My eyes got misty. We don't have family traditions from when I was little. After Mother left, nobody felt like keeping anything going, and Annette hasn't started any new ones. Besides, once you're as old as I am, it's too late.
Carolyn went back into the kitchen. Annette walked over to the table and picked up an embroidered napkin and fingered it. “That is so sweet. When I have a baby, I'm going to do everything like that, too.”
I practically fainted. “When you have a baby? Are you—I mean—you and Daddy—you're—”
“No,” said Annette sharply, “and don't start any rumors. But I might. Someday. I love kids.”
I thought this was very brave of her, considering what the three kids she knew best had subjected her to for the last year and a half.
But it was too much. Too many people, too much coming and going, too many contrasts, too many worries. I felt the way I had when I was eleven and the divorce was happening; when both my parents were both right and wrong, and we loved them and hated them too; when sleep was never restful and meals never peaceful.
My grandmother came slowly into the yard and lowered herself onto a pile of cushions. I poured her a glass of tea, and she held it against her cheek, already overheated.
Angus raced into the yard brandishing a tennis racket. “Uncle Todd is teaching me how to play!” he shouted. “Uncle Todd says I'm a natural. Uncle Todd says I'm probably going to be a tennis star pretty soon.” Angus swatted invisible tennis balls with great vigor.
The balls felt real, bouncing off me, bruising me.
“Shelley, darling, are you all right?” said my grandmother. “It's the heat, isn't it? Barrington is such a furnace in August. Civilized people can hardly survive backyards in August. Come sit in the shade with me, sweetie. You and I haven't had a chance to talk yet. You must tell me everything.”
I made myself skinny so I could lie on the chaise lounge next to Grandma. Even in the fierce heat it was wonderful to snuggle and be soothed. Grandma said a person couldn't be too careful in the sun, and I looked a little pink to her. She hoped I was not the kind of girl who obsessed about a tan, because too much sun was bad for lovely complexions like mine. When was I coming to visit her in Arizona? She had missed me so much.
It was pretty nice to have somebody worrying about me besides me.
Grandma took some of her own sun-protection lotion and began massaging it into my hands and up my arms. The veins in her hands stood out, knotted blue against age-spotted skin. Her knuckles were twisted, and her rings swung loosely on arthritis-curled fingers.
Grandma is old, I thought.
At the surprise party, everybody would say to Angus and to me, “My, how you've grown!” but they would say nothing to Grandma. You couldn't say, “My, how you've aged!”
I had no grandmother now laughing on her old front porch while our roller skates dented her floor. No more changes, I thought desperately. I can't face any more changes. Grandma is slowing down, but don't let her come to a full stop.
“Now, after supper,” said Uncle Todd, flipping hamburgers on the grill, “we can't play tennis, Angus, because we'll be watching Brett's Little League team. He coaches Town and Country Gas.”
“He what?” said Angus.
Carolyn gurgled with laughter. “The teams are named for their sponsors, who provide the uniforms and the ice cream afterward. We're very big on ice cream and T-shirts in Barrington. Win or lose, you get ice cream, you get a T-shirt. Tonight, Town and Country Gas is playing against Crest Septic Service. Those kids have a motto printed in maroon letters on their T-shirts: SEPTIC PUMPING IS BEST WITH CREST.”
Angus was reverent. Nobody in New York would have a §3 T-shirt that said that. He wanted a T-shirt from Crest Septic Service.
“It won't be an exciting game,” Carolyn warned us. She passed potato salad, and Angus, who hates mayonnaise, gagged. She passed deviled eggs, and Angus, who hates hard-boiled eggs, gagged. “Better fix me six or eight hamburgers,” he told Uncle Todd. “There's nothing else to eat.”
“Why won't the ball game be exciting?” Annette asked.
“Because they're only nine years old. If they even hit the ball, we stand up and cheer, but mostly they only get to base by being walked. I don't think there's any such thing as a really great nine-year-old pitcher.”
