The Slippery Year
Page 18
A rhythm is quickly established. We sleep late. We wander down to the ocean, me with a mug of coffee, Ben with a butterfly net. We spend a couple of hours sitting on the rocks and poking around. There’s so much to see and smell and absorb. The leaves of the birch trees make a sound like gold coins pouring from a hand. The air smells of hay, sunscreen and pine needles. I’m like Frederick the mouse in that Leo Lionni book, gathering sun, colors and words for the rest of the year when we’re living three thousand miles away from this beloved place where both my son and Bodhi were born.
When Ben gets bored, he wanders down the shore to my mother-in-law’s house and they go off to the dump, to the bakery or to Cod End for fried clams and I go back to the house, crawl into my bed and sleep some more.
I give up on the eyedrops. The only cure for a scratched cornea is time. I try and have faith that this is all happening for a reason. My sight needed to be reassembled.
Wearing my glasses, I feel I’m under a spell. Time has reversed itself and I’m a girl again. When I lived in absolutes. When I knew exactly what I loved and what I hated. When pain was not a stranger but a familiar visitor. Some part of my body was always bleeding or skinned, because I was always falling, because I was always risking something. Pain with a beginning and an end. Pain that could be ridden out.
They call that innocence.
I think about Ben. And how the veil of his innocence is being lifted. About the things he used to know. And what he’ll forget. And what, one day, if he’s lucky, he’ll remember again. When he was three he told me grapes tasted like sadness. When he was four he told his father I was king of all the womens. When he was seven he told his best friend he didn’t need to go to heaven because he was already living inside of God.
I am so relieved when my husband comes.
“Give me the car keys,” is the first thing he says.
I hand them over.
“You are now officially relieved of your chauffeuring duties.”
I don’t tell him we’ve barely left Owl’s Ledge since we’ve gotten here and he won’t want to either.
The time away from each other has been good. It was time enough to really miss him, and as the days pass, I begin to recognize him again. This is what happens when you’ve been together for nearly twenty years. You become strangers and then you recognize each other and then you become strangers again and you repeat this pattern—this loop, this skein—over and over again.
I watch him in his competence steering a Boston Whaler up the St. George River at low tide in the fog, teaching our son how to paddle a kayak and ferrying his half-blind wife around the Port Clyde peninsula. We swim in lakes. We read the entire Sunday New York Times. We are happy.
And finally it’s our last night before we leave Maine. We’re at my mother-in-law’s house and a large group of cousins and aunts and uncles have gathered—all from my husband’s side of the family. We’ve eaten dinner and we’ve made our way through numerous bottles of wine. We have been talking about everything except why we are gathered here.
Why we are gathered here is the reason my son is on a couch crying softly. Tonight we are burying Bodhi. Ben’s holding the gallon-size Ziploc baggie on his lap. Every now and then he shakes the bag, his version of petting the dog.
We have chosen a special place in my mother-in-law’s garden where Bodhi’s ashes will go, between the lemon mint and the pachysandra. There is a stone angel marking the spot, but as we get closer to actually putting him there and saying our last words, Ben gets more and more visibly upset.
Finally I kneel down and whisper to Ben, “We don’t have to leave him here.”
“We don’t?” asks Ben.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think it’s the right thing. I did, but I don’t anymore. I thought because he was born here we should bury him here. But he needs to be where we are. That’s where he belongs. With us. We’ll take him back.”
“Home?” Ben asks me.
“Yes, home,” I say.
Home—the ways in which we are bound to one another. Not by chance. Not by country or house or blood, but by choice. I see now that home has always been my choice. We leave the door open. Or we seal it shut. We run away. Or we choose to stay.
Sometimes the days burst open like seedpods and we see thousands of futures, and it’s so much that our throats swell and we can’t do anything but turn away and try and forget that gleaming, all that possibility. Who could live into such brightness? Sometimes the days beat their wings slowly so we can take their measure, so we know how lucky we are that we are being given just one moment more.
“We’re going to get stopped by airport security again,” I whisper to my husband. “You do realize that this particular incarnation of Bodhi bears a peculiar resemblance to a pound of coke?”
“Don’t worry,” says my husband. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Good sit,” my son whispers to the Ziploc baggie when he thinks everybody has stopped listening.
Later we walk back to Owl’s Ledge, picking our way along the shore: our small family—a mother, a father and a boy carrying his dog. We are enough. We are just as we should be. Our bellies are full with good food and good wine. Our clothes smell of wood smoke, and our hair smells of the sea. Tonight our son adores us. We haven’t lost him yet, to his friends, to music, to love. Changes are ahead. Low tides. But right now we are walking beneath a starry sky, bathed in the moon’s light.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to my agent, Elizabeth Sheinkman, for believing in this book, understanding it before I even had words for it, and for finding it such a good home. I can’t say enough about Jordan Pavlin—sorcerer, midwife, and friend—in short, the editor of my dreams. Thanks also to the entire team at Knopf, most especially Leslie Levine, Sarah Gelman, and Paul Bogaards. Also thanks to Felicity Blunt and Betsy Robbins at Curtis-Brown UK.
A huge thank-you to all my friends and family for their generosity and counsel: Kerri Arsenault, Brigeda Bank, Laura Barnard, Natalie Baszile, Allison Bartlett, Elizabeth Bernstein, Kathleen Caldwell, Kathryn Fox, Helena Echlin, Carol Edgarian, Rodes Fishburne; my sisters, Dawn, Rebecca and Sara Gideon; my parents, Sarah and Vasant Gideon; Joanne Hartman, Robin Heller, Jeanne Martin, Alexandra Merrill, Caroline Paul, Elizabeth Pelzner, Lisa Ruben, Beth Schoenberger, Renee Schoepflin, Cameron Tuttle, Ken Vivian, and, last but not at all least, my fellow writers at the Grotto.
Thank you to Charlotte Sheedy—one of the classiest women I know.
Thanks to Dan Jones, for publishing the Modern Love essay that was the seed for The Slippery Year.
And finally, abiding thanks to my husband and son for letting me tell our story.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melanie Gideon was born and raised in Rhode Island. She now lives in the Bay Area with her husband and son.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
COPYRIGHT © 2009 BY MELANIE GIDEON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC., NEW YORK, AND IN CANADA BY RANDOM HOUSE OF CANADA LIMITED, TORONTO.
WWW.AAKNOPF.COM
KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS, AND THE COLOPHON ARE REGISTERED TRADEMARKS OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC.
eISBN: 978-0-307-27304-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009928265
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