Good Family (11 page)

“Well, then,” I said.

The woman sat there for a while, looking pleased to have arrived home in a car. Perhaps she had been gone for weeks. Perhaps she had set out like a fur trapper, hunting for pelts to warm them in the winter, returning instead with cookies.

I took one from the box she offered.

“No thanks,” said Dana, staring anywhere but at our passenger.

The woman heaved herself out of the car, pulled her blanket close, clutched her bag, peered back in at us. “You know them astronauts?” We stared at her blankly. “The ones that went to the moon?” Dumbly, we nodded. “You can see how the weather’s gone all wrong.” This was a statement.

Dana and I looked at each other. Nothing strange about the weather as far as we could tell. The summer had been a little dry and windless, but Michigan weather was always changing.

The woman lifted her right hand, spread her fingers wide, palm up, and gestured at the sky. For a minute, I thought she was going to say,
So long, Kemosabe.
Instead, she said, “So it’s them
astronauts.
” We looked up, then back, but she was heading down the road into the forest.

We sat there for a minute, the motor idling. Dana said, “Shit, Maddie. Shit, shit, shit. We could have been killed. She could have knifed us and hidden the bodies and made off with the Malibu.”

But I was tingling with adrenaline and the headiness of risk. I took a hard bite from the cookie. “No,” I said, shaking my head, my mouth filling with ginger, “she’s just kind of crazy.”

We drove off, leaving the forest and the pastures behind us and heading toward town. It had been five years since our father had caved in and bought a TV so we could watch the moon landing. The image had been fuzzy and broken, but we had seen the footprint they made. A proud moment for all
Americans—except for those who lived in the forest, under a pristine moon. If you had no TV, you couldn’t see the One Giant Leap. But we’d seen it. We’d gathered in front of our set as if it were a campfire around which tales were told.

Dana obviously felt relieved, having expelled our passenger. Had Tad Swanson with his reckless bravado and his belly full of beer seemed as remotely foreboding and threatening as the Indian woman, perhaps Deb would not have gotten into his car. But she had grown up with him, trusted him. There was nothing strange or exotic about Tad.

I felt solemn and ennobled. My back was a little straighter. I would tell Derek what had happened. Perhaps I would tell Louisa we picked up an Indian woman. It was fine and good, and I was somehow different from my father.

We were almost back to Sand Isle. I could feel Dana’s thrill at returning the car undetected as we pulled into the parking lot alongside the ferry dock. She was getting away with something—a rebel in her own right. The sky was darkening. Perhaps our parents had left the cocktail party, perhaps they had gone on to dinner. Tomorrow Dana would brag to her friends about her transgression. She might even tell about the Indian woman—
You know them astronauts?
—but, like Eve and the apple, I was the one who’d eaten the cookie, and Dana had refused.

I
began posing for Derek in his studio below the kitchen. The room was tucked between a stair landing and two bathrooms—the kind of room that appears in dreams when you thought no room was there. The walls were papered with studies of nudes he’d done at Yale. An old woman’s pendulous breasts. A man splayed on a stool, his penis drawn as carefully as his hands.

“
I
was the one who wanted to pick her up,” I said, telling him about Dana’s and my hitchhiker.

Derek was holding a paintbrush at arm’s length as if to measure my features. He blinked one eye, then the other, until he seemed satisfied and made a dash of charcoal across the page.

“Me,” I repeated, studying Derek, mimicking him. Each time I alternated blinking eyes, he moved slightly left, then right. If I blinked really rapidly, it appeared as if he and Edward were standing side by side.

“Stop blinking, please,” said Derek.

Derek was a masterful draftsman, using the chiaroscuro of charcoal and chalk to good effect. Tacked to the wall were several studies of a voluptuous
nude, the terrain of her curves exquisitely rendered. “What’s her name?” I said, lingering on the smudge of charcoal between her thighs.

“Yvonne.”

“Is she your girlfriend?”

