“That is fortunate. There are many opportunities hereabouts. You’ve landed in an excellent region of the country. Are you taking classes?”
Now Clover chimed in with her sister. “Dad!”
“My dear daughters, this young woman will want to practice conversation. How else will her English improve?”
Under the table, Clara was squeezing Robert’s hand. He could feel her trembling, trying desperately not to laugh. Robert was used to Granddad’s extremely warped M.O. Unless you broadened your sense of humor, it could look demented or just plain rude. But Robert knew that his grandfather really and truly meant the things he’d said; he suspected that even the waitress, at some deep intuitive level, understood this, too. But not Robert’s mom, who for a number of reasons (some understandable; others a complete, ridiculous mystery) had a low tolerance level for her father’s idiosyncracies.
“I am so sorry,” she said to the waitress. “Ignore him and do your job. I will have the whole sea bass, number fifty-one.”
Robert’s dad ordered a spicy beef dish. To compensate, Robert ordered tofu. Clara ordered noodles with mushrooms. By the time the waitress took their order to the kitchen, Robert was ravenous. He whispered in Clara’s ear, “Food doesn’t get here fast, I might eat you.”
She laughed softly. The beads that dangled from her earlobe tickled his lips. He pulled his napkin securely across his lap.
His mother leaned toward them. “You two seem to have a secret.”
“The secret is that we skipped lunch,” said Robert.
“Oh Trudy, these are simply”—Clover had just opened the agate earrings and was holding them up to the votive candle before her—“these are just luscious, like … mm, like giant jeweled candycorns.” Playfully, she touched one of the earrings with the tip of her tongue. Robert had picked them out (defying the notion that only Clara could exercise good taste) and didn’t mind the comparison, but he saw his mother wince. Maybe she had germs on the brain. Doctors were like that. Doctors who were mothers were the worst. The smell of Dial soap, to Robert, was the core odor of childhood.
“I’m so glad you like them,” said his mother. “I did get a little help from Robert and Clara. The gift is from all three of us. But now—now tell me all about the school, how it’s going in the barn.” She flashed a smile at Granddad, as if to let him know she’d forgiven him for his behavior toward the waitress.
As Clover talked about the first month of school, all the adjustments, the reactions of the older children who’d known the space at the church so well, she looked happier than Robert had maybe ever seen her. Teaching seemed like a cool thing to do, but Robert couldn’t understand getting excited about the bureaucratic stuff: ordering supplies, putting together a nursery school newsletter, organizing parties to basically beg for money that would pay for, what, crayons and gluesticks? There was going to be some glitzy auction the following spring, and Clover was already looking into music and a caterer. “I am psyched,” she’d told him while they were waiting for Granddad.
Robert leaned across the table. “Hey,” he said quietly to Lee, “so how’s the bad old city treating you these days?”
Lee shrugged. “Fine.” But he was pleased to be noticed by his older cousin. “I’m doing soccer and tae kwon do. My dad’s also making me work with him at a soup kitchen. Like every other weekend.”
“That’s cool. That’s good,” said Robert.
“It’s okay. It’s weird to see the same guys you see sitting on the street asking for money. Like, I don’t know if I’m supposed to act like we know each other when I’m handing them a plate of food. Not that we do.”
“But look,” said Robert, “to me it would be the only way to live in a place like New York and hold on to your conscience.” Although, it occurred to him, how was New York different in this respect from Matlock, or Newton—or Harvard, for fuck’s sake? And was he, Robert, ladling soup for the crazies? Was going to college a legit excuse for giving it a pass? Not according to Turo. Nothing entitles you to take a break from your debts to the real world, he would say, not in times this dire, this have-or-have-not.
Lee had no reaction to Robert’s statement. He ate a bite of his spring roll and said, “Dad’s taking us to Washington, D.C., for Columbus Day weekend.”
“See the monuments, stuff like that?”
“Yeah. Museums and stuff. But we get to stay at a hotel with a really huge pool.”
