But Beth’s disability was not the only evidence of the unexpected that I might have seen in my family. Laura, with her fourth-grade eyes, was beginning to observe something else, which she would whisper about in our bedroom at night. Our mother was smiling less, struggling to keep up with the four of us, Beth’s extra needs, housework, and classes for a master’s degree. Some days she just started crying. Our father—the only father on our block who worked four jobs—seemed more delighted by us kids than his wife. But our parents never fought in front of us, so it was easy for me to refute what was already vivid to Laura. Easy to refute, but not ignore; one night I had a dream in which my father was stoking the fire in our fireplace when the flames leapt out and encircled him. As they rose higher I screamed at him to jump to safety, but he calmly replied, “I can’t, Rachie. I’m stuck.”
Then my father got a job in Pennsylvania, four hours away. I was distantly aware that through the winter and spring, our house was being sold, a new house was being bought, movers were being hired, boxes were being packed. But I kept playing with my siblings and neighbors, especially my best friend, Naomi, a sweet blond girl who lived next door. I knew moving day was approaching, but with all the contentments of dandelions and bicycles and Naomi’s mother’s tuna fish and watching
Let’s Make a Deal
, moving felt as otherworldly as college.
Then moving day arrived. A truck longer than our school hallway pulled up in front of the house. Naomi and I kept going from her lawn to ours, watching. Laura did the same with her best friend, Lucy, who lived across the street. A crowd of neighborhood playmates gathered as movers carted each room, piece by piece, into the truck. Then our parents called Laura, Beth, Max, and me inside to “say good-bye to the house,” and things started to get strange. Walking through the rooms was like seeing someone naked for the first time. The house was too large and inhospitable to be the house we knew. It even talked back, echoing our voices. A feeling of unease began engraving itself on our faces.
My parents said it was time to go. Max and Beth sat in the middle of the station wagon while Laura and I settled in the rear, taking the seat that faced backward. All of our friends—most prominently Naomi and Lucy—planted themselves at the fender of our car. “Bye,” they said in a civilized way. “Write to us.” We giggled at how serious we were being. Then my father swung the door closed, and our loyal companions burst into tears. The car pulled away and Laura and I bawled our eyes out as the wailing group ran after us, reaching out their arms.
We drove crying toward the rural Pennsylvania area where my father was helping start a community college, and that night we stayed in a hotel. Hotels had always been a delicious treat, but I couldn’t even doze off. Is this what moving was? Something that yanks you out of your place in the world? That carves moods no one understands and thoughts no one wants onto your brother’s and sisters’ faces—and deep inside of you? The next day, the movers carried our furniture into the new house. We stood taking in the neighborhood, a desolate subdivision of muddy lots, backhoes, and just-built split levels, and when no kids materialized, we knew that here we’d just have each other. The movers drove off, and when we went inside we noticed that our glass coffee table was missing. “Where is it?” I asked. “The movers dropped it,” my mother said, and my father added, “It broke.” “But we love that table!” Laura said, and Beth and Max and I agreed. “Stuff happens.” My father shrugged. “You have to expect that when you move.”
With our first round of chores out of the way and half an hour until the movers arrive, Hal and I now have to deal with our pets.
“Okay,” Hal says. “You hold Zeebee upstairs while I cage up Peach.”
I herd the younger of our two cats into the room with the exercise machines, now unscrewed down to their skeletons. Black-and-white Zeebee, who has not been through a move, has been bounding around the cardboard playground springing up in the house. But orange-and-white Peach, a seasoned mover, has been hiding under the bed. This is why we’re separating them now, lest Peach’s distress at the sight of the carrier lead Zeebee to catch on and panic.
I sit on the floor and stroke Zeebee, but I can see by the worried confusion in her eyes that our strategy is foundering. I wish I could reassure her that her imminent captivity is only for a trip to the vet’s so she won’t be underfoot during the move, and that when we pick her up tomorrow, she’ll have a new home with sunny windows that she’ll grow fond of. But I’m no pet communicator. Even if I were, how do you reassure anyone when you yourself are on edge?
