Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (6 page)

“No.”

“He was older. When we were kids we used to take care of each other. I wanted to be a ballet dancer, and he used to tell me I could, and he would draw pictures of the costumes I would wear. I remember that.”

“Did you take dance lessons?”

“No.” She laughed. “That didn’t seem to matter. Hey, can I maybe borrow some money?” she asked. “Just a little bit. I gave so much to the guy, the detective. I guess he probably wasn’t a real detective, was he?”

“Do you mean borrow, or keep?”

She made a pained face. “I don’t know,” she said. “I want to get on my feet. I’d want to pay you back.”

After breakfast, he drove with her to the bank and gave her four hundred dollars he had earned building scaffolding with Acey. And then Rita vanished. It was a family talent. Steven drove by her apartment, and there was a sign saying it was for rent.

He went out fishing a lot, after that. Sometimes he would go at night and borrow a Sunfish like they used to, because it was so easy. Other times he would sit on a dock before sunset with a line in the cool water, watching the light play on the surface. He caught fish, not as many as he remembered catching as a kid, but enough to prove they were still there, waiting for food to come by, unaware that the river was only theirs until the plant started up, and then their time was over.

He finally left the plant, months before it was ready to open, not long before his job would have run out anyway. He sold his parents’ house and moved to Florida, because there were plenty of jobs building houses there, and because it felt like a place everyone had moved to. It didn’t seem like a place anyone was from. There were girls in the bars there, too, and sometimes he talked to them. If they didn’t seem too crazy, he sometimes took them home.

There was one who moved in with him, who was a few years older than he was. She had been a mermaid at a water park, and she looked like a mermaid, with wavy blond hair. She showed him some of her act once, in the pool at his apartment building, with the kids coming out on the balconies to watch her do backward somersaults. It was convincing even without her green tail, and in that moment he thought he might love her. But he kept comparing the way he felt about her to the way Acey had seemed to feel about Rita, and it was a hard standard. After a few months he broke it off, and felt better. He didn’t want anything that felt like it had a history to it.

When they started to drain a swamp where birds and fish had lived, for a new housing development down the road from his apartment, Steven watched the protests and the preparations with interest. The bird people were furious, the developers unmovable, and Steven was filled with relief that the fight wasn’t his. Nothing here was his: the streets weren’t full of things he’d done with Acey, or places he’d ridden his bike in grade school, and nothing reminded him of his dead parents. Even the old people were older than his parents had been. He thought there should have been something sad about how little he was tied up with the place, but instead it felt like freedom. He was free because it wasn’t his water here, and they weren’t his fish.

ONE JANUARY EVENING
, when the doctor’s new house felt warm and inviolable against the wind and cold outside, his younger brother called. They hadn’t spoken for months. Aaron assumed George wanted something: a larger share of what their parents had left them, or a loan, or some other favor that would annoy him. But George’s desires were hard to predict, and what he wanted, this time, was to invite the family skiing, over Presidents’ Day.  A new girlfriend had put him up to it, he said. She thought they should spend time together. It bothered Jonna—that was the girlfriend’s name—that the brothers spent Christmas apart. She worked with George as a ski instructor, and she craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.

“So are you inviting us skiing or calling me a pain in the ass?” Aaron asked.

“Don’t be a jerk,” his brother said.

“
I’m
the jerk?” Aaron wished he could play a recording of the phone calls for a third party and get some satisfaction, but George usually managed to make him sound childish, too.

“Just say no,” George said. “So I can tell Jonna you don’t want to.”

“Tell her no yourself.”

“I can’t.”

“Then get a new girlfriend.”

“She
is
a new girlfriend. That’s why I can’t say no.”

“Since when is Presidents’ Day a family holiday?”

“Oh, hell, Aaron,” George said. “It’s a weekend people go skiing. She just thinks we should get together.”

“Do we have to chop down a cherry tree? Recite the Gettysburg Address?”

“I’ll tell her you said no.”

“We’re coming,” Aaron said, before George could hang up. It was not the first time he had done something solely because his brother seemed to want him not to. He would have to ask his wife, and Bea would remind him of his altitude sickness and his constant fighting with George, but he could manage all of that. “We’ll be there,” he said.

“Suit yourself,” George said, as if the trip were Aaron’s idea. “Make sure you bring Claire.”

“I’ll see if she’s free.”

“I already asked her,” George said.  “She’s in.  You just have to fly her home.”

Aaron hung up and spent the rest of the evening fuming at George’s presumption. Aaron’s daughter, Claire, was now a sophomore in college, but he didn’t think of her as someone who could be invited separately on a trip. She was the little girl who had climbed on his head, who had asked him if people could see inside her mind, who had loved his old
Mad
magazines as he thought no girl had ever loved
Mad
, giggling at them while he read the paper, asking sometimes to have things explained. Into her teens she had stayed home on weekend nights and watched old movies with him, curled under his arm on the couch, while Bea wandered off, losing interest. He could still feel the weight of his daughter’s head against his chest, and see, cast in silver light from the TV, the rapt absorption with which she watched. The only movie they disagreed on was
Rebecca
. It was his least favorite Hitchcock, but she loved the sweet, simple girl meeting the rich man with the dark secrets: “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool,” shouted from his hotel dressing room.

