Good Family (16 page)

“It must have been hard,” I said.

“What’s that, dearie?” She blinked into the TV for a second, an expression on her face that betrayed how she must have looked as a teenager. Dull, snaggletoothed, but eager.

“Losing the farm.” I was starving now. I realized I would have to put Sadie in the car carrier and drive to Safeway if we were going to eat. The lenses of my eyes felt furry from lack of sleep. I regretted not taking my mother up on her offer of a nurse. My mother had only come once to see Sadie, the west side of L.A. being foreign territory. She preferred the valet service and predictability of Pasadena to the Santa Monica hodgepodge of bodybuilders, fake breasts, and men holding hands.

“The farm?” said Mrs. Farley. Her eyes were fixed on Dana Andrews. Suddenly she roused herself and, with a little shake of the head, said, “The farm, dearie, is a bit of a stretch.”

I stared at her blankly.

“Angus just having his fun.”

This was the first I’d heard about it. Whenever the farm was mentioned before, Mrs. Farley had vaguely said,
Ah, the farm, the farm
. In an instant, I saw in her and Angus the same qualities I’d seen in L.A.—orchestrated, shallowly rendered, the colors not quite right. For weeks, I had lain awake at night, wearing the Southern California heat like skin. The sirens on Santa Monica Boulevard had made me pull my pillow over my head. My body wasn’t my own. Sometimes, there were popping noises amid the lurid night sounds—backfires or gunshots. I’d lift Sadie from her crib and take her into our bed. I felt the same longing I had a year before. The need for water. The need for green. I craved to be back among the familiar smells and stories of my family in a house where I could count the stairs and knew which ones would creak.

“Mrs. Farley?” I said. I wanted to ask her which part
was
true. Had they lived in Rhodesia? Had Angus gone to boarding school? His love and his lies were wrapped in paper fine as tissue. Clutching Sadie to my chest, I picked up the baby carrier and headed to the car.

T
ake the I-10 to the I-5, head north to the 134 that turns into the 210 at Pasadena. Do not exit. Let your parents sleep. Head east on the 210, the mountains to your left along with the silhouettes of oleanders lit by strip malls and gaudy fast-food signs. Roll up the windows. Turn on the fan (there is no air-conditioning in this used car because you were too cheap to buy a decent one). Slam
Dreamboat Annie
into the tape player and sing at the top of your lungs, imagining you are one of the Wilson sisters, the one with the stronger voice and the broadest range. You sing “Magic Man” you sing “Barracuda” as if your life depended on it. You blend with
the perfect, cranked-out voices of the Wilsons while your own sister lies asleep in the La Cañada hills.

You know if you can make it as far as the Continental Divide, you will make it all the way. At the tipping point, water splits. If you can break to the east, you will flow in that direction. You have a credit card. You have some money. You can buy clothes and diapers en route. You pass Arby’s and Macy’s and Taco Bell. They keep passing you, like the caves and palm trees and rocks in The
Flintstones
when Fred is chasing Barney. Ahead lie Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan. The song changes to “Crazy on You.” East, you think. East.

Let me go crazy, crazy on you…

Sadie starts crying. She is inconsolable. You reach over the back of the car seat and paw her reassuringly. It doesn’t help. You fast-forward through
Heart’s Greatest Hits
to find “Dog and Butterfly” because it’s sort of a lullaby, and it might work, but it doesn’t. You get as far as Riverside, and then you turn around.

S
adie smelled like me. Her skin, her sour-milk breath, even her baby farts—all familiar in a visceral way. I would bury my nose in her neck, and Angus would say,
What are you doing?

Don’t they smell babies in Zimbabwe?
I asked him.

Rhodesia
, he said. And
no.

I’m sure Angus loved Sadie as much as I did. I’m sure that her smells and her cooing and the grip of her tiny fingers stirred him as much as me. But it was I who had carried and bore her, I who held her to my breast five times a day. When she cried—which was often—I was the one who walked her or put her in the car seat and drove her around. Down the freeway I drove, through Anaheim, pointing out the Matterhorn, telling her that in a few years, we’d go there as a family.

