Family Reunion (12 page)

Maybe people from stable families can be understanding. Maybe all those backyards naturally make you understanding. I wouldn't know. I'm new to backyards. “We are not broken, Aunt Maggie. Plates get broken. Glasses get broken. Legs get broken. Families do not get broken.” Angus pantomimed that we would be happy to break legs or plates. “And if anything is broken around here, it's your family,” I said. “And you're too cowardly to admit it.”

Aunt Maggie gasped.

Beth and Joel said hastily that perhaps they would just go and refill their drinks.

Last year, when we were renting a place in Vermont, before we bought our own cottage, the lawn mower flicked a pebble against the dining room sliding glass door. For a moment, it was just a hole with a few little cuts radiating off it. But as we watched, the cuts grew. Shatter lines laced across the glass and linked up with each other, and slowly the entire huge door became a sea of glassy cracks. It didn't fall apart. But you couldn't see through it anymore.

That was me. Shattered. When Mommy left Daddy to go with Jean-Paul, the cuts grew and connected until I was all one frosty collection of splinters.

We were broken.

At last, I could admit it. But families have strong glue. I'd been repaired. Just this summer. Just this day.

There we stood: Aunt Maggie, Annette, Angus and me.

“You're right, Shelley,” whispered my aunt. “I'm sorry for saying that. I know I get overbearing. I guess I'm still hoping we haven't actually broken—Brett and I.” Aunt Maggie held out her arms to me.

For a long minute I stared at her empty arms. I could hardly tell whose they were: Aunt Maggie's or my mother's. I stepped inside the circle of her arms and she closed them around me, and our hug was a rocking hug, a dancing hug. A good hug.

“Maggie!” called Uncle Todd. “Ellen is here!”

Aunt Maggie let me go. She walked toward her husband thickly, as if she were swimming.

“Guess what, Annette!” I said, wanting to share the good news with her. I felt bright from the inside out. I knew that my eyes were shining, and my hair was shining, and my heart. “I'm going to visit Mommy after all, Annette, this very summer. What do you think? Isn't that great? My own mother! I'm okay about it now!”

Annette burst into tears.

People's emotions are always lying there, waiting for you to step on them and muddy them up and squash them beneath your feet.

“Annette, stop crying,” I said, shoving her into the house. “People will see you; they'll think there's something wrong. They already don't understand about Daddy because of Toby and because of Angus being weird.” I herded Annette to the safety of the back hall, where we wouldn't run into anybody.

“I thought you and I were getting along so well,” Annette said, weeping. “Who's Toby?”

“Toby is not Daddy's son,” I reassured her. “And we are
getting along so well. That's the whole point. So I'm calling her Mommy again.”

Annette said if he didn't get here soon, she was going to have a complete and total nervous breakdown.

“If who doesn't get here soon?” I asked. “Toby?”

“Who is Toby?” exclaimed Annette. “Why would I care about this Toby? Your father, of course! And what made you suddenly want to visit France? You won't even get on the phone with your mother.”

“I know, but I'm the prodigal daughter. Or she's the prodigal mother. We're going to party. I can tell. I'm ready.”

“I thought you were the stable one,” said Annette gloomily. “Are you just starting a mental collapse, Shelley, or are you well into it?”

“You thought I was the stable one?”

Angus joined us.

“Go away,” I said to him.

“No. Why is Annette crying? Do you want to see my autograph collection?”

“Angus, did you ask anybody how many wives they've had?” I demanded.

“No, what do you think, that I'm weird or something?”

Annette began laughing insanely.

“Don't laugh like that, Annette,” said Angus. “People will think you're weird.”

“People would be right. I'm going to wash my face.”

Annette headed for the stairs and the bathroom least likely to be occupied, but a pack of guests who had been touring the house were coming down. She headed for the family room, but a pack of guests who were sick of the mosquitoes outside had filled it up.

My grandmother emerged from the formal living room. My aunt and uncle have one of these houses where nobody ever uses the living room. You look in the door, as if you're at a historical house with velvet ropes to block passage, but you never go in. “Annette, darling,” said Grandma, “come sit with me for a minute. You look a little strung out.”

We all went into the living room. Delicately, because Aunt Maggie would be able to see our footprints in the nap of the carpet.

Grandma said she had been crying herself just a little bit. “People always cry at reunions,” she said. “Like weddings. Or funerals. There's something very painful and very beautiful about your very own family.”

Annette turned her face to the wall.

It's not her very own family, I thought. There's nothing beautiful here for her. All she has is trouble.

