A Perfectly Good Family (4 page)

Since Peter would vanish for days on end, on benders or fast-burn romances he’d never say, I spent a lot more time with Andrew. The younger man was light enough to share my scooter, on which the two of us would top-heavily weave to Stop ‘n’ Shop for provisions, to return flapping with plastic bags. His hands resting deftly on my hips sent a warm glow up the back of my neck. Though I might have dismounted grateful to have made it home without capsizing, I’d feel doleful when our mission was accomplished, already chafing to run out of Marmite—his favourite late snack with cold, burnt toast.

An atavistic socialist and paid-up member of Greenpeace, Andrew would wag his slender double-jointed fingers by the hour, lecturing on the betrayals of the Labour Party; I only half-listened. Our more frolicsome times were spent hunched over sticky oilcloth at the kitchen table, where he taught me the conventions of British crossword puzzles. The
Independent
’s clues were oblique in comparison with the
Herald Tribune
’s, a distinction which would tempt Andrew to extemporize on how Americans had no sense of irony. I’d retort that the British were selfregarding and coy. Andrew hailed from Bath; his
l
s converted to
w
s, his
th
s to
f
s and
v
s. I’d mimic his reading of clues—‘Boat of bwuverwy wuv’; he’d caricature my inattentive lapses into a southern accent—‘Keeyun-sheeyup’.

I liked to think it inevitable that, as we haggled over 19 across, his hand would eventually drop the pen for mine.
I liked to think it equally inevitable that, on a later night, Andrew off to bed, Peter would burst into the flat when I was only wearing a kimono, let the cup of coffee I fixed him cool as he poured the last of his White Horse for me, until at 4a.m. the flaps of my kimono would fall open.
Improbably, this went on for months. I counselled each of them in turn that to keep our household amicable it was paramount they neither blurted to the other about any indiscreet flatmating. Though the two had little in common, they liked each other, and agreed. Andrew said he could see how Peter might feel left out; Peter said, that poor lad’s not getting any crumpet, no reason to shove our sheets under his nose. I doubt two women would have been capable of it, but judging from the ease and hilarity of that period those chaps must have kept their traps shut.
About that time I feel wistful, though I know I shouldn’t—playing double-footsie under the oilcloth; rushing to throw on my jeans when Andrew and I heard a key in the door; pretending wakefulness so that Andrew would lumber off to bed before Peter stumbled jovially in after last call. I knew our trio couldn’t last, but somehow neither man encroached emotionally on the other in my head. Peter was rambunctious and liked to wrestle; he spent no time analysing ‘our relationship’ and he still didn’t tell me where he went on holidays from our flat. Peter would slam-bam; Andrew was tender, solicitous and adventurous in bed. While Peter was oblivious to the crudest details of my existence, Andrew made meticulous enquiry into my past and grilled me on whether I wanted to have children.
Although I’d never have expected appreciation, from Peter in particular, they both adored my sculpture. I fashioned and fired my pieces at a ceramics cooperative in Clapham, but bubble-wrapped them back to the flat, where I unveiled them to my fans in our spare room, to gratifying oohs and ahs.
Good news seems always paired with bad. A fortnight after the three of us had polished off four bottles of champagne to celebrate my coup with the Curlew Gallery, the phone rang again. It wasn’t the middle of the night, which might have prepared me. Truman was admirably factual. He had found my mother in our parlour at ten in the morning, surrounded by old photos of my father. Undoubtedly, her heart.
Both boys were terribly sweet. Andrew got right on the phone to BA, and I hadn’t known there were special rates for emergency bereavements—I got on a flight at half price the next day. He fixed me tea while Peter, predictably, ran for vodka. They both saw me off at Heathrow, while I assured them I’d be back in a few days; I had to put up my show at the Curlew when I returned.
Take care of my darlings in the spare room, I said, and kissed each of them, daringly, on the mouth.
They may not have been gossipy girls, but if you put two people of any sex in a room by themselves for long enough they will tell all.

‘I’d been flirting,’ I told Truman, ‘with both of them. I guess while I was gone they had a few beers with each other, and…well, they must have been mad.’