Sadie is brilliant
, I told her.
Sadie is perfect
.

I would never have put her on a leash.

I pushed her down the sidewalk on the Santa Monica beach in the baby carriage my mother had given me. The derelicts and the bodybuilders admired her and called me Susie Q. The man at the taco stand said, “
Bonita bambina! Pero, señora, se aparace nostálgica.
”

“Nostálgica?”
I asked.

“Homesick.”

“Sí, es verdad.”
Once again, the season of packing trunks had come and gone. I would fold a blanket around Sadie or tuck her ears into a hat, wonder if, unlike me, she would grow up to be a girl who could clearly find her way. After I was born, my mother took to her bed. They had wrapped her breasts, handed me over to a nurse, and apologized to my father for my being another girl. My father was indignant.
What did I care that you were a girl?
he would say.
You had ten fingers, didn’t you? Ten toes?

But I felt he mentioned this point too many times.

I
want to take Sadie to Sand Isle,” I said to Angus.

“You know I’m too busy.” Angus was working overtime on a project at White Bread Studios—a miracle of postproduction revisionism involving an actor’s acne. This intricate manipulation of pores into flawlessness, frame by frame, took hours. Often, Angus returned home well after midnight—his eyes red with the fine work of close editing, the scent on his skin betraying baser pastimes.
Hairline
, he told me, citing the area they’d been touching up.
The pores around the nose.

I wasn’t altogether indifferent to his straying, if that’s what it was. If I’d had more passion for Angus, I might have been undone. But as it was, I was tired. And though I relished her tiny body upon my chest, I was always holding Sadie. Touching was constant. There was a heavy, clinging weightiness about my skin—the way my breasts draped, the fullness of my thighs.

“Mommy used to make films,” I told Sadie. “When you grow up, you’ll get to do something, too.”

H
ave you thought about the Junior League?” my mother said when I told her I was coming to Michigan without Angus.

I was packing hastily. Not for us the fine old leather trunks with
compartments for shoes and hats. I stuffed anything I thought we might need into a duffel—diapers, pacifiers, the baby monitor, Desinex, and a change of clothing into the quilted bag decorated with cows. The phone tucked under my chin, I said, “That’s not the issue.”

“How will he cook dinner if you abandon him like that?”

“I’m not aban…Mother, Angus knew how to feed himself before I met him.”

“Is something wrong?” I could hear her light a cigarette. “I mean, is there a problem?”

“It’s almost August. Don’t you want Sadie to see Sand Isle?”

“Have you talked to Dana?”

I had talked to Dana, and Dana had pointed out Mother’s concern that showing up without one’s spouse the summer after one’s wedding was unseemly and boded badly for our marriage.

“Our marriage is a paradise,” I said to Mother, holding a black leotard up to the light, then tossing it aside.

“You’re not becoming like Adele, are you? Because when you think what she gave up…”

Mother and Aunt Pat were still reeling from Adele’s divorce from Stephen Reed thirteen years before. He was a lawyer from a good family, and an impressive dancer to boot. But Angus was none of these things. Angus was a prevaricator of the worst sort—the kind who told you what you wanted to hear. What would I be giving up by leaving Angus?

“It’s only for three weeks,” I said.

“Are you bringing a nurse?”

“A what?”

“Who’s going to watch the baby?”

In the living room, Sadie was happily asleep in her swing. I’d put on a tape of any kind of music (Pink Floyd, Lou Reed, Bach), and she would stare dreamily off into space like Derek on peyote. I had given birth with no drugs, breast-fed her, kept her with me day and night for four straight months. What could my mother teach me about parenthood?

“You can sleep in the nursery,” my mother said. “When are you coming?”

“Tomorrow night.”