His brother might have despised Claire, since he hated everything else Aaron had. He liked to say that Aaron’s career as an orthopedic surgeon was mercenary, his marriage to a fellow doctor bourgeois, and his modest house on a hillside an environmental nightmare. So he might, by extension, have declared Claire a spoiled, entitled brat. But Claire wasn’t spoiled, and George loved his niece. He had courted her from the time she could walk and talk, bringing her presents from his adventures. He played invented games with her, endless games for which no one else had patience. In her favorite, he was the Fire, chasing her around the house and the backyard, never quite catching her, while she squealed with terror and glee. Aaron had tried to be the Fire a few times, out of fatherly duty, but he didn’t do it with the correct enthusiasm. Claire tried to direct him but soon lost interest. She could play it for hours with her uncle.

When she was old enough, Claire learned to ski. She was fearless, and George advanced the theory that the fearlessness came somehow from him.

“How do you think that would work?” Aaron had asked.

“She didn’t get it from you two,” George said. “You’re both so conservative.”

“No we aren’t.”

“In terms of your life choices.”

“Maybe we made her feel safe,” Aaron said. “So she can be brave.”

“It seems genetic,” Aaron said. “It could be. Diabetes is passed that way—over and down, like a knight in chess.”

“No it isn’t!”

“Yes, it is.”

“There’s no gene for bravery that you have and I don’t,” Aaron said.

“Then maybe I taught her to be fearless, by playing those games.”

“Why don’t you have your own kids and speculate about their character traits?”

“If I were having a kid,” George said, “you’d just tell me I couldn’t afford it.”

And that was true.

Aaron didn’t like George’s courting of Claire, and didn’t like George inviting her skiing before he invited Aaron and Bea, but he couldn’t keep her from his own brother. She might need bone marrow someday, he told himself. She might need a kidney. Also there was the fact that Claire loved her uncle. So they went off to ski, for Presidents’ Day, because George had ambivalently asked them to.

THE FIRST MORNING,
they all met in the gondola line. Jonna, the new girlfriend, flashed a nervous, welcoming smile, and Claire, back from California on a ticket that wasn’t cheap, hugged her tightly. Then she hugged George. Claire’s cheeks were pink with health and cold and happiness, and she wore a blue fleece hat that said UCLA on it. She asked Jonna questions as the gondola rose, and Aaron was inordinately proud of her: she was so vibrantly young and engaging and unself-absorbed.

Jonna, on the other hand, was a puzzle. If Aaron had met her on the street, he wouldn’t have pegged her for a ski instructor. She didn’t seem hardy or sporty or gregarious; she seemed delicate, prickly, and undernourished. She was wiry, about thirty-five, with a peroxide-white cloud of hair around her face, and a small diamond stud in one nostril that must have been hell in the cold. Aaron gave silent thanks that Claire had not gone in for piercing her face. Then he heard Jonna say that her father was a lift operator when she was a kid, so she skied for free, tagging along after the instructors in place of being babysat. That made sense. She was a ski brat the way people were military brats, and it had made her insecure. That was typical of George’s girls. He liked them needy and dependent, the opposite of Bea, who ran an emergency room and was born to command. The puzzle solved, Aaron stopped listening and watched people make their way—some quick and graceful, and some in a slow, shuddering slide—down the mountain below.

At the top, Claire went off with George and Jonna, the better skiers, and Aaron stayed with his wife. Bea never left the groomed runs where she could make long, easy turns all day without breaking a sweat. Years in the ER had left her with no attraction to danger. On the chairlift, they compared notes on Jonna. Bea guessed it wouldn’t last, that Jonna wouldn’t be able to buoy George up the way he needed.

“There’s a look little girls have who are adored by their fathers,” Bea said. “It’s that facial expression of being totally impervious to the badness of the world. If they can keep that look into their twenties, they’re pretty much okay, they’ve got a force field around them. I don’t know if Jonna ever had it. I think she’s always known about the bad things.”

“Does Claire have the look?” Aaron asked.

Bea turned to look at him, with amused affection behind her goggles. “Are you kidding?” she asked. “With you and George both? She’ll have it when she’s eighty. She’ll never get rid of it.”

THE FIVE ALL MET
for lunch, piling hats and gloves on a long table, with the snow melting on their unbuckled boots, carrying cheeseburgers and fries on cafeteria trays. George was slowed by handshakes and questions from people he had taught to ski, and when he finally brought his tray, he squeezed between Claire and Jonna.

“Eight bucks for a veggie burger,” he said. “It’s like Aspen around here. Rich doctors like you, crowding the slopes and driving the prices up.”

