I see you everywhere (18 page)

117

Mom asks Hugh about his parents. He tells her about their recent vacation in Scandinavia, a Harvard-sponsored cruise with expert lecturers and a gourmet chef from Sweden.

“You could do that,” Mom tells Hugh.

We look at her blankly.

“Be the professor type on one of those cruises! Louisa could go along and paint the scenery. I miss your paintings, Louisa.”

“Mom, Hugh teaches mostly American history.” He does teach modern European, too, and a senior seminar in twentieth-century art, but I’m annoyed that she suffers from a chronic refusal to accept that I haven’t painted since college, more than ten years ago.

“He could do one of those riverboat tours on the Mississippi. Or an Alaskan cruise. Or Chesapeake Bay! Your father wants us to sail the Inland Waterway when he retires, just the two of us.” She adds gaily,

“Maybe with his
second
wife he will.”

Having grown up on a farm, my mother claims that she still yearns for a landscape far from the sea, somewhere the soil yields more than stones for building walls, but long ago she resigned herself to life in New England. She gets a lot of martyr mileage out of the sacrifice she made. And she translated her talent with livestock into her knack with horses and hounds. She gives riding lessons in the summer only; for the rest of the year, she devotes herself to the hunt and its artificial yet creaturely occupations, filling the nearby woods (what’s left of them) with the tumult of hooves and the voices of dogs in joyful, throaty abandon. The phony fox scent is laid down ahead of time by local high school boys trained by Mom to simulate the cunning maneuvers of foxes.

“Speaking of Europe,” I say, “I’m thinking of applying to a graduate program in England. For a year from now.”

She eyes me over the rim of her sherry glass. She sets it down.

“England!”

“It’s a fellowship for writing about fine art, a master’s degree.”

“Why England? What’s New York for if not studying art?”

Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 118 118

Julia Glass

“It’s a special program, at the Tate. There’s nothing like it anywhere else.”

“What would Hugh be doing there?”

I look at Hugh, who is looking at the pool. “Hugh would be taking a leave from his school,” I say when he doesn’t say it.

“Won’t he lose his job?”

“They have sabbaticals.” I glare at Hugh, trying to rope him in, even just get his attention back to the table. “He’s been teaching there just long enough to take one, at least for a semester.”

“Hugh!” Mom exclaims. “Do you like this idea?”

“England would be interesting,” he says. There’s that vague smile again.

“ ‘Interesting’?” my mother scoffs, and I’m thinking the same thing. Whatever happened to
incredible
?
an adventure
?
a blast
?

“Fascinating, I mean,” he says. “I could take classes, too.”

Or lie around in bed all day.

“Louisa and I could be students together,” says Hugh. I feel a tug at the sound of his voice. Does he mean to sound romantic?

“It’s all the rage these days, isn’t it? Going to school forever,” says my mother, and her tone is no longer flirtatious. She looks accusingly at me.

“Have you been in cahoots with your sister? She’s on that bandwagon, too. Now she’s decided she needs to get some sort of extra degree in extinction management or something even more specialized and impractical than what she’s already studying. How many degrees does a person need? College was enough in my day, then you plunged into the experience of
life.
And look at your father’s fancy degree. Botany! Beau tells me

‘botany’ doesn’t even really exist anymore! And is that how he makes his money now? Plenty of hugely successful people have been to college, period. Now education is like an elastic band. You just keep on stretching it and stretching it. A bungee cord, that’s what it’s like! You two young people have jobs, good jobs! Who’s to say that Hugh’s teaching position will be waiting for him when you return?”

I say sharply, “A contract, that’s what.” But I’m distracted by the per-Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 119
I See You Everywhere

119

nicious thought that my sister’s probably wheedling money out of our father. And the wounded feeling that she’s told them about her plans before she’s told me. Not that we’re the best of friends, but we respect each other. It’s not as if I’m planning to ask for money from them myself—I’m applying for a grant—but I know the power Clem has over Dad. He glows when she tells her stories, all about her Darwinesque adventures in Brazil, Labrador, Alaska; she makes him nostalgic for science. I can’t even keep straight what animals she’s working to save, though mostly they’re animals who live in the water. She’s always said that school, to her, is nothing more than a necessary evil, so my mother’s news is startling.