Annette turned back to face us again, and somehow she had gotten strength from checking out the wallpaper. Maybe we should take a roll of it home. “I'm just frazzled from the plane flight,” she said. We let it pass.

Angus said he wanted to know what stable meant, anyhow.
It seemed to be the most important word in Barrington conversations.

“It means you are not affected by change,” said Grandma. “In physics it means the atoms don't decay. They just go on and on, always the same.”

“How boring,” said my brother. “And here I thought it was good to be stable. You mean all stable is, is that every morning you wake up and there's nothing new? But I like change.”

Grandma looked as if she wanted to take all three of us, one by one, including Annette, onto her lap for snuggling. Annette just looked as if she wanted the next flight out. “Who is Toby, anyhow?” Annette said. “And what do you mean, he isn't your father's son?”

I told them everything.

Angus, with the same interest he had shown in Vermont, namely very little, said, “That was pretty nice of Dad, huh?” Annette said, “Yes, he's like that.”

And I said, “But why was it a secret when it's so nice? I thought you only kept bad things secret.”

“Barrington gave your father a pain in the neck, just the way it did Celeste,” said Grandma, laughing. “Just the way it did me. Why do you think I moved to Arizona? Everybody in Barrington always has to be knowing things.”

At last Angus was fascinated. “You mean you lied when you said you moved because the winters here are so hard?”

“The winters are hard, but eighty years in Barrington were enough. For your father, sixteen years were enough. He liked to keep his life to himself. You can't do that in a small town.”

Grandma forgave him, I thought. He ran away all those years ago and had divorces and troubles and gave her grief, and she doesn't care. “Does Aunt Maggie know about Toby?” I asked.

“We all know about Toby. He's spent every summer of his life here with his grandparents, and half of it on my front porch.”

“Drinking lemonade.” I nodded, envying Toby.

“But I doubt if Maggie knew your father supported Toby and Celeste for several years. Your father didn't think it was anybody's business. I don't think he would consider it a secret, just something in the past between him and Celeste.” Grandma looked soft and sad.

“Are you crying, Grandma?” I said.

“Yes, honey. I'm proud of your father.”

“He's pretty great, huh, Annette?” Angus said.

Annette shrugged.

“Just because you have to party without him,” said Angus, “is no reason to get mad at him.”

“She's upset because I'm going to visit Mom after all,” I said. “But how come, Annette? Why aren't you glad?”

She shrugged.

“Love isn't flat, like a freshly ironed sheet, Shelley,” said
my grandmother. But it was Annette's hand that her gnarled fingers took and held. “Love is a tangle. Hair that's never been brushed.”

Annette said, “I thought I was more important. I guess in spite of all my best intentions about keeping my perspective, I decided I came first.”

Angus explained to her that stepmothers never came first.

She nodded. “I know.”

“But you come in second,” Angus told her. “Second is pretty high, when you consider the population of the United States.”

Out in the yard we heard a tremendous hullabaloo.

People were shouting, yelling, cheering.

“What's that?” said Angus, obviously hoping for a fire or an explosion to liven things up. He leaped away, grateful for an excuse to abandon all these emotional women cluttering up the place, and raced out.

Grandma stood up, taking my arm for support. “Might as well see what all the commotion is about,” she said.

Annette followed without enthusiasm, as if any commotion Barrington might rustle up was assuredly not going to be worth the trip.

Aunt Maggie, who must have been showing off bedroom décor, came hurtling down the stairs. She was horrified by the idea that yet another major catastrophe had happened at her party. All of us hit the back door together.

“Surprise!” shouted my father.

He stood at the edge of the yard, tall and heavy and laughing. He shouted out the names of all those old friends and yelled hello to his sister Maggie and bellowed with joy at the sight of the dessert table and the welcome-home icing on the big sheet cake.

Angus threw himself on Daddy. “You lied,” said Angus. “You said you weren't coming for days.”

“Are you kidding? Ruin your aunt Maggie's surprise party? I just had to add a little extra excitement to the event.”

“You were coming all along?” cried Angus joyfully. “You were just giving your own sister a hard time? Like a real brother and sister?” He and Daddy laughed and socked each other.

“Should I beat him black and blue,” said Aunt Maggie to Grandma and me and Annette, “or join in the hugging?”

Grandma began laughing. It was that soft, possessive love of people who had always known what Daddy was like, but now they knew again.

“Annette, did you know all along?” I accused her.

She rolled her eyes. “Of course. He thought it was funny.”

How maddening for her, listening to Aunt Maggie carry on. She could have given Daddy away. I bet she wanted to. But she stuck on his side, even though he was being as much of a pain as Angus ever was.

