by Julia Glass
My thesis is a proposed compromise between conservationists protecting West Coast seals and the increasingly hostile fishing merchants, who, like Republicans on the subject of welfare, slander their marine foes as slothful, greedy, unproductive citizens who ought to have had their tubes tied long ago. If my disingenuously optimistic theories are coalescing at the speed of a slug, and if there’s anything to blame outside my native lethargy and my brooding struggles with pointlessness, it’s Zip. I met Zip at Miso Magic, where he is a regular. I go there once in a while, when I long for virtue, and I ought to have known better—realized that a man so free of toxins would make me feel doubly poisonous by comparison.
Zip says I’m too much Of The World. He frowns on my lust for tequila, my sarcasm, my secrecy, my habit of dancing with strange men in bars (just dancing, that’s all!). He says I eat too much yin food, and he suspects I don’t go deep enough when I meditate. I wouldn’t tell him that I don’t really meditate at all; I go through the motions sometimes, just for him, and I’ve tried, I really have, to let go of the world—but I can’t. The world weighs so much, and it bears down so hard. We’ve been seeing each other for three months and he’s sort of moved in. Not that he’s a freeloader. Speaking of productive citizens, in fact, Zip is the county’s social services director. I like his idealism. Would that it were contagious.
He stays over most nights and always does the cooking. He bought a set of Japanese knives for my kitchen and treats them like holy relics. They are the sharpest knives I’ve ever touched, sharper than hunting knives, sharper than envy. The night he brought them over, I ran one lightly across my palm—the one time I’ve seen him lose his cool. “For God’s sake!” he shouted; the knife sliced my skin like the easy flesh of a melon. A lot of blood for so shallow a cut, and I laughed as Zip wrapped my hand in a dish towel. “Hey,” I joked, “life is never dull.” Zip was not amused.
He moves around my kitchen with the grace of a priest; just to watch him is reassuring. But lately I’m sick of hijiki salads, brown rice breakfasts, and daikon root stews, even if I do gaze across my chopsticks at a face akin to Rob Lowe’s (better: less of the chipmunk). There’s the mental brown rice, too, of which I’ve had my fill and said so. I may lie about meditating, but I let him know when I’ve had enough woo-woo talk. But Zip’s a crusader, a member of the spiritual-health gestapo. My resistance seems only to make him more ardent. He is determined to save me.
I drive to San Francisco on two hours’ sleep. My sister waits on the United sidewalk looking like she cried across all four time zones, but even if she is a wreck, she’s composed: a proud wreck, as befits the Confederate trunk of our lineage. As I get out to greet her, I say, “Guess they don’t call it the red-eye for nothing.” Right away, I realize how stupid and mean this sounds, but adjusting to Louisa’s presence is always a tricky business for me.
“Is that your best shot at sympathy?” she says.
“Bad joke. Sorry.” I hug her; briefly, she lets me. “But I warn you, you’re looking at a walking, talking stingray.”
“Better than a soon-to-be-ex-husband deep in an emotional coma.”
“So what did he do?”
“You mean what didn’t he do, what doesn’t he ever do.”
“Okay, what doesn’t he ever do?”
“Pay attention! React to the emotions around him! Live life!”
I heave her suitcase into the trunk. I can’t tell if she’s planning to stay a month or has simply overpacked as usual. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s some innate melodrama in my sister’s soul, something that leads her to travel anywhere, no matter how temperate, as if she must be prepared for every natural catastrophe ever leveled at the planet. Years ago, when we’d pack for summer camp, I’d watch her fill a trunk with everything from flannel pajamas to party shoes.
