Family Reunion (8 page)

Carolyn was too busy defending a brother to notice. I have defended a brother in my time. It's humiliating and necessary, and you hate your brother for making you do it, and you'd hate yourself if you didn't.

“You say one more thing about Brett,” said Carolyn, “and I'm going to sock you so hard you'll need dentures, Miranda.”

I was filled with respect for Carolyn. Not only had she been fine when I was the one who got the necklace, but she was willing to attack with words and fists.

Angus now wore a huge white bandage over most of his head. He bit open a tiny white packet and held it up to his forehead. Take-away ketchup from a hamburger place. Fake blood. Finally Miranda and the others noticed him. “Who is that?” whispered Miranda.

Carolyn and I said nothing.

Miranda thought we should locate the parents in case the little boy was insane.

My soda can was perspiring against my ankle. I leaned down over my lap, and holding the can out of sight beneath my bleacher, I shook it vigorously.

“Ooooooh, look!” said Carolyn. “Brett's team is going to make a home run!”

This was mainly because nobody in the outfield was looking or could catch or, after they caught up to the ball, could throw. All the parents stood up and cheered madly for everybody and anybody.

“Miranda, you have a little brother or sister on one of these teams?” I asked.

“No, I just like to come.”

“She just likes people around she can pick on,” said Carolyn. “Everyone has a skill. That's Miranda's.”

Miranda smiled proudly, her tiny teeth exposed like little beads.

She was watching Brett, though. I did not think it was teasing or nine-year-olds that brought Miranda to the games. I finished shaking my soda can.

“Has your mother admitted yet,” Miranda asked Carolyn, “that Brett has moved out forever and doesn't even plan to finish high school? Has the chairman of the school board actually said out loud, 'Yes, my son is a high school dropout'?”

I held up my soda. “Want a sip, Miranda?” I aimed my can and yanked off the pull tab.

Soda sprayed two feet in the air. It dripped into Miranda's hair. It soaked into her T-shirt. It ran down her dangly earrings and hung like brown diamonds from her eyelashes. All the honeybees in Barrington deserted trash cans and flower beds to get better acquainted with Miranda.

“So, Carolyn,” I said to her, over the sound of Miranda's screams, “when are you coming to visit us, anyway? I think you and I would get along—to use the perfect word— perfectly.”

The family room off the kitchen had television, VCR, stereo, compact disc player, two computers, exercise bike, rowing machine, bookcases full of paperbacks, CDs, tapes and videos, and a fireplace with a raised hearth. Your old-fashioned people could start a fire and toast their toes or their marshmallows while your up-to-date people could check their e-mail, and your fitness people could slim down while your musicians could wear headphones. Wedged among this equipment were three enormous recliners, which, when tilted back with footrests up, missed the various components by an inch. Once positioned in a recliner, you stayed there, wrapped in a hand-crocheted afghan, while the person closest to the kitchen fed you.

Uncle Todd's recliner was dark and leathery, while Aunt Maggie's was ruffled and flowery. Carolyn, Annette and I fit on a double recliner, rather like an upholstered hospital bed that bent at the knees as well as the waist. Annette looked as nervous as somebody using a ski lift for the first time, perhaps expecting to be flattened inside the mechanism. The moment I tried out that recliner, I was addicted. It was the most comfortable, wonderful way to sit/lie/slouch. I felt decadent, a Roman aristocrat reclining for a feast. “All we need are the slaves,” I told Carolyn.

“Angus?” she suggested. “How well trained is he?”

Annette and I laughed.

Angus of course was busy trying out headphones, synthesizers and the latest computer games, sorting through video selections and also starting a fire. Grandma said what with the air-conditioning and so forth, perhaps we didn't need that many logs, but Angus was safe inside his earphones and added every piece of kindling standing upright in a hammered-brass basket on the hearth. Grandma sat in a straight-backed kitchen chair. She can't slump now or it's permanent. “Aren't little boys wonderful?” she said of Angus.

Annette and I reserved comment.

Aunt Maggie said, “They are. I wish Brett would still—” She broke off. “What is everybody going to wear tomorrow night for the reunion party? Not that it matters, with Charlie not coming. I don't know how I'm going to face everybody.

I feel like the youngest kid in this room. All I want is to slug my big brother.”

“Then this is a good time to tell Uncle Charlie stories,” said Carolyn. She passed Annette an unappealing homemade snack—Cheerios, broken pretzels, peanuts and onion salt making a mess in the bowl—and Annette passed it along to me, and I passed it to Angus, who is an excellent garbage bag for food nobody else wants. I could hardly wait to hear all the wonderful Uncle Charlie stories.

