbing the railroad-tie steps up the bank and already she had turned, and was fiercely waving ‘come on.’
As I walked past Louise, she looked up from her book and said, civilly, “Have a nice time,” and Leonard gave me a cool grey-eyed look from under his bandages, and began vigorously rattling the charcoal around in the barbecue’s metal pan.
“What’s … up there, anyway?” my mother asked, a few yards into the hike. The “wagon trail” was overgrown, and as we climbed, it grew steeper. She had grasped for support at the trunk of a tree, and her breathing was harsh.
“Another farm,” I said. “At some point the Cools divided their property and made a second farm on the ridgetop.”
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