Of course, I remind myself, not all pets suffer at moves. Dogs in particular can be comforting or even adventurous, especially if they sense that their owners are eager to fold their cards on one round of their lives and try their hand at the next. Or so I learned on the second move of my life, which happened precipitously after the first.
Laura and my dream had been right. Three months after my family moved to that friendless subdivision in Pennsylvania, my mother got a job as a librarian in the community college where my father was working. But it failed to usher in whatever spark she was lacking in her spirit, and his new job failed to extinguish his discontent with her. Two months later, he packed a suitcase, called Laura and me into their bedroom, and told us, as my mother sobbed on the bed, that he was moving out. We would still see him, but he needed to go. Would we be strong for Beth and Max? We promised. Then we walked him downstairs as our mother stayed in their room, hugged him with stunned desperation, and watched his car leave.
But even as melancholy came down on each of us, snow on the frost that had never melted from the move, all was not grim. Laura was turning ten, and for her birthday, my mother said she could get a dog. So a month after my father moved out, my mother picked herself off the bed and drove us to a house where our new puppy lived with his dog family. We brought him home, and soon we became his family and he ours. A small black dog with tan paws, he was named Ringo, for the Beatle who wore rings. What uncompromising happiness he brought us. We ran around with him in the houses under construction. We slept with him in our beds. And when our mother decided she needed to lean on her own mother, we spent our first, and only, winter in that house driving back and forth the four hours to New Jersey, my mother seeking a respite from her pain, the four of us playing word games, Ringo entertaining us all.
When we moved back to New Jersey at the end of that summer, we embraced the change. I’d made friends only at school, and wasn’t as close to them as to the few kids from our old house who wrote me letters, which, sadly, did not include my blond friend Naomi. A new home might mean new friends, and also that our mother might stop crying. Plus, my father, in a new job, was already living near the apartment we’d be renting. Maybe he’d even come back. We could be a family again. We cuddled Ringo, following the moving van, singing to the radio.
Now Hal says, “I’m ready.” I open the door, we wrestle Zeebee into the carrier, and while Hal waits for the movers, I secure the cats at the vet.
“They were due ten minutes ago,” Hal snaps, unearthing his inner pessimist.
The dormant optimist in me replies, “I’m sure they’ll be here soon.”
In the already sweltering heat, we stand on the front porch, waiting.
“Well, if they’re not here at nine o’clock,” Hal says, “I’m calling the main office.”
“A lot of our neighbors like them,” I say. “Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”
Were any neighbors outside—and there are not, because the rates for Dinkins & Sons are lowest on weekdays, so we picked a Monday for this move—Hal and I would appear to have swapped our roles. I suppose we have, but as he well knows, I’m saying these words as much to crank up my hope as to reassure him. Late movers were the next Stuff that Happened in my growing up, and optimism, however misplaced, was all I had left to cling to.
The day we moved on from the apartment in New Jersey the movers came egregiously late—just as I was hoping they would. I was eleven by then, and for two years I’d hungered for my father’s return. At the same time, I knew that moving brought so much newness into a life that it almost seemed to sow new selves inside the original self. In the past two years, the four of us had acquired a darker humor and a mistrust of our own lovability, and my mother had begun wearing a hangdog face. So what if we were moving to a house on a pretty lake in another part of New Jersey? All I could think as we waited for the truck to show up that morning, then afternoon, then evening, was that if it never arrived, history would have only one move to reverse. Then there’d still be a chance to restore the personalities—and family—we’d been.
Finally, after dinner, the movers showed. “How could you do this?” my mother wailed. We hit the road at ten, reached the new house at eleven, and at two a.m., the movers finished. My mother’s expression grew even more powerless. My hope was unmasked as naïveté.
“You’re right,” I say to Hal on the porch. “We should call the home office now.”
“Let’s not worry just yet. It’s only quarter to nine.”
Cicadas thrum in the humidity. Our roles have switched again. We wait.
“I’m Albert,” says the lead mover. “This is Jimmy and Melvin.”
Tall and muscular, they have two moving trucks, which they parked in the center of the street, right beneath the leafy sycamores. I am glad that they’ll be shaded as they work.