I could hear the surrender in my mother’s voice. No doubt she was worried about the effect my showing up for a month without Angus would have on my father. I wanted to remind her that many women of her generation had coped while their husbands were off at war, but I knew this was different. Theirs was a sacrifice born of virtue—a temporary widowhood to be endured until the men returned to assume their roles. I had seen the photographs on the walls of the Aerie—Aunt Eugenia and my mother next to Uncle Halsey and my father in their uniforms staring impassively at the camera. Their reunion seemed inevitable as sunrise—their marriages preordained. My marriage was a different sort of paradise, and, like a wayward Eve, I was breaking out.

“Assuming I don’t get stranded in Detroit,” I said, zipping the duffel shut.

W
e slept in the nursery where I had slept as a child with Louisa. My great-grandmother’s shadow had walked here. My cousin and, later, Jamie had pressed themselves upon me. Yet the room felt safe as a sanctuary. I knew the patterns in the wood grain; the faded geraniums on the curtains; the squeak of the mattress; the smell. It was a room of dead moths and lavender. How many children had breathed into these pillows or nestled beneath the covers on a chilly summer night? The toilet in the WC next to us ran constantly. I checked the crib for spiders, judged the width between the rails to be safe. Derek’s son had slept here, as had Sedgie’s children. As a baby, Jessica had lifted her head like a turtle; later, when she could stand, she would shake the bars and scream. A pillow needlepointed by my mother read
Shhhh! Baby’s sleeping!
The rail pad had Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger doing somersaults, flying kites, and being chased by bees. Into this downy nest, I laid my child.

T
he wonderful thing about Tiggers,”
I sang, cupping Sadie’s head in my hands, her legs propped on my chest as we twirled about the Aerie’s living room,
“is Tiggers are wonderful things…”

“So, is he coming at
all?
” said Aunt Pat. She and my mother were sitting in the card room playing double solitaire, trying to concentrate while I bobbed like a maniac in front of the fireplace.

“Their tops are made out of rubber
…I
told
you, he has a deadline. For which he’s getting paid.”

Adele was back in the Love Nest that summer. Following her breakup with Guthrada, she was working with a past-life regressionist to understand her proclivity for dominant males of questionable virtue. The regressionist had suggested Adele spend some time in the Aerie getting in touch with the vibrations of our ancestors, and now Adele was driving everyone to distraction by stopping suddenly, holding up her hand, and saying,
There! Do you feel it?

“Even so,” said my mother. “They should give him time off to be with his family.”

“Their bottoms are made out of springs.”

Aunt Pat, I noticed, was keeping her eyes on the cards as if she was determined not to look at Mother. She had already screamed at Jessica that morning for coming in with sandy feet. When she turned her back, Jessica had stuck out her tongue.

“What kind of work is he doing, anyway?” Aunt Pat succeeded in sounding nonchalant, but I wasn’t deceived. A careful scorekeeper of lives as well as bridge rubbers, Aunt Pat had been delirious that Adele’s first husband had gone to Harvard Law School.
Bidding and strategy are critical
, she once told me,
but nothing beats being dealt a great hand.

“Pores,” I said. “The occasional stray nose hair.”

Pat’s obsessed with her obituary
, my mother used to say.
She wants it to read like one of her Christmas cards
. Reading Aunt Pat’s legendary Christmas
cards, one might think Adele had been married to a Supreme Court justice and that Sedgie was up for an Oscar.

“Honestly, Maddie,” said my mother as she moved a row of cards and flipped the remaining one over. “Angus is a film editor—”

“—who alters reality,” I said.

“Well,” said Aunt Pat, rearranging cards as if they were errant children, “we could all use a little of
that
.”

If Aunt Pat had known Sedgie was going to be divorced from his wife, Elaine, by this time the following year, she might not have been so smug. But she was busily managing everyone’s lives as usual: her husband’s, her children’s, her children’s spouses’, her children’s children’s, and anyone else who got in her path.

“And bouncy, bouncy, bouncy, bounce…and, oh! So much fun!”

“Your mother tells me your old beau is about to be a father.”

