Good Family (32 page)

Adele clasps Fiona’s hand as I explain that Jamie and Fiona are interested in the house.
“If”
—I pause—“we’re going to sell it.” I gaze beseechingly at Adele. “The feng shui?”

Adele’s eyes graze across mine. “Ah,” she says. She nods at Fiona. “It’s problematic.”

I silently bless her.

“Can we fix that?” says Fiona.

“Honey,” says Jamie, “we can fix anything.”

M
addie?”

I turn to see Fiona, who has followed me into the dining room while everyone else is in the kitchen, talking to the Sears installer. She eyes the light fixture, runs a long, painted nail, reminiscent of my mother’s, along the table, tracing the gouges made from years of the knife-in-the-crack trick.

“I suppose you’ll want to paint this out,” I say, indicating the initialed measure marks on the wall. My voice sounds harsh and peevish.

Fiona cocks her head. “Why would I want to do that?” Her cornflower eyes widen, and I can see that I scare her. I suddenly feel embarrassed for both of us.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s all been too much.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s a beautiful house. I would love to have grown up in a house like this.” She makes a goofy face that I begrudgingly find endearing. “If you saw where I grew up…” Fiona points to our tattooed measurements with her flawless nail. “How could you let something like this go?”

Why not? I let Jamie go. He screamed at me on the beach, and Aunt Pat told me I didn’t try hard enough. Years before he became Fiona’s husband, years before he became president of RidCo. In the kitchen, I hear Jamie talking to the Sears guy about trash mashers, and what it would take to get a Sub-Zero up these stairs. Fiona listens to him for a moment, and looks me in the eye. “Talk about nostalgic. Why do you suppose he’s even looking at this place? I mean…our marriage is fine and all. We have kids. But
you
were his great adventure.”

S
he he said that?”

I am sitting with Dana on the porch. The lake is a swath of sapphire, and the air is filled with the preparations of one last great meal.

“I should have said ‘his great
disaster
.’” I swat away a mosquito. “Look at my clothes. Besides that, I like his wife. It kills me to admit it.” Dana laughs. “So, do you think they’ll buy it?”

“It depends,” says Dana. “Do
you
want to sell?”

“Would that it were so simple.”

“But it
was
simple once. When did it change?”

“I don’t know. After Dad bought the TV for the moonwalk. Or when we stopped coming by train.”

“Or the summer Tad Swanson died,” Dana says. “
That
was a summer.” She is knitting something green and complicated. It spreads before her like a lawn. She had her abortion; life went on.

“Can you even imagine us together?” I say. “Jamie Hester and me?”

“The Mole’?” She shakes her head. “No.”

“Ah yes. The Mole. Did Mom ever call any of
your
boyfriends names, Dane?”

“I believe she had something biting for Bruce Digby.”

“Ha! No doubt.” I inhale the fragrance of leeks and morels. Tomorrow, Sedgie and Adele are heading out, then the rest. I’ll stay on an extra day to help Dana pack the house; then we, too, will evaporate. “But she must have liked Angus Farley. She never came up with a derogatory name for him.”

“Actually,” says Dana, “she did.”

I jerk my head around and look at her. Knitting, avoiding my eyes, Dana mumbles something.

“Excuse me?” I say.

She clears her throat. “The Dreadful Bloodsucking Faux Brit.” Her mouth twitches. The smell of sautéed garlic and onions rushes past us, along with a suggestion of mint.

“Well, they could have at least told me.”

“They knew you were pregnant.”

I am taken aback. “No, they didn’t.”

Click, click, click
. “Yes, they did.”

“Did
you
tell them?”

Dana gives me a sideways look as she counts her stitches. “You know, Maddie, parents see more than you think. Half the stuff we used to do? They knew, Maddie. Parents
know
. You think
I
don’t know about Jessica?”

To which I say nothing.

“Besides,” Dana goes on, “Jessica’s a big talker. You can’t believe half of what she says.”

“Parents don’t know everything, Dane.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“There’re lots of things they don’t know.”

“And things they don’t
want
to know,” says Dana, scratching her eyebrow with her knitting needle. For a moment, I think she’s going to stick herself in the eye. Two squirrels race each other up one side of the oak tree and down the other. “Why do you hate it here, Maddie?”