Derek looked like Edward, yet not Edward. It was as if someone had taken Derek’s features and gently rearranged them like one of his portraits, primitive yet artfully capturing some essential quality. I wondered what quality Derek would find in me, but I suspected there was nothing of interest to exhume. I was teeming with impulse but little substance.

“And the sun shines down like honey on our lady of the harbor,”
Derek sang as he moved his hand across the page.

After Dana and I picked up that Indian woman at the end of July, the mood of the summer had shifted. Adele arrived the beginning of August, thin as a toothpick and wearing leather pants along with a macramé shirt, huge fortune-teller earrings, her black hair pulled straight back from her face. With her sunglasses on, she looked like someone who would hang out with Andy Warhol or Roman Polanski. She had left her husband for an Italian and had just come in from Florence. Her Italian, she told me, did things to her she never dreamed of, using his tongue, his hand, his knee.

His knee?
I said, trying to imagine that one. For years, Adele had taken a sporadic interest in me, though I was about as exotic as cornflakes. Like Derek and Edward, Adele was olive-skinned, but her eyes were more topaz. Angling for her allegiance, I reported what Aunt Pat and my mother were saying about her terrible mistake divorcing Stephen, who was a bright light in his Cleveland law firm and who came from such a good family.

“Stephen,” Adele had told me, eyes flashing, “is the world’s most boring person.”

I had taken this to mean that Stephen was
not
adept at using his knee. Spouseless, Adele commandeered the Love Nest and the phone, talking to her Italian, ignoring my father’s demand that she reverse the charges because why should
we
pay for her adulterous conversations.

“And she’s touched your perfect body with her mi-ind,”
Derek continued, singing the Leonard Cohen song.

Possessed by a new bravado, frozen in a pose, I continued to examine Derek’s studio. Dibs and daubs of color—detonations worthy of Pollack—graffiti’d every surface. The floor was strewn with drawings passionately tossed aside.

“Derek,” I said, “would you like me to take my shirt off?”

I suspect he heard me, but he busied himself with a knife and a charcoal pencil, filing its tip to a point. I undid the backstrap of my halter. As it slid to the floor, I was suddenly aware of the thinness of my arms, the pronounced line of my clavicle. In spite of all those times I’d willed it otherwise in the mirror, my breasts were barely formed, pink-tipped as rosebuds. Thrill gave way to doubt as a breeze came through the window, and I shivered violently. Derek, his back to me, hacked at his pencil silently. I studied his neck, discerning a spot of color. Then all at once he turned.

“So,” he said.

I
continued posing over the next two weeks. Midmornings, I went to the studio below the kitchen, sat in a wicker chair. I would unbutton my shirt, fold it neatly, then pose primly or languorously, depending on what he wanted. It became like a game of hide-and-seek—going off to a secret place, hoping no one would find us.

“See that pattern on your belly?” Derek pointed to the shadow made by the lace curtain. He touched my back. I thought he might kiss me, but even when he stared with a frankness that took me in, he always returned to his sketch.

And what was I to do? After the initial thrill of sitting in the nude wore off, I had to acknowledge my incipient boredom. My legs grew tired. My neck itched. So I fantasized, using the prose I’d read in novels to conjure lurid yet unspecific scenes of romance in which I was seduced—not so much against my will, but without my awareness, thus absolving me of any
incestuous transgression, real or imagined. Why such obtuseness appealed to me became a subject of discussion with Dr. Anke, but at fourteen, my idea of romance had everything to do with it being inadvertent as well as overwhelming.

“Think of it—” Derek said one morning while he was measuring me with the brush. “Our exalted civilization. We could be sitting in a café reading poetry, and Nixon tips off the Cold War. A nuclear blast, and we’re annihilated. Reading Pablo Neruda one minute, and the next we’re fused to our seats. Eyes, hair, flesh gone. Bone becomes rubble.” Derek spoke with alluring moral authority. It was the middle of August, and Nixon was going down. I was about to say that it was probably as good a time as any for the Soviets to invade our country while all of us were preoccupied with Watergate, but when I opened my mouth to speak, Derek said, “Lift your chin, Maddie. Imagine yourself on a throne.”

