Family Dancing (7 page)

She handed Mrs. Harrington a small slip of paper that she had produced from her purse. “That’s all you need to know,” she said.

At that moment, thank heavens, the door opened.

Jennifer had come to rescue her mother. To help her out.

“Mom, I need to talk to you,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Joan,” Mrs. Harrington said, standing. “We’ll talk.”

Thank you for rescuing me,” Mrs. Harrington whispered to her daughter.

“Mom, you’re not going to believe it,” Jennifer said. “Greg Laurans is here. And he brought those people with him.”

“You mean from Young Life?”

“Them .
.
. and some others.”

In the dining room, the mass of guests had separated into small clumps, all engaged in
not
looking at the sunken bowl of the living room,
not
listening to the music rising up from it.

Mrs. Harrington glanced down curiously. Seated around the fireplace, by the Christmas tree, were Greg and a group of cherubic young people, all clean-cut, wearing little gold glasses and down vests. One had a guitar, and they were singing:

“And she draws dragons

And dreams become real

And she draws dragons

To show how she feels.”

Mrs. Harrington looked behind her. Mrs. Laurans was dropping an olive into a martini;
this
, she thought, is cruel and unusual punishment.

Then she noticed the others. There were three of them. The boys were dressed neatly in sweaters. One had dark blond hair and round eyes. Occasionally the girl next to him had to take his chin between her thumb and forefinger and wipe it with a Kleenex. The other boy was darker, squatter, and could not seem to keep his head up. Every few minutes, the girl with the Kleenex would lift up his chin and he would look around himself curiously, like a child held before an aquarium. Near them was a dwarf girl with a deformed head, too large, the shape of an ostrich egg, and half of it forehead, so that the big eyes seemed to be set unnaturally low. Yet they were alert eyes, more focused than those of the boys. From the corner where they were gathered, the three sang along:

“An se dwaw daguhs

And de becuh ree

An se dwaw daguhs

Ta so ha se fee.”

“They’re from the state hospital,” Jennifer told her mother. “They’ll probably live there all their lives. It was really amazing that they let them go to come here. It’s incredibly nice, really, even though it’s pretty horrifying for us.”

“And for Greg’s mother,” Mrs. Harrington said, distantly.

She stared down at the circle of singers. Now some of them were shoving pieces of paper and crayons into the invalids’ hands.

“And she draws unicorns

And makes us all free

(An se dwaw oonicaws).”

“Come on,” the pretty young people were saying. “Draw a daguh. Draw an oonicaw.”

“This is the cruelest thing of all,” Mrs. Harrington said to her daughter.

She turned around again, but Mrs. Laurans had disappeared. Quickly she walked toward the bedroom. She rapped on the door, opened it. Ursula Laurans lay on her bed, on top of fifty or sixty coats, crying.

Mrs. Harrington sat down next to her, rubbed her back.

“I’m sorry, Ursie. I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why does he do this to me?” Mrs. Laurans asked. “He was getting so much better, he went to synagogue. For Christ’s sake, he was a physics major, a goddamn physics major. Then one day he comes home and he tells me he’s found Jesus. He tries to convert
us
, his parents. You don’t know how it upset Ted. He tried to argue with him. He wouldn’t even accept the theory of evolution. A physics major! He thinks everything in the Bible is true! And now this.”

“I’m sorry, Ursie,” Mrs. Harrington said.

Ted Laurans entered the room. “Oh, God,” he said to his wife. “Oh, God. I’ll kill him. How can he do this?”

“Shut up,” Ursula said. “It’s futile. You gave him all that bullshit already, about questioning. He’s beyond reason.”

Why were they telling her this? Mrs. Harrington tried to be comforting. “Oh, Ursie,” she said.

Then, very suddenly, Ursula Laurans launched up and landed against Mrs. Harrington. She fell against her, dead weight, cold and heavy. Mrs. Harrington’s arms went around her instinctively.

Ted Laurans was crying, too. Standing and crying, softly, his hands over his face, the way men usually do.