We were eating and passing plates and not using our embroidered napkins, because they were too good to be used, when I realized that Grandma was filming us. I choked on my potato salad, and she laughed and put away the video camera. “The moment you're self-conscious, the film's no good,” she said. “But think what pleasure I'll have next winter putting this in the VCR to play for myself and have a nice, warm and sunny my-family-is-the-best-in-the-world moment.” She sat beside me, but it was difficult for her to swing her legs over the picnic-table bench. Uncle Todd held out a hand to guard her against falling.
“I'll film!” shouted Angus. He spent the rest of the meal taking close-ups of people chewing.
“Time for presents,” announced Grandma. “You have to eat lots and lots before you open presents, so you're stuffed and happy and ready. Then you rip off the ribbons and the paper and see your new treasures and top them off with cake and ice cream.”
“My kind of schedule,” said Angus.
Aunt Maggie filmed Angus opening his first. Videos, of course; old favorites—early James Bond, early Indiana Jones, early Star Wars, early Harry Potter. At least we wouldn't be subjected to the rain dance again. He also got a pogo stick, which he immediately hopped himself into the pool on and surfaced still bouncing at the shallow end. Finally, a tennis racket and two containers of neon yellow balls. “This is better than Christmas,” said Angus, hanging up his pogo stick to dry and hugging Grandma fiercely, the way Daddy has taught us to hug. Squash the person.
“Easy,” said Grandma, “I need my ribs intact.” She wasn't joking. Some of Grandma had gone by, vanishing like the color of trees in autumn. She was closer to winter now, frail and easily broken.
“Gather round,” Grandma told us. “Shelley's gift is small.” She handed me a velvet box the size of my spread hand, and I opened the box's clasp, which was the shape of a princess's crown. Inside lay a necklace of gold lace with tendrils of seed pearls dangling from the gold and, at the center, one large pearl wrapped in a gold ribbon.
“It's beautiful!” I breathed. “Is it old?”
“It was your grandfather's engagement gift to me, Shelley,” she said.
I could hardly remember my grandfather. I thought of them, all those years ago, young and in love, when such a necklace was just the right gift.
“But it isn't the kind of thing people need in retirement communities. I want you to have it. You'll be going to proms and dances, and this is a necklace for very special occasions.”
“Shelley has just the neck for it,” said Aunt Maggie. “Long and fashion-model.”
“I'd have to have the perfect dress, though,” I said, holding up the filigree of gold.
“Very, very low-cut,” said Carolyn.
“Not that low-cut,” said her mother.
“This will be such fun,” said Annette, touching the lacy gold curlicue around the large pearl. “We'll spend months shopping for the perfect dress, Shelley. Promise me not to find the right dress the first afternoon we look.”
I promised, although it seemed to me that even more crucial than the perfect dress was being asked to this dance by some perfect boy to start with. “Oh, Grandma!” I said. “Thank you so much. It's so lovely.”
“Don't cry, darling,” she said, holding me and the necklace close. But I cried anyhow, and for a horrible moment I thought everything painful might come out of me, in one great sob, but luckily Angus said, “Don't get mushy. Yuck.”
“Girls do that,” said Uncle Todd. “You get used to it. Come on, everybody, quick. We've got to get to the game.”
Grandma stayed home, because she was tired, but the rest of us climbed into the huge, shiny SUV and hea
ded for the baseball diamond behind the elementary school. Green-painted bleachers held parents, brothers and sisters. The sun was going down, the heat was tolerable and there was a nice breeze. All the little players hit their bats against the ground to make dust storms, and all the coaches squatted about, giving advice nobody listened to.
“Which is Brett?” I asked.
Carolyn pointed. “Blue-and-yellow baseball cap on backward. Come on, we'll sit with everybody else.” She grabbed us two cans of soda from Aunt Maggie's canvas holdall and a pack of cupcakes.
I knew Annette did not want to be deserted, so I didn't meet her eyes as I deserted her. We clambered over the bleachers to the top row on the far side, where a dozen older kids sat in the shade of a huge oak. As we left, Annette was being introduced to somebody. “Oh, Charlie's latest wife!” said a cooing woman. “How sweet.”