“I don’t hate it here.”

“You do. You treat it badly, like an old doll you don’t love anymore. Like you don’t love
us
.”

“But I do love you! Besides,
you’re
the one showing it to prospective buyers.”

I hear Sedgie calling for Adele, and somewhere in the house, Beo laughs. From the Love Nest, the thin trill of Derek’s recorder, and I think, I
love
it here, now more than ever. Maybe because Mother is gone. It’s a wobbly, awful house that surely will bankrupt us, but I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep it.

“Maddie, what
happened
to you that summer?”

The question is so unspecific as to be meaningless. Perhaps she means the summer of the convention or the moonwalk; the summer Sadie died; the summer I got drunk; the summer I broke up with Jamie; the summer my chipmunk disappeared. But from the look on her face, I know what summer she means. The summer of hitchhiking Indians and cast-off rings. Dana was pregnant, and I had grown silent and furtive. I scratched at my arms. I could have peeled away my skin. I pretended nothing was happening. For Edward’s sake and mine, I was a brick.

There is a moment in truth telling when one recounts a story told in one’s head so many times that it suddenly sounds false. Memory has a surreal quality, as if experience, perception, and interpretation don’t quite mesh. What is the boundary between intention and consequence? At what point does a natural loving embrace between cousins cross the line? In our family, truth was never legal tender. To speak the truth, you have to trust, and how can you trust if you think you’ll be called “a throwaway”? But now, in the twilight of a dying day, with both parents gone and no one left to reject us, I turn to my sister and tell her.

After I finish, I say, “You see, he was so damaged. It wasn’t really his fault.”

In a flicker of recognition, we had chosen each other. No one else had any idea of what Edward really saw in Vietnam.
The waste
, he said.
The stupid,
stupid stupidity. The thing is, I don’t know anymore. I don’t even know what’s what.

What happened between us felt as intimate as if we’d taken each other. Afterward, Edward had clutched my wrist. My instinct was to pull away, but I had learned about patience by trailing nuts along a path and holding very still. If you wait long enough and quietly, shy, defenseless things will come to you. When I wrapped my arms around him, Edward wept.

Dana inspects me through the corner of her eyes. I wait for her to say,
That’s really weird, Maddie.

Instead, she says, “Oh, Maddie,” in a voice so compassionate it makes me wince.

I
find Derek on the beach. The structure, as far as I can tell, is complete. It stands about twelve feet high—a mound of branches and driftwood and rock. Ian told me to get some footage, and that’s what I intend. Less detail-oriented than Ian, my style of interviewing consists of dialogue punctuated by the provocative question.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Whatever you want it to be.”

With Ian’s camera slung over my shoulder, I ask Derek about his structure and if it represents his current artistic direction or a new departure altogether. He ruminates for a moment. The evening is warm and brushed by the tame light of a dwindling season. I hold up the camera, set the auto-focus, fix Derek through the lens. He blurs and grows sharp. Sometimes, that’s the way life is—the small things coming gradually into focus. Other times, it takes the panoramic shot to give perspective and context. Derek’s face, reminiscent of Edward’s, is the kind the camera “loves.” Plain faces can appear handsome or beautiful when photographed; the beautiful sometimes appear plain. But Derek, handsome to begin with, seems to come alive when seen through the lens.

“A fortress? Or a funeral pyre?” I suggest.

“A phallus, maybe. An object of desire.”

“Eye of the beholder,” I say.

The thing looms like some alien visitor alongside the beached sailfish and the canoes. My internal narrator’s voice describes it as
the incongruous manifestation of a fertile mind
.

Derek readjusts some rocks. Out of the blue he says, “Why do some marriages make it? And some go preposterously bad?”

“You’re asking me?”

The camera keeps whirring. Derek stands back, assesses the change, begins to circumnavigate once more. “Your parents, for instance. Do you think they were happy?”

Tracking him with the lens, I say, “They were married for more than forty years.” Of course, there was that vein in my father’s neck when my mother was tight at dinner; the clipped way he said,
Evelyn
; my mother’s naps and endless cigarettes.

