Family Dancing (10 page)

“Tradition can become repetition,” Ellen says, “when you end up holding onto something just because you’re afraid to let it go.” She shakes her head. “I am ready to let it go.”

“Let what go?” Douglas says. “The family?”

Ellen is silent.

“Well, I don’t think that’s fair,” Douglas says. “Sure, things are stressful. A lot has happened. But that doesn’t mean we should give up. We have to work hard at this. Just because things are different doesn’t mean they necessarily have to be bad. I, for one, am determined to make the best of this vacation—for my sake, but also for Mom’s. Except for this, without this—”

“She already has nothing,” Ellen says.

Douglas stares at her.

“You can face it,” Ellen says. “She has. She’s said as much. Her whole life went down the tubes when Daddy left her, Cape Cod or no Cape Cod. This vacation doesn’t matter a damn. But that’s not the end. She could start a new life for herself. Mark, remember the first time Douglas didn’t come home for Christmas? I’ll bet you never guessed how upset everyone was, Douglas. Christmas just wasn’t going to be Christmas without the whole family being there, I said, so why bother having it at all? But then Christmas came, and we did it without you. It wasn’t the same. But it was still Christmas. We survived. And maybe we were a little relieved to find we weren’t as dependent on your presence as we thought we’d be, relieved to be able to give up some of those old rituals, some of that nostalgia. It was like a rehearsal for other losses we probably all knew we’d have to face someday—for this, maybe.”

Douglas has his arm around Julie, his fingers gripping her shoulder. “No one ever told me that,” he says. “I figured no one cared.”

Ellen laughs. “That’s never been a problem in this family,” she says. “The problem in this family is that everybody cares.”

They get back to the cottage around eleven to find that the lights are still on. “I’m surprised she’s still up,” Ellen says to Mark as they clamber out of the car.

“It’s not so surprising,” Mark says. “She’s probably having a snack.” The gravel of the driveway crunches beneath his feet as he moves toward the screen door to the kitchen. “Hi, Mom,” Mark says as he walks through the door, then stops abruptly, the other three behind him.

“What’s going on?” Mark asks.

Alex is standing by the ironing board, in his coat, his face red and puffy. He is looking down at Lydia, who sits in her pink bathrobe at the kitchen table, her head resting on her forearms, weeping. In front of her is half a grapefruit on a plate, and a small spoon with serrated edges.

“What happened?” Ellen asks.

“It’s nothing, kids,” Alex says. “Your mother and I were just having a discussion.”

“Oh, shut up,” Lydia says, raising her head slightly. Her eyes are red, swollen with tears. “Why don’t you just tell them if you’re so big on honesty all of a sudden? Your father’s girlfriend has arrived. She’s at a motel in town. They planned this all along, and your father never saw fit to tell any of us about it, except I happened to see her this morning when I was doing the grocery shopping.”

“Oh, God,” Mark says, and leans back against the wall of the kitchen. Across from him, his father also draws back.

“All right, let’s not get hysterical,” Ellen says. “Let’s try to talk this through. Daddy, is this true?”

“Yes,” Alex says. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell any of you but I was afraid of how you’d react. Marian’s just here for the weekend, she’ll be gone Monday. I thought I could see her during the day, and no one would know. But now that everything’s out, I can see that more deception was just a bad idea to begin with. And anyway, am I asking so much? All I’m asking is to spend some time in town with Marian. I’ll be home for meals, and during the day, everything for the family. None of you ever has to see her.”

“Do you think all this is fair to Marian?” Ellen asks.

“It was her idea.”

“I see.”

“Fair to Marian, fair to Marian,” Lydia mumbles. “All of this has been fair to Marian. These two weeks you were supposed to be fair to me.” She takes a Kleenex and rubs at her nose and eyes. Mark’s fingers grip the moldings on the walls, while Julie buttons and unbuttons the collar of her sweater.

“Lydia, look,” Alex says. “Something isn’t clear here. When I agreed to come these weeks, it was as your friend and as a father. Nothing more.”

