I see you everywhere (19 page)

I sit on the opposite bed. “Are you sick, do you think? Do you need to make an appointment with Dr. Breen?”

“No,” he says firmly, with a trace of belligerence. “I’m storing up, like a solar panel. School starts in three days, you know.”

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“Of course I know.” But then I say, more gently, “So get dressed, okay? We’re having champagne for some reason.”

“Your father’s just made a lucrative deal with somebody like Ted Turner, only not Ted Turner.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me while I was carrying hay.”

“Why didn’t she mention it at lunch? Why did she tell you and not me?”

“He phoned while I was with her, I guess.” Hugh opens the closet to pull out the same striped Brooks Brothers shirt he wore to lunch. I glance at the shelf above the hangers. Before Hugh closes the door, I see two cardboard boxes. On one, in Mom’s handwriting, is written xmas deco. Glass baubles displaced my wedding gown?

“What’s for dinner?” asks Hugh.

“Shish kebabs. Marinated in Ken’s Steak House dressing.”

He makes a noise of amused contempt.

“Actually, they’re pretty good.” I leave the room. My goodwill has vaporized. I would never, in a million years, be saintly enough for Doctors Without Borders. I wonder what became of Dreamboat Jeremy. Probably high on the Money Tree by now. I’ve probably passed him in Midtown.

My mother’s poured four glasses of Codorníu, the Spanish stuff in the bottle shaped like it’s melting. “Aha! Where’s Hercules?”

“Resting from his labors. Holding up the world is hard,” I say. I announce that I need a shower before I can drink champagne. I am a sweaty, dusty mess.

“There won’t be much hot!” warns Mom. “I just washed the saddle pads!”

“But I
love
cold showers.” I am now a full-fledged grouch. “And I love being married to a guy who does nothing but sleep.”

“Honey, it’s the sea air,” says Mom. “It does that to people.”

“Sleep is good medicine,” says Dad, who’s leaning on the counter, paging through a magazine. “People who sleep a lot live longer. Did you Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 125
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know that?” They’re aligning themselves against my doubts. Or that’s my paranoid impression.

“You look like a salt lick,” Mom says to Dad. “Go comb your hair.”

“Aye-aye, commodore,” he answers.

I hear her say, as I head back upstairs, “Commodor
ess
to you.”

When I come out of the bathroom, out of my brief, tepid shower, Hugh is still in the bedroom, though he’s dressed. He is reading one of Eliza’s letters, which I left on my bed after waking him up. I snatch it away from him.

“What?” he says.

“That’s private.”

“It’s about two decades old,” he says. “I didn’t even know you then.”

“It’s not about me; it’s about someone else.” The rubber band around the letters has disintegrated; I hold them tightly in one hand, searching the room for something to bind them together again. I look instinctively to where my desk once stood.

“Lovebirds!” my mother calls up the stairs. “The bubbles are escaping!”

I push the letters under my pillow, which makes Hugh laugh at me. “I don’t see what you have to hide, Louisa.”

I don’t, either. My keeping the letters to myself seems like a matter of principle, though I know it’s utterly silly.

When we get downstairs, Mom is pouring another glass for Tighty, who’s materialized, as he often did at this hour through my teenage years. I guess nothing’s changed. Though I feel almost traitorous, since he’s practically a member of the family, I can’t help seeing Tighty as a walking, talking cautionary lesson, a brilliant guy who can’t seem to put together a life worthy of his talents. I notice that he’s gained even more weight since I last saw him, yet I suspect that’s made him no less alluring to the horsey women who giggle like teenagers when he’s around. Clem says Tighty has top-notch pheromones. She says they’re the glandular equivalent of high EQ.

“Yo,” he says to me, a new greeting he must believe makes him sound younger. He raises the glass in a toast and takes a generous sip. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 126 126

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“Hey,” I answer. “How are you, Tighty?’

“I am stupendous,
comme toujours,
” he says in his perpetually sardonic manner. With his free hand, he reaches into a large square pocket on the side of his loose grimy pants. He pulls out two plastic packages and lays them on the kitchen counter. “Dr. Feelgood, at your service.”

The packages contain syringes. The fancy wedding; the fireworks. My mother’s horses would go nuts with fear if they had to endure the fireworks fully conscious, galloping and snorting around the pasture. Closing them in the barn would only compress their panic. One Fourth of July ritual that goes back almost as far as I can remember involves making sure the horses are tranquilized at just the right time and that someone’s over at the kennel to babysit the hounds, pill the ones who get anxious. They get Valium in a meatball.