Miranda looked down at me from the top bleacher. “Oh, the cousin,” said pointy-toothed Miranda. “How sweet.”
Carolyn and I sat below Miranda, presumably to avoid looking at her nasty little face.
“Brett get his car back yet?” asked Miranda, poking her nose, which had the same profile as her teeth, into Carolyn's face.
“No,” said Carolyn woodenly.
Miranda burst into a flutter of giggles, like pigeons on a sidewalk when you scuffle through them. “Your cousin Brett,” she said, pointing her nose at me, “believes that anybody who obeys the rules of the road is just a coward. You should see Brett drive. Of course, you won't, because his father took away his car, and Brett moved out of the house and is living with Johnny Cameron, and of course the Perfect Preffyns aren't admitting that they have a sort of problem with their unperfect—”
“Shut up, Miranda,” said Carolyn.
Miranda was not the shutting-up sort. “Brett was chalking up points by hitting old ladies, Seeing Eye dogs and toddlers in diapers,” she told me gladly.
“He was not!” hissed Carolyn. “He took the corner too fast, his tires screeched and scared the old lady, and she stumbled on the curb and that's how she broke her ankle. Brett did not hit her. Nobody hit her. And Brett called the ambulance and went with her to the hospital. So there.”
“Now you're saying that,” said Miranda. “But at the police station, you were first in line to lynch your own brother, you were so mad at him for not being a Perfect Preffyn.”
By now we had missed the first inning. I glanced at the scoreboard. It didn't matter. Nobody had gotten on base, never mind made a run.
I could hardly wait to tell Annette about Brett. What ammunition. Not just a flaw, but a huge, gaping—
Midway between the grown-ups and us, alone on a middle bleacher, Angus was slowly wrapping himself in toilet paper. He had used half a roll, and both legs looked as if he had plaster casts. He was working on his left arm. He finished the arm and began on his forehead.
Carolyn was too busy defending a brother to notice. I have defended a brother in my time. It's humiliating and necessary, and you hate your brother for making you do it, and you'd hate yourself if you didn't.
“You say one more thing about Brett,” said Carolyn, “and I'm going to sock you so hard you'll need dentures, Miranda.”
I was filled with respect for Carolyn. Not only had she been fine when I was the one who got the necklace, but she was willing to attack with words and fists.
Angus now wore a huge white bandage over most of his head. He bit open a tiny white packet and held it up to his forehead. Take-away ketchup from a hamburger place. Fake blood. Finally Miranda and the others noticed him. “Who is that?” whispered Miranda.
Carolyn and I said nothing.
Miranda thought we should locate the parents in case the little boy was insane.
My soda can was perspiring against my ankle. I leaned down over my lap, and holding the can out of sight beneath my bleacher, I shook it vigorously.
“Ooooooh, look!” said Carolyn. “Brett's team is going to make a home run!”
This was mainly because nobody in the outfield was looking or could catch or, after they caught up to the ball, could throw. All the parents stood up and cheered madly for everybody and anybody.
“Miranda, you have a little brother or sister on one of these teams?” I asked.
“No, I just like to come.”
“She just likes people around she can pick on,” said Carolyn. “Everyone has a skill. That's Miranda's.”
Miranda smiled proudly, her tiny teeth exposed like little beads.
She was watching Brett, though. I did not think it was teasing or nine-year-olds that brought Miranda to the games. I finished shaking my soda can.
“Has your mother admitted yet,” Miranda asked Carolyn, “that Brett has moved out forever and doesn't even plan to finish high school? Has the chairman of the school board actually said out loud, 'Yes, my son is a high school dropout'?”
I held up my soda. “Want a sip, Miranda?” I aimed my can and yanked off the pull tab.
Soda sprayed two feet in the air. It dripped into Miranda's hair. It soaked into her T-shirt. It ran down her dangly earrings and hung like brown diamonds from her eyelashes. All the honeybees in Barrington deserted trash cans and flower beds to get better acquainted with Miranda.