“So go then!” Lydia shouts, standing up and facing him. “You’ve brought me lower than I ever thought you would, don’t stand there and rub it in. Just go.” Shaking, she walks over to the counter, picks up a coffee cup, and takes a sip out of it. Coffee splashes over the rim, falls in hot drops on the floor.

“Now I think we have to talk about this,” Ellen says. “We can deal with this if we just work on it.”

“There’s no point,” Douglas says, and sits down at the table. “There’s nothing left to say.” He looks at the table, and Julie reaches for his hand.

“What do you mean there’s nothing left to say? There’s everything to be said here. The one thing we haven’t done is talk about all of this as a family.”

“Oh, be quiet, both of you,” Lydia says, putting down her cup. “You don’t know anything about this. The whole business is so simple it’s embarrassing.” She puts her hand on her chest and takes a deep, shaky breath. “There is only one thing to be said here, and I’m the one who has to say it. And that is the simple fact that I love your father, and I will always love your father. And he doesn’t love me. And never will.”

No one answers her. She is right. None of them know anything about
this
, not even Ellen. Lydia’s children are as speechless as spectators watching a woman on a high ledge: unable to do any good, they can only stare, waiting to see what she’ll do next.

What she does is turn to Alex. “Did you hear me?” she says. “I love you. You can escape me, but you can never escape that.”

He keeps his eyes focused on the window above her head, making sure never to look at her. The expression on his face is almost simple, almost sweet: the lips pressed together, though not tightly, the eyes averted. In his mind, he’s already left.

Aliens

A year ago today I wouldn’t have dreamed I’d be where I am now: in the recreation room on the third floor of the State Hospital, watching, with my daughter, ten men who sit in a circle in the center of the room. They look almost normal from a distance—khaki pants, lumberjack shirts, white socks—but I’ve learned to detect the tics, the nervous disorders. The men are members of a poetry writing workshop. It is my husband Alden’s turn to read. He takes a few seconds to find his cane, to hoist himself out of his chair. As he stands, his posture is hunched and awkward. The surface of his crushed left eye has clouded to marble. There is a pale pink scar under his pale yellow hair.

The woman who leads the workshop, on a volunteer basis, rubs her forehead as she listens, and fingers one of her elephant-shaped earrings. Alden’s voice is a hoarse roar, only recently reconstructed.

“Goddamned God,” he reads. “I’m mad as hell I can’t walk or talk.”

It is spring, and my youngest child, my eleven-year-old, Nina, has convinced herself that she is an alien.

Mrs. Tompkins, her teacher, called me in yesterday morning to tell me. “Nina’s constructed a whole history,” she whispered, removing her glasses and leaning toward me across her desk, as if someone might be listening from above. “She never pays attention in class, just sits and draws. Strange landscapes, star-charts, the interiors of spaceships. I finally asked some of the other children what was going on. They told me that Nina says she’s waiting to be taken away by her real parents. She says she’s a surveyor, implanted here, but that soon a ship’s going to come and retrieve her.”

I looked around the classroom; the walls were papered with crayon drawings of cars and rabbits, the world seen by children. Nina’s are remote, fine landscapes done with Magic Markers. No purple suns with faces. No abrupt, sinister self-portraits. In the course of a year Nina suffered a violent and quick puberty, sprouted breasts larger than mine, grew tufts of hair under her arms. The little girls who were her friends shunned her. Most afternoons now she stands in the corner of the playground, her hair held back by barrettes, her forehead gleaming. Recently, Mrs. Tompkins tells me, a few girls with glasses and large vocabularies have taken to clustering around Nina at recess. They sit in the broken bark beneath the slide and listen to Nina as one might listen to a prophet. Her small eyes, exaggerated by her own glasses, must seem to them expressive of martyred beauty.

“Perhaps you should send her to a psychiatrist,” Mrs. Tompkins suggested. She is a good teacher, better than most of her colleagues. “This could turn into a serious problem,” she said.

“I’ll consider it,” I answered, but I was lying. I don’t have the money. And besides, I know psychiatry; it takes things away. I don’t think I could bear to see what would be left of Nina once she’d been purged of this fantasy.