“Uncle Charlie,” said Carolyn happily, “is the black sheep of the family.” She heaved herself out of our recliner and crawled over her father's extended feet, explaining that we needed a higher quality of snack down at our end of the room. “Everybody was always mad at Charlie,” she said, heading for the kitchen, “and he was always having to run away or get divorced in order to escape.”

Annette said she thought that was an oversimplification of the facts.

Uncle Todd said maybe he would tell Carolyn stories instead, like the time she sneaked into the state fair without buying a ticket on the same day the state police were trying to corner a gang of teenage pickpockets and—

“No!” yelled Carolyn, charging back into the room, armed with a half gallon of ice cream and a scoop. She had no bowls, and I hoped that we were just going to pass the ice cream around and lick. But she made a second trip for bowls and spoons.

“Your poor dad,” Uncle Todd told me, “has become a Barrington myth. From what I see of Angus, there is a possibility of a second generation joining him.”

“Was Daddy that bad?” I said nervously. I wasn't sure I wanted to hear any When Your Father Was a Boy stories after all.

“Your father was terrific,” said Uncle Todd. “Speaking of course as a latecomer who missed the really good years. You're never bored around Charlie. Of course, people don't know the facts of situations like Toby, because along with everything else, Charlie keeps a great secret, and secrets generate gossip.”

Angus was encased in his own noise. He did not hear the word Toby. Carolyn and Aunt Maggie did not look interested, and Annette was yawning. Grandma stood up slowly. “I believe I'm going to bed,” she said, and Uncle Todd took her arm and escorted her to the guest room as if he were walking her down the aisle to seat her at a family wedding.

“Perhaps it's time for all of us to get some rest,” said Aunt Maggie. “You three have had a hard day. All that travel. Of course I'm sure I won't sleep a wink, what with thinking about my ruined party.”

Recliners popped back. Electronics were shut down and snacks collected.

I cannot bear to admit that I am ignorant. I don't care what it is—science class, new computer program, using a
different subway—I can't stand to be the dumb one. It's as if I think I should have been born knowing everything. So if I said, “What are you guys talking about? Who is Toby?” I would feel as if the whole world were pointing and jeering. Uncle Todd thought my dad was terrific. All I had to say to my nice uncle was “So tell me about Toby Because it's a secret from me, too.”

But how could a hidden half brother be a good secret? How could it be anything but bad? And yet there didn't seem to be anything hidden about Toby. He was here, and they knew him, and Carolyn was friends with him, and Toby knew who I was, and had been invited to the party. If he's really my half brother, I thought, wouldn't I feel toward him what I feel toward Angus? Half yuck and half affection? Love that's just an affectionate state of being annoyed?

Ask, I told myself.

But I didn't.

Aunt Maggie showed Annette how to flatten one of the recliners completely and make it up for a bed. Annette did not look eager to sleep there.

We all drifted up to bed, except Angus, who wanted to stay up all night playing with electronic components. Annette would have said yes, since it was vacation and who cared anyway, and he could have had the recliner bed, and she would have slept in Brett's room on a mattress. But Aunt Maggie was the sort who believed that firm bedtimes
created stable character, so Annette said, “Angus! Certainly not! It's bedtime!”

Angus looked as if he had not encountered this concept before, which all summer in Vermont he hadn't.

“And you have to get clean first,” I said, because the shock of having to use soap would keep Angus from saying, “What do you mean—bedtime?”

“Oh, good!” said Angus, leaping up. “I get the bathroom first!”

Annette and I stared at him.

“The bathroom has a whirlpool,” explained Angus. “You don't even need a washcloth in one of those. It just flicks the dirt off you, like a dishwasher.”

Aunt Maggie followed Angus toward the bathroom.

“I don't need help!” he shrieked, horrified.

“I'm just going to show you how to turn everything on, and especially how to turn everything off,” said Aunt Maggie. “Floods are so boring.”

“Not to me,” said Angus. But he was grinning at her, and she was half reassured that he wasn't intentionally going to flood the place just to get a little action going.

I picked up my necklace in its lovely case. “What present did Grandma give you, Carolyn?” I asked, and then was scared that maybe Grandma hadn't given Carolyn anything, and now I would have to offer to split the necklace or something.

Carolyn beamed. “Train tickets for the next time I visit her in Arizona. I don't want to fly. I want to take the train and look out the window at America.”

We had never visited Grandma in Arizona. My mother was the one who had arranged family trips, and from the day she moved out to be with Jean-Paul, we hadn't had such a trip. Daddy couldn't put it together. It was Annette who put Vermont together.

Carolyn said, “How come Grandma didn't give you anything, Annette?”

“I'm too old for midsummer presents,” said Annette. “Anyway, she's not my grandmother.”

“True,” said Carolyn. “And I suppose she's had so many daughters-in-law with Charlie that she can't be giving presents to every new bride every summer.”