‘So they kicked you out.’
‘That’s not all they kicked. Or one of them. When I flew back, no one met my plane. I took the tube, and came home to the flat empty. I was restless, and headed for the back room thinking I could start swathing my pieces in bubble-wrap for transport to the Curlew…’ I sighed.
‘The hand,’ twigged Averil.
‘Oh, nobody had taken a pickaxe to them. I might have preferred that. No, all the hands were lopped off. Every one.’
‘Couldn’t you glue them back?’
‘Not for a toney London gallery, and the breaks weren’t clean. No, the sculptures were ruined all right. Three, four years’ work at least. I’m back to Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.’
‘I find it hard to believe,’ said Truman, ‘that those guys would destroy all that work for
flirting
.’
It’s true that I sanitize my stories for Truman, but like his mother he’s so gruellingly good.
‘You said it was only one of them,’ said Averil. ‘Which?’
‘I was surprised. Peter was given to drunken rampages. Andrew was the sensitive, cerebral one. Then, I don’t think Peter would have cared so much. He was savvy, he was wild and casual and had other women. Andrew…’
‘Was in love,’ said Averil.
‘Maybe,’ I conceded. ‘I hadn’t noticed. I probably didn’t want to.’
That night, my spindly lover had returned, having given me just enough time to discover his get-out-of-my-life present. Behind the glare of his horn-rims, his eyes were anthracite. For once, he did look knowing.
‘Why the hands?’ pressed Averil.
‘Because my hands,’ I said, ‘had lied. But they hadn’t really. I liked each of those men. I liked each of them, in a different way, a great deal.’
Whenever my father was asked if he wanted pie or ice cream he would smirk and say he wanted pie
with
ice cream, so I was raised with the idea I could have both.

In my bedroom, I could make out snippets of conversation overhead. ‘How long is she—’ Averil pierced.
Truman’s voice was more muffled. ‘Until…she’s depressed.’ ‘Corlis takes over!’ My lullaby, and I slept.
I woke early, on UK time, and stumbled down for coffee. Our long, woody kitchen was added to the house around 1900, built on top of what was once a deep back porch. We’d eaten most of our meals at the rectangular table in the middle, the formal dining room reserved for interminable potroast dinners after church. I loved this kitchen. It had never been done over with linoleum and Formica, but retained its tacked-tin countertop by the pockmarked porcelain sink; cabinets were thick ash with crazed china knobs. My mother had read that a dishwasher used more hot water, so had washed up by hand; hence, aside from the Cuisinart, the room was free of garish modern appointments. With a few home-jarred pickles and strings of garlic bulbs garlanding the curtains this kitchen might have been the hospitable Southern hearth my English friends would picture, wafting with the rise of baking cornbread.

Instead the smell was stale, sharp with rancid oil and the faintly medicinal residue from ‘perfectly good’ heels of bread with the mould pinched off, as if no one would know the difference. Counters were littered with fat green broccoli rubber bands my mother couldn’t bear to throw away, or the yellow crimps of sweet roll ties, amid an array of rinsed-out jars with the wrong lids and painstakingly smoothed aluminium foil, dull from reuse. A peek in the pantry proved it predictably lined with watery store-brand ketchup and reduced-price dented tins, recalling ‘surprise’ suppers when we would open
real
bargains without labels;
at my feet the floor was knee-deep in plastic bags. On the refrigerator, sheaves of coupons were magneted to the door. Beside them, a last grocery list exorted with shy urgency, ‘t.p.!’ She had never bought double-ply in her life.

I rooted around for a spoon among the ancient airline peanuts packets (Piedmont had long before gone to the wall); from between the gas-war glasses, I retrieved a send-away-for-your-free Nestlé’s Quik coffee mug. The prospect of a grown woman who is comfortably well off cutting out three logos from successive purchases, stuffing and stamping an envelope and remembering to tuck it in the postbox and raise the flag, all for one mug covered in advertising for chocolate powder, frankly made my jaw drop.

Waiting for coffee to drip (through a cone that had never quite fitted the jug and tipped precariously when filled), I slumped to the table. My mother’s kill-joy obsession with minuscule frugalities was so unnecessary. Her husband had been a successful civil rights lawyer, later a state Supreme Court judge, and despite the cheques to the United Negro College Fund and his assumption of countless down-and-out discrimination cases
pro bono
, they’d never hurt for cash. I’d had a drink with their estate lawyer when my father died to confirm she was provided for, and he’d been reassuring. So why were we raised on A&P powdered milk?