“Maybe this is his way of trying to reestablish a relationship,” Mrs. Harrington offered. “It’s very kind, bringing them here. No other person would have done it.”

“It’s all aggression,” Ursula said. “We’ve been seeing a family therapist. It’s all too clear. I wasn’t enough of a mother to him, so he took the first maternal substitute he came across.”

Mrs. Harrington chose not to say anything more. Soon Ted Laurans ran into the bathroom, leaving the two women alone with the coats.

Eventually, Mrs. Harrington emerged. Many of the guests were leaving; in the kitchen she bumped into the dwarf girl, who was washing a glass in the sink with remarkable expertise despite the fact that her chin barely reached the counter.

“Excuse me,” she said quite clearly. “I get under people’s feet a lot.”

They both laughed. The dwarf girl smiled pleasantly at her, and Mrs. Harrington was glad to see that she had the capacity to smile. The dwarf girl wore a houndstooth dress specially tailored for her squat body, and fake pearls. She had large breasts, which surprised Mrs. Harrington; she wore a gold necklace and a little ring on one of her fingers. Obviously she wasn’t as retarded as the two boys.

Mrs. Harrington turned around to look for her children. Then Ernest ran into the kitchen. He was crying again. He held his arms out, and she lifted him up. “Oh, Ernie, you’ll get sick from so much crying,” she said.

“I want to go home,” Ernest said.

“What’s wrong? Didn’t you have fun?”

“They ditched me.”

“Oh, Ernie.”

Three little children, two boys and a girl, ran into the kitchen, laughing, stumbling. As if she were a red light, they screeched to a halt at Mrs. Harrington’s feet. “Ernie, you don’t want to play anymore?” Kevin Lewiston asked. All the children’s faces stared up, vaguely disturbed.

“Go away!” Ernest screamed, turning in to his mother’s shoulder.

“All right, that’s enough,” Mrs. Harrington said. “I think you kids better find your parents.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison. Then all three ran out of the room.

Mrs. Harrington was left in the kitchen, holding her child like a bag of wet laundry. He would probably want to sleep in her bed tonight, as he did all those nights he had to wear the eye patch, to deflect lazy left eye syndrome. “We’ll go home, Ernie,” she said to him. Then she noticed the dwarf girl. She was still standing by the sink, staring up at her.

“Roy’s in the bedroom with some boys and they’re smoking pot,” Ernie mumbled to Mrs. Harringston’s shoulder, which was now soaked through with tears and drool.

“Don’t be a tattletale,” Mrs. Harrington whispered.

She looked down at the dwarf girl, who looked up at her. The dwarf girl held a glass of water in her tiny fat hand; the owl eyes in the huge head seemed gentle, almost pretty; in the bright light of the kitchen, she wore an expression that could have indicated extreme stupidity, or great knowledge.

Unmoving, the dwarf girl stared at Mrs. Harrington, as if the big woman were a curiosity, or a comrade in sorrow.

The Lost Cottage

The Dempson family had spent the last half of June in a little rented cottage called “Under the Weather,” near Hyannis, every summer for twenty-six years, and this year, Lydia Dempson told her son, Mark, was to be no exception. “No matter what’s happened,” she insisted over two thousand miles of telephone wire, “we’re a family. We’ve always gone, and we’ll continue to go.” Mark knew from her voice that the matter was closed. They would go again. He called an airline and made a plane reservation. He arranged for someone to take care of his apartment. He purged the four pages of his
Week-at-a-Glance
which covered those two weeks of all appointments and commitment.