But why would I want to imagine myself away from this perfection with my cousin focused on me?

E
dward came back from Vietnam the second week of August. He returned twitchy and preoccupied. Ever since he was a teenager, Aunt Eugenia had been wary of him, circling around like a mama bird assessing the viability of a chick that had fallen from the nest. He had a way of staring at mirrors as if he was falling into them. We knew better than to ask. Even so, we overheard things—the way he talked to Louisa, for instance, as though she was the only person who understood. With a smile that could swallow the waning moon, Louisa spoke low and steady to Edward, spoke to him about nothing. Edward watched as Louisa cracked eggs and chopped vegetables and chattered on about the heat and “them nasty raccoons strewing the garbage again.”

Edward had reclaimed the old boat room, where he’d slept before going to Vietnam, making it into a spartan sort of camp. A cot mattress. A candle by which to read. He’d taken to burning incense. Its smell would
insinuate into the rest of the house, permeating the rooms with the sweet fragrance of overgrown temples and deep-jungle statuary with slanted eyes.
Weird,
Sedgie said.
Edward’s just plain weird.
But then, he’d always been a little off. If you looked at him funny. If you looked at him at all.

He didn’t smoke pot anymore. He was living clean.
Survival,
he explained to me one morning when I saw him drinking something green and thick as pond slime. It
could
have been pond slime, for all I knew. Adele told me that Edward had survived an ambush by breathing through a hollow blade of grass beneath the surface of a river.

“Did you really do that?” I asked him. I wanted to envision what it looked and smelled like, the sounds of the jungle, the taste of the swamp.

Edward stared at me over his sludgy drink. While Derek’s hair was long, Edward’s was strange—short but uneven as if he hadn’t used scissors. I was almost fifteen, now. My braces would be coming off at Christmas. Emboldened by my new stature as a muse, I decided to press further. Had fear electrified his nerve endings in a steady burst? Or had it stuck in his throat?

“Did
what
?” The tone in which he said it made the question itself seem dirty.

I hesitated, then said, “Sucked air through a straw?”

“
Sucked
?” Edward laughed. “Sure. Want me to show you how?”

Things had been unraveling in the house ever since Dana and I had taken our clandestine Malibu drive. The ferry driver, it seemed, had reported us. My parents were informed. Now Dana had been double-grounded. She would drag the phone from the dining room into her bedroom, its long cord snaking around the landing and through another hall. We could hear her muffled voice as she described this purgatory to her boyfriend, who at first was sympathetic, then bored, and, finally, indifferent. When it became apparent Dana no longer held his fascination, she took it out on me. If we hadn’t picked up that Indian, we would have made it home unnoticed. And now Bruce or Buck or whatever his name was wouldn’t return her calls. Doors slammed. Sobs ensued. My mother’s voice was firm as she tried to comfort Dana. Once, after a tearful scene in which
Dana threatened to drop out of school, I overheard my parents arguing, my mother telling my father that Dana was
his
daughter, too, and why didn’t he step in?

I, in the meantime, was invisible to my parents. If my mother even noticed me, it was with mild surprise as if I was a book she had set down or misplaced, then forgotten altogether. After her fight with my father, I had found my mother playing solitaire in the card room. Flipping a card and scanning for an ace, she had drawn on her cigarette and said,
Promise me when you have a problem, you’ll spare us the hysteria.

“So what do you do in there anyway?” Edward asked over the rim of his glass. “Derek got you cleaning his brushes?”

Ignoring his question, I mustered my courage. “So what
was
it like?”

Edward slowly set down his glass, licked a fleck of green from his lower lip, and sat back with his arms crossed. Like Derek, he was dark, but his lips were fuller, almost girlish, so that when he sneered, it looked faintly pornographic. In spite of the antipathy I felt for him, I was curious.

