Good Family (14 page)

Oh God, I thought, remembering the back of the limousine. I had extracted myself from the producer, pulled up my dress, said something lame
and witless about having been raised in Pasadena. When they dropped me off around 3
A.M.,
I’d staggered into the guestroom bathroom and thrown up.

“He’s engaged.”

Nausea seized me again, but before I could say anything to Dana, there was a clicking on the line. “Wait a minute. I got a call.”

I depressed the cradle on the wall phone.

“Addison? You hungry?”

“I’m not talking to you.”

“Listen, I’ve got someone here who—”

I punched the cradle again and got Dana on the line. “What do you mean, ‘engaged’?”

Dana cleared her throat. “Aunt Pat said they’re taking the tiara out of the vault.”

“We-ll…it could be for one of his cousins?” I said hopefully.

“He’s here with a woman, Maddie.”

Click, click, click.
“Hang on.” I took a long, deep breath. “Angus, what do you want?”

“Hellooo?” said Dana, perplexed.

“Damn.” I depressed the cradle with my thumb, held it down an extra second, then put the receiver cautiously to my ear. “Angus?”

“I’m coming over,” said Angus.

“No, you’re not.” But Angus had hung up. Again, I punched the cradle. “Dana, can I call you back?”

I could hear muffled voices, then my mother’s voice saying,
She’s being ridiculous. Tell her to come.
“Maybe Mom can tell me that herself.”

Again, the muffled voices, and my mother got on the line. “Maddie? Your father would love it if you’d come.”

I wondered what my father would say about that pretty little scene last night. I started to tell my mother that I was in trouble, that I was overwhelmed. What was I doing in California? I wanted to tell her that the world had provided me with too many choices in no apparent order. But
before I could say,
I’m drowning,
the incessant click of call waiting began again.

“You’d better answer that,” my mother said.

H
onestly, Addison, I had no idea.”

Angus had appeared as promised, and now we were seated beside Dana and Philip’s pool on chaise longues, drinking Bloody Marys. He seemed suspiciously perky given the amount of drugs and alcohol we’d consumed the night before.

“Seriously,” he went on, “I thought she was interested in me.”

“No, you didn’t.” It was three in the afternoon but, as my mother would say, it had to be five o’clock somewhere.

“I was quivering, Addison. Lit-rally quivering.”

I sipped my Bloody Mary. My headache was subsiding by fractions.
Hair of the dog,
Angus had said as he marched through the door of Dana and Philip’s house, helped himself to their liquor cabinet.

I wanted Angus to go away, but he continued to babble. “I know she’ll call you. I know it—”

“I just want to forget about it—”

“You can put it on your résumé. ‘Felt up by famous producer.’”

“You’re disgusting.”

Angus looked at me and smiled. I was beginning to recognize that particular smile—a combination of pity and complicity. “I wish I’d had a camera.”

“Oh, please.”

Angus sipped. His hair was slicked back as if he’d just washed it. “You’re not really into sex, are you?”

“Spare me your boarding-school prurience.”

Angus reached over and touched my stomach. I shifted uncomfortably as his fingers played around my navel like butterflies. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s one of the things I like about you.”

His fingers continued to move in circular motions. My belly rose and
fell. Something creepy was happening in my toes. Angus licked his lips. His fingers slipped beneath my shirt.

“Stop it,” I said.

But he didn’t. He kept stroking until my eyes closed, and I started to feel like I was floating. I had that same sensation I’d had the night before of needing him—the way one needs a life preserver when one is going down. I was terribly sleepy, my eyes like stones, my skin sucked dry by the California sun.

“I can’t take much more, Addison,” Angus said.

I waited for him to kiss me, or to get up and take me by the hand, lead me into the house. But he didn’t. He just touched me as if he knew that’s what it took. I wanted to say,
You bastard.

But Angus, his voice thick, his accent even thicker, spoke first. “Marry me, Addison.”

I yelped with laughter, but when I opened my eyes, I saw he was serious. He wasn’t gorgeous like Jamie, but his eyes were green like Derek’s.

Ultimately, I didn’t say yes out of audacity or whimsy or even righteous conviction. I was a child running through a train station, searching for sanctuary in my father’s hand. Angus was rubbing my stomach, and I, soothed by vodka and the feel of his touch, suddenly longed for him as if he was my salvation. He seemed to understand. If Angus wasn’t exactly like the boys I’d grown up with, he was a damn good imitation—down to the pinkie ring on his left hand. He was familiar, and his familiarity promised safety. So when I said
maybe
, which Angus took as saying
yes, yes, yes,
I virtually climbed into a car and set off down a highway with him driving, pedal to the metal, our speed approaching ninety as we hurtled toward a nonnegotiable curve.

U
ltimately, Angus
did
make his move, and I
did
let him touch me. There was a delicious, toothachy inevitability about it all. Within a week, he was staying with me at Dana’s house. By August, we were engaged. “We’re a team, Addison,” Angus said before we made the call to my parents. “We drive our own train.”