Tighty is staying for dinner. This is good, in that it will subvert any Serious Conversation about things like whether Hugh and I ever plan to have babies (or why Mom banished my wedding dress to the barn), and it’s difficult, in that Tighty and Hugh have zero chemistry. They go through an awkward guy-dance of pretending to care passionately about baseball (which neither does) or President Bush’s foreign policy (about which Tighty will know nothing, as he lives in a political vacuum) or the art world (which, actually, they both know about, though art talk leaves my parents in the cold, and Mom won’t tolerate that).

They shake hands. “What’s up with the teaching?” asks Tighty.

“Well, it’s still summer,” says Hugh. “For a few more days, at least.”

“Oh,” says Tighty. “No summer school for you.”

“No,” says Hugh.

“Right,” says Tighty.

Dad, who might rescue them, is on the phone; he gets so many calls during high boating season that Mom forced him to get a separate line, on a cordless phone, mostly so she can chase him out of the room when she’s sick of hearing nautical talk. He paces around the house with his free hand pressed against his open ear, carrying on loud conversations Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r2.qxp 7/28/08 7:55 AM Page 127
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related to weather forecasts, sailing regattas, mooring disputes, and the health of local shellfish.

“Out, Beau. Scram,” says Mom, steering him away from the kitchen, her palms on his shoulder blades. She asks me to set the table, and she asks Hugh if he can take over the grilling. She likes dinner on the table at seven sharp.

When I open the cupboards, I see an unfamiliar set of plates. I hold one up toward my mother. “Mom, where are mine?”

“Yours?”

“The plates I gave you and Dad for your anniversary?”

“Oh.” She refills Tighty’s champagne glass. “Well. We got a new dishwasher—you remember that flood we had at Christmas?—and I’m afraid your plates just don’t fit in the dish rack.”

“But where are they?”

“I put them away for now,” Mom says. “Don’t fret about it, honey.”

Tighty watches me closely. He’s seen knock-down verbal melees in the kitchen, one adolescent daughter after the next. “Yo. How’s Clem? I miss that girl.” Tighty and Clem were close when she was younger; sometimes I wonder how close, but I’ve never dared to ask, not even when she saved his ass out in California. That whole farce—from Tighty’s cross-country dognapping to my cross-country marital tantrum—is so excruciating to recall, for both of us, that we have never mentioned it since. Sometimes I can almost believe it never happened. You’d think we might have bonded on our shared retreat in that truck, across a dozen states over nearly a week; hardly. We got along fine, but our embarrassment only increased with the mileage. I still don’t know why Mom didn’t fire him, but I think she regards him like one of her animals, and that’s a compliment. She will never give up on an animal.

The subject of Clem sends Mom into her tirade about education as a bungee cord. With which Tighty, whose three years at Yale led him nowhere, opts to agree. “Education,” he says, “is one very pricey form of procrastination.”

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jump down Tighty’s throat, but right now Hugh simply looks bemused. Perhaps, unlike me, he knows a pointless struggle when he sees one. I ready myself for conversational combat, but Mom starts handing us dishes, sending us out to the porch. The horses watch from the pasture. When the four of us are seated (Dad is somewhere else, still on the phone), Tighty declares, “So. Speaking of education as a farce, rumor has it that Millie’s writing a book.”

“Millie who?” I say.

“Millie the White House springer spaniel. What other Millie is there?”

Mom snorts with laughter. “Tighty, you’d better start taking notes over at the kennel. I’ll bet
our
guys have much better tales to tell than some oversize sissy lapdog whose breed has been hopelessly corrupted.”

This leads Mom and Tighty into a spirited condemnation of the AKC and how its narrow guidelines for canine beauty have led to the proliferation of congenital tragedies like sudden rage syndrome and an epidemic of hip dysplasia. I notice that Mom has covered my father’s plate to keep his food warm and doesn’t seem bothered that he’s still absent from the table. I glance at Hugh. He glances back at me and smiles, perhaps at the eccentric turn of conversation, perhaps out of fondness. Why do I need to know why? I return his smile.

