Good Family (18 page)

I insisted on going to the beach. Feverish, I wanted to get into the water. I tracked sand back into the house, and when I saw Aunt Pat, said, “I’m sorry,” and she said, “No, honey,
I’m
sorry.” She put her hands on each of my shoulders and gazed into my face until I looked away. Then she pulled me into her chest. “It’s going to be fine. Perfectly fine.”

Angus wasn’t suited for tenderness. He sat on the porch and smoked. He was a fish out of water—superfluous, an outsider. We weren’t his family. He called his mother. He needed explanations. I heard Aunt Pat talking to him in the room off the kitchen. I was taking spiked tea back to bed. She said, “This is nobody’s fault.”

After that, Angus tried to bully me with his charm. Since my mother and aunt had made all the arrangements, there was nothing else for him to do. “Come on, Addison,” he said, “get out of bed.”

The house was tainted with mourning. I was inconsolable. I tried to be a brick. My mother’s eyes were red, and I knew she wasn’t sleeping. My lips were parched with salt. My father had no words. If it had been in our nature, we all would have howled.

S
ometimes, I dream of Edward. I usually wake with a start. He cut off contact with the family over a decade ago, but I believe his ghost is here. The Edward I knew was unpredictable, hair-trigger moody, and dangerous. But in my dreams, he’s the most rational of us all. He says,
The thing is, Maddie, no one really sees each other. If they say they do, they’re lying.

I
hear a buzzing sound coming from my mother’s room—almost a hum. Poking my head in, I see a prostrate figure on the floor at the end of the bed.

“Adele?”

She doesn’t answer. Her hairless head is bent forward so that her forehead touches the floor. The back of her neck is thickly grizzled, more muscular than one would expect in a woman. I wish I could wake my mother just for the pleasure of having her see Adele kneeling before her. In my mother’s opinion, Derek’s pacifism and hippy clothing were nothing compared to Adele’s two divorces and what my mother called her “serial exhibitionism.” She had been my father’s favorite niece—well mannered but fun, athletic,
popular with boys.
Too
popular, according to my mother.
Like flies to flypaper,
she said.

After she took up with her Italian, Adele became exceedingly glamorous. A
throwaway
, said my mother.
Unseemly
, my father said. No Addison should be caught dead with Gucci luggage, much less gold-framed designer sunglasses and necklaces that spelled
AMORE
in diamonds. Adele wore pink high-heeled mules with jeans, had her colors done and her chart read, dumped her Italian for a Hindu, went with him to Bombay. She came back wearing gold bracelets up to her elbows, and set up an altar in the Love Nest, complete with candles, incense, flowers, and a picture of her guru.

I think about asking Adele if she brought a wig.

Mother, her left side permanently placid, seems oblivious to Adele. Perhaps she is ignoring her. More likely she doesn’t know Adele’s here—the way she’s forgotten her hand or her foot.

Adele lifts her head like a cobra. I notice that the sunflowers I put in her room are now on Mother’s bureau. She finishes her half-whispered chant, sits back, claps her hands together, opens her eyes and fixes them on me. “Why have you stayed away so long, Maddie?”

“Why did you move the flowers?”

In 1980, when Adele married
Guthrada, my mother said, Guthrada, my foot. He’s Jewish.
The ceremony was held on a bluff in Bolinas overlooking the Pacific under the proper alignment of planets. We all threw flowers off the cliff, prayed to seven or eight gods to bless the union. Later, when Guthrada pulled me close and ingratiated his tongue into my mouth, I knew that Adele was in trouble.

Adele rises to her feet. Like the fast-forward animation of plant life, she seems to unfurl and blossom. She is undeniably regal, even with her shorn head. Thin as she is, she should look like a cancer victim. But there is too much life in Adele. She pulses with it.

“She needs flowers,” Adele says briskly, steering me out of the room. “And air and music and prayers.”

Again, I feel that twinge of guilt, as if everyone else knows what’s best for
my mother. I want to tell Adele that it’s too late, that Mother’s needs were abandoned long ago, that what she wanted was to be recognized, heard, to be taken seriously, but I’m not sure if I’m speaking for my mother or for myself.

I follow Adele into the hall. “She brought this on herself,” I say, flinching at the harshness of my words.

“It’s because she’s a Taurus,” Adele shoots back.

“A-dele,” I say, drawing out her name, “it’s because she’s an alcoholic.”

Adele caresses my cheek. Most of the household is still asleep. Once again I shy away, whether at Adele’s beauty or her compassion, I’m not sure. I don’t want her to touch me, but I stand perfectly still, my eyes fixed on a light switch by the door. I brace myself for some irritating assertion of incarnations and karma. “Sadie’s still with us, you know,” says Adele. When I say nothing, Adele nods wisely. “And she’s not the only one.”

