As sun encroaches on the terrace where we sit, I notice that bees are feasting on the border of blue hydrangea. The blossoms are as large as melons. Mom, whose dress precisely matches the flowers, hasn’t noticed that a few of the bees hover near her shoulders. She is on a mission.
“Can I tell you both one thing, just one thing?” She doesn’t wait for permission. “Don’t wait to have children until you are ready. You are never ready. Never. Ready is irrelevant. And I understand the health care system in England is perfectly fine. And free. How about that?”
I want to tell her that nothing’s free, but I’d rather change the subject.
I come upon the box that contains my specially preserved, freeze-dried or mummified or vacuum-packed, wedding dress. There’s a little peekaboo window, a glimpse of the embroidered bodice, worn once, perhaps never to be worn again. Certainly not by me. But it was my understanding that this item had earned storage in the house, away from the radical temperature changes of the barn. Last time I looked, it was in the top of my—of the guest-room closet. Panting from the afternoon heat, I allow myself a moment of idle stupor. I wonder if I’m going to carry it down and confront my mother. I hear her outside right now, talking to someone in the driveway below the window. There won’t be lessons now; it’s too hot. Mom is compassionate toward her horses; most summer afternoons they spend snoozing under the maple trees at the edge of the pasture, swishing their tails at flies.
I can’t hear what she’s saying because I’ve plugged in a fan to keep from getting heatstroke. Thanks to the wine at lunch, which I regret, the stifling air up here is making me dizzy. I throw the box aside in disgust; it’s large but very light, its contents all gossamer and tulle. I slice open a box labeled only 1970–74. The box contains letters. Letters I received from friends during high school, most of them written in the summers we spent apart, most of those during the months before I left for Radcliffe, when several friends had jobs away from home. That summer I was living right here, commuting to a secretarial job at a nearby community college. I answered a phone that rarely rang and typed a few insignificant letters for the dean of admissions, who came in only two or three days a week. The campus had been more or less abandoned. I felt like I was living in a future, Ray Bradbury kind of time when education had ceased to matter; when books, rather than being burned, simply gathered dust.
I pull out a rubber-banded clutch of lime-green envelopes. Oh, Eliza. Dear Eliza, with whom I lost touch for no better motive than sloth. Or maybe, I’m ashamed to say, I felt superior going to Harvard when Eliza was going to Hollins.
Eliza was madly in love that summer; really, except for me, who wasn’t? When you’re seventeen, love is constitutional. It’s oxygen. I open one of the letters. It begins:
Dear Louisa, God I know what you mean. My sister drives me totally crazy too. She steals EVERYTHING from me and lies about it all the time. But Jeremy says not to let it get to me. Jeremy has 3 little brothers who are spoiled rotten. He’s like a third parent, held to a different standard. He is going to go so far, and he’s going to do something that makes a difference, not be a slave to the Money Tree like his father. Have you ever heard of Médecins sans Frontieres? It’s so AMAZING…
The rest of the letter was about Jeremy, his golden muscles, his eyelashes, his noble ambitions, his way of somersaulting backward off the pier. He was another counselor at the camp in New Hampshire where Eliza was working that summer. She was about to let him be the first guy she’d have sex with.
God he’s driving me totally crazy with LUST, I just know I’m going to break down! He’s so polite and so persistent all at the very same time!!! And he’s really serious about me. I know, I know, but REALLY. Every night after lights out, after our kids go to sleep (it’s like we’re playing HOUSE!!), we sneak out to the lake and swim. We’re never the only ones, which is probably good. We take off our suits like everybody else and I dive in really fast so he won’t really see me naked but then he swims over to me and OH GOD I can’t stand how sexy he is underwater. The invisibility is practically fatal, if you know what I mean! How much will you hate me if I do it first? And GOD, Louisa, don’t show this letter to ANYBODY, EVER!!!!!
