Sometimes Kit’s mother drove the household crazy; Jasper said it was like living with an amateur deejay: “Almost as bad as a one-legged dancer.”
She let the rest of them make suggestions. One time, Jasper hauled a box from the back of a closet: it contained the records his first wife had banished from their mingled collection. Eagerly, Kit’s mother flipped through them, pulling out a dozen or more. “God, I forgot about Jefferson Airplane,” she said. “Who could forget about Jefferson Airplane?”
She slid the record from its brittle paper sleeve, tipped it toward the light to look for scratches, and placed it on the turntable. She leaned close, aiming the needle at a particular song; as soon as it began, she sang along with a passionate abandon that made the rest of them laugh. She altered her tone to emulate the lead singer, a woman with a voice as hard as flint, sparking with rage.
Kit had heard the song before, probably on the car radio, but he hadn’t liked the aggression of the singer’s voice. It was the voice of a woman trying to be a man. But as he listened to his mother sing the song, he heard more than bitterness and anger, or even the vehement longing to be loved; he heard a strange, almost vengeful threat in the words.
Don’t you want somebody to love? … You better find somebody to love.
So what if you didn’t? What then?
His mother raised the needle from the record when the song was over. She was out of breath from trying to match the emotion. “Grace Slick,” she said.
Jasper’s smile was sly. “I remember that summer, Lordy do I ever. I did not behave my age. Vivian almost left me.”
Kit’s mother returned his smile, but then she looked away. “I remember it, too.” She pushed the box toward him and said, “You choose something. Something I wouldn’t expect from you.”
“Jefferson Airplane,” sighed Jasper, shaking his head, looking pleased.
“Something else,” said Kit’s mother. “Play me something else. From another summer. No more summer of love, please.”
At three in the morning, he takes off his shoes and walks upstairs in his bare feet. Sandra’s sleep, unlike her conviction, is fragile.
Without brushing his teeth or undressing, Kit slips into Will’s room. Will, like his father, could sleep through a tornado. On the lower bunk, Kit shoves aside the stuffed animals gathered there in a sort of purgatory: too babyish to rank as sleeping companions yet spared, so far, from a box in the attic. A snowy owl, a parasaurolophus, Maurice Sendak’s Max, SpongeBob, and half a dozen of the amoebalike creatures known as Uglydolls. How much more specific and peculiar are the stuffed animals modern children collect than the ones Kit owned (generic bear, generic horse, generic mouse). “Over, Uglies,” whispers Kit as he pulls a fleece blanket out from under the menagerie, spilling several plush totemic beings onto the floor.
He lies down and pulls the blanket over his shoulder; still he shivers. To save money on heat (telling the children they are living greener lives), Kit sets the thermostat to sixty-five by day, fifty-five by night. In two and a half hours, the furnace will grumble back to life, begrudging them those ten degrees. Fanny complains that she can’t dress “like a girl” in a house this cold.
It is entirely Kit’s fault that he lost his job—or, really, failed to keep it. His students showered him with praise on their teacher evaluation forms (making him vulnerably smug), but he did not meet the deadline for his manuscript, the fattened-calf version of his Ph.D. thesis on the use of antlers in Inuit sculpture. He had collected permissions for all the illustrations—the art in the book would have been glorious—but he felt as if he’d said all he really wanted to say on this subject. What he wishes, in retrospect, is that he had taken what his colleagues (some condescendingly) would have called a “folkloric” approach, collecting stories along with the images. Bringing a culture’s oral and visual customs together is all the academic rage. By nature, Kit scorns anything remotely fashionable—but to what end? Purity? Integrity? Look at him.
Kit met Sandra on what he now thinks of as his youthful “driveabout.” He had stopped in Churchill to see the Eskimo Museum. The otherwise forlorn-looking town was crowded with tourists, yet the museum was virtually empty. For most of their time in the galleries, Kit and Sandra were the only visitors. Finally, they looked at each other and laughed. “Where is everybody?” said Kit.
“Bird-watching,” said Sandra. “Or beluga watching.”
“But not you.”
“And obviously not you.”
“I guess we don’t give a hoot about the wildlife.” It surprised him, how quickly he was flirting.
“Speak for yourself,” she said. “I’m just taking a break from the sun.”
Over dinner, Sandra told him that she was from Eugene. Friends of her parents who were moving had paid her to drive their second car to Montreal. She had decided to “see a bit of the way-up-north” on her trip home, a relay of bus and train. “What would ever bring me here again?”
Kit told her he would be driving even farther north. He had a list of artists’ cooperatives, craft galleries, places to see the art he was writing about. They hadn’t finished their main course when Sandra said, “Need a navigator? Hire me on spec. Free, I mean. You can boot me out anywhere.”
“Deal,” he said, then realized she wasn’t joking. He also realized that she had mistaken him for a genuine adventurer. He wished it were true.