“Those are pretty serious charges,” I say as we get in. “But it’s not like Hugh’s a very, well, emotive kind of guy.” I think of the first time I met him, a couple years ago, when Louisa brought him to Maine for a visit. It was summer, I was still in grad school, still with Luke, the guy almost everybody thinks I was stupid not to marry. One night a whole bunch of us made roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, smoked a little ganja, and danced in Luke’s living room to quadraphonic soul. Hugh was friendly but held back on all the excess; no drugs, no dancing, not even much roast beef. He’d brought along a huge book—a biography of the artist John Singleton Copley, such a weird book to carry around that I have never forgotten it—and vanished in the middle of the meal (not that most of us noticed, I have to confess). Later, we found him asleep on Luke’s bed, the big book splayed on his tweed lapels. Soon after that, Louisa broke it off with Hugh because, she said, he had no wild side; a touch of true wildness was crucial. I agreed heartily with that, though the guy had seemed perfectly nice. Then, last year, almost out of the blue, they got married. Not like they had the mercy to elope. No; I had to wear one of those poufy satin dresses, get up at my parents’ beach club and make a toast.
“He’s never been the kind of guy,” I say now, “to revel in things—to, like, take up flamingo dancing. You know that. But then, he’s never impulsive, he’s … dependable.” I choose my words carefully—but not carefully enough for my sister the word nerd. “Flamenco,” she enunciates quietly.
“What?”
“It’s flamenco dancing.”
“I knew that.” (Did I? I need to stop counting the lies that don’t matter.) I reach over to jostle Louisa’s shoulder, trying to calm her down the way I did Mrs. Simonson. She is clearly all wound up. I say, “So, hey, looks like we’ve got a new dance to invent.”
It doesn’t work. She says impatiently, “No more jokes. Please. I don’t mean to be rude. I’m just … I’ve lost my sense of humor.”
I try to imagine what she wants to hear, why she came all this way. I say, “I’ll drive, you ride. Talk if you want. Or don’t. Just have a vacation.” Just be here, Zip would say. Be here in the I Don’t Know.
I take the scenic route, through artichoke country, striped green fields ending at cliffs on the ocean. No trees; just fields, rocks, water, and this one endless ribbon of road, rippling with the tentative heat of late May. “Incredible, isn’t it?” I say. At last, she agrees with something. Where we come from, you’d see fancy houses, not vegetables, sprouting left and right—hidden by tall dense hedges.
Louisa is four years older than I am; also nearly four inches shorter and about four decades more full of opinions. Sometimes when she enters a room, it feels like half the air’s been sucked out. I know a lot, but around her, it’s never enough.
We are as different as white chocolate and seaweed, the Milky Way and a tropical reef. For one thing, I do not know how she, or anyone, lives in New York City. For another, I do not know how she, or anyone, can suspend disbelief long enough to turn up married. The first thing, Louisa says, she understands perfectly; the second she says I’ll grow out of. I’m certain she’s wrong there, and this is how I see it. The world evolved, the only way it could, as a place of competition and loneliness. Everything natural or invented that we see as beautiful or remarkable—from Japanese maples to bone scans—was nurtured by one or both of these forces.
You might see marriage that way, I guess, but I’m convinced it’s just a major form of self-delusion, a wrench in the Darwinian works, the grandest of grand illusions.
So I am surprised at none of Louisa’s accusations: Hugh’s sleepy silence over candlelit dinners, his tortoiselike retreat in the face of her anger, the Jeevesy routines that drive her nuts. And it’s not that I don’t like Hugh: he’s a stately, rock-of-ages kind of guy, if not too ambitious. Prince Charles, Gerald Ford, and Morris the Cat all rolled into one. Our mother likes him because he always shows up in a tie and, more important, descends from Cotton Mather or some other famous stuffed shirt. (“Blood will tell,” she’s always saying; perhaps, but I don’t think she listens.) Dad likes Hugh because even though he’s smart (he te
aches history at an all-boys prep school), he’s happy to let everyone else do the talking. He’s also—a bonus—patriotic. He teaches mainly American history and gets teary-eyed at places like the Old North Bridge. Parents go for that. And then, on top of those virtues, what Hugh does makes sense to them. Louisa writes for an art magazine, and while our parents are hardly philistines, they never know what to ask her. You can always ask Hugh what he thinks about Ollie North or Roe versus Wade; he’ll never offend anyone. Ask Louisa what she’s up to and chances are she’s reviewing some show where two women with shaved heads slip into giant condoms and fence with dildos.