Aaron said nothing and started on his second beer. It was so good and so cold. His brother was only joking, looking for attention, having gotten so much from the rest of the cafeteria. His ski students clearly loved him, and that seemed touching. Aaron’s patients didn’t love him that way. People loved their GPs and their dermatologists, but not their orthopedists. They saw him only under duress, and he gave them frustrating news. “George,” he said. “We should ski together this afternoon.”

“All right,” George said warily, pounding the ketchup bottle over his yellowish soy patty.

“You act like I want to push you off a cliff.”

“Maybe you do.” George resorted to a knife, and the ketchup slid out along the blade.

“You should take me on the good stuff.”

“You can’t handle the good stuff.”

“Sure I can.”

“Honey, you don’t always do well at eight thousand feet,” Bea said. “And you’ve had two beers.”

“See?” his brother said. “Listen to your wise wife.”

Aaron didn’t like to be reminded of his debility—no one else got sick at this altitude—and he was doing fine. “Did you take Claire on the good stuff ?” he asked.

“Dad,” Claire said.

“Claire’s a really good skier,” George said, through a mouth full of soy.

“I know she is. I taught her.”

“
I
taught her,” George said. “And she’s thirty years younger than you are.”

“But you’re only five years younger.”

“But I ski every day. Stop staring at my veggie burger. Eat your own goddamn burger. Your dead cow corpse burger.”

At twenty, George had dropped out of college to go cycling around France with a girl, and he became a vegetarian under her influence. At the time, Aaron had defended George’s decision to leave school to their parents. He had admired and envied his brother’s bravery—he was already in medical school and wouldn’t have known what to do without the structure of classes—and he thought it important that George be allowed to find his own way. Also, in his secret heart, he was glad his brother wouldn’t be a doctor, too; the medical profession wasn’t big enough for both of them. So he had told the parents to back off. But it seemed, so many years later, that it was time for George to drop the lingering no-meat affectation, or at least to stop proselytizing. “Look, you can eat soy protein if you want,” he said, “but why harangue other people?”

“I’m just thinking of your arteries,” George said.

“My arteries are fine. Who decides to stop eating meat in
France
? You could have come back from that trip looking tan and healthy and full of steak béarnaise, and instead your skin was
gray
.”

“Boys,” Bea said. “Please don’t fight. For once.”

“We’re not fighting, we’re talking,” George said. “It’s not just about health. There’s a movie you should see, about slaughterhouses. Claire, you should see it. I’ll give you the DVD.”

“Please don’t give my daughter an eating disorder,” Aaron said.

“It’s not a disorder!”

Jonna stood, digging her coat out of the pile. “I’m going skiing,” she said, glaring at them both. She pulled her jacket onto one arm and rocked determinedly toward the door in her stiff-bottomed boots. She had a tattooed sun on the back of her neck, below the white-blond puff of hair, and it disappeared as she shrugged the coat up onto her shoulders.

Bea looked at George, as if expecting him to follow. “Aren’t you going?”

He held up his ketchupy hands. “She wants to ski alone,” he said.

Bea sighed, and dropped her paper napkin on her tray. “Claire, can you stand to ski the boring stuff with me?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” Claire said. She draped an arm over her father’s chest, planting a kiss on the top of his head. Aaron resisted looking at George in triumph, but then Claire whispered, “
Be good,”
into his hair, which lessened his sense that he’d won this round.

Bea and Claire weaved through the crowded, noisy cafeteria, and the brothers watched them go. Even bundled in ski clothes, the two women had a matching grace.
Women
. It was so strange to see Claire that way.

“Do you and Bea still fuck?” George asked.

“Just stop,” Aaron said. “You’ve done enough for one lunchtime.”

“How often?” he asked. “Like, once a week? Once a month? Once a
day
? Do you take pills?”

Aaron started to pull on his coat. “Knock it off.”

“What about Claire, do you think she’s a virgin?”

Aaron grabbed his gloves and stalked away, but he was slowed by the staggering gait of the boots, which made him feel ridiculous. He couldn’t even storm out. He’d never been able to. He turned and asked, “Are you coming or not?”

THE TWO BROTHERS
were on the highest chairlift, headed for the top of the mountain, and Aaron had calmed down. Life with George was like interval training—it was possible for Aaron to get his heart rate up and then quickly down again, from constant practice. He was admiring the trees gliding past, the white mare’s tails against the blue sky, and he thought of the winter he and George, as boys, were on a makeshift ski team, coached by another boy’s father, taking turns practicing slalom gates and taking jumps on their old wooden skis. George must have been about nine, and he was already the better athlete, instinctive and efficient, where Aaron was always thinking things through, using too much energy and movement, a gawky teen. He thought how spectacular it had been to watch George take the gates, and how proud he had been of his talented little brother. They were confederates, on that team of boys they didn’t know well, as they couldn’t normally be, when Aaron was in high school and George still learning to spell. They rode back home on the ski bus side by side, making jokes. He was about to ask George if he remembered the team, when his brother started in.