Tall and wide-boned, her limbs long, her feet large, Sandra made the rental car seem even more compact. Her knees nearly met the dashboard, and her voluminous hair clung to the fabric lining the roof. Within a week, they were sharing not just a car, and then a room, but a bed. How strange it felt to become lovers in a place where the sun shone through most of the night. “Do you think too long a period of nightlessness,” mused Sandra, “could drive you insane, the way they say sleeplessness can?”
He objected, though of course he was flattered, when she called him “an academic Kerouac.” He did like driving through the wilderness, through the brief, bright flowering of the tundra. The monotony of these spaces did not put him off, nor the hardscrabble roads, but when it came to striking up a conversation with the artists he met, asking them to talk about their work, he turned shy and formal. He learned little beyond what he needed to know.
Kit had no clue how to ask the startling question that would yield the unexpected revelation. He would never have made a good collector of folklore. He didn’t have that investigative edge, what an anthro professor in college dubbed “intercultural moxie.” Art history, he claimed, was where you belong if, despite a yearning for “the other,” you lack the requisite shamelessness for probing into things like the sex lives of strangers. True to such predictions, that’s where Kit ended up. Or thought he ended up.
If he’d had a “real” father from the very beginning, Kit sometimes wonders—though casually, not as part of some existential crisis—would he have been discouraged from pursuing such an impractical, vaguely effeminate path? Would such a path never even have occurred to him? Would he have hung out more often in locker rooms, developed ambitions for scoring goals, winning contests, closing deals, finding work where adrenaline mattered?
He doesn’t even ski anymore. He could have blamed this on the job he landed—though blame of any kind was moot, back then, in the face of his good fortune. Emerging from the perpetual gridlock of too many smart young scholars, he landed a tenure-track position not just anywhere but at a college within view of the Manhattan skyline. From their house in suburban New Jersey, you can drive for a weekend to Vermont, even the baby mountains of the Berkshires; but life became too homebound once the twins arrived—even before the twins arrived, when he and Sandra found themselves tethered to the cycling of hormones, natural and then induced.
Not long ago, they would remind each other how lucky they were. Sandra still misses the latter-day hippies of Eugene, where her father owns a nursery. (Until a few years ago, when he finally understood how settled they were, he hoped that
she would come home to run the business once he retired.) But she found a part-time job at a fancy nursery in Saddle River. After giving up on trying to get pregnant the “normal” way—she began to bracket the word with her fingers, in fond imitation of their fertility doctor—she decided that the logical, backhanded antidote to entering the IVF gauntlet was a return to nature, if only in the form of landscape architecture courses. By the time she was solidly pregnant, Sandra had a master’s degree. “Talk about silver linings,” she said. Kit had never seen her so happy.
After the amnio came back “normal” times two (the air quotes now a mimed stand-in for the word itself), after the morning sickness (blessedly severe) had passed, they felt giddy, shamelessly smug. They had no intention of trying for more children, no intention of moving, no intention of changing their jobs. They referred to their imminent babies as the two great unknowns. When these invisible creatures began to exert their eight limbs inside the chamber of her body, Sandra called them the two rambunctious unknowns. “Except I know this much: they’re training for the frigging Tour de France.” During the last half of her pregnancy, Sandra reveled in baby books; Kit’s appointed challenge was to make giant strides on writing his own book, racing ahead of himself in an effort to outpace the time he would have to steal from his work life the minute he became a father.
The night of Kit’s graduation from eighth grade, Jasper and his mother took him out for dinner at a starched-linen restaurant. No sooner had they placed their orders than Kit’s mother proposed an idea she was certain would, as she put it so cheerfully, so succinctly, “simplify everyone’s life.” She leaned toward Kit. “Next fall, suppose I could rent a tiny apartment near my school? Near Nana and Papa. You could go to school with me, and we’d stay there four nights a week. Fridays, we’d come back here.” Her smile swiveled toward Jasper.
Jasper gripped a roll in one hand, a knife in the other. He looked at Kit. “I’m not crazy about this notion your mother’s cooked up, but I said she could try it out on you.”
Kit said, “Well, no. No, I’d rather not.”
His mother frowned. “Rather not? Why not?”
“Come on, Mom. I mean, I have this life here, at school. My friends. My team. Like everything is here.” Kit ran cross-country. He liked hanging out with his teammates. He also liked a girl named Madeleine. At the big table in art class, they pulled their stools close, their bodies exchanging a mutual electricity. Madeleine admired the rickety cartoon strips he drew whenever the teacher let them indulge in “free drawing.” Except for science, Kit liked just about everything related to school.
“But Kyle’s leaving the high school here. It’ll just be you,” said his mother.
The regional high school would be a big change, he knew that, but this time he looked forward to the change. He and his local friends would travel together on the bus. They would still have one another.
“I vote no,” he said. “Sorry, Mom.”
She looked at Jasper. “Don’t you see how this makes sense?”
“Things that make sense don’t always make sense.” Jasper shrugged. “I’d rather have you both here as much as possible, you know that. Weekends, I’m working more often than not.”