I sit down and read the entire letter. It’s eight pages long. The whole Ray Bradbury feeling comes over me again, but in reverse. Now is the time that’s strange; we’ve just been brainwashed to live the way we do. We are not enlightened. We’ve gone astray. I think about skinny-dipping at midnight with friends, in the ocean just down the road: naked bodies slipping against one another as amicably as if we were dolphins. It’s something I’ve practically forgotten and will probably never do again. Why doesn’t anybody write letters anymore, handwritten letters that go on and on for neon pages, inscribed with a torrent of exclamation points (the top of each one a meticulously inverted teardrop)? These are emotions you can hold in your hands. You tell each other every little thing, things like the fatality of what you can feel but can’t see. Suddenly I am remembering the excitement, the anticipatory thrill, of opening our mailbox that summer and looking for that particular flash of green. As if Eliza were my lover. I ate up her news, her news from the world abroad, dipping into that girl talk like chocolate fondue. I’m eating it up, now, all over again. You’d think it would embarrass me, but it moves me. When was the last time anything seemed AMAZING to me?
I turn at the sound of footsteps on the hayloft stairs.
“Hello there, you there.”
Dad is just back from work, earlier than usual because I’m here. He’s wearing a khaki hat with a wide floppy brim, but still his nose glows like a poppy. I envy him his grown-up job that permits him to spend all summer out in the sun. I’m lucky to have the job I do, but there are long days when I go without breathing a mote of fresh, sunlit air.
I stand up and kiss him on the cheek. “I’m trying to throw stuff away. Trying.”
Dad gestures at the Everest of boxes—his—that dwarfs my stash. “Allegedly,” he says, “all things must pass.”
Allegedly is code for “according to your mother.” We share the conspiratorial laugh of the family pack rats.
He asks if the two large plastic sacks are garbage. When I say they are, he drags them to the loft door and tosses them out.
“Watch out belooooow!” he bellows. I hear two loud metallic thuds.
“Dad!”
“Louisa, I’ve got the truck out there.” He tells me I’ve made admirable progress. “I order you to quit. Or your mother does. Clemency from on high—or down below. She’s opening a bottle of champagne.”
Only as we cross the driveway do I realize that I’m still holding Eliza’s letters. My mother’s in the kitchen now, back in barnworthy clothes (jeans and a threadbare cotton shirt that my father’s paunch outgrew some years ago). She’s pushing cherry tomatoes and chunks of oily meat onto skewers. “Aha!” she says when she sees me. “Time for a toast!”
“Where’s Hugh?” I ask.
“Reading, I think. He came back from the beach two hours ago.”
Upstairs, I find him in bed—or on the bed, in his bathing suit and a boyish plain white T-shirt, asleep on one of the quilts made long ago by one of my father’s dowager aunts. There’s sand in his dark curly hair. “Jesus,” I whisper.
I have the urge to tell him he shouldn’t be lying on that antique quilt with sunblock and sand all over his body. But I decide, right now, that I have to stop being rude to him. I think of a time, only a year or two in the past, when I would have lain down beside him and kissed him, face-to-face. Hello there, you there, I would have said.
He opens his eyes. “I know. I’m sleeping too much.”
I sit on the opposite bed. “Are you sick, do you think? Do you need to make an appointment with Dr. Breen?”
“No,” he says firmly, with a trace of belligerence. “I’m storing up, like a solar panel. School starts in three days, you know.”
“Of course I know.” But then I say, more gently, “So get dressed,
okay? We’re having champagne for some reason.”
“Your father’s just made a lucrative deal with somebody like Ted Turner, only not Ted Turner.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me while I was carrying hay.”
“Why didn’t she mention it at lunch? Why did she tell you and not me?”
“He phoned while I was with her, I guess.” Hugh opens the closet to pull out the same striped Brooks Brothers shirt he wore to lunch. I glance at the shelf above the hangers. Before Hugh closes the door, I see two cardboard boxes. On one, in Mom’s handwriting, is written XMAS DECO. Glass baubles displaced my wedding gown?
“What’s for dinner?” asks Hugh.
“Shish kebabs. Marinated in Ken’s Steak House dressing.”
He makes a noise of amused contempt.
“Actually, they’re pretty good.” I leave the room. My goodwill has vaporized. I would never, in a million years, be saintly enough for Doctors Without Borders. I wonder what became of Dreamboat Jeremy. Probably high on the Money Tree by now. I’ve probably passed him in Midtown.