“So, Carolyn,” I said to her, over the sound of Miranda's screams, “when are you coming to visit us, anyway? I think you and I would get along—to use the perfect word— perfectly.”
The family room off the kitchen had television, VCR, stereo, compact disc player, two computers, exercise bike, rowing machine, bookcases full of paperbacks, CDs, tapes and videos, and a fireplace with a raised hearth. Your old-fashioned people could start a fire and toast their toes or their marshmallows while your up-to-date people could check their e-mail, and your fitness people could slim down while your musicians could wear headphones. Wedged among this equipment were three enormous recliners, which, when tilted back with footrests up, missed the various components by an inch. Once positioned in a recliner, you stayed there, wrapped in a hand-crocheted afghan, while the person closest to the kitchen fed you.
Uncle Todd's recliner was dark and leathery, while Aunt Maggie's was ruffled and flowery. Carolyn, Annette and I fit on a double recliner, rather like an upholstered hospital bed that bent at the knees as well as the waist. Annette looked as nervous as somebody using a ski lift for the first time, perhaps expecting to be flattened inside the mechanism. The moment I tried out that recliner, I was addicted. It was the most comfortable, wonderful way to sit/lie/slouch. I felt decadent, a Roman aristocrat reclining for a feast. “All we need are the slaves,” I told Carolyn.
“Angus?” she suggested. “How well trained is he?”
Annette and I laughed.
Angus of course was busy trying out headphones, synthesizers and the latest computer games, sorting through video selections and also starting a fire. Grandma said what with the air-conditioning and so forth, perhaps we didn't need that many logs, but Angus was safe inside his earphones and added every piece of kindling standing upright in a hammered-brass basket on the hearth. Grandma sat in a straight-backed kitchen chair. She can't slump now or it's permanent. “Aren't little boys wonderful?” she said of Angus.
Annette and I reserved comment.
Aunt Maggie said, “They are. I wish Brett would still—” She broke off. “What is everybody going to wear tomorrow night for the reunion party? Not that it matters, with Charlie not coming. I don't know how I'm going to face everybody.
I feel like the youngest kid in this room. All I want is to slug my big brother.”
“Then this is a good time to tell Uncle Charlie stories,” said Carolyn. She passed Annette an unappealing homemade snack—Cheerios, broken pretzels, peanuts and onion salt making a mess in the bowl—and Annette passed it along to me, and I passed it to Angus, who is an excellent garbage bag for food nobody else wants. I could hardly wait to hear all the wonderful Uncle Charlie stories.
“Uncle Charlie,” said Caroly
n happily, “is the black sheep of the family.” She heaved herself out of our recliner and crawled over her father's extended feet, explaining that we needed a higher quality of snack down at our end of the room. “Everybody was always mad at Charlie,” she said, heading for the kitchen, “and he was always having to run away or get divorced in order to escape.”
Annette said she thought that was an oversimplification of the facts.
Uncle Todd said maybe he would tell Carolyn stories instead, like the time she sneaked into the state fair without buying a ticket on the same day the state police were trying to corner a gang of teenage pickpockets and—
“No!” yelled Carolyn, charging back into the room, armed with a half gallon of ice cream and a scoop. She had no bowls, and I hoped that we were just going to pass the ice cream around and lick. But she made a second trip for bowls and spoons.
“Your poor dad,” Uncle Todd told me, “has become a Barrington myth. From what I see of Angus, there is a possibility of a second generation joining him.”
“Was Daddy that bad?” I said nervously. I wasn't sure I wanted to hear any When Your Father Was a Boy stories after all.
“Your father was terrific,” said Uncle Todd. “Speaking of course as a latecomer who missed the really good years. You're never bored around Charlie. Of course, people don't know the facts of situations like Toby, because along with everything else, Charlie keeps a great secret, and secrets generate gossip.”
Angus was encased in his own noise. He did not hear the word Toby. Carolyn and Aunt Maggie did not look interested, and Annette was yawning. Grandma stood up slowly. “I believe I'm going to bed,” she said, and Uncle Todd took her arm and escorted her to the guest room as if he were walking her down the aisle to seat her at a family wedding.