Aunt Maggie began to laugh, just when I had thought she would never have a real, true laugh again in this world. She and my father went toward each other carefully, miming a fight. “Charlie,” she said to him, “I don't know how yet, but you are going to pay.”

The guests egged her on, with a dozen suggestions of what could be done to my father. Angus whipped out his notebook and wrote them all down.

I wanted to race up like Angus and fling myself on top of Daddy and be his special girl in front of everybody. But I didn't. I could feel Annette wanting to do the same thing. But she didn't. It was like opening the door for somebody, where you each step back and wait for the other person to go first.

Daddy is first for both of us, I thought. And we don't know how to share very well. And Joanna can't share at all.

But the first one of us Daddy kissed was his mother, my grandmother. He swung her on his arm and then put the other arm around Annette. Grandma slipped free, and I had a turn with the arm she had used. Even Daddy's one-armed hugs are bear hugs. “Daddy,” I said reproachfully, “you made us suffer. We had to listen to Aunt Maggie say bad things about you.”

Daddy roared with laughter.

I didn't have to protect him, I thought. Daddy never cared what anybody here thought. Only I cared.

Carolyn came over for her hug, but she was shy about it. My father is so much more energetic than her father. Daddy shook hands with Uncle Todd, and then finally he said, “Maggie, don't be mad. I had to do it to you. The situation begged for it.”

Behind her, their friends began singing “For She's a Jolly Good Fellow.” Maggie allowed my father to kiss her cheek. She called him some names, and people with video cameras told her to talk louder so they could immortalize it.

“Your son,” said Aunt Maggie, as if Angus were a clear and present danger, “has a present for you. Autographs of everybody in town.” She moved into the shadows, letting my father have the stage he was so good at taking, and Uncle Todd put his arm around his wife's waist.

Angus displayed his autograph collection proudly. He looked with satisfaction at the gathering of relatives. “We're all here now,” he said contentedly. Then he left us, because a latecomer had brought yet another dessert.

Angus's sentence hit me. We're all here now.

But we weren't all here. Joanna, our sister, she wasn't here. Mommy, our real mother, she wasn't here.

All my family reunions will be partial, I thought.

What will my wedding be like one day? Extra pews for extra families? Double-length inscriptions on the invitations to accommodate all the parents?

Oh, Brett. Oh, Joanna. Don't fall out the bottom of our families. Come home.

I thought of Aunt Maggie having to look at the videos and photographs of this party, which was going to be a smashing success and remembered by all. But forever and ever the photographs would remind her that one summer she was missing a son.

The party changed.

Laughter was longer and louder, the way laughter is when my father is there, and the stories were funnier, and the food even yummier. The heat did not lessen, but nobody went into the air-conditioning now; everybody gathered around Daddy and told stories and shouted out punch lines and passed drinks and barbecue and extra napkins.

“Shelley, there's a call for you,” said Carolyn. “It's a boy.”

“Toby?”

“No. Weird name. I had to ask three times to be sure of it. DeWitt?”

“DeWitt!” I said. “What phone did he call on?”

“Your cell phone, of course. It's in my room. A guest heard it ringing and tracked it down and reported in.” The two of us ran to her bedroom, where none other than Beth, the pre-Celeste girlfriend, was chatting away with DeWitt. “Well, I am just so glad I found out where you got that name from, DeWitt,” said Beth. “Now here's Shelley, at last. I declare, they had to go all the way to Texas to find her.”

“DeWitt?” I said into the phone.

Beth grinned at me and said, “Carolyn, let's go have a
dessert,” and all of a sudden I thought, Daddy's pre-Celeste girlfriend was pretty good too.

“It's me,” confirmed DeWitt. “How are you doing?”

“Is it an emergency?” I asked him. “Did our house burn down? Or yours? Are you all right?”

“I just wanted to say hi. See how it's going. And if Annette sagged and Toby turned out to be your brother.”

“Oh, DeWitt, you won't believe it. Toby's not my brother, but he is the son of Daddy's first wife, except his father of course was the second husband. I know, there are a lot of husbands and wives in my story, you don't have to remind me, they play my family here like a board game. Toby is really nice. I went on a roller coaster with him.” I could see DeWitt, his shaggy hair, his face with too much forehead until his smile equaled it out, like an equation in math. “DeWitt, I don't think I gave you my cell phone number.”

“You didn't. I asked the Frankels. They have about sixty-two numbers for you guys. Five cell phones, New York home phone, Vermont home phone, Paris home phone, Barrington home phone. In case of emergency, they'd probably be on the phone two or three days just trying to break through.”