When I see the Monterey County Social Services van in my driveway, I say, “There’s two things I have to tell you right now. One, that van belongs to a guy I’m seeing, and please don’t give me shit about how eccentric he is, because I don’t think it’s going to last much longer. Two, we might have a mission from Mom. Poor Tighty’s flipped.”
“Now that, that is exactly what I need right now. Mom and her drama.”
I resist the urge to say, Look who’s talking. “Lighten up, Lou. You’re in the Sunshine State.”
“Clem,” she says, “the Sunshine State is Florida.”
“Now there you are wrong,” I say, gleeful because this turnabout is a rarity. “Florida is the Gator State.”
Louisa shakes her head and smiles at me, rueful with a dash of haughty. “California is the Golden State, and the creature that lives in the Everglades—as you of all people should know—is the crocodile. I’m sorry.”
“Boy, you are in a bad mood,” I say. “And for your information, both crocodiles and alligators inhabit the state of Florida. Alligator mississipiensis is the genus native to the Southeast. We ever make it to Jeopardy, you’ll never beat me in anything scientific, I promise.”
“I’ll just study my pants off, I’ve always been better at that,” says Louisa.
“God you are smug,” I say, but at least we are laughing.
She’s standing by the trunk as I open it, hands on her hips, wearing a bossy smile. “I came to just the right place, I see, for unconditional love, free of hostility.”
“Yeah, and to just the right place for other people to carry your ten tons of stuff.” I’m lugging her grand-tour suitcase, and despite the awkwardness, she puts an arm around my shoulders. We’re not the world’s most affectionate family, the four of us, so this is something. I look up just then and see Zip, so handsome, so serene, watching us from my first-floor apartment.
Since moving to California last year, I’ve stopped telling people that my mother is a master of foxhounds. I could explain, as I always have, how at Figtree the hounds never taste blood, how it’s a drag hunt—someone goes out and lays a phony trail by dragging a mop soaked in fox urine and a lot of secret odious dilutants through the countryside—but even bird-watching is a violation to the people I’ve met through Zip. (To them, animals treasure privacy as much as they do freedom.) And blood sports—even soft-core bloodless blood sports—well, you’d better not breathe a word unless you’re out there stretching the piano wire. I’d never confess I was once a participant, dressing up in horsey attire and cantering around behind my mother and her exuberantly baying hounds.
Louisa steered clear of all that; she liked reading, modern dance, badminton. She did homework. I did everything else.
We grew up near the Rhode Island coast (the Ocean State, that one I do know), respectably well off in a town of solid if covert wealth, our house small but charming, two miles from the beach. The hunt club ought to have died a dignified death decades ago, but Mom and her richer compatriots persevere in carving out a patch of ersatz country. Tuesdays and Saturdays, fall and spring, three dozen riders thread their way through woods and fields endangered on all sides by grandiose housing developments and gratuitously straightened roads. Long before the dawn fog evaporates, our mother’s oversize “Tallyho!” can be heard at the self-service Mobil on Route 14, the Windjammer Clam Hut on Pemiquisset Point, and even, I bet, if the wind is from the east, as far inland as the Pilgrim’s Pride Mall near the overpass on the Roger Williams Turnpike.
Until I was rudely awakened by nursery school, I thought I was a foxhound puppy. I was pack-trained, deer-proofed, taught to shun cur dogs—the works. I looked to my mother for biscuits and praise, forthcoming whenever deserved. The Figtree kennel was across the road, down a long elm-shaded drive, but even so there were always hounds in our house—recuperating from wounds (barbed wire, surgery, rivalry over a bitch) or whelping litters (for which we kept a wide wooden box, with a heat lamp, in a corner of the mudroom over the furnace). Our mother attended these births with a mesmerized devotion we seldom saw elsewhere. Afterward, she watched those puppies like a batch of lottery tickets. She made sure they were all kept clean as new snow and would rearrange them while nursing, to keep the sly fat ones from hogging the most bountiful spigots. She shredded newspaper twice a day, Q-tipped ears as tiny as limpets, made sure the mother had time out to laze in the sun. She never put the runts to sleep. Once, ringside at a hound show, I heard another master challenge her on this point. “You’re defying the will of nature,” he said, and she said, “I don’t know about you, but in my house nature’s not the boss.”