“Thank you for sharing that,” said Annette.

We use them for our family joke, I thought. We say, “The Perfects wouldn't have a food fight now, would they?” They use us for their family joke. “How many wives is he up to now? Anybody kept count?”

It was fine for us to laugh at them, but it was not fine at all for them to laugh at us.

Aunt Maggie returned, wearing a satin bathrobe, lacy and fragile, like something in an old-fashioned trousseau. She held high on a padded velvet hanger a summery dress with tiny tucks and a flared skirt and tiny pottery planets on embroidered orbits facing a silver crescent moon.

“Oh, that's stunning!” cried Annette. “You will be the belle of tomorrow's ball.”

“Somebody has to be something,” said Aunt Maggie, “since the guest of honor isn't going to show up. What's your dress like?”

“Nothing compared to that,” said Annette, touching the little solar system. Annette was a New Yorker. Even in summer, she was happiest wearing black. She had a crisp summer suit, with knee-length cuffed shorts and a soft white blouse with tuxedo pleats and a tiny black jacket with a black-and-white kerchief tucked in the tiny pocket and black-and-white beads to match black-and-white earrings. But since Annette could only choose clothing well, and not wear it well, she would look disheveled and hot.

She and Aunt Maggie would face the next day's party in outfits carefully chosen, leaving trails of perfume behind them, hoping nobody would know that they were cut to pieces inside. My father did indeed seem able to leave everybody in the lurch.

We slouched off to our rooms. I was tired from flight and family, but I wasn't sure I could ever fall asleep. “What's that over your bed?” I asked Carolyn. “Have you framed a baton?”

“It is a baton,” she said, “and Brett framed it for me for a birthday present. When I was learning baton-twirling and hoping to make the team, Mom took a video. Of course, she takes hundreds of videos. I saw myself all worked up about
my ability to catch a stick, and I realized that that's what I would be remembered for at my high school reunions. My ability to catch a stick. Brett thought it was hysterical and just right for my abilities as a human being. He began introducing me as his sister the dog. We'd be cleaning up the yard after a storm, and every twig and branch he'd pick up, he'd throw across the grass and yell, 'Fetch!' ” Carolyn grinned at me. “So I quit twirling.”

I have cried myself to sleep a few times in the past several years. It was much nicer to laugh myself to sleep.

In the morning Aunt Maggie strong-armed us onto chairs around the breakfast table. For a woman who does not believe in violence, she is very forceful. We had bacon, grapefruit halves, hot biscuits slathered with butter and honey, pan-fried potatoes, blueberry pancakes and tall glasses of orange juice. I don't usually have that much breakfast in a month.

Grandma told about how my father used to hold lawn-mowing races with his friends, and once, he got so excited, he mowed off the entire garden of the next-door neighbors. Aunt Maggie said that that very garden owner was coming to the surprise party that night with a little plaque commemorating the event, only of course Charlie, being Charlie, would not be there to receive it. Grandma told about how Daddy ran away from home three times when he was in junior high. “Didn't usually go very far,” she said. “We found him once sleeping in the garage.”

“Reminds me,” said Uncle Todd. “Come on, Angus. You and I have chores to do in the garage.” “I hate chores.”

“Me too. That's why I'm going to make you do all of them. Last one in the garage is a rotten egg,” said Uncle Todd, taking a scoop of scrambled eggs in his bare hand. Angus was thrilled at the prospect of a food fight and let himself be chased into the garage.

“You know what I forgot to tell everybody?” I said. “Oh, gosh, I knew there was something important. I'm so sorry. I forgot to tell you Joanna's coming. She's flying in tomorrow. Isn't that fun? She'll be here too.”

“That's wonderful!” cried Grandma. “I'm so happy. All five of my wonderful grandchildren will be together.”

Aunt Maggie burst into tears.

“Now, Mom,” said Carolyn, with the quick desperation I knew so well, the daughter thinking, I can smooth this over; I can make it all right; I can solve this. But she can't. “Brett has to come home eventually,” said Carolyn. “Just because he wouldn't even talk to us at the baseball game doesn't mean he'll never live at home again. Johnny's parents will get sick of feeding Brett, and Brett's grown another inch and needs new clothes, and Johnny's parents surely won't buy somebody else's kid new jeans and sneakers. So Brett will have to come home.”

“He won't have to!” said Aunt Maggie savagely. “He'll be just like his uncle Charlie and wander around town making
friends with the scum of the earth and wearing sneakers he slices open to let his toes air out.”

Angus had come back for another handful of scrambled egg. “Slicing out the toes of his sneakers?” he said eagerly.

“Get lost,” I said to him, and he did, presumably because he had sneakers to deface.