“Cool,” said Robert. Turo had blogged a whole diatribe on the evils of swimming pools: the energy, the chemicals, the waste of so much money and water. But Robert had promised his mother not to talk politics at his aunt’s birthday dinner. Not like Clover was a Republican, but his mom always feared that politics would send Granddad into some devil’s advocate spiel that would embarrass her in a room full of strangers. She was weirdly adolescent that way.
Granddad was asking Filo about third grade. Robert heard her talking about the classroom cockatiel, whose name was Jacaranda Star Wars. He tried to remember if he’d ever been in a classroom with a pet. Why couldn’t he remember such a thing? He tried to summon third grade. Mr. Redmond. Who smelled awful but told great jokes and gave out treats if the Red Sox or the Bruins were riding high. Those were the kinds of things Robert retained from elementary school. What happened to the stuff you supposedly “learned”? Did it fill some deep-down reservoir in your brain, like an aquifer of knowledge from which you could draw only without being conscious of it? What the hell was the crux of education? He felt like he’d learned more when he was helping build that lodge in Costa Rica than he had in his first two years at Prestige U.
The food arrived in a rush of steamy warmth, the dishes set down on the table by their waitress plus three helpers. “Oh my gosh!” exclaimed Clover, pressing her hands together, such a corny kid-gesture. Maybe if you worked at a preschool, you picked up four-year-old gestures and expressions. You probably had to train yourself to say things like “Feathers!” and “Shoelace!” instead of the instinctive obscenities. What did that do to your brain? (Though maybe it made you age more slowly, too.)
“But first I am opening your gift.” Clover smiled at her children.
Inside the colorful box they’d brought was a pair of dark green leather gloves, long and slim. Immediately, Clover put them on, raising her suddenly stylish hands high above the table, careful not to dip them into the various dishes of open food waiting to be eaten. “Oh my gosh,” she said again. “How. Exquisitely. Elegant.” She waved her hands in the air, like fluttering birds. “I feel like … Helena Bonham Carter!”
She kissed her children and slipped the gloves back into their box. Robert noticed that Filo and Lee looked just the tiniest bit perplexed, and he didn’t think it was the reference to Helena Bonham Carter. He wondered if they’d had anything to do with picking out her gift. His mother had a theory that their father was still in love with Clover and always would be, even if the guy had confessed to her that maybe he was gay.
Robert hardly knew his cousins, not just because they were so much younger or lived in New York, but because now there was this weird psychological barrier caused by the fact that he couldn’t help wondering if they “knew” about Uncle Todd (technically, Ex-Uncle Todd). Robert wished he knew more than what he’d overheard, and probably he could have asked his mother outright, but he didn’t want to. In any case, when Robert saw Filo and Lee at holidays and tried to “get to know them” (as his aunt, not his mother, encouraged him to do), they had these stiff conversations about sports and movies and how cool New York was and how lucky they were to grow up there.
What made it worse was that Robert had heard his parents completely dissect his aunt’s entire life again and again and again, supposedly because they cared for her and wanted her to be happy, yet usually sounding more like they were movie critics and Aunt Clover’s life, sad to say, wouldn’t be up for any Oscars or Golden Globes unless she fired the writers, the cinematographer, and definitely the continuity guy.
In fact, Robert had heard way more than necessary about his aunt’s split from Ex-Uncle Todd because of what Robert’s dad did for a living. He was a divorce mediator. Two years ago, when the guano really hit the fan, Aunt Clover had stayed at their house a lot, mostly weeping on the couch. Several evenings in a row, Robert’s parents sat with her and discussed her “situation.” Robert had been up in his room most of the time, doing homework or phoning friends, but who wouldn’t have listened in on the family drama? Robert, unlike his parents, really did love his aunt, no judgment attached, and felt completely sorry for her. He hadn’t lived on his own yet back then, but you’d have to be an idiot not to see already that life—that Rubik’s Cube of huge decisions and risks—could paralyze you totally.
If she’d asked for Robert’s advice, he’d have told her to steer clear of his parents, not because they weren’t smart, even wise (their lives seemed so well organized and carefully run, it was spooky), but because he knew they disapproved of her choices and didn’t appreciate her spirit.