It’s true that thrift was a game to my mother, and she must have enjoyed it. And habits like clawing all the cartilage off the chicken carcass and throwing it into the soup would have been installed in childhood: through the depression, her father was a hard-up typewriter repairman; they’d stinted on sugar through the war. She married in the fifties, when whole magazine spreads were devoted to limp-potato-crisp casseroles. She had never held a job, and her only contribution to the family coffers was to not-spend; so day-old baked goods
empowered
her. But I resisted seeing Eugenia McCrea as a creature of era; I preferred her as uncommonly cheap. Plenty of her cohorts had gone on to reach for new Ziploc bags rather than washing the old ones relentlessly and sealing a lone half of uneaten spud—perish the thought she should throw it away—into greasy plastic. In the scrimping of this larder you could see it: she must have felt so undeserving.

A sensation to which I had only contributed. She had cooled my forehead with damp cloths when I was feverish, whereas my father, when I was carsick, blew his stack. Yet, like my mother herself, to others I promoted my champion-of-the-underprivileged Dad. When I returned home in adulthood, I debated affirmative action with my father in the sitting room while my mother scoured this yellowed sink. Hadn’t he told us himself that he’d been ‘waiting for his children to grow up’ so that we could at last ‘engage in adult conversation’? In the meantime we bored him. So he left the raising of his offspring to his wife, and then had the temerity to rage when his eldest didn’t turn out as he’d have liked. When I was young he was so rarely in evidence, forever in ‘meetings’, that my favourite birthday present was to spend an hour with my father alone, and to do so again I would have to wait another year. Gruff, inaccessible, buried in briefs with glasses down his nose, Sturges McCrea had been more icon than parent to me, and in truth I owed him little.

You’d think that the one reward for doing all the puke-wiping and nappy-dunking would be a little credit; instead we dismissed our mother for being so apparently unimportant. So she redeemed herself by mailing off for coffee mugs, and settled for victories of remarkably intact quick-sale vegetables while my father brought home honorary degrees.

‘I thought you might want some milk.’
Truman delivered a carton, and sat down with his panda mug. ‘You’re not spending much time downstairs?’
‘It doesn’t feel like mine yet.’
Yet
. I didn’t take issue, for Truman charmed me in the morning. He

took hours to wake up, and rubbed his eyes, bear-like, with the backs of his hands. For years he’d collected panda posters from Peking, Tshirts from the National Zoo, and mugs like the one he was slurping from, on which LingLing nibbled bamboo. In fact, he looked like a panda: with dark rings around his eyes and a myopic bumbling amble, especially on rising, like a massive, muscular mammal I knew to be vegetarian and could tease if I liked.

‘Ready for the big pow-wow?’ Though a question, the sentence fell. ‘As I’ll ever be. I noticed nobody’s cleaned out the fridge.’ ‘That’s right,
nobody
has.’
‘There’s some furry yellow squash casserole in there that could cure all Tanzania of TB.’

Truman wandered to the sink; he compulsively tidied. ‘Nuts.’ He stopped. ‘The sponge.’
I turned to glimpse, fossilized by the faucet, the horror of Truman’s childhood. It had been his job to wipe the kitchen table, and my mother could not have started a fresh sponge more than once a year. The same fastidious boy he’d been then, Truman wet it by knocking it into the sink and running the tap; he squeezed it with a fork. Touching the sponge with only his fingertips, he nudged the foetid greenish square through my sloshed coffee. He scrubbed his hands, sniffed his fingers, and washed them again.
‘How much can a new sponge cost?’ he despaired. ‘Thirty cents?’
As his first act of revolution, Truman pinched the reeking tatter by its very corner and dropped it in the bin.

Not expecting any surprises, I wasn’t dreading our conference with the estate lawyer. If anything, I looked forward to seeing Hugh Garrison, who had handled the particulars of my father’s death two years before. For a lawyer, he was unprepossessing, big on corduroys and always tugging at his tie; when he resorted to legal jargon, his eyebrows shrugged apologetic inverted commas on either side. He and my father had been colleagues, though I suspect that during our one after-hours beer at Brother’s Pizza two years back I got to know him better than my father had over two decades. Had they met socially, my father would have held forth about how Carter was a much better president than reputed to be (he identified with Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer maligned as a moron because he had a Southern accent). Sturges McCrea liked issues. Told your wife had just given birth to a paraplegic, he’d start in straight away with the rights of the handicapped; it would never occur to him to ask how you felt.