A few days later he was there. The cottage still needed a coat of paint. His parents, Lydia and Alex, sat at the kitchen table and shucked ears of corn. Alex had on a white polo shirt and a sun visor, and talked about fishing. Lydia wore a new yellow dress, and over it a fuzzy white sweater. She picked loose hairs from the ears Alex had shucked, which were pearl-white, and would taste sweet. Tomorrow Mark’s brother and sister, Douglas and Ellen, and Douglas’s girlfriend, Julie, would arrive from the West Coast. It seemed like the opening scene from a play which tells the family’s history by zeroing in on a few choice summer reunions, presumably culled from a long and happy series, to give the critical information. Mark had once imagined writing such a play, and casting Colleen Dewhurst as his mother, and Jason Robards as his father. The curtain rises. The lights come up to reveal a couple shucking corn .
.
.

Six months before, Alex and Lydia had gathered their children around another kitchen table and announced that they were getting a divorce. “For a long time, your mother and I have been caught up in providing a stable home for you kids,” Alex had said. “But since you’ve been out on your own, we’ve had to confront certain things about our relationship, certain facts. And we have just decided we’d be happier if we went on from here separately.” His words were memorized, as Mark’s had been when he told his parents he was gay; hearing them, Mark felt what he imagined they must have felt then: not the shock of surprise, but of the unspoken being spoken, the long-dreaded breaking of a silence. Eight words, four and a half seconds: a life changed, a marriage over, three hearts stopped cold. “I can’t believe you’re saying this,” Ellen said, and Mark knew she was speaking literally.

“For several years now,” Alex said, “I’ve been involved with someone else. There’s no point in hiding this. It’s Marian Hollister, whom you all know. Your mother has been aware of this. I’m not going to pretend that this fact has nothing to do with why she and I are divorcing, but I will say that with or without Marian, I think this would have been necessary, and I think your mother would agree with me on that.”

Lydia said nothing. It was two days before Christmas, and the tree had yet to be decorated. She held in her hand a small gold bulb which she played with, slipping it up her sleeve and opening her fist to reveal an empty palm.

“Years,” Ellen said. “You said years.”

“We need you to be adults now,” said Lydia. “I know this will be hard for you to adjust to, but I’ve gotten used to the idea, and as hard as it may be to believe, you will, too. Now a lot of work has to be done in a very short time. A lot has to be gone through. You can help by sorting through your closets, picking out what you want to save from what can be thrown away.”

“You mean you’re selling the house?” Mark said. His voice just barely cracked.

“The sale’s already been made,” Alex said. “Both your mother and I have decided we’d be happier starting off in new places.”

“But how can you just sell it?” Ellen said. “You’ve lived here all our lives—I mean, all your lives.”

“Ellen,” Alex said, “you’re here two weeks a year at best. I’m sorry, honey. We have to think of ourselves.”

As a point of information, Douglas said, “Don’t think we haven’t seen what’s been going on all along. We saw.”

“I never thought so,” Alex said.

Then Ellen asked, “And what about the cottage?”

Three months later, Alex was living with Marian in a condominium on Nob Hill, where they worked at twin oak desks by the picture window. Lydia had moved into a tiny house in Menlo Park, twenty miles down the peninsula, and had a tan, and was taking classes in pottery design. The house in which Douglas, Mark, and Ellen grew up was emptied and sold, everything that belonged to the children packed neatly in boxes and put in storage at a warehouse somewhere—the stuffed animals, the old school notebooks. But none of them were around for any of that. They had gone back to Los Angeles, Hawaii, New York—their own lives. Mark visited his mother only once, in the spring, and she took him on a tour of her new house, showing him the old dining room table, the familiar pots and pans in the kitchen, the same television set on which he had watched “Speed Racer” after school. But there was also a new wicker sofa, and everywhere the little jars she made in her pottery class. “It’s a beautiful house,” Mark said. “Harmonious.” “That’s because only one person lives here,” Lydia said, and laughed. “No one to argue about the color of the drapes.” She looked out the window at the vegetable garden and said, “I’m trying to become the kind of person who can live in a house like this.” Mark imagined it, then; Alex and Lydia in their work clothes, sorting through twenty-six years of accumulated possessions, utility drawers, and packed closets. They had had no choice but to work through this final housecleaning together. And how had it felt? They had been married more years than he has lived.