“News bulletin!” Dad announces as he joins us. He’s just finalized the lease of his smallest boatyard, starting next summer, to a Texan who’s taken up yachting in Newport. “Your mother should’ve bought the real thing,” he says as he opens a second bottle of Codorníu. “For about fifteen minutes, we’ll be feeling very rich.”

Mom glows with delight. She says to me, “How much would I bet that your father is scheming to buy the boat of his dreams?”

“May, your imagination sometimes fails you,” says Dad.

“We’ll see,” she says. “We will just wait and see.” She winks at Hugh. Outside, the sun has set and the crickets are revving up. Tighty looks at his watch and excuses himself to drug the horses. As soon as I’ve cleared the unfamiliar, mass-produced plates, I beg off to continue the parsing of my childhood belongings.

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“Tighty!” my mother is calling toward the barn as I go upstairs to change for the fourth time today. “Take the rest of that pie when you go, will you?”

Fortified by cheap champagne, I face the crates containing the pottery I neither sold nor gave away, nor continue to use in my everyday life. And there I find, sure enough, a new box—smaller, as if to apologize for its insignificance (or as if to hunker down in hiding)—containing the twelve plates, blue as the ocean in August, their glaze crackled to a dragonfly shimmer, that I gave my parents for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I was proud of these plates when I made them; they look both ancient and new, each a little different from the rest. They are much nicer than the dark raku plates Hugh and I use every day in New York. I’ve switched on the barn lights, spooking a dozen cats from their lairs in the ramparts of hay. Two bats zigzag through the rafters and out the door to the sky, now the pure blue of twilight (a blue I once yearned to mimic in glaze).

Several mundane thoughts convene around my indignation. The plates should never have gone in the dishwasher to begin with. I did not expect them to be saved for special occasions—those are reserved for my grandmother’s china—but I did expect them to be washed, lovingly, by hand. My mother apparently knew about this stash of boxes, which leads me to wonder what else she knows about my things. I picture her snooping through the boxes, including all my teenage letters, resealing them carefully so I’ll never know. This is absurd, of course. She has neither the time nor the inclination for such deceit. For better or worse, she lives life out in the open.

What makes my parents so compatible when it seems they are anything but? Is it just a matter of sticking it out, the never-ending aggravations, till all the habits you have, good and bad, are simply all you know, easy because they’re familiar? Yet my parents make a happy marriage look real.

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Here, in the next crate, are my teapots, elongated vessels with serpentine spouts, green with flares of orange and violet across the surface. I remember the sensation of blowing the glaze through a narrow straw, taking care not to draw it up into my mouth, yet tasting chalk and metal for hours. Some of the pigments smelled like spices: cinnamon, turmeric, mace. I called this my Arabian Nights phase. Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was my last phase, during which I started working at the magazine, during which I met Hugh. “I must be looking for a sultan,” I said, self-consciously, the first time I took him to my studio and showed him these pots. “No, not a ceramicist,” I corrected him. “A potter. I’m a potter.” Words, in the end, came to matter more. Now I shape words, not clay.

A loud crackling noise stuns me with fear for an instant. It comes from outside the barn, yet it’s close. Beyond the door I see only dark sky, the tops of trees around the house. Then comes a long sharp whistling, a war-movie sound, followed by a soft, thunderous echo. A small string of explosions. I’d forgotten all about the fireworks. At the next fusillade, I walk over to the door, edging carefully toward it, holding on to the top rail with both hands, leaning forward so that my feet remain a good ten inches from the threshold leading to open air. Though it doesn’t include the fireworks—which I realize now would be visible only in the opposite direction—the view of my childhood house, in the dark, holds me there for a moment despite my fear of heights. (If I were to fall, I’d land in the bed of Dad’s truck, on the bags of memorabilia with which I’ve reluctantly parted.) Nearly all the windows are alight. In the kitchen, my mother is at the sink, rinsing her nonexotic dishes, talking on the phone, probably with Tighty, checking in at the kennel to make sure the hounds aren’t panicking at the inexplicable clamor from above. On the porch, Dad’s pacing and talking on his phone. I hear him laughing. I hear him say
rich for
about fifteen minutes.
Upstairs, the light is on in my room, too. Is Hugh reading? Has he defiantly taken Eliza’s letters from under my pillow (do I really care?) or is he in the middle of that book on Vietnam, the one that puts such a dark scowl on his smooth, kind face? Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 131
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