On Christmas Day when he was seven, Robert had been struck with Cupid’s arrow for the very first time. Beautiful, colorful, carefree Aunt Clover had given him a red wooden sled and taken him to the big hill in Matlock where she and his mother went sledding as girls. She had wrapped her arms and legs around him and shrieked at the top of her lungs all the way down to the bottom—several times over. When they returned to Granddad’s, she’d made him hot cocoa from a Swiss chocolate bar and swirled in whipped cream with cinnamon. For months after she returned to New York, he’d sent her drawings with scrawled captions. She replied to him with postcards of the city, with promises to show him all the sights if he came for a visit.
The next time she’d come to Massachusetts—it was during a croquet game at Granddad’s as she helped Robert send his dad’s ball far into the bushes—he had asked her if she’d marry him when he grew up. She looked him in the eye, without laughing, and told him they would discuss it later, in private. He didn’t know it, but she had just become engaged to Todd. Alone together by the pond, later that day, she’d explained this to Robert as if he were otherwise a viable suitor. “But you will always be special to me, forever and ever,” she’d said, and she’d given him a ring with a pair of clasped hands, which she took right off her pinkie. Robert still had that ring, in a box in his sock drawer in Cambridge.
As far as Robert could tell, Clover had never told a soul about his crush, not even his mother. So it had pained him, over the past few years—even in the car on the way out of the city that night—to hear his parents discussing Aunt Clover as if she were a wayward child.
Robert knew firsthand that only children hear far more than they should, especially on long trips in the car. Where siblings might have been occupied fighting about whose legs were bumping whose, or singing stupid car songs, or playing hangman, Robert had often been distracted from his comic books, plastic Transformers, or the latest Harry Potter when his parents began to discuss people he knew. So he’d heard about Clover’s falling in love with her yoga instructor and actually confessing this to Todd—which apparently led to Todd’s even bigger bombshell, that lately he’d been wondering if he was more attracted to men. Then nothing at all happened with the yoga instructor, but the cat was out of the bag—or the closet. (“For God’s sake,” Robert’s mother had said, “we all have urges and infatuations. If my sister had enough self-control, she’d have kept that one to herself, and maybe things would have smoothed themselves out!”) Clover became incredibly depressed, Todd clammed up, and their marriage went from okay to dismal to flatlined.
Robert was practically out of high school by then, so maybe his parents figured it was no big deal if he overheard all this sordid stuff. They’d made it clear that they knew Robert might not be a virgin and that he’d drunk beer at his friends’ houses. They liked to describe themselves as “realistic” parents.
But at a much younger age, he had heard them talking in the front seat about family matters that he found not just unpleasant but disturbing and sad. Mainly about Granddad. Robert’s mother, back when he was in fifth or sixth grade, actually seemed unhappy that Granddad continued to live alone in his house. Granddad’s friend Norval Sorenson had tried to fix him up with a woman Robert’s mother thought was “just ideal for him,” but he refused to even ask her on a date.
Till then, it hadn’t occurred to Robert that his grandfather was someone who could “go on a date.” And why should Robert’s mother want him to? But of course, riding in the backseat on the way home from Matlock (probably his mother thought he was asleep), he had found out why.
“What is he going to do in twenty, thirty years with no one but us to look after him?” Robert’s mother had said to his father. “And by ‘us,’ I mean you and me, Douglas. He’s going to fall down those crooked back stairs one day, and lie there, unable to get to the phone, and—”
“I can understand your fear of catastrophe, but I think you’re a little hard on your dad,” Robert’s father had said.
“Look. I love that house as much as he does. It’s all that remains of my mom, in a way—not just her things but the way she arranged them. But it’s not reasonable for him to stay there forever! If he’s not going to find a mate and share the place, and if Clover’s not going to move up from New York—and she isn’t, Todd has a very sound business there—well, why doesn’t he look into one of those great condos they’re building near the green? He could walk everywhere, even to the train. He wouldn’t have to deal with snooty Laurel Connaughton or the upkeep of the barn. The good things in his life could all remain the same.”
