Good Family (12 page)

Soon, I was nestled into my bed. The nursery was pleasantly musty and barely bigger than the closet where the geranium fabric hung. Dead moths were tangled in the yellowed sheers; there were corpses of wasps on the sill. I had slept in this room with its narrow bed and old-fashioned crib off and on since my childhood, discerned distorted faces in the grain of the cedar bead-board, made up stories and games when I was left alone for hours. Now that I was nearly fifteen, the room seemed close. My legs and breasts
felt bruised from growing. And I ached in some mysterious way—a delicious, throbbing midriff ache that spread downward to my thighs.

I must have slept. In the narcotic slumber of an oppressive night, I dreamed of tall, thin houses by a lake. Restless, I threw off my sheets. My breaths took on the rhythm of the waves. When the footsteps came, I lay very still.

What were you thinking
? Dr. Anke would eventually ask me.

Explanations fail me. Was I excited? Scared? The door closed behind him, he crossed to my bed and sat down. In the darkness, I could barely see his face, just the ragged silhouette of hair. He touched me—not on my breast, but on my braces. He ran his finger across them, then his tongue. He tasted of toothpaste. With Adele’s Italian in mind, I had dreamed of passion. I had imagined Derek, but it wasn’t Derek. The darkness leached out what subtle differences they had; Edward became Derek became Edward again.

“I saw the pictures,” Edward said. “The ones he drew of you.”

Something flickered in my stomach.
It’s not what you think
, I started to say, but I was riveted by the all-seeing look in Edward’s eyes.

“Don’t you get it?” he said, touching my face. “You think they see you, but they don’t.”

Edward sighed as if it should have been obvious.
You’re bottomless,
Anaïs Nin wrote.
You’re unfathomable.
When he lay down next to me, I took Edward’s face in my hands. I could have lain like this all night, but Edward gradually grew agitated.
Shh, shh, shh,
he said as he rubbed his Levi’s against my nightgown.

Uck, I thought, still trying to read Edward’s face, praying he wouldn’t kiss me.

Somewhere on a beach, Dana was crying. On the Baileys’ porch, Adele leaned in for a kiss. In another house, my mother blew smoke, lifted her drink, while my father, watching Nixon, shook his head. Edward’s breath quickened. Tearfully, Dana snapped that chain from her neck and flung her boyfriend’s ring into the lake. Edward shuddered, whimpered, became still.
I could not move. On the back of my tongue, the bitterness of bile. I knew that I had brought this on myself with my prurient fantasizing. That Edward, as well as Derek, was my cousin entered my senses with latent if obvious clarity, and I felt sick. I wanted him to say something more. I could already taste the abandonment, but, unlike my sister, I had no ring to toss extravagantly away. When morning came, I would go to Derek’s studio, find those drawings, and tear them up.

M
y mother sent me to Harvard with three pieces of advice: wear clean underwear, take music appreciation, and look up Jamie Hester. The Hesters had been friends of my parents since before they were married, Bibi Hester being the one person my mother could count on to get even more sloshed than she did at a party. Bibi Hester was resolutely blond, her hair teased into whatever was that summer’s version of a beehive, her lips and nails ranging from coral to pink. My mother liked to tell the story of how Bibi had blackened the eye of another bridesmaid at my parents’ wedding in an attempt to catch the bouquet.

And she was already married to Huntley!
exclaimed my mother.

Except for the underwear, I blew off my mother’s suggestions, signing up for literature courses like Love and Eroticism in Poetry and History of Politics in the Novel. I altogether ignored Jamie Hester, who was in his first year at business school, but my mother and Bibi were in cahoots, and Jamie eventually gave me a call. Up till then, Jamie had been a pale-haired boy with brown legs leaping over tennis nets or rooster tailing behind ski boats, the son of my mother’s boozy friend. When he showed up in my dorm
room, he affected the cocky manner of a boy who’d avoided the draft and whose future in bags was set.

“You’ll want to move into an apartment next year,” he said with an air of authority. “No one stays in the dorms.”

Although I agreed with his assessment, I shot back, “It’s not so bad.”

He took in my roommate’s side of the room—her Happy Face decals on the closet door, the fake fur throw pillows, the “I am I, and You are You, and If By Chance We Meet, It’s Beautiful” poster. Jamie’s eyes drifted back to mine, an amused eyebrow arching slightly. We both laughed and then and there, like our mothers, became co-conspirators and friends.