Nor, for that matter, is Dad. Our father’s work is seasonal; for most of the summer, he practically disappears. He owns and runs three boatyards in different crannies along our home state’s convoluted shoreline. In his work, nature is the boss. And if he’s not preoccupied with dry-dock lineups or battening down for a storm, he’s in his rose garden, kneeling at the foot of a Mademoiselle Franziska Krüger, or submerged in an armchair, reading five-pound biographies of the world’s imperial pillagers. One thing I’ve noticed is that patient, good-natured men often worship Cortez and Napoleon—apparently, even those who also worship the beauty of nature.
Zip opens the back door. “The sister. Yes,” he says to Louisa, smiling his enlightened smile.
“For better or worse,” she says. We stand together in the kitchen, all silent. I see her sizing him up; I shouldn’t have told her a thing.
“Take this onto the sun porch, would you?” I hand Zip the suitcase. He takes it but continues to study Louisa, sizing her up in return, though it’s probably something to do with her karma or chakras. “Wheatgrass? Just made a fresh batch,” he says brightly.
I open the refrigerator and scan its alarmingly wholesome contents. “She’d like a beer, and so would I.” Aiming for a pair of Coronas, I snake my hand past a head of bok choy and a picnic thermos of Swiss chard broth.
“I’ll try some, sure,” Louisa says to Zip. “I feel kind of dried out.”
“Sun. That’s what you need,” he tells her. “Whenever you change time zones, either direction, you should be in the sun as soon as you can. It tells your body where you are.”
“Okay, so we’ll stand around in the driveway and find out where we are.” I’m annoyed at Zip because he’s part of the reason I got so little sleep: I got home at 5:00 a.m. to be greeted by a boyfriend wide awake with lust.
“Didn’t I see a little lawn out there?” asks Louisa.
“Our crabgrass welcome mat? I guess that’s a lawn if you come from New York.”
Zip and I take the front steps, Louisa sits on the grass. “This does feel nice, I’m sure you’re right,” she says, slanting her face to the sky, sipping her juice.
Zip begins to expound on our inner sun compass and his solar-therapy program for shut-ins. Through the open window above us, the phone rings.
My voice clicks on, backed by Charles Mingus. Mom tackles that beep like an otter swatting a fish onto dry land. “I’ve been trying to reach you all morning, honey, you are never in! Shouldn’t you be working on that paper of yours? Are you at the library? Are you there but hiding?” Crackling pause. “Well, I am beside myself here, beside myself! Call me right away, please, the minute you get this, and tell me what the police have to say. Time is of the essence. The FBI practically
laughed in my face, and your father says we’ll never be able to extradite on dognapping charges, but so help me, if I have to fly out myself, that man will pay with his skin. I will flay him alive with a bread knife. I’ve already changed the locks on the carriage house. I don’t care if his great-great-grandfather did build the First Presbyterian.”
The three of us listen for another long minute, as if to a radio play. Finally, the machine puts an end to her tirade. I feel guilty and decide that if she calls right back, which she often does when she’s cut off, I’ll run inside and pick up the phone, but she doesn’t.
“Tomatoes. She should cut down on nightshades,” Zip says with compassion. This is his routine diagnosis of people who lose their temper, and he may be right; he never eats tomatoes or eggplant, and he never gets mad.
Louisa’s travel pallor has vanished. “Do you think it ever occurs to her that people have problems all their own?” Nothing and no one raises her temperature faster than Mom. “And what’s all this stuff about extradition?”
Zip shakes his head with his typical air of omniscience. “Dogs.
According to the law, they’re mere property. The police will treat them like stolen appliances. Worse.” His tone is ominous.
“Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?”
“Well, Lou, while you’re flipping out about Hugh, Mom is flipping out about Tighty, who’s also clearly flipping out, though I’m not sure about what.” I tell my sister what I know.
“A plan. You’ll need a plan,” says Zip, who doesn’t question the wisdom of getting involved. Zip believes in loyalty to family against all logic. That’s fine for him, since his parents have passed away and his only brother is well employed, happily married, and lives in Montreal.