“Please,” I say.

“She’s waiting to come back.”

I want to slap her, but Adele has a way of making a believer out of us all. I want to touch her head where her beautiful hair used to be. It must have lain in chunks around her feet when she hacked it off. Did the nun who shaved her do it lovingly? Was there a ceremony—like the Brownies moving up to Girl Scouts? And with this transcendence, this baptism, was there
gnosis
, insight? Like Edward falling into mirrors, I try to fall into Adele’s all-knowing eyes, but my beliefs are limited, and I can’t share her certainty.

P
hilip has come up from the beach to announce that the sailfish was washed down to the neighbors’ last night, even though he pulled all the boats up and secured them. “Nothing’s ever as secure as you think,” he says, running his hand through his now-frizzy hair and glancing at the hard line of blue that has formed on the horizon beneath the dissipating clouds. “A lot of branches down.”

“Did they clear out the view?” says Dana. The three of us are standing on the porch. Not for the first time, I marvel at Dana’s anxious hopefulness.

Philip nods. “We can either have those branches hauled, or let them mulch over the winter. The garden’s trashed anyway.”

Philip, securer of boats, assessor of damage. We have had our differences. I have raged at him about policy and politics. He always calmly rebuts me.
You are so predictable,
he says. And so it goes, each of us wrapping ourselves in the cloak of Addison righteousness, a cloak that, were I to be honest with myself, fits Philip as much as me.

“Why don’t we haul them ourselves?” I cast a look at him. “Oh, come on, Philip. No one will see.”

But Philip has his own ideas, and Dana usually capitulates. “Why don’t you two hash this out,” Dana says, turning on her heel, “and let me know what you decide.”

I peer over the edge of the railing and nudge Philip. “Look.”

Below us, Derek is already hacking at the fallen branches. Squatting, he shoulders an immense birch limb, complete with leaves, and begins to drag it down the path.

“What the hell—?” says Philip.

I watch Derek disappear beyond the dunes. For the first time in years, I feel a visceral desire for a drink. Branches and twigs have flattened the sunflowers. The sandy soil has washed over what’s left of the boardwalk. Slowly, the forest is reclaiming us. It will take fortitude and will to beat it back, tame the sands, and wrestle the unruly tendrils into something resembling the summer garden of our great-grandmother. I would have sworn that I’m more drawn to the beauty of wild things, but the crushed, surrendered artifice of Grannie Addie’s garden makes me sad.

I
pour milk onto my cornflakes, listen to plans for canoe rides and tennis, jam sessions in the afternoon. Jessica is going to sing, accompanied by Beowulf. There is a striking musical talent in their generation, and I wonder where it came from.

Miriam comes out of the kitchen, carrying a tray of Ensure, Snapple,
and toast. She draws a bead on Adele as if she still can’t believe what blew in the night before. Clearly, Adele is the result of a séance gone bad.

Jessica is examining the charms on Adele’s bracelet—a seated Buddha, a jade Ganesh, a Celtic cross, a heart, praying hands, a bug of some sort, possibly a beetle—all having to do with her latest religion. “I
love
it,” says Jessica, fingering each charm like beads in a rosary. “Love it, love it, love it.”

“It has nothing to do with anything,” Sedgie says. He has had a long talk with Adele that morning and decided that the whole religion is bogus.
Just watch
, he told me.
They’ll get her dough
.

I thought this was a little rich coming from Sedgie.

Adele’s eyes settle on Jessica. “Your wrist,” she says, nodding at Jessica’s tattoo. “It’s Celtic?”

The seduction is beginning. I recognize the signs.
Like flies to flypaper
.

“Tell me,” says Adele, mesmerizing Jessica with honeyed attention, “are you drawn to the Celts?”

Sedgie chimes in from across the table. “She’s a wanton little pagan, Dell.”

Adele, her eyes not leaving Jessica, says, “There’s nothing wrong with paganism. You just have to know your gods.”

“Mammon,” says Sedgie. “Now,
there’
s a god.”

Adele gives Sedgie a long, cool look. Nothing ruffles her.

“But you’re probably thinking more of Gaia,” Sedgie persists. “The earth-goddess thing. Or the one with all the arms and tits.”

“Betty,” I say.

Sedgie and Adele look at me.

“My friend Ian calls God ‘Betty.’”

“Who’s Ian?” says Sedgie, but the spell is broken. Pulling her wrist away, Jessica snorts with laughter.

T
he hours of summer days on Sand Isle seep into one another. Meals pass the time. The sun moves overhead, leaves stir, the wind on the lake kicks up. One has the vague impression of morning, and then suddenly
it is afternoon. The desultory feeling of a languid Midwestern summer overtakes me, and I meander from room to room. For a while, voices drift up from downstairs—the sweet harmonies of Jessica and Beo. But that sound, too, ebbs, disappears, drifts off to the beach or elsewhere.