Soon, he was dropping by all the time. My roommate, who was prone to promiscuity, often stayed out nights with the hockey player of the week. It was on these nights that Jamie would appear in my room with his guitar and a bottle of wine. He had a birthmark on his cheek, the only flaw in an otherwise perfect face. The more I sipped, the more gorgeous he became with his thin ponytail and single earring. Gradually, he began to take on more significance than the son of my mother’s friend. In his slow, stoned voice, I gleaned spiritual depth that needed only to be teased out by someone with a more evolved social conscience. Perhaps I could talk him into using his graduate degree for something loftier than commerce. When he played his guitar and sang Neil Young songs, something stirred in me.
Old man, take a look at your life…

“You’re not like your family,” I told him.

“And
you
,” he said slowly in a wine-thickened voice, “are definitely not like yours.”

I took a sip from his glass. “Which means?” I said, trying to decode his stare.

Seeing the look on my face, Jamie chucked me on the chin and strummed a few more chords. “The crazy Addisons,” he said.

O
ne January evening, Jamie found me in the library reading Proust. It had been snowing hard all day. “You can’t even see the
sidewalks,” he said, insisting that he walk me back to the dorm, helping me to navigate the snowdrifts that challenged my California sense of balance. It was a wild ocean of a storm. Snowflakes like frenzied fairies danced around the streetlamps of Cambridge. Breathless, we arrived at the dorm, icy-cheeked, our clothes powdered with snow. “If you’d grown up in the Midwest,” he said, watching me shiver in my blue jeans and insubstantial coat, “you’d know how to dress.”

“I
know
how to dress,” I said, slapping snow off my skimpy jacket that was soaked clear through.

Jamie helped me off with my coat. Outside, all of Cambridge was cloaked in white. “Do you know how to undress?” he said, nuzzling my neck.

My first reaction was to laugh. My second was to stand perfectly still. I had never had a lover. In the minute that followed, I considered my prior yearnings. Now, as Jamie backed me up and lowered me onto the bed, I looked up into his eyes and tried to interpret what I saw.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. I knew I wasn’t. Still, I hung on his words as though they held the possibility.

F
or weeks, I told no one, not even Dana. That my lover was someone I had grown up with struck me as slightly incestuous. But Boston was a different longitude, far from my family in California, farther still, in many ways, from the Aerie and Sand Isle. Meeting in cafés, going to bars, listening to his guitar in my room, I pretended that our relationship had nothing to do with our families, that it was freshly honed, that Jamie was a man who could see me for myself. Hadn’t he looked delighted when I told him about the Indian woman we once picked up?

“The aunts will be delirious,” predicted Jamie, and I could just imagine Aunt Pat sizing up the situation. We all knew about the Hester tiara that was moldering in a safety-deposit box—a nineteenth-century crustacean that yielded up diamonds whenever one of the Hester men became betrothed. I had seen Hester-tiara diamonds mounted as solitaires, nestled
between smaller diamonds, offset by colored stones on the knuckles of Jamie’s aunts and cousins’ wives. Jamie’s mother, the boiled Bibi, had a stone the size of a prune on her left hand.

“You’re late for economics,” I said as Jamie rolled over and lit a cigarette. He looked for all the world like someone who was in love. His pupils seemed to expand when he saw me.

The roommate had moved out permanently by April, and because it afforded more privacy than the apartment Jamie shared with four other guys, we made my dorm room into our own little world. We rarely saw anyone else. We went to our classes, hurried back. The midday sun streaked through curtains onto the Formica desk. The floor was strewn with books and clothes and empty Mateus rosé bottles. On my bedside table, an ashtray I had stolen from the Aerie, monogrammed with the initials of my grandmother, was filled with the stubs of Marlboros and Virginia Slims.

“I could teach that class,” said Jamie, who had spent his childhood dinners talking about profit margins in the bag business.

“So come to class with
me.
” I was madly in love with poetry and was trying my own hand at it to poor effect.

He shook his head and smiled, ran his finger down my cheek as if it were the finest porcelain. Not infrequently, I compared him to Derek, searching for some scrap of the artist or poet in Jamie’s soul. And every now and then, I compared him to Edward.

I grabbed his hand and kissed it.
“I stood on the balcony dark with mourning like yesterday,”
I said, “…
hoping the earth would spread its wings in my uninhabited love.”

“Maddie’s sad poetry,” said Jamie, pushing my hair away.

“Neruda,” I said.

That our world became very small, that Jamie overtook me like the sea seemed only natural. To this day, I remember feeling his beating heart through his frayed cashmere sweater.

When I finally told Dana, she said,
Aunt Pat’s going to pop a vein.

B
y June, the dewy newness of my affection was giving way to annoyance. Mannerisms that had struck me as charming eccentricities began to irritate me—Jamie’s proclivity for putting on a brocade bathrobe after sex; his aloofness toward waitresses; his fastidiousness about his hands. He was constantly scrubbing his nails. And then there was his elitism.
We are the American aristocracy,
he said to me one night over a glass of wine. Thinking this over, I felt my ardor cooling.
Jamie,
I said,
even if aristocracy was worth aspiring to, you shouldn’t confuse it with selling a lot of bags.