“Well, whatever you say,” says Mom. She sighs the sigh of someone wronged and eats a bite of her chicken salad. “Your sister has a mind of her own, and I can’t argue with that, can I? I raised you girls to be independent, and independent you are.”

Hugh is staring toward the pool again, and I get the creepy, panicky notion that he’s staring at the lifeguard. I tell myself that just because we now sleep together like friends—just because all he can do in bed these days is sleep, then sleep some more—doesn’t mean he’s gay.

“What about babies?” my mother says then, as if she’s reading my mind. She’s scary that way.

“What
about
babies?” I say. This tears Hugh’s gaze away from the pool.

“I don’t mean to be pushy, but Louisa—and Hugh—isn’t it time? We’re coming up on what—your fifth anniversary?”

“This isn’t lunchtime conversation.”

“What is it, honey, breakfast conversation? Bedtime conversation?”

She laughs lightly at her unintentional quip. “Or do you mean it’s none of my business?”

Hugh laughs appreciatively. Whose side is he on? I say, “Actually, that’s precisely what I mean,” making sure there is no humor in my tone.

“Chip?” My mother touches the waiter’s sleeve as he passes our table, Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 120 120

Julia Glass

and for a minute I think she’s going to ask him whether he thinks my having a baby is her business or not. “Chip, can we please get more rolls? I worked my son-in-law hard this morning.”

As sun encroaches on the terrace where we sit, I notice that bees are feasting on the border of blue hydrangea. The blossoms are as large as melons. Mom, whose dress precisely matches the flowers, hasn’t noticed that a few of the bees hover near her shoulders. She is on a mission.

“Can I tell you both one thing, just one thing?” She doesn’t wait for permission. “Don’t wait to have children until you are ready. You are never ready. Never. Ready is irrelevant. And I understand the health care system in England is perfectly fine. And
free.
How about that?”

I want to tell her that nothing’s free, but I’d rather change the subject. I come upon the box that contains my specially preserved, freeze-dried or mummified or vacuum-packed, wedding dress. There’s a little peekaboo window, a glimpse of the embroidered bodice, worn once, perhaps never to be worn again. Certainly not by me. But it was my understanding that this item had earned storage in the house, away from the radical temperature changes of the barn. Last time I looked, it was in the top of my— of the guest-room closet. Panting from the afternoon heat, I allow myself a moment of idle stupor. I wonder if I’m going to carry it down and confront my mother. I hear her outside right now, talking to someone in the driveway below the window. There won’t be lessons now; it’s too hot. Mom is compassionate toward her horses; most summer afternoons they spend snoozing under the maple trees at the edge of the pasture, swishing their tails at flies.

I can’t hear what she’s saying because I’ve plugged in a fan to keep from getting heatstroke. Thanks to the wine at lunch, which I regret, the stifling air up here is making me dizzy. I throw the box aside in disgust; it’s large but very light, its contents all gossamer and tulle. I slice open a box labeled only 1970–74. The box contains letters. Letters I received from friends during high school, most of them written in the summers Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 121
I See You Everywhere

121

we spent apart, most of those during the months before I left for Radcliffe, when several friends had jobs away from home. That summer I was living right here, commuting to a secretarial job at a nearby community college. I answered a phone that rarely rang and typed a few insignificant letters for the dean of admissions, who came in only two or three days a week. The campus had been more or less abandoned. I felt like I was living in a future, Ray Bradbury kind of time when education had ceased to matter; when books, rather than being burned, simply gathered dust. I pull out a rubber-banded clutch of lime-green envelopes. Oh, Eliza. Dear Eliza, with whom I lost touch for no better motive than sloth. Or maybe, I’m ashamed to say, I felt superior going to Harvard when Eliza was going to Hollins.

Eliza was madly in love that summer; really, except for me, who wasn’t? When you’re seventeen, love is constitutional. It’s oxygen. I open one of the letters. It begins:

Dear Louisa, God I know what you mean. My sister drives me totally crazy too. She steals EVERYTHING from me and lies about it all the time. But Jeremy says not to let it get to me. Jeremy has 3 little brothers who are spoiled rotten. He’s like a third parent, held to a different standard. He is going to go so far, and he’s going to do something that makes a difference, not be a slave to the Money Tree like his father. Have you ever heard of Médecins sans Frontieres? It’s so AMAZING. . . . The rest of the letter was about Jeremy, his golden muscles, his eyelashes, his noble ambitions, his way of somersaulting backward off the pier. He was another counselor at the camp in New Hampshire where Eliza was working that summer. She was about to let him be the first guy she’d have sex with.