“I can’t be here as much as even I would like!” Kit’s mother said, her sudden sorrow jarring.
Kit knew he was hurting her with his refusal, but she was the one who’d brought him to Jasper’s remote house and sparsely populated town, and now that he liked it, the life she had chosen for both of them, he had no desire to trade it for yet another.
“Daphne, darling.” Jasper cleared his throat. “I’d like to say you could quit your job, and I reckon that if I get ahead on the boys’ college loans, then in two or three years—”
“Two or three years is all I have before Kit’s gone, too! And Jasper, I like my job. You know that. What would I do all winter here, all day long—or should I say all day short, considering how soon the sun sets behind that mountain?”
“Bake your splendid pies?”
Kit saw, as soon as his stepfather made light of her disappointment, what a mistake he’d made.
“Five months of the year I take my life in my hands on that drive—the mud and the sleet and the snow. I do that to make this family possible! I want this family to stay possible.” Was she threatening that somehow it wouldn’t?
Jasper and Kit looked at their plates; for the first time, with a stunning surge of guilty pleasure, Kit was aware of a distinct alliance between them.
Jasper reached toward Kit’s mother, laying a hand over hers. In the nicked, sun-spotted skin of his stepfather’s massive hand as it engulfed his mother’s fine fingers with their painted nails, Kit recognized something else: the acute difference between his mother and her husband—not just in age but in the habits and passions that had shaped those hands. “This family,” said Jasper, “wouldn’t be much of a family with you two gone half the time, now would it?”
Kit’s mother shook her head, though it wasn’t clear if she was disagreeing with Jasper or trying to shake free the delusion that her idea would “simplify” anything at all.
“I bet there’s a plum job for you somewhere in this neck of the woods,” suggested Jasper. “All your experience, that’s got to be golden.”
“All my experience is what gives me the seniority I have where I’m teaching now. That I am not giving up. And forget the problem of reciprocity between states. None of the schools here have the funding that makes my job what it is. You know that. The arts are diddly-squat out here in the boonies.”
Kit stared at her, but she was focused entirely on Jasper. She seemed to have forgotten Kit was there, too. Was she saying that his art classes, his art teacher, his drawings and cartoons, were “diddly-squat”?
They ate in silence for a time, until the hostess—yet another past pupil of Ski Bum Number One—stopped by to ask Jasper what brand of hiking boots she should buy as a birthday present for her son.
And so, over the next three years, their routines remained the same, though now, at least through the cooler seasons, only the three of them shared the house—which made it seem larger, colder, and more a place of separate privacies than open-aired, communal living. Over these years, Kit discovered sex (with the admiring Madeleine) and the pleasure of being just the right degree of drunk. In Jasper’s beat-up Rover, he learned to drive. He learned to paint with oils and sculpt wood. He made a few pieces of thick but useful furniture. In his sophomore year, he failed chemistry (retaking it over the following summer), but he won an award in a juried art show for students from all across the state. The following winter, he helped Jasper train their first team of sled dogs, to add another tourist attraction to the business. For good money, he helped a friend of Jasper’s build a tool-shed and a sugarhouse. Over these years, it was Jasper’s approval and praise he sought, more than his mother’s.
But Kit and Jasper weren’t close, or not in any singular way. With Rory and Kyle weaned (as their father put it)—Kyle at the University of Vermont; Rory leaving college, midway through, to teach Outward Bound in Colorado—Jasper still cooked breakfasts and dinners, but in those margins of time when he and Kit were alone together, Kit’s mother on the road or working late, he did not make much effort toward fatherly small talk. He kept a weather radio on at all times, sometimes stopping in the midst of an indoor task (caulking a drafty seam on one of the many windows; filling the firewood bin; unpacking groceries) to listen and comment on approaching changes.
“Sunny weekend, there you have it. Bonanza.”
“That’s not what the barometric pressure tells me, buster.”
“Two feet of powder, Santa: that’s right there at the top of my list.”
Kit began to do his homework at the kitchen table rather than up in his chilly room. Jasper’s periodic remarks on the changing climate became a companionable source of amusement to Kit, commercial breaks in the slog of history papers and cramming for Spanish or algebra tests.
&
nbsp; His mother, meanwhile, seemed less amused by Jasper; by everything, really: by Garrison Keillor, by the dogs’ antics in the first snowfall, by sharing songs on the stereo. She began to voice regrets: that she had never made Kit persist with piano beyond a single year’s lessons, that they had never traveled outside the country together, that she had never searched out fellow musicians to form a local chamber group. On the occasional weekday afternoon, she’d call from work to say that she was staying overnight with a friend; she was just too tired to make the drive. When summer arrived, she did not appear to savor its freedoms. As if she were the budding adolescent, the restless, disdainful teenager, she seemed to prefer her own company to either Kit’s or Jasper’s. She hiked alone and read a great deal. She played her cello more often. When Kit told her how glad he was to hear her playing again, she gave him a skeptical, almost cautionary look. “Not a lot else to do around here, honey.”