My mother’s poured four glasses of Codorníu, the Spanish stuff in the bottle shaped like it’s melting. “Aha! Where’s Hercules?”
“Resting from his labors. Holding up the world is hard,” I say. I announce that I need a shower before I can drink champagne. I am a sweaty, dusty mess.
“There won’t be much hot!” warns Mom. “I just washed the saddle pads!”
“But I love cold showers.” I am now a full-fledged grouch. “And I love being married to a guy who does nothing but sleep.”
“Honey, it’s the sea air,” says Mom. “It does that to people.”
“Sleep is good medicine,” says Dad, who’s leaning on the counter, paging through a magazine. “People who sleep a lot live longer. Did you know that?” They’re aligning themselves against my doubts. Or that’s my paranoid impression.
“You look like a salt lick,” Mom says to Dad. “Go comb your hair.”
“Aye-aye, commodore,” he answers.
I hear her say, as I head back upstairs, “Commodoress to you.”
When I come out of the bathroom, out of my brief, tepid shower, Hugh is still in the bedroom, though he’s dressed. He is reading one of Eliza’s letters, which I left on my bed after waking him up. I snatch it away from him.
“What?” he says.
“That’s private.”
“It’s about two decades old,” he says. “I didn’t even know you then.”
“It’s not about me; it’s about someone else.” The rubber band around the letters has disintegrated; I hold them tightly in one hand, searching the room for something to bind them together again. I look instinctively to where my desk once stood.
“Lovebirds!” my mother calls up the stairs. “The bubbles are escaping!”
I push the letters under my pillow, which makes Hugh laugh at me. “I don’t see what you have to hide, Louisa.”
I don’t, either. My keeping the letters to myself seems like a matter of principle, though I know it’s utterly silly.
When we get downstairs, Mom is pouring another glass for Tighty, who’s materialized, as he often did at this hour through my teenage years. I guess nothing’s changed. Though I feel almost traitorous, since he’s practically a member of the family, I can’t help seeing Tighty as a walking, talking cautionary lesson, a brilliant guy who can’t seem to put together a life worthy of his talents. I notice that he’s gained even more weight since I last saw him, yet I suspect that’s made him no less alluring to the horsey women who giggle like teenagers when he’s around. Clem says Tighty has top-notch pheromones. She says they’re the glandular equivalent of high EQ.
“Yo,” he says to me, a new greeting he must believe makes him sound younger. He raises the glass in a toast and takes a generous sip.
“Hey,” I answer. “How are you, Tighty?”
“I am stupendous, comme toujours,” he says in his perpetually sardonic manner. With his free hand, he reaches into a large square pocket on the side of his loose grimy pants. He pulls out two plastic packages and lays them on the kitchen counter. “Dr. Feelgood, at your service.”
The packages contain syringes. The fancy wedding; the fireworks. My mother’s horses would go nuts with fear if they had to endure the fireworks fully conscious, galloping and snorting around the pasture. Closing them in the barn would only compress their panic. One Fourth of July ritual that goes back almost as far as I can remember involves making sure the horses are tranquilized at just the right time and that someone’s over at the kennel to babysit the hounds, pill the ones who get anxious. They get Valium in a meatball.
Tighty is staying for dinner. This is good, in that it will subvert any Serious Conversation about things like whether Hugh and I ever plan to have babies (or why Mom banished my wedding dress to the barn), and it’s difficult, in that Tighty and Hugh have zero chemistry. They go through an awkward guy-dance of pretending to care passionately about baseball (which neither does) or President Bush’s foreign policy (about which Tighty will know nothing, as he lives in a political vacuum) or the art world (which, actually, they both know about, though art talk leaves my parents in the cold, and Mom won’t tolerate that).
They shake hands. “What’s up with the teaching?” asks Tighty.
“Well, it’s still summer,” says Hugh. “For a few more days, at least.”
“Oh,” says Tighty. “No summer school for you.”
“No,” says Hugh.
“Right,” says Tighty.