I had the phone in my hand. It wasn’t as if I
had
to marry him. But the possibility of choices eluded me—partly because of my drinking, partly because of Jamie’s engagement, partly because, to my horror, I exhibited a degree of fertility unknown to my sister and Adele.

“Anyone who wants to can climb aboard. If they don’t, we’ll just pass them by,” Angus went on, expanding the metaphor. I had no idea what he was talking about, but it was not an altogether unpleasant image. I had never thought of myself as a driver of trains, a passer of others. Angus seemed confident and assured, absolutely certain he knew what was right. As far as he was concerned, the deal was sealed. He took a can of nuts from Dana’s pantry, popped it open while I dialed the Aerie in Michigan.

Chewing on cashews, Angus said, “Tell them it’s a synergistic marriage of artistic intention.”

The phone on the other end was ringing. No one was picking up. I could imagine the empty house abandoned for the lake.

“Tell them,” Angus went on, “I’ll support you in the manner to which you’re accustomed.”

A click. A voice on the other end. “Addison residence.”

“Louisa? It’s me, Maddie.”

“Ooohhh, Miss Maddie. What’s wrong now?”

It wasn’t the greeting I’d hoped for. “Louisa, is my mother there?”

“No one’s here, child.”

“Dana?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Hmm,” I said.

Angus went on. “Tell them we can all be there by Labor Day.”

“Louisa, look. They’ve got to call me at Dana’s. I need to speak to them.”

Silence at the other end. Then: “Girl, you sound strange.”

Knowing there was little hope in putting something over on Louisa, I whispered loudly into the phone, “I’m getting married.”

Louisa made some kind of “Oh!” that could either have been joy or agitation. She dropped the receiver. I heard rapid footsteps and, in the distance, Louisa shouting someone’s name. Minutes seemed to pass. Then Dana picked up the phone. “Maddie?”

I took a deep breath. “Dane—you know that guy who dropped me off at your house in June?”

“Louisa just told me you’re getting married.”

“Tell her,” said Angus, “we’ll get the ring later.”

“Yeah, well,” I said.

“The guy with the accent?”

I braced myself for one of my family’s pronouncements about my choice of partners. “His name is Angus.”

“Who
is
he?”

I found myself reciting Angus’s story of the confiscated farm, the dreary boarding school, the long-dead father.

“How long have you known him?”

“Years,” I said, though the first time I’d ever talked to him was maybe eight months earlier.

Pause. “Are you pregnant?”

I was stunned. Put so baldly, the fact of my pregnancy took on a new lucidity. I felt my future crystallizing out of germination, mitosis, the replication and differentiation of cells.

Dana was breathing heavily. “When?”

“Um,” I said, “Labor Day. We thought the end of summer would be good. Everyone will still be in Sand Isle.”

“No. When’s the
baby
due?”

I did the math and, with reluctance, said, “April, I guess.”

“So you’re not showing?”

“I’ve barely missed my period.”

Dana didn’t laugh. She was all business. “Don’t tell Dad.”

“Are you
kidding
?” I said.

W
e went to Sand Isle in the middle of August. My parents seemed rather taken with Angus. I, on the other hand, felt sucked into a vortex from which I couldn’t emerge. My father, who had never been to Africa, pressed Angus for details. Angus was quite a storyteller, weaving images that would have impressed Dinesen about the blood-red African sky. My mother sipped her drink, laughed at Angus’s jokes, seemed particularly pleased that he, in turn, laughed at hers.

“So,” she said, turning her attention to me. I noticed that, for the first time, she hadn’t come up with a derogatory name for my boyfriend. “Bridesmaids?”

I hadn’t thought about it. I was feeling nauseated most of the time. My listlessness seemed epic. I stared back at my mother in dumb, addled silence.

“Dana, of course,” my mother went on. “And Adele. Don’t you have any college friends?”

“I’ve got
plenty
of friends,” said Angus, who doubted my ability to produce a guest list. His mother would be appearing. An old friend from boarding school would be his best man. Derek was living in France, and Edward was institutionalized. But Sedgie would be an usher. Hurried phone calls, the stamping of envelopes, the frantic perusal of catalogs. My mother and Aunt Pat would separate the worthy wedding gifts from the “shovundas” that were to be returned or given away. It would all come together in a blur of fabric swatches and the sickeningly sweet smell of lilies.

T
hree weeks later, I was standing in the bathroom, dressed in my great-grandmother’s antique lace. There were no full-length mirrors in the Aerie—a legacy of our Protestant aversion to vanity—so I stood on the toilet to catch a glimpse of the total effect in the medicine cabinet. The effect was not good. I looked undercooked, the depravity of June having spilled into July before it was preempted by morning sickness and a marked absence of vitality. My eyes were holes; my collarbones protruded; my skin looked sallow and prematurely old.

“Will you hold still?” said Dana. She was trying to cinch in the sash of the dress we’d rescued from the costume box. Ringlets and a parasol would have completed the picture, but my hair hung drably, in spite of my mother’s efforts to tease it into something more buoyant.