Everything changed when we returned to Sand Isle and the adhesive presence of our families. Cornered by Aunt Pat, who advised me that Jamie was a good catch and I should be careful not to lose him, I started to squirm.
He’s from a good family,
Aunt Pat said.

My mother started referring to Jamie as the Mole because of his birthmark. It was to be the first of her many disparaging nicknames for the boyfriends I brought home. As the years progressed, they would be called the Chinless Wonder and the Criminal, the latter being the pot dealer I dated senior year.

Why was your mother so dismissive of your boyfriends
? Dr. Anke asked.
Did she cause you to break up with Jamie
?

But it wasn’t my mother who was behind my disenchantment. It was through Edward’s eyes that I began to perceive Jamie as just another young scion marching unquestioningly down his path. Edward would size up Jamie’s clothes and grooming.
A country-club boy,
Edward would pronounce him.
A prepster.
Good family or not, there was neither poet nor swamp in Jamie.

“Don’t you ever feel like doing something different?” I asked him one night. We were sitting on the end of the yacht-club dock. We were both pretty drunk, and Jamie was talking about his future in the family business. After more than a couple of glasses of wine, I had become brittle and argumentative. “Don’t you
ever
want to break away?” Feeling expansive and
intoxicated with the possibility that there could be more to life than the obvious path, I swept my hand across the panoramic view of twinkling mooring lights.

Jamie pushed a yellow lock from his eyes, lit a Marlboro, passed it to me. Where Dana had failed in teaching me how to smoke, Jamie had succeeded. It would be years before I quit. “No,” he said. “Not really.”

And I, less secure in the happy providence of manifest destiny, suddenly realized that Jamie’s principal act of rebellion for his entire life would consist of the length of his hair and the earring he wore in college.

The next night, Jamie tried to make love to me in the Aerie. My parents were playing bridge, and whatever cousins were around were locked in combat over Scrabble or backgammon. Jamie grabbed my hand, looking pleased by his own daring, and led me to the nursery on the top floor. It still had its geranium curtains, its solitary bed.

“C’mon,” he said.

“No. I mean…this is not the place.”

“C’mon, Maddie. No one will find us.”

A feeling of revulsion. I pushed him away with a newfound ferocity. How could I tell him that there were no secrets in this house, that someone
would
find us, that there were ghosts?

Something evaporated in Jamie’s eyes that evening. The rapture gave way to the recognition that I wasn’t the girl he had perceived. There was a flaw. My sense of whimsy that he so admired betrayed potential instability. “God, Maddie,” he said, looking at me the way someone would a piece of coal they had mistaken for a diamond, “what is
wrong
with you?”

For years to come, men would ask me this question in their own way. Even if I’d known, I couldn’t have answered. Besides, I had found something that could kill the pain. A glass of wine washed away that gritty feeling inside my head and stopped that impulse to scream. Two or three made it possible to feel lighthearted, to act like everything was fine. If I could just tamp down the boredom, the self-contempt, the despair, the loneliness,
one of these relationships might work. The right amount of alcohol, and I would become the sunny, fair-haired girl my family had raised me to be.

Our final argument was on the beach. Jamie had persisted in finding opportunities to have sex in the Aerie or on the beach, in someone’s boat, in someone’s car. “Goddamn it, Maddie,” he said, flinging a rock into the lake. “You’re fucking crazy.”

I wanted to tell him that there was nothing wrong with me—nothing at all—but his assertion had taken root, and I couldn’t deny the possibility. I left him on the beach, tossing him away as Dana had once tossed her boyfriend’s ring—certain that the world held a plenitude of Jamies—lovely boys, but with deeper spirits, more soaring hearts. I walked back to the house on the boardwalk under a dusky sky. It was August, and except for the black-eyed Susans and baby’s breath, the garden was looking frayed. I passed Edward’s boat room, empty that summer, came up the back stairs, found Louisa in the kitchen making cookies. Sitting me down at the table, she felt my forehead. When I was tiny, Louisa would open cupboards, find me inside, and shriek.
Miss Maddie, you know that drives me crazy!
She had always maintained I had a dark nature.
Still water
, she said,
runs deep.

“Girl,” Louisa said now, studying me closely, “you look like you seen a ghost.” The taste of butter and sugar was comforting. I pressed my palms into my eyes and tried not to cry. Later, Aunt Pat would look both exasperated and pleased when she told me in front of my mother,
You should have tried harder.
But Louisa, seeing my face, pulled me into her chest and spoke to me in a voice she had used with Edward. “You are special, child. Special, special, special.”