by Julia Glass
The only direct ventilation in this space is a wide double door at one end, under the peaked roof, that opens into thin air one story up from the driveway. My sister, when we were little, called it the door to the sky. As a guardrail, Dad nailed a pair of two-by-fours across the inner frame, but still I see it as a treacherous maw. If I have to open the doors, I unlatch them, step back, and push them ajar from a distance, using a broom. The breeze smells strongly of ocean. The warmer the day, the stronger the smell. For that reason alone, high summer is my favorite time of year in this place.
It is not, however, an ideal time of year to be ordered by your mother to “please clear out all your old moth-eaten stuff or prepare to have it cleared out for you.” Especially when you live in a New York apartment with no storage space whatsoever, let alone a hayloft the size of Bryant Park. Especially when you are not sure about the state of your marriage, and your husband is the one with the lease.
It’s not as if my parents are moving or remodeling or doing anything for which they need that extra space, the modest corners occupied by my two dozen boxes of life souvenirs. It’s more like they’re sending me a message.
You’re a grown-up, Louisa, did you know that?
The thing is, I do know that, and the knowledge is weighing me down.
Four years ago, I married Hugh on the lawn I’d be able to see from up here if I weren’t afraid of standing anywhere near the door to the view. My dad’s roses were in high, plush bloom, brandishing their fragrance in the soft humidity of June. Also present in colorful abundance were my dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins from down south, the clan my father left behind when he came north to college. They crank up any occasion till it feels like an affair of state.
I married Hugh less than a year after taking over his job. It’s a family joke: She got Hugh’s job and then she got Hugh. He was a good boss, and when he left the magazine to teach at a private school, I stepped into his shoes. Almost instantly I missed him. I understood why he’d been such a good managing editor, and I understood just what “managing” really meant. Hugh knew how to keep people calm and efficient in the face of contention (and we are talking art people, people with absurdly towering egos, with short tempers that someone’s decided are justified by so-called creativity). This retrospective admiration of Hugh’s diplomacy and patience made me ponder what a good husband and father he’d make. I was thinking about my girlfriends, the ones who were panicking about not being married as we all closed in on thirty. I did that thing where you fix the guy up with the woman you see as his ideal match and then, the morning after their first date, she phones you to say that you’re right about the ideal part, but he’s ideal for you. Other friends meet him and volunteer parallel opinions; they consult with more of your friends and come to a joint conclusion. The conclusion is, Don’t blow it! Then, weirdly, you find out somehow that all of his friends who’ve met you at his parties arrived at that conclusion, too.
One day you look at each other and you know. You might even laugh out loud. It’s obvious, it’s easy. How silly that you didn’t notice before the rest of the world around you.
Parties are thrown in your honor; the circle of approval grows; the toasts (many about your adorable, shared obtuseness) evolve toward an eloquence that makes you feel as if you are in the benevolent presence of Destiny itself. (Hugh’s best man wrote a comic ballad called “Much Ado About Lou and Hugh.” No one but my sister is allowed to call me Lou. Still, it drew a standing ovation at the rehearsal dinner. My Confederate cousins whistled and stamped.)
Your parents like one another; my goodness, they drive the same car! Same year, same color! Turns out you went to his father’s alma mater. Like your dad, the other dad played lacrosse. (Is it conceivable the two men actually crossed sticks back in 1951?) The whole thing comes together like a jigsaw puzzle, just the way my mother insists you proceed: Put the edge together first, then work your way toward the center, organizing the pieces into groups by color and, within color, by shape. A few rows in, you see that it’s going to get much easier—it has to—because you’re finding the right place for each piece faster and faster. The picture will be finished and perfect in no time. (Never mind that after all your hard work, it will go back in the box.)
My mother buys our family a puzzle every Christmas—not too hard, not too easy, always intricate with color; an opulent Dutch bouquet or a clamorous sporting print—so I know the routine. In fact, I’m incapable of having fun with a puzzle that’s put together any other way. I’m that well trained.
Today is like the opposite of Christmas. I’m opening all these boxes, their contents often a mystery even though they’re already mine, but what I need to do (as sweat pours down my spine and soaks the waistband of my shorts) is to make myself discard things, not add them to my already cluttered life. So far this weekend, I’ve saved a few of my favorite reports from grade school (one on volcanoes, one on the ritual sun dance of the Sioux, one on photosynthesis), a few precociously detailed still-life drawings (seashells, daffodils, a taxidermied wood duck, a kerosene lantern), and the only Barbie doll whose hair wasn’t harvested for nesting by a family of mice that must have eluded the cat patrol. Steeling myself against sentiment, I’ve stuffed mounds of brittle composition paper and limp stuffed animals into garbage bags.
I am working my way toward a stack of wooden crates I would give anything not to open. They contain the last vases and bowls I made before I gave up on pottery, before I moved in with Hugh, even before I became the managing editor of Artbeat. (I can’t blame the surrender of my own art on Hugh.) They are not supposed to be here, in my parents’ barn, but I sneaked them in on one of our visits when, as usual, my mother was so busy fussing over Hugh’s arrival that she didn’t notice me open the trunk and stagger into the barn with my loot.