Albert, a Montel Williams look-alike, has a no-nonsense persistence that the ninety-three degrees and ninety-eight percent humidity do not shake. Trim, gangly Jimmy seems cut from the same cloth: efficient and serious. Melvin smiles—and jokes, and goofs off, and carries the lightest pieces of furniture, one per trip. Melvin’s clothes are the most colorful, and his eyes are lit with a sense of play. Under other circumstances, like an office cubicle we shared, I’d adore the jovial atmosphere in our foxhole. But now, when he’s manipulating the giant wooden desktop out of my study and saying, “Sure is a big desk,” I simply say, “Yeah,” suspecting that Hal would be irked if he knew I were chatting with someone on the clock.
Of course, Melvin, who hasn’t the faintest idea about our history, can’t possibly know that Hal often found my inclination to talk with strangers disruptive in our first relationship, as brief exchanges with waiters, postal workers, even telemarketers turned into animated social affairs, and he waited beside me, steaming. By the time we split up, I knew that when I was around him, judiciousness was called for. Even now, if Hal and I are out for a walk, I’ll try to assess his tolerance level before a nod to a stranger watering her lawn becomes an hour-long garden party. And today is undoubtedly not a tolerant day.
“There’s always one who doesn’t keep up with the others,” Hal says, coming up to me when I’m standing in my study, watching the movers from the window.
“Yeah, but Melvin lends comic relief.”
“I’m not paying for them to take time doing their job.”
I guess it’s wise that I’m keeping my mouth shut—this sure won’t be a good move if we start fighting. Though I wish Hal would be more zen about this, more like the Master Thich Nhat Hanh I have just become. He’s probably wishing I would be more vigilant, more the eagle-eyed worrier he has just become. It seems we have reversed ourselves yet again.
Too bad we can’t trade our memories, too, I think, as Hal heads downstairs to keep an eye on the movers and I stay at the window. Until adulthood, he was a charter member of that elite group of people whose moves were harmless. He was familiar with the logistics; along with his parents and little sister, he moved three times around the suburbs of Washington, D.C. But each transition was unexceptional, and his family was stable, so he remembers nothing of those moves. The ones he does recall were on an ocean liner, at the start and finish of two years in London, where his father had gotten a job. On the way, fourteen-year-old Hal was repeatedly chided for unbecoming behavior at state dinners, but on the way back, at sixteen, he had a grand time running around the twisting passageways with his sister, infiltrating the first-class decks.
That’s the kind of moving day memory I’d like—frolicsome, picturesque. But in fact, the move I made at sixteen, which happened to be my next move, is the very one I would not wish on anybody. Not only is it a moment in my family’s history that is so extreme that it hardly seems real, but whenever I unscrew the lid on my remembering to tell the story, the old ice storm comes alive so ferociously in my chest that I get the telling over with as fast as I can.
So: I am sixteen, and it is a sleeting February afternoon, and Max and I are in our mother’s driveway, shoving our things into our father’s car. In the five years since we moved to this house—the house on the lake—my mother’s insecurities and loneliness have led her through a succession of testy boyfriends, each more kid-allergic than the last. As she drifted more fully into their arms, we four kids spun our aches into sarcasm, our longings into contentiousness. My father moved back to Pennsylvania, where he’d begun living with Theresa, though the animosity between him and our mother became so severe that we saw him only every few months. Even today, as we are leaving her house, he will not step inside.
Four weeks ago, my mother met an ex-con in a roadside bar. A drinker and smoker of Dionysian proportions, as flinty-eyed as Rasputin, he sweet-talked her into believing that he was a secret agent leading a life of excitement, and that, if she ditched her children, he’d give her the adventure of a lifetime. Astoundingly, my mother, a non-drinking, nonsmoking librarian, bought into this. Two weeks later, he moved into our house. Two weeks after that, on this very morning, Laura, Max, and I were told to leave. Beth can stay—my mother still feels affection for her. Laura quickly departed for a rented room, though she will soon resettle at our father’s, which is where Max is going tonight and where Ringo will end up, too. I’m being placed in a boarding school—right now. Yesterday, we were just an excessively messed-up family. Now, as Max and I get in the car and look through the cascading sleet to the front door and see Beth holding Ringo and waving good-bye, we are a family in ruins. Whatever family means.