Dana was dressed in peach moiré, as was Adele. Neither of them looked delighted. Adele had been married for six years to a holistic shaman who went by the name Guthrada, and was trying desperately to have a baby. Lack of body fat, Dana insisted, but here I was, as skinny as Adele, yet indisputably with child—a fact I had shared with no one but Dana.

“I’m going to puke.”

“Don’t you dare, Maddie. Don’t you dare!” Dana’s eyes glared ominously as if to say,
Haven’t you caused enough problems?
Words from my mother’s mouth. Words from Aunt Pat. Dana grasped my sash so tight, I thought she would never let go. She would walk me down to the croquet
lawn at the yacht club, see that I didn’t pass out from nausea or heat or from being utterly overwhelmed by my situation.

“Nerves,” pronounced Adele. And then nodding as if the reason was obvious, added, “Your mother-in-law.”

Aunt Pat had been looking smug ever since the arrival of Angus’s mother, whose appearance and demeanor cast into doubt the authenticity of Angus’s story about the farm.
All the English have bad teeth,
my mother said.
Besides, she’s a widow
—as if this explained the state of her clothes. But when Aunt Pat inquired about her deceased husband, Mrs. Farley was taken aback. “Passed away, you say? More’s the pity.”

Later, Aunt Pat had remarked that Mrs. Farley was very “interesting.”

“Not very evolved,” said Adele, examining her cat’s eyes in the mirror. Adele was reveling in the recent assertion by a channeler that she was the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. It boded well for Adele’s karma—the one fly in the ointment being her inability thus far to produce a child. Within a year, Adele would find more flies in the ointment in the revelation of Guthrada’s mistress, but in that summer of 1986, she felt her course was set.

“I’m going to have a baby,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. Dana glared at me, but I wanted to see Adele knocked down a peg for that comment about Angus’s mother, who, in spite of her dreary clothes and bad teeth, I rather liked. Adele’s smile didn’t drop, but I heard the quick intake of breath, saw the flicker of an eyelid, and knew I had hit my mark.

A
dance floor had been laid out on the croquet lawn, tiny lanterns strung overhead. The wedding was late in the day, the shadows long and heralding autumn. Once—many summers before—my mother, Dana, and I had stayed through Labor Day after Dana and I had come down with chicken pox. We had watched the other families on Sand Isle leave, watched Harbor Town empty of summer people while the lake turned from blue to green. For a week, the Aerie and the island became our own
private universe. My mother taught us how to play spit and bathed us in calamine lotion. To this day, Dana bears a scar just below her ear.

As I stood at the altar the florist had fashioned from an ivy-draped trellis, I longed again for that quarantine. Dana was standing so close beside me, her breathing became my own. A decade earlier, I had stood beside her in a Catholic church, the priest’s mutterings indecipherable, the service unbearably long. Dana had looked pale and tired; her hands had shaken. Now our places were switched. I had sworn I would never have a conventional wedding, but here I was. There was no praying to a pantheon of gods, as we’d done at Adele’s wedding to Guthrada. No tossing flowers off the edges of cliffs. I pledged my troth with the most pedestrian of promises. The only hint of anarchy was to come later—not from me or from Angus, but from my mother, who went swimming in her evening dress. It was quite remarkable. She hated water.

Time has a way of attenuating like a piece of Silly Putty, stretching the transferred image of unpleasant memories until the cartoon becomes a cartoon of itself. Focus in with a long shot from the lake, the little gathering of seventy or so distant at first, the tent and the yacht club barely distinguishable. One long, unbroken shot, and move in closely, panning the ladies in their St. John’s Knits, the gentlemen in linen jackets, the four or five black-clad film-school friends looking uncomfortably hot in this sea of pastel. Focusing on the wedding party, you linger on the face of the groom (delighted), the bride (pinched), the matron of honor (earnest), the best man (sloshed), and the bride’s parents (inscrutable). Over the background of the Presbyterian minister’s admonishments about God’s intention and cleaving together, dub the bride’s interior monologue:
Oh God, just let me get through this. Please, dear Lord, don’t let me go crazy.

Afterward, my father gave a silly toast about how I used to train chipmunks using peanuts, and now I had Angus eating out of my hand. I daintily sipped my champagne, pretended to laugh, but I had lost my taste for alcohol. It was like a reprieve, this abstinence. It lasted for a year.

Soon we were all dancing under a ceiling of lanterns. The sun was setting
lower in the west, staining the sky an improbable red. “Sailor’s delight,” Angus whispered into my ear as he spun me around.

It was during the break that I found myself standing alone. The music had stopped; Angus had disappeared with his old friend from boarding school; Adele, who’d had too much champagne, was sitting at a table with robed Guthrada, crying, “It just isn’t fair.” My mother’s eyes met mine, and she opened her mouth to say something, but changed her mind.

“Six
years
!” Adele wailed.

“Well, then,” my mother said to no one in particular. She grabbed up the hem of her peach chiffon and, drink in hand, flounced down the lawn and straight into the lake. For a moment, no one said anything. Then Mrs. Farley, who was more than a little tipsy, let out a braying laugh identical to Angus’s, grabbed my father by the arm, and said, “Come on, ducks. We’re all going in!”