But here is a cardboard carton of childhood books: Dr. Seuss, Mike Mulligan, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard, Ferdinand, Charlotte. Classics all—saved, presumably, for children of my own, though they smell so unspeakably musty that the concept of holding them anywhere near a child’s face seems laughably perilous. Hugh owns a box containing almost exactly the same collection of books; I know this because it’s in the back of our bedroom closet. Probably, I think with irrational resentment, they are in much better shape for having received this preferential treatment. If I believe we will honor our vows and stay together forever, the choice here is obvious, isn’t it? (Though I’ve made the excuse to myself that if we have two children, why not have two copies of all our favorite childhood stories for them to inherit?)
I close this box and drag it toward the steep wooden stairs. I scare a cat from behind a rusty sled; it darts down the stairs and out of sight. When my sister and I lived here, the cats were friendly because we played in this loft with our friends. It was more than a warehouse; it was a catacomb, an imaginary village, a lesser Narnia. My mother feeds and worms the cats, she has them fixed and takes them to the vet if they’re injured, but they no longer get much human affection. Their residence here is a business deal: Friskies and shelter for mice. A dead rodent on the doorstep is as good as a rent check.
I suppose, in retrospect, that once we’d passed the Narnia stage, Clem met boys up here. More than a few, I suspect. Hugh and I, after we were engaged, had one literal roll in the hay. It seemed like something we had to check off the list of courtship rites, something permissibly naughty.
After I’ve finished with the books, four boxes in all (from which I salvage a dozen yellowed art books and a copy of Moby-Dick filled with endearingly naïve notations, made for the soulful eyes of the teacher on whom I had the biggest crush of all time), I head back to the house.
My mother is in the paddock with two of her students, lithe freckled girls who, if they lived in New York, would be loitering about Lincoln Center in leotards and metallic ballet flats. Here, in semirural Rhode Island, they wear black leather boots, skintight buttermilk jodhpurs, and velvet hard hats. Their faces are pink from the heat, but they loo
k happy. Their horses are having a water break, drinking deeply at the trough.
“Never clutch the pommel,” my mother is saying to one girl. “Have confidence in the reins and in your seat; hold on to the mane when you gallop. But hands off that saddle, young lady!”
I never took to riding, not in any daring way. I liked our horses, but they were big dogs to me. To pet them, feed them, watch them roll in the grass, that was enough. I did not like cantering or jumping fences any more than I like heights. My sister got the horse gene, along with the daring gene. She rode for most of her childhood. Now she skis and scuba dives. She marches fearlessly into forests where predators lurk.
I am sitting alone at a table overlooking the club pool and, beyond it, the beach. I decided to walk here on my own, to get some exercise; I expected Mom and Hugh to pass me in the car. They are already ten minutes late, and I’ve made the mistake of ordering a glass of wine, which is going straight to my head. The lifeguard is half my age and very, very cute. I think of Clem, who would be chatting him up right now if she were here. She would not be sitting here so passively: bored, annoyed, separating the lamination from the menu.
“Hugh is one strong fellow!” my mother calls out, startling me from my funk. She’s exchanged her riding clothes for a light blue linen dress, tapered and sleeveless, that shows off her impressively solid curves and her athletic limbs.
Hugh smiles at me over her shoulder; it’s too vague a smile for me to interpret. I don’t expect Mom to apologize for being late, but Hugh has manners (here he is now, pulling out a chair for her). That’s one thing he’s got in spades. A few twigs of hay cling to his shirt. I reach across the table and brush them off.
“I’m glad he was helpful,” I say.
“Helpful and strong,” she insists. “Do you know how strong your husband is?” She is waving at the waiter. “Chip! My son-in-law would love to try that local brew. He’s earned it!” Chip will already know what to bring her.
“Did your father call? I left him a message. Is he joining us?” Mom glances at the menu and sets it down. “Chip,” she says when the drinks arrive, “the chicken salad special: is that white meat? Yes? Then that’s what I’ll have, but regular lettuce, please, instead of spinach. Raw spinach makes my tongue feel furry.” She turns to Hugh and touches his arm. “Order whatever you want. If you like lobster, the bisque is tops.”
I wedge myself into the sphere of her attention. “Dad’s caught up with the harbormaster. Something about fireworks for a wedding on the bluff tonight.”
“He volunteered for that boating safety committee again. Glutton for punishment, that’s your father.” Mom smiles at Hugh. “Have my roll, please.” She puts her roll on his bread plate, giving it a brief pat as if it might fly away.
Hugh hasn’t said a word. This is typical, my mother’s domination notwithstanding. I’m not even sure what lifting or dragging job she enlisted him for—something in the barn, obviously, and though I’m curious, I don’t want to ask, because it will draw out an endless story involving people from the foxhunt or the 4-H or her spoiled-princess riding pupils, someone who let her down so that Hugh could stand in as last-minute hero.
Mom asks Hugh about his parents. He tells her about their recent vacation in Scandinavia, a Harvard-sponsored cruise with expert lecturers and a gourmet chef from Sweden.
“You could do that,” Mom tells Hugh.
We look at her blankly.