Today Nina sits in the corner of the recreation room. She is quiet, but I know her eyes are taking account of everything. The woman with the elephant-shaped earrings is talking to one of the patients about poetry
qua
poetry.

“You know,” I say to her afterward, “it’s amazing that a man like Alden can write poems. He was a computer programmer. All our married life he never read a book.”

“His work has real power,” the teacher says. “It reminds me of Michelangelo’s Bound Slaves. Its artistry is heightened by its rawness.”

She hands me a sheet of mimeographed paper—some examples of the group’s work. “We all need a vehicle for self-expression,” she says.

Later, sitting on the sun porch with Alden, I read through the poems. They are full of expletives and filthy remarks—the kind of remarks my brother used to make when he was hot for some girl at school. I am embarrassed. Nina, curled in an unused wheelchair, is reading “The Chronicles of Narnia” for the seventeenth time. We should go home soon, but I’m wary of the new car. I don’t trust its brakes. When I bought it, I tested the seatbelts over and over again.

“Dinner?” Alden asks. Each simple word, I remember, is a labor for him. We must be patient.

“Soon,” I say.

“Dinner. It’s all—” He struggles to find the word; his brow is red, and the one seeing eye stares at the opposite wall.

“Crap,” he says. He keeps looking at the wall. His eyes are expressionless. Once again, he breathes.

Nearby, someone’s screaming, but we’re used to that.

A year ago today. The day was normal. I took my son, Charles, to the dentist’s. I bought a leg of lamb to freeze. There was a sale on paper towels. Early in the evening, on our way to a restaurant, Alden drove the car through a fence, and over an embankment. I remember, will always remember, the way his body fell almost gracefully through the windshield, how the glass shattered around him in a thousand glittering pieces. Earlier, during the argument, he had said that seatbelts do more harm than good, and I had buckled myself in as an act of vengeance. This is the only reason I’m around to talk about it.

I suffered a ruptured spleen in the accident, and twenty-two broken bones. Alden lost half his vision, much of his mobility, and the English language. After a week in intensive care they took him to his hospital and left me to mine. In the course of the six months, three weeks, and five days I spent there, eight women passed in and out of the bed across from me. The first was a tiny, elderly lady who spoke in hushed tones and kept the curtain drawn between us. Sometimes children were snuck in to visit her; they would stick their heads around the curtain rod and gaze at me, until a hand pulled them back and a voice loudly whispered, “Sorry!” I was heavily sedated; everything seemed to be there one minute, gone the next. After the old woman left, another took her place. Somewhere in the course of those months a Texan mother arrived who was undergoing chemotherapy, who spent her days putting on make-up, over and over again, until, by dusk, her face was the color of bruises.

My hospital. What can you say about a place to which you become addicted? That you hate it, yet at the same time, that you need it. For weeks after my release I begged to be readmitted. I would wake crying, helplessly, in the night, convinced that the world had stopped, and I had been left behind, the only survivor. I’d call the ward I had lived on. “You’ll be all right, dear,” the nurses told me. “You don’t have to come back, and besides, we’ve kicked you out.” I wanted cups of Jell-O. I wanted there to be a light in the hall at night. I wanted to be told that six months hadn’t gone by, that it had all been, as it seemed, a single, endless moment.

To compensate, I started to spend as much time as I could at Alden’s hospital. The head nurse suggested that if I was going to be there all day, I might as well do something productive. They badly needed volunteers on the sixth floor, the floor of the severely retarded, the unrecoverable ones. I agreed to go in the afternoons, imagining story corner with cute three-year-olds and seventy-year-olds. The woman I worked with most closely had been pregnant three times in the course of a year. Her partner was a pale-skinned young man who drooled constantly and could not keep his head up. Of course she had abortions. None of the administrators were willing to solicit funds for birth control because that would have meant admitting there was a need for birth control. We couldn’t keep the couple from copulating. They hid in the bushes and in the broom closet. They were obsessive about their lovemaking, and went to great lengths to find each other. When we locked them in separate rooms, they pawed the doors and screamed.