God he’s driving me totally crazy with LUST, I just know I’m going to break down! He’s so polite and so persistent all at the very same time!!!

And he’s really serious about me. I know, I know, but REALLY. Every Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 122 122

Julia Glass

night after lights out, after our kids go to sleep (it’s like we’re playing HOUSE!!), we sneak out to the lake and swim. We’re never the only ones, which is probably good. We take off our suits like everybody else and I dive in really fast so he won’t really see me naked but then he swims over to me and OH GOD I can’t stand how sexy he is underwater. The invisibility is practically fatal, if you know what I mean! How much will you hate me if I do it first? And GOD, Louisa, don’t show this letter to ANYBODY, EVER!!!!!

I sit down and read the entire letter. It’s eight pages long. The whole Ray Bradbury feeling comes over me again, but in reverse.
Now
is the time that’s strange; we’ve just been brainwashed to live the way we do. We are not enlightened. We’ve gone astray. I think about skinny-dipping at midnight with friends, in the ocean just down the road: naked bodies slipping against one another as amicably as if we were dolphins. It’s something I’ve practically forgotten and will probably never do again. Why doesn’t anybody write letters anymore, handwritten letters that go on and on for neon pages, inscribed with a torrent of exclamation points (the top of each one a meticulously inverted teardrop)? These are emotions you can hold in your hands. You tell each other every little thing, things like the fatality of what you can feel but can’t see. Suddenly I am remembering the excitement, the anticipatory thrill, of opening our mailbox that summer and looking for that particular flash of green. As if Eliza were my lover. I ate up her news, her news from the world abroad, dipping into that girl talk like chocolate fondue. I’m eating it up, now, all over again. You’d think it would embarrass me, but it moves me. When was the last time anything seemed AMAZING to me? I turn at the sound of footsteps on the hayloft stairs.

“Hello there, you there.”

Dad is just back from work, earlier than usual because I’m here. He’s wearing a khaki hat with a wide floppy brim, but still his nose glows like a poppy. I envy him his grown-up job that permits him to spend all summer out in the sun. I’m lucky to have the job I do, but there are long days when I go without breathing a mote of fresh, sunlit air. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 123
I See You Everywhere

123

I stand up and kiss him on the cheek. “I’m trying to throw stuff away. Trying.”

Dad gestures at the Everest of boxes—his—that dwarfs my stash.

“Allegedly,” he says, “all things must pass.”

Allegedly
is code for “according to your mother.” We share the conspiratorial laugh of the family pack rats. He asks if the two large plastic sacks are garbage. When I say they are, he drags them to the loft door and tosses them out.

“Watch out belooooow!” he bellows. I hear two loud metallic thuds.

“Dad!”

“Louisa, I’ve got the truck out there.” He tells me I’ve made admirable progress. “I order you to quit. Or your mother does. Clemency from on high—or down below. She’s opening a bottle of champagne.”

Only as we cross the driveway do I realize that I’m still holding Eliza’s letters. My mother’s in the kitchen now, back in barnworthy clothes (jeans and a threadbare cotton shirt that my father’s paunch outgrew some years ago). She’s pushing cherry tomatoes and chunks of oily meat onto skewers. “Aha!” she says when she sees me. “Time for a toast!”

“Where’s Hugh?” I ask.

“Reading, I think. He came back from the beach two hours ago.”

Upstairs, I find him in bed—or on the bed, in his bathing suit and a boyish plain white T-shirt, asleep on one of the quilts made long ago by one of my father’s dowager aunts. There’s sand in his dark curly hair.

“Jesus,” I whisper.

I have the urge to tell him he shouldn’t be lying on that antique quilt with sunblock and sand all over his body. But I decide, right now, that I have to stop being rude to him. I think of a time, only a year or two in the past, when I would have lain down beside him and kissed him, face-toface.
Hello there, you there,
I would have said. He opens his eyes. “I know. I’m sleeping too much.”