“Mmm,” I said, determined not to give up points. “Which one?”

Aunt Pat shot me an incredulous look that suggested I’d had only
one
beau worth mentioning. “That divine Jamie, of course.”

“Ah,” I said, blowing raspberries at Sadie. “The married one.”

My mother stubbed out a cigarette that she seemed to have forgotten, so long was its ash. She lit another one, blew out smoke, and gave Aunt Pat a long, appraising look. Later, I would get that same look from Dr. Anke—a look that said,
You’re up to something, but I’m going to stay very quiet until I’m sure exactly where you’re going with this line of thinking
. My mother was a veteran of Aunt Pat. She had made her peace by fitting in, by generally agreeing with her, and, by all appearances, giving up.

But I was damned if I was going to let Aunt Pat use my marital choices for fodder. Opening my mouth to say something disparaging about Jamie Hester (I wasn’t sure what), I was beaten to the punch by my mother, who said, “No child, Hester or not, will be as beautiful as little Sadie.” She then smiled in a superior fashion. If Aunt Pat had said anything to contradict my mother on this point, my mother would have played her ace: in this case the fact that Aunt Pat’s grandchildren—Sedgie’s Jason and Patricia—
been found in the boat room smoking bongs with Skippy Swanson’s daughters, who both went to Farmington and whose records had been exemplary until this lapse with the Hadley grandchildren.

I was as dazzled by Mother’s audacious trumping of Aunt Pat as I was by this surprising display of loyalty. I suddenly realized I had my own trump card, and her name was Sadie. My mother was seeing me in a different light. Only last night, she had presented Sadie with a silver monogrammed brush that had been my father’s as a child, telling me it was good for cradle cap.

I started to bounce again.
“And the best thing about Tigger,”
I sang, feeling for the first time in years that I actually belonged,
“is he’s the only one.”

I
t started out as one of the best Augusts in memory. I hadn’t been this happy in Sand Isle since I was a child. Sand Isle, I realized, was made for children. If I thought of Angus, it was only in passing. The Aerie had taken on a pronounced female energy since Philip had gone back to California to meet with his client. The only cousin besides Dana and me was Adele, the only grandchildren, Jessica and Sadie. My father and Uncle Jack spent most of their time on the boat or the golf course. Louisa, who was getting old, stayed in the kitchen watching her “shows.” Against my father’s wishes, my mother had bought her a portable TV. Between
All My Children
and
One Life to Live
, she’d get up and stir the soup.

From the storage room, we had resurrected an ancient wicker baby carriage that had carried my father and his siblings. My mother and I would perambulate Sadie down the sidewalk, my mother smoking, her bracelets jangling, her feet moving cheerily in Belgian loafers.

“She’s adorable. Ab-solutely adorable!” said Bibi Hester when we wheeled her by the tennis courts. Her eyes met my mother’s, and they both sighed.

Mrs. Swanson, who was married to the “Drape Man,” called from across the net, “Evelyn, aren’t you thrilled? Finally, a grandchild!”

“I have
two
grandchildren,” my mother said coolly.

Mrs. Swanson shielded her eyes over a toothy smile that implied,
But Jessica isn’t blood.

We walked on. My mother smoked and jangled. After a while, she said, “Bitch.”

My mouth filling with the minty memory of Addison’s Antiseptic, I laughed out loud. My mother tossed down her cigarette, ground it out, kicked some dirt over it with her fuchsia shoe. It was a cloudless day, warm but not hot. Shadows of leaves pocked the sidewalk as we headed home.

“Don’t tell your father.”

“Well, she
is
a bitch, Mom.”

My mother smiled. “She is, isn’t she?”

Sadie’s eyes shot open. She gave my mother the studied, sober look with the preverbal wisdom of a four-month-old.
Fresh from the divine
, Adele had said about babies.
They’re already missing God.

“Look at her,” said my mother, still smiling. “She looks just like you. Even when you were a baby, you looked like you’d already figured it out.”