Edward seemed to weigh my intentions. “The weird thing—” He leaned toward me across the table. I found myself pulling back a little, just in case. “The
weirdest
thing,” he continued, “is that I’d rather be stuck on a hill with the slants shooting at me than holed up here with a bunch of prepsters worried about scoring beer and whether Mommy and Daddy are going to come through with some bucks. Know what I mean?”

In some nascent, unformed way, I did.

D
erek, in the meantime, was taking peyote and studying rocks. I found him on the beach one evening before the sun went down. Sitting together on the cool mound of sand, we watched the lake turn to slate. There was a dark bank of clouds along the horizon boding evil weather, but for now the sky above was clear, soon to be pricked with stars.

“Matter is an illusion,” Derek said. “Do you have any concept of the distance between atoms?”

I edged a little closer to him. Ever since Uncle Halsey had passed away in the winter of 1969, Derek had taken on the pastoral quality of a handsome priest. Derek was awestruck, not cynical like Edward. I so much wanted to emulate him, but my fear was that I was more like Edward, prone to sourness and a jaded eye.

“Have you ever taken peyote, Maddie?”

I shook my head. Psychedelics made me think of Jimi Hendrix and Art Linkletter’s daughter, the stove flame that blossomed into a flower in the antidrug film we’d seen in school.

“If you did, you’d see things. Really see them. My father—” he broke off. For a long moment, he regarded the lake. My memories of Uncle Halsey were dim recollections of a thin-faced man, peevish with cancer, unkind to his sons. Derek’s green, spaced-out eyes took on a keen sort of focus. He fondled the rock. “All these connections. There’s poetry in these rocks, Maddie. If you could only see it.”

Y
our cousin,” my mother said, yanking a red strand of yarn through needlepoint canvas, “seems to be having difficulties.”

“Which cousin?” I said.

She stared at me over her glasses. She was wearing Ben Franklins now, looking more and more like my aunt Pat in cable-knit sweaters and Liberty print skirts. “Who do you think? That Edward, of course.” She sniffed. “He was always strange. Even as a child.”

We were sitting in the tower room, me with my book, my mother with her needlepoint. I had been reading a Harold Robbins novel till my mother found it and took it away. I had dog-eared some of the sex scenes, marveling at how my thighs tingled from merely reading the printed words. Now I was reading a copy of Anaïs Nin I’d purloined from Adele.

“Maybe he was in the Green Berets, Mom. He could have seen women and children butchered.” I sighed dramatically.

“Even so,” said my mother. “He’s odd.”

Which was exactly what drew me to him. I had previously found him repugnant; now I was enthralled, as with the Indian woman and her store-bought cookies, her notions about the moon. Edward was odd, and his oddness held promise. Even Derek, who
was
my idol with his artistic vision and his noble sense of justice, had lost some of his luster to the taboo allure of Edward. While Derek might take peyote and find poetry, Edward, drug-free, saw demons.

My mother, who had given up on Dana’s moroseness, took longer and longer naps, and I was left mostly to myself. Soon, the summer would be winding down, and I would be back to my sophomore year. In two years, I would get my own school ring,
Virtute et Veritas
engraved around the edge. But for now, I was savoring the last of the August evenings, already heralded by a dented harvest moon.

It could have been a Friday or a Tuesday night. All the nights in summer bled together with little to distinguish them. Most of the family was out, including Dana, whose detention had expired. Even Adele had gone on a date, wantonly disloyal to her Italian as well as her husband, and I was left alone on the porch swing to contemplate a partially eclipsing moon. Above the shrill of crickets, I could hear the faint threads of a dance band at the yacht club. I pushed the swing back and forth, immersed in Anaïs Nin’s voluptuous self-exposure. Deep in the house, Edward was listening to Asian music in his own private reverie, facing his demons or casting them out. At one point, the music stopped, and I thought I heard him pacing, but no one came onto the porch, and when my solitude proved too unbearable, I went upstairs to my monk’s cell in the recesses of the fourth floor.