“He wouldn’t have his swimming routine. That’s important to him.”
This had silenced his mother for several seconds.
“It’s his life,” Robert’s father had said, very gently.
“I know that, Douglas. But if it weren’t for him, Mom might still have hers. I’m sorry.”
Dad had sighed, but he’d said nothing at all in reply. Robert lay on the backseat and wished for the conversation to continue. But it didn’t. There was so much more to know, but what? It occurred to Robert that whenever he heard Mom talk about Granddad, she almost always had that same tone, one of sadness, frustration, and anger all bundled together. He understood that the visits they made to Matlock were, for her, more obligation than pleasure.
At that age, Robert thought his mother was as close to perfect as a mother could be (mostly, he still did), but he’d felt suddenly, deeply sorry for his grandfather. Hadn’t he been a good father? He must have been. After all, as Robert’s mother had explained to him when he put together that his lack of a grandmother equated his mother’s loss of a mother, Granddad had become “both parents rolled into one.” So how could she be so critical? Not that Robert dared to ask.
It was then, just as he began the normal adolescent disentangling from his parents (which, unlike so many of their friends, they would take in gracious stride), that Robert resolved to be an actual friend to his grandfather.
Platters of confetti-like food traveled up and down the table; small piles of bean sprouts and dried chilies gathered slowly at the edges. Granddad had coaxed Filo into talking about her gymnastics. Robert’s dad was trying his best to have a baseball conversation with Lee, about what it felt like in Boston and New York now that the Red Sox and the Yankees had swapped slots as the Charmed Team and the Losers-Despite-Themselves. Clover, Trudy, and Clara were talking about Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House. (Robert’s mom couldn’t stand her and didn’t trust her; Clover said she was the victim of rampant misogyny, from women as well as men; Clara was pretending to be neutral when Robert knew she agreed with his mom.)
Robert slipped away to the men’s room and then checked his phone. Turo had borrowed his car again, asking permission after the fact. Robert was beginning to regret that he’d given Turo the extra key. He hadn’t confronted his friend, but he knew that Turo used it more often than he let on. Robert knew this because h
is father, after helping him buy the car on craigslist, had given him one of those dad talks. Among other gratuitous bits of advice, he’d said, “Every time you turn that key, make a habit of checking the gas gauge.” Somehow this nugget of Mister Rogers had stuck. More than once in recent weeks, Robert had started the car and noticed that the tank was more full than he’d left it.
Robert texted Turo, HIT THE BKS NOT THE RD! The guy didn’t even have a girlfriend this year. He was practically married to his campus recycling program, and he was talking about joining a committee to advise the university on becoming carbon neutral. Now there was a mission for zealots.
When Robert returned to the table, Granddad was telling a story. Everyone was listening.
“… so this time, someone managed to fling patches of manure—pig manure, the most objectionably pungent sort—across the front yard of our newly elected selectwoman, who just installed a brand-new sprinkler system.” He laughed with delight. “A sign was posted reading, IRRIGATE FARMS, NOT LAWNS. It makes me want to dance with glee.”
Clover looked quite ungleeful. “Daddy, vandalism is vandalism.”
“Oh pish-tush, daughter. Someone’s taking a stand against the bourgeoisie.”
“Of which you are not a member?” Robert’s mother wore a playful smile.
“Of course I’m bourgeois, but I’m bas-bourgeois,” said Granddad.
Clara and Robert’s father laughed.
“This was in Matlock, untouchable Matlock?” said Robert. “Turo would so love this.”
Clara nodded. “And how. It’s right up his alley.”
“We had a similar incident in Newton,” said Robert’s mother. “Last week someone came home from a party to find their hot tub filled to the brim with what looked like steaming blood. It was terrifying.”
“Blood?” said Robert. “Whoa.”
“It was red-wine vinegar, but still.”
Robert started laughing. “We know them?”
“The parents of that girl who asked you to the prom, but you said no.”