Dad, who might rescue them, is on the phone; he gets so many calls during high boating season that Mom forced him to get a separate line, on a cordless phone, mostly so she can chase him out of the room when she’s sick of hearing nautical talk. He paces around the house with his free hand pressed against his open ear, carrying on loud conversations related to weather forecasts, sailing regattas, mooring disputes, and the health of local shellfish.
“Out, Beau. Scram,” says Mom, steering him away from the kitchen, her palms on his shoulder blades. She asks me to set the table, and she asks Hugh if he can take over the grilling. She likes dinner on the table at seven sharp.
When I open the cupboards, I see an unfamiliar set of plates.
I hold one up toward my mother. “Mom, where are mine?”
“Yours?”
“The plates I gave you and Dad for your anniversary?”
“Oh.” She refills Tighty’s champagne glass. “Well. We got a new dishwasher—you remember that flood we had at Christmas?—and I’m afraid your plates just don’t fit in the dish rack.”
“But where are they?”
“I put them away for now,” Mom says. “Don’t fret about it, honey.”
Tighty watches me closely. He’s seen knock-down verbal melees in the kitchen, one adolescent daughter after the next. “Yo. How’s Clem? I miss that girl.” Tighty and Clem were close when she was younger; sometimes I wonder how close, but I’ve never dared to ask, not even when she saved his ass out in California. That whole farce—from Tighty’s cross-country dognapping to my cross-country marital tantrum—is so excruciating to recall, for both of us, that we have never mentioned it since. Sometimes I can almost believe it never happened. You’d think we might have bonded on our shared retreat in that truck, across a dozen states over nearly a week; hardly. We got along fine, but our embarrassment only increased with the mileage. I still don’t know why Mom didn’t fire him, but I think she regards him like one of her animals, and that’s a compliment. She will never give up on an animal.
The subject of Clem sends Mom into her tirade about education as a bungee cord. With which Tighty, whose three years at Yale led him nowhere, opts to agree. “Education,” he says, “is one very pricey form of procrastination.”
If I were Hugh—if education were the source of my income—I’d jump down Tighty’s throat, but right now Hugh simply looks bemused. Perhaps, unlike me, he knows a pointless strugg
le when he sees one. I ready myself for conversational combat, but Mom starts handing us dishes, sending us out to the porch. The horses watch from the pasture.
When the four of us are seated (Dad is somewhere else, still on the phone), Tighty declares, “So. Speaking of education as a farce, rumor has it that Millie’s writing a book.”
“Millie who?” I say.
“Millie the White House springer spaniel. What other Millie is there?”
Mom snorts with laughter. “Tighty, you’d better start taking notes over at the kennel. I’ll bet our guys have much better tales to tell than some oversize sissy lapdog whose breed has been hopelessly corrupted.”
This leads Mom and Tighty into a spirited condemnation of the AKC and how its narrow guidelines for canine beauty have led to the proliferation of congenital tragedies like sudden rage syndrome and an epidemic of hip dysplasia. I notice that Mom has covered my father’s plate to keep his food warm and doesn’t seem bothered that he’s still absent from the table. I glance at Hugh. He glances back at me and smiles, perhaps at the eccentric turn of conversation, perhaps out of fondness. Why do I need to know why? I return his smile.
“News bulletin!” Dad announces as he joins us. He’s just finalized the lease of his smallest boatyard, starting next summer, to a Texan who’s taken up yachting in Newport. “Your mother should’ve bought the real thing,” he says as he opens a second bottle of Codorníu. “For about fifteen minutes, we’ll be feeling very rich.”
Mom glows with delight. She says to me, “How much would I bet that your father is scheming to buy the boat of his dreams?”
“May, your imagination sometimes fails you,” says Dad.
“We’ll see,” she says. “We will just wait and see.” She winks at Hugh.
Outside, the sun has set and the crickets are revving up. Tighty looks at his watch and excuses himself to drug the horses. As soon as I’ve cleared the unfamiliar, mass-produced plates, I beg off to continue the parsing of my childhood belongings.
“Tighty!” my mother is calling toward the barn as I go upstairs to change for the fourth time today. “Take the rest of that pie when you go, will you?”