Mother is sleeping. Miriam has rolled her onto her side, and her knees are drawing up, her back rounding as if she is receding into her birth. Her breath is uncannily steady for someone who has smoked for years.
If there’s a heaven
, she once said,
I’ll be able to smoke there.
A soft curl of gray hair falls across her forehead, and I tuck it back. Leaning forward, I smell her skin.

In my mother’s bedroom, as with most of the rooms of the house, there is a little desk fashioned between the wall studs. A pull of the knob, and it opens to reveal slots for mail and pens, scissors, and Post-its. In a drawer are sheets of yellowed paper:
Evelyn Petrie Addison, The Aerie, Sand Isle.
One-cent stamps from the forties with pictures of Teddy Roosevelt. Stamps from the fifties with soldiers waving a flag. I reach into the drawer, discover a gold thimble, an ashtray with scraps of beach glass, a pearl earring, a lipstick, a miniature bottle of vodka that my mother squirreled away just in case. I can imagine Grannie Addie writing her friends in her beautiful scrawl, describing summer pastimes, the evolution of children. I pull up a chair and sit. Taking an old ballpoint and a sheaf of stationery, I begin a letter to Dr. Anke.

I don’t agree with what you said about Angus
, I write.
What was to be gained by marrying him? Certainly not salvation. My father led us down that path of virtue as if there was no other, and yet look what happened to me. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps I wanted to redeem my mother.

The morning after I married Angus, I knew I had made a mistake.

It didn’t work,
I write.
The redemption thing. My mother’s gone downhill twice as fast since my father died. If freedom is what she wanted, she certainly didn’t take to it. If you saw her now, you’d understand. She’s lingering between living and dying. She’s lingered there so long.

Behind me in her bed, Mother breathes. I chew on the pen. Outside,
the sunlight bangs off the water. I think I make out our sailfish sail skittering westward. It’s been years since I sailed, years since my father died.

Dr. Anke told me she was trying to get me to reconnect with my feelings. She said this the same way my tennis coach used to say,
We’re trying to get some spin on that serve of yours
. They both made it sound as if my life depended on it.

Do you remember the story of when I went into treatment? We had lost Sadie, then Angus and I divorced. After Dad died, Mother simply turned away as if it had all been my fault. Do you think it brought home the uncomfortable fact that we all have choices?

Dr. Anke and I have covered this ground countless times. You break rules in families like ours, and they close ranks. Better to be quietly drunk than flagrantly sober; better to be miserably married than wantonly divorced. The fact of my cousins’ imperfect lives didn’t deter my father from judging his own children. But after he was gone, my mother had a choice. And her choice was harsher than his.

Mother gives off a sudden, loud snore. Her arm is reed thin. The tendons in her neck protrude like fallen branches beneath the snow. When I was a child, I crawled into her lap, let her enfold me in her smoky perfume, her spangle-covered arms. She would rest her chin on my head, rock me, sing the song about mockingbirds and diamond rings, even when I was too big and my legs touched the floor. I knew who I was then. I knew I was alive.

I ball up the letter to Dr. Anke, toss it into the wastebasket. In the mirror, I smear some lipstick from the drawer on my lips. Revlon Passion Pink, #421. The effect is eerily incongruous with who I think I am.

I
find Miriam in a room off the kitchen. It is a room of projects waiting to happen. There is a bed and a sewing machine. An old, broken rock tumbler sits on a table amid a battlefield of unpolished rocks. In the
closet are shoe boxes of photographs to be stuck into albums, framed or pitched out. In an armchair in the corner, bent over a gateleg table sits Miriam, sorting flowers. Between leaves of paper, she is laying down snippets of Queen Anne’s lace. The room is quiet except for a low, rhythmic snore that I identify as coming from the receiving end of a baby monitor that Miriam has clipped, walkie-talkie style, to her lapel. It reminds me that Mother is with us, even as I sit on the old spool bed that groans under my weight.

“What is it?” says Miriam. She doesn’t look up.

“Nothing.” I used to go down to Louisa’s room until I was a teenager. At some point, I became aware enough to understand that this was exclusively Louisa’s territory, and although I was tolerated, I was no longer wholeheartedly welcome. After that, I lost interest anyway, preferring other company to that of our cook. But there was a time when I asked Louisa a million questions—questions about her children (two), questions about where she grew up (Louisville), questions about cooking (
you jes’ look at the recipe, child, but nothin’ is rule
). She took her tollhouse-cookie recipe with her to the grave, but we’ve made our stabs at it, melting the butter or substituting lard, halving the baking powder, stirring by hand instead of by blender. But Louisa held her magic close, and the memory of her cookies exceeds in virtue those that we have eaten since.