“Be the professor type on one of those cruises! Louisa could go along and paint the scenery. I miss your paintings, Louisa.”
“Mom, Hugh teaches mostly American history.” He does teach modern European, too, and a senior seminar in twentieth-century art, but I’m annoyed that she suffers from a chronic refusal to accept that I haven’t painted since college, more than ten years ago.
“He could do one of those riverboat tours on the Mississippi. Or an Alaskan cruise. Or Chesapeake Bay! Your father wants us to sail the Inland Waterway when he retires, just the two of us.” She adds gaily, “Maybe with his second wife he will.”
Having grown up on a farm, my mother claims that she still yearns for a landscape far from the sea, somewhere the soil yields more than stones for building walls, but long ago she resigned herself to life in New England. She gets a lot of martyr mileage out of the sacrifice she made. And she translated her talent with livestock into her knack with horses and hounds. She gives riding lessons in the summer only; for the rest of the year, she devotes herself to the hunt and its artificial yet creaturely occupations, filling the nearby woods (what’s left of them) with the tumult of hooves and the voices of dogs in joyful, throaty abandon. The phony fox scent is laid down ahead of time by local high school boys trained by Mom to simulate the cunning maneuvers of foxes.
“Speaking of Europe,” I say, “I’m thinking of applying to a graduate program in England. For a year from now.”
She eyes me over the rim of her sherry glass. She sets it down. “England!”
“It’s a fellowship for writing about fine art, a master’s degree.”
“Why England? What’s New York for if not studying art?”
“It’s a special program, at the Tate. There’s nothing like it anywhere else.”
“What would Hugh be doing there?”
I look at Hugh, who is looking at the pool. “Hugh would be taking a leave from his school,” I say when he doesn’t say it.
“Won’t he lose his job?”
“They have sabbaticals.” I glare at Hugh, trying to rope him in, even just get his attention back to the table. “He’s been teaching there just long enough to take one, at least for a semester.”
“Hugh!” Mom exclaims. “Do you like this idea?”
“England would be interesting,” he says. There’s that vague smile again.
“ ‘Interesting’?” my mother scoffs, and I’m thinking the same thing. Whatever happened to incredible? an adventure? a blast?
“Fascinating, I mean,” he says. “I could take classes, too.”
Or lie around in bed all day.
“Louisa and I could be students together,” says Hugh. I feel a tug at the sound of his voice. Does he mean to sound romantic?
“It’s all the rage these days, isn’t it? Going to school forever,” says my mother, and her tone is no longer flirtatious. She looks accusingly at me. “Have you been in cahoots with your sister? She’s on that bandwagon, too. Now she’s decided she needs to get some sort of extra degree in extinction management or something even more specialized and impractical than what she’s already studying. How many degrees does a person need? College was enough in my day, then you plunged into the experience of life. And look at your father’s fancy degree. Botany! Beau tells me ‘botany’ doesn’t even really exist anymore! And is that how he makes his money now? Plenty of hugely successful people have been to college, period. Now education is like an elastic band. You just keep on stretching it and stretching it. A bungee cord, that’s what it’s like! You two young people have jobs, good jobs! Who’s to say that Hugh’s teaching position will be waiting for him when you return?”
I say sharply, “A contract, that’s what.” But I’m distracted by the pernicious thought that my sister’s probably wheedling money out of our father. And the wounded feeling that she’s told them about her plans before she’s told me. Not that we’re the best of friends, but we respect each other. It’s not as if I’m planning to ask for money from them myself—I’m applying for a grant—but I know the power Clem has over Dad. He glows when she tells her stories, all about her Darwinesque adventures in Brazil, Labrador, Alaska; she makes him nostalgic for science. I can’t even keep straight what animals she’s working to save, though mostly they’re animals who live in the water. She’s always said that school, to her, is nothing more than a necessary evil, so my mother’s news is startling.
“Well, whatever you say,” says Mom. She sighs the sigh of someone wronged and eats a bite of her chicken salad. “Your sister has a mind
of her own, and I can’t argue with that, can I? I raised you girls to be independent, and independent you are.”
Hugh is staring toward the pool again, and I get the creepy, panicky notion that he’s staring at the lifeguard. I tell myself that just because we now sleep together like friends—just because all he can do in bed these days is sleep, then sleep some more—doesn’t mean he’s gay.
“What about babies?” my mother says then, as if she’s reading my mind. She’s scary that way.
“What about babies?” I say. This tears Hugh’s gaze away from the pool.
“I don’t mean to be pushy, but Louisa—and Hugh—isn’t it time? We’re coming up on what—your fifth anniversary?”
“This isn’t lunchtime conversation.”
“What is it, honey, breakfast conversation? Bedtime conversation?” She laughs lightly at her unintentional quip. “Or do you mean it’s none of my business?”
Hugh laughs appreciatively. Whose side is he on?
I say, “Actually, that’s precisely what I mean,” making sure there is no humor in my tone.
“Chip?” My mother touches the waiter’s sleeve as he passes our table, and for a minute I think she’s going to ask him whether he thinks my having a baby is her business or not. “Chip, can we please get more rolls? I worked my son-in-law hard this morning.”