Through the camera, his eyes meet mine. I, who have craved nothing more than being seen, have spent the last fifteen years seeing others through a lens. Now I’m studying Derek, casting about for the proper angle, the proper light. Ian says you can tell if someone is lying by the way his eyes dart to the left. Hold still, I think to my own shaking hands.

I say, “Do you remember that day I trashed your studio? Just you and me sitting on the floor and all those strips of paper.”

“My entire portfolio was in tatters.”

“I had such a vicious crush on you.”

“Maddie,” he says, “turn the camera off.”

I continue to film him. Derek turns back to his tower of rock and wood. Picking up a can, he douses it with lighter fluid and, with a strike of a match, sets it ablaze. The flames take hold, snake into a rage. Sparks drift down, burning holes in Derek’s sweater, touching his hair. I reach out and brush them away. Moths swoop in like deranged fairies. I want to ask him why he stopped painting, but, pushing the camera away, he pulls me in roughly and kisses me.

For a second, I can’t breathe. “Whoa,” I say, pulling away. We stare at each other. In the shimmering light, he could be his brother. Derek and Edward.
Virtute et Veritas
.

“You were just fourteen,” he says, his palms turned up like a beleaguered Jesus.

I wipe my nose with the back of my arm. “Look,” I say, “my life is fine.” For some reason, I think this will comfort him as if he needs to be absolved. We all crave absolution, but who is left to give it in any meaningful way? Derek shimmers, whether from heat or because of my dazzled eyes. Again I say, “I’m fine”—this time with a kind of surprised assurance that, for lack of a better word, seems to come from grace.

“Hey!” someone yells. “Hey!”

Smoke or steam is rising from Derek’s sweater. Mac the ferry driver, singular fan of our Feingold film, is running down the beach. He is waving something. At first, I think he has drawn his gun, but then I realize it’s only his flashlight.

“You’re on fire,” I say to Derek.

Solemnly studying the jewels of embers studding his sweater, Derek doesn’t seem to notice either the smoke or Mac’s shouting. Then with a start, he begins swatting himself, dancing about in an absurd jig. As bedazzlement gives way to panic, I pick up fistfuls of sand, flinging it at him to smother the flames. He holds up his hands as if I am hitting him, and maybe I am. Batting away embers and lashing out at my cousin Derek—lashing out even at Edward—expressing my fury at what was lost that summer when I last stood on the edge of innocence and everything was possible. As the flames subside, replaced by the acrid smell of burning wool, a sudden squall of laughter rushes up from deep within my belly. My old obsessions, my self-pity, my intractable antipathy toward Sand Isle—all of it caught up in a tide of convulsing shoulders, hiccups, and laughter. The spell broken, I am overcome.

“Ma’m?” says Mac, looking from Derek to me. “Ma’am? Is everything all right?”

I
s this party crashable?” says Sedgie, arriving on the beach with all the cousins to see what on earth is on fire. While Philip looks gratified that
someone
had finally cleared out the branches and disposed of them, Ian picks up the camera I have dropped. He presses the “record” button, preserving for posterity the exquisite moment as Derek’s effort of the past week combusts and collapses. I hear Jessica shriek, taunting Beo as they gallop fully dressed into the water. Then Sedgie, in a dead-on imitation of my former mother-in-law, screams, “Come on, ducks, we’re all going in!” Within minutes, Adele has stripped down, Sedgie and Ian following suit. Philip, with an amused half smile, says to Dana, “After you.” Semidelirious, I follow them, tripping out of my clothes.

“Hey!” says Mac, watching our clothes pile up on the beach, trying very hard not to stare. “It’s not even
nine
P.M
.!”

“Come
on!
” we scream to him.

Beyond the waves, Ian shouts back at the shoreline, “Beware, you last bastion of the idle rich! Your days are numbered!”

Then Mac, too, begins to unbutton his shirt. Sedgie laughs his contagious baritone and throws his arm around Ian. Summer is almost over, and the sun is setting earlier. In years to come, we’ll replay this film, our smiles proclaiming
our
time to be the best, the happiest, the most divine. Stripped of my clothes and the weight of my past, I plunge into the cold, resurface into the eternal summer of childhood. It is a